Homeier debuts a new idea in ventilation

Check this out.

Those three things are functioning as a ventilation hood. It's a really neat idea. Each of those three towers, for lack of a better term,  is 560mm tall and 180mm wide, is attached to the counter, rotates 270 degrees, and uses a remote blower to do the actual ventilating.

What I'm showing you here is the Alia from Homeier and it represents something really new in ventilation. The Alia towers can be combined  in groups of two, three, four or five, depending on the need. Kitchen pros, here's the spec sheet.

I can see using these on an island as an alternative to dropping a hood from the ceiling. Their height would make them more effective than a pop up extractor and that the individual units rotate just adds to that effectiveness. Great idea Homeier. What do you guys think?

I'm asking again, Gorenje please come to North America

The Slovenian appliance manufacturer Gorenje has been on my radar for around the last two years. They make exceptionally well-designed and well-priced appliances and they're only sold on the other side of the Atlantic. When Blanco had me in Germany last month to attend The Living Kitchen and IMM it was painful to see the number of innovative, new things that never make it to the US and Canada.

So on my first day at the show I was walking the floor and I turned a corner and saw this.

At long last. I'd been reading about this company's products for ages and finally, I'd get to see them for myself.

I was beyond impressed with all of their offerings but what really got me was a wall oven they're calling the iChef+. It is a wall oven that looks as if it has an iPad embedded in it.

the iChef+ takes the idea of programming the setting on an oven to a level I never thought was possible. It has to temperature or timer controls. Rather, it has a hi-def touch pad that walks you through anything you want to bake with a simplicity that masks the complex programming you're actually doing with noteworthy perfection.

The home screen looks like this.

From here you pick any of the oven's five modes. So if I just want to bake something conventionally, then I'd just pick SIMPLEbake. By selecting that, I get a menu that looks like this.

There are nine options that pop up and you just scroll through them to find the kind of food you want to bake. The oven then works conventionally.

If you choose the AUTObake mode, the oven takes over a bit more. Select the kind of food you're baking and the oven tells you which kind of baking pan to use. You tell it the size of the portion you're baking how well done you want your food and what time you'd like to serve dinner. The oven then sets the temperature and time by itself. No guess work involved. So if you want to make prime rib but don't know how, the oven does so just get out of the way and let it.

PRObake allows you to program up to three temperature changes over the course of baking or roasting something. That's revolutionary, frankly. I cook a lot and a lot of foods require temperature changes while they're in the oven. Setting and resetting the timer and temperature is a pain in the butt and I'd kill for a way to program all of that in advance.

Not only that, once you set your cooking program in the PRObake mode you can save your recipe to MYbake.

This means you only have to program these settings once. So the prime rib temperature combo you've perfected can be saved as My Prime Rib in the MYbake library and the next time you make it, all you need to do is click on the title of your recipe. Slick!

Finally, the EXTRA mode holds all of this oven's additional features.

Note that it has a defrost mode and this is a convection oven, not a microwave. I'm as impressed as I remember it as I was when I was playing around with the controls.

Gorenje has a video that goes through the features of the iChef+ and what it communicates better than anything is how easy this oven is to use.




So after seeing that, maybe you can join my petition drive to get Gorenje to cross the pond. Please.

Gaggenau just raised the bar on induction cooktops

When Blanco had me over in Germany last month I saw a nearly overwhelming number of new and innovative products at The Living Kitchen, the trade show I attended in Cologne. Until I got to Germany, I never really thought about how alone in the world the US is with regard to its design sensibilities and I never fully grasped that really innovative products don't debut here. More than anything else, my trip to Germany was an education in how the world works and it was pretty humbling.

I've talked about a lot of the innovations I saw there. The skinny counters, the drain switches, the overflow drains on kitchen sinks, the wide use of laminates and the total dearth of raised-panel cabinet doors were fascinating to see and to report on. More than anything else I saw in Germany though, a new induction cooktop from German manufacturer Gaggenau was the real star at The Living Kitchen.

I'm fascinated by the concept of zoned induction. By zoned induction I mean induction cooktops that dispense with the idea of round burners and turn the whole cooktop surface into an induction zone. There are a couple of European manufacturers playing around with this idea, and none of these models are being exported to the US. Not yet anyway but they're coming. Eventually.

Gaggenau has raised the bar on zoned induction with something called FreeInduction.

