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Nathan Myhrvold's Recipe For a Better Oven
Tekla Perry writes: We cook our food today using technology invented to bake bricks. We can do a lot better. Nathan Myhrvold explains what's wrong with today's ovens and challenges oven designers make them better. He says, "Oven designers could do a lot to make ovens heat more evenly by taking advantage of the different ways ovens transfer heat at different cooking temperatures. At 200 C or below, convection moves most of the heat. But at 400 C, radiant energy starts doing a fair amount of the heat transfer. At 800 C, radiation overwhelms convection. Why couldn't we have an oven designed to cook primarily by convection at low temperatures that switches to radiant heating for high-temperature baking? ... The shiny skin of raw fish reflects heat, but as the skin browns, it reflects less and less energy. That’s why food under a broiler can seem to cook slowly at first and then burn in the blink of an eye. But technology offers a fix here, too. Oven designers could put optical sensors in the oven chamber to sense the reflectivity of the food, and then the oven controller could adjust the heat automatically or at least alert the cook as the surface browns. And a camera in the oven could feed to a color display on the front panel, giving the chef a clearer view of the food than a small window in the door can. Indeed, a decent optics system could allow designers to dispense with the glass in the door altogether, reducing the gap between the hottest and coolest corners of the oven and obviating the need to open the door and rotate the food midway through cooking.
the real question is "how many patents have Mr. Myhrvold and his minions already staked out in this area?"
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
Because the incremental improvement adding all of these optics and electronics, make it robust, and make it work is not cheap. And most cooks do pretty darn good with just what they have.
Small benefit vs big cost => no change
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
How to improve the oven has been known for ages. ...'
The problem is that it's costly to do right, especially if the oven needs to actually be a reliable oven and last at least 10 years daily use.
For example 'optical sensors can be placed in the oven to
How do you keep these clean after the four hundredth time they're spattered with grease at 250C and it's burned on to a nice black film.
How do you determine what the food is, and what the surrounding dish is in order to pick what needs to be browned.
The 'right' way to do this would be with thermal IR cameras.
Unfortunately, this raises even more cost issues.
Photoshop to cook our food?
We could use the device to preview the finished dish, too.
Of course, he is theoretically correct, but, as we know, theory and practice are different things.
...it will costs thousands to repair... if parts are even available...
Master patent troll Nathan Myhrvold. I hope one day, the sooner the better, I will dance on his grave.
I like to keep my appliances simple. Fire for one is excellent and is still used 1000s of years since it was harnessed. I like my oven to last 20 years and not need an upgrade or be connected to the net, so no thanks to the proposed enhancements.
When cooking something gases and boiled off fats condense on things inside the oven. How are you supposed to keep the camera lens clean so this idea will work right? You can't so this is all one big what if that can't work.
End of discussion.
Rarely, if ever, will the temperature inside your oven ever exceed 230C -- there are entire cooking techniques that rely on the uneven heating patterns of a traditional convection oven and broiler.
If the skin on your fish is going in silver and coming out brown, you're doing it fucking wrong!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
You geeks in basements better stick with microwaves before you burn the house down.
This all sounds way too complex for an oven. Lots of moving parts in a high heat area sounds like a recipe for failure (HA!) Things I'd like to see: Faster warm up time for the oven More even heating throughout the oven
I usually cook at maximum 225C except for thin pizza which likes 250-270C. I canÃt understand what you are supposed to cook at 300C or above. This normal ovens never gets into radiant energy territory.
What am I missing here?
Unfortunately, this raises even more cost issues.
Not for Nathan Myhrvold.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Because building it would be so complex it would be overly expensive and break down a lot more. My oven has been running for over a decade. It may well last several more decades. That's a lot longer than the expected life cycle for 'smart' products. I'll take a dumb oven and be a smart cook any day of the week. A ring of stones and a cook fire is better than too much technology.
Nope. Because boom, headshot
Too expensive is not a reason. Nor an excuse.
Check out Gaggenau... they could do with these hints
Alex.
Last 10 years? Make sure you don't buy garbage made by Whirlpool as it's made to fall apart in a very short time. This is the front of our gasrange after less than 5 years of careful use: http://toxicice.com/images/eng...
According to Whirlpool this is "normal wear and tear". Good luck using an oven if you can't even read the markings anymore
Aside: the "clock" doesn't even have battery backup. It's 80's technology but made to last way less long.
Perl Programmer for hire
Something cookbooks harp on: most ovens do very poor temperature regulation. Baking books in particular recommend getting a separate themometer, and adding thermal ballast (such as stones) to your oven to get it to keep an even temperature.
