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  • Two Kitchen Robots Turned Me Into Their Prep Cook for Thanksgiving

    The holiday is still almost a week away, and I’m sick of Thanksgiving. I’ve already made four rounds of mashed potatoes, three of mac and cheese, and three turkeys (with more still waiting in my fridge) as part of testing smart probes to help smoke turkeys outside and preparing seven-course holiday meal kits for friends and family.

    I was eager to finally outsource some of the cooking by testing two very different robo-chef devices, the Thermomix TM7 and the Posha kitchen robot. Both promise to plan my meals and also do most of the cooking, which sounds pretty good to me.

    The Thermomix descends from a German device launched in 1968—a time when the best-known robot chef was cartoon Rosie on The Jetsons—that was essentially a blender with a heater. It’s since caught on big in countries from Italy to Portugal to Australia, and over the years it’s added multi-tier steaming, baking, proofing, a touchscreen, an encyclopedic recipe app, and a whole lot of smart features. WIRED reviewer Joe Ray called 2020’s last-generation Thermomix TM6 (9/10, WIRED Recommends) the “smartest of the smart kitchen.” The newest version, the seventh-generation TM7, was released in August and looks like a giant trophy with a computer screen. It retails for $1,699 and its goal is to replace almost every appliance in your kitchen. It’ll even happily order groceries for you on InstaCart.

    The newest robo-chef entrant is Posha, a Silicon Valley-via-Bangalore startup device that aims at truly autonomous one-pot cooking, once you’ve chopped up the proper ingredients into little bins. The Posha kitchen robot was released in January at a price of $1,750 and promptly sold out, as has each successive batch. The device comes complete with a robot stirring arm, and a camera to monitor moisture and browning. Press a button, and Posha will add ingredients at the appropriate moment, spice and stir your food, add water and oil, and cook it down, all without your participation.

    I used both the Posha and Thermomix to make a spread of Thanksgiving sides: candied yams, mashed potatoes, mac and cheese, brussels sprouts, and a more complex wild card entry chosen because I thought my Aunt Katherine might like it—and assessed cooking experience overall. Consider it a robo-chef face-off.

    Here is my experience with each of the Thermomix and the Posha—and how each fared on five Thanksgiving side recipes.

    Cooking Experience With Thermomix

    • Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

    • Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

    • Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

    • Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

    WIRED

    • Steams, blends, bakes, proofs, roasts, mixes, weighs, orders groceries….
    • Choice of 100,000 recipes, often quite well tested
    • Beautifully powerful and fast blending

    TIRED

    • You’re still doing all the prep
    • Many recipes still call for an oven
    • Cleaning the multiple parts is a chore if you don’t run the dishwasher

    The Thermomix has almost 60 years of history. This is a good thing. It began as, essentially, a blender that can cook. It is still a very powerful blender that can cook. Lord, it makes pesto or mashed potatoes as quickly and easily as anything. I stood by in actual awe of its raw cooking-blending power.

    But it’s also evolved into a whole lot more, an all-in-one device that purports to replace just about every appliance in your kitchen. Today’s Thermomix has become a beast of multifarious functionality.

    Matthew Korfhage

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  • I Keep Cooking Thanksgiving! Here’s the Best Holiday Meal Delivery

    Making a full Thanksgiving feast for guests can be daunting, for some perhaps even terrifying. The world, and especially Hallmark movies, is full of holiday disaster stories: burnt turkeys, failed desserts, steamed hams. But I’m not bragging when I say that the first Thanksgiving dinner I prepared for my extended family—a little early, this year—was an unmitigated success.

    My aunt couldn’t stop talking about the black pepper in the biscuits and the sage on the carrots. My uncle went in for the turkey and the apple-sausage stuffing. My father didn’t speak at all, unless prompted. He just ate and ate. This was a compliment.

    But of course, I had cheated. I had ordered my Thanksgiving in the mail—one of the new breed of Thanksgiving meal kits.

    The meal was genuinely home-cooked, of course, prepared mostly from scratch. But the entire seven-platter feast—its ingredients and recipes—had arrived two days before, in a box large enough to house a primal cut of beef. It was Thanksgiving in a box: a $200 “Chef’s Table Thanksgiving” meal kit available from sister meal delivery plans Sunbasket and Gobble.

    The spread from Sunbasket was vast and generous. The table contained a nearly 3-pound roast of turkey, mounds of mashed potato, pebbled cranberry compote, roasted carrots dressed in miso-sage butter, brussels sprouts dappled with pecorino romano and pancetta, an endless platter of fennel-apple-sausage-stuffing, Gruyère black-pepper biscuits caked more than an inch tall, a tureen of deep brown turkey gravy, a ginger apple crisp waiting in the wings.

