Meet your Bluetooth-powered smart kitchen (pictures)

The kitchen has seen a sharp uptick in cooking smarts as of late, with a new generation of foodie-friendly tech aimed at raising your culinary IQ -- and making it easier to cook like a top chef.

For many of them, the common denominator is Bluetooth, which is quickly becoming one of the most important standards in the smart home. Click through for a mouth-watering look at what's out there.

A smart kitchen needs to know what you're trying to make, and what ingredients you're working with. That's where the venerable kitchen scale comes into the picture. This smart scale from Adaptics is one our favorites -- pair it with your phone, and it'll walk you through the baking process ingredient by ingredient.

The high-end blender pros at Blendtec are getting in on the action, too, with a new cooking system that incorporates a Bluetooth-ready smart scale, a food processor, and, of course, a blender.

Orange Chef incorporates a smart scale into a subtle-looking, battery-powered Bluetooth countertop, and offers compatibility with Vitamix, Crock-Pot and Jawbone in order to serve as your one-stop kitchen shop for fitness and nutrition.

Perfect Bake's Bluetooth scale takes a colorful, kid-friendly approach to smarter cookie-making.

For a decidedly less kid-friendly spin on the smart scale, there's Perfect Drink, which promises to serve as your connected bartending buddy.

You can also enjoy Bluetooth-powered booze with the SodaStream Mix, a smart countertop carbonator that uses cloud-connected smarts to carbonate way more than water.

Another of our favorites is the iDevices Kitchen Thermometer. Available in two sizes, the thermometer keeps track of your roast's temperature, then transmits the data to your smart phone over Bluetooth, letting you keep an eye on things from the living room. When it's ready to come out, you'll get a notification on your phone.

iDevices also sells the iGrill Mini, which does the same thing for your backyard grill.

There's been an explosion of smart sous vide cookers recently. One of the most notable is the Anova Precision Cooker. Clamp it to the side of a pot full of water and pair it with your phone, and you'll be able to select a recipe, vacuum seal your ingredients, and drop them in the automated bath. We tested it out, and promptly enjoyed some of the best steak ever cooked at CNET Appliances. There's nothing that isn't smart about that.

You'll find smart sous vide incorporated into this high-end countertop from GE, with a wireless, Bluetooth-enabled temperature sensor that lets the countertop automatically cycle the heat on and off to maintain a precise, sous-vide-appropriate temperature.

For a less expensive way to get started with smart, induction-powered sous vide, there's the Paragon Induction Cooktop from FirstBuild, which pairs that same Bluetooth temperature sensor with a single, standalone induction burner.

For another unique spin on sous vide, there's Meld. Like the Paragon, it uses a wireless, Bluetooth-powered temperature sensor that clamps onto your pot, but unlike the Paragon, it doesn't come with its own burner. Instead it smartens your existing stovetop up with a nifty knob that automatically turns the heat up and down as needed.

The Cinder Sensing Cooker is yet another connected cooking gadget promising sous vide smarts. What's interesting is that unlike most sous vide cookers, it doesn't take a water bath approach, operating more like a George Foreman grill, instead.

Lest sous vide hog too much of the smart spotlight, there's a Bluetooth-powered pressure cooker, too. It's called the Instant Pot Smart, and we used it to cook some of the most magnificent pork shoulder butt we've ever tasted.