Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Recipe for a Better Oven

spectrum.ieee.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 86 posts

Re: Recipe for a Better Oven

#21

Post by kjksf »

[deleted] wrote: post #20

[deleted]

The article talks about way of improving the tools that would make better chefs from ordinary people and that's, in general, what good tools are about.

I'm sure there people who develop intuition about cooking food properly after decades of doing so but the part of cooking that the article talks about is really simple: how to apply a consistent amount of energy to a piece of food.

Everybody would benefit from a tool that allows for a precise control of temperature, and the less experienced people could achieve the same results as the best chefs.

Re: Recipe for a Better Oven

#22

Post by noelwelsh »

Nice article but I don't think it's greatly relevant to most of us. I use the oven a lot, cook most days, and don't cook above 220C. I don't think our oven goes above 250C.

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.

Re: Recipe for a Better Oven

#23

Post by ceejayoz »

noelwelsh wrote: post #22

Nice article but I don't think it's greatly relevant to most of us. I use the oven a lot, cook most days, and don't cook above 220C. I don't think our oven goes above 250C. 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.

It'd be really nice for pizza, giving roasts a nice crust before/after slow roasting, etc. I'd be happy with it and I'm of the general opinion that molecular gastronomy is pretentious wankery.

Re: Recipe for a Better Oven

#24

Post by nsajko »

I have very little experience in cooking, but after seeing the complex solutions needed for proper food preparation, I think it would be better to produce more practical foods and simplify the whole nutritive process.

Re: Recipe for a Better Oven

#25

Post by batbomb »

VLM wrote: post #7
tptacek wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 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.

Re: Recipe for a Better Oven

#26

Post by awjr »

The 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 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.

Re: Recipe for a Better Oven

#29

Post by kennywinker »

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #18
fezz wrote: post #14

There are two key innovations missing from this oven that would make it revolutionary. I won't say them out loud because Nathan might run and patent them...

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.

Re: Recipe for a Better Oven

#30

Post by 0xdeadbeefbabe »

tptacek wrote: 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...

Post reply on HN