    Sunbasket is among a new bounty of meal kit companies that aim to ease the stress of the holidays by doing the planning and the shopping for you—big meal boxes tailor-made for those who still want to make a home-cooked meal but for whom the prospect of planning a vast and complicated feast is prohibitive. In fact, two weeks later I cooked another Thanksgiving meal from Blue Apron, this time for my sister’s family.

    Here was my experience with Sunbasket and Blue Apron—and some of the other Thanksgiving meal delivery options to get your whole Thanksgiving meal delivered to your home.

    Update Nov. 18, 2025: Added a review of the Blue Apron Thanksgiving and holiday meal kit dishes, after preparing an eight-dish meal. Also updated prices, ordering deadlines, and offerings throughout.

    Want meal kits for more everyday occasions? See WIRED’s guides to the best meal delivery services, and the best plant-based meal delivery kits.

    The Blue Apron à la Carte Thanksgiving (and Holiday) Meal Kit

    Available till December 29. Order by November 19 to ensure delivery by Thanksgiving.

    • Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

    • Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

    • Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

    • Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

    Blue Apron

    Thanksgiving and Holiday Meal Delivery

    Blue Apron, one of the OG meal kits in the US, has undergone a wholesale transformation this year. One of the biggest changes is that subscriptions are no longer required, and à la carte meal ordering is possible—indeed, it’s now my favorite no-subscription meal kit offering. What this means is that for this Thanksgiving, you can order individual Thanksgiving recipe kits to prep fresh at home, without ever setting foot in a crowded grocery store.

    That means roasted grape and goat cheese salad ($12), a big ol’ turkey breast with gravy and cranberry sauce ($50), rosemary herb stuffing ($15), a truly excellent casserole worth of truffle-oiled Southern mac and cheese ($20), almond apple crumb pie ($15), brown butter mashed potatoes ($8), challah rolls with maple ($8) and roasted brussels sprouts with pistachios, ($10). I made all of these recipes for my sister’s family and our parents, a little early this year—and it was a surprisingly delicious feast fit for at least eight people. Probably even 10, if you add an extra order of mashed potatoes.

    Matthew Korfhage

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  • Is the Bartesian Cocktail Machine Worth It? I Tried It to See

    Right now the Barsys is making me an Oaxaca Old Fashioned, but it could have been any of literally 2,000 other drinks, if I only had the ingredients. Among “Oaxaca” drinks alone we potentially also have a “Flower,” a “Gold,” and a “Tail.” The Barsys promises nearly 50 takes on Old Fashioned, and more than 70 versions of the mule. (A third cocktail machine option, the Bev by Black + Decker, uses Bartesian’s capsules with a different device design. It is likely being discontinued according to reps, but is still available on Amazon.)

    It’s all very ridiculous, my friends assure me, when I send them videos of the Barsys aggressively spitting ingredients into a glass whose magnetic bottom spins the liquid inside into an icy, frothy whirlpool.

    “I am embarrassed to be watching this,” wrote my editor at WIRED.

    “That is so dumb,” echoed a friend, before adding, “You should definitely bring it over.”

    No one really needs a machine to make a decent cocktail, of course. But you might want one anyway. I have a theory, the kind of big idea you hear sometimes in small bars. The promise of an automatic cocktail machine is not ease, nor necessity, nor even usefulness. It is, instead, excitement. It is fun. It is whatever will make today different from yesterday. It’s that little bit of dumb gee-whiz that makes your neighbor happy to come over, gives people something to talk about at a holiday party, or keeps your partner mildly entertained after a Tuesday that just kind of sucked the life out of her.

    As holiday party season arrives, here’s how to choose between two flawed but kinda fun cocktail machines. Machines that mirror the life they indulge.

    Best for Parties: The Barsys 360

    • Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

    • Photograph: Matthew Korfhage

    WIRED

    • Machine pours very precise measurements by weight
    • Phone app suggests any of 2,000 cocktails, depending on ingredients
    • It looks cool, doesn’t it?

    TIRED

    • Cleaning, flushing, and changing ingredients is a lot of effort
    • The app can be a little buggy, and hard to navigate
    • It’s a sloshy thing. Cleaning, again

    The Barsys 360 is a flashy machine, literally. Select your drink on the device’s phone app, and the machine will light up like a discotheque or a try-hard bowling alley. The Barsys pours in hard, aggressive squirts—impressively accurate to within three-hundredths of an ounce, by my measure.

