Oven 2.0

So today, you know, a lot of times Jonathan and we talk about some kind of world changing proposition, like planetary defense exactly, artificial intelligence, radical life extensions, space elevators, colonizing the moon right right right right, the the you know, the whole idea of the singularity, where we transform into the post human species, where we're part man, part machine. All awesome, But sometimes we focus on the little things too.

And so one question we often like to ask is, in this age of innovation, are are some of our simplest and most reliable devices and machines actually things that still can be improved? Or have we already reached peak toaster? Have we already reached peak vacuum cleaner? And today the one we wanted to look at was the oven. Yeah, the work horse in your kitchen, standard, basic, pretty simple machine. Is there any way that ovens could be better than

they are today? And if there is a way they could be better than they are today, is it worth it? Should we try to improve this device? Right? And and just as a peak behind the curtain, guys, what happens sometimes that Joe and I will meet up with some of the other folks behind forward thinking and we have these big pitch meetings, like one every few months, maybe like every once a quarter or something like that. Well, we'll get together and we just start throwing out ideas

about various topics that we can cover. And once in a while someone throws out something that on the surfaces. You know, you're like, wow, why would we even cover that? And then you think, well, know, this is a valid question. Can can we take something as established as the oven and and make measurable improvements not just tiny improvements? And efficiency which is important, don't don't get me wrong. Energy

efficiency is very important. You want, you know, you want to have good efficiency, You want to have a good ability to cook food thoroughly and properly. But but how much better can we get? And it turned out that this was kind of an interesting question to sort of rattle around. Yeah, totally. So let's let's take a look at the oven. Let's get the old oven out and pry the door open and poke it and prod it and see if there's anything that can be done with

this old honky beast. Okay, and now the first question we have to ask is how does an oven do what it does? How does an oven actually cook food? And we're talking specifically about the oven compartment, not the not the stovetop or anything, but really the oven itself. Well, you may remember from elementary school science class that there are three main ways you're gonna get heat transferred from

one place to another via physics. So one is going to be radiation radiant heat, and this does occur in ovens. This is heating via electromagnetic radiation, the infrared part of the spectrum. It's the same way the Sun heats the Earth. There's nothing in between the Earth and the Sun but a bunch of space, and yet these electromagnetic rays can reach us and and make our planet nice and warm.

And in the same sense, the heating elements and the walls of your oven can radiate heat throughout sending these infrared rays towards your frozen lasagna and and bringing it to a nice bubbly finish. All right, so that's that's one of three. But you said they're two more, right, so right, Well, of course there's also conduction. Oh short conduction. This is a pretty simple idea. It's where you've got the transfer of heat between stuff that's in direct contact

with one another. Right, So, conducting heat. If you were to put some sort of conductive material onto a hot surface, that heat would then pass into the the conductive material you've pushed put down there. And some stuff conducts heat really well, like most metals. Yeah, they're great conductors for heat. Some stuff does not conduct heat very well. That's what we use as insulators, things like you know, like the rubber you might use for a potholder type thing, or

or maybe air. Actually, just one of the funny things that most of the cooking by touching that happens in your oven happens because your food is touching air that is hot because the oven gets the air hot. But air is not a good conductor of heat. One way to make it a better conductor of heat is to

uh is, to augment that through convection. Convection is the third form of transfer of heat energy, and this happens when you transfer heat energy through a moving fluid like air or water, So you have currents of circulation that move hot fluid from one place to another. Convection of an than most cases, uses fans to circulate hot air coming off of the heating elements, and by doing this

the food usually cooks faster and more evenly. Yeah, you get that distribution of heat as opposed to you know, if you if you have one source of heat, then obviously whatever part of the food is closest to that one sort one source is more likely to cook faster than the part that's furthest away. Yeah. So by using convection and distributing that heat a little more evenly, you create something where you're not going to end up with alasagna that is bubbling hot on one side but still

frozen on the other. Right, which, you know, you might still get that because ovens are stupid. The ovens are stupid, and sometimes even when you do everything correctly, the oven itself doesn't. Yeah, and we mentioned the idea of convection ovens. These are ovens that are designed specifically to blow that hot air around and get it circulating. But even in a standard non convection of an there is some natural

convection that happens just because of uneven heating. Yes, so there's there's a little bit of limited airflow right right, There's there's no such thing as as an oven where the air is completely stationary and isn't moving at all. I mean, that's physics would tell us that that's not going to happen. Right, But then we have one other that we can mention very very briefly, and we're not really going to focus on it too much in this episode.

But of course there are microwave ovens. Microwave ovens don't use any of these methods to heat up food. What they use is well, they use the radiant method, but in this case it's radiating microwaves, not infrared. Yeah, it's a different kind. So instead of transferring heat directly to

the food, it transfers energy to the food. Right, different kind of energy, electromagnetic energy in the form of microwave radiation, which, because water is a polar molecule, has it makes water molecules in your food start to vibrate furiously, and this turns into heat. Yeah, exactly, that motion is essentially heat, right, Molecular movement is heat. If you were to talk about the absolent complete absence of molecular movement, that's when you

get absolute zero. So making molecules move more means they're heating up. So using your microwave, it ends up that energy ends up getting absorbed by water, by fats, by sugars. That's what ends up really heating up food. Um. Theoretically it's cooking all the way, like all all the parts are cooking at the same time, although that doesn't necessarily happen in practice because of lots of different stuff, including things like uh, microwave interference. Um. Sometimes it depends upon

the thickness of the food. But because obviously it's if it's thick enough, then the the middle never gets penetrated by those microwaves and doesn't cook through whether you put an old computer in the microwave with your food, Yeah, that also would definitely factor in. I mean, I don't

typically do that, but I'm learning more about you, Joe. UM. But yeah, that's that's one of those ovens that we're probably not going to concentrate on too much in this episode, but figured we might as well, you know, get all the way. We're really focusing on the traditional uh oven, especially in the Western hemisphere. You know, in the course of reading up for this episode, I did read about at least one oven that combines traditional oven heating with microwaves.