The Gaggenau CX 480 uses 48 micro inductors that work together to sense the size and number of any pots or pans set down on the surface. So if you have a rectangular roasting pan and you want to make gravy in it and you have a round pot for steaming broccoli and a third round pot for boiling potatoes, you set all three on the cooktop however they'll fit. The cooktop can tell their sizes and shapes and only activates the induction zone beneath each one. Make sense? No? Watch this video.




Even more amazing than the technology underneath the glass is the touch screen interface that controls the cooktop. Did you catch how that works on the video? It's brilliant. That each control that pops up in response to a pot or pan has its own, separate timer just adds to the genius of this thing.

Induction cooktops are here to stay so get used to them gang. They're a small but growing presence in the US and Canada and you can count on their increasing prevalence. Innovations such as Gaggenau's FreeInduction are a real thrill to see because they represent a complete rethinking of The Way We Do Things. Not only that, they're just cool. Now if they were only available in North America...

This is how they see us

This sign was hanging on a display by Gorenje, a Slovenian appliance manufacturer I've blogged about here frequently. If you don't know, the rest of the world calls full-size, side-by-side refrigerators American refrigerators.

This is the model that sign was promoting.

Catalunyan range hoods make me question everything I think I know

Range hoods used to be an afterthought. They were the unglamorous, practical thing that every kitchen needed. For years, they were the gnarled hand of necessity reaching into an otherwise lovely and well-thought out room. They were all so boxily utilitarian that nobody really thought about them.

All of that started to change since the beginning of the new millennium and we seem to be reaching some kind of critical mass with them. every time I turn around it seems, someone's re-thought the range hood again.

Well, most of the time I don't get too excited about these re-thought range hoods. Then I saw this.

That's the Sphere from Frecan.

Frecan is a Catalunyan appliance manufacturer with its headquarters in Barcelona. They didn't stop with the Sphere either. Check out the Saturn.

Between the two of them I'd be hard-pressed to pick which one I like more. Now clearly, some of these hoods (and I hate to call them hoods, the Brits call them "extractors" which sounds so much more elegant) aren't capable of venting to the outside, they just recirculate. Keep in mind that in their target market, they're not dealing with the enormous cooking appliances popular in the US. However, some of these models could be adapted to use in North America. Just look at these beauties.

Frecan's really onto something here, who says that range hoods have to be boring? Check out Frecan's website, maybe I'm not the only one who'll be questioning everything he thinks he knows.

Miele announces a new line of dish cleaning products

Miele, maker of the dishwasher series ranked highest in customer satisfaction by J.D. Power and Associates, introduces the innovative Miele Care Collection™ II series (for dish care) which includes three new products: phosphate-free dishwasher tabs, a powerful rinse aid and specially formulated softening salt engineered to spotlessly clean and preserve dishes, flatware, utensils, crystal, glassware and more. The new generation Miele Care Collection™ II dishwasher tabs combine a special glass guard formula, water softening salt and a sustainable cleansing agent to provide exceptional results and advanced protection, even with heavy soiling. The series is complete with Care Collection™ II rinse aid and water softening salt which go even further to enhance performance - especially for sparkling glasses and perfect drying results.

"Miele is known the world over for manufacturing the ultimate dishwasher, but you don't need to own a Miele to use our extraordinary dish care products," states Paul McCormack, Spokesperson for Miele. "These products are made to protect your dishes and glassware while safeguarding our environment. With so many states banning phosphates, it's important to consider your dishwashing options. You want a name you can trust to get your dishes and glassware safely clean and sparkling. Taking care of the environment without compromising performance is not new for Miele. And what good is using a detergent that doesn't work as promised? When homeowners do not get the results they expect, they will waste water pre-rinsing versus changing detergents or even their dishwasher. About 20 gallons of water is wasted pre-rinsing per dishwasher load," explains McCormack.

Miele's new dish cleaning products are available from Miele's website and at select retailers nationwide.

Autumnal re-runs: Induction cooking rules the universe

This post ran originally on 9 July 2009. I wrote it after I returned from a really great trip to GE Monogram's headquarters in Louisville, KY. I know a couple of people who are headed to Louisville this week to take the same class and I know they're going to learn a lot, eat a lot and enjoy themselves tremendously. Wear your thinking caps kids but tie them too tightly.

