I wonder how a continuously on stove/oven like http://www.agasales.com/index.htm compares. These always remain at temperature. Obviously not a solution for most people.
Recipe for a Better Oven
71–80 of 86 posts
Re: Recipe for a Better Oven
#72The issue as much as anything is about reliability and the lifetime of an oven. The less moving parts the more reliable and longer life the oven has. 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 n…
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…
There are financial system problems. If we don't value engineer our products to rapidly fail, the mfgrs will go out of business and we won't have any ovens.
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.
Re: Recipe for a Better Oven
#73> 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…
Yes, and I've seen it used at other businesses. Positive pressure systems are also used for clean rooms.
Re: Recipe for a Better Oven
#74Whoah, 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…
Technologically it's not that hard (KFC has been doing it for nearly 50 years, remember). I think it's just a little messier. You're dealing with two independent heating/control circuits and on top of that you need to manage a cavity that's at 100% humidity. Most consumer ovens can't handle that much moisture for long before they start rusting from the inside out. There's a little more CVap discussion here: http://ww…
I was the guy that used to write all the software for the CVap ovens at Winston, so here's my take... The basic idea is the pan of water is your food temperature and the air temperature is your food texture/browning. It really is incredibly simple technology, and it really is quite superior to the old way. I would LOVE to have that feature in a normal home oven. The same oven can be a proofing oven, baking oven, steamer and holding cabinet. You can cook a roast and it can safely be held for about 24 hours without affecting the food at all (medium-rare will stay that way no matter how long you keep it in the oven). Not to mention that is cooks faster and more efficiently. Also you can cook at lower temperatures safely, which is kind of big.
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.
Re: Recipe for a Better Oven
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you say them here they will form part of the prior art and a suitably date-verified version of your post would negate such an attempt at patenting those parts. Of course a patent on a refinement or a specific implementation would still be possible.
Of course, the patent examiner would almost definitely not see the post in their shallow searches for prior art. The patent would get issued, and then it would cost near to the tune of $1million to invalidate it using the court system. Yay patents.
In the UK it's free to submit prior art (S21 of the CDPA I think) to the patent office and IIRC also free to request the office re-examine a patent.
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.
Re: Recipe for a Better Oven
#76Earlier quoted context omitted.
So we can imagine independent temperature controls but not making all the humidity bearing cavities UV-exposed? 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.
UV actually doesn't penetrate grease very well. At least that's the story we told each other in the dinosaur decades when our eprom erasers wouldn't erase a chip in time, well, wipe that quartz window with solvent and try again. 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…
UV does not penetrate well in nearly anything. Materials like quartz are the exception.
Odds are that your refrigerator will only degrade the plastic bags that contain the produce, without even reaching it.
Re: Recipe for a Better Oven
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Hey that probably has less asbestos than my fibrament baking stone, and maybe it doesn't smell as bad when you heat it up the first time.
Re: Recipe for a Better Oven
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sous-vide won't work for breads. The best bread is going to come from an oven that's using heavy convection current to crisp up the outside. A brick oven does this, as do the more modern convection units. 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: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkFrsUP9QUU
Oh, sorry, I missed that he was talking about bread. Making bread seems a little bit similar to cooking bricks. :)
Also similar to reflow soldering.
Re: Recipe for a Better Oven
#79Anyone else sees this?
")},load:function(e){var t,n,r=!1,s;s=Date.now(),i.load();if(!e)return;for(n=0;n Re: Recipe for a Better Oven
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
Technologically it's not that hard (KFC has been doing it for nearly 50 years, remember). I think it's just a little messier. You're dealing with two independent heating/control circuits and on top of that you need to manage a cavity that's at 100% humidity. Most consumer ovens can't handle that much moisture for long before they start rusting from the inside out. There's a little more CVap discussion here: http://ww…
I was the guy that used to write all the software for the CVap ovens at Winston, so here's my take... The basic idea is the pan of water is your food temperature and the air temperature is your food texture/browning. It really is incredibly simple technology, and it really is quite superior to the old way. I would LOVE to have that feature in a normal home oven. The same oven can be a proofing oven, baking oven, stea…
Whoah, cool. How did that job happen? Why'd you leave? Do you still work in food tech?