InternetofJim

It cooks with heated plates, but it's an entirely different cooking process than something like Foreman-- more versatile, and with dramatically better results and enables new cooking techniques which can't be done reliably on any other device.

Good suggestion. We plan to do that. There are already two early examples in our blog at blog.cindercooks.com: The grilled cheese grilled sandwich (the cheese is browned inside the sandwich) and an example of testing salmon recipes 4 different ways. But lots more to come...

I try to eat as little solder as possible, even RoHS stuff :-) more seriously, getting a whole 10x10 plate to the same temp is trickier than just controlling a single point...

There's only one version, and it has both an app and a an onboard UI based on a knob-button with an embedded dot matrix display. We're very conscious of the tradeoff between onboard and app controls.

The knob lets you have full manual control of temperature, but is not a good way to share recipes or learn how to cook something you don't do every day. So you want to make a quick panini or egg, the knob is great. On the other hand, we don't want to be like your microwave, with tons of features hidden behind scrolling text prompts and a keypad.

On the other hand, an app interface lets you have a different UI for each food type, so you can ask for a medium rare steak or light brown caramelized onions.

Once you've used the app to set things up, you'll be hands-on in the kitchen, so the next few steps can be controlled from the knob or the app.

We're shooting for around 4 minutes, but depends on our production heating plates, which will have better heat transfer than the beta units. Also a question of whether/how we take advantage of 20A kitchen circuits.

Internally, it's all metric, and we'll have that choice in the app.

The cooker goes up to a brief peak of 1600W when it's heating up rapidly, but for the extended cooking period, it stays well under 100W average.

Also worth mentioning is that there isn't a lot of juice running out of the food, because it generally stays inside. When you see a lot of liquid running out of meat, that's the taste running down the drain. Since I've started cooking on this, I've found that I do a lot less saucing, because the food itself is so much juicier and tastier.

It's pretty, but there's nothing delicate about this cooker, and we plan to do a fairly extensive test program. We intend for this to be a real workhorse for cooks, usable several times per day for years.

We really haven't noticed any significant oxidation over cook times of up to 4 hours; We have not yet tested something like a 72 hour recipe.

We do plan to have public demos from time to time (we've already done a few at various meetups and other events -- we're based here in SoMa). If you'd like, email info >>at<< cindercooks.com, and we can add you to our mailing list so you could be notified of these events.

Our sensor elements are accurate out of the box, so in theory we shouldn't have to. But I'll admit, for our beta units, we still are calibrating each unit, largely for our readout electronics. We'll either fix this in the production model, or we'll have a highly automated calibrator.

We raise the temperature back up as quickly as possible without overshooting in thst case. During low temp cooking, you really only care about the maximum temperature, so you don't care much, it just takes a little longer to finish. But during sear of a protein, you just drive the temperature high enough that any loss from adding food or water to the plate is acceptable.

Absolutely, it works beautifully from frozen. Incidentally, it's also great at rewarming, since many of the bad effects of reheating are from local overheating in a microwave or oven.