Recipe for a Better Oven

Things like this could be a big deal.

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.

> And you’re not going to be able to stop a cook from opening the oven door on occasion—peeking through a grease-splattered window just doesn’t cut it. But designers could prevent that blast of cold air by building a blower into the door frame that generates a “curtain” of air whenever the door is opened, retaining more of the preheated air in the oven. Larger versions of air doors are already in wide commercial use for refrigerated warehouses.

Whoa, isn't this also used in supermarkets when you enter them?

We share our planet with a lot of people that are retarded. There are simpler things that can be done to make ovens better:

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).

Better ovens already exist, such as combi-ovens, but they are all designed for commercial use or extremely high end personal use, and so have 5 figure price tags. It would definitely be cool to see that come down to 3 or 4 figures for reasonable consumer versions (e.g. combi-ovens are designed for cooking multiple sheet pans full of food, that's overkill for home use, so there's an opportunity for cost savings). Definitely an opportunity for crowd funding to get development rolling.

We're all reading these articles because we're excited about the future. In that context, the issues you've raised don't seem to be that big. Cost for the bill of materials will drop with mass production, and many of the major parts are already cheap.

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.