That's not just for ultra-high-end stuff; that's for just making good bread. Bread is fairly sensitive to temperature, because you're trying to orchestrate a complex set of reactions including yeast production, internal steam, setting the internal protein structure, and browning the crust. Swings of 25F are enough to throw off that balance, yielding loaves that are too high or too low or too brown or other problems.
Most home ovens do it very badly. It seems to me that's a much more fixable problem without spending a fortune on the ultimate oven.
It's a hammer looking for a nail.
Is this due to unfamiliarity with Centigrade?
All the food baking I've done is well below 260C (500F).
800C (1472F) is cherry red can melt a lot of metals.
It's in the range you would use a muffle furnace or kiln to get.
at 400 C, radiant energy starts doing a fair amount of the heat transfer. At 800 C, radiation overwhelms convection.
800 degrees C??? That's 1470 degrees F! Who has an oven that goes that high? That will turn just about anything into charcoal in under a minute.
Even 400 C-- 750 degrees F-- is quite a bit hotter than most ovens.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
from his new book "If Only God were as Smart as Me!"
Why the fsck should we listen to anything this dishonest vulture says or wants? He has worked to single-handedly ruin everything about anything we could ever care about. Intellectual Ventures is the scum of the Earth, and is akin to the mafia coming to you and mentioning that they need some money else something bad could happen to your precious new business venture. Everything this man and his cohorts touch is tainted - Intellectual Ventures and Mr. Myhrvold needs to be removed like a cancer before they can spread even further.
Fsck Intellectual Ventures.
Fsck Nathan Myhrvold.
In some parts of the world, they'd cut off his thieving hands. I wouldn't take one of his new ovens even if they gave it to me - except maybe to smash the crap out of it on YouTube.
Nobody has built such an oven, Mr. Myhrvold, because you're sitting on so many patents you did not create and have no intention of implementing that whoever built this perfect oven would be sued into oblivion.
I think repeatedly confusing C and F should immediately disqualify someone as an oven engineer. Or an oven operator, for that matter. :-)
Koans and fables for the software engineer
Not only it's not obvious what "better" means when baking is involved, but he's showing his Microsoft roots here, stupid "improvements" that make the whole system break so much easier.
It's a known fact that most "modern" residential ovens, the ones with displays, lots of buttons to set baking programs etc, should never use the self-clean cycle. The thermal insulation is not good enough to protect the electronics (a.k.a. control board) and the oven fails, typically after a high-heat cycle (the self-clean reaches 700-800*F). This is equally true for GE and Whirlpool as well as for Viking and Ilve.
Adding more electronics to a hot environment is asking for more and expensive trouble.
Commercial appliances are better built though, are they Myhrvold's target? In any case, his post is just a petulant rant showing overkill application of technology, just because "he can". Zapping mosquitoes with laser beams sounds more realistic...
Given that he raises the spectre of salmonella from uneven temperature in sous-vide cooking, it's pretty clear he knows fuck all about cooking. Hey Nathan? Sous vide is done in a precision-controlled water bath, you numpty. Not an oven.
Would work on inventing an oven, don't you? Hitler would've loved Nathan Myrvold.
I will buy any oven he has a hand in designing.
...when there is nothing left to take away. Myhrvold seems to think the opposite is true. Did he by any chance work for Microsoft? It would explain the byzantine maze of Windows-related API's...
--frank[at]unternet.org
We have about 80 years worth of recipes based on the current oven standards.
All of them would need revisions and people who don't cook that often wouldn't be aware of why their recipe failed if they used a new style oven.
Convection is great for crispy skin, not so great for custards.
Ascii artist &
It's called pressurized air blown across the lens assembly. If we can stare up the ass end of a jet turbine or rocket motor, I think this guy can put one in a simple oven. Armchair engineers need to STFU.
You can blow pressurized air across the lens assembly to keep it cleared. We do it all the time with jet engines. I hate all of you armchair engineers with a passion of 10,000 of these 800C ovens.
I modded my almost new dumb oven (2 knobs and indicator light) with cast iron plates about 5 millimeters thick on top and bottom, with some additional rails to quickly remove them if necessary. The heat up process is a bit slower, but overall the oven performs way better than stock one and bakes evenly.
This is thermal mass right over heaters for even roasting/baking.
If I want crust, I just pop on the ventilator in the oven for 10 minutes before done, perfect every time.
