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Re:A Slow-Motion Trainwreck Facing the Meal-Kit Industry by bradleyjg on Tuesday June 27, 2017 @02:53PM (#14648146)
"I'm cautiously optimistic about Tovala. They are the first one of these that has a fairly unique system where the food just needs to be popped into their combi-oven (bake, broil, and steam) and you just wait until it cooks."

Isn't that just the old TV dinner promise dating back to the 1950s and the invention of the microwave?

Re:A Slow-Motion Trainwreck Facing the Meal-Kit Industry by ghaff on Tuesday June 27, 2017 @03:05PM (#14648256)
And they say this as something so wild and wacky it's worth an exclamation point :-/ "The Tovala doesn't just cook Tovala meals - you can program it to cook your own food too!"

So it's some sort of programmable combi oven. They're apparently (sorry) hot in modernist etc. cooking circles. I've read that keeping them free from mold etc. can be a problem but I haven't looked into them in any great detail.

I have to say that the example meal shown on their site is really not something most people would find at all challenging or time-consuming to prepare using supermarket ingredients.

Re:A Slow-Motion Trainwreck Facing the Meal-Kit Industry by illumin8 on Tuesday June 27, 2017 @04:08PM (#14648914)
Sure, but because a combi-oven can steam as well as bake and broil, you can cook things like vegetables, which would normally be dried out husks in a standard oven. Also, you can broil and get a nice crisp finish.

It's just like a TV dinner or a microwaveable dinner, but hopefully better because you have more cooking capabilities.

Re:A Slow-Motion Trainwreck Facing the Meal-Kit Industry by silverlake on Tuesday June 27, 2017 @06:29PM (#14650126)
I have a super fancy combi-oven. It cooks some things nicely, but it doesn't speed up dinner overall. I enjoy cooking and spend a lot of time doing it. The benefit of this expensive oven is better baking, but it is definitely overkill.