Whoah, 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 have done DIY water baths, and there are even people doing DIY rotary evaporators, but nobody does a DIY CVap. Is it that hard?
Technologically it's not that hard (KFC has been doing it for nearly 50 years, remember). I think it's just a little messier. You're dealing with two independent heating/control circuits and on top of that you need to manage a cavity that's at 100% humidity. Most consumer ovens can't handle that much moisture for long before they start rusting from the inside out.
I was the guy that used to write all the software for the CVap ovens at Winston, so here's my take... The basic idea is the pan of water is your food temperature and the air temperature is your food texture/browning. It really is incredibly simple technology, and it really is quite superior to the old way. I would LOVE to have that feature in a normal home oven. The same oven can be a proofing oven, baking oven, steamer and holding cabinet. You can cook a roast and it can safely be held for about 24 hours without affecting the food at all (medium-rare will stay that way no matter how long you keep it in the oven). Not to mention that is cooks faster and more efficiently. Also you can cook at lower temperatures safely, which is kind of big.
The two major difficulties are: 1) The pan of water is a pain to clean and keep full. All that moisture just builds up gunk. 2) The user needs to rethink how they cook. They need to think food temperature and texture, rather than cook X minutes at Y. It's simple to modify your recipes, but customers have always seemed quite resistant to change. I still say it is needed in every kitchen, however.
Basically, Louisville is a small town when it comes to Engineering. I had some contacts which eventually led to a job there. But the job got stale. Our platform was based on a National Semi COP8 (8-bit micro without even a multiply instruction). That can only be interesting for so long. So I went to GE and started designing 3-phase induction motors. Quite a change of pace.
It was a lot of holding cabinet stuff. That's easy to introduce into your workflow and doesn't really change the way you do things. Primarily a money saver by being able to hold things longer. I think Arby's experimented with it since they slow roast at a fairly low temperature. Cookong that way will more quickly get you out of the "unsafe" region where bacteria grows quickly. Restaurants menus have been optimized for the current way of doing things. There's not enough incentive to change that. Especially in franchises where you'd be forcing them to buy expensive new equipment and shake up the menu. (KFC is especially scared after the meas introducing the Chicken Little caused.) It's easier in fine dining and smaller chains where they have the ability to experiment. They also have more incentive to be different.
I've seen that same situation regarding chains that are trying to stay relevant with new items but trying to avoid the constant introduction of new equipment in the kitchens. When it works it works great, like you mentioned it can also go incredibly bad.
My eyes have also been opened to the politics between the corporate parent, the franchisees, and even how the vendors get involved (like Coke or Frito-Lay). It's crazy stuff.
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?
Try 1/2 inch sheet steel instead of a baking stone. More thermal mass, better conduction and more wear-resistant (won't crack from thermal stress). Cast iron is a cheaper alternative.
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:
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.
No it isn't, but I would expect him to have patented anything he could get away with and have his shell companies lying in wait for anyone who builds an infringing oven.
This comment has nothing to do with mine. It's just noise. I was talking about CVaps, and you're talking about... patent trolling? Myrvhold didn't invent CVaps.
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 own with professional chefs. I'm very lucky:)
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 I can see some opportunity for nastyness and corrosion. People letting water sit for weeks all dusty and moldy and then wonder why the kitchen and food smell. Dirty oven walls now with extra moisture for special mold growth what could possibly go wrong. Maybe a vaporizer that uses distilled water would be more realistic. A traditional combi just isn't going to work in a residential setting.
Also a meta observation is he's not talking about getting to a destination, but several alternate paths of getting to a destination. So your oven cooks 5% too fast or slow, a "nest" level of intelligence bolted onto the oven should take care of that. Or most of the fooling around with a combi precision thermostat discussion is to get a sous vide like effect... well most of the time just use a sous vide and be done with it? (edited to add what I'm getting at is its possible thru application of extreme engineering to do something difficult... then again there are simpler methods... for example controlling the humidity inside a working oven is no joke to compensate for massive humidity variations in the ambient kitchen air... wouldn't it be a heck of a lot simpler to very tightly control humidity in the kitchen which is COTS and use a conventional oven which is COTS rather than making a very complicated oven?)
I have looked into the market and small excellent sous vide rigs are available, and cheap, but this article is correct, you are not putting a combi into a residential home without totally freaking out the interior decorator, the electrician, the plumber, probably the carpenter... its like dreaming of one of those 25 horsepower 5 minute steam dishwashers the commercial kitchens use instead of home dishwashers... well, you can wish for free, but its about as likely as mass adoption of a turbine car...
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.
On a podcast of Cooking Issues with Dave Arnold, he mentioned his dream is to modify his oven with copper tubing and inject water into his oven (he uses bricks for thermal mass). Of course, this was largely in relation to baking and injecting a massive amount of steam quickly, but I think a spray system over thermal mass (metal is the modernist suggestion, but I think possibly some sort of ceramic would be best).
