To someone with functioning eyes, this must seem rather difficult. I've noticed that sight is what I like to call a greedy sense, in that if you have this high bandwidth data input it sort of blocks you from being able to pay attention to input from your other senses.
As a blind person who fancies myself as a bit of a cook though, being able to smell, feel, and interact with the food as I'm cooking really does make up for a lot. Also, you just kind of have to get over the initial fear of heat :)
The article mentions this and it's absolutely true: a high-sided pan makes all the difference. I use my 6 qt cast iron Dutch oven for browning meet and this completely avoids spillage.
Also if you ever wondered who buys those weird "smart" kitchen devices, anything with an app is about 15,000 times more useable than the touch surfaces for most modern appliances. It's way easier to set the air fryer or instant pot from the phone, which reminds me I've been meaning to try and reverse engineer the protocol that my Bluetooth instant pot uses before the unmaintained app
is removed from the store.
The Instant Pot ecosystem would benefit from open-source firmware, so it can be integrated with Home Assistant and voice controlled systems like Alexa, Siri, Google. The company is under PE management and in bankruptcy, but for the sake of the millions of repairable devices out there, will hopefully find a second wind. If not, perhaps the internal controller can be replaced with a RPi.
My most wanted Instant Pot modification is to replace the beeps it makes when it reaches pressure. It should play a chiptune version of Queen’s “Under Pressure”
Edit: mine might only beep when the timer expires, but that’s still a great opportunity to play that tune
In Germany there's plenty of Thermomix clones from groceries chains like Aldi and Lidl. Usually in the 300€ range. I own a Thermomix with the all cookbooks subscription but it's basically a glorified blender and soup maker for me these days (at least there will be plenty of pumpkin soups the next couple of month) as I usually cook with my normal equipment. I use my good old AirFryer more for example.
I always wanted to add some "smart cooking" device as a BA thesis topic for our students, because it just annoys me how closed these systems are (I briefly looked into reversing the TM). I mean how much cooler would it be if I could send any recipe to a smart cooking device and it would provide the easy stepthrough system of the TM instead of just their curated ones. Honestly I have never considered how cooking must feel for the blind so that's a very interesting use case.
I wonder why there wasn't a bigger market for home cooking devices integrated with Alexa. Even things like bluetooth temperature sensors would be highly useful, and you could conceivably use Alexa to monitor these devices and let you know if they go outside of your desired thresholds.
Even as a sighted cook, I do rely on the noise a pressure cooker makes when relieving pressure at the red line. There is usually a visual pressure indicator, but on most models it is rather "binary" anyways, either the knob is out or in.
> anything with an app is about 15,000 times more useable than the touch surfaces for most modern appliances.
As a person with pretty good sight (140% with glasses), I have to say that these sort of devices tend to be difficult to use even for me. For example, my father has an inductive stove with a touch interface, and I commonly fail to properly use it on the "subsequent first tries".
When I see a touch screen interface that is completely static (same "buttons" at the same positions), I often wonder what led to the decision to utilize them instead of just using hardware buttons/knobs. Is it a cost-saving measure, or just some managerial person who decided they needed to use something more modern?
I find sensors are dangerous, for two reasons. Sensors react not only to your finger but also to the wet cloth while cleaning, so cleaning can change settings or switch on the heat. There is usually a "cloth-detection", but that often doesn't work. And on the hob, if you spill something, liquid might get on the buttons and change the settings. I've had a spill turning into a disaster of burned milk and even more spillage that way.
Idk how it works but when I clean my induction burner, when the buttons are wet, there is some sort of annoying alarm beep but it never ever activated some button for no reason. Also, you need to long press the power button then the burner specific button.
Of course it’s induction so even if it was erroneously powered on, it would only be an issue with a pan on it which never happen anyway when you clean.
I hate sensors buttons with passion for everything but in the specific case of an induction burner, I think that’s a smart choice (accessibility aside).
My previous ikea induction burner even had 4 virtual sliders for the temperature, one for each burner and it was so nice that I wonder why it’s not the default.
I’d be fine with them except that the stove completely turns off when the sensors get a drop of water on them. And your fingers has to be dry and clean to use them. Both conditions make them hopeless in a kitchen.