As for bread, i pop out the plates, Heat the oven and cast iron pot with lid to 260C, pop in the bread when hot and forget about it for 45 minutes.
If he wants Tech in the oven, well let's see his ideas. At friends house they bought new $INSERT_NAME oven (overpriced around 1500€) with all the bells all over, you can't even expect to turn it on without at least reading 10 pages of the 80 pages long manual. It's super energy saving design takes like 20 minutes to heat up to 200C or ~30 minutes to 250C. For the fun of it we popped in an NTC sensor to see what's going on in heat up and baking process. Nice SLOOOW and steady heat up, then we popped in a roast. Temperature dropped around 40C then heating back up for 16 minutes, overshoot set temperature by 18C, dropped back 21C under set temp and oscillated all the way to the end. All the micro controlling in there failed with REGULAR use.
With that price tag you expect at least steady even temperature, but noooo, $INSERT_NAME decided to screw the customer with poor excuse for an oven, and telling you that you baked your stuff wrong all your life, so they decided to set you straight.
If I wanted to die of waiting I would go to DMV line...
Things in a rear mirror might be behind you
I'll just rely on Chef Mike for the time being.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
If you want a perfect Neapolitan-style pizza, you do want temperatures in excess of 500F. That said, 800C is really hot, I'm guessing 800F was intended, which is a totally reasonable temperature.
you could just use your nose to tell you what is happening in the oven.
thanks, nathan, you scumsucking patent troll!
Remember kids, if you're not paying for the service, YOU ARE THE PRODUCT THAT IS BEING SOLD.
Has he patented it yet?
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
The shock of seeing a 28oz porterhouse presented in a searing hot skillet is so similar, and OP is too focused on not spilling 800c browned butter to notice.
What are you cooking? Aluminum? "Welcome home honey! Dinner's almost ready! Tonight we're having melted aluminum!"
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
Durable goods are supposed to be durable. They are simple to be durable. Adding all these features means they will break more often, it's a foolish path IMO. I wouldn't trust a single circuit board in a oven that can reach 500F.
How much is this going to increase the price of an oven. And how often will parts need to be replaced and the cost to do such. Currently ovens may be inefficient, but they work, and don't break very often when they do its a case of a cheap fix, or replace the stove.
i would not want to see what the optical sensor would cost to replace, or the specialized elements. i cant see the cost of one of these stoves being anywhere close to the reward you get out of possibly faster cooking/energy saving.
http://news.slashdot.org/story...
The article footer implies that he's some kind of cooking science wizard, but I have trouble believing that Nathan Myhrvold has ever done more with an oven than toss a slab of meat in it. I'm no expert, but I've baked an awful lot of cakes, cookies, breads, and pastries, and I find this article very confusing:
Most of us bake, roast, and broil our food using a technology that was invented 5,000 years ago for drying mud bricks: the oven. The original oven was clay, heated by a wood fire. Today, the typical oven is a box covered in shiny steel or sparkling enamel, powered by gas or electricity. But inside the oven, little has changed.
Weird condescension towards "brick dryers" is a running theme of this article. To see how ridiculous this is, I invite you to consider a nineteenth century cake recipe with its many methods for determining correct oven temperature and shielding parts of the cake from the oven walls so that it bakes evenly. Turning a knob to set an arbitrary temperature, while imperfect, is a *vast* technological improvement over wood-fired ovens. (Remember: just because it's analog (or non-electronic!) doesn't mean it's not technology.) Likewise, the metal that the oven is made from represents thousands of years of technological advances in itself.
Preheating always seems to take an unreasonably long time because ovens waste most of the hot air they generate. The actual amount of energy required to reach baking temperature is quite small: Just 42 kilojoules will heat 0.14 cubic meters of air to 250 C. The heating element in a typical domestic electric oven supplies this much energy in a mere 21 seconds. Unfortunately, the heat, which originates in the heating coils of an electric oven or the burner of a gas oven, must pass through the air to get to the walls, and air is an awful conductor of heat, only slightly better than Styrofoam. Even worse, air expands when heated, so much of it flows out of the vent, heating the kitchen rather than the oven.
But the oven walls will heat the air anyway, so how much energy would we really save by heating the walls directly? Pre-heating is only a fraction of the oven's total operating time. And wouldn't an electric burner also produce radiant heat? And then a few paragraphs later:
As soon as you open the oven door to adjust or check on the food, nearly all the hot air spills out. The puny electric element or gas burner is no match for such large surges of cool air, so the temperature in the oven plummets, and it recovers slowly.
which is totally inconsistent with what he said earlier.
