Review: Multo Intelligent Cooking System by CookingPal

I love a good hot sauce, but I proceed with caution when it comes to anything spicier than Tabasco. So when I came across a recipe that had a picture of somebody barehanding half of what was supposed to be a habanero chile, it gave me pause. I called an aficionado.

"Hot Pepper Man," I texted to my buddy Brian along with a photo of the dubious pepper-handling shown in the app of a kitchen gadget I was testing, "would you ever handle a habanero like this?"

Brian is Brian Gojdics, an accomplished pizza chef who makes and bottles a line of hot sauces for family and friends under the brand name Ring Sting. So, would he?

"Never would I ever," he responded as quickly as if I were considering grabbing one at that very moment. "The capsaicin on those would wreak havoc on your eyes or bathroom parts if you did not thoroughly wash your hands after touching."

Two seconds went by and he texted again. "Actually, I'd be leery after a good handwashing too."

So I went back to a list of hazards I'd been compiling about this gadget since I started testing it. After “1: Could cause bodily harm,” I added “2: Could sting your junk.”

While those are two more extreme examples, they also proved to be somehow typical of CookingPal's new Multo, a multipurpose machine with a name that feels like a cross between Fiat's platypus-looking Multipla minivan and Lego's Duplo blocks.

The Multo is like a big blender that you can cook things in and, with the use of a basket perched on the blender jar, steam things on. It's very similar in concept to the Thermomix, an impressive German machine that is relatively new to the United States but has been a global phenomenon for decades. The Thermomix is a smooth, powerful machine, but the secret to its success is the trove of thousands of companion recipes that are tasty, tested, and well written.

Each of those last few words is crucial. Whether home cooks realize it or not, well-written recipes have baked-in guidelines that help them succeed when they're whipping up Tuesday dinner. Ingredients, for example, should be listed in the order they are used. If a wet and a dry ingredient use the same measuring implement (say, a half-cup scoop) in the same step, list the dry one first to keep things clean. Bowl and pan sizes should be given. Rough sizes or even weights should be provided when ingredient sizes can vary. (The grocery store down the street from my house, for example, sells onions as tiny as a plum and as large as a softball.) Testing a recipe multiple times ensures that it has the right quantities and that each step in the procedure makes sense as written. Finally, if the food doesn't taste good, nobody's going to make the recipe more than once. Taking all of those steps when crafting recipes is expensive and time consuming and can require a dedicated team.

With the Thermomix, you can pull up the recipe you want, pile your ingredients around the machine, and take advantage of its built-in scale to weigh each ingredient in, one after another, as you're guided through the recipe, every step teed up by the machine's software. It allows you to fly through a recipe and cut down on dirty dishes, and you can do it with anything from smoothies to red sauce. While the Multo has a built-in scale, and its creators seem to have ambitions for it to function like the Thermomix, it's nowhere near as slick and sophisticated.

Furnishing a set of recipes for something like a skillet isn't that important, as it's easy to find a bunch of great examples in cookbooks you already own. It's another story for manufacturers of unique products like this one, which need to provide recipes for everything from hard-boiled eggs and quick lunches to fancy dinners, lest their exciting new machine gather dust in a cabinet.

Launching a product like this is a huge undertaking, and I was curious to see if the Multo was up to the task. The Multo had about 85 recipes available when I started testing. That's not a ton, but it's not bad for a new smart kitchen appliance, assuming the number of recipes goes up in the future. I went out and bought the food for several of its solid-sounding recipes: ginger chicken soup, potato salad, green chile burritos, hummus, peanut butter, and kimchi fried rice. It was a collection that felt like a nice cross section between putting the machine through its paces and stuff that just sounded tasty.

The Multo comes with its own custom tablet, which you use to select recipes and control the machine. The Multo base has an on/off switch on the back and a glorified start/stop button on the front, and that's it. I like the way using the tablet keeps you from using an app on your phone, where you might get distracted by messages and notifications, but it drives me crazy when you can't control a kitchen appliance by pressing buttons on the appliance itself. It also felt unsafe to be able to control a machine with whirling blades by using use a tablet from across the room while my back was turned.

Testing started by opening the salmon burger recipe on the tablet. I immediately appreciated how scalable the recipes are and the spaciousness of the roomy blender jar.