While I do get mildly irritated any time a water spillage triggers the buttons, I mostly love the sensor buttons on my induction hob. I clean the hob far more often now I can just give it a quick wipe down with a cloth and not have to try and get all the crevices on the controls.
Biggest reason by far is saving cost, but there are also some important benefits for the end-user like having no moving parts and being easier to clean.
The UI for these seems to be universally awful. I was looking for a stovetop/hob for my mother and I couldn't find a single brand that didn't have glaring usability faults. I finally found a model that I could order sight-unseen that had knobs - but it took far too much research.
There's some law of capitalism that says that anything in the kitchen with electronics must have a devily awful UI. It isn't just microwave ovens! I have found no brand that puts UI as a priority.
Side note, I couldn't help notice that both your comment and the article at one point spell the word "meat" with a double E (as in meeting) - we can tell it's a speech-to-text mishap given the context here, but it makes me wonder how often this happens, and how much of an issue this is when the tool is used on a daily basis.
It's not a voice recognition issue as presumably both pronounciations are identical - so it's up to the software to infer the right word from context cues or grammar rules.
I've noticed quite a leap in the quality of dictation/STT over the past 10 years or so, and I really hope this and other features can continue to improve at this pace.
As someone with a colour vision deficiency I sometimes struggle with things like "this meat is in date but smells a bit iffy." I can't even begin to imagine how much more of a struggle being blind would be in the kitchen. I remember as a child we had someone visit us in school, I remember we talked about how they made a cup of tea, which seemed difficult enough, I never stopped to consider how they would make a Bolognese!
> I've noticed that sight is what I like to call a greedy sense, in that if you have this high bandwidth data input it sort of blocks you from being able to pay attention to input from your other senses.
I'm visually impaired/low vision with some neurological visual issues but I pass as sighted and this is really it. Vision takes so much work - I'm definitely going to describe it as a 'greedy' sense + steal your bandwidth analogy.
The neural cost of vision is relevant to those who wear vision-correcting glasses, e.g. what's the neural impact of choosing to have non 20/20 vision in some daily situations? Or altering the duty cycle of the eye?
> when our eyes are open, our vision accounts for two-thirds of the electrical activity of the brain – a full 2 billion of the 3 billion firings per second – which was the finding of neuroanatomist R.S. Fixot in a paper published in 1957 .. half of all neural tissue deals with vision in some way.
> According to John Medina in his book Brain Rules, in the fight for more neural real estate that’s going on between our olfactory cortex and the visual cortex, vision is winning. He writes: “about 60 percent of our smell-related genes have been permanently damaged in this neural arbitrage, and they are marching toward obsolescence at a rate fourfold faster than any other species sampled.”
Forgive me if this is an insensitive question and feel free not to answer, but do you care about the way your food looks when it's done? I mean to say that many restaurants put a lot of time into how the dish looks, the way they put things on the plate. Do you completely disregard it or do you put the ingredients in a particular way that is convenient to eat?
Secondhand observations on plate layout, not aesthetics:
- red plate can increase contrast with food
- non-slip mat to reduce plate movement
- food bumper or edge to push food onto utensil
- food type by compartments and/or clock face location
> most of the products available for visually impaired people are functional but not aesthetic .. I was quite shocked at how some solutions can become stigmatising objects, like a beeping electrode that is attached to a glass that gives off an alarm signal when it is full," .. "I wanted each functional feature to become part of the aesthetics in this tableware set. So that it is really integrated and the collection can appeal to people without vision problems..
> "With five per cent vision, pouring a glass of water is like pouring something invisible into something invisible," .. "Visually impaired people can, however, perceive colour contrasts," she explained. It was an exciting puzzle for me to try to use colours and the refraction of light into water to give a visual signal when there is enough water in the glass."
> The color of the plate makes a difference, especially for people in memory care or with vision and depth-perception issues. “A red plate can help foods—especially light-colored foods like poultry, pork, potatoes and corn—stand out,” .. plates with rims or raised edges.. help diners scoop up food.
That's really insightful, thank you! I didn't even consider that pouring a glass of water would be a challenge or that the common solution is an electrode.
