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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.
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.
From the article:
Domestic ovens tend to swing in temperature and can be off by as much as 5 percent at any point during cooking. At 205 C—a temperature at which you might cook a turkey—that 5 percent isn’t a big deal. But consider a style of cooking known as sous vide, in which you cook food in bags in a water bath at low temperatures such as 60 C, near the threshold at which bacteria can survive. Here, 5 percent can be the difference between safe and unsafe.
He raises the spectre of salmonella from uneven temperature to point out why ovens can't do the low and slow temps in sous vide cooking. And I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that he knows significantly more than fuck all about cooking.
My wife and I both use the oven equal amounts, more or less. Same goes for the vacuum. What point were you trying to make? That men doing housework is evil? I'd accuse you of trolling, but I am too confused to.... ahhh. Touché.