
Recipe for a Better Oven - spectruman
http://spectrum.ieee.org/consumer-electronics/gadgets/nathan-myhrvolds-recipe-for-a-better-oven
======
tptacek
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?

~~~
0xdeadbeefbabe
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?

[0] [http://www.instructables.com/id/Hack-a-Toaster-Oven-for-
Refl...](http://www.instructables.com/id/Hack-a-Toaster-Oven-for-Reflow-
Soldering/)

~~~
rpenm
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.

~~~
0xdeadbeefbabe
Hey that probably has less asbestos than my fibrament baking stone, and maybe
it doesn't smell as bad when you heat it up the first time.

------
chollida1
The oven design is of course patent pending:)

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:)

[1] [http://www.amazon.com/Modernist-Cuisine-Home-Nathan-
Myhrvold...](http://www.amazon.com/Modernist-Cuisine-Home-Nathan-
Myhrvold/dp/0982761015/)

~~~
tptacek
I have both MC and the much cheaper Modernist At Home and recommend the latter
(the smaller cheaper one) over the former.

~~~
VLM
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...

~~~
batbomb
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.

~~~
joezydeco
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.

------
awjr
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.

~~~
sauravc
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.

~~~
VLM
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.

------
prestadige
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.

------
noelwelsh
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.

~~~
sauravc
I beg to differ. A better oven means tastier food at home, which pays
dividends every single day of your life.

~~~
dllthomas
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.

~~~
tptacek
The oven improvements being discussed here will have the effect of making more
things best done in the oven.

~~~
dllthomas
Yes, certainly that metric should be "the amount you use your _new_ oven", not
"the amount you use your _current_ oven".

------
vanderZwan
The opening lines immediately reminded me of this wonderful article about old
technology behind energy efficient brick ovens:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20140327025219/http://www.lowtec...](https://web.archive.org/web/20140327025219/http://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2009/10/hoffmann-
kilns-brick-and-tile-production.html)

(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.

------
netcan
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.

------
nwenzel
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.

------
coldcode
I wonder how a continuously on stove/oven like
[http://www.agasales.com/index.htm](http://www.agasales.com/index.htm)
compares. These always remain at temperature. Obviously not a solution for
most people.

------
chrisBob
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.

[http://puckoven.com](http://puckoven.com)

------
dzhiurgis
> 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?

~~~
Jtsummers
Yes, and I've seen it used at other businesses. Positive pressure systems are
also used for clean rooms.

------
InclinedPlane
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.

~~~
sauravc
His article takes aim at these high-end ovens as well, and makes several
proposals to make them even better.

~~~
InclinedPlane
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.

------
fezz
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...

~~~
pbhjpbhj
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.

~~~
kennywinker
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.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
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.

------
aaron695
Things like this could be a big deal.

Part of an unhealthy food culture is some people find it hard to cook, both
the difficulty and the time involved.

A well price oven that's easier and quicker might have a lot of run on health
benefits.

~~~
tormeh
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.

~~~
cheald
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.

~~~
nazgulnarsil
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.

------
mnot
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.

~~~
unwind
How about bread? Many people feel that bread is interesting stuff.

------
reitanqild
Anyone else sees this?

    
    
        ")},load:function(e){var t,n,r=!1,s;s=Date.now(),i.load();if(!e)return;for(n=0;n ­

------
Aardwolf
Looks like you could make one out of a PC case :)

~~~
gerbal
Provided it has temperature tolerances in excess of 1000° F.

~~~
anon4
So that's a metal case and a pair of nVidia cards (or a single pentium 4).

------
chimeracoder
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].

[0]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_Ventures](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_Ventures)

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_Ventures#Controve...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intellectual_Ventures#Controversy)

[2] [http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-
archives/episode/441/t...](http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-
archives/episode/441/transcript)

~~~
chasing
Yup. And as such I do not feel we ought to be promoting any work of his on
Hacker News.

~~~
dang
HN users are hopefully mature enough to make a distinction like that.

We did take his name out of the title, though, mainly because we usually do,
but also because it's baity in this case, at least for this site.

~~~
chasing
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.

~~~
tptacek
Yes. That exact sentence is exactly correct.

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!"

~~~
chasing
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.

------
Theodores
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).

~~~
nitrogen
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.

------
nsajko
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.

~~~
Loughla
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.

To make it fancy, you need all this nonsense.

