Can smart kitchen devices with a Wi-Fi chip make me a better cook?

I am a competent barbecuer and a reluctant everything-else. I can feed my family, but I wouldn’t call most of it cooking, and I definitely wouldn’t call it fun, even with a glass of red wine in one hand. So when three of the kitchen’s most-hyped connected appliances landed on my doorstep, I had one question: can a Wi-Fi chip and an app actually make me good at cooking? I gave them a month to try.

Broil King Regal Q 590 Pro: The smart BBQ that earned its keep

First, a warning. Assembling this thing nearly ended me. My dad and I set aside an afternoon and gave up after four hours, beaten by a flat-packed slab of stainless steel that fought us at every bolt. We called in a professional, who also found it a struggle. Budget for that, both the time and possibly the tradie.

Once it was standing, though, the Regal Q 590 Pro is a serious piece of kit for serious meat eaters. Five dual-tube burners push out 55,000 BTUs, with a searing infrared side burner and a rotisserie on top. The 9mm stainless grids feel like they will outlive me. The premium materials are obvious the moment you touch them, and at about $3900 to $5500 in Australia, you are paying for them.

The smart features sound like gimmickry, but they aren’t. The BBQ’s iQue system connects over Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, holds a set temperature without me fiddling with knobs, and runs electronic meat probes through to an app so I know when the brisket is done without lifting the lid. There is a learning curve to managing all that across five burners, and the first couple of cooks involved more squinting at the phone than I would like. There is even a scale under the gas bottle that tells me how much propane is left, which I’d say has already saved me at least one mid-cook dash to the servo.

I enjoyed barbecuing before this. The probes have meant I’ve stopped guessing and stopped overcooking, and a slow brisket I would normally have babysat for hours basically minded itself. It made the whole thing easier and more fun, and if you want to call barbecuing cooking, it did make me better at it.

Thermomix TM7: Clever, capable, a little exhausting

The TM7 is the opposite experience. It is dead easy to use, easy to clean, and it gave me ideas for meals I would never have attempted on my own. The 10-inch touchscreen walks you through every step – my two-year-old could probably follow along – and the machine does the work of a cupboard full of gadgets. A risotto that stirred itself while I dealt with my son was the moment I was sold, even if a small part of me felt like I had outsourced the only satisfying bit.

The catches are real, however. It costs $2649, and you can’t simply buy one.

In Australia, Thermomix sells exclusively through independent consultants, who come and give you an in-person demonstration before you hand over the money.

You are then locked into the “Cookidoo” recipe platform, an $89-a-year subscription that drives the guided cooking. It is also very noisy. And if you already own a decent blender, food processor and set of scales, expect part of your cupboard to become redundant.

It made plenty of meals easier and broadened what I cooked over the month. Did it make me a better cook? It made me a more efficient one, which is not quite the same thing.

Philips 5000 Series XXL Connected: The sensible one

The air fryer is the cheapest of the three by a distance, about $299, and the most useful per dollar. The 7.2-litre basket feeds a family of four, the rapid air turns out crispy chips and a whole chicken without a vat of oil, and the basket goes in the dishwasher. On a chaotic weeknight, it arguably does more real work than either of its pricier rivals.

It is also the appliance that makes you most ask: do I really need this connected? You can start, stop and monitor it from your phone through the Philips app, and pair it with Alexa. The future is now!

While starting dinner from the train sounds handy on paper – actually, I’m not even sure that it does – you’ll probably mostly just stand in front of it and use it like a normal person.

The bit nobody markets: privacy

Here’s where the sceptic in me digs in. When the British consumer group Which? tested smart air fryers in November 2024, it found some that asked permission to record audio through their phone app, connecting to advertising trackers, and, in two cases, sending personal data to servers in China. Australia’s own consumer group, Choice, has found the same pattern closer to home. Testing connected cars and smart TVs, it reported that more than half of smart TV owners never open their privacy settings, and that plenty of these devices quietly pass viewing and usage data to advertisers.

As with AI and social media, it’s at least partially on us as consumers to push back where we need to. A barbecue does not really need to know your habits and an air fryer does not need a microphone.

Before you connect anything, check what it wants access to and whether the online features have an off switch. Turn on only the ones you will actually use. Plenty of these appliances cook just as well in dumb mode; not everything needs to be on the internet.

So, did it work?

No. A month in, I can definitively say that I am not a good cook. The reason, I think, is that smart features cannot touch the actual problem, which is that I don’t enjoy cooking. Enjoyment is what makes people good at it – they do it more, they pay attention, they get better. An app cannot install that. At least not yet.

The Thermomix and the Philips make cooking easier, however, without necessarily making it fun. The Broil King does something better: it takes a thing I already love and makes it more enjoyable still. That’s what it boils down to: smart appliances are a multiplier on enthusiasm you already have, not a replacement for enthusiasm you don’t.

You can tell if food was made with love and effort; if you love feeding people, the right connected gadget is a real pleasure. If you don’t, no amount of Wi-Fi will change that. It just gives you a faster way to make a dinner you didn’t want to cook in the first place.

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