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Comment by infecto | Hacker News Reader

Frying would require some sort of oil or fat and it’s hard to tell but the pan looks clean. Anything with oil will dramatically bump up those numbers. It’s intuitive just cleaning your kitchen, grease being cooked travels.

My one wish is the west adopted Chinese style kitchens. Even in new condo builds the kitchen will be isolated in a room you can close off, with an exterior wall and powerful exhaust vents. I always found it perplexing how ok folks are with what feels like cooking food in their bedroom.

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Because I want to feel connected with my family or my guests while I'm cooking. I spend a lot of the day in the kitchen preparing multiple meals for a family, I don't want to be closed off.

A concept of a door is such that if you want to be closed off you can be and if you don't want to be you also have that choice. Having a door to the kitchen is strictly better than having no door. Personally I'd pick a glass sliding door too.

The air quality depends on exactly what you are cooking. Close the door if your cooking involves high heat, open it otherwise. And incidentally I don't understand why the author would do testing while frying an egg. Frying an egg does not involve high heat. High heat means getting close to or past the smoke point of your oil. I would not close the door when frying an egg.

Don't cook with high heat but do cook with high smoke point oil seems like a better solution.

A lot of people seem to like to knock a lot of holes in their kitchen walls making doors and shutters complicated and rarely used.

The chef breathes in the kitchen.

Food cooked in high heat often has additional related risks.

Sometimes you have to make the Pan hot enough so all the food goes "Tssss!" immediately and loudly when it goes in, and doesn't boil in its own moisture. Doing this appropriately is one thing that separates okay cooks from terrible cooks

> A concept of a door is such that....

If you feel the need to condescend to the point that you're explaining what a door is please ask yourself if you're underestimating the intelligence of the person you're speaking to.

HN comments aren't reflective of a person's intelligence at all. I write so many comments with grammatical errors such that my high school English teacher would berate me for low intelligence.

> A concept of a door is such that

It's just for comedic effect, or "performative erudition" in the words of a New Yorker reporter. No need to read too much into it. You have better things to do in life than to be offended so easily.

> You have better things to do in life than to be offended so easily.

I laughed along with you until this...

But don't now tell me what I do and don't have time for. Do you have time to be so patronising in your life? What an ass

I've been on this site daily for more than a decade and a half and this is the first time I've ever felt it necessary to call someone an ass. I hope you have a bad night of sleep.

I've tested with oil. You don't see a large spike unless something is blackened or the oil smokes

Biggest generator of pwm during cooking is when things actually burn. Which can be just a very tiny portion of the food, like one black speck that came off and heated extra. This produces more pwm than the mass of oil and food.

You’re right but I also think as you hint, that it’s very hard to cook without causing this to happen. I would add that when frying, even if you are below smoke point, just the act of cooking food in that oil atomizes the oil enough that it lowers air quality.

Have you ever wiped the top of the cabinets in your kitchen? Mine always get coated in grease. It is almost like the oil is being atomized like perfume. Hood works great with smoke testing but this still happens. Inside of the hood is also extremely gross to the point where the oil condenses and drips if I forget to clean it for a while.

I personally take special care to never vaporize fat. It can be done but you have to change your cooking style and only cook with certain styles outside.

How do you prevent this? I keep temperature below smoke point already but also it has to be high enough so things actually cook upon the oil vs being saturated with oil.

How powerfull is your hood? In my experience, consumer hoods are extremely underpowered. You can make them work, but that involves taking several minutes, even up to 10, at max power to set up a draft that will exhaust fumes from your stove.

It is powerful enough to smoke under it and have it draw out the smoke. It also ate its carbon filter at one point, just sucked it off the grease trap into the fan. I shut the door to the kitchen and open some windows and there is very appreciable draft coming out of those windows. I tend to only use the back two burners directly under the hood while cooking. Certainly no commercial unit, however.

A good test is to see if a piece of paper will stick or fall off (mine will actually keep a plastic tray stuck to it).

Often the problem is the exhaust path, not the extractor itself. Mine has a short straight path with a low resistance terminal cowl.

Yes that's a big downside of oil. I'm not sure about atomization but oil spatters a lot even if it isn't smoking.

Worth it over eating teflon I suppose.

Yeah, I suspect its the burning that is more effective.

