The best kitchen kit, from smart thermometers to pacotisers

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I’m a suspicious cook who blames his tools (or the ingredients) rather than taking personal responsibility for poor outcomes. I have an oven whose thermostat is wildly inaccurate, a standalone oven thermometer whose readings I take with a pinch of salt, and a meat thermometer that raises more questions than it answers. Have I pushed the probe in far enough? Are these pictures of chickens and cows helpful, or a mere distraction? Am I about to poison my family?

The app offered me one option of “well done” (reassuring)

This new device by Witt assuages many of my anxieties (the rest I’ll work on in therapy). Central to the accuracy of the CookPerfect system is a probe (or, in the case of this Dual version, two probes) equipped with five sensors along its length, so the question of whether the tip is in the correct place is moot; push it in as far as the marked line and it’ll calculate the core temperature of the meat, along with the current ambient temperature of the oven. It communicates wirelessly with a small docking station (doubling as a charger for the probes) that sits somewhere in your kitchen; that station sends the numbers (again, wirelessly, via Bluetooth or 2.4GHz WiFi, up to you) to the Witt CookPerfect app on your smartphone. 

I loved this thing. Its first run was for Sunday lunch: I told the app that chicken was on the menu, it offered me one option of “well done” (reassuring), I pressed go, and it displayed the oven temperature and rising core temperature along with a constantly finessed estimated time of completion. (Naturally, I let it go 5°C higher than the recommended 75°C, because old kitchen habits die hard.) Second run was for a previously tried slow-roast beef recipe, where the oven temperature is set absurdly low and you wait a ridiculous amount of time for the temperature of the joint to creep up to 65°C – but with the Witt probe I could monitor progress far more easily and be reasonably sure that when my phone pinged “done”, everything was going to be great. And you know what? It was. 

Smooth operator

You won’t hear the verb “to pacotise” outside a small number of pro kitchens, but it’s the secret behind impossibly smooth ice-creams, butter mixes, mousses, concentrates for soups and so on. The Pacojet, put most simply, processes food that you’ve frozen in special beakers at –20°C, be it ice-cream mixtures, peas in stock, guacamole ingredients, broccoli stalks – let your imagination run riot. Insert the beaker into the machine, and its blade shaves the top of the frozen block to produce a purée with a texture that you’d be unable to achieve even with a high-end food processor. Pacotise as much as you need and put the beaker back in the freezer. A gateway to unique kitchen experiments.

A cast-iron excuse

This is the most compact of Aga’s new cast-iron cookers with integrated induction hobs, combining their traditional radiant heat with a safe, wipe-clean surface. It packs a lot into a 100cm-wide kitchen-unit space; aside from the hot plate and the two-zone induction hob, its four doors conceal a roasting-baking oven with a grill, a slow-cook simmering oven and a conventional fan oven with nine temperature settings (for recipe purposes, equivalent to the gas mark) and a speedy 15-minute heat-up time. Behind the Aga-badged door sits a touchscreen panel for controlling the zones and setting timers. The 100 comes in multiple hues, but the just-launched black vitreous-enamel version is striking.

Give me some dough

The dough hooks that come with food mixers make a valiant effort, but they struggle to generate decent gluten development. Ooni, the pizza oven firm, has now scaled down the big commercial machines that are used in bakeries to create a domestic equivalent: a kneading powerhouse that’s only slightly bigger than the average food processor. It can work with up to 5kg of dough to create the consistency you’re after (it has a timer, but human judgment is advisable in the notoriously volatile world of baking). Pizzas, focaccias and sourdough loaves are its forte, but its whisk and silicone beater make it an all-in-one cake-mixing marvel too. A food processor that saves time and considerable effort.

Keep it clean

Hidden beneath the sink: a desktop PC-sized water purifier, a small control box and a bottle of mineral concentrate that Bluewater calls “Liquid Rock”. Above the sink: a wireless, O-shaped ring that glows orange when the tap dispenses mains water. Tap the ring and it turns blue, indicating that water is being sent through the purifier, with minerals added in your desired ratio (from “light” to “bold”) and back out of the tap. The purifier claims to eradicate 99.7 per cent of contaminants (bacteria, microplastics, forever chemicals) to make tap water safer to drink. I’m unable to say if the filtered water is any better or worse for me than the municipal stuff, but it tastes substantially better.

@rhodri