I've heard of such things, and I fear them. It sounds pretty weird. Sounds like a Frankenstein's Monster of ovens. Okay, Well, So one question that I think one reason actually I would say that the question of have we reached peak oven is kind of interesting is that ovens have been around for a long time. I mean, it's obvious that we have not yet reached peak cell phone people are going to keep redesigning cell phones and obviously making them better. Uh,

it just hasn't been around all that. That's been around since like the nineteen seventies, right, But we've had ovens for I mean, at least in basic concept versions of ovens for a really long time. Right, We've had We've had ovens as we understand them for centuries. We've had ovens as in a general concept for millennia. So depending on your definition of ovens, they date way back to prehistoric times. Now in this case, you have to be

pretty liberal with your description of what an oven is. Uh. In in prehistoric times, it might include a pit and you would fill that pit with hot coals, which would have ash on them that helps insulate some of the heat.

And then you would wrap your food in some sort of protective covering, most often something like leaves, and you would put those on top of the coals, and then you would bury it for a while and let it cook, traps the heat in, drops the heat in, and uh then you dig it up and you've got your nice

tasty food wrapped in charred leaves. And this is in at least some interpretations the type of oven, although clearly not something you would go to your local hardware store and say, hey, can I see your pits filled with charcoal? Like it's not gonna happen. Well, no, I mean this sounds like an nice way you get to kind of smolder going on. It's different than cooking over an open flame. This might be your your earliest ways to do something more kin to barbecuing or smoking, or you get a

kind of low and slow heat. Yeah, ancient civilizations used stone or brick ovens fired with wood to bake bread. So the Greeks, the Romans, uh, you know, uh, these civilizations that were really kind of the forefront of that technology. They made those sort of ovens, the same sort of stuff you would find in a pizzeria that has the wood fired oven in the back. It's really meant for like a pretty high temperature oven. And then you had variations on brick ovens that continued all the way through

the medieval times and early Renaissance. By the seventeen hundreds, people had started to adopt cast iron stoves and those became quite popular. By the eighteen hundreds, people were starting to rely on coal as fuel as opposed to would and then the first guest stoves appeared in the early nineteenth centuries. Around the the mid eighteen twenties, that's when you first started seeing them. Uh. And in the late inventors began to experiment with electric ovens, although at the

time during that experimentation they were not terribly efficient. It required a lot of energy to to generate the electricity necessary to heat up a heating element in cine electrical oven. It was not really practical for the first like a decade or so of experimentation. Um, it took all it took some time for that to find traction, but then once it did, it became quite popular. I just had a question. I didn't come across this, but I wonder

if if early oven technology had any dangerous exploding periods. Oh, I'm sure. I mean, we're gonna talk a little bit about an article we both read where one of the things that they mentioned about how ovens can be inefficient is that the air expands on the inside, right, so it needs to have a place for it to vent out of r l that expansion, you know, the oven has to contain it, and so you essentially have a

pressure bomb. You don't have any kind of way. And I'm sure there were instances of ovens going boom, and we probably don't know much about them because people weren't around to tell what happened afterwards, just at whatever place they were in. Burned down recipe ever, right, uh man talk about a pop tart whackedish mackay d so. Um. The microwave came about in the mid nineteen hundreds, like

six forty seven was pretty much win. An engineer discovered the principle behind microwave ovens This was an engineer who noticed that whenever he was working near a microwave antenna, the candy bar that he had would melt, and so he said, huh, there seems to be something going on here, and eventually that became the basis of the microwave oven, which, by the way, it took some time for people to adopt because there were some fears about the nature of

the radiation um which still happens today. You'll hear people say, don't stand in front of that microwave. It really it really got a lot better when they started putting doors on them. Yeah, exactly when it when you know, the early microwave ovens where you had to stand in front with a ping pong paddle and just bat them back as hard as you could. Those days are over. Also, the ones where you had to stick your head inside

to check on the food. Those weren't very good. The old Hansel and Gretel models, Yeah, man, those were the day. So over time we've seen lots of different variations on ovens, some of which were clearly kind of gimmicky. You know, they weren't necessarily a real advance in the technology, but it was something to set it apart from competing ovens so that you could sell more of them. Well, and that's something to keep in mind today because I think that same question will apply to a lot of the

advances that we bring up. Yeah, so let's talk about some of the stuff. Like, you know, clearly the older ovens, the ones that the precursors to today's ovens, didn't have

certain things that we rely on today. Uh. And one of those is just the thermostat inside the oven, which tells you that it's what allows you to preheat en oven to a specific temperature, as opposed to just well, throw some more wood on and then hopefully we can get this hot enough, or if it's too hot, then maybe we put some ash on there to cool down the fire. Like it's that was a very inexact way

of going about it. These days, you get a new oven, you've got a little digital counter, you program in what temperature you want the oven to preheat, and it does it all for you. Right. Yeah, it's actually pretty simple machine,

you know. It's it's like a switch, Yeah, exactly, this switch as if it gets up to the temperature you've set, then it's time to turn it off, right, And so it stops the cycle, the heating cycle at that point, and then if the temperature or when not if when the temperature drops down to a certain threshold, then the thermostatic switches the whole system back on again, so it heats back up. So it's a con stint heating and

cooling process. It's not necessarily doing it very fast. These cycles can last a good long while, but it's all meant to try and keep the food at the general temperature that you chose, general being somewhat of a of a generous term depending upon your oven thermostats, right, well, depending on your oven, And really this will apply to all I mean, no, no oven is going to have perfect precision on the temperature inside. There's gonna be some variation.

