Ask HN: Have You Automated Cooking?

It takes maybe 50% longer to make five portions versus one. It's going to be tough to find similar gains through automation. I've got four servings of pulled pork and five burritos in the freezer, all homemade apart from the brioche buns for the pulled pork and the wrappers for the burritos. Many recipe sites will calculate quantities for 2X and 3X the servings. If you overlap cooking multiple servings, there's enough variety. I'll be making a big pot of curry chicken today.

Breakfast is usually eggs or oatmeal or toast and jam, which entails only a few minutes of preparation. I even brew coffee a big pot at a time and that lasts for three days reheated.

The critical robot in this scenario is the dishwasher.

My espresso machine is semi-automated and lots of folks seem to go for fully automatic coffee experiences. Mr Coffee all the way to K-cups etc.

There are some crazy things [1] going on in the oven world, though Miele seems to have blown the marketing. My wife and kids all furrowed their brows when I told them about the fish in the ice block. They don't understand or care about physics, they just like tasty food they know how to prepare. "Why would you cook a fish in an ice block in the first place?"

[1] https://www.mieleusa.com/m/in-dialog-with-food-miele-to-unve...

You need to invest in cooking skills and utensils so you don't have to spend 1-2 hours per day cooking. The Ninja Instant Pot is amazing at what it can do - you can pressure cook, slow cook, etc. These tools save a lot of time when cooking from scratch.

Regardless, meal planning is a vital part of the regimen. You need to plan out your meals for the week and I know people who also pre-cut their vegetables and stuff so all the prep work is already done so that during the week all they have to do is through their pre-planned meal together. They tend to spend 1-2 hours on Sunday getting everything together so during the week when they're hectic they only need 20 to 30 minutes of meal prep.

None of this requires fancy tech and a lot of money.

Not so automatic, but we are very happy with our Samsung Hotblast https://www.samsung.com/in/microwave-ovens/convection/28-lit... (or a similar version). You setup the temperature to 200°C (392°F), the time to 20 or 30 minutes and you can go to another room while it cooks. It takes some time to find the perfect time, and sometime you must use the microwave or grill instead, but it's perfect for cooking in a short time.

I've had to cook from scratch for many years because I've lived with people with various food restrictions and sometimes that's just the easiest way to do things.

That said, you really don't need to spend 1-2 hours a day on cooking. If you put a little time in and level up on some basic skills, you can make shockingly good meals in 10-20 minutes.

It's mostly a question of figuring out what you like and getting good at making those things, then generalizing the skills you have into making more things.

I had the exact same problem and have been working for the past 4 years on solving this issue.

https://kastanj.ch/

I think it is insane how much time people collectively spend on feeding themselves. It should be much simpler. Currently your options are something like this:

Option 1: Buy a cooking machine that can do some kinds of food quite well. Will be expensive, can't cook all types of food but works okay according to my colleagues that use them.

Option 2: Learn how to cook 5 recipes well. You will gain speed over time, but you will eat the same 5 things over and over for the rest of your life. This was my personal solution to this problem. This worked great until I met my wife. I am someone that can eat the exact same meal, everyday for months (yes I have done that) and not get tired of it. My wife is not this kind of person. Therefore option 2 stopped being an option after getting married.

Option 3: Learn how to cook for real. This will take a lot of time, failed meals, frustrations etc. But over time you can save good money because you learn how things work from the ground up. You will also gain speed over time, however you constantly need to learn new things, otherwise you will be back at option 2 but with the 20 meals you memorized. Consider this a lifestyle to do well.

Option 4: Only eating pre-made meals. Very expensive. Not good for long term health.

Option 5: Kastanj. An app that helps you cook good food without having to learn everything. If you just know how to hold a knife and what a pan is, then you have sufficient knowledge. The app will guide you through everything step-by-step with pictures. It is as fool-proof as cooking can get. Beta launch is planned in 2026.

The core ideas behind the app: - Instructions need to be idiot proof so younger me could understand them. - All instructions needs pictures, because "cut the carrot into (fancy word)" meant nothing to me. - I am the "robot". The app tells me what to do. I should not have to think and understand. Just following along needs to be enough to succeed. - Better to have 100 recipes that work 100% of the time, than 1000 recipes that work 50% of the time.

We take recipe quality very seriously. Every recipe is developed and photographed in house. Every recipe is tested at least 3 times with some variation to account for user errors. The app and all content is constantly improving to maximize success. For example, an alpha user recently managed to fail (consistency was a bit off) with one recipe despite following the instructions. The recipe was soft-banned and we set up a test where we cooked that recipe 9 times over until we managed to pinpoint what went wrong and updated the recipe accordingly. We do not accept bad recipes. This means we can't brag about having the biggest recipe collection, because developing recipes like this is slow. However the benefit is that, our users can simply scroll the app like a restaurant menu and feel confident that anything they see, they can make.