Recipe for a Better Oven
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Recipe for a Better Oven
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Re: Recipe for a Better Oven
#2The oven design is of course patent pending:)
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...
Re: Recipe for a Better Oven
#3The oven design is of course patent pending:) 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…
I have both MC and the much cheaper Modernist At Home and recommend the latter (the smaller cheaper one) over the former.
Re: Recipe for a Better Oven
#4Looks like you could make one out of a PC case :)
Re: Recipe for a Better Oven
#5In case you missed it, Nathan Myhrvold is also the founder of Intellectual Ventures[0], arguably the worst and most pernicious patent troll in the country[1][2].
[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...
Re: Recipe for a Better Oven
#6Looks like you could make one out of a PC case :)
Provided it has temperature tolerances in excess of 1000° F.
Re: Recipe for a Better Oven
#7The oven design is of course patent pending:) 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…
I have both MC and the much cheaper Modernist At Home and recommend the latter (the smaller cheaper one) over the former.
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 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...
Re: Recipe for a Better Oven
#8The oven design is of course patent pending:) 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…
I'd seriously love to own his books but I refuse to give any cash to patent trolls directly.
Re: Recipe for a Better Oven
#9In case you missed it, Nathan Myhrvold is also the founder of Intellectual Ventures[0], arguably the worst and most pernicious patent troll in the country[1][2]. [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...
Yup. And as such I do not feel we ought to be promoting any work of his on Hacker News.
Re: Recipe for a Better Oven
#10Whoah, 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 have done DIY water baths, and there are even people doing DIY rotary evaporators, but nobody does a DIY CVap. Is it that hard?