Of course, I read this article and thought exactly one thing:
There's no way an oven like this will be affordable and reliable over a 3+ year. There's way too many things to break.
I know of a few professional ovens that add humidity by spraying water directly on the heating elements. The trick is to use a very small amount at short intervals. You can't quench the calrod or it will crack.
Coincidentally my copy of MC at Home just arrived today. I had made a few dishes from recipes available on his site and was blown away. It has definitely rekindled my interest in cooking.
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.
The issue as much as anything is about reliability and the lifetime of an oven. The less moving parts the more reliable and longer life the oven has.
If you look at some of his suggestions and when they have been implemented, the costs are quite astronomical. Also you begin to quickly realise that specialised ovens that cook in a certain way don't cook in multiple ways.
It's the versatility of your oven that a home needs. Mine can fan heat, convection heat and grill.
The only specialised extra 'oven' in most people's houses is the microwave. It's cost effective at what it does.
We're all reading these articles because we're excited about the future. In that context, the issues you've raised don't seem to be that big. Cost for the bill of materials will drop with mass production, and many of the major parts are already cheap.
After seeing personal computing and mobile computing revolutions unfold during my lifetime, I'm pretty sure the technical obstacles to making a reliable and cheap oven that Myhrvold describes are surmountable. Electric cars, jet planes and search engines deal with much harder engineering challenges.
There are financial system problems. If we don't value engineer our products to rapidly fail, the mfgrs will go out of business and we won't have any ovens.
So imagine a "super oven" that is rust proof and thermal shock proof to tolerate high humidity cooking. Someone is going to figure out that running that dude dry means it'll operate theoretically for 500 years, and 90% of the home cooks will be too lazy to ever fill the distilled water tank anyway, so 50 years in or so, that mfgr will go out of business, and no new ovens.
There are some examples in the automotive world, where in the old days when farm trucks were really farm trucks and not marketed as a macho station wagon for starbucks runs, some people bought them for 100% asphalt use anyway, because they'd last 25 years if treated better than farm trucks. That value engineering epic fail has been fixed for decades now, but in the old days this was a serious problem. Ford had no problem selling commuter cars that would rust out and require replacement in 3 years but they couldn't figure out how to keep farm trucks on the farm and off the roads for 20 years, back in the 70s.
James Dyson's twin-drum contrarotating washing machine was a huge improvement over normal washing machines but failed to take off because it was much more expensive.
The Privilege of Incumbency is tough to beat. To convince the public to adopt a new technology you must have something that's cheap, reliable and yet performs overwhelmingly better than the existing design.
Nice article but I don't think it's greatly relevant to most of us. I use the oven a lot, cook most days, and don't cook above 220C. I don't think our oven goes above 250C.
If you're into molecular gastronomy I can imagine you'd want to play around with the stuff mentioned in the article, but outside of that ... m'eh.
Every single day of your life that you use the oven, as opposed to eating something fresh or cooked stove-top. And strictly, just for those things cooked in the oven that the oven-improvement improves.
It'd be really nice for pizza, giving roasts a nice crust before/after slow roasting, etc. I'd be happy with it and I'm of the general opinion that molecular gastronomy is pretentious wankery.
(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.
There'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.
Can't your get far more bang for your buck by using convection and a pizza stone or a brick or something else to hold in the heat?
Certainly the steam/humidity thing won't be helped by the pizza stone. But keeping the air moving and providing something solid to act as a more uniform beat source gets you pretty far. It's like switching from crappy pots and pans to a nice set. A big difference is the thickness and materials in the base to create even and steady temperature.
I wonder how a continuously on stove/oven like http://www.agasales.com/index.htm compares. These always remain at temperature. Obviously not a solution for most people.
Am I the only person here that has seen the ad for the Wolfgang Puck pressure Oven? I am curious how it really performs because everything looks good on an infomercial.
> And you’re not going to be able to stop a cook from opening the oven door on occasion—peeking through a grease-splattered window just doesn’t cut it. 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. Larger versions of air doors are already in wide commercial use for refrigerated warehouses.
Whoa, isn't this also used in supermarkets when you enter them?
Better 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). Definitely an opportunity for crowd funding to get development rolling.
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.
There are two key innovations missing from this oven that would make it revolutionary. I won't say them out loud because Nathan might run and patent them...
If you say them here they will form part of the prior art and a suitably date-verified version of your post would negate such an attempt at patenting those parts.
Of course a patent on a refinement or a specific implementation would still be possible.
Of course, the patent examiner would almost definitely not see the post in their shallow searches for prior art. The patent would get issued, and then it would cost near to the tune of $1million to invalidate it using the court system. Yay patents.
In the UK it's free to submit prior art (S21 of the CDPA I think) to the patent office and IIRC also free to request the office re-examine a patent.
There are better places than HN to submit a defensive publication but HN posts aren't outside the locus of prior art searches unless they get delisted from Google.