Some parts of the oven are going to be hotter than other parts, and even in general, the average across the oven is not going to be exactly what you

said it to. And then you've got other factors, right, like your altitude, like there are other things that come into how much how long you need to cook things at what temperature, But just speaking from a general sense, like let's say you're at sea level, all things being equal, yes, your oven could end up having a thermostat that is not terribly accurate or has lost acuracy over time, And it could mean that when you try and cook stuff,

even though you're following all the directions and you're absolutely certain you're doing so, maybe you're undercooking stuff or overcooking stuff. If a thermostat fails, it could potentially lead to something really awful, like a fire. Yeah, because if they never if it never detects that it's gotten too hot, it just keeps getting hotter. You have never thought of that. I would just have to assume that modern events have some kind of safety measure in place to prevent that.

But yeah, don't. I mean, it's it's one of those things where it's it's a possibility. It's not necessarily a likelihood because there usually are fail safes involved, But it is one of those things, especially the earlier ovens with thermostats,

that you had to worry about. Now, granted, most of the time thermostats aren't like going super haywire, right, But if you suspect that yours is inaccurate or becoming less accurate over time, then you can do some various tests to make sure like they're there tester or units you can have which essentially are thermometers with timers where you can put them in for like half an hour to see how much variation in the temperature there is over at least three cycles of your oven heating up and

cooling down. And then what you do is you take the average amount of temperature there and that'll tell you how close or far off from the programmed temperature you actually are. And if it's pretty far off, it may mean that you need to have your thermostatic calibrated, which could require a visit from a repair person. Yeah, because I mean if if you have the manual and you feel confident in your skills to to take off a panel and uh and and act and work on a thermostat,

then possibly you could do it yourself. Um. I would never attempt such a thing because I like having people who are certified that kind of stuff doing for me. That way, if they break it, I have some recourse. But anyway, yes, that's also very important. So another thing you can always do, obviously is use food thermometers to

keep track of how your food is doing. And this is probably a good idea either way, because the oven temperature is measuring, even if it's measuring it more or less accurately, it's measuring the oven temperature, not the food temperature. And what matters is the food temperature. Right. And if you're if you're cooking a turkey and you think, oh, I did this last year and it was perfect, I'm

going to do it exactly the same way. You have to remember turkeys aren't all identical, right, Like, if you have one that has thicker, thicker muscle tissue, so that you know it's going to take a little longer for the heat to be able to cook that food, that meat, then clearly you need to keep an eye on that sort of stuff. So even as there can be variation in ovens, there's also obviously a huge amount of variation

in the food we put in our ovens. Or even something as simple is not remembering which rack you put it on. Putting it in a different place in the oven can make a difference. Oh sure, yeah, putting putting something on the top rack versus the iraq actually does make a difference. Um, So these are all factors that

you have to take into an account. Or how about the fact that you've got stuff like a window in your oven typically, I mean most people do, right, so that you can look through the little window and stare and say, does that look golden brown to you? Jonathan? Stop? Tell me the definition of golden brown? How is it different than golden or brown? Uh? You know, I think golden brown. The definition is how can we make something sound so enticing as to convince people to buy this oven?

Cooking all foods to a delicious golden might be a little cynical because of certain life choices that are coming up to me right now, which involves buying big appliances. Yeah, so, Jonathan, are you in the in the market for an oven right now? Not right now, but please don't call me if you're an oven salesperson because I'm already dealing with

sales people right now. Anyway, that the idea being that the windows is a nice thing to have, and windows typically don't allow a whole lot of heat to escape. They're double pained. Usually they don't. There's not If the seal on your door is fine, that's not allowing a lot of heat to escape. That's not a problem. Yeah, Well, the problem is that they're not like the walls of your oven. What are the walls of your oven supposed

to do. They're supposed to radiate that heat into the chamber of the oven, right, Yeah, they absorbed the heat that's created by the heating element and then they're supposed to send it right back in. Yeah, but the window doesn't really do that. Window the windows ability to do that is much more limited compared to the walls the oven. So you have this zone on the walls of your oven or on a wall of your oven that is not equivalent to the others, which again can lead to

some uneven heating and cooking. Um. I don't know that there's necessarily a huge issue for most types of of stuff you're gonna be doing in the oven, unless you're cooking at particularly high temperatures. So if you're baking something in the baking temperature is pretty high, then you might run into some problems with this where the unevenness actually comes into play, whereas at the lower temperatures it's not

such a big deal. Um. So, if you're like doing something where you're just roasting some vegetables or or something along those lines, it's not a big it's not a big problem. But if you're baking a cake or something, then it might be. Well, this issue brings us to one of the main things we're going to talk about in this episode, which is an article that the address

this very topic. Yeah, it was published in twenty in the I Triple A Spectrum by Nathan Mirvold and w Waite Gibbs, and that it's essentially the same basic topic we're talking about today. Can you design a better oven? And their answer is oh, yeah, yeah. I get the feeling as I read this article that they're they're that they could be like the two guys in front of a group of people just doing that fast paced pitch

back and forth. There's like a whole series of kids in the hall sketches that are in that in that vein, but ovens, right, yeah, they're the worst. Tell me about it. A lot of times when I read about Nathan Mervold, I feel like I'm getting a very fast pitch on something. Yeah, don't get me wrong. I love this article, right I. I really enjoyed reading it, and I enjoyed the the proposals made in it. I questioned how easy some of

