By JUDY STARK, Times Homes Editor

© St. Petersburg Times, published April 15, 2000

We feel the need for speed in the kitchen, and new appliances are trying to keep up. Oddly, they might just get ahead of us.

DALLAS -- I'm rushed. I don't have time. But I still want a home-cooked meal.

That is the consumer cry to which appliance manufacturers responded recently when they unveiled appliances that promise to deliver crispy chicken, crunchy cookies and succulent shrimp in a matter of minutes.

"People want good food, fast and easy," said Thomas Lindell of Jenn-Air, which introduced its Accelis 5XP fast-cooking wall oven at the National Association of Home Builders show in Dallas.

"People are leading harassed lives," Lindell said. "Family time is limited more than ever. People say they have only 30 minutes to make a meal. That's why there's such an increase in the amount of prepared foods and takeout foods people buy, but the food's not as nutritious as they would like."

The Accelis wraps forced hot air around the food, cooking it in one-fifth the time of a regular oven, Jenn-Air claims. (The same technology is used in commercial appliances under the name Turbo Chef.) It can cook a three-pound chicken in 20 minutes, a 10-pound turkey in 55 minutes, a pan of lasagna in 9 minutes.

[Photo: General Electric] The Advantium oven uses white-hot halogen bulbs to brown food. The result: Quite tasty, testers found.

The oven's interactive controls, in English, French and Spanish, request information on weight, thickness and desired degree of doneness to calculate cooking times. The oven weighs food in pounds and kilos.

The Accelis will begin presales this month and hit the market in June, for about $3,499.

"Speed was important," said Gareth Morgan, of the major appliance division of Maytag, the parent company of Jenn-Air. "But quality of food and ease of use were just as important. People told us: "Make it easy.' "

At the builders' convention, Dean Fearing, the celebrity chef from the Mansion on Turtle Creek in Dallas, was doing demonstration cooking using the Accelis. A few aisles away, chefs at the Whirlpool booth were handing out chocolate chip cookies, chicken wings and shrimp freshly prepared in its entry into the quick-cook sweepstakes: the quartz-element microwave-convection combination Speed Cook oven that claims to reduce cooking time by 50 percent and, unlike the Accelis, needs no preheating.

Showgoers had to wait only eight minutes for those chocolate chip cookies rather than the usual 15, and just 13 minutes for chicken wings instead of the standard 33 minutes. The Speed Cook can also function as a regular microwave.

"It does everything and it does it fast," a chef said as she handed out warm cookies. The Speed Cook will be available in June priced from $2,800 to $3,000.

GE was demonstrating the Advantium oven it introduced a year ago, which uses white-hot halogen bulbs to brown food. It's on the market now, priced at $1,700 to $1,900. Still in the concept stage for the Advantium: voice activation that will recognize 250 regional accents.

"People tell us that they want to spend 15 to 30 minutes cooking dinner. That's not much time to have a good meal. We know this really hits a need for people," spokeswoman Julie Wood said.

All these fast-cooking ovens have preset cycles for specific foods and databases into which users can program cooking times for their own favorite recipes. They're all about the size and shape of microwave ovens. The Accelis even tells you when it needs cleaning.

Cooking appliances that do more than nuke frozen entrees or warm up coffee or make popcorn may find their niche among buyers who yearn for comfort food (16-minute oven-fried chicken and 15-minute meatloaf in the Accelis, according to the former executive editor of Cook's Illustrated magazine, who tested the oven early on). One of the biggest consumer disappointments of the last 20 years, the manufacturers say, is the realization that the microwave doesn't really cook the way they wanted it to: It doesn't brown meat; it turns some foods rubbery and others leathery.

These appliances also respond to a wish articulated by Joan McCloskey, executive building editor of Better Homes & Gardens magazine, whose readers are as mainstream and middle-American as they come. Her readers, she told a news conference, are saying, "We want a house that's no hassle, that requires very little maintenance and repair. We want a house that will make our lives easier." Those may be the target market for an alarm clock, recently introduced by Sunbeam, that alerts the coffeemaker that you're up and in need of caffeine.