Even in nicer houses in the US, they’ll have a range hood but no intake air! And then I’ll hear neighbors complaining about it not working well because nobody tells you that if you don’t have make-up air, you also need to open a window for it to work well.

I have plenty of million dollar plus houses around me selling without any exhaust at all, just a cooktop on an island in the middle of the kitchen, and most of the times it is a gas cooktop! And in 80% of the houses, it's just a shitty microwave exhaust above the range.

So right off the bat, you're down $20k at least to remodel the kitchen so it has proper ventilation, assuming you cook.

Forget the health effects and whatnot, but are people not bothered by cooking smells pervading the house?

Good cooking smells delicious. Let it permeate!

Have you ever smelled a room permeated by Indian food?

Yes, it smells amazing. One of the best things about Indian food tbh.

Maybe you're making really mild "Indian" food haha. I'm Indian and if we're making anything remotely spicy, we're dumping lots of hot stuff in a tadka or pan frying it, which is not only unpleasant elsewhere (read: eye watering and cough inducing), but sometimes prohibitively much for the person doing the cooking, if the ventilation is inadequate.

Yes it's the absolute best. Right up there with roasted pork or chicken thighs.

Cumin, Turmeric, hot onion and garlic just fragrant, butter, creams...

What do you think food should smell like? Boiled chicken? Do you have sensory issues?

I don’t want to be smelling food when I am not eating, or about to eat.

Cooking really spicy food can cause everyone in the house to start coughing, even those who love eating spicy food, and even with a decent venting system. Then there is sea food, many preparations of which are going to smell like sea food no matter what you do. Or there are just recipes that involve lots of fish sauce (or any other heavily fermented sauces).

Baby octopus fried in fish sauce stink, even with a vent fan.

Plenty of dishes, and entire cuisines, need good ventilation.

> Forget the health effects and whatnot, but are people not bothered by cooking smells pervading the house?

Being very honest, no, not really. From all the issues I can encounter in a house the smell of a meal cooking is not one of them.

The issue isn’t odors during the cooking process, the issue is odors pervading the walls, fabrics, and other fixtures all around the house such that it causes an odor at all times.

Odors are spread this way through oils. All lingering odors mean greases have permeated the tissues of the building. It's quite foul, but I have observed many people to live this way.

Or if you by accident just burn something.

I think it also depends how much people cook and what they cook. I suspect most here are thinking about that roast in a crockpot that has a pleasant aroma.

On the flip side I am thinking about anything with high heat, meats and oil. The food will be delicious and the smell of the food is great but the smell from the cooking process is miserable and will linger.

Sometime in the last 30 years builders learned how to build something that looks like a house, but isn't- no vent to outside in kitchen, 'two-car' garage that cannot fit even the smallest cars, etc. You don't notice these things as a kid, so you don't look for them when you buy your first house, by which point it's too late.

This is exactly my situation (cooktop in an island with nothing above it). Our solution (because we cook a lot and often it's Chinese food with the attendant oil) was to just stick an existing rolling island in the garage with an induction hotplate on it and do our messiest cooking out there. Not ideal but it keeps the house cleaner and we didn't have to spend much.

Personally I would prefer a Chinese style kitchen with a fully enclosed cooking space (sliding glass doors to leave open if desired) and exterior ventilation. It keeps the worst of the aerosolized oil contained and away from the rest of the home.

I think that's because people don't cook as much as they used to. And when they do it's rarely proper cooking and more assembly of prepared stuff, often just reheating.

In France too, most kitchen are optimized for looks with an island and fully opened to the living room. If you use noisy equipment, it makes both places uncomfortable. But I think that's the point, it doesn't happen that often.

There are not a whole lot of people who actually cook anymore and those who do deal with the annoyance or have their house choice influenced by that requirement.

I think complex home cooking is a vestige of the time when there were middle class housewives with a lot of time to actually do that. Nowadays with both parents working, cooking has been relegated to an activity that has to be fast, easy and efficient; which is why those multifunction cooking appliances are so popular. You never get something great out of it but it works decently enough to have the person responsible take care of some other errands simultaneously.

Some anecdata from my kitchen, which has an air quality monitor positioned approx. 4 meters away from the stove:

- Most days when cooking PM2.5 doesn't exceed 5ppm.