them are. I mean, he's pretty glib or they are pretty glib with some of the explanations of how we can improve the oven without going into too much actual detail how that would work, but um it is. It's fun to read, So let's talk about some of them. Well, yeah, I think I should let you know. Is basically how they start off first sentence, most of us bake, roast, and broil our food using a technology that was invented

five thousand years ago for drying mud bricks. The oven already fire got the gate with a with a real hard hitting approach. That's a good opener, though, is it evokes this feeling of disgust. It's like, I don't want to eat mud bricks? What are we in the Stone Age? Not hardly. But they do go on to talk about some of the problems with ovens today and that you know, I am not an oven engineer, but based on the way they explain, and most of these things make sense

to me. Uh So, Number one, they argue that the oven is not well designed to cook food equally well under varying conditions. For for all the things that we use ovens to do, our ovens are okay at doing them all, but not perfect at doing all of them right. So they're not going to cook food equally l depending on the load, meaning you know how much food is in the oven. It's going to vary if it's full

versus mostly empty. Based on the placement of the food, you might just get better cooking on the top rack that on the bottom. Uh. And frequency of checking how how much are you checking on the food? Opening the door looking inside to see Yeah, opening the door is a bad idea in general. We'll talk a little more about that in a little bit later, but yeah, don't like.

It's so tempting to do because one, you want to get a chance to look at it, and too, you want to release that sweet, sweet aroma of whatever it is that's in the oven and fill that the whole kitchen with that scent. Is you should you should resist that temptations an incredibly pleasurable sensation, Which is why I have to remind myself not to do that very thing of opening the oven door every five minutes. I'm I've

been guilty of it before, is what I'm saying. I have to, especially when the food you're working on is really good. I've got one thing I won't share my whole recipe on the podcast, but one of the things I really love making in the oven lately is an oven baked all day red sauce like a tomato sauce.

Uh and so, and when you bake it in the oven instead of on the stovetop, you get some browning on the surface of the Yeah, you do it on a low heat, but you just leave it going in the oven for a long time and when it makes it really rich and delicious, it's awesome. I'm gonna ask you for that recipe later. Uh, we're not. But we're not here to talk about a recipe. That's that's a Chuff Watson episodes. You can go listen to some crazy recipes in that show. Okay, So moving on to more

of the problems with ovens they mentioned. Another one is that the oven wastes a lot of heat energy. We we alluded to some of this earlier. For for one example, air is a very poor conductor of heat, and yet it's what has to conduct the heat from the heating element to the walls of the oven. Uh. And then the walls from the oven retained the heat that allows

the oven to maintain its temperature. So, as we said earlier, as the air heats up, it expands, it takes up more space in order to keep the oven from exploding as the air expands, You've got to vent some of that air out of the oven, which is just purely wasted energy unless you're also trying to heat your kitchen at the same time. Another admission I'll make is that

I've done that before I was in graduate school. I think about um like so so one of the things, it's funny that you put lasagna in as the example earlier, One of the things my mom used to make that I thought was amazing was a phenomenal lasagna, Like she just made a killer lasagna. And my birthdays in the summer and I she would ask me, like, do you want me to make that lasagna for your birthday? Like, yes, please, because it's awesome, which was a huge thing. I mean

it was. It was a several hours to put this all together and get it to work right. It's a multi stage process, and of course the last part of it was putting the lasagna in the oven and allowing it to make my birthdays in late June. I grew up in a in in rural Georgia. It would turn the house into just a like you might as well open the doors. You're actually gonna get cooler opening the doors in late June and Georgia than you would um having the air condition you go because it's just not

going to be able to handle that. And that's that's tough because you're sitting there thinking like, Wow, this is actually energy that we could be using to cook the food, but instead it's being wasted on making the house almost uninhabitable. Yeah. Yeah, so so that is a problem. And then you've also got the problem with the oven doesn't heat up as fast as it could. That this this is more with traditional ovens. I've tended to notice the convection ovens heat

up pretty fast. Yeah, I've got a on mine. I have an option called rapid preheat, which turns on the convection fans and heats up much faster. And uh it's it's remarkable how much, sir, the rapid preheat is compared to just if I do a regular preheat. Yeah. Another one is just generally ovens don't cook as evenly as they could, especially as they could if you had like a rotisserie or something. I mean you can have some

ovens equipped with something like this. Uh. Then there are other things with the oven doesn't know with precision how hot it is. We mentioned that there's variable humidity and this leads to different outcomes. And so essentially the two guys behind this article claim that the that we have

all the technology to fix these problems today. Yeah. I love the idea that again, just getting that vision of the two guys standing in front of the group just saying the future of ovens is hot, hot, hot, Well, Jonathan, I think it is hot, hot, hot. Well that might be because you've read the article as well and saw that they've talked about a lot of different proposed changes to the oven that they claim will make the oven

far more efficient and effective in cooking foods. Yeah, well, I'm going to start with one that I either, you know, I want to give them the benefit of the doubt and just say maybe I don't really understand the purpose, but I was a little iffy on this first one. So one is an oven that varies its heat transfer

method depending on at what temperature you're cooking. And so I'm going to read a quote by them, and the quote is at two hundred degrees celsius or below, convection moves most to the heat, but at four hundred degrees celsius, radiant energy starts doing a fair amount of the heat transfer. At eight hundred degrees celsius, radiation overwhelms convection. There, they're just talking about the natural ways that heat transfer changes

at different temperatures. Uh, they continue, why couldn't we have an oven designed to cook primarily by convection at low temperatures that switches to radiant heat for high temperature baking. So two hundred degrees celsius, that's they're talking about convection there. That's four hundred degrees fahrenheit. If you're used to cooking fahrenheit temperatures, Uh, four hundred degrees celsius is seven hundred and fifty degrees fahrenheit, and that's where it starts shifting

