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Comment by hammock | Hacker News Reader

Miele's new Dialog oven is technically a combi microwave/convection/steam oven (similar to what Starbucks heats up your food in), but uses longer wavelength radiation than a standard microwave. Longer wavelengths can penetrate food more deeply.

It's called RF solid state cooking. It uses radio frequency as a heat source. It allows for much higher precision (compared to traditional speed cooking methods that combine microwave technology and traditional oven elements) due to the RF signals providing a feedback loop. They respond back and help the oven understand and target specific zones within the cooking cavity.

Hence the name: “Dialog”

By regulating the oven’s heat in one place, you can cook the fish while the ice stays frozen. Another such example is making cooked and raw salmon at the same time, by focusing the oven’s action at specific areas of the salmon

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Ok, that's the marketing spiel, but how does this differ from a regular microwave?

I suspect it uses phased array antennas to:

* Direct microwaves at different parts of the food differently. That way you can cook some stuff lots while leaving other parts cold.

* Detect which parts of the food are cooked - by watching the absorption of microwaves across a broad range of frequencies, you should be able to detect chemical reactions that happen at certain temperatures - eg. ice turning to water, or raw egg becoming cooked egg.

Combine these two things, and you can cook food far 'better' - and get all of your meat to the perfect temperature while overcooking none.

Notably, I don't think you need phased array antennas to do this. A few bits of spinning metal to scatter microwaves in random directions could instead be controlled by servos and lots of maths to send microwaves in very specific directions.

And as long as you make sure you have feedback, you can realtime adjust the microwave power every few microseconds to do all the same things.

My intuition says phased arrays are the more reliable way to do this. Less moving parts and more control. As well, it feels like phased arrays in general are at a really good maturity to be used for this kind of application.

They're fiendishly expensive if you want a kilowatt of output power...

Clearly. The price reflects it (and puts it out of the budget of most markets), but I thing Miele is targeting reliable more than they are targeting low cost.

Because a regular microwave can't do what was described in the comment you're replying to? A microwave just heats everything - maybe irregularly, but not intentionally irregularly

> By regulating the oven’s heat in one place, you can cook the fish while the ice stays frozen. Another such example is making cooked and raw salmon at the same time, by focusing the oven’s action at specific areas of the salmon

https://youtu.be/wMwjHnspohU?t=585

The oven knows how to cook the food. It knows this because it knows how much energy has been put in to the oven, and how much energy was not put in to the food. By subtracting how much energy was put in, from how much came out, it obtains the kilojoules of energy the food absorbed, or the Gourmet Unit.

Does Miele also design missiles?

>Does Miele also design missiles?

The technology comes form a company called Goji Food Solutions. This is the founder - he has a bunch of other patents, mostly focused in the medical devices, biotech and healthcare spaces: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shlomo_Ben-Haim

It's a reference to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZe5J8SVCYQ

> The missile knows where it is at all times. It knows this because it knows where it isn't. By subtracting where it is from where it isn't, or where it isn't from where it is (whichever is greater), it obtains a difference, or deviation. The guidance subsystem uses deviations to generate corrective commands to drive the missile from a position where it is to a position where it isn't, and arriving at a position where it wasn't, it now is. Consequently, the position where it is, is now the position that it wasn't, and it follows that the position that it was, is now the position that it isn't.

They have a pretty extensive introduction including the tech on YouTube. https://youtu.be/wMwjHnspohU

Ironic that the text is almost content-free, while the useful information is buried in a video.

Thanks! Thought this whole thing was a joke/prank until I read your explanation

>"The frozen outer layer prevents the food from overcooking or drying out during the cooking process."

Other cooking tech does this as well. Wrapping in leaves and clay for example.

Cool, but if I want raw fish I'll just not put it in the oven I think.

Isn’t it true that ice does not heat up in even a regular microwave though?

Yes, but few people know that, so this still sounds impressive.

I suspect I could do that 'cook fish in ice' demo in my home microwave after a few practice runs. The trick will be having the whole block of ice at -1C so the ice is solid, but the slightly salty water within the fish's body is not frozen, and therefore absorbs microwaves really well.

Adding a little gelatine to the water will probably make it work even better, because then convection currents won't eat away at the ice so quickly.

you're like Mr white from that TV show

I stopped reading at "longer wavelength radiation than a standard microwave."

A microwave do not irradiate your food. Rather, it uses an oscillating magnetic field to induce dipole heating (in mainly water molecules but also other dipoles that may be present in the food).

…electromagnetic radiation?

Edit: I stand corrected.

Huh, TIL. So is this the same principle used in an induction stove top to heat the pan, just applied to water molecules instead of metal?

> [No electromagnetic radiation] whatsoever in a microwave.

WTF!? Is this leaking out of some kind of weird electromagnetic health conspiracy theory subculture?

Any trivial web search provides an avalanche of results explaining otherwise--that your microwave oven definitely uses electromagnetic radiation--including the EPA and FDA.

Or is your thesis that everybody else is wrong about wave-particle duality and photons aren't real?

Magnetic fields radiate. It's radiation. It's just that it's not ionizing radiation.

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