The holiday is still almost a week away, and I’m sick of Thanksgiving. I’ve already made four rounds of mashed potatoes, three of mac and cheese, and three turkeys (with more still waiting in my fridge) as part of testing smart probes to help smoke turkeys outside and preparing seven-course holiday meal kits for friends and family.

I was eager to finally outsource some of the cooking by testing two very different robo-chef devices, the Thermomix TM7 and the Posha kitchen robot. Both promise to plan my meals and also do most of the cooking, which sounds pretty good to me.

The Thermomix descends from a German device launched in 1968—a time when the best-known robot chef was cartoon Rosie on The Jetsons—that was essentially a blender with a heater. It’s since caught on big in countries from Italy to Portugal to Australia, and over the years it’s added multi-tier steaming, baking, proofing, a touchscreen, an encyclopedic recipe app, and a whole lot of smart features. WIRED reviewer Joe Ray called 2020’s last-generation Thermomix TM6 (9/10, WIRED Recommends) the “smartest of the smart kitchen.” The newest version, the seventh-generation TM7, was released in August and looks like a giant trophy with a computer screen. It retails for $1,699 and its goal is to replace almost every appliance in your kitchen. It’ll even happily order groceries for you on InstaCart.

The newest robo-chef entrant is Posha, a Silicon Valley-via-Bangalore startup device that aims at truly autonomous one-pot cooking, once you’ve chopped up the proper ingredients into little bins. The Posha kitchen robot was released in January at a price of $1,750 and promptly sold out, as has each successive batch. The device comes complete with a robot stirring arm, and a camera to monitor moisture and browning. Press a button, and Posha will add ingredients at the appropriate moment, spice and stir your food, add water and oil, and cook it down, all without your participation.

I used both the Posha and Thermomix to make a spread of Thanksgiving sides: candied yams, mashed potatoes, mac and cheese, brussels sprouts, and a more complex wild card entry chosen because I thought my Aunt Katherine might like it—and assessed cooking experience overall. Consider it a robo-chef face-off.

Here is my experience with each of the Thermomix and the Posha—and how each fared on five Thanksgiving side recipes.

Cooking Experience With Thermomix

The Thermomix has almost 60 years of history. This is a good thing. It began as, essentially, a blender that can cook. It is still a very powerful blender that can cook. Lord, it makes pesto or mashed potatoes as quickly and easily as anything. I stood by in actual awe of its raw cooking-blending power.

But it’s also evolved into a whole lot more, an all-in-one device that purports to replace just about every appliance in your kitchen. Today’s Thermomix has become a beast of multifarious functionality.

Nobody embarks on a career in cyber security expecting an easy ride. It’s widely recognised that protecting critical digital infrastructure is high-pressure and high-stakes work. 

For many of us, that’s part of the buzz. Every day, we tackle complex challenges, address high-stakes problems, and (hopefully) make a real difference – but who will protect cyber professionals from the risk of burnout?

It seems to me that this industry continues to reward heroic and even superhuman effort, but often fails to take into account the limits of human resilience. Think, for example, of the brutal all-nighters pulled by incident response teams, often for several consecutive nights.

This profession faces a burnout crisis, and the warning signs have been sounding loud and clear for some time now. 

Back in 2023, market analyst firm Gartner predicted that by 2025, nearly half of cyber security leaders would change jobs, with 25% of these taking different roles entirely due to work-related stress. In a 2024 survey conducted by the Chartered Institute of Information Security (CIISec), over half (55%) of respondents reported that the stress of the job interferes with their sleep and keeps them awake at night. And the 2024 Workforce Study from industry membership organisation ISC2 revealed a four percentage-point dip from the previous year’s study in favourable job satisfaction rate, down to 66%.