High-Tech is What's Cookin' in the Kitchen

With technology constantly evolving, it was just a matter of time before Jetsons-like digital gadgets made their way into the kitchen – the place often considered the nerve center of the home.

Today, you can find all kinds of tech-savvy appliances that will keep your kitchen humming. Take the digital toaster by Krups, which has an LCD display that offers nine levels of browning and counts down the seconds to the end of the toasting cycle. Or check out the Nutri-Weigh Scale by Salter. The scale weighs your food and also lets you punch in information that analyzes its nutritional value, including its calories, carbohydrates, fat, sodium and cholesterol.

The latest high-tech appliances include an oven that allows you to start dinner before you ever leave the office; a technology center that allows you to call up recipes while playing your favorite songs; and a refrigerator that serves up the local weather forecast as well as your favorite TV shows in high definition.

Intelligent Oven

Technologically advanced ovens, such as TMIO’s Connect Intelligent Oven, let you program and adjust the settings through your cell phone or Internet connection, so your roast can be cooking while you’re commuting and ready to eat when you walk in the door. For a cool $7,000, the cyber-oven also doubles as a refrigerator, so you can keep your chicken cold until you want to start cooking it.

You can call the TMIO Voice Control Center on any phone and use either touch tones or voice commands to check on the status of your oven, start cooking a meal, create or change a cooking program, stop cooking or place your oven in refrigeration mode.

The oven can be connected to a home network or connected directly to an Internet Service Provider's network box outside the home. If the oven is not connected to the Internet, it will still cook and refrigerate, but you wouldn’t be able to program the appliance from afar.

Pandigital Kitchen Technology Center

The Pandigital Kitchen Technology Center is designed specifically to help the cook in the kitchen get the job done -- and perhaps enjoy a little entertainment along the way.

The center has a 15-inch touch screen and comes loaded with pre-programmed recipes that can be accessed with one touch. The device can also bring you onto the Internet to find more recipes.

The center has approximately 1 gigabyte worth of memory, and it can play MP3s, display pictures and videos and even support high definition TV playback. Plus, there's a calendar function that lets you program a photo slide show to begin while you’re preparing lunch, or bring up a recipe you need and a song you love when it's time to get busy making dinner. The touch screen is sealed with glass, so it is built to weather spills and splatters.

LG Refrigerator

When you're stuck cooking in the kitchen, you can still enjoy your favorite TV show on LG Electronics' refrigerator with built-in 15-inch digital high definition television.

The LG refrigerator has a remote-controlled cable-ready high definition LCD screen and FM radio on its right door as well as a DVD connection on top of the unit and a four-inch Weather & Info Center LCD display. Through a wireless pager network, the unit provides personalized weather forecasts based on a homeowner's geographic area, along with the forecasts for four surrounding cities.

The refrigerator also has a built-in recipe bank with 100 pre-loaded recipes from the Culinary Institutes of America, including instructions on how to make appetizers, soups, meat, seafood, side dishes and dessert.

Other features include a child lock, room temperature display, digital user manual and a clock and calendar.

By Dina Gerdeman

[Via Digital Landing]