As realtime OCRing from a phone is getting better, I wonder how hard it would be to have a glass mounted camera paired with the phone to read aloud any text that is pointed at by the user's finger.
No fancy object recognition or trying to be smart, just fast and solid reading aloud.
I'm not blind, but the way I wash dishes, when I rinse I press my fingers against the surface and slide with a bit of force through as much surface as I can. If my fingers don't skip across, it's not clean enough. It ideally should make that audible squeaky-clean sound.
I also identify minuscule stuck pieces of food through touch rather than sight. I need to not feel those for it to be clean.
A water break test[1] is even more sensitive, but requires vision. Total overkill for cooking though, even your skin oil left by touching the pot will cause it to fail the test.
Hehe, that reminds me of one of the Applied Science videos where he's trying to get a coating to adhere to glass by various extreme cleaning techniques. Afterwards he says something like "washing the dishes is basically just scraping off the big lumps of food."
Related to this, using white ceramic pans comes with an interesting chalenge: they look dirty but with no impact on the food.
The white surface gets brown spots that are crazy hard to remove, but that also means it won't get to the food you prepare. So you have to make peace with having no good visual indication of how sufficiently clean the pan is.
I kinda came to assume the dark pans have the same issue, it's just not visible.
I'd never considered the problem of "food bit accumulation" for visually impaired people, until reading this.
The first approach of limiting escape makes sense (e.g. vertical side, deep pans), as the problem turns a typical quick spot clean into a deep whole clean.
One of the principal challenges listed in the article is that you cannot stick a thermometer into the ground beef.
Apropos of that, I would like to encourage bakers to start using thermometers on their baked goods.
You'll see lots of recipes give all sorts of instructions on how to tell when something is fully baked like "until golden brown" or "until it pulls away from the sides" or "knock on it until it sounds right".
But it turns out you can just stick a thermometer in it.
Most things I bake need to hit around 190F internally before they're ready. This especially works well for things like cinnamon rolls that have a gooey filling that sometimes slows the bake so it looks done from the outside but is still gooey inside; you stick the thermometer in when it looks done and lo, it is only 160F inside, totally under baked.
It was a bit revelatory to learn this trick, for me; previously I only thought of thermometers as a tool for cooking meat and syrup.
I do this with bread baking, if it looks ready, temp it. If it's below ~90C i'll tent it with foil to stop the top from burning but let it get up to temp.
The video in the linked article for the Talking Thermometer illustrates nicely how hard "simple" things like operating an oven and finding the place to test the temperature are:
I can see the huge value these videos provide. Listening to her spend so much time describing how it looks really sold the point home. To me - its shape and how it unfolds is obvious.
Really shows how much better we can make content for the disabled. How many ecom store descriptions would have even taken the time to describe the shape of the devive so TTS/screenreader would even have a chance to read it?
They'd have to improve the quality of the deliveries for that to be useful. Door dash seems to deliver at a random location each time, and about 30% of the time delivers to the neighbor instead of the correct address. Even with sight, it sometimes takes me a few minutes to find the delivery, I have no idea how that would be useable by someone that has partial or no vision.
What's the premium for meal delivery services over home prep? 300%? How many people can afford to pay $20 for a meal they could make themselves for $5?
I haven't posted in years, but felt the need to weigh in on a food topic that's dear to my heart:
With ground meat, the two things you're looking to develop with heat are flavor and texture (and safety). The problem is though, that while texture can be developed as a function of time, flavor can be harder to develop since it's mostly a product of the Maillard reaction (browning). Unfortunately, as you develop texture (heat up the meat), the muscle fibers contract and squeeze out water, which lowers the temperature of your cooking surface and mitigates Maillard development. This is exacerbated by using ground meat, which isn't as insulted as say, a steak would be, which means water comes out faster. This leaves two major ways to develop flavor:
1. Sear your meat before you grind it -- easy said, but a pain in general because it involves cutting and semi-freezing the meat chunks after searing, slowing down your cooking, or
2. Working in batches and trying to get your ground meat to brown before the heat causes the water to come out, which is slow.
Both of these options suck. For any aspiring home cook, I'd say the best thing you can do for your food is to buy a high heat source. Use a powerful induction stove on the highest setting, and you can brown your meat without batching it as the water evaporates faster than it can collect (up to a point).
