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Do you have eleventy-billion dollars burning a hole in your metaphorical pocket? Do you like to cook and prepare food by the most targeted means possible? If so, this collection of expensive countertop appliances is for you!
Secondhand shops are awash with once-trendy, novelty kitchen gimmicks and gizmos like cake pop molds, waffle-bowl makers, taco toasters, and something called a “YolkFrog”… but those kitchen gadgets are cheap, both cost-wise and quality-wise. If you’ve got the do-re-mi to do so, consider kicking your culinary game up a notch by investing in one of these high-end food- and food-adjacent appliances around.
1. SMEG Dolce & Gabbana Citrus Juicer
The Italian appliance company SMEG is one of those brands that is really only well-known among the well-heeled—the exact opposite of Gucci, a brand so famous that the name itself is literally synonymous with “excellent.”
Dolce & Gabbana falls somewhere in the middle, but it also has a strong Italian heritage; pairing up with SMEG to create a juicer with a serious Sicilian vibe was an inspired move. Once this decorative device enters your home, you’ll be tempted to push all other appliances out of sight in order to showcase it. Along with a stand mixer, electric kettle, and toaster, this offering from the partnership’s undeniably bold “Sicily Is My Love” line is nevertheless a $700 unitasker.
Buy the SMEG Dolce & Gabbana Juicer at Williams-Sonoma for $700
2. A Blast Chiller Called Freddy
The humbly-named Freddy is a blast chiller—an appliance made to rapidly freeze foods and beverages. You may have seen these “reverse microwaves” on cooking competition shows like Chopped, when contestants must cook and present plates at a breakneck rate. Not only can Freddy take blazing hot dishes to -3℃ in a matter of minutes, it can also slow-cook at low temperatures (in your face, Thermos!)
Freddy is billed as “the first blast chiller made for home use” so now, all you’ll need to stage your very own cooking competition is a big handsome picnic basket filled with bafflingly unrelated ingredients, a sense of urgency-inspired anxiety, and of course Alex Guarnaschelli—ideally at her most skeptical.
Buy the Freddy blast chiller at Kitchen Universe for $6,259
3. The DeLonghi TrueBrew Drip Coffee Maker
Our next luxury countertop appliance utilizes something called “proprietary bean extract technology” (which sounds like an erudite euphemism for folks with digestive issues) to “transform your at-home coffee experience.” In other words, it’s a coffee maker that never stops “thinking about those beans.”
What sets the TrueBrew apart from the hoi polloi’s coffee machines is that it starts out with whole coffee beans, grinds them, and immediately brews them into one of five different kinds of java in one of six different sizes. When you’re finished with your cup, this clever coffee contrivance takes it back, washes it, and sterilizes it.
(Just kidding about that last part, but that technology can’t be too far in the future, can it?)
Buy the DeLonghi TrueBrew at Target for $399.99
4. Ooni Volt 12 Electric Pizza Oven
The Ooni Volt 12, a portable, compact, and practical little pizza oven, boasts that it’s capable of reaching temperatures of up to a massive 850°F, nearly twice the temperature of your average oven. This little guy takes only 20 minutes to preheat; once it’s up to temp, it cooks a crisp-crusted, melty-mozzarella-ed pie in only 90 seconds—almost fast enough to keep up with the pizza-eating speed of whatever teenage boys happen to be in the family.
Buy the Ooni Volt 12 Electric Pizza Oven at Amazon for $899.
5. Kitchen Idea Kody29 Cooking Robot Chef
We’ve been promised robots for decades—and although they’re now pretty commonplace in manufacturing capacities, the promise of in-home robots to do our bidding, leaving us with more free time to cruise around the cosmos in our flying cars, has yet to be fully realized. Sure, we’ve got robot vacuum cleaners, robots to tidy up the important components of our outdoor living spaces, like grills and swimming pools, and companion petbots—but they’re not robot-robots, ya know?
Despite having a product moniker that was apparently plucked directly from the annals of AOL usernames, the Kody29 by Kitchen Idea is a robot-robot. A robot’s robot, as it were. The platonic ideal of a—well, let’s not get carried away. But a multicooker that possesses all the necessary skills—measuring, dicing, slicing, mixing, adjusting temp and technique on the fly, and even self-cleaning (in your face, deLonghi TrueBrew!)? Now that’s a robot.
Buy the Kody29 Robot Cooking Chef at Amazon for $879
6. The Perfect Ice Cube Maker
Mankind has been searching for the perfect ice cube since time immemor—*record scratch* Wait. No, it hasn’t. But leave it to Hammacher Schlemmer, the iconic and iconoclastic mail-order retailer that brought us such compelling consumer goods as the $20,000 seven-person tricycle and the “Bionic Dolphin” personal submarine, to convince us that not only is the perfect ice cube a thing, but also an attainable one.
That is, if your ice-cube-maker budget hovers around $1K.
According to its tagline, Hammacher Schlemmer has been “guaranteeing the best, the unique, and the unexpected for 175 years.” This luxury kitchen appliance, which indeed creates a perfect, 2 ½-inch sphere of ice in just 60 seconds (y’know, for the spherical-ice-cube aficionado who’s always on the go), certainly ticks a couple of those boxes.
Buy The Perfect Ice Cube at Hammacher Schlemmer for $999.95
7. The Barsys 360
Is it a revolutionary vacuum? Abstract art? Designer obstacle for a ritzy canine agility course? Possibly a portal to another dimension? MRI scanner for small mammals?
Now that an ice-sphere-shaping gizmo has found pride of place in your pantry, it’s time to seriously juice your potent potables game, and the $475 Barsys 360 seems perfectly poised to do just that. This sleek, minimalist appliance promises to redefine the way you imbibe at home. Simply insert ingredients, choose your beverage from the connected app, and let your drink upstage everything else in your house–except your robot, of course.