Yet along came the smart-kitchen products. Devices debuted with apps instead of manual controls, forcing cooks to look at their phones instead of the food. It started to feel like tech was being crammed in for tech's sake. Selling ancillary products like subscriptions to meal kits to make in the device felt like a higher priority for companies than helping people make better food. The content—aka the recipes that show you how to put your new machine to good use—often felt wholly inadequate. You might never fully understand the machine and how to integrate it into your cooking routine. You also might stick it in a cupboard and forget about it.

"It's hard enough to make a great appliance, and just adding an app to a basic one isn't the answer." Lisa McManus, America's Test Kitchen

Many of the connected-kitchen products feel like distinct steps backward. The Tasty One Top, a countertop burner that allows you to control the temperature of your pan to the degree, seems like a nice way to become a more capable cook. While there are rudimentary controls on the burner itself, it’s clearly designed to be controlled through the app, which also provides step-by-step videos to guide you through recipes. Yet I was unable to sear a steak in the way the video showed—the burner was clearly too small. How does that happen? Other smart-kitchen apps, like one made by SideChef, are supposed to make cooking easier by breaking it down into easy steps. But the recipes within them are often vague or confusing. One pasta recipe I tried in the SideChef app failed to mention the step when you "cook the pasta."

These examples bring up a key problem for smart-product manufacturers: content creation. Tried-and-true tools, like Dutch ovens and chef’s knives, don’t require new recipes; your favorite cookbooks and magazines are full of recipes that put them to use. But many connected gadgets—such as the immersion circulators used for sous vide cooking, temperature-controlled pans, and even some newfangled rice cookers—differ enough from old-school appliances that the product makers need to provide a mini-cookbook's worth of unimpeachable recipes that have been tested over and over again before the product is released, so we completely understand how to cook with it. Yet many manufacturers punt here and provide only skimpy or whimsical offerings. It can be nice to feature complex recipes that home cooks might enjoy once or twice (Tasty's croquembouche comes to mind), but nobody is going to use the appliance long term without a good understanding of how it fits into their arsenal. Cookbooks for these new products often don't exist yet, and home cooks need to know how to nail a fried egg, pork chops, or weeknight tomato sauce.

The most frustrating part of the "connected kitchen" has to do with the apps themselves. Appliances look sleek with no buttons and knobs, but those are very effective ways to turn things on and off and adjust settings. If you have to control your cooking device with an app, you pay for the perceived convenience with your time. For example, if you want to use an app to adjust the temperature of an appliance, you have to (1) grab your phone, (2) face/thumb/passcode your way in, (3) ignore the text messages and push notifications and 4) ignore the news, (5) remember why you pulled out your phone, (6) swipe to (6.5) open the app, (7) swipe to adjust the temperature, and (8) try not to wonder what will happen to your buttonless product if the Kickstarter-backed company that makes it goes under and stops updating the app. The old-fashioned way? Twist the knob on the appliance itself and get on with your dinner.

If I made the smart-kitchen product-design rules, dictum number one would be, All key functions of an appliance must be able to be controlled on the appliance itself. App control is fine as an option, and secondary functions could be app-only, but you need to be able to control a stove on the stove itself.