to radiant heat. Um eight hundred degrees celsius is like fifteen hundred degrees fahrenheits so blowing glass. And unless you're operating a restaurant with like a pizza oven or some incredibly very unusually hot oven, I don't see the appeal Like at home, who cooks it temperatures like this? Yeah? I um, I don't think I've ever pushed mine above four fifty fahrenheit at home because I almost everything I cooked requires that temperature or lower, so it would be

very rare. But then I'm also not a baker. Yeah, yeah, I mean there there are some things that are very nice to have a very hot oven for. I'm not sure about fifteen hundred degrees fahrenheit. That seems it might be a tad excessive, but yeah, my oven does not go anywhere near seven hundred and fifty degrees fahrenheit four d re celsius where the radiant heat starts kicking in.

Uh So, yeah, I also don't really know how they propose this works, other than the fans just stopped blowing for convection and the you just concentrate all the heating

elements directly behind the oven walls. Well, this could have this this may be able to tie into something that comes up later in their suggestions, which is variable emittant surfaces also got you well, And then they also mentioned something else that I talked about earlier, the idea that when you open that oven door, you are releasing a lot of heat, thus cooling the interior of the oven, making it less efficient over time. Right, This idea that

you really shouldn't do that. I've seen a lot of different um places kind of site, although I haven't seen the actual uh source of the information that it drops the temperature by about twenty five degrees fahrenheit when you're just just opening the door to look in and then closing it, and that means the whole system has to warm up again. There's this inadvertent cooling that's happened. It

messes things up. In other words, yeah, um, so the authors of this piece actually say that people are just always going to open the door and check. There's no way to convince them not to do it. So instead of just having an instruction manual that says, don't open the door to check, just look through the window, they say that you can protect the oven cavity from heat loss by having the door frame equipped with blowers that generate a curtain of air to prevent hot air from escaping.

This would work kind of like you may have seen some cooler cooler containers at the grocery store like this that have an air curtain that blows across the surface. I've walked into buildings that use this where they have like the air curtain just on the other side of the doors. That lead into the building, and as soon as those doors open, the air curtain starts blowing down and it prevents the cold air from inside the building.

A being again, we're in Georgia where it gets pretty hot in the summer, So in order to reduce the energy uh consumption of a building, you might install something like that so that you don't you're not constantly losing the air conditioned air and having to cool it over and over again. Yeah, that being said, I wonder what it would feel like if your hand came in contact with the curtain of hot air. Um, Well, I wonder what temperature the curtain is. Yeah, it may not be.

It may not be at the same temperature as whatever the internal temperature of the oven is. I don't know, but it does sound like that could be a toasty encounter. I granted it, air is a poor conductor of heat. It's not like you would immediately get burned, but you would feel how hot it was pretty quickly. Well, we've probably had the experience if you've peeked in an oven, like opening the door up and having the hot air come out and kind of kind of scald your face.

But I bet one thing you've noticed. Is it's even and worse if there's something steaming in the oven? Yes, yeah, because well, I mean then you've got water, which is a better conductor in the sense that once it hits you, it's gonna continue to release that that heat. It's not not a better conductor so much as it holds onto that heat pretty well and then it when it gets

on you. Uh, steam burns are no joke. But but anyway, so creating this curtain would help reduce the heat loss from people being nosy and opening up the oven door before they're supposed to. So depending on how expensive that would be to do, how safe it would be, maybe I don't know, I might just kind of go with, like maybe some text on the door that says do not open during cooking. Yeah, I mean I could see this, and I don't know, because in a professional kitchen people

know better. But so, but it's hard for me to imagine something quite that extravagant in a home kitchen. Although to be fair, we've seen some pretty extravagant appliances come out over the last you know, ten years. So well, let's talk about some of the other UH advances that they've proposed. Okay, here's one that's incredibly simple. They just suggest adding more reflective surfaces inside of the oven to

create more even browning during broiling. Yeah. They actually talk about how in broiling, a lot of people will create kind of a um a little almost like a collar out of aluminum foil, like home hacks that just have like foil things to reflect more of the heat back in. Right, And they said, well, there's no reason why oven manufacturers couldn't just build this in to begin with, so that it's part of the system as opposed to something that people have to hack together to make it happen. Yeah.

Another argument they make is that on while we're talking about broilers, you could replace the flame. Yeah, this is assuming you've got a gas broiler. You could replace the flame broilers with gas catalysis, so of course. Yeah. Well, so what they say is you could have flameless catalytic broilers that would take incoming gas just regularly you know gas, and then filter it through a catalytic metal that's bound

to a ceramic plate. And the catalytic metal would make the gas oxidized in the presence of air, and this gives off carbon dioxide, water, vapor, and heat and then the heat gets absorbed by the ceramic plate, and then the plate radiates it evenly throughout the oven. They claim this brown's food more evenly and it's very energy efficient. Well, again,

we can't assess the veracity of these claims. Jonathan and I have not done extensive testing on prototype ovens, so I guess we'll just have to take their word for it at this point. Though, I will note that though I usually wouldn't recommend reading the comments on an article, the comments below this article were interesting. A lot of them seem to be from the engineering readership at the I Triple A Spectrum, arguing with the wisdom of some

of the suggestions made in this article. Interesting and they also had some other suggestions as well, including getting read of that window so that all the interior facing surfaces of the oven were pretty much identical. That you don't have to worry about that one surface no longer radiating heat back at the same level as everything else. But Jonathan, if you get rid of the window, how are you going to check on your food without opening the door?

