My senior thesis is a combination of two things I am passionate about: cooking and technological innovation. I plan to make an interactive spice rack that allows cooks of all levels to explore the art of blending spices. I thought of this idea while, unsurprisingly, cooking! As a college student off the meal plan for the first time, I am finally learning the fundamentals. This has presented me with a number of challenges, including being able to layer spices correctly. I had no clue there were so many flavor profiles and ways to intermingle them. One fruit tart recipe I followed called for cardamom, a spice whose name I’ve heard, but always thought was a flowering plant found at a nursery (I was confusing carnation + mum). I was reluctant to add this to the mixture because to me, adding a spice in a sweet dessert that wasn’t cinnamon or nutmeg sounded catastrophic. Eventually, I mustered up the courage and funds to purchase cardamom and use it in the tart. It had a pleasantly warm and floral smell that married well with the flavor of sugared berries. This find led me to research other kinds of spices and their flavor profiles. Sweet, nutty, piney, bitter, herbal, spicy, woody. The list goes on and on. Spice is the heart of a meal; it can either make or break the taste, as well as shape its flavor style. Why leave spice layering to professional chefs? It’s time for a creation that will bring this life skill to the home kitchen and spice up every cook’s life.
Two of the biggest challenges I faced while cooking were timing and multitasking. Organization is key when it comes to speed. No one wants to spend valuable time scouring the cabinet for the correct spices. Chances are, I am racing the clock to leave on time or hurrying before my family gets home and finds other snacks to eat instead. I also found it hard to remember ingredients and steps listed in a recipe. I was constantly running back to my book or phone to reread a section. For these reasons, I want to create an interactive spice rack that utilizes visual cues that immediately direct my eyes to where I should be looking. If I want something hot and spicy, every spice on the rack with a matching flavor profile will light up. This way, I will have an easier time finding what I need. This feature also allows an exploratory experience, allowing the chef to truly relish in the thought process of cooking instead of rushing to get it done.
Cooking a delicious meal through exploration and discovery is one of the most satisfying experiences as an amateur cook. Recently, I purchased some riced cauliflower for the first time and decided to make a loose version of pork fried rice with ginger. The second time I made riced cauliflower, I added cilantro and lime instead for a Chipotle-inspired meal. One or two ingredients can make all the difference and drastically change the style of it. That is why I would also like to implement a sort by geographical region in my spice rack. This way, cooks can easily find the spices that are common in cultural recipes from around the world and use it as inspiration for their dishes. Along the way, if I discover a spice I like or a combination of spices that pair well with a dish, I want to have the capability to save them in the system so I have access to them for later use.
In summary, the coded interface should primarily sort spices and herbs by flavor and geographical region. It should also save user-favorited spices and groups of spices for future reference. Secondary features include making flavor blend suggestions (sweet pairs well with spicy) and spice pairing suggestions (cumin and turmeric are usually paired together). A tertiary feature I am considering is providing possible spice blend recipe combinations like Chinese 5 spice, chili powder, curry powder, apple pie spice, and baharat. This requires including less used spices on the spice rack and I am not sure yet if there will be enough space.
Next, I plan to outline hardware requirements for the interactive spice rack. Obviously, I will need to present my project with some spices. I am currently considering building a 4×3 wooden rack that will hold 12 of the most common spices and herbs I’ve come across in my research: basil, black pepper, cayenne pepper, cinnamon, cloves, cumin, ginger, nutmeg, oregano, paprika, rosemary, and thyme. This list is subject to change or expand throughout the course of my research. I will build the LED lights into the spice rack and hook them up to the coded interface that will decide whether the lights will turn on or off beneath each spice. I do not know how this will work yet, so I am still considering my options. I have begun working in Autodesk Tinkercad to learn electronics and circuits. I also need to look into Arduino hardware and see if that could be implemented in my project. As for the user interface itself, I am planning to have a screen that the user can interact with to sort the spices. Thinking about how this will function in the kitchen made me consider a possible hands free option instead. Hands free appliances from electric mixers to Amazon’s Alexa have significantly optimized cooking, so finding a way to make spices light up through voice recognition would take this project to the next level.
I definitely plan to work on the software side of this project first to make sure the sorts work. A complete baseline project would be a simple application that performs the basic flavor profile and geographical region sorts of the spices. I will later hook the code up to the lights, then hook the lights up to the spice rack. And from there, hopefully, BOOM! The good kind, not the blowing up kind.
Need to talk to Professor Kuiphoff about the fabrication part of this.
In terms of the rack hardware, you’ll need to balance an appropriately crafty, human feel (wood as you suggested) with the potential for multicolor illumination (something like translucent white plastic). If the rack were wood, perhaps the bottles could be plastic. If — as you suggested in class — this were all one big kit, then conveniently the bottles could be uniform.
Need to research the technical stuff, obviously. At the moment I imagine each bottle “snapping” into one of several slots on the rack. At the bottom of each slot is an RFID reader, and on the bottom of each bottle is an RFID sticker. That way the system knows where each bottle is at any given moment, but the user doesn’t need to put them back in any particular order. (After all, your project is designed to help users make sense of their spice rack — requiring them to put bottles back in alphabetical order seems to work against that.) Behind each bottle is a multicolor LED.
Talk to Dr. Nakra about the RFID stuff. The stickers are cheap, but given the potential cost of multiple RFID readers, you might demo only 3 or four slots on the rack.
Just as important to research the human experience side of your project. Talk to experienced cooks and everyday cooks. How do they approach the question of spice layers and profiles in their cooking? Think of it this way… what questions would they ask of their high-tech spice rack?
Speaking of asking questions… look into the possibility of hands-free voice interaction, possibly using Amazon Echo and IFTTT: https://ifttt.com/amazon_alexa
Talk to Nivi about this, specifically.