OK, so I spent the beginning of the week this week In Louisville, KY as a guest of GE Monogram appliances. While I was at GE I was not only treated like a prince, I was assigned a cooking station in GE's Monogram test kitchen. On Tuesday and Wednesday, the other designers who attended this appliance summit and I prepared most of our own meals under the expert tutelage of GE's chefs.

The bottom line was that I had a kitchen with $20,000 in appliances at my disposal and I was in heaven. I spent most of my time falling in love with the GE Monogram Pro 48" range I wrote about the other day. But the bulk of the actual cooking I did was on a GE Monogram 36" induction cooktop.

I have been on the induction bandwagon since my first hands-on experience with induction cooking at a Wolf seminar about four years ago.

I wrote a description of how induction cooktops work back in January, give it a look if you need a primer.

Induction cookers are highly efficient and they work with unusual speed. For example, an induction cooktop can boil six quarts of water 400 percent faster than natural gas can. I'm a bit of an efficiency nerd and despite my former preference for cooking with gas, I conceded that preference to induction years ago. Get this, from the energy expended from a gas burner, 62% of that energy gets lost and does nothing more than heat up a room. Only 38% of that energy gets delivered to the food being cooked. That lousy efficiency is why gas cooktops have to be vented. Old school radiant electric cookery is more efficient from an energy perspective. In this case, 72% of the energy expended goes toward heating the food and 27% is lost. In induction, 84% off the energy expended goes to the food being cooked and only 16% is lost.

This is the actual electromagnet and circuitry inside an induction cooktop

Anyhow, I've played around with induction at a variety of training seminars I've attended over the years, but I've never actually cooked with it. Until this week that is.

On Tuesday afternoon I browned chicken and made a red curry on an induction cooktop and I was really impressed. The process of browning chicken was faster, but it wasn't due to my using higher cooking temperatures. It was faster because the skillet got to the correct temperature in seconds. It was amazing, actually.

On Wednesday, I made pasta with a sauce of bacon, pine nuts, feta and mascarpone. I made the sauce in a sautee pan. I was always concerned about how well induction would fare with sauces, but my concerns were unfounded. My pasta sauce turned out perfectly. Ditto a caramel sauce I whipped up later. The butter, brown sugar and cream blended flawlessly at a medium heat and then stayed warm on simmer until it was time to eat. Best of all, when I cleaned out the pot later, there was nothing scorched on the bottom.

So, even though I've been responsible for getting induction cooktops into a bunch of peoples' houses in the last few years, I'd never cooked on one until recently. After having done so, all I can say is that induction cookery exceeded even my lofty expectations. So I guess the next step is to get one for me. Hmmm.

The shape of induction cook tops to come

I love induction cook tops. I say it all the time. They're smarter, faster and more efficient than any other cooking technology out there. Induction may be new in the US, but it is here to stay. I keep up with new developments in the induction world and yesterday I stumbled upon this photo.

Big whoop, right? Well it is a big whoop because it's the first induction cook top on the market that dispenses with circular coils. here it is up close.

That's the 93cm Continuum Induction Hob from De Detreich, and the the world's first flexibly zoned induction cook top. Right now, it's only available in the UK but this is how they will all look and operate within the next two years, mark my words. By flexibly zoned I mean that the surface interacts with whatever pot or pan gets placed on it, regardless of the pot's size. You use the same controls for a Dutch over as you would a small saucepan and the cook top "knows" how big the metal surface is that's sitting on it and adjusts itself accordingly.

Let me explain a little bit.

Here's a particularly good induction cook top from GE Monogram. See the circles? It has round electromagnets underneath those circles. They're round because that's what people expect a burner to look like.

Electric burners are also round and they're round because gas burners are round.

Gas burners are round partially due to the way that gas functions, but that was lead by the woodstoves that proceeded the widespread adoption of gas. Since pots have been round ever since the dawn of pottery, it made sense to have round burners. However, not all pots and pans are round.

This is an All-Clad roasting pan. I like to make gravy right in the roasting pan after I remove a bird when I'm making a big meal.

Similarly, if I'm trying to boil sweet potatoes, boil regular potatoes, steam broccoli, reduce a sauce and make gravy at the same time, I run out of burners. With a zoned cook top, I'm not limited to the number of available burners. I'm only limited by the number of pots I can fit on the cook top.

It's genius. It's genius and it's definitely the shape of things to come.

