Best gifts for the home chef

The NutriBullet Balance connects to a companion app (available for iOS and Android) that walks you step by step through smoothie recipes and gives you the exact nutritional information of your liquid meal.

The KitchenAid Pro Line Series Blender has plenty of power to chop and mix solid food into smoothies, soups, sauces, butters and batters. It's constructed from sturdy metal, plastic and silicone parts. It has just a few components, which are a snap to clean, and two speeds to pulse its blades at.

The Bluetooth-connected Perfect Blend Pro scale talks to your device to tell you how to build a smoothie, drink or other blended item based on the weight of the ingredients. 

The Hestan Cue uses Bluetooth to connect a pan, a countertop induction burner and an app to walk you through recipes and regulate your cooking temperature. Each step comes with videos that show you what to do. The app's recipes are delicious and make it easy to improve your cooking skills.

The Tasty One Top is a Bluetooth-enabled induction countertop burner designed to help you cook the recipes you see in Buzzfeed's Tasty cooking videos. 

The Dash Rapid Egg Cooker offers an affordable way to poach, boil and steam eggs without much effort. It's easy to use and clean and doesn't make a mess.

You scan the bar code from Tovala's prepackaged, refrigerated meals on the Tovala Smart Oven, and the appliance automatically cooks them with little effort on your part. The Tovala meals are leaps and bounds ahead of traditional convenience foods like frozen TV dinners.

The June Pro is very similar to the June Intelligent Oven. Both appliances use mobile device-grade processors, high-definition cameras and your home's Wi-Fi network to identify the food you put in (similar to facial recognition technology) and cook it automatically. You can also control each oven remotely from your iPhone or iPad and watch a livestream of your meal as it cooks. 

GE's electric slide-in stoves in the Cafe line include a Bluetooth-connected temperature probe that can talk to the cooktop so you can maintain a constant and exact temperature in your pot. 

The Electrolux EI30EF45QS slide-in electric range cooks food quickly and looks good doing it. The stove provides a taste of luxury that costs less than comparable models and performs just as well -- if not better.

Amazon's gadget is a battery-powered, voice-enabled grocery scanner. Point it at a bar code and press the button to add that item to your Amazon shopping cart when you're running low, or press and hold to ask Alexa to add it. She'll even talk back to you through the scanner's tiny speaker.

The cheapest Family Hub smart fridge is surprisingly affordable and comes with enough smart features to merit consideration for the kitchen.

The iGuardStove Intelligent automatically shuts off your stove if you step away for too long, which could help keep kitchens safe for families, kids and older adults. And built-in Wi-Fi lets the iGuardStove send you email alerts if five or more auto-shut-offs happen within 24 hours.

The Bialetti Cold Brew Coffee Maker decants strong coffee concentrate and easily fits into your fridge.

This pricey appliance is the first super-automatic espresso contraption Breville has built for the home. The Oracle Touch doesn't just grind whole coffee beans, froth milk and pull espresso shots -- it tackles all this pretty much on its own.

The Barista Brain Conical Burr Grinder produces quality coffee grounds quickly. It also has a built-in scale for extra convenience. Thanks to intuitive controls, it's also simple to use.

The Baratza Encore burr grinder is affordable considering it packs 40 coarseness settings to supply a wide range of coffee types and brewing styles. It produces grounds that are uniform in size and texture. It's simple to operate, sturdily built and relatively quiet.

The Kalita Wave 155 pour-over coffee maker brews outstanding cups of drip coffee. It's relatively affordable compared with fancy automatic coffee makers.

This sous vide machine will cook your food in a water bath, but more uniquely, it will also keep it refrigerator-cool until you're ready to start cooking. Toss in a vacuum sealed steak in the morning, come home from work to precisely cooked, medium rare-perfection.

This cup-at-a-time coffee-making gadget takes some practice to use effectively, but once you figure it out it brews an outstanding cup of joe.