And these appliances are part of a movement toward automating the home. On the one hand, that movement is creeping slowly into new construction: Just 5.1 percent of all new homes have integrated security and lighting controls, and only 2.8 percent have integrated heating, cooling and security systems, according to NAHB research. On the other hand, booth after booth on the 800,000-square-foot trade show floor offered home automation systems that can be accessed from anywhere in the world by phone or modem, window blinds that can be controlled with a remote, whole-house wiring systems that allow homeowners to adjust their thermostats, choose a video, or program their lighting via laptop. (That must be what all those people are doing in airport waiting lounges with portable computers on their knees.)

There is great debate about how much of this technology is useful and practical and how much is just plain silly. You've probably seen the TV commercial for IBM in which an appliance repairman appears at the door, summoned by an ailing refrigerator even before the confused homeowners know they have a problem. There's something vaguely spooky about appliances having a life and a voice of their own. What are you supposed to do when you get a phone call or an e-mail at work from your refrigerator saying, "My door is open"?

"It's scary that people haven't asked themselves why they really need to open the front door for the plumber by remote," Raymond Boggs, a technology analyst at International Data Corp., a Framingham, Mass., market research company, told the New York Times recently. Lots of "early adopters" simply program their appliances once and never touch the settings, so what's the point? Or, when something does go wrong, they frantically push dozens of buttons, making the situation worse and undoing hours of programming.

"We're in limbo right now," Alex Pentland, the academic head of MIT's Media Lab, where much of the new home technology is incubated, told the New York Times. "If you stand back and forget the hype, you have to ask yourself: Do you really want your microwave to talk to your refrigerator? What's it going to say? We have yet to come up with something that people really care about. And that's why a lot of these things aren't going to last."

Case study: GE's "Web-enabled refrigerator." A consumer can scan food under a bar-code reader while unpacking the groceries to create a database, then scan the items again when using them to maintain a running list of what's available and what has been used. It will retrieve recipes and suggest what to cook with the ingredients on hand. It will do self-diagnostic tests and can call the homeowner if someone leaves the door open or when it's time to change the filters. It will e-mail a grocery list to an online supermarket. Consumers can carry its detachable "Web pads" -- laptops -- to another room to sit down and make their grocery lists or plan meals, scan the Internet or send e-mail.

The refrigerator is "absolutely" a work in progress, GE spokeswoman Wood said. Other manufacturers are fiddling with the same idea. Frigidaire showed a PC-equipped "Screenfridge" refrigerator at the National Kitchen and Bath Show last year, and this year's upgraded version has networking capability that lets the user control and monitor other kitchen appliances, lighting, entertainment systems, security systems, and so on from the refrigerator screen. Frigidaire also showed a remote-operated range at the Kitchen and Bath show last week in Chicago. At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this winter, Microsoft showed a refrigerator that kept track of groceries and prepared shopping lists. Whirlpool's prototype wireless touch-screen PC can be removed from the refrigerator door and carried around.

"I don't think consumers out there today are asking for this technology," GE's Wood said. "They probably haven't even stopped to think about it. We don't know if any of the things we show today are the things people are going to be interested in." That's why GE is showing these "concept appliances" to builders and test markets "to let them tell us what they want."

She said surveys at the booth at the builders' show indicated interest in the refrigerator's inventory-management feature and the ability to generate shopping lists and order groceries online. "They consider that a real chore and this would really help them," she said.

But how many of those stressed-out, busy consumers -- the same ones who want home-cooked meals in minutes -- want to take on the role of checkout clerk when they bring home bags of groceries, running each item under the bar-code reader before they put it away?

"The stage we're at is, What are the capabilities and what do people think?" Wood asked. "People want things that save them time."

To that end, Whirlpool introduced its Catalyst washer ($799), which it says eliminates the need for pretreating. The washer creates a highly concentrated mix of soap and water in which the load of laundry soaks. The washer spins the laundry, forcing this solution through the clothes by centrifugal force. Then it moves into the regular wash cycle. The companion Senseon dryer ($599) solves a problem for time-pressed consumers by completing a drying cycle in 30 minutes instead of the usual 50 so those who are doing multiple loads of laundry need not stand around and wait. The washer and dryer will be on the market in late spring or early summer.

"Tough stain removal is important and no one does it well," spokesman Kevin Madden said. "People don't like pretreating. They're telling us, "Take this chore away from me.' "

-- Information from the New York Times was used in this report.

© St. Petersburg Times. All rights reserved.