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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.
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.
The real question is "who cooks at 800C?". I do quite a bit of baking and the only reason to go over 200C is pizza.
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.