Philips Air Cooker: a cooking robot in your kitchen cabinet
A scene from The Jetsons or Star Trek: a robot in the kitchen that can cook like a Michelin-starred chef and serve one delicious meal after another. It sounds like science fiction, but it’s already possible, because if you have a Philips Air Cooker in your kitchen, all you need to do is buy groceries and do a little slicing and chopping. The appliance can do just about everything except the dishes.
Are you about to buy a steam oven, thinking about getting a sous vide machine, or is your regular oven due for replacement? Hold on. Philips is introducing a kitchen appliance that replaces all three, and can also defrost and reheat, so the microwave can go to the thrift store too.
It’s the Philips Air Cooker, a brand-new kitchen appliance. It looks like—putting it uncharitably—a printer with a water reservoir. You place a basket filled with asparagus, risotto rice or salmon fillets, for example, inside it, and after a certain amount of time, perfectly cooked and fragrant food comes back out. In the meantime, you can sort the waste paper or check Instagram, because you really don’t have to do anything else.
Michelin-star meal
Can’t cook to save your life? Don’t panic: the Philips people created an app with recipes, so all you have to do is follow the instructions exactly and voilà, a Michelin-star meal rolls right out of the appliance. The app keeps track of what you cook and what your skill level is, so you get meal suggestions that suit you. Have you come up with something delicious yourself? You can add that to the app too, so you can shine again—and other people using the app can benefit from your discovery as well.
Orzo with cockles? Easy
The new kitchen appliance was tested by a number of Michelin-starred chefs, including Erwin Vinke of De Kromme Watergang (two stars) and Erik van Loo (also two). They were so impressed by the Air Cooker that they created new recipes and adapted dishes from their restaurants so you can make them at home with the Air Cooker too. You can simply cook orzo with cockles just like Erwin Vinke does, without any effort. Of course, mashed potatoes with a sausage can also be made in the Air Cooker, but you probably won’t fancy that anymore once you see the recipes in the app: slow-cooked veal cheek with green asparagus, for example, or braised eel with fennel—take your pick.
Faster than the oven
The technical side of things: the appliance uses so-called NutriFlavor technology, preserving up to 90% of the original nutrients. And the Air Cooker is 30 percent faster than your oven and uses just 70 percent of the electricity of an average oven. Not bad either, when you see where energy prices are heading.
Time to save
So cancel that new oven, call off the negotiations over a sous vide container, and stop using that filthy microwave you’ve had for a year without cleaning it (be honest): this is the new kitchen appliance that makes all that other equipment obsolete. Time to save, because it costs almost six hundred euros (gulp), and then you’re ready to go.
