Helpers in the home and kitchen for festive days
A multi-menu robot that cooks from risotto to sweet and sour pork. Fire and smart surveillance systems that monitor the house when we are away. For a worry-free holiday.
In the dialect of Reggio Emilia, the word liffo has two meanings: it means gourmet or a particularly delicious food. For the two tech entrepreneurs Stefano Pedrazzi and Massimiliano Delsante, founders of Robomagister, the term encapsulates their love of regional recipes and is how they named a food processor that they believe will redefine the industry.
Already available in Italy, soon also in the US and then in the UK, it is an automatic chef with a single pot: you choose a recipe from over 200 available, load the necessary ingredients into eight 500 gram containers inside the machine, fill the tank with water, set the meal time. Stop. An internal refrigeration system preserves the food, so it can be loaded and programmed up to 24 hours in advance.
A couple of years ago on these pages we talked about a robot cook named Moley, who prepared risotto with his sleek swivel arms. Even though Liffo is rather large - about 50 centimetres per side with a weight of 29 kilos - it dispenses with theatrical gestures and prepares everything inside the unit: it pours the ingredients into the four-litre pot at the right time and at the right heat, then uses internal paddles to stir according to the preset pattern. You don't need to control it while it's running, but a built-in camera, which doesn't fog, will allow you to do so remotely if you wish.
Risotto, a typical dish that cooks in a single pot, is clearly no problem - but Liffo's catalogue of recipes, although tendentially Italian, is incredibly adventurous and ranges from salmon with dill to sweet and sour pork, as well as many desserts. Ingenious devices for preparing pasta in a single pot (Liffo cooks pasta as he would risotto, Pedrazzi explains) allow the selection of dishes to be further expanded. He can learn recipes with quantities perfectly adapted to your taste and can even improvise meals based on the available ingredients.
For those who never have time and have grown tired of take-away food, the limited choice of ready-made meals and winter stews that require long cooking times, this really is a revelation.
