Miele's new Dialog oven is technically a combi microwave/convection/steam oven (similar to what Starbucks heats up your food in), but uses longer wavelength radiation than a standard microwave. Longer wavelengths can penetrate food more deeply.
It's called RF solid state cooking. It uses radio frequency as a heat source. It allows for much higher precision (compared to traditional speed cooking methods that combine microwave technology and traditional oven elements) due to the RF signals providing a feedback loop. They respond back and help the oven understand and target specific zones within the cooking cavity.
Hence the name: “Dialog”
By regulating the oven’s heat in one place, you can cook the fish while the ice stays frozen. Another such example is making cooked and raw salmon at the same time, by focusing the oven’s action at specific areas of the salmon
The oven knows how to cook the food. It knows this because it knows how much energy has been put in to the oven, and how much energy was not put in to the food. By subtracting how much energy was put in, from how much came out, it obtains the kilojoules of energy the food absorbed, or the Gourmet Unit.
The technology comes form a company called Goji Food Solutions. This is the founder - he has a bunch of other patents, mostly focused in the medical devices, biotech and healthcare spaces: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shlomo_Ben-Haim
> The missile knows where it is at all times. It knows this because it knows where it isn't. By subtracting where it is from where it isn't, or where it isn't from where it is (whichever is greater), it obtains a difference, or deviation. The guidance subsystem uses deviations to generate corrective commands to drive the missile from a position where it is to a position where it isn't, and arriving at a position where it wasn't, it now is. Consequently, the position where it is, is now the position that it wasn't, and it follows that the position that it was, is now the position that it isn't.
* Direct microwaves at different parts of the food differently. That way you can cook some stuff lots while leaving other parts cold.
* Detect which parts of the food are cooked - by watching the absorption of microwaves across a broad range of frequencies, you should be able to detect chemical reactions that happen at certain temperatures - eg. ice turning to water, or raw egg becoming cooked egg.
Combine these two things, and you can cook food far 'better' - and get all of your meat to the perfect temperature while overcooking none.
Notably, I don't think you need phased array antennas to do this. A few bits of spinning metal to scatter microwaves in random directions could instead be controlled by servos and lots of maths to send microwaves in very specific directions.
And as long as you make sure you have feedback, you can realtime adjust the microwave power every few microseconds to do all the same things.
My intuition says phased arrays are the more reliable way to do this. Less moving parts and more control. As well, it feels like phased arrays in general are at a really good maturity to be used for this kind of application.
Clearly. The price reflects it (and puts it out of the budget of most markets), but I thing Miele is targeting reliable more than they are targeting low cost.
Because a regular microwave can't do what was described in the comment you're replying to? A microwave just heats everything - maybe irregularly, but not intentionally irregularly
> By regulating the oven’s heat in one place, you can cook the fish while the ice stays frozen. Another such example is making cooked and raw salmon at the same time, by focusing the oven’s action at specific areas of the salmon
Yes, but few people know that, so this still sounds impressive.
I suspect I could do that 'cook fish in ice' demo in my home microwave after a few practice runs. The trick will be having the whole block of ice at -1C so the ice is solid, but the slightly salty water within the fish's body is not frozen, and therefore absorbs microwaves really well.
Adding a little gelatine to the water will probably make it work even better, because then convection currents won't eat away at the ice so quickly.
I stopped reading at "longer wavelength radiation than a standard microwave."
A microwave do not irradiate your food. Rather, it uses an oscillating magnetic field to induce dipole heating (in mainly water molecules but also other dipoles that may be present in the food).
> [No electromagnetic radiation] whatsoever in a microwave.
WTF!? Is this leaking out of some kind of weird electromagnetic health conspiracy theory subculture?
Any trivial web search provides an avalanche of results explaining otherwise--that your microwave oven definitely uses electromagnetic radiation--including the EPA and FDA.
Or is your thesis that everybody else is wrong about wave-particle duality and photons aren't real?
It seems to be a directional microwave, where it monitors how much microwave gets reflected back as a proxy for how much is being absorbed by the food in each spot, so it can ramp up/down the power as necessary to deliver the requested amount of energy. Pretty neat.
"The truth is, it’s actually difficult for any microwave oven to melt ice. That’s because solids tend to transmit, rather than absorb microwaves, and because the hydrogen bonds in ice are stronger than (and harder to induce vibration/heating in) those of liquid water"
>That’s because the Dialog’s underlying technology is based on medical devices used to reheat donated organs that are kept cold for transport.
The first guy to make the jump from heating donor organs to heating your food probably got a couple of weird looks. I wonder if there was any viewing the Silence of the Lambs before the connection was made.
