Pantelligent

There’s a frying pan that apparently transforms you into a gourmet cook. At least, that’s the story of one of the founders behind Pantelligent. For $199 (according to an old issue of Time magazine), the snazzily-advertised product “guides you step-by-step in real-time ensuring a perfect dish every time”. As a scientist, perhaps it’s not surprising that I clicked first on the “How It Works” webpage.

One claim is “precise temperature control on the stove top”. What this actually means is that it gives you a real-time readout of the temperature at the surface of your pan where it is in touch with the food you are cooking. Unless you have a very fancy stove-top that’s linked up to your pan, and your fancy burner can adjust the temperature very finely and very quickly, what you have is a good sensor (patent-pending). Is it worth $199? Well, let’s see what else is on offer.

The selling point seems to be the mobile app that is linked to the sensor (via Bluetooth). There are pre-loaded recipes that hand-hold you all the way through the cooking portion. Voice instructions mean you don’t have to be reading a recipe book for the next step while your food is burning on the stove. And you might get consistency with this approach, perhaps even robotic consistency. Is that a worthy goal? Perhaps for some people. I personally like the experimentation that comes with non-Pantelligent cooking. There’s an excitement to cooking – serendipity in discovery and having a bit of skin in the game (because you could mess up), perhaps not high stakes on your steaks. (Couldn’t resist the bad pun.)

Another claim: “An interactive algorithm keeps your food in the optimal temperature range from start to finish ensuring a perfect dish every time.” I’m skeptical. Not about whether there’s an algorithm, but how useful it will be if you’re a novice cook and don’t know the personal quirks of your stove-top well. If you aren’t a novice cook, you’ve probably already learned to spot the appropriate signs. The shimmer of the oil, the golden-brown of the garlic (okay, stir-frying with garlic is my stock-in-trade), the crackle as you stir ingredients around, and the right combination of smoke and sizzle that tells you whether some liquid is needed. Could Pantelligent teach you to be a better cook? Yes, but only if you make use of your observation skills and not just rely on the sensor-fed talking-app.

What Pantelligent got me thinking about this week, is not so much cooking, but the notion of Temperature. I suppose it’s because I’m teaching thermodynamics in both General Chemistry and Physical Chemistry. I decided to spend a few minutes this week in class discussing the connection between temperature and the average speed of a collection of molecules. Since I’m teaching chemistry classes, one of my goals is that the students learn how to connect notions in the macroscopic world (such as temperature) with what might be happening in the microscopic or even nanoscopic world. We briefly talked about how liquid (mercury or alcohol) thermometers worked, but did not have time to delve into solid-state devices and thermocouples (probably what Pantelligent uses).

I also started planning some lessons in my head surrounding the notion of temperature. What is temperature? How can it be measured? How precise and accurate are the measurements? What are the limitations to such measurements? Why should we care? What does it mean to have an absolute zero on a scale that you may not be able to reach? Why does life cluster around a narrow range of temperatures? I would like such an investigation to be conceptually rich, beyond the 5 minutes here and there, that I will inject into class discussions. Now that I think about it more, I could probably plan a whole scientific inquiry block on temperature. Unfortunately, I don’t have time to incorporate such a plan into either one of those classes this semester. But I will probably put together a stand-alone lesson plan that I can use when I’m visiting a chemistry class at a different institution. (I sometimes get invited to be a guest lecturer in a college or high school chemistry class.) I’ve found these visits to be a good motivator to build up engaging activities for students. In fact, I almost always incorporate them into my classes the following year.

I could even use Pantelligent to spark some interesting class discussion. Besides thinking about the engineering and how it might be improved perhaps more cheaply, students could critique the two graphs on the website (shown below). Even though I feel no inclination to buy their product, what I like about Pantelligent, is that it made me think! This means that I can see ways to incorporate it into my class to get the students thinking. I had a similar experience (once again from magazine browsing) with Float Therapy. It allowed me to combine an exercise both in scientific inquiry and in quantitative reasoning into my non-majors course last semester. Besides discussing the potential validity of “advertised” benefits, I had students come up with a cheap bathtub design – that, among other things, also required temperature control!)