Review: Hestan Cue

In the kitchen, people have an amazing tolerance for imprecision. Ovens might say 400 degrees, but many regularly veer 20 degrees above or below that mark, if it’s calibrated correctly in the first place. On the stovetop, we don’t even have the specificity of degrees—we just turn the dial up to “high” or “medium-low” or just “seven,” even though every manufacturer has a different standard for what that place on the dial means.

In the past several years, a string of mostly smaller companies have made a push toward real numbers. Sous vide machines cook food in a water bath held at a steady, exact temperature. Precision countertop ovens with less temperature range are hitting the market. The Breville PolyScience ControlFreak is an induction burner that uses both a nub with a thermometer to measure the heat of the bottom of a pan and a probe that reaches into the pan to take the temperature inside. It can control the intensity of the power that goes into getting it up to speed, then turn on cruise control so the temperature stays right where you want it.

Cookware manufacturer Hestan has a new take on this with the home-chef friendly Cue, a 1600-watt induction burner that looks like a miniaturized Roomba. A custom 11-inch fry pan with temperature sensors in the base and a tiny circuit board in the handle sits on top. The fry pan and burner are sold together for pause-inducing $500. A larger, deeper pan, which will accommodate larger batches of food and different techniques, is due later this year.

Plug in the burner and open the accompanying app to find a video of pro chef Philip Tessier guiding you through setup; and then, step by step, through more than 100 recipes.¹ It’s an impressive amount of work that Hestan says they’ll continue for more recipes in the future.

I scrolled through those recipes, selected a few, then went to the grocery store and got cooking. I started with salted almond brittle, which immediately brought some of the Cue’s finer points to the fore. Heating a pan full of sugar, while not necessarily difficult, requires attention. Give it too much power too quickly and the sugar can scorch. Many traditional recipes get around this by either waiting it out over very low heat, or mandating the use of a candy thermometer. With the Cue’s app controlling the temperature and intensity as you use it to follow the recipe, it gives you the confidence that you won’t overshoot.

Hestan

Later, for crispy eggplant with tomato basil sauce, I dipped discs of eggplant into flour, then egg, then bread crumbs, and added them to the Cue for a shallow fry in oil. The pan remained heated to a temperature that browned and crisped the outside while keeping the interior soft. When it was time to flip, the app chimed in.

That recipe calls for 1/4-inch thick discs. At that thickness, the Cue knows that a certain temperature held for a certain amount time will consistently yield tasty results. There’s some elasticity built in, of course, but if the slices are too thick or too thin, you end up with underdone centers or burnt bits.

This is also how the Cue aces a steak. Call up the Pan Seared Flat Iron Steak recipe and the app prompts you to measure the thickness of the steak down to the eight of an inch. From there, choose between “rare,” “rose,” “pink and juicy,” “little pink,” or “well done,” and the pan does the rest. After an initial high temperature to brown the exterior, the heat dials back. The app also starts a timer for every step, which yields a great steak, no matter the size.

The Cue certainly has its faults. The app is slick—there’s a little video to guide you through almost every step of every recipe—but once you’re in the middle of the step, it consumes the whole screen and there’s no going back to double-check a previous step until the whole thing is done. This can be glaring when you look at the teaspoon of salt next to the burner and wonder if you missed the addition or just haven’t come to it yet. (A Hestan rep told me this would be fixed with an upcoming update.)

It’s also difficult to scan a recipe before you start, which has odd effects. If you don’t know if you can combine the ingredients for a rub in the same bowl, they all go in different bowls, which creates more mess to clean up. On top of that, the recipe database is hard to surf, leaving you browsing recipes the glazed-out way you might look at Netflix tiles on a Thursday night. And while cooking, I learned that there isn’t much room to freestyle once you’re locked into a recipe. More than once, I longed for some version of the “add 30 seconds” button on my microwave. “A little crispier” for that eggplant, or “a little more cooked through” on that steak, would be worthy additions.

Hestan

The Cue is very app-dependent. While there’s a slider on the base that allows you to cook without the app, the heat control is old school—poke it in the middle for “medium,” or all the way to the right for “high.” Confoundingly, there is no way to set, maintain, or even read the precise temperature on the base without using the app. You shouldn’t be forced to pull a phone out of your pocket to cook and use the basic functions of a kitchen appliance.

Finally, I wished there were more cut and dry recipes to cement the utility of the Cue in the minds of its users. If you want to woo with “brioche custard French toast,” by all means, go for it. But you should also have a recipe for down and dirty French toast when you just want to get it done in a hurry. Instead of “spicy sausage and peppers,” how about starting with “sausages,” as in just two links in the pan?

While testing the Cue, I often found myself nudging the burner closer to my kitchen’s smoke hood, more than once setting it directly on top of my stove. It got me looking forward to the day when something like a whole-stove version of the Cue is a reality. I also started thinking back to the potential of cooking by degrees, wishing for recipes and cookbooks that say, “Heat a large cast-iron pan to 375 degrees,” an app-assisted cooking style the Cue can accommodate in what’s called “Control Mode,” allowing you to dial up both the desired temperature and the intensity.

The Control Mode style of cooking holds some of the most exciting long-term promise of both the ControlFreak and the Cue. Knowing the best temperature to set the pan to for searing salmon skin, then holding that temperature as steady as possible when the cool filet is added to the pan—a sort of cruise control for cooking—allows us to both refine the language of a recipe and the precision of our cooking.

¹July 13, 2017: This story was updated to correctly identify the chef who appears in Hestan's videos.

July 14, 2017: An earlier version of this story referred to the Breville PolyScience ControlFreak as an induction burner with a special pan. That product includes only the burner, not a pan.

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