Recipe for a Better Oven
spectrum.ieee.org
spectrum.ieee.org
What's interesting to me is that everybody and their cousins have done DIY water baths, and there are even people doing DIY rotary evaporators, but nobody does a DIY CVap. Is it that hard?
[0] http://www.instructables.com/id/Hack-a-Toaster-Oven-for-Refl...
If you want to see what's new in convection cooking, check out the Turbo Chef Fire. This is a commercial piece of equipment, but could eventually be adapted for home use:
There's a little more CVap discussion here:
http://www.cookingissues.com/primers/sous-vide/part-ii-low-t...
The two major difficulties are: 1) The pan of water is a pain to clean and keep full. All that moisture just builds up gunk. 2) The user needs to rethink how they cook. They need to think food temperature and texture, rather than cook X minutes at Y. It's simple to modify your recipes, but customers have always seemed quite resistant to change. I still say it is needed in every kitchen, however.
Do you recall if any major customers (like chains) were using the CVap for prep/cooking, or like KFC was everyone just using it as a holding cabinet?
My eyes have also been opened to the politics between the corporate parent, the franchisees, and even how the vendors get involved (like Coke or Frito-Lay). It's crazy stuff.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20100217/1853298215.shtml - and plenty more if you look further.
FYI, patent trolls usually haven't invented the thing they hold a patent for.
That said, Nathan pretty much hits on all of the criticisms that I do have of the oven. Pre-heating takes way too long, high-heat requires hacking the safety mechanism of the oven, and no rotisserie (although they do use the pulsed heat hack that Nathan mentions).
I'm a foodie, and my next oven will be another Solardom, which is as high praise as I can give, but I wish there was something even better.
On a serious note, Like him or not his books/treatise on cooking is excellent. [1]
I got it for my wife for Christmas about 3 or 4 years ago, can't remember, and all 5 books have been well used.
You'll need a big kitchen for all the specialized gear he recommends but it made cooking fun for me and helped my wife go from an amateur enthusiast to someone who can hold their own with professional chefs. I'm very lucky:)
[1] http://www.amazon.com/Modernist-Cuisine-Home-Nathan-Myhrvold...
I was kind of surprised to start reading the article and immediately start guessing he's aiming at either more sous vide in the home or a combi oven in the home and I had to read about 3/4 of the way thru to find yup its a combi oven story.
One little problem with combi ovens is they work really well when sterile-ish but I can see some opportunity for nastyness and corrosion. People letting water sit for weeks all dusty and moldy and then wonder why the kitchen and food smell. Dirty oven walls now with extra moisture for special mold growth what could possibly go wrong. Maybe a vaporizer that uses distilled water would be more realistic. A traditional combi just isn't going to work in a residential setting.
Also a meta observation is he's not talking about getting to a destination, but several alternate paths of getting to a destination. So your oven cooks 5% too fast or slow, a "nest" level of intelligence bolted onto the oven should take care of that. Or most of the fooling around with a combi precision thermostat discussion is to get a sous vide like effect... well most of the time just use a sous vide and be done with it? (edited to add what I'm getting at is its possible thru application of extreme engineering to do something difficult... then again there are simpler methods... for example controlling the humidity inside a working oven is no joke to compensate for massive humidity variations in the ambient kitchen air... wouldn't it be a heck of a lot simpler to very tightly control humidity in the kitchen which is COTS and use a conventional oven which is COTS rather than making a very complicated oven?)
I have looked into the market and small excellent sous vide rigs are available, and cheap, but this article is correct, you are not putting a combi into a residential home without totally freaking out the interior decorator, the electrician, the plumber, probably the carpenter... its like dreaming of one of those 25 horsepower 5 minute steam dishwashers the commercial kitchens use instead of home dishwashers... well, you can wish for free, but its about as likely as mass adoption of a turbine car...
Of course, I read this article and thought exactly one thing:
There's no way an oven like this will be affordable and reliable over a 3+ year. There's way too many things to break.
The dis-infection problem would be trivially solved (relatively) by adding a very powerful UV light and ensuring it hit all the relevant surfaces. 20 minutes of that and nothing would be left alive.
