[InternetofJim]

Co-founder/CTO here with a little backstory. Cinder (YC W’15) is like a countertop grill that controls temperature precisely to 2F across the entire cooking surface. I’m hoping this is exciting to HN because it’s not just a connected cooker— it means you can hack your food. With this accuracy, you can target specific kinds of chemical reactions, fine tune your preferences and when you come up with something amazing, send the cooking recipe and your friends can replicate it anywhere. I put a quick summary of some of these things at http://blog.cindercooks.com/cinder/2015/3/4/hot-tips.

Feel free to ask me any questions here about Cinder or the magic of cooking more generally.

[placeybordeaux]

Do you feel like you are competing with sous vide products like anova?

If so how do you justify the price difference?

I love the idea, but I just got an anova for ~200 and felt like that was just at the edge of a reasonable price for me. Not having to bring water up to temperature/have a giant pot sitting around would be nice, but just not sure if it is worth the extra 300.

EDIT: a tiny amount of reading later: I see that another advantage is that you can do both the low tempature 'sous vide' style work and then sear with the same machine. That is a nice value add.

I personally got an anova largely because of chefsteps. I would highly recommend sending them one if they will take it.

[lifekaizen]

We are big fans of chefsteps. Imagine having sous vide precision up to 550 degrees F. Then you can set onions to brown and walk away. It's game changing. We built Cinder to be your go to daily cooker, both Jim and myself experienced decreasing use of sous vide over time.

[placeybordeaux]

Yeah it really does sound pretty great, not sure if I will be an early adopter, but I will certainly keep an eye on it.

Good luck!

[foobarian]

My understanding is that they also have fine grained sensors/heating elements on the surfaces, kind of like "heat pixels." So you could potentially cook half the steak rare and half well done. OP can you comment? What is the resolution/configuration of your heating grid?

[lifekaizen]

We will have one cooking temperature, but there are tricks to getting one steak rare and one medium. Other tricks to throwing in onions and mushrooms on the same device, for our advanced users.

[blacksmith_tb]

Sounds like an interesting product (I am pretty fond of induction - but it lacks the smarts, so I could be swayed). I am curious about branding: to me, the connotations of 'cinder' are not positive when it comes to cooking, i.e. 'burnt to a cinder'. Did the name test well?

[InternetofJim]

Thus far, it's been a lot easier to make people think of the positive connotation and ignore the negative than is generally thought. The name is intended to evoke low heat-- blow on a coal and it glows softly red, gently warming your food.

Induction is the best kind of burner for traditional cooking, but it's not capable of either the evenness or the accuracy required. Even a copper pan can have as much as a 30-50 degree differential across the surface, regardless of how you heat it. And medium rare is a 5 degree range, caramelization is just 8 degrees for that nice sweetness, and eggs change with literally every degree. So those degrees count.

[pdabbadabba]

> The name is intended to evoke low heat-- blow on a coal and it glows softly red, gently warming your food.

Hmm. Then I think I would've gone with "ember." Though I still like "cinder" well enough, despite its burnt connotations (and this: http://libcinder.org).

In any event, it looks like a really interesting product -- makes me think of a sous-vide-like approach, only brought to the surface of a pan. (Which, of course, is much more challenging, since you need to do more than simply hold a vat of water at a constant temperature.)

[lifekaizen]

Naming is a balance of traits including availability, look, emotion, implication. And they change over time. Examples of names that are common now that seemed funny: Virgin, iPad, Gap. We really like cinder and the round logo built out of it, hope you will to.

[jsankey]

As another datapoint from someone in your target market: cinder evokes burnt for me. Glowing coals aren't typically "gently" warm, for that matter (if I'm thinking charcoal or wood fire, I'm thinking awesome for cooking but high heat).

It could be cultural, I'm coming from an Australian perspective.

[ericd]

I'm an American, I immediately thought "food, burnt to a cinder". Other than the minor branding foible, though, this looks great.

[supercoder]

I'm Australian and also thought of food being burnt.

[sdab]

You guys mentioned having a test chef. Have you thought about reaching out to Kenji Alt? He writes a popular column for SeriousEats called FoodLab and evaluating a product like this would seem right up his alley.

Take a look at his Turkey brining experiment for a good example of applying his science background (an MIT guy) to food. http://www.seriouseats.com/2012/11/the-food-lab-the-truth-ab...

[lifekaizen]

Big fan of Kenji. We've reached out and hope to get him some time on our prototypes.

[lifekaizen]

Now scheduled to meet Kenji soon.

[bambax]

> Take a look at his Turkey brining experiment

I just did. He didn't try everything. For chicken breasts (or, better, duck breasts) you can brine with soy sauce, then slow cook, then sear, and the results are amazing.

And if you use a tenderizer before brining, it's even better. (Tenderizer: best $20 I ever spent).

[buro9]

How is the temperature control done? How do you stop it from exceeding that heat, accurately?

