Gourmia is relatively new to the small appliance market, though you might not guess that from its long list of products. The Brooklyn-based company peddled some of its housewares at the International Home + Housewares show in Chicago this weekend, including a Wi-Fi-connected multicooker and a Bluetooth-enabled sous vide circulator.
The $600 GKM9000 multicooker seems to be a sort of smart Thermomix. It has a 7-inch LCD touchscreen, as well as a mobile app. Either will take you through recipes, though the device is supposed to do the bulk of the work. The list of dishes it can make include pasta, rice, steamed vegetables, soups, and sauces. It blends and purées, chops and grinds. It will crush ice for your beverages or let you make a cocktail or smoothie. Once you add an ingredient, its built-in scale will weigh it and advance to the next step.
The multicooker comes with a cooking basket, blade attachment for chopping and blending or stirring (depending on which way it’s rotating), whisk, spatula, and steam tray. There are 10 speed settings, depending on what you need the appliance to do. The measuring cup is built into the 3.5-quart jar’s lid.
Gourmia’s Wi-Fi and Bluetooth-enabled Sous Vide pod also works with a smartphone or an LCD display. The screen shows the current water temperature and your desired temp, which you set using a scroll wheel. Clip it to the side of your pot, and it will circulate up to 1.5 gallons of water per minute, to ensure a consistent temperature. The $200 Gorumia circulator joins a host of other similar products, but the company is hoping its app will make it stand out. Jason Logsdon of Modernist Cooking Made Easy contributed many of his original recipes for the iOS and Android apps, which are meant to help noobs navigate the new, precisely heated waters of sous vide.
Finally, Gourmia is also showing off its GC5000 coffee maker, which is coffee-pod agnostic. The $300 machine brews K-Cups, as well as Nespresso, Illy, and others’ pods thanks to an interchangeable “CoffeeCart” system, which has different cartridges for each different brand’s capsule.
With a brand as new as Gourmia, it will take some time, and testing, before we know how reliable all these innovations — interesting though they are — turn out to be.