It’s better than your mom’s paella, the robot’s creators say, and while the purists out there will likely huff and puff, this robot could be of great help in the kitchen.
Paella is one of those foods with an almost mythical quality around them. It’s only the initiated that can seemingly whip up a delicious dish, masterfully blending the rice with the other ingredients. But two companies — robot manufacturer br5 (Be a Robot 5) and paella stove manufacturer Mimcook — beg to disagree.
It’s true, some skill comes into making paella, but it can be taught, not just to humans, but to robots as well. The two companies teamed up to develop the world’s first robotic paellero, revealing it at a food fair earlier last month.
It works like this: you set the program, load the rice, the sofrito, the seafood, the stock, and just leave the robot to do its thing. The robotic arm is hooked up to a computerized stove, and together, the two can whip up a reportedly delicious paella in no time.
The advantages of the robot are obvious: it does everything as planned and doesn’t get distracted. It’s easy, especially when mixing a rice, for a human to not pay enough attention or get distracted by some other task (or a text message) — resulting in burned rice or some other imperfection. The robot will do none of that.
“It doesn’t make sense for us to be stirring rice – especially because you’ll be looking at WhatsApp while you’re doing it and it’ll burn. That won’t happen with a robot,” said Enrique Lillo, founder of Be a Robot 5, to The Guardian.
The company specializes in food-making robots, and it emphasizes that this is not a ‘paella-making robot’, it’s a rice-making robot — a distinction aimed at preventing the anger of Valencians, where the dish originated.
The robotic arm makes paella because it’s connected to a specialized paella stove (after all, the paella itself is named after what it’s made in). You could connect to a different type of stove, and it would make burgers, pizzas, or croissants, which the company has already previously demonstrated.
The robot is already causing quite a stir, drawing the interest of many companies but also protests from people who fear the robots will take their jobs. But its creators argue that it’s not meant to take people’s jobs, just help them by doing the mundane things and allowing them to focus on what matters.
“At the end of the day, it’s an assistant. I like to say it’s a bit like the orange-juicing machines where you put oranges in the top and get juice out of the bottom. That’s a robot too – people just don’t realise it – and so is a coffee-vending machine. No one looks at those and goes: ‘Crikey! It’s stealing jobs from people!’ No. It’s elevating human capacity.”