Grundig’s vision of the future contains an oven that makes your food cold

In the future, we’ll all be flying around with jetpacks, using our brain-computer interfaces to have non-verbal conversations, before coming home to a perfectly cooked chicken that we left there before setting off for work.

Okay, maybe the first two are a stretch, but the third is a real possibility. At least if the research and development team at Grundig has its way. 

We attended an event about the future of kitchen technology and were lucky enough to see some of the products that could soon be gracing our kitchen counters.

It felt a little like being 007 getting shown around Q’s lab, only if Bond was a chef. 

‘What’s this Q? An oven?’

‘Yes Bond, but this is no ordinary oven. This oven makes your food...cold.’

That's cool

"Why would you want an over that chills food?", I hear you ask. Well, say you want to cook a roast chicken for an evening get-together after work; you would currently have to start dinner at midnight.

With the Cooling Oven, you can leave said fowl in the oven being nicely chilled until the optimal moment, the oven switches itself on, then you arrive home just in time for first basting.

Now obviously there are already ovens on the market that allow you to set a timer for when the food starts cooking, but they usually have a maximum six hour waiting time before starting, because salmonella is no laughing matter. 

If your oven serves as a back-up fridge, you can leave whatever it is in there over the weekend if you want and come home to that perfectly cooked kleftiko on Sunday night.

Everything you ever put in the oven tells you to pre-heat first, and we thought food going from cold to hot would have a negative effect on the cooking but we were assured that it would just need an adjustment of cooking time. Now we just have to worry about leaving our oven on while we’re not in, which we’re pretty sure you’re not supposed to do.

The Grundig Cooling Oven was first unveiled at IFA last year as a concept, and looks like it may be available as early as next year.

Andrew London

Andrew London is a writer at Velocity Partners. Prior to Velocity Partners, he was a staff writer at Future plc.