About KitchenGearCalc

KitchenGearCalc is a reference site for indoor precision cooking. It covers sous vide and immersion circulators, vacuum sealing including chamber machines, combi and steam ovens, air fryers, multicookers and pressure cookers, the Ninja Creami line, blenders, espresso, induction cooktops, thermometry, fermentation and dehydrating. It currently holds 16 calculators and 273 reference pages across 10 chart sets, backed by a catalog of 145 products.

How the numbers are sourced

Every figure on this site falls into one of three buckets, and each page says which applies before you read a number.

• Published. Safe minimum internal temperatures are quoted from the USDA Food Safety and Inspection Service, with a link to the source. We do not paraphrase them and we do not round them.
• Calculated. Come-up times come from a one dimensional conduction model where time scales with the square of thickness. Vacuum boiling points come from the Antoine equation. Both are stated on the page with their assumptions, so you can disagree with the model rather than with us.
• Left blank. We do not publish pasteurization hold times below the USDA safe minimum internal temperature. Those come from the FSIS Appendix A lethality tables for a specific product, they vary with fat and salt content, and a single figure from us would be wrong for somebody.

We do not test products

Nothing on this site comes from cooking test batches or running instruments in a kitchen of our own, and every page says so. Recommendations are built from manufacturer specifications, owner manuals, published standards and recurring themes in verified owner reviews. That method is genuinely good at some things and genuinely bad at others, so it is worth being clear about which.

It is good at catching what specifications reveal and marketing hides: duty ratings, seal bar lengths, the number of power steps, whether a part can be replaced, whether a bag type fits a machine. It is bad at telling you how something feels to use, how loud it is, or whether you will still like it in a year. Any site claiming personal testing of forty appliances across a dozen categories is telling you a story, and we would rather be the site that says what it actually knows.

Every product is verified

Each product in the catalog was confirmed live against the Amazon catalog through the Creators API rather than copied from an older article, and the price shown is the one the listing carried at that point. Where we wanted a product and could not verify a live listing, it is named in the writing without a buy card rather than substituted for something else. The Anova Precision Oven, Combustion thermometers and the Acaia Pearl scale are all in that position. That is the correct outcome, not a gap.

What this site does not cover

Anything that happens outdoors. Barbecue and smoking, including the Ninja Woodfire, belong to SmokerCalc. Pizza ovens and dough belong to PizzaOvenCalc. Grills and outdoor cooking belong to BackyardGearCalc. Cake batter, frosting and meringue belong to CakeDecoratingCalc. Stand mixers are treated here as general purpose only, because dough and cake batter push you toward different machines.

Corrections

Corrections to a time or a temperature are the most useful thing you can send us. Cite a source and we will check it against ours and change the page if you are right. The contact page goes straight to a person.