Chef Abhijit Saha of Rock Salt is cooking a meen moilee when I enter the newly-opened Bora Experience Centre in Bengaluru. Surprisingly, I can hardly smell it. A helpful Dominik Lill, the Bavarian cooking systems manufacturer’s export manager, tells me it is thanks to their cooktop extractors. “Steam and odours rise at a maximum speed of one metre per second. But our extractors instantly draw these downward at approximately four metres per second,” he shares. The result: vapours are fully extracted, and odour and grease particles are trapped in the cooking system’s stainless steel grease filter.
This patented innovation came out of complaints that Willie Bruckbauer, the founder of Bora, often heard — of how chimneys spoilt the design aesthetic of the kitchen and that they were noisy to boot. So, with a combination of applied physics and design innovations, he decided to stop cooking vapours from rising at all.
I find myself drawn to the clean lines of the custom-made cooking range, with its touch-controls, stainless steel fittings and the economy of design of its air inlet grille. The smoke billowing down, almost cascading like a waterfall, creates a beautiful picture. Helpfully, they have mounted the cooktop extractors in a glass island, so customers can see the details and understand how they work. And if you have any doubts about its suitability for Indian kitchens, Lill says that the higher amounts of oils and spices in our cooking are ideal as they make the vapours heavier, causing them to be extracted faster.
Bora — which débuted in India last October — currently has three cooktop extractors, all of which are showcased at the centre: the Basic, Classic and Professional. While the former is a one-unit piece, the Classic is a domino system with the extractor in the middle. The cooking surfaces can be customised. The Professional range, as the name suggests, is aimed at professional chefs, with control knobs rather than touch-controls, because, as their research showed, chefs liked them better.
Priced from ₹2,20,000, the products are available through dealers like Knolte, Hettich and Haecker.