You put a camera in it. Hey, now that's pretty smart, And that's actually one feature of a product that we're going to talk about later in the episode. Yeah, Actually, I've seen a couple of different uh appliance manufacturers talk about having cameras installed inside the ovens to to be able to track that kind of stuff without again having to peer through a grease stained window or crack open the oven door and ruin everything. And now the sou

flea will go crazy and rampage of the down. So there was that, and then there are you know, we talked a little bit about some of the alternatives to the electric and gas ovens, or the typical electric ovens. Anyway, the typical electrical oven as um heating elements that you are are essentially giant resistors, right you run they get

hot when the electricity goes through them. Yeah, you run the current through them, and because they resist the flow of electricity, that a lot of that energy is converted over to heat, and that's what you used to heat stuff up. Well, there are other ways you can use electricity to generate heat, although not directly or as directly

as that, For example, halogen lamps. This is like a really giant, industry sized version of an easy bake oven, which would just use a tiny little lightbulb, but um, Yeah, you use a halogen lamp to generate heat and cook food, and it has the same basic set up as any other oven, although in this case the heating chamber may be made out of glass instead of uh, you know, the stainless deal or whatever material, ceramic, whatever tiled materials

the oven that you would be using normally. But it's radiant heat, it is, and it can distribute the heat with fans, so there's also confection cooking in there. But the heat itself comes from the halogen lamp, which is projecting infrared light, so not visible light, but infrared light, the same sort of stuff. The heats are planet from the sun. So um, it's it's one of the alternative approaches that, according to some people, would be far more

efficient than our conventional ovens. Yeah, and this is also mere bolding. Gibbs suggest using halogen lamps as one possible way to create rapid pulses of heat to simulate the even cooking effects of a Rotisseriye, So you've seen rotisserie chickens and stuff at the grocery store before, at the you know some restaurants, haven't. You put it on skewer and then you rotate it over the fire or near

the heating element. So turning the food as it cooks is a good thing to do because it creates gentler, more even heating because one part of the food heats as it moves towards the heat source, and then as it moves a way, the heat on the surface can

dissipate inside the food. Uh and the authors claim you can recreate this this gentle and even heating effect with pulses rather than steady direct heat and regular heating elements would have trouble creating fast pulses like this, but they suggest that you could create fast pulses of heat by having oven walls that quickly change their conductance, for example.

So their ideas that you might do this with variable emittance coatings, and this would mean a stuff where a stuff, This would mean some some stuff coding the oven walls where you can apply electrical current and this changes the transparency or reflectivity of the surface. And I think the idea here would be that you could repetitively apply the current to the oven walls to have them alternately reflecting heat in word toward the food and then giving it

a rest for a minute. This seems like incredibly complicated advance to what has previously been a relatively simple appliance. Um. But but of course they also suggest haligen lamps. Yes, I was saying, that's one way you could maybe create fast pulses of heat to get that slow even effect.

And there were some other ones we could talk about, for example, using ceramic elements heating elements, so you would use intermetallic ceramic compounds, which have the features you would want in an oven, that's being that they're electrically conductive and also that they have a relatively high melting point somewhere north of two thousand degrees celsius, so they're going to be uh sturdy enough to withstand the temperatures of

your your oven. And uh they are said to be more efficient than other types of of heating elements, so that's also an alternative. But then what about water vapor? Yeah, this is the thing. So they talk extensively about controlled water vapor ovens in their in their piece. And I don't know, maybe I'm weird, but I would tend to think if you're oven is full of steam, it's not

really an oven. It's more of a steam cooker. I mean This is a it's not just a proposal of there is controlled vapor ovens or or a thing that that exists out there. You can buy them now. Then there are various different kinds of them, but they essentially use like a tray of water or something like that to maintain a level of human set level of humidity inside the oven. And this can be useful for certain things, you know, for getting a certain even type of cooking,

for controlling the humidity. It seems like it would prevent the kind of browning that you want on the outside of foods when you normally do roasting in the oven. But there are also some variable models I read about. They sound very expensive, but you can like essentially turn on and off the roasting versus steaming options, and so I guess that's another thing that you could do if

you wanted. But anyway, I wanted to point out again I mentioned this a minute ago, but if you go and read this article, I actually thought there was some interesting conversation in the comments section where people were talking about some criticisms of their ideas, like how much would all this cost? Would it really make enough of a difference to justify the price and the materials. Right. Yeah, if you if you were to say, like, here's the

Oven of the future. It costs a year seventy five thousand dollars, you might say, well, you know, if my cupcake is a little gooey on the inside, I'm just gonna live with it. I can stop up that goo with all of my paper money, right exactly, all the money that I did not spend on the Oven of the Future. But but there are some ovens, a couple of them that we wanted to highlight just as sort of markers of where things are going right now. Yeah, so if you, if you just look it up on

the internet, say, what are people touting right now? Is the smart oven of the future, you know, the most cutting edge of an out there. So we looked around just to see what what was on people's minds. Now, there was one product that I found several pieces about that was announced back in I think the first time. I don't know, there might have been uh proposals earlier, but it's first started really getting pressed in and it's called June June the Oven, like like Cleaver, I didn't

think about that connection. I'm just that's the first thing that making dinner Yeah, okay, so June claims to be well, June doesn't personally claim to be The people who create June claim that it is an intelligent oven or a computer that cooks. Now, if June does claim to be an intelligent of it, and we should probably listen at that point, because something has happened. Yes, get inside me. June has become sentient. I'll show you why you created me.