    As it pours your drink, the device’s lights will change from white to blue to green when your cocktail is ready. And if you’ve also bought Barsys’ mixer glass ($45) with a magnetic spinner, the cup will now very rapidly swirl your drink, ice and all, as it spins your tropical diamond daiquiri into a green-lit froth. Whoopee! Glowing, spinning drink!

    We are firmly in party-trick territory here. And lord, it’s stupid. And fun. And stupid. If you keep it on your kitchen counter, the device may cause you to make too many drinks just because you can, and because you’ve filled the reservoirs anyway. This can be dangerous on a work night.

    Matthew Korfhage

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  • I’m a Smart-Home Writer and This Is How I’m Automating My Holiday Parties

    There’s an automated solution, though. For my latest parties, I brought the HP Sprocket Photo Booth Machine ($600), and it was a hit. It’s a 21-inch-tall, portable photo booth that both automatically prints 3 x 4-inch pictures and lets you download digital versions via a QR code. I love that you can create events on the device and set up customized filters—mine had the word “Soupsgiving” on the bottom, though it was in an incredibly small font compared to the regular filter designs—and you can also add settings like how many prints of one picture guests can print. We left the default setting of two on for the soup-themed Friendsgiving, but I think I’ll bump it up to at least three for future gatherings. Make sure to stock up on HP’s Zink paper packs ($40 for 50) for the photo booth to print with, especially if it’s a big gathering. It will need both Wi-Fi access and a power outlet.

    HP

    Sprocket Photo Booth Machine

    Sprocket Zink Photo Paper

    How to Automate Your Appetizers

    Feeding a crowd is hard. Feeding a crowd that includes some serious allergies and dietary restrictions doesn’t make it any easier. In the spirit of automating everything I could, I turned to ChatGPT to come up with my appetizer for a group that featured two vegetarians and someone whose allergies include avocado, beans, shellfish, and eggs. (Getting those two sets of friends their protein needs at the same time has a singular overlap in the Venn diagram of what they can all eat: tofu.)

    ChatGPT did a good job brainstorming some possible options, and when I asked for a holiday angle, it came up with new options that were nice and seasonal. I chose to go with the lowest-lift option—pomegranate and ricotta crostini—but the baked brie bites were a big contender too. I was able to have this digital conversation and get the recipes all on ChatGPT’s free tier, but you can hit the paywall when you ask too many questions or ask things that need more research from the artificial intelligence.

    How to Automate Your Cooking

    Fellow WIRED reviewer Matthew Korfhage is currently testing two different robots that will cook your dishes for you, but in the meantime, the closest I’ve found is the 10-in-1 Ninja Foodi PossibleCooker Pro ($119). You can choose from options ranging from sear and slow cook to sous vide and even bake. It turned my broccoli-cheddar soup experiment (I was on a quest to replicate my favorite Panera soup for Soupgiving) into a one-pot dish where I could sauté my onions, stir up my béchamel, and then mix in all my ingredients and let it simmer until done. It even comes with an integrated utensil.

    It was really helpful to use in an already busy kitchen, and I imagine it would be indispensable for big, Thanksgiving-style dinners where the stove and oven are monopolized. While I still had to do the cooking, I was able to hang out in my own little spot and let the PossibleCooker help me. It has a timer in the front to help remind me how long I’ve been cooking on a setting, though I do wish there were a medium setting (your choices are low and high for the cooktop settings).

    Photograph: Nena Farrell

    Ninja

    Foodi PossibleCooker Pro

    Automate Your Food Disposal

    There are a lot of food scraps when you’re cooking for events like Thanksgiving and holiday dinner parties. I really loved grabbing the canister from the FoodCycler and bringing it next to where we were cooking soups so everyone could throw their food scraps in as we went. When it’s full, just set it in the machine and it will grind-and-dry the scraps (or leftovers!) into a sort of nutrient-rich meal that can be mixed in with potting soil or sprinkled on your lawn. I have the new FoodCycler Eco 5, and WIRED reviewer Kat Merck recommends the FoodCycler Eco 3 as one of her favorite home food recyclers.

    FoodCycler

    Eco 3 Compact Kitchen Food Recycler

    What Else I’m Testing This Holiday Season

    The holiday season is only just starting, and I’ll be testing more gadgets and gear all season long. Here’s some of what I’m testing next:

    The Bartesian Cocktail Maker ($349): This cocktail maker promises to be the Keurig of cocktail machines, with capsules for cocktail mixes instead of coffee. You’ll need to bring your own liquor, but once you fill up the included containers with the liquid, the machine should be able to take it from there. I’ll be testing some of the fun holiday cocktails too.

    Nena Farrell

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