Living with a smart oven and smarter pans

For the last six weeks, my family has cooked with a connected GE induction oven and a set of connected pans from Hestan Cue. So far I haven’t regretted my purchase of the smart oven (or connecting it to my Wi-Fi network), although I think I could do without the smart pans.

Back in January, I wrote about what I learned connecting the oven, and so far the only surprise I’ve had was a pleasant one: After power outages, I no longer have to set the clock on the oven because it resets automatically. (We lose power a lot, so that’s actually a pretty nice feature.) But what about the lived experience of cooking and connecting? Let’s (ahem) dig in.

I’ll begin with a few bits about the oven. After connecting it, I realized that GE Appliances (which is owned by Haier) wouldn’t let me invite other users to the app. Since the oven was connected to the app on my phone, this meant that if my phone wasn’t in the house, people at home couldn’t access the app. But it would only be an issue if they wanted to use the smart pans or some of the advanced cooking features. GE Appliances, also known as GEA, is planning to add the ability to invite other users over time.

In the meantime, I had two options: Log into the GEA app called SmartHQ on our home iPad as myself, or delete my account and create a new email for the home iPad that would also work with the Hestan Cue smart pans. Because the Hestan Cue smart pans use Bluetooth to connect and report data back to a phone or iPad, and because Hestan Cue wouldn’t let me invite multiple users, I decided we should delete all of our accounts and create a new dedicated home account on our home tablet.

That was a pain. It also felt like a dumb design decision, one that I’ve seen across multiple kitchen gadgets. Most homes have more than one person who will both cook and use connected gadgets. But not everyone has a spare iPad or home phone lying around to act as a dedicated kitchen controller. Which means kitchen appliance makers, much like lock makers, have to think about how to let multiple people in a home link to a single device and related account.

I also heard from several people who were unable to reset their ovens back to factory settings, so they had a smart oven in their home that was still attached to a prior homeowner’s account. That is both frustrating and a security risk. But as a helpful tech at GEA explained to me, you can actually do a hard reset for the Wi-Fi connectivity on the oven.

Each oven varies, but there should be a physical button somewhere labelled “settings.” Once in the settings menu, simply click through to Wi-Fi. From there, you should see a SSID and a password for the soft AP associated with the oven. From that point, you’ll need to go to the SmartHQ app, sign up for an account, and then start the process of adding a device.

If you are planning on moving, or if you simply made a mistake and put your oven on an individual’s phone instead of a house device, disconnecting the oven from your account is pretty simple. It just takes some time to explore the nested menus in the poorly designed app.

From the home screen in the app, you’ll select the oven. Once you click through you’ll be presented with a control screen for the oven. Ignore that, and instead click on the hamburger menu in the upper left-hand corner. Once in that menu, select “product” info and then click “remove appliance.” Once you do that, your oven will be detached from your account.

That’s pretty much all I have to say about the oven other than it performs as an oven should and integrates with Google Assistant and Alexa for functions like preheat, which is nice.

So let’s talk about the smart pan from Hestan Cue. We purchased the 5.5-quart chef pan since that’s the workhorse in our kitchen. We had previously used a Scanpan non-stick chef pan, but the smart pan was actually less expensive ($249.99 on sale), though it wasn’t a non-stick.

The idea of these pans is that they report data on their temperature so that, when placed on a dedicated burner on the stove, they communicate with the range to ensure the heat stays at a specific level. This is really cool for browning butter or caramelizing onions, when maintaining even heat is essential. It’s also cool for people who may not know how to cook, since Hestan Cue has an app that can guide the user through a variety of recipes while controlling the pan’s temperature.

But as mentioned earlier, we originally hooked the pan up to the app on my phone. That meant anyone using the pan needed my phone to cook in it. The alternative — using my husband’s phone — isn’t great. There are plenty of times we need to cook when the other isn’t around. To be clear, we only need the app if we want to use a guided recipe or maintain a set temperature.

You can cook in the pan without the app if you don’t want to take advantage of the smarts. And that’s what I do 90% of the time. I hate cooking with a guided recipe. I suspected this about myself, but working with the pan cinched it. It feels fussy and boring and exactly like baking, which I loathe.

My husband, on the other hand, loves the pan and the guided cooking because he feels like he can cook something without having to guess if it’s done enough or he’s messed something up. The things that drive me crazy make him feel secure as a chef, and his food does turn out better. He’s all about this smart pan, which is almost a surprise because there are a bunch of things about it he finds inconvenient.

First, getting the pan set up on the right account was a pain. And every time he cooks with it he has to take the battery out of the pan to get it to reconnect to the Bluetooth on the phone. This would be a deal killer for me, but he’s so happy with the results he’s willing to overlook it. Still, we’d both like to see that improve.

The pan is also physically very heavy. It does heat quickly and evenly on the stove and conducts heat well. But it isn’t non-stick, so no one really enjoys getting saddled with the dishes after we cook in this pan. I find myself using my dutch oven whenever possible to avoid cooking in this pan, but again, my husband is all in.

Personally, I would prefer to buy the original non-stick Scanpan chef pan and would sell the Hestan Cue and give up on precision cooking. But what I think will happen is that my husband’s love of it means we’ll keep it in rotation while also getting another everyday chef’s pan for when I cook or we just need to make a quick meal we already know how to cook. And if we do that, I’ll be grateful for it the few times a year I want to make a pudding or caramelize onions.

I find my feelings about the pan ironic since the whole reason I connected the GEA range was to use this pan. And yet, after experiencing the ability to tell Google to preheat the oven and not having to reset the clock after power outages, I’m glad it’s connected.