It's a smallish countertop of it, about the size of a toaster oven. Actually that has about one cubic foot of cavity space, so it's not huge. It's not going to make a big Thanksgiving turkey, but it'll it'll make you know most of the stuff you'd be roasting as long as it's not gigantic. And it as carbon fiber heating elements convection fans, so it's got some some good heating technology in there. Uh. It has a digital core

temperature probe. Now you could just buy one of these separately and use it with your regular oven, but this one is linked to the oven itself and supposedly interacts with June's smart elements, so it's got like a This is a probe you plug into your food and June

the oven knows how hot your food is on the inside. So, in other words, June the oven would continue cooking your turkey when you thought, oh, it's got to be done by now, but June's like, no, this is not the right internal temperature for it to be safe for human consumption. So I'm not gonna stop cooking just yet. Well, I haven't used a June oven, and the details on that are a little bit uh difficult, but it seems that it could have that functionality as long as it's had

the right programming. So not necessarily uh outwardly stated as this is a feature, but is possible that it could be a feature based upon the vague wording that we do have access to. Yes, all right, they're all so weight sensors. That mean you could use the top of the oven as a kitchen scale. That sounds handy, But then again, you could also just have a separate kitchen scale. Yeah,

but Joe, come on this way, Yes, save space. I don't know how many counters you got in your kitchen, Joe, but I got so few counters I gotta I gotta maximize the space I got. That's true if you have very little counterspace. This might actually be useful. Yeah, it's actually I like that idea a lot, although it does suggest to me that you would probably have to, you know, constantly be cleaning the top of your oven. I mean you you would likely be using little containers and you'd

have to weigh the containers first. That four ounces of honey, I just poured four ounces of directly on top of the oven. Yeah, um, okay, what what was I making in it? I don't know. It was like a very very sweet bread. Yeah maybe. Uh So. Of course it

has WiFi connectivity, which is needed for system updates. But also this is so this is so you can connect to your phone for the smart elements, so being a smart oven it yet, like I said, it connects to an app on your smartphone for remote cooking, which means you can use your phone to adjust temperature time and you can get push notifications when your food is ready if you're I don't know, not in a position to

hear the oven. Uh so that's not bad. But and we was out working on the car in the garage exactly. And so we've talked about functionality like this before as a sort of obvious place for kitchen appliances to go for a while. Yeah, and so this is sort of the Internet of Things applied to the kitchen. And uh, this isn't the only oven that offers connectivity and links

to a smartphone app. Some full size ovens already on the market have versions of this, though just from a quick peek at the reviews, it didn't sound like most of these apps are very impressive yet. I think it's the same path we saw smart TVs take. So when smart TVs first came out, it was all about the widgets that you would have on your screen, which really

just took up screen space. And we're not terribly responsive or necessarily helpful, and so it ended up being kind of a a non starter for a lot of people. It wasn't until about three or four generations later that we started seeing smart TVs that actually work the way people want them to. Yeah. Uh. So the app also has also has some sort of library recipe library feature. I'm honestly never really impressed with stuff like this, because

we already have a searchabowl recipe library. It's called the Internet and now that way hang on though, if it has a direct line to Chef Watson okay, okay, well, no, okay,

I do want to be fair. I guess I can see the appeal of a specialized library, Like if it has instructions tailored specifically to this oven, right, so it can tell you exactly how long to uh to you know how long it needs to cook because it knows all the parameters, or if it doesn't even need to tell you, like if you can select select a recipe for the oven, as long as you put the right ingredients in, it knows automatically what to do and just does it itself, so your job is just the prep

and and putting it together, and then it takes care of everything else. So if that is a feature that it's smartness offers, that might be a helpful feature to somebody. Um, But then again, I would say if the oven does actually need special instructions, that makes me worry that it will not perform as expected on standard recipes written for standard ovens. We'll talk a little bit more about that and the other oven that I'll be covering in just

a minute. Yeah. So then there's another feature, and I think this one for me is the real true big selling point. Internal digital camera heat resistant. So it's got a what it calls food recognition. Supposedly, the oven has some ability to look at what food you stick inside it and to make cooking recommendations to match, and so this might be useful, especially to novice cooks. But I'm a little skep t goal. I think they're trying to

be humble about it. They're not saying like it's going to recognize anything you put in there, but it might recognize something that's yeah. I mean again, considering the variation of food it is, it's hard for me to imagine how that works. I mean, granted, we've seen things about machine learning, like the whole idea that a I can learn the concept of a cat by looking at all these different pictures of cats and be able to tell

the difference in general between cats and people, with some exceptions. Somehow, I doubt it's quite there. But here's where here's where I think the real serious appeal is, at least to me. You can see what your food looks like remotely via video feed to your smartphone, and the oven software will create time labs the video of the cooking process. Now, this will clearly be a huge hit. Did you remember a few years ago when Netflix had a thing where

they released on April Fool's Day. Uh, I think it was a video of bacon cooking, but it was backwards, so in other words, it started at the end where bacon was fully cooked, and then if you watched it over the course of like forty five minutes, you would watch the bacon uncooked. That's kind of cool forty five minutes, Joe, if you watched the whole thing, I mean I had it on. I didn't. I wouldn't say that I watched

it the whole time, but I definitely had it on. No, this seems very useful for making gifts, and it seems useful for definitely going to be useful for people who, for example, we're in a food blog or something like you want they want to show how the food looks when it's cooking. If you've got a YouTube channel and it's all about ways to cook different things, this could

be a really useful tool. Yeah. So the camera seems to me, like hands down the most appealing part of this product, especially that you can check what that You can check the camera from your phone, so you could be in the other room and look at what your food looks like. Right now this is what I beating if only I were in the other room. No, I think that's actually a pretty cool feature if it could be affordable. And okay, well that's that's a good point,

if it could be affordable. So how much is this oven gonna cost? Well, the last figure I saw is it's going to be about dollars. I mean it's this is like a countertop oven. Yeah, there there are full size ovens that don't cost this much. Yeah, this isn't. This isn't a full oven with stove top. This is a countertop appliance that you could put next to your microwave. Yes, yes, that's true. And now I do want to say it's not the only oven on the market with the camera.

