Cooksy serves up real time cooking guidance using thermal imaging

Cooksy is launching now on Indiegogo. It’s marketed as an intelligent culinary assistant whose role in the kitchen is to give you real-time advice that’ll stop you from under- or overcooking your food.

As Jeff Knighton, Founder and President at Cooksy, puts it: “Cooking is all about applying the right intensity of heat for the right amount of time. Cooksy makes this easy, giving you a ‘sixth sense’, guiding you to make consistently amazing food.”

An experienced cook will recognise when a pan is hot enough or when a sauce is reducing perfectly but Cooksy promises to deliver that information instantly and accurately so that novice cooks don’t destroy their dinners and more experienced home chefs can cook more complicated recipes with greater precision.  

What is Cooksy?

Cooksy is a small, connected device, measuring 3.49 x 1.14in (10 x 2.9 cm) and weighing 11oz (311g). It clips onto the underside of your cooker hood or a similar spot above your hob. It analyses your on-hob cooking via a camera with thermal imaging tech and delivers this information to you via the Cooksy Companion app (iOS and Android).

The thermal imaging promises to measure much more accurately than a thermometer or probe by taking the temperature at thousands of spots across your pan many times per second.

But this tech doesn’t come cheap. The early bird deal for the entry-level Cooksy costs $389 (approximately £275). The device has a 5Mp camera and thermal imaging sensor with a 32 x 24 array. It also has 8GB of storage (which amounts to 15 hours of video/ thermal recording).

Cooksy for social media

But why would you need storage? Well, you can opt to record your cooking efforts to watch back and remind yourself exactly how you created a particularly outstanding dish, or you can record and share cooking videos with others, including the Cooksy community.

This is another angle for Cooksy. It could potentially be a very handy tool for people who want to showcase their cooking on social media. The app will track when ingredients are added and provide timing markers on the video. Its smart editing option automatically condenses your recipe into a quick, shareable top-down video that features all of the key steps.

Social media broadcasters might prefer the higher-spec Pro Cooksy model. You can opt for the Cooksy Pro at $479 for the early bird deal (roughly £339) or the Cooksy Pro SE Signature ($749/ £530).

These devices have better cameras (13Mp) and more sensitive thermal imaging tech (80 x 62 array), as well as more storage at 32GB – about 60 hours of video/ thermal recording. In addition, the Pro SE Signature comes in a copper colourway.

Cooksy Companion app

Download the Cooksy Companion app for Android or iOS and, if you’re following a Cooksy recipe, you’ll get alerts and step-by-step guidance. Cooksy will tell you if your pan is too hot or cold, when to turn down the heat and when to add your next ingredient.

You can also record, edit and share your own recipes and organise your recipes into cookbooks.

To buy or not to buy

In a sense, it seems like two products in one: a handy, social-media focused way to record cooking videos and a cooking assistant. On the social side, a lot of its success will depend on what its uptake is like, how easy it is to make videos and how easy it is to share them across social media beyond Cooksy. The price alone will deter a number of potential purchasers.

But it’s the thermal imaging that sets Cooksy apart from other app-based cooking guides, which can really only tell you in what order to do things, or how food should look at each stage of cooking.

According to the Indiegogo page, you can use temperature drop pins to keep an eye on the different temperatures in your pan and if that works well, it would lead to much more precise cooking. But just how accurate is the thermal imaging? And how much better is the Pro version?

We hope to test it and find out but the campaign launches today and has already passed 100% with products aimed to ship in October. To back the campaign and get your Cooksy, visit the page on Indiegogo.