Miele makes vacuum cleaners and they're as good as it gets

Everybody knows Miele from their great dishwashers, coffee makers and other kitchen appliances. It comes as a surprise to a lot of people that they also make vacuum cleaners. Just as their dishwashers are the best in their class, so go their vacuums.

A lot of what makes a good vacuum a good vacuum has to do with the motor of course, but the onboard filter plays as big a role in a vacuum's performance.

Adding HEPA filters to vacuums gets a lot of press when it comes to these things but a HEPA filter's only as good as the seal that isolates what's been filtered. Vacuums that don't filter the exhaust air from from the motor aren't really doing anything but make people think their vacuum's working when in fact, all it's doing is pushing around air and particulates.

Miele's collection of vacuums was tested by an independent lab, Michigan-based IBR Labs, and IBR compared the filter efficiency of Miele's versus a number of other premium vacuums. Here's a chart that shows some of the results.

Miele USA set up a section on their website that's dedicated to explaining the results of these tests and if you'd like more information about Miele vacuums and their filtration, check it out.

What amazed me to read is that my vacuum's motor spews as much dust back into the air as it vacuums up. And that dust and particulates generated by the motor itself. Miele vacuums filter the motor exhaust air and removes the particulates that I for one never knew were there.

For a lot of people this level of air filtration may be overkill, but if you or someone you care about suffers from  respiratory problems, no amount of filtration's enough.

Looking over these reports certainly has me looking at my cursed, $100 vacuum with new eyes. I have to tell you, there's a lot to like here. The motors on these Miele vacuums have adjustable speeds, so you can vacuum things like draperies on a lower setting. Pretty smart. They also look really good. Here's their Libra cannister vacuum.

Most of their models take their names from Classical mythology and I'm torn between if I'd rather the Callisto, named for the nymph who was later turned into a bear

or Neptune, simply because he was so cool.

So consider these vacuums the next time you're in the market for a good one. You can see these vacuums and the rest of Miele's products on their website.

Sub-Zero/ Wolf's Westye Bakke Center: better photography

As I posted last week, I was a recent guest of Sub-Zero/ Wolf at their Westye F. Bakke Center and corporate headquarters in Madison, Wisconsin.

During the Depression years of the 1930s, self-taught engineer Westye F. Bakke worked as a refrigeration consultant with Frank Lloyd Wright. He invented and developed built-in refrigerators and freezers for such Wright projects as the Johnson Wax Building and Wingspread. In 1945, Bakke founded Sub-Zero and he named his company for the fact that his freezers were the first to hold a consistent temperature below zero.

The Westye F. Bakke Center is a training and meeting facility that sits between the Sub-Zero refrigeration plant and the Wolf cooking appliance plant. As incredible as the building is, that it sits squarely between the two factories that made the building possible speaks volumes about Sub-Zero/ Wolf as a company and as a group of people.

I was dissatisfied with the photos I took of the Center when I was there last week, and Diane White from Sub-Zero/ Wolf's marketing department sent me a collection of their official photos. Here are some highlights of the things I saw in Madison.

Here's the building itself. It was designed by the Madison architectural firm Zingg Design.

This is the staircase to the second floor, where the administrative offices and main dining room are.

Suspended from the second floor ceiling are the Chihuly chandeliers that catch everybody's attention when you enter the building.

As I mentioned last week, I have a connection (though tenuous) to the Art Nouveau lounge in the center. The man who designed it, Bill Draper, is a genius.

I think his Brasserie des Artistes is as perfect an homage to the Art Nouveau movement as I've ever seen.

Down the hall from it are two adjoining Mick de Giulio kitchens that despite their size, don't feel anything like the commercial spaces they are.

The entire Westye F. Bakke Center and my experiences there were the sorts of things kitchen designers daydream about. Designer people out there, do not pass up an opportunity to take a pilgrimage to Madison.

And for all of you non-designer people, Sub-Zero/ Wolf has extended their current instant rebate program through March, 2011. At stake is an instant rebate worth up to $2500. You can find more information on their website.

Many thanks again to my Sub-Zero/ Wolf rep, Cathy Bame, for making all of this possible. Many, many thanks go to the great people at Sub-Zero/ Wolf in Madison for being such enthusiastic hosts. Let's sell some refrigerators and ranges!

You can see Sub-Zero/ Wolf's entire collection of food preservation and preparation appliances on their website.