Just take the whole compressed, square, package-shaped "patty" of ground meat from the plastic and drop it into a ripping hot pan intact, and don't touch it until it browns pretty darkly on the bottom, then proceed to break it up and cook as normal. This gets you quite a lot of Maillard flavor without having to cook crumbled meat within an inch of its life. (As with most good ideas, this one came from Kenji.)
This relates to my biggest objection to this article, which is that the best cooking tip for ground meat (blind or not) is that it's really easy to hear the difference between the "hiss" of water evaporating as steam and the "sizzle" of it frying/browning, and the two things do not happen at the same time. Alternative title: "how to slowly steam ground meat flavorlessly without vision."
Or you can bake it. That way you can save the tasty juices. It's especially effective for hamburger patties. When you are done cooking, you can dump the juices on the bread and then put your hamburger patty on it. Absolutely delicious.
After years of overcooked dry meat, setting off the smoke alarm, dealing with splatter all over the stove and a lingering smell in the apartment for the entire day, I discovered the magic of baking meat and will never go back to searing and frying meat.
This works just as well for steak. Instead of buying individual cuts of steak, buy a rib roast. Roast it in the oven and cut it into individual steaks afterwards. Cooked steak keeps amazingly well so you can put it in the fridge or freeze it and eat it later. Pan searing or grilling will never get you the tasty crust that roasting can. Try it and never go back to a smoke filled apartment with a screaming smoke alarm.
With meat especially, but also with fish and some vegetables, one of the prime indicators as to how far along someting is cooked, for everyone not just the visually impaired. is not sight but resistance. This is because usually the outside the things when prepared well should look the same irespective of how coocked trough it is.
For meat the easiest way to learn the different ways meat feels at different points throughout the coocking scale from 'bleu chaud" to 'well done' is steak.
Pushing down with a spatula a raw slab of beef feels like solid pudding. You can push it sideways with preessure on the top and without moving it, and also it will compress and bounce back. As it gets more coocked through, the elastic feel will gradually become more contrained until you end up with a rock solid charred brick.
For ground meat this is similar but more subtile. For vegetables you do not use the push down method, but you feel the resistance by sticking a fork in and feel it change from pretty hard to prick in to slicing through like butter. Easiest there yo practice id with boiled potato.
Smell is also usefull, but inly to an extend as there can be many strong smells in a kitchen and the differences for degrees of coocking can be very subtle and vary with each batch, and also smeling can be impeded when you have a cold.
My controversial take: cook ground meat as you would a steak. Toss the whole block in there and get a nice crust on both sides and then once you have gotten that Maillard reaction, then break it into the ground crumbles like usual. Flavor will be so much better.
Most “browning” of ground beef is more akin to steaming than searing.
This is entirely counter to my usual method of chopping up a block of mince meat before putting it in the pan. I’m going to give it a try next time and see how it goes, I suspect it’ll result in the outer layer being delicious and the rest less so, but we’ll see.
depending on how deep the heat gets in, it might also result in large chunks of meat with lots of interior meat that was cooked but never touched the pan. Personally I've tried this and I don't like it. I have better experience in success by brreaking it up, adding things like onions and garlic as well as spices.
But I'd rather have nice crusty bits with good flavor and some textural difference and some really juicy meat that didn't get fully dried out vs. having all meat dried out and none really well browned, just slightly browned.
I actually adopted the practice of rubbing the tip of my spatula against the surface of a piece of meat to get a sense of doneness. Think taking the tip edge of your spatula, planting it into the top surface of the meat and rocking it back and forth a bit to feel how spongy it is still. The less give, the more done. This works really well for finicky cooks like chicken and fish.
If you do something often, it pays to find out how to do it without vision. I can't function in the morning without/before I have coffee, and this often means I can't pull my shit together enough to make said coffee by which to function. So I have a moca pot and two timers, one 9 minutes and one 13 minutes. Moca pot goes on full heat and it takes exactly 9 minutes for the first coffee to come through; alarm goes off; turn the flame down to very low so as not to burn coffee. By this point I should have switched from making bed to cleaning dishes or folding laundry, (or
vacuuming or cleaning the stove or bathroom or another area I noticed needed cleaning - I attend to each on longer and shorter rotations). At the 13 minute alarm, the coffee is exactly full, and ideally the morning chores are done.
