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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
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.
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.
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.
This is spot-on. The suggestions in this article mostly range from the impractical and expensive to the barely useful and ludicrously expensive.
I do a LOT of baking, roasting, braising, etc. in my oven. I'm also the kind of guy who owns multiple probe thermometers with different sensitivities and speeds, multiple kitchen scales with different accuracies for different quantities, a pH meter for kitchen use, hydrometers for fermentation, miscellaneous lab glassware for accurate measuring (and often convenient pouring), etc.
Basically, I know there's a lot of room for precision in the kitchen, and I make use of it all the time.
On the other hand, I'm also the kind of guy who throws in a handful of some herb and a couple pinches of another spice while I'm cooking or baking -- I recognize that there are sometimes when precision is warranted, and sometimes when it doesn't really make a huge difference becauses there are other variables in play. (How fresh is the herb or spice, is it small new leaves or large old leaves, etc.? -- sure, I could weigh a small amount of it, but those variations mean that a "handful" is probably about as reasonably precise as I'm going to get in terms of flavor potential.)
Cooking and baking generally involves a lot of ingredients that have significant variation to them -- it's not like you order "laboratory grade" spices that have stable flavor profiles and are 99.99% pure or whatever. And kitchen conditions are variable enough in temperature and humidity that even if you had the perfect yeast that always started out exactly the same, by the time your dough ferments for a couple hours in your kitchen, each batch is going to be a little different. (Even with my temperature-controlled proofing box for proofing dough, my pizza timing and process will require adjustment from batch-to-batch.)
So why exactly am I going to pay a ridiculous premium for these features on my oven? Most of them can be easily approximated with cheap fixes for those who care. If I want to have higher humidity in my oven, I put a steam pan in. Great. Whee. Cost of a few bucks for a cheap pan. If I want bursts of steam like a commercial bread oven, I can use a water kettle and a piece of tubing that costs me a couple bucks -- a valve too, if I want to be fancy about it. Myhrvold worries about how some of these "fancy" ovens can produce high humidity, but what if you want to brown your food and need to get rid of the humidity, which the oven isn't designed for. What the heck? Take my $5 steam pan out of the freakin' oven after I'm done with the steaming phase. What is so hard about this?
Or I could spend hundreds or thousands of dollars for some ridiculous improvements to have precision equipment when I'm not generally using ingredients or cookware or whatever else that are built to the same precise tolerances... so I'm wasting money. The biggest improvement to my pizza-baking, for example, came NOT from precision measuring instruments for ingredients or from my special proofing box (both of which need to be adjusted according to variances in ingredients and kitchen conditions), but from buying a cheap steel plate to bake my pizza on (a suggestion that originated with Myrhvold's book, by the way).
I'm not saying that ovens can't be improved. Many of his ideas would be interesting for general features, but his obsession with precision is just ridiculous.
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
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.
Commercial ovens, and specifically commercial salamander ovens. And what the summary failed to explain is that the heating elements get up to that temperature, not the air - hence, infrared radiation cooks the food, rather than convection through the air.
They're useful for anytime you want a quick and hard sear, including steaks, creme brulee, flash broiling fish, etc.
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
The problem is that you can't just swap in a different cooking method and expect the same results. If you decided to (for example) deep fry that same turkey, unaltered, it would also have bad (even dangerous) results. While much of the gourmet and other higher-quality dishes are made sans microwave, a quick search for microwave cooking reveals a fair amount of useful ideas. Some of these are much more difficult with other methods.
This is also why many of these ideas are worthless - they would require a change in recipes and methodology, or we would get different results.