Or specifically, is the heating method induction? And how do you determine the temperature from that? (If induction, is it deduced from resistance?)

[InternetofJim]

No, not using induction, just traditional resistive heating plus materials, shape and heater design to get even heating.

Preventing overshoot is a matter of the control method. We have a model of the system and use a predictive control algorithm to cut off heating just when we need to in order to hit the target without overshoot.

[bhayden]

So is that to say if you introduce something to the cooking element, like water, the temperature will be wrong because the water unexpectedly cooled the surface?

[InternetofJim]

We raise the temperature back up as quickly as possible without overshooting in thst case. During low temp cooking, you really only care about the maximum temperature, so you don't care much, it just takes a little longer to finish. But during sear of a protein, you just drive the temperature high enough that any loss from adding food or water to the plate is acceptable.

[nickff]

Do you individually calibrate the grills, or keep the same model parameters for all of them?

[InternetofJim]

Our sensor elements are accurate out of the box, so in theory we shouldn't have to. But I'll admit, for our beta units, we still are calibrating each unit, largely for our readout electronics. We'll either fix this in the production model, or we'll have a highly automated calibrator.

[pjc50]

So it's basically a temperature controlled soldering iron for food?

[InternetofJim]

I try to eat as little solder as possible, even RoHS stuff :-) more seriously, getting a whole 10x10 plate to the same temp is trickier than just controlling a single point...

[chefprogrammer]

it would be good to get more technical specifics on the operation of your device (1) how is contact between the grill and the food set? is it a single hinge? is the height adjustable? (2) is air free to circulate on the sides of the food--is it a closed or open compartment? (3) how does the power draw of your device compare to a sous vide machine at moderate to low temperatures, e.g. 135f for eight hours? (4) what is the usable volume of the compartment?

thanks!

[johnxy888]

I'm the mechanical engineer of the team, and thought I'd share some of the details of what we're working on.

Our current specification for the cooking volume is 10" x 10" x 2.5", enough space to comfortably fit two sizable steaks. Our cooker will have a single hinge, but the mechanism will keep the plates aligned in the XY plane at any distance within the cooking volume.

As far as contact with the grill and the food, the upper half will have an optimal amount of counter-balance. The key is to offset the weight of the upper half to prevent food from getting crushed/squeezed dry, but still have enough weight to ensure the upper plate still makes enough contact for heat to conduct into the food. We are also planning to have 2-axis tilt on our upper cook plate, which should allow for better contact with foods that aren't sliced parallel to the cook plates (such as chicken breast, fish, etc).

Our cooking volume has [removable] side walls surrounding the plates. While it does not form an air-tight seal, it does reduce the amount of convection from the surrounding environment that would normally reach the cook plates, thus greatly reducing heat leakage and also allowing our sensors to get a much more accurate picture of what's going on. (our CTO/control systems engineer @InternetofJim can speak more on that). From our tests so far, cooking at low temperatures (135F) uses relatively low levels of power, well below 100W.

Hope that answers some of your questions, and we welcome any thoughts/comments on our design!

[stephen]

I've got five kids...how about a 10 x 30 version. :-)

[ars]

You really should target this market. The more people you have to cook for (typically) the less time you have.

[lifekaizen]

Working on it :) If you buy 2 for your own house, email me and I'll give you $50 off.

[avibryant]

I often cook steaks from frozen (sous-vide, or just low temp in the oven). I'm curious: is that one of the use cases you're testing or thinking about?

[InternetofJim]

Absolutely, it works beautifully from frozen. Incidentally, it's also great at rewarming, since many of the bad effects of reheating are from local overheating in a microwave or oven.

[mzl]

When it comes to searing a cooked steak, how fast will the heating element go from low even heating to searing temperature?

Also, please consider making all measures defaultable to standard metric measures. I have some appliances (e.g., the Polyscience Sous Vide Professional) that support metric measures, but where I have to choose it every time. Very annoying and seems to be not uncommon in stuff form the US.

[InternetofJim]

We're shooting for around 4 minutes, but depends on our production heating plates, which will have better heat transfer than the beta units. Also a question of whether/how we take advantage of 20A kitchen circuits.

Internally, it's all metric, and we'll have that choice in the app.

[sterlingross]

Do you have an idea of how many watts this will run at? I live off-grid so every watt counts.

[InternetofJim]

The cooker goes up to a brief peak of 1600W when it's heating up rapidly, but for the extended cooking period, it stays well under 100W average.

[sterlingross]

That is good to hear. That makes is perfectly feasible.

[gcb0]

what's up names reusing common words? isn't that impossible to trademark?

[lifekaizen]

trademarks are filed for specific classes of use, like "software" or "cooking appliances" and yes, they are harder to enforce than a created name such as Exxon or Accenture, but those take millions in marketing to create associations in peoples mind. Cinder already evokes a low, gentle heat, so you kind of get that we're a precision cooking appliance.