- I accidentally burned some vegetable oil this week, and PM2.5 shot up to around 70ppm.

- I fried up pancetta a little too hot a few months ago, rendering the fat entirely, and both PM2.5 and PM10 went up to >999ppm.

I wonder what the difference between PM2.5 from cooking oil or fat vs PM2.5 from combustion engines is on the lungs.

My instinct is that it should be less toxic from vegetable oil, if it's just vaporised... past the smoke point maybe the chemistry changes enough to make it more toxic. The body has mechanisms to remove foreign matter from the lungs, but how easily and how much it clogs up your lymph nodes seems to depend on what it's made of.

My current kitchen has a quite good vent that exhausts outside. Several years ago when I was testing a weather station with a particulate sensor before deploying it, it would pick up large spikes when I cooked, even though it was across the house and behind several doors. For air quality specifically, I very much doubt that realistic levels of separation between the kitchen and the rest of the house make much difference.

You can doubt it but it’s a fairly simple idea. Most homes don’t have makeup air systems. You have adequate ventilation you need makeup air. A good compromise is having an area that does not allow odors and smoke to move around easily. Hence separation. Now of course an adequate hood is the best but only the 1% of homes have that.

If you had all the windows closed and you don’t have makeup air, then running the exhaust will suck air in through any available gaps, which can potentially worsen air quality.

Try measuring PM2.5 in that room and log it as you turn on the fan for a while without cooking anything.

what feels like cooking food in their bedroom

Aside from studio apartments, where space is at a huge premium, I'm having a hard time understanding what you mean by this. Can you elaborate?

Have you been into a western home? The stove may not have a hood, if it does have one it’s usually inadequate. The kitchen will be in an open space so anything you cook travels everywhere. The number of homes without range hoods is wild to me. Hence cooking in your bedroom, you cook and the whole house smells.

Externally vented hoods are now required in my town in Massachusetts. But I have lived in several places like you describe and it’s sub par.

Yes, I've been in many Western homes, but never one without a hood over the stove. Perhaps it is a hasty generalization to assume they don't have hoods. Adequacy of the hood seems like it's not going to be usefully quantifiable or provable. I hope your analogy doesn't rely on this measure...

I also don't think "you cook and the whole house smells" fits the analogy of "cooking in your bedroom". The key feature of the bedroom is that it's where you sleep, get dressed, etc., not the smell.

I have a hood over my stove.

It has a fan to pull smoke and steam up out of the cooking space.

It blows the fan output right in my face, rather than outdoors.

This does not contribute anything useful to the cooking process.

It's fairly common in America. It's so common it appears it doesn't even cross your mind to consider it as something that might be desirable or useful.

(For those who say "well fix it then", I've looked, but unfortunately if you just put a hole in the wall behind the fan you end up in another exterior wall that meets up with the house there. It's not an easy cheap fix.)

Hoods are a great addition but a closed kitchen is the real deal if you want to keep smells out of the house. Even the best hoods can't keep up with cooking anything remotely smelly.

And in many places the hood doesn't extract outside but just filters and blows back in the kitchen. Even less efficient.

In modern buildings you get these together: an open kitchen meant to make the living room look more spacious and a hood that and just spins the air around a bit because it can't blow it outside (it's nowhere near an outside wall, or you can't just drill a big vent, or mess with the air circulation). The smell will go to every place that didn't have the door closed. Don't get me wrong, the smell of good food is great, but not when it gets in your dresser full of clothes or when the house gets saturated with a cacophony of smells very difficult to remove.

Since you want to argue it, where is your data? I can share some of mine from a recent study. It’s non trivial numbers without hoods and even more using recirculation.

Weird hill to defend when you don’t even have data. Maybe you did not like my analogy but it also matters how much you cook and what you are cooking. Hence why it can be more important in a Chinese household, lots of high heat cooking of meats including fish. So I can see the analogy failing in a household that does not cook often or cooks more tame items. If you frequently cook fish, or do any type of high heat, heck if you have done any cooking in a commercial kitchen before you quickly realize how inadequate the venting is even if it does go outside. Hence it can feel like you are cooking in your bedroom in a lot of western houses since they use an open floor plan with the kitchen. But ignore the analogy if you don’t like it!