At 200 C or below, convection moves most of the heat. But at 400 C, radiant energy starts doing a fair amount of the heat transfer. At 800 C, radiation overwhelms convection. Why couldn’t we have an oven designed to cook primarily by convection at low temperatures that switches to radiant heating for high-temperature baking?
As others have mentioned, this is a Fahrenheit/Celsius error at best and a non-sequitor at worst. The highest normal baking temperature is around 500 F (260 C) unless you're going crazy with pizza. If the article's numbers are correct, we should totally ignore radiant heating! (I don't think they are.) And I'm not clear on how the oven is supposed to "switch" to radiant heating. If the walls are hot enough to radiate, you get hot air for free. If the air is hot, it heats the sides of the oven.
Myrhvold next dives into a laundry list of suggested improvements, which fall into a few categories:
1. Stuff that already exists, but is expensive.
2. Stuff that's not done because it's too expensive and/or inconvenient.
3. Complicated gimmicks that require recipe-specific behavior.
4. Star Trek.
And you’re not going to be able to stop a cook from opening the oven door on occasion ...
Visit the
As a set of co-workers at an energy retailer (now defunct) did all this 30 years ago, just come down to Aus and buy one with either methane or electricity as the heat source.
As with most of Myrhvold's stuff, it's not so hard to blue-sky it (and take out a broad patent which covers everything while teaching nothing); it is hard to actually implement it. Take the optical sensor to detect browning. Yeah, works great... except it's got to be inside an oven. Which gets grease all over it. Grease that is not transparent.
If you want to make something practical for a residential oven, it has to work in an oven environment. Reliably. Without much maintenance.
Yeah, let's glorify more people who say "X is done wrong, someone else should fix it. But not me! I'm just here to point out that everyone else is an idiot!"
Everyone knows that fire does a great job of killing trolls and keeping them from regenerating
The temperature of the oven is irrelevant to the temperature of the food. Replaceable probes that stick into the food and still work at 300deg C (800 LOL) would be vastly more important than anything else.
Likewise, hobs should have thermostats and work according to temperature rather than fixed power.
These things may well exist.
A smoke detector would be nice too but is unlikely to be reliable.
That's a terrible way to talk about the Mafia.
The temperature of the oven is irrelevant to the temperature of the food. Replaceable probes that stick into the food and still work at 300deg C (800 LOL) would be vastly more important than anything else.
Depends on what you're making. Lots of baking is done in a relatively short timeframe (less than an hour) and the interior of foods needs to achieve the right temperature before the surface of the food burns. That's usually the reason for the difference between recipes that recommend various oven temperatures: it's always a race against time to get the inside cooked before the outside burns.
Now, you might say, we could just pay attention to the inside, and turn the oven down if the inside temperature isn't rising fast enough. I myself have done this in the process of baking, but temperature rises unpredictably in many foods, and the rate will be altered every time you change the oven temperature. It's really hard to predict this, so most people rely on a reasonably consistent oven temperature.
Also, there are plenty of foods where certain chemical changes happen in the exterior in a very short time-frame and need to be coordinated with the interior, particularly when leavened (some examples of sensitive foods -- bread, pastry, souffles, cakes, etc.). Screw up the oven temperature, and the things will never rise properly, have a terrible crust, and/or end up dried out or underdone in the middle.
n/t
You're right, of course.
I was thinking the outside is more predictable, particularly if you keep opening the oven or someone invents a reliable monitor.
Nathan's rich - why doesn't he actually design and build a prototype oven and prove his ideas? Ideas are a dime a dozen, implementations that actually work are not.
I work on commercial ovens every day. What you need is the oven you see at Subway, a Turbochef. It has 2kw of microwave available, convection heater, infrared heater, and a very powerful air circulator fan, all controllable by programmable computer. It idles at 500f air, and 900f IR.
And you’re not going to be able to stop a cook from opening the oven door on occasion ... 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. ... Designing one for an oven is trickier because the chamber is small and turbulent currents could do more harm than good. Still, it could be done.
Personally, I haven't found the occasional door-opening to be a big deal. It is discouraged for delicate foods like cakes. But clearly we need a complicated, expensive air curtain that either runs constantly or turns on in an instant. Nobody knows how to do it and it might be more trouble than it's worth, but Myhrvold is *sure* that someone (not him) will make it work.
Siemens solved the door opening problem in a simpler/smarter way with its liftMatic ovens. These are wall mounted ovens, and instead of having a front door, you push a button that lowers the bottom and trays. They're predictably expensive.