Aside from someone who doesn't know anything about UV finding a way to bypass the interlocks and blinding themselves.
As a cooking technique I wonder if you could do anything interesting with strong UV. Literally bleach color from the surface of something. Could you bleach the surface of an angelfood cake to be pasty white yet baked? Might take a higher than sane UV flux for an impractically long time...
Another weird idea: Refrigerator UV bulb. Not entirely insane, well, probably. At least in the raw produce drawer.
Odds are that your refrigerator will only degrade the plastic bags that contain the produce, without even reaching it.
CI does review cooking related appliances, tools, and such, but their focus is on better ways to prepare the food and they go into great detail about the experimentation they have tried and why one worked and another didn't.
If you look at some of his suggestions and when they have been implemented, the costs are quite astronomical. Also you begin to quickly realise that specialised ovens that cook in a certain way don't cook in multiple ways.
It's the versatility of your oven that a home needs. Mine can fan heat, convection heat and grill.
The only specialised extra 'oven' in most people's houses is the microwave. It's cost effective at what it does.
After seeing personal computing and mobile computing revolutions unfold during my lifetime, I'm pretty sure the technical obstacles to making a reliable and cheap oven that Myhrvold describes are surmountable. Electric cars, jet planes and search engines deal with much harder engineering challenges.
So imagine a "super oven" that is rust proof and thermal shock proof to tolerate high humidity cooking. Someone is going to figure out that running that dude dry means it'll operate theoretically for 500 years, and 90% of the home cooks will be too lazy to ever fill the distilled water tank anyway, so 50 years in or so, that mfgr will go out of business, and no new ovens.
There are some examples in the automotive world, where in the old days when farm trucks were really farm trucks and not marketed as a macho station wagon for starbucks runs, some people bought them for 100% asphalt use anyway, because they'd last 25 years if treated better than farm trucks. That value engineering epic fail has been fixed for decades now, but in the old days this was a serious problem. Ford had no problem selling commuter cars that would rust out and require replacement in 3 years but they couldn't figure out how to keep farm trucks on the farm and off the roads for 20 years, back in the 70s.
The Privilege of Incumbency is tough to beat. To convince the public to adopt a new technology you must have something that's cheap, reliable and yet performs overwhelmingly better than the existing design.
If you're into molecular gastronomy I can imagine you'd want to play around with the stuff mentioned in the article, but outside of that ... m'eh.
https://web.archive.org/web/20140327025219/http://www.lowtec...
(waybackmachine because the official website is down).
There's surprisingly many old and forgotten technologies that are still relevant in terms of energy efficiency. Of course, this particular one is only relevent at industrial scales, but the website has more articles to offer.
Start with the acquisition of dev bootcamp schools and the emergence of these schools in general. They are very SV-esque. The funding. The founders. The aesthetic. There's obviously a link via teaching programming and preparing people to work in startups but fundamentally these are more like schools than tech companies. Why are they seem like tech companies?
Tesla is a car company. Also SV-esque.
So here's the poorly articulated meta-point. Technology has changed a lot in the last decade or two in ways that are relevant to many industries and many products. Schools. Banks. Hotels. Ovens.
Even just the information people have available about products is very different. The slightly above average consumer has information available about fishing rods or ovens is very different. A motivated buyer of an tablet has access to a lot of objective information and the ability to make a far more rational choice. Compare that to buying toasters or fishing rods. The average person walks into the store. The sales person might seem knowledgeable. But ultimately, brand matters more than anything and that is a very long feedback loop.
These days, it's a lot easier for a new product with a genuine improvement to win.
Between all these effects, I think there's room for radical changes to a lot of products.
Certainly the steam/humidity thing won't be helped by the pizza stone. But keeping the air moving and providing something solid to act as a more uniform beat source gets you pretty far. It's like switching from crappy pots and pans to a nice set. A big difference is the thickness and materials in the base to create even and steady temperature.
Whoa, isn't this also used in supermarkets when you enter them?
Of course a patent on a refinement or a specific implementation would still be possible.