Of course it doesn't matter for a competitor what the granted patent says, if they have date verified disclosure prior to the priority date of the granted patent then they can submit that to the court and win a case by invalidating the granted patent.
The article talks about way of improving the tools that would make better chefs from ordinary people and that's, in general, what good tools are about.
I'm sure there people who develop intuition about cooking food properly after decades of doing so but the part of cooking that the article talks about is really simple: how to apply a consistent amount of energy to a piece of food.
Everybody would benefit from a tool that allows for a precise control of temperature, and the less experienced people could achieve the same results as the best chefs.
There's also the fact that healthy food kinda sucks: It rots fast and is usually not premade. I'm surprised the market for healthy fast food is too small for Nestle/Kraft etc to bother with.
It generally rots quickly (and is thus not premade) specifically because it's healthy. Rotting indicates the presence of thriving yeast/mold/bacteria, which can't live without nutrients to feed on.
There are plenty of decently-nutritious pre-made meals in the freezer section of your grocery store. If "take the wrapping off and put it in the oven for an hour" is too much work, though, there's always Soylent.
We're aiming for a middle ground with MealSquares. Even easier than Soylent (no prep) but also made of whole foods. Caveat: same as OP complaint, they last something like a month compared to 6+ months for most of our competitors.
We ran into the exact problems talked about in the article when trying to bake our prototypes in a home oven. Even heating is next to impossible. Working with a convection oven now is much better.
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.
In case you missed it, Nathan Myhrvold is also the founder of Intellectual Ventures[0], arguably the worst and most pernicious patent troll in the country[1][2].
Hacker News is a community of technologists, many working in the start-up space.
This man, his company, and the industry he represents are a bane for many start-ups (and other companies, small and large).
Such a bane, in fact, that many people, including many on this site, are working hard and expending large amounts of resources to change laws to prevent this man, his company, and their ilk from continuing to be an economic drag on our entire industry.
But never mind all that. He's got some great ideas about ovens.
This little subthread is a microcosm of one way the whole site regularly goes off the rails. "Wet bulb temperature shmet bulb temperature, let's all yell about patent trolling!"
Fair enough. I'm not sure how else to communicate my distaste for giving Myhrvold additional attention on this site. But I'm getting down-voted, so my opinions are not shared by other people participating in this thread.
Thanks for engaging instead of simply down-voting.
We share our planet with a lot of people that are retarded. There are simpler things that can be done to make ovens better:
The majority of ovens have wire slots to hold the racks. Retarded people do not place the racks in the slots, they place them on the slots. Therefore when it comes to pulling a rack out the back tips up and the dish dangerously slips off the wire rack. Simply by passing some standard where it is not possible to have wire side slots that accept racks in non-design-for positions a sizeable battle in the war on health'n'safety can be won.
People that do not know how an oven works put the temperature up to max on the assumption the oven will heat up quicker. It won't but some people cannot be told. A simple 'preheat oven' button that takes the oven to 200C would help the retards out. A beep when the 'preheat' temperature is reached could help too.
The whole notion of pre-heating the oven is often a waste of time, particularly with vegetarian dishes. A jacket potato really does not care if the oven is heating up or is already pre-heated. Same for plenty of other dishes. Even pizza doesn't actually care. Souffles and other advanced dishes are exceptions, however the default is to waste a small eternity pre-heating an oven. This is wrong. It is worse than leaving the tap running whilst brushing one's teeth as far as the environments and polar bears are concerned.
Some people like to clean. If you clean the oven exterior and hob whilst you cook then the heat makes it an easy task, no chemicals needed. Retarded people that spend longer cleaning than researching recipes will get the abrasive solvents out and put in a lot of time and effort removing those symbols next to the dials. Therefore they actually have no idea what dial does what and it can be quite dangerous to have the wrong ring turn on the hob.
Some people like to store every baking tray in the oven, so, rather than heat up that jacket potato they heat up several kilos of metal. Instructions on food should have 'remove unnecessary trays from oven' as part of the instructions. This would be good for the polar bears.
Timers on ovens are not used by the overwhelming vast majority of people. Retarded people put the timer on max to speed up the oven, forgetting to put the temperature on either max or something more sensible (see earlier point). Timers need to go. If someone wants a timer then they should get an app for that, the dial/buttons on the oven need to go. Nobody would miss them, they are pure 'feature-itis'.
Regarding the door, it must be possible to have ovens with something more akin to a chest-of-drawers arrangement, where you can pull out one of three drawers, with the wire rack coming out too. The drawers could be interchangeable with the option to flip them upside down so that no matter what you cook there is room for everything. This would help keep the heat in and be more convenient for retarded people that cannot put normal wire racks in safely (see earlier point).
I bet if you reworded your post to remove the offensive analogies to the mentally disabled, then framed it as a list of common myths and their polite rebuttals, you'd be upvoted instead of downvoted.
I 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.
What's interesting to me is that everybody and their cousins have done DIY water baths, and there are even people doing DIY rotary evaporators, but nobody does a DIY CVap. Is it that hard?