If the person you’re buying for doesn’t consider it holidays until they’re in the kitchen cooking up a storm, consider some of these ideas for the gift giving season.
We all know someone who loves to spend time making a feast, dabbling with ingredients and spices and herbs and flavours to build a dish or drink or dessert that delights. Those people are typically not easy to buy for.
Oh sure, you might normally opt for the cookbook or some sort of nice cup or cutlery, but technology can also serve their needs in different ways, as well.
Once you look beyond the basic apron and simple appliance, you can find gadgets galore that a clever chef or fascinated foodie can take advantage of, and turn ideas into the edible.
Panasonic PN100 Compact Bread Maker
Price: $269
Bread makers are hardly anything new — the technology has been out for years, and hasn’t changed much — but the latest option from Panasonic aims to fix one thing all bread makers have in common: size.
Most bread makers take up a reasonably chunk of your kitchen counter, which is something Panasonic’s “compact bread maker” is designed to fix.
Built more like a bucket with an oven inside, it includes 18 programs with pizza dough a part of the package, and even jam, making it a more compact kitchen addition that can be used to make gifts over the holidays.
Tefal Dolci Ice Cream Maker
Price: $349
An ice cream maker made a little differently, the Tefal Dolci is a dessert gadget designed for kitchens that might not want or need the large compressor-style ice cream maker on their bench taking up space.
This one works a little differently, and is a little like a blender of sorts. You’ll freeze your concoctions overnight in special containers, and then come back to them the next day to churn them into ice cream, gelato, sorbet, and the like.
The idea kind of works in reverse from a regular ice cream maker, but has the ability to make some really tasty treats, provided the person you’re buying for thinks a little in advance and preps their treat for tomorrow, rather than today.
Bartesian Cocktail Maker
Price: $499
If you know someone with a lot of alcohol and a need for regular cocktails made easy, you might want to check out a gadget specifically made for purpose.
The Bartesian is basically the Nespresso of cocktail makers, taking mixer pods and using spirits such as tequila, rum, whiskey, and vodka to blend cocktails, or even water and the mixer for a mocktail.
The downside of the mixer pods is that only Bartesian makes them, and the varieties on offer in Australia mightn’t be as good as what you can find overseas. But it also does a decent hurricane in a pinch, so there is that.
Ninja Slushi Frozen Drink Maker
Price: $549
Try as we might, we’ve never quite found a way to take a 7/11 Slurpee home, as much as we want one. Frankly, if we could have it all the time, many of us probably would.
That’s probably what makes Ninja’s latest gadget so dangerous, particularly for the waistline.
The Ninja Slushi is a frozen drink maker that skips the frozen bowl of regular dessert makes, and instead rolls liquid around a cooling cylinder to turn it into slush you can eat and drink. It already sounds like summer’s best friend.
Masterbuilt 710 Electric Digital Smoker with WiFi
Price: $549
Not everyone wants to cook in the kitchen. Some want to take their food exploration out of the kitchen, and that’s where the BBQ reigns. But what if you want to apply some smoke, and just want it to happen in the background?
Masterbuilt has a digital smoker box that runs on electricity, and offers WiFi control monitoring, letting you smoke without gas or charcoal, and running a temperature from 35º Celsius all the way to 135ºC.
It’s one BBQ we’re eager to try, and could just make smoking that little bit easier overall.
DeLonghi La Specialista Arte Evo Cold Brew Machine
Price: $669
A variant of a coffee machine we checked out a few years ago, one of DeLonghi’s latest keeps the combination of automatic and manual with a machine you can control so much that it can deliver hot and cold coffee.
You know the hot coffee, with cappuccinos and lattes and such, something the machine forces you to have a hand in making.
But this variant goes a little further with a cold brew mode that can make the cooler style of coffee in under five minutes using cold extraction technology. It’ll even grind fresh beans up, so the coffee is the freshest it can be when it’s made.
Ooni Volt 2 Electric Pizza Oven
Price: $899
We can’t all have a proper pizza oven in our home, and not every backyard is set up for it, so there are gadgets designed to fill that space.
The Ooni Volt 2 is one example of that, with an indoor pizza oven that uses electricity so you can run it inside and run high temperature just like a proper pizza oven. The system can reach 450ºC in around 90 seconds too cook the pizza (don’t touch!), but can also run at 20ºC to proof the dough, as well, helping it to cover much of the pizza-making journey, from dough to cooked pie.
There are also presets to specifically cook styles of pizza, something Ooni calls “Pizza Intelligence”, plus oven and grill modes so you can use the electric cooker for more than simply pizza.
Samsung AI Family Hub 636L French Door Fridge
Price: $5099
Easily the most expensive item on this holiday gift guide (and probably one of the most expensive in the entire list of gift guides this year), the Samsung Family Hub is the gadget made for someone who lives in the kitchen and needs to know what they have in stock when they’re out shopping.
While the screen on the outside might seem like the obvious star of the show, it’s the camera inside that really should get attention. Using that camera and a bit of AI, you can quickly check out what’s inside your fridge while you’re out and about shopping.
It’s a feature that could just save on food waste, while also bringing with it a beverage centre, ice maker, four doors of fridge and freeze room, and yes, a screen on the front for everyone in the family to leave notes and drawings on, as well.