I assembled the ingredients and touched the Start Cooking button on the tablet, trying not to notice that the peeling and cutting of the mango and pineapple and fine dicing of that habanero took more than the seven minutes it optimistically predicts. But right there in step three is that barehanded habanero photo, and that's where things started unraveling. If the CookingPal staff is worldly enough to come up with a recipe for a fruit-and-habanero salsa for a fish burger, how did no one flag the necessity of wearing gloves when handling a screaming-hot pepper?

I put the ingredients in the blender jar, then went to the tablet and hit Start. Behind me, and across the kitchen, the Multo sprang to life, reducing big chunks of fruit and pepper into salsa in five seconds. I put the sauce in a bowl and put jalapeño and green onion in the blender jar. I noted the “10 sprigs of coriander” in the ingredient list were called “10 pieces of cilantro” here in the step-by-step recipe. While it's all the same plant, in the United States, coriander usually refers to the dried seeds while the fresh leaves and stems are more commonly known as cilantro. However, calling one thing by two different names in the same recipe is confusing and bad form.

I might have gotten a bit more up in arms about that if this wasn't the point where I also discovered that you can start the machine without locking the lid fully into place. In short, there's a kill switch that the back of the lid locks into, but there isn't one on the front. This means you can more or less close the lid without securely latching it, then start the blades a-spinning. Curious, I unplugged the machine and was easily able to reach my man-hand in there and grab the blade. I realize that kitchens are full of knives and blenders with lids you can open and close willy nilly, but those aren't remote controlled. This felt a little dangerous.

Step six instructs the home cook to “cut about 1/3 of the salmon into chunks,” making no mention what to do with the skin and bones that often come attached to a filet or how big a chunk might be. It was the style of recipe-writing half-assery that reminded me a bit of the SideChef app. It felt almost as if one of the conditions for funding the Multo was that one of the VC dudes who was also a Bobby Flay fanboy got to write the recipes himself.

Anyway, the salmon chunks get whirled into a paste along with breadcrumbs, cumin that the graphic shows as seeds but appears ground in the photo, and oregano that may be fresh or dried, who can say? There's a photo of what looks like ground black pepper going in there, but it's not in the ingredient list.

In the next step, you cut the remaining salmon into chunks, trying not to wonder why you didn't pre-chunk it in the earlier step, and whiz them into the paste. From there, you're counseled to form it into patties, cook them in a skillet on your stove, and eat them with the salsa on buns that are on the ingredient list and mayo that is not.

That was about enough for me and the Multo, but just in case, I pulled up the ingredient list for ginger chicken soup. There was my old friend, a sprig of coriander, along with "1 piece" of lemon.

"What's a piece of lemon," my wife Elisabeth asked. "A wedge? A whole lemon?"

And there, dangling limp at the bottom of the ingredient list, even though it gets used way up in step 2, is "1 piece" of ginger, the recipe's co-headliner, true quantity unknown.

My reflex here was to send the Multo back. I went as far as packing it into its box, but out of an abundance of caution, I pulled it back out a week or two later, planning to try a few more dishes. I started with peanut butter, always a fun trick in blenders and food processors, and the end product came out well enough. While there was a nice touch of peanut toasting in the Multo at the beginning of the recipe, that triggered two kinds of high-temperature warnings on the screen. The recipe also called for sugar (which should be flagged as optional—plenty of brands use none), which remained crystallized once the peanut butter was finished, slightly altering the texture you’d expect. Still, it was nice on cool celery stalks during a pummeling Seattle heat wave. In that vein, the Multo's recipe for potato salad sounded like a cooling balm, though I never got to taste it.

In the week or two while the Multo sat in in its box in my workshop, a software update became available. I was glad to see it; I could never get the tablet to display weights and measures in metric anywhere outside the settings panel, and I hoped this might fix it. After running the update, the amounts for ingredients listed in the recipes were still in ounces, and the tablet immediately started asking for another update. This felt weird but I went along with it, yet that second update kept failing. It ended up stuck in a frequent pop-up loop, either asking for that new update or telling me it failed when I tried.

A factory reset felt like a pain, but the only option. This got the tablet going again but killed the connection between the tablet and the machine, something I was never able to reestablish on my own. With no manual controls on the Multo, this bricked it. I called customer service and chose to get a callback, which I learned could take a day.

While I was waiting for that call, I boxed it up to send it back, which solved all of my problems right there on the spot. No more waiting, no more pop-ups.

I still had food for the other recipes for the Multo in my fridge, but I pulled out a few well-written cookbooks and just used those. I like my fingers where they are, and no capsaicin on my junk.