It's Here: Paragon upgrade kit

I've had my Paragon Induction Cooktop for a while now and have been using it mostly for deep frying.  I know it's capable of doing much more, but I prefer using the gas range for sauteing and an immersion circulator (Nomiku, Anova, Joule) for sous vide.  Recently they offered an upgrade kit that would expand the cooktops abilities so I jumped in.

As noted on the box, the upgrade kit includes a mat, a temperature probe and a sensor module.

After opening the box.  Pretty sparse documentation but all the important stuff about getting the sensor paired to to the cooktop is easy to follow.  So what does the upgrade kit do?  The new mat goes between the cooktop and a pan and measures the temperature of the pan so you can control the surface temperature, this will be very useful for things like shallow frying, tempering chocolate and candy making where you want to bring your sugar up to a specific temperature.  The battery/sensor module is a separate piece that fits in to both the mat and the sensor probe, the original module was an integral part of the probe.  This should make it much less of a hassle to charge it and if something fails you won't have to replace the entire probe assembly.

Here is the mat in action, depending on which mode you're using you'll get some degree of overshoot with an empty pan (especially in "Rapid Mode") but the sensor reading from the mat seems to mesh pretty well with the actual surface temperature reading from my IR thermometer.

One downside of the upgrade kit is that the mat can only go up to 375°f, same as the temperature probe.  That means it probably won;t be particularly for post sous vide searing.  There is a new product coming from First Build called the Tasty One Top that appears to be basically the same technology.  From the description it looks like the surface temperature sensor is built in to the unit rather being a separate mat.  It also will feature Bluetooth connectivity for control via an app, but minimal on-board controls.  It will also have a higher temperature range up to 450°f making it useful for searing.  These are not out in the wild yet (expected shipping date in November) so I have no idea about the quality of the hardware, but may be something to take a look at if someone is interested in this type of technology.

Next week I should recieve my most expensive kitchen gadget yet, a Spinzall home culinary centrifuge.  Once I've had a chance to play around with it a bit I'll post a review.