There is a method that might make this even easier / safer for visually impaired persons. I don't remember where I got it from, and mind you, it sounds a bit off-putting, but it actually works. I don't use it often as it's not worth the hassle for me, but has it's advantages.
The trick is to add a cup of water to your ground beef, and mix it in thoroughly. Put that on the stove on high heat. Oil is optional as the fat from the meat will have melted by the time water evaporates. The ground beef will separate perfectly with very little effort. Cook it until it starts sizzling, then let it brown as needed. No hot oil, no clumps, no raw meat.
For any dish with a thick sauce (chilli, bolognese, etc) it tastes the same, would just avoid it when going for drier results like taco meat as the texture is different.
Suddenly I realise what everyone is going on about when they say one should be aware of one's own "privilege" - simply cooking is something that is massively privileged with sight, and honestly till today it never even crossed my mind.
I realised this once when I was helping a female friend move and I was proud of how I packed all her pots and pans into a single box.
She called me over a bit later because she wasn't able to lift it on her own, so we had to split the contents across two boxes, I didn't even consider weight to be an issue while packing as long as the box wasn't in danger of breaking.
The texture, weight, and resistance of ground meat is really key to understanding how "done" it is. If it is no longer "springy" at all, it's overdone. But what cut of meat you have, and how it was ground, is also essential to the result.
The best teacher in the kitchen is repetition. Take a ball of whatever meat you have, try to cook it. However it comes out, make a tiny adjustment, try it again. Do that a dozen times. You won't have spent very much money, but you will have learned a lot about how it reacts in a pan. Do that for all kinds of foods and you will very quickly become experienced.
There's an Android cellphone (with replaceable battery!) for the blind market, which includes NFC and the WayAround app for reading their NFC tags, which are designed for attaching to food items in fridge/freezer/cupboard, clothes (laundry ready buttons) and more.
> You can copy a Wayaround tag onto a generic tag and it will operate on the Wayaround app same way. HOWEVER, you cannot just use generic tags freely. The tag does not really hold the information you "write" to it. It just has a serial number that it looks up on your account when you read it. I copied a blank Wayaround tag to a generic one, then had the app set that tag as Artwork, Statue of Cthulhu. Both tags now respond with that same result.
On iOS, NFC tags can be used to trigger user-scripted Shortcuts that speak audio or take other scripted actions when the iPhone is tapped on a tag. Requires Lockdown mode and Airplane mode to be disabled. No app necessary. For a quick demo, some public transit passes are NFC and readable by iPhone. Even if the pass is expired, the NFC identity function can be used indefinitely.
It's remarkable how many opportunities for error there are in this process. Even sighted cooking isn't easy the first time. Has to be a good analogy for something.
Two of the best cooks I have ever known have significant visual impairment, though neither is blind. One is blind in one eye and I've heard the other described by someone knowledgeable as one of "the sighted blind."
They both rely heavily on smell to determine doneness, which gets vastly superior results to my reliance on time as an indicator of doneness.
My process for ground beef in particular involves a potato masher and a really deep skillet. Don't forget the onions. I don't need to see a damn thing. There are 2 completion triggers for the sauté phase: smell and sound. You can smell the sugars being created and burned off, but for me the much bigger one is sound. I can hear the pan and the "sizzle rate" with such precision that I could tell you how many seconds until I need to stir it at every moment.
I can get 2 lbs of taco meat prepped in ~20 minutes completely blindfolded with my mise en place. Absolutely no doubts about that. Practice makes perfect. You do something once a week for a decade and it becomes 2nd nature.
Is it really necessary to "brown" ground meat if you're not going to make it crusty? If you're making tacos or chili, what happens if you just add the spices and liquid and braise the whole thing?
Obviously it would change the timing somewhat, but it should be safe (everything comes to well over minimum temperature). If you didn't mean to make a fond, is there any difference in flavor?
Your ground meat is wet- are you defrosting it before cooking? Hard to get up to temp- are you using vegetable oil?
