GE smart ovens promise to cook the perfect turkey this Thanksgiving

The smart kitchen is getting a little more intelligent this holiday season. Appliance manufacturer GE has a new Turkey Mode for its smart ovens that promises to take the prep and guesswork out of roasting that big bird. It arrives on over half a million GE connected ovens and ranges this week via an over-the-air software upgrade.

The Kentucky-based GE Appliances gave me a demo of the new tech, and it’s pretty impressive. You put the bird in the roasting tin, pop it in a cold oven, insert the temperature probe built into the oven, push the Turkey Mode button (either on the LCD screen of the oven or in the GE SmartHQ smartphone app), and sit back and relax.

There is no basting, stuffing, brining, fiddling with foil, preheating, or panicking about whether it’s over or undercooked. And most importantly, there is no math; whether the bird is 12lbs or 20lbs, Turkey Mode calculates the cook time and executes its cooking algorithms to bring the bird to 170 degrees a few hours later. And if you want to, you can monitor the turkey and temperature in real time through the app or LCD screen. When it’s ready, the oven timer will go “Gobble, gobble.”

Sabrina Hannah, a food scientist at GE, explained that her team cooked hundreds of turkeys to perfect the algorithms, and she’s confident your turkey will turn out just as perfectly juicy and crispy as the one they showed me in the demo.

Image: GE Appliances

The Turkey Mode feature will be available in a total of 336 GE ovens, including Monogram, Café, GE Profile, and GE models. It’s part of GE’s Precision Cooking program available on its smart ovens that guides cooking everything from cakes and cookies to salmon and beef tenderloin.

Manufacturers are still struggling to convince people to buy smart versions of their large kitchen appliances. But innovations such as this one — and GE’s recent over-the-air update to add an air fryer mode to its ovens — help provide reasons to consider the upgrade next time you’re appliance shopping. An oven that gets new, helpful features like Turkey Mode after you’ve bought it is pretty smart.