Have you seen the Cinder? It has been making the rounds over the past few days and since it is meat related I thought I would share it with you.
Basically, to me anyway, it seems like a sous vide cooker had a baby with a George Foreman grill. According to their website the Cinder Sensing Cooker uses advanced temperature controls to give you a perfectly cooked piece of meat every time.
From what I can tell it looks like a very fancy contact grill that has some advanced temperature sensors and controls. Rather than just heating to a single temperature like a standard grill I am guessing it will adjust the temperature across the cooking plates throughout the cooking process. It looks like you can select what cut of meat you have, select the doneness or temperature and it will do all the work. It can even hold your meat at temperature until you are ready for it. And you can control the whole thing from your iPhone or iPad (and I am guessing the new Apple watch that was just released today).
The $500 price tag is a bit high on the surface but if you have trouble cooking meat and frequently ruin steaks or chops or fish by overcooking or undercooking it could end up a bargain in the long run. It doesn’t take a lot of messed up $30 steaks to make this thing worth it. I could also see it being useful if you have kids because you can just start the meat and walk away. You don’t have to worry about an overcooked steak because you are up to your elbows in a dirty diaper.
I don’t think I would ever pay $500 for something like this but I would be very interested in testing one out sometime. I am particularly interested in how well it can sear a steak while keeping the internal temperature where you want it. And if it can do it without smoking up the house like my preferred cast iron skillet method all the better. I would think for thinner pieces of meat like fish it could be very helpful as it is very, very easy to overcook a piece of fish.
So to me this is a very interesting item but if you are confident in your meat cooking abilities you can probably pass. But I do see some potential and some valuable uses for the Cinder. Would you pay $500 for perfectly cooked meat every time?
