Suppose you don't know how to cook eggs. Suppose the thought of an undercooked egg gives you not just the willies but such full-blown aversion that you won't even handle a skillet, much less crack an egg into it. You have options: You could experiment on your own, screwing up again and again until you don't. You could ask for help and let someone watch you while you screw up. Or you could get help from an app and a sensor-laden pan that promises, via the magic of connectivity, that you simply won't screw up.

I'm made my share of scrambled eggs, but wanting to see if a smart pan could up my kitchen game, I set off on a project of high-tech cooking with the hope of becoming the kind of person who wakes up ravenous and goes to bed thinking of breakfast. What would it be like to let a pan and app duo take the place of instinct? What would the app make of my usual technique? Would it correct me? Congratulate me?

I pressed start.

Pantelligent

The idea behind the Pantelligent $174 pan is to take the guesswork out of cooking. Or, as the Pantelligent people put it: "Our app uses data from the pan to adjust the recipe in real-time—just like a seasoned chef." A temperature sensor in the pan sends data via Bluetooth to an Android or iOS app. Sensing the real-time temperature in the pan, the app walks you through recipes like mushroom risotto and "perfect bacon," telling you when, for example, to flip the bacon, and when that bacon is done.

Pantelligent isn't just for telling you, okay, the pan is hot, time to take the meat off. For my scrambled eggs, first the app told me not to break up the eggs beforehand, that stirring them around in the pan would make them fluffier than whisking them beforehand. Already I was skeptical. Then it told me to add the butter at the same time as the eggs, not before. What?

But I was questioning too much. Part of the appeal of a smart pan is that it takes the thinking out of cooking, turning it into something that if not automatic is at least automated. So I added the eggs and butter and brought the pan to 230 degrees, as instructed, paying attention not to the eggs but the screen, where a graph showed the temperature arcing upwards. Listening not to sizzling but to the voice from the screen telling me to turn up the heat.

If cooking without a recipe is about instinct, then cooking with an app and a smart pan is about ignoring that instinct. The eggs may sound loud, and the eggs may feel like they're done, but the app hasn't told you to stop cooking, and your temperature is perfectly steady, so why stop now?

On the other hand, maybe cooking with Pantelligent's assistance is about accepting that there may be other ways to cook besides the way you already know. When I made my next meal with the pan—"simple salmon"—the first step the app directed was to preheat the pan, using the language of baking, not stovetop skillet cooking.

I'm not sure if the idea is to wean oneself off the Pantelligent eventually, perhaps after the three to five years the thing is supposed to last, applying the techniques learned over those years of directed, measured cooking to making meals without the training spatulas. If that's the case, the quitting might be tough. You might grow so accustomed to quantified cooking in a smart pan that, when faced with the dumb version again, you just don't know how to proceed. Then again, maybe muscle memory is at work, too, and when you pay attention to Pantelligent's input, you're internalizing when the eggs are really ready.

Again I watched the pan's temperature increase in the app, raising and lowering the flame until the heat plateaued at 375 degrees. Before I started, I entered the salmon's thickness into the app, and it adjusted the cooking time. The salmon, as the recipe name promised, was indeed simple: Put the fish in skin side up, cook for 7 minutes, flip it, and cook for 7 minutes more.

Rachel Z. Arndt

But it was not, as promised by the bacon recipe, perfect. I could tell even before flipping the fish that it was going to be overcooked. Still, I'd already given myself over to the pan and app, so I made myself wait until the voice told me it was time. By the end of the 14 minutes, the fish was long past opaque in the center, long past moist. It was flakey, but in the way dry things are, not in the way of properly cooked fish.

At least it wasn't undercooked.

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