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Recipe for a Better Oven

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51–60 of 86 posts

Re: Recipe for a Better Oven

#51
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every single day of your life that you use the oven, as opposed to eating something fresh or cooked stove-top. And strictly, just for those things cooked in the oven that the oven-improvement improves.

The oven improvements being discussed here will have the effect of making more things best done in the oven.

Yes, certainly that metric should be "the amount you use your new oven", not "the amount you use your current oven".

Re: Recipe for a Better Oven

#52
post #45

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.

There's also the fact that healthy food kinda sucks: It rots fast and is usually not premade. I'm surprised the market for healthy fast food is too small for Nestle/Kraft etc to bother with.

It generally rots quickly (and is thus not premade) specifically because it's healthy. Rotting indicates the presence of thriving yeast/mold/bacteria, which can't live without nutrients to feed on.

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.

Re: Recipe for a Better Oven

#53
post #25
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ditto on the latter, get the at home version. Its only like $100 (the big set is like $575 or so) 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…

On a podcast of Cooking Issues with Dave Arnold, he mentioned his dream is to modify his oven with copper tubing and inject water into his oven (he uses bricks for thermal mass). Of course, this was largely in relation to baking and injecting a massive amount of steam quickly, but I think a spray system over thermal mass (metal is the modernist suggestion, but I think possibly some sort of ceramic would be best). Of…

That podcast is completely amazing, by the way. Anyone on HN who is into food that doesn't listen to Cooking Issues is missing out, bigtime.

Re: Recipe for a Better Oven

#54
post #52
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's also the fact that healthy food kinda sucks: It rots fast and is usually not premade. I'm surprised the market for healthy fast food is too small for Nestle/Kraft etc to bother with.

It generally rots quickly (and is thus not premade) specifically because it's healthy. Rotting indicates the presence of thriving yeast/mold/bacteria, which can't live without nutrients to feed on. 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're aiming for a middle ground with MealSquares. Even easier than Soylent (no prep) but also made of whole foods. Caveat: same as OP complaint, they last something like a month compared to 6+ months for most of our competitors.

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.

Re: Recipe for a Better Oven

#55
post #25
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ditto on the latter, get the at home version. Its only like $100 (the big set is like $575 or so) 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…

On a podcast of Cooking Issues with Dave Arnold, he mentioned his dream is to modify his oven with copper tubing and inject water into his oven (he uses bricks for thermal mass). Of course, this was largely in relation to baking and injecting a massive amount of steam quickly, but I think a spray system over thermal mass (metal is the modernist suggestion, but I think possibly some sort of ceramic would be best). Of…

I know of a few professional ovens that add humidity by spraying water directly on the heating elements. The trick is to use a very small amount at short intervals. You can't quench the calrod or it will crack.

Re: Recipe for a Better Oven

#56
It lost me when it started talking about cooking above 200C - almost all oven cooking is at temperatures below this, and the more interesting stuff happens much lower than this.

Re: Recipe for a Better Oven

#57

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…

I bet if you reworded your post to remove the offensive analogies to the mentally disabled, then framed it as a list of common myths and their polite rebuttals, you'd be upvoted instead of downvoted.

Re: Recipe for a Better Oven

#58
Can't your get far more bang for your buck by using convection and a pizza stone or a brick or something else to hold in the heat?

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.

Re: Recipe for a Better Oven

#59
James Dyson's twin-drum contrarotating washing machine was a huge improvement over normal washing machines but failed to take off because it was much more expensive.

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.

Re: Recipe for a Better Oven

#60
post #10

Whoah, this is a really good article. It's not a pitch for a specific better kind of oven Myhrvold came up with (which is what I expected it to be, and the reason I didn't read it until just now), but a survey of all the problems with current oven technologies and what modern tech can do to solve them. If you haven't read the whole thing, do check it out. What's interesting to me is that everybody and their cousins h…

I'd like to say DIY ovens are hard; don't even attempt it :) but if you are interested in really good pizza, pita, bagels, and ciabatta all you need is a conventional oven modded basically like this[0]. Also a baking stone is required. SV takes too long, is it worth it? [0] http://www.instructables.com/id/Hack-a-Toaster-Oven-for-Refl...

Try 1/2 inch sheet steel instead of a baking stone. More thermal mass, better conduction and more wear-resistant (won't crack from thermal stress). Cast iron is a cheaper alternative.
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