STACK #203 Sep 2021

LIFE TECH FEATURE

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Essential Kitchen Upgrades

W hether it’s breakfast with a morning coffee or crafting a dinner designed to outdo the best television chefs, we’re spending more time in the kitchen these days than ever before. But despite being one of the most important rooms in the cooking up a quick and healthy

home, kitchens tend to be incredibly straightforward and simple when it comes to the tools we use to create a whole range of foodie goodness. Your typical kitchen is designed to do the very basics required to prepare food and drinks, but the rest has traditionally been left up to a combination of

manual labour and extreme patience. But over recent years, tech has started to sneak into the kitchen to make our lives easier – and we’re not talking about rudimentary electronic devices like rice cookers, grills and, err, popcorn makers. The kitchen tech products that are turning

heads now have a bit more going on under the hood, utilising digital smarts to make a task faster and easier. Others are designed to make cooking easier, faster and healthier, to deliver recipe info without the need to hunt for a cookbook, or to make the room of food a more pleasant place to spend your creative time.

Why Not Pods? While coffee pods can be hugely convenient, they are also expensive compared to buying coffee beans and grinding them that can grind beans for you, there’s also a much wider range of coffees available – and nothing beats the taste of freshly- ground coffee. yourself. With a coffee machine

Coffee Done Right

I n another world not that long ago, for many people making a coffee involved spooning some granules into a mug and pouring boiling water over it. The more dedicated might have gone for a stove-top percolator or a glass plunger, both great ways to make very good coffee, but messy and time consuming. If a tech solution was needed for anything, it was coffee, the essential wake-up beverage of choice for millions. And tech, as usual, answered the call, with devices that can deliver a proper cup of quality coffee with minimal effort and mess. The most common of these that you’ll find in homes is the capsule coffee machine – a concept made famous by Nespresso. These couldn’t be simpler to use – just drop your coffee capsule of choice into the machine, stick a cup or mug under it, and press the start button. A few seconds later, your coffee’s ready to go. Capsule machines are the ultimate in simplicity, but they do limit the types

of coffee you can make to what’s available in capsules, and the price per cup is higher than it is with other types of machines. But they can’t be beaten for simplicity. If you’d prefer to buy your own bags of coffee to grind at home, you can go for a proper espresso machine. These coffee-making beasts let you get properly serious about your

comes out the other end. Some even offer Wi-Fi connectivity so that you can brew coffee from bed. For those wanting to unleash their inner

barista and do coffee the proper way, there are manual machines that provide complete control over every step of the coffee-making process. DeLonghi has been a brand intrinsically tied to quality coffee for many years, and their latest manual machine is the ultimate home barista tool. The La Specialista Arte stays out of your way as you create the perfect coffee, using tech subtly to assist with precise temperature control, recipe control and the delicate art of grinding the all-important beans. It even has a micro-foam steam wand to let you create your own barista-style patterns on top of the cup. With dishwasher-safe parts for easy cleaning, this is one serious (and seriously good-looking) coffee machine.

favourite beverage – and if you still want one-button simplicity, you can have it. Fully automatic coffee machines take

care of everything for you, from the perfect bean-grind to the exact type of coffee that

62 SEPTEMBER 2021

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