The traditional way to store food is to put it in the fridge or freezer, Hoover is showing us another way to preserve our food and that’s in the oven. The Hoover H-KEEPHEAT 700 can keep your food ready and safe to eat for up to two weeks.
Hoover has designed an oven not only for cooking but also to maintain food at the serving temperature. The H-KEEPHEAT 700 does away with freezing and reheating your food and promises to keep them safe to eat and at the perfect temperature for serving for up to two weeks. It looks just like a regular convection oven, but it has a “keep warm” system for individual portions.
Hoover uses Exever technology, which is basically very precise cooking using low temperatures. The Exever system is the only one that can safely preserve food using heat, but also cook at low temperatures, without using any water or steam.
In the Hoover H-KEEPHEAT 700 food is gently cooked to retain flavor and are preserved and aged naturally at a constant temperature above 60°C, preventing the growth of harmful microorganisms. The food is always ready to eat even after several days and tastes just as if it was freshly made.
Two settings are offered, either 63 degrees Centigrade (145 degrees Fahrenheit) or 70 degrees Centigrade (158 degrees Fahrenheit), depending on the type of food being preserved. The oven then keeps its chamber at that perfect temperature for a prolonged period.
If you’re skeptical that low temperatures won’t breed bacteria, at temperatures above 60C° there is no bacterial growth. This is where they got the idea to use heat to Preserve food and cook at low temperatures. The Exever technology preserves the organoleptic properties of foods (are the aspects of food, water or other substances that an individual experiences via the senses—including taste, sight, smell, and touch.).
How does hot and cold food preservation work?
For cold preservation, hot cooked foods are brought to low temperatures as quickly as possible to and warmed up just before eating.
However, in addition to requiring a high use of energy to reach temperatures that prevent bacterial growth and additional energy to bring the food to serving temperatures, this system has some negative effects: freezing changes the cell structure of foods, reducing their nutritional properties and quality.
Cold food storage
hot food storage
Chilling your food doesn’t actually kill bacteria, but only makes them inactive. Freezing can cause changes to the flavor of food and a loss of nutrients.
Not only do we have state of the art food preservation but we have a high-end oven. You can slide in a partition horizontally across the oven creating two sections that can be heated to different temperatures for different foods. This over should even be able to act like a sous-vide, cooking at low temperatures. The ovens ability to hold a precise lower temperature for a long period of time is key to this claim.
If all this seems a little too high tech, have no fear Hoover has an app that will come with recipes that can be automatically loaded onto the oven. H-KEEPHEAT 700 is also compatible with the new Google Home and Amazon’s Alexa Digital Butler.
We tried out some of the packed food Hoover was serving up at IFA GPC 2019 and we have to say, it tasted very good! Hoover says that the individual packs of sealed food will stay good for up to two weeks. Since you’re storing your food in the oven at serving temperature all you have to do is open up a packet and slide it on a plate. Hoover claims it will cost roughly a dollar a day to run in Exever keep-warm mode. How that compares to your refrigerator or freezer will depend on how energy efficient that appliance is. Don’t forget that you’ll have to use energy to heat that food when it comes out of the fridge.
We have no word on pricing or launch date, but we’re going to be keeping an eye on this technology, it’s an interesting solution to an age-old problem of how to stop food from spoiling.