Heat the pan. Heat the oil. Put the meat in. It's basically starting to brown immediately.
Like the blind kitchen says- use your ears and nose. It should sizzle immediately when you put the meat in (just a gentle sizzle, NOT a violent sizzle). And it should start smelling good pretty quickly.
Defrost first. Don't try to brown too much at once (the meat needs to touch the oil and the pan).
EDIT: Oh, I think you're trying to make chili "all at once" by skipping the browning. Yes, it's safe. No, it won't taste as good. Browning is about flavor, not safety. When you cook a steak, you sear it for the crust, then continue cooking to get it up to temp. If you cook a steak in a low-temp sous vide bath, you do the reverse. You get the meat up to temp in the bath. Then when you're ready to eat, you finish it by searing it in a pan.
Almost any stovetop heat setting will do the job, it's just a question of how long you want to wait. The post said to use medium heat and listen for the sizzle; the sizzle starts when the water is gone. Then the browning/Maillard begins.
For anyone making tacos at home: If you don't get to the point where you hear the sizzle, you're making tacos out of steamed meat, not browned meat. This is an easy fix that will seriously up your taco game (unless for some reason you like grey tacos).
You can always cook off the liquid. It'll start browning when the pan begins to dry. Just make sure you add oil so it doesn't stick. With ground beef it's really not a problem to fully cook the meat in liquid before browning it.
I just make a pancake of mince, about 1/2" thick. I cook that until it's browned (I can see, but you could time it), then I chop it into four quarters, and flip them.
Yeah, I end up with four triangular slabs of what amounts to a giant burger; I then smash it up with a fork or the back of a spoon. Add the result to some fried onions; viola - cottage-pie filling.
A device I thought would be cool as a careless cook (not a blind one) which would help here is some kind of rotating tumbler. A bit like a composter but small and made of steel, and rotates itself (could use energy from heat source to assist).
This would allow you to chuck mince, chicken, rice etc. in and have it so no burning occurs. Use a low heat and wait a bit longer.
> There have been numerous accounts of a Thermomix machine "exploding" and scalding people with hot liquids ...
Choice told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) that it was aware of 87 cases where Thermomix consumers had been burned. The ABC understood that 18 of those required several weeks of treatment in hospital burns units ...
In April 2018 Thermomix in Australia was handed a $4.6 million fine because they had violated consumer law by failing to report dangerous defects.
Well, it's a pressure cooker with a rice cooker as a main selling point.
>> Do I need to cook vegetables or shellfish before adding to the rice if doing a varied rice recipe?
>> There is no need to precook vegetables or shellfish before putting them in the rice as the steaming action will cook them thoroughly.
> not sold in US
I don't know why it's so (with Tefal products overall, not only with that one). It's just what I knew about this one. Other brands should be available, I think.
I feel like it would be super interesting to try to learn cooking blind even as a person without impaired vision. I can even imagine it as a hobby and it would make it easier to recognize and remember the need of accessibility in our worlds - both the digital and the physical one.
But I'm anxious about hurting myself attempting this.
Pretty soon the answer will be: use smartglasses to snap a picture of the pan, use visual mode of chatgpt app to answer whether it looks done or not, have it respond back to you with voice on how done it looks.
As a color-blind person, I have the phobia of either undercooking or overcooking food, as I can’t use “color” to assess it. Cook poultry until it’s not pink inside? I have no idea if this color classifies as “pink”. Therefore this website might actually be useful not for only blind people!
As a blind person who fancies myself as a bit of a cook though, being able to smell, feel, and interact with the food as I'm cooking really does make up for a lot. Also, you just kind of have to get over the initial fear of heat :)
The article mentions this and it's absolutely true: a high-sided pan makes all the difference. I use my 6 qt cast iron Dutch oven for browning meet and this completely avoids spillage.
Also if you ever wondered who buys those weird "smart" kitchen devices, anything with an app is about 15,000 times more useable than the touch surfaces for most modern appliances. It's way easier to set the air fryer or instant pot from the phone, which reminds me I've been meaning to try and reverse engineer the protocol that my Bluetooth instant pot uses before the unmaintained app is removed from the store.