Reading their copy and looking at the photos I was pretty sure it was microwave based since that was the only thing that fit with it heating "evenly throughout," the bland colors, and lack of any burning or charring. Given this, I wonder how the flavor will turn out in these dishes. Traditionally microwaving fish and steak aren't the tastiest ways to prepare them, but maybe the improved control solves that problem somewhat?
Microwaving is bad for steak, since steak really benefits from a browned exterior.
It's actually an OK way to prepare many fish, though. Many fish have a delicate flavor that would be overwhelmed by browning, and also a delicate texture that would fall apart in most applications that would brown them.
Poaching is a common way to gently raise the temperature of such fish until just cooked through, and you can emulate that in a microwave. Put them in a glass pan, add some water and flavorings (herbs, lemon, etc), and nuke until cooked through.
That's applied mostly to smaller, whiter fish, and to salmon. The bigger and redder fish like tuna, shark, etc. are more likely to be cooked the way steak is -- often not just rare, but raw in the center.
Anyway... I dunno if a $10,000 fancy microwave would be worth it as a glorified fish poacher.
> The new M Chef cooking method utilises energy in form of Gourmet Units. The appliance maintains a constant dialog with the ingredients to cook dishes in their entirety, until achieving the desired result.
(emphasis mine)
Personally I’d take this paragraph out of the marketing altogether. Making up your own units sounds suspicious, and making up ones that are generic + high concept sounds even more suspicious.
The rest of the marketing tells me they might have a product that’s truly new and interesting. Those (presumably real, and we’ll find out when the public can test it) pictures are excitingly wild.
The thing that made me more suspicious than that did was the fact that all the pictures comparing results were at an angle with the Miele result farther away and angled so you couldn't see it. the one head-on picture of the results was of a white fish that looked suspiciously like sashimi.
I'm dubious to say the least. Why not show the clear delineation between cooked and uncooked salmon straight on instead of canted like that?
I'm a fan of Miele but isn't this just an ad? Couldn't the HN post be a link to something interesting about the technology instead of an advertisement?
Let's say I've got a cooked fish sitting in ice, scales & eyeballs included, how do I get that to a state where I could serve it? Is there a recipe where already-cooked frozen fish is an ingredient?
You serve the whole fish, it's not that uncommon in some cuisines. I can't imagine why you'd want raw fish skin and cooked meat though (there has to be some heat gradient due to the ice touching the outside of the fish)
If this technology is actually worth $10k, there should be a demonstration of an actually valuable cooking process with it. This contrived demo makes it feel less valuable than it might be (I don't really know if it's actually valuable...)
Modern fishing frequently does on-ship flash freezing and the results are often better than fresh fish. At least one reason is that the freezing kills parasites. But also the fish will stay viable longer.
The important detail is the method of freezing. Just tossing a fish into a regular freezer doesn't work. Flash freezing doesn't create large ice crystals which mess up the tissue.
Freezing is often worse than non-frozen but is actually fine for preserving freshness of fish. But actually putting a whole fish in an ice-block - I don't think anyone does that.
We regularly underestimate the value in people doing impractical things at the leading edge. Many restaurants around the world are feverishly hungry for new cooking techniques that they can use to explore new approaches and create fundamentally new dishes. Sous vide is a more recent one and it was used to create all sorts of new approaches that had effects for home cooks as well as people outside the cooking world altogether.
It's not cooking the salmon in ice. A block of ice was hollowed out, the fillet was put inside, the block was supposedly covered with a layer of ice and then the Dialog oven only heated the salmon inside of the ice.
A surprisingly large number of these high end ovens are sold into houses where they are literally never used. I'm talking touring a ten year old house and I open the oven and the original manual is still taped to the grill.
At least in this case it might be shown off as a party trick.
The question is more... ok, target a specific location where? Does it actually know where the different food items are on the tray, where is their center and where is their surface, and how each should be cooked separately?
Perhaps it is effectively radar that cooks stuff, and which can thus theoretically beamform and read directional reflections to detect where the food is.
Because it is mostly-enclosed, it can theoretically additionally detect how much energy isn't going back into the closed loop, and thus went into the food.
Marketing material always makes it extra fancy but it's quite possible that the actual manual says that you must make sure that what you want to heat is at the centre because that's where the energy will be focused.
Also possible, though I got the impression that it was actually directing energy to specific places. And I was already fantasizing about microwave oven with CT-scanner :)
The worst part is that it is 3x longer than it needs to be because every claim they make is repeated, nearly identically and without further elaboration, at least 3 times. It's like watching the same exact commercial 3 times
Thank god, finaly! I was getting so annoyed at my ice melting when cooking fish and the beeswax melting when cooking tenderloin. Why didn't anyone think of this before? /S
When you have a product you think is cool but you don't yet have a sales pitch. Wait until you figure out your sales pitch to release it. This might be a great oven, but the material just makes it seem like a really random gimmick that no one needs outside of filming TikToks about how random it is.
