The Connected Kitchen

Bring your kitchen and utility room into the 21st century with a spicy selection of delicious smart gadgets.

- Cliff Joseph

The iPhone and iPad quickly found a place in the kitchen when they were first launched, with dozens of apps providing recipes and nutrition information to help you become a better chef. There have also been some weird and (not so) wonderful kitchen gadgets released over the years for your iPhone and iPad.

Recently, we’ve seen the Hapifork, which monitors the speed at which you eat in order to try to avoid over-eating and stomach problems, while Kickstarter has given the world the SmartPlate, which includes a camera and sensors that allow it to analyze everything you eat. Even celebrity chef Jamie Oliver’s been at it, using Google Glass techno-specs to record videos as he prepares dishes so that you can watch the preparation process from the cook’s point of view.

OUT OF THE FRYING PAN

Some of these gadgets can seem a bit pointless, but there are many other smart devices that can be genuinely useful in the kitchen. If you’re watching your weight then there are several sets of smart scales that can use an app to count the calories in your latest extravaganza. However, the best set of scales that we’ve seen for the amateur chef is the Drop Kitchen Scale ($100), which can talk to the recipes in its companion app to make sure you get all your ingredients just right. It can even tweak recipes as you go along, changing weights or suggesting alternatives if you find that you’ve run out of a particular ingredient.