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10234804/?utm_sourc...

You made the analogy & the claim that cooking in the west feels like cooking in your bedroom. The onus is actually on you to explain it and prove it. I didn't make any claims. Oh, I guess I claimed that the bedroom is where people sleep and get dressed. No, I will not be providing data for this. :)

The link you've provided says nothing about hoods generally not being in western homes or make your analogy any more apt.

You’re missing the point. I already explained why Western kitchens often feel like “cooking in your bedroom”: open layouts, weak or recirculating hoods, and a lot of households with no real ventilation at all. The data backs this, about 10% with no hood, another 26–36% with recirculating, only, and plenty more with underpowered or poorly designed systems.

I never claimed hoods don’t exist, just that they’re often inadequate. And yes it’s wild to me that 10% of homes don’t have a hood and the other 30% or so are recirculating air which is close to the same. Whether the analogy clicks for you or not, it reflects the lived reality of anyone who cooks frequently (especially with high heat or strong flavors). That’s why Chinese-style kitchens, with closed layouts and strong direct venting, are so valued.

If your rebuttal boils down to “but bedrooms are for sleeping,” then maybe this discussion is not valuable.

Why do people insist on defending the oddest of hills over such a lived experience comment like the one I made. Now for sure if you rarely cook or if cooking is making Mac and cheese then sure this will be hard to understand.

Your job is not to prove why you prefer Chinese style kitchens. I merely asked you to explain your analogy.

I was trying to understand your analogy, because, having cooked in western kitchens and been in bedrooms (often in the same house!), it made no sense to me. It's not like people generally sleep in their kitchens. Your reasoning seems to be that cooking makes your house smell. Even if this is true, I still don't see how this makes your kitchen feel like your bedroom.

Then you talked about hoods, with an undefined "adequacy" measure. I correctly suspected here you were going to use this undefined adequacy measure to move away from the analogy about cooking in your bedroom (presumably because it is inexplainable) to start a separate argument and take it wherever you needed to. You found some study (about Canada, but there's a lot of "West") that talks about hoods (being found in 90% of homes). But you see, some of these hoods are not adequate enough... sigh

OK, all that is beside the point, because again, what does any of this business about hoods have to do with bedrooms?

You’re really overcomplicating this. The analogy isn’t about dragging a bed into the kitchen, it’s about the way smells and particulates permeate living spaces when ventilation is weak or nonexistent. In an open floor plan, cooking odors don’t stay “in the kitchen,” they drift into the same areas where you relax, sleep, or work. That’s the point: the boundaries between spaces collapse, so it feels like you’re cooking in your bedroom.

If you can’t grasp that distinction after multiple explanations, then maybe the analogy isn’t the problem. Happy to discuss if you actually have anything constructive to add but please your beating a dead horse for no reason.

I have nothing to discuss with you if you're the type to resort to personal insults when challenged.

What insults and what have I not explained to you? You are arguing with me over a lived experience. You can have a different lived experience than me but I find that open concept kitchens coupled with what is always poor ventilation leads to smelly situations for most types of cooking. I don’t even understand what you are arguing with me about. I gave you data and my own experience. You refute and ignore the data and waffle on the rest. Like I said, maybe the problem is not the analogy here. If that hurts, well then tell me why I am wrong. This is definitely tops as one of the more silly threads I have participated in.

> Adequacy of the hood seems like it's not going to be usefully quantifiable or provable

If the exhaust mechanism is attached to an above the range microwave, it’s not adequate. And that is the vast majority of kitchens I see on Zillow, and I have probably sifted through thousands and thousands of houses.

A dedicated exhaust hood is seen in very few home listings, mostly in new higher end homes, or older renovated homes.

And most vented hoods are still inadequate either because there is no makeup air and the fan is restricted or more likely the fan is just junk.

I suspect most homes are leaky enough that they don't need any kind of "makeup air."

Even with an open mesh door during the summer to let replacement air in, our range hood feels completely inadequate. After any sort of fried cooking the spices and oil can be smelled everywhere on the level of and above the kitchen.

Old homes, absolutely but with new builds this is becoming a problem.

If your house is 35 years old+ then yes. If your house is newer than that I would not count on it unless the person who built it was specifically concerned with the quality of their whole house HVAC system.

