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.
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...