Sensory Intelligence: Spoons That Taste Your Food for You

One of the best parts of making cookies from scratch is tasting the dough. Once you've creamed the butter and sugar, beat the eggs, folded the flour and mixed in the vanilla and spices, it's time to test the dough. Why go through all the hassle of homemade cookies if you can't enjoy the raw, unbaked fruits of your labor?

But let's say the culinary project isn't quite so taste-test friendly—perhaps a French onion soup or a breakfast quiche. Since the soup will probably scald the tongue and gobbling down raw quiche eggs isn't a wise idea for the belly, how's an amateur chef to know if all's going according to plan?

Smart Cooking

In 2006, Connie Cheng and Leonardo Bonanni at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Counter Intelligence Lab created a kitchen tool that could ease the worries of nervous cooks far and wide. The pair of students devised an oversized plastic spoon that literally "tastes" food. Although it can't detect specific flavors, the intelligent spoon prototype evaluates four crucial properties:

pH: Acidity levels are important to know for salad dressings and pickling recipes.
Temperature: Some recipes must be kept at certain temperature levels in order for the ingredients to combine properly.
Viscosity: Sauces, soups and other liquid-based foods depend on the right viscosity, or thickness.
Salinity: Over-salting a dish is one of the fastest ways to ruin it. Salinity measures the sodium content.

Metallic Taste Buds

How exactly does this intelligent spoon taste foods? Cheng and Bonanni outfitted the smart tool with zinc, aluminum and gold (yes, gold!) sensors that run via a battery-powered microcontroller. But unless you have a laptop handy in the kitchen, the intelligent spoon won't do you much good. In order to read the spoon's results, you have to hook it up to a computer. Then, depending on what you're cooking, the spoon can suggest any tweaks—say, an extra dash of salt or another teaspoon of baking soda—to balance those four essential levels and coax the food toward culinary perfection.

But when it comes to distinct flavors, success depends on the chef's palette, not the spoon. The smart tool can't tell whether that boysenberry jam needs more boysenberry. While some might consider that a shortcoming, technology simply can't eliminate all of the magic of cooking. After all, that Julia Child-like process of sipping and sampling your way to a mouthwatering meal is part of the fun of cooking in the first place.

What else is cooking on the Counter?

The intelligent spoon isn't the only project that students are whipping up at MIT's Counter Intelligence Lab. The purpose of the lab is to apply smart technology to improve functional, cognitive and social support in the kitchen. Other gadgets students have developed include the Talking Trivet, a smart oven mitt that detects food temperatures, and synesthetic recipes, a graphical interface that suggests menus based on the descriptions of foods someone is craving (i.e. refreshing, hearty, comforting).