A lot of 90s+ builders are trying to prevent any and all air leaks, many with the idea of insulation, with the outer vapor barrier system already blocking 90% of what would get through on and older house, on top of the fastest building process being sealing every visible seam and line with caulk instead of trying to cut and match it up perfectly. And any overall airflow problems are quite literally not their problem, that all goes onto the HVAC guys/company or lack thereof, which often these days are the cheapest possible corporate scrapings for employees that only have half a clue what they are doing and only really care about whether the system turns on or not as per the system manual.

Why is combining it with a microwave inherently bad? As long as there is an air channel to the exterior, the critical thing should be air volume over time, no? (CFM or m^3/minute or whatever)

I am assuming that effectively all microwaves move less air than dedicated range hood. From cursory Googling, microwaves vent at 300cfm to 400cfm, while dedicated range hoods can move 600cfm to 2,000cfm.

As the other person said most microwave vents barely move any air and in addition most are recirculating the air not venting it.

> Adequacy of the hood seems like it's not going to be usefully quantifiable or provable

If we can't come up with something a little more scientific I'm happy to send my wife over to do some cooking!

The effectiveness of the range hood directly impacts how close you can be to the stove before your eyes start burning and watering and you start coughing a lung out because you've effectively been hit with pepper spray.

In the worst case scenario (no range hood or ventilation), you'll probably want to evacuate the house.

As the person you replied to says as well, the popularity of "open concept" spaces contributes too. Even with poor ventilation, a kitchen with a door you can close helps limit how far the cooking byproducts reach.

Having grown up in western homes, and visited innumerable other western homes, I believe you may have not been in very many western homes.

Not trying to start a fight here but not sure what kind of hill yall are trying to die on here.

I am from the west, have lived all over the US and no there is not great data on the matter but I have historically had an interest on air quality and I cook a lot. There is some nuance to the data. 10% reported not having any hood. 26% of gas households were not vented. 36% of electric were not vented. You can start going down that path and also start seeing that most vented hoods are either inadequate or don’t properly cover the cooking area.

So I am not sure what you are trying to argue about? There is a non-trivial amount of homes in the US without proper ventilation. You can pull up Zillow almost anywhere in the country and easily find center island cooktops without hoods or down drafts. Or even more common a microwave recirculating that air.

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10234804/?utm_sourc...

I think most people don't know that the fan in their microwave is not vented to the outside and that that is important. Maybe its a height thing- are you tall? I don't think short people realize how gross the top 1-2 feet of a kitchen are.

That could be it! I am tall but also obsessed with cooking and at one point during the California fires, air quality.

By "western", do you mean American?

I'm pretty sure a hood is mandatory in the U.S.

Not that vents to the outside.

It’s local code and not always true today and especially historically. Even then code can allow for those recirculating fans.

> one wish is the west adopted Chinese style kitchens

This works if there is a designated member of the household (whether family or employee) who prepares food away from everyone else.

It doesn't for a social setting. Fortunately, the only thing you need to reach the health benefits of the former in an open kitchen is a good vent. If you have a multi-story home, the motor doesn't even have to be in the kitchen, allowing for quiet designs.

Sure but most homes in America don’t have a good vent and often with new builds, to have a good vent you need makeup air and you then introduce a lot of annoying issues.

The socializing part feels like an edge case but I guess it depends if you are cooking to entertain or cooking for your daily food. The daily food only a small portion of the cooking requires closing up the kitchen.

Hey, the author here! Thanks for your suggestion. I did use oil here, but not alot. I should measure it next time. I'm trying to figure out how to synthetically generate uniform particles for testing some DIY filters I'm making, and just frying stuff in more and more oil seems like a good bet.

My new kitchen will be separated from any other living spaces for exactly that reason; though the exhaust may need juicing.

After being in a number of Chinese condo apartments I realize how awesome it was. Most had sliding glass doors so you could open it up if you want but if you were cooking something heavy, you could close the doors or internal windows, open that window or balcony door outside and let the cooking commence.

At least in America, most places will have big enough kitchens that can isolate grease to the area around the stove. Good design will put the stove far enough from living and dining areas.

Good design probably exists in the minority then? I live in America and venting requirements are terrible and open concepts lend to lots of smells across a house with central air.

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