For some people cooking is a chore, as they struggle to find ways to feed themselves and their families nutritious food without spending ages in the kitchen.
There are many good reasons to cook meals from scratch. Cooking simply at home from whole ingredients is often cheaper than even fast food restaurants. Food made at home usually has far less salt and fat than either processed food or ready to eat frozen meals.
Multiple factors are impacting people's perception about cooking at home. Raw ingredients are more expensive than frozen dinners. It takes time and effort to buy the raw produce, imagine what to cook, determine the recipe, and then actually cook it.
Many people are too busy and do not have the time or imagination to cook. They are hooked on fast food restaurants that offer fast and cheap meals. People have lost the skills and will to cook healthy meals from scratch.
People are more accustomed to a wider selection of food options and have a more varied palate now than a few decades ago. When they cook at home, they expect to have a similar variety of diverse cuisines with exotic ingredients.
Making food quickly and well can be easy once one has mastered how to cook; but it is a learned skill, the acquisition of which takes time, practice, patience and the acceptance of mistakes. To cook whole foods at a pace that can match box-meal offerings, one needs to know how to make substitutions on the fly; how to doctor a dish that has been oversalted or overspiced; how to select produce and know how long one has to cook it for, amongst other variables.
Mistakes are a natural part of learning to cook, but they can cost a person time, ingredients, and money without actually feeding anyone. A botched recipe can make the expensive ingredients inedible. Too many mistakes can also make a persuasive case that cooking is not worth the trouble and that Hamburger Helper is worth the cost. Therefore without these skills, cooking from scratch becomes a risky business.
Slow cooker devices are known, which allow a person to assemble all the ingredients then just leave them to cook while they do other things. A slow cooker, also known as a Crock-Pot (a trademark), is a countertop electrical cooking appliance that is used for simmering, which requires maintaining a relatively low temperature (compared to other cooking methods such as baking, boiling, and frying), allowing unattended cooking for many hours of pot roasts, stews, soups and other suitable dishes, including dips, desserts and beverages. A basic slow cooker consists of a lidded round or oval cooking pot made of glazed ceramic or porcelain, surrounded by a housing usually made of metal, containing an electric heating element. The lid is often of glass seated in a groove in the pot edge.
A slow cooker is designed to cook while no one is there to care for it, thus allowing a cook to fill the pot with the required ingredients and come back several hours later to a ready meal. Raw food and a liquid (such as water or stock) are placed in the slow cooker. Some recipes call for pre-heated liquid. The cooker lid is put on and the cooker is switched on. Some cookers automatically switch from cooking to warming (maintaining the temperature at 71-74° C. [160-165° F.]) after a fixed time or after the internal temperature of the food, as determined by a probe, reaches a specified value. Thus a slow cooker allows a person to start dinner cooking in the morning before going to work and finish preparing the meal in the evening after work. But, one still must know how to cook, which spices to add, what quantities of spices to add in order to make a meal using a slow cooker.
A slow cooker is handy for making some kinds of recipes like soups and stews that require an elongated slow cooking period, but it has a limited repertoire. The long, moist cooking is not suitable for food items that are meant to remain crisp and fresh, as a slow cooker can leave food mushy by overcooking it. This process can also destroy nutrients particularly from vegetables due to enzyme action during cooking and due to heat degradation.
More recently, multi-cooker devices have become available, which although allowing for multiple cooking processes (e.g. baking or stewing), have many of the same drawbacks as slow cookers. Among the drawbacks is a lack of freshness or “à la minute” preparation of food ingredients. Such devices are not suited, for example, to stir-fried, poached, or steamed preparations, which require precise timing and precise exposure of ingredients to short heating durations, and/or exposure of different ingredients to different amounts or durations of heat (e.g. onions vs. carrots).
It would be desirable to have an automated meal preparation apparatus that would allow cooking from whole ingredients using an easy, cost-effective and healthy process.
USPTO Backgrounds
USPTO Backgrounds