Ah. Thanks. When I saw the problems you pointed out I assumed it was because I knew less about cooking than Myhrvold, not more :p And yeah if he's using C where he means F, the article's numbers look a lot more reasonable. Nice comment.
The fish
is cooked
so nice and brown
have a bite
and lose that frown!
Don't Feed the Super-Troll
.. One might worry that this will help Sun because we will just have vaporware": ..
..
1990: "The purpose of announcing early like this is to freeze the market at the OEM and ISV level
Nathan Myhrvold to Bill Gates
1995: "Given that we are looking at the Internet destroying our position as the setter of standards and APIs do you see things we should be doing to use ACT assets to avoid this?":
Biill Gates to Nathan Myhrvold
...don't fix it. The oven isn't a broken invention. Some of the best food in the world comes out of simple, or even primitive, ovens...it's the cook & ingredients that matter. A $10,000 oven isn't going to make a great cook...just like a $10,000 bike wouldn't help Myhrvold win the Tour de France.
You really don't want to cook at higher temps since it promotes formation of Cancer causing compounds.
I find cooking at lower temps for a longer period produces more reliable results while avoiding an under cooked interior.
In "add just a few hundred dollars to the cost of the parts", you may have missed one thing. Adding a few hundred dollars to the cost of parts is going to add a whole lot more to the cost of the oven The parts have to be put in (perhaps not very expensive) and then everybody in the chain from factory to appliance store is going to get their profit margin off those parts. His lowball estimate is going to much more than double the price of a cheap residential oven.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
To cook a pizza a couple years back.
It cost about 100 bucks.
Who is it that owns all the patents for these optical sensors and cameras used in an oven ?
I bet some scumbag patent troll corporation.
I'd really like to see a stovetop with a thermostat. Bains-marie have recently become popular for certain kinds of low, slow cooking, but they're not common and they're unfortunately pricey (and usually require a vacuum sealer that adds even more to the cost).
I end up doing a lot of things in the oven instead, where I can simmer a pot roast at at a reliable 150F. But it's not as precise or consistent as I'd like, especially at the low end.
Getting the stove top to do both precision heating and ultra-high temperature blasting for searing would be a bit of a challenge, but I'd like to see it.
Designing any electronics like cameras to operate above 60C is a challenge above 125C exceptional. Still the ovens envisaged would make a great test bed for electronics aimed at exploring Venus in more detail.
Coming from Europe to live in Canada for a year, I never realized how much difference there is in the ovens (and appliances in general). There is a lot to improve in the typical North American oven. First of all, the heating elements in the European style ovens are behind the enamel. The European models (if not fan-driven) may take a bit longer to heat up, but they won't have the problem of sudden heat transfer changes, since they don't really have that much infrared radiation. The oven is easier to clean, too, because of that, and the risk of the baking sheet catching fire is almost non-existent, whereas in an American-style oven, that happened during my first weeks here. Another thing is that the European ovens have a heating element also in the upper area of the oven. This means that the oven trays can be as big as the interior of the oven, without worrying burning the food and that you can more control, since the elements can be controlled separately (most also have the grilling element, which is similar to the ones in America). The European ovens also have a seamless interior (I still don't know where the excess cleaning foam goes in the American ones, probably part of it ends up in the food later). One last thing is the heat insulation. It barely exists here, as soon as the oven is switched on, the apartment gets hot like a poorly warmed sauna - and not only do you waste the electricity there, you double the pay if you want to switch on the A/C to remove that. Still the glass in the door is tiny and sometimes even painted with a similar pattern as a microwave door (why??!), so you always have to open the door to see if the food is ready. Don't even get me started on the cooking platters. They, while fast, are red-hot in typical use, so imagine spilling oil on those. Instant fire. No wonder they are called burners here. And of course, the knobs to switch off are *behind*, now good luck reaching there through the flames. And since they need to be detachable for cleaning all of the stuff that leaked and through some miracle didn't burn, they are pretty unstable, too. Great combination with the tendency to catch stuff on fire. Oh well. I guess also the ovens here are sold by the horse power, not by the usability. But yeah, let's integrate an optical sensor (and maybe a frigging laser) and fix everything else in software. It sounds much fancier than "safe", "energy efficient" or "usable".
Does this mean those ovens I see on infomercials actually cook better than my oven? You know, the ones that are supposed to cook by radiation,convection and infrared at the same time and use a LOT less energy?
Put a sensor in to keep the temperature of the "coals" below the flash point temp of chicken grease!