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.
How about bread? Many people feel that bread is interesting stuff.
Recipe for a Better Oven
61–70 of 86 posts
Re: Recipe for a Better Oven
#62Better 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). Defi…
His article takes aim at these high-end ovens as well, and makes several proposals to make them even better.
It's rather more of a grab-bag of ideas on the future of oven technology. Which is very cool, but far from a simple linear trajectory toward a better oven. It's the promise of perhaps a better oven, which maybe if we're lucky might be affordable and practical, or perhaps not.
Re: Recipe for a Better Oven
#63Whoah, 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 have the Solardom oven that he mentions towards the end, and they really are a step above standard ovens in terms of versatility. I have had mine for 10 years, and not only is the oven technology pretty good, but the user interface is genius in its simplicity. I think it's the only oven I've ever owned that I have discovered and used all the different modes that it provides, because after all, who really wants to spend their time reading an oven operating manual...
That said, Nathan pretty much hits on all of the criticisms that I do have of the oven. Pre-heating takes way too long, high-heat requires hacking the safety mechanism of the oven, and no rotisserie (although they do use the pulsed heat hack that Nathan mentions).
I'm a foodie, and my next oven will be another Solardom, which is as high praise as I can give, but I wish there was something even better.
Re: Recipe for a Better Oven
#64There's some meta-point here to make. I don't understand it well enough to articulate it, but I'm going to try.
Start with the acquisition of dev bootcamp schools and the emergence of these schools in general. They are very SV-esque. The funding. The founders. The aesthetic. There's obviously a link via teaching programming and preparing people to work in startups but fundamentally these are more like schools than tech companies. Why are they seem like tech companies?
Tesla is a car company. Also SV-esque.
So here's the poorly articulated meta-point. Technology has changed a lot in the last decade or two in ways that are relevant to many industries and many products. Schools. Banks. Hotels. Ovens.
Even just the information people have available about products is very different. The slightly above average consumer has information available about fishing rods or ovens is very different. A motivated buyer of an tablet has access to a lot of objective information and the ability to make a far more rational choice. Compare that to buying toasters or fishing rods. The average person walks into the store. The sales person might seem knowledgeable. But ultimately, brand matters more than anything and that is a very long feedback loop.
These days, it's a lot easier for a new product with a genuine improvement to win.
Between all these effects, I think there's room for radical changes to a lot of products.
Re: Recipe for a Better Oven
#65The opening lines immediately reminded me of this wonderful article about old technology behind energy efficient brick ovens:
https://web.archive.org/web/20140327025219/http://www.lowtec...
(waybackmachine because the official website is down).
There's surprisingly many old and forgotten technologies that are still relevant in terms of energy efficiency. Of course, this particular one is only relevent at industrial scales, but the website has more articles to offer.
Re: Recipe for a Better Oven
#66Earlier 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...
SV meaning "sous vide"? Worth it? Very yes.
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:
Re: Recipe for a Better Oven
#67The 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 tend to read Cooks Illustrated magazine as I have found that great cooking isn't a lack of equipment but instead learning how ingredients work together and proper preparation and use of those ingredients.
CI does review cooking related appliances, tools, and such, but their focus is on better ways to prepare the food and they go into great detail about the experimentation they have tried and why one worked and another didn't.
Re: Recipe for a Better Oven
#68I 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.
It's not proper food preparation, it's fancy food preparation.
You can cook tasty, nutritious food over an open fire in a field. For generations, that's how it was done. In fact, the best gumbo I've ever eaten was cooked over an untreated scrap lumber fire in a spillway behind a construction site.
To make it fancy, you need all this nonsense.
Re: Recipe for a Better Oven
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
SV meaning "sous vide"? Worth it? Very yes.
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. :)
Re: Recipe for a Better Oven
#70Earlier 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…
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 strong UV. Literally bleach color from the surface of something. Could you bleach the surface of an angelfood cake to be pasty white yet baked? Might take a higher than sane UV flux for an impractically long time...
Another weird idea: Refrigerator UV bulb. Not entirely insane, well, probably. At least in the raw produce drawer.