There are better places than HN to submit a defensive publication but HN posts aren't outside the locus of prior art searches unless they get delisted from Google.
Of course it doesn't matter for a competitor what the granted patent says, if they have date verified disclosure prior to the priority date of the granted patent then they can submit that to the court and win a case by invalidating the granted patent.
Part of an unhealthy food culture is some people find it hard to cook, both the difficulty and the time involved.
A well price oven that's easier and quicker might have a lot of run on health benefits.
There are plenty of decently-nutritious pre-made meals in the freezer section of your grocery store. If "take the wrapping off and put it in the oven for an hour" is too much work, though, there's always Soylent.
We ran into the exact problems talked about in the article when trying to bake our prototypes in a home oven. Even heating is next to impossible. Working with a convection oven now is much better.
")},load:function(e){var t,n,r=!1,s;s=Date.now(),i.load();if(!e)return;for(n=0;n [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_Ventures
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_Ventures#Controve...
[2] http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/441/t...
We did take his name out of the title, though, mainly because we usually do, but also because it's baity in this case, at least for this site.
This man, his company, and the industry he represents are a bane for many start-ups (and other companies, small and large).
Such a bane, in fact, that many people, including many on this site, are working hard and expending large amounts of resources to change laws to prevent this man, his company, and their ilk from continuing to be an economic drag on our entire industry.
But never mind all that. He's got some great ideas about ovens.
This little subthread is a microcosm of one way the whole site regularly goes off the rails. "Wet bulb temperature shmet bulb temperature, let's all yell about patent trolling!"
Thanks for engaging instead of simply down-voting.
The majority of ovens have wire slots to hold the racks. Retarded people do not place the racks in the slots, they place them on the slots. Therefore when it comes to pulling a rack out the back tips up and the dish dangerously slips off the wire rack. Simply by passing some standard where it is not possible to have wire side slots that accept racks in non-design-for positions a sizeable battle in the war on health'n'safety can be won.
People that do not know how an oven works put the temperature up to max on the assumption the oven will heat up quicker. It won't but some people cannot be told. A simple 'preheat oven' button that takes the oven to 200C would help the retards out. A beep when the 'preheat' temperature is reached could help too.
The whole notion of pre-heating the oven is often a waste of time, particularly with vegetarian dishes. A jacket potato really does not care if the oven is heating up or is already pre-heated. Same for plenty of other dishes. Even pizza doesn't actually care. Souffles and other advanced dishes are exceptions, however the default is to waste a small eternity pre-heating an oven. This is wrong. It is worse than leaving the tap running whilst brushing one's teeth as far as the environments and polar bears are concerned.
Some people like to clean. If you clean the oven exterior and hob whilst you cook then the heat makes it an easy task, no chemicals needed. Retarded people that spend longer cleaning than researching recipes will get the abrasive solvents out and put in a lot of time and effort removing those symbols next to the dials. Therefore they actually have no idea what dial does what and it can be quite dangerous to have the wrong ring turn on the hob.
Some people like to store every baking tray in the oven, so, rather than heat up that jacket potato they heat up several kilos of metal. Instructions on food should have 'remove unnecessary trays from oven' as part of the instructions. This would be good for the polar bears.
Timers on ovens are not used by the overwhelming vast majority of people. Retarded people put the timer on max to speed up the oven, forgetting to put the temperature on either max or something more sensible (see earlier point). Timers need to go. If someone wants a timer then they should get an app for that, the dial/buttons on the oven need to go. Nobody would miss them, they are pure 'feature-itis'.
Regarding the door, it must be possible to have ovens with something more akin to a chest-of-drawers arrangement, where you can pull out one of three drawers, with the wire rack coming out too. The drawers could be interchangeable with the option to flip them upside down so that no matter what you cook there is room for everything. This would help keep the heat in and be more convenient for retarded people that cannot put normal wire racks in safely (see earlier point).
You can cook tasty, nutritious food over an open fire in a field. For generations, that's how it was done. In fact, the best gumbo I've ever eaten was cooked over an untreated scrap lumber fire in a spillway behind a construction site.
To make it fancy, you need all this nonsense.