I did a search and found some press about an Electroluxe oven that also has a built in camera and smart connectivity. Though the camera appears to be in the handle peeking through the window, rather than inside the oven, so it's essentially the same view you would have if you were bent down looking through the little window. Yeah, so I think the inside the oven view is kind

of crucial. The heat resistant camera that can look down from the ceiling of the oven and and see with clarity and high rez what's actually happening inside right thumbs up for that. Yeah, I love the idea that you can have like like the equivalent of food selfies. And but the product has not been released yet. June got

some press in is supposed to ship in spring. Obviously that hasn't happened yet and the ship date has been pushed back to the end of Well, I want to talk about another one that's not too different from what you were just talking about, apart from one or two um important points, called the Tovalla oven. And this one is again about the size of like a microwave oven.

It's a countertop oven, so so similar to June in that respect, but this one actually can use different ways to cook food, including conventional oven uh, the convection oven approach, and also steaming. And the big selling point is that can automatically set itself to cook prepackaged fresh food automatically, So, in other words, you would subscribe to this food service. It's kind of like the Curig coffee maker of ovens. Right like you would buy you get fresh ingredients that

are already preseasoned, pre prepared. They're in a little package that's got a barcode on the top. You scan the barcode with this device A seven. You remove the foil it's at the top of it, You place the container in,

and it does all the rest of the work. It cooks it exactly as long as it needs to in the right method, and then afterward you're supposed to end up with they perfect, perfectly cooked dish of whatever it was that you ordered, Which is a very clever approach, right, this idea of I don't I don't have to worry about all the prep work which is very time consuming. I get fresh ingredients as supposed to frozen. You don't

have to deal with like food recognition. If you have a barcode, right, it just it knows immediately which recipe that is, and it already follows the pre programmed steps that as to follow in order to cook that particular meal. UH. You can also use it as an oven, there's UH. And it also has a smartphone component where you can use a smartphone to control the oven. You can you select which method of cooking and what temperature and all that kind of stuff, so you can use it like

a regular oven too. You don't have to follow this prefab approach. But if you did, then it makes things fairly simple, and I can see the appeal for this definitely. I mean, especially when you see services like Blue Apron out there where you can order meals and essentially it's all the ingredients and you you prepare it and you put together and cook it. That that's, you know, fairly popular. But imagine one where you don't have to do all the prep work and it's just super fast. Um, and

it's fresh food as opposed to frozen food. I could see the appeal. This one is priced at around four hundred dollars and it started off as a Kickstarter campaign, although the creators say the reason they went with the Kickstarter route was not to fund the the company, but rather to help build up awareness. So in other words, they said that they were going to be making this anyway.

I don't know how I got through Kickstarter that way, but then I don't always understand our Kickstarter approves certain things and disapproves other things, but this was but it was kind of like a marketing campaign as opposed to we need the starting capital to actually put this thing together.

At least that's what they have said. Um, So I'm keeping an eye on this because if it actually works as advertised and and people have a good impression of it, I could see myself getting something like this because I could imagine it being really useful on those days when I walk home. By the time I get to the house, I'm tired. It's it's an hour of walking, and um, I would like to be able to rest. And I'm

the cook in our family. So I start to have incredible sympathy for my poor mom who would come home from a full day of teaching elementary school to a home gotta make lasagna for Jonathan home with two kids who are like, what's for dinner as soon as you walked through the door. So, uh, yeah, I love you, Mom. So I feel a lot of sympathy for her these days, and something like this, which would be incredibly convenient if in fact it works as it is proposed to do,

seems really attractive to me. Yeah, well, we we seem Yet again, this often happens with cutting edge technologies where we're in a sort of middle period of smartness. Yeah we're getting smart ovens, but it might be right to call them sophomoric. You know, they're sort of smart now. If an oven could be really smart, like really truly smart, then obviously that that would be a big help to

lots of people. But there's I have a lot of questions with stuff at this point, Like I would be curious to see how something like June works once it's actually released, like how the food recognition elements and things like this that have been claimed and in their marketing in the past. To what extent do stuff like that really works so far? Does it really have an impact or is it just again a gimmick to sell a

particular brand of technology. Yeah, I mean if you could, if you could take the human guesswork out of cooking and just put some cookie batter in and have the oven no when the cookies are ready. When they're ready, it turns itself off and opens the door. Okay, I mean that seems cool, But do do you trust it? Right? That's I mean, that's a question that I think right now we could say probably no, but maybe maybe the

answer no won't be no forever. So I've got another basic functionality that I could personally see being very useful in ovens in the future, and that that would be the ability to have adaptive smart cooking or adaptive automated smart cooking based on food temperature as opposed to oven temperature, and so you would probably want to have the ability to have multiple different readers and different points of input. But here's an example. So you're making a standing rib

roast on Christmas Day. It's a big, expensive piece of meat and you don't want to mess it up. Now. Ideally, this piece of meat should have a gentle, pink, medium rare on the inside and be crackling crusty dark brown on the outside. This difference is ideal, but it's often difficult to achieve because there are lots of different tricks and strategies cooks have to use to try to get it.

And if you're not interested in reading up on all the best recipes and tricks to get that that contrast between the medium rare exterior and the crispy, dark brown outside, you could just tell the oven that, well, I want the roast when it's done to have an internal temperature of a hundred and thirty degrees fahrenheit and the exterior to be this color. And if the oven is smart enough to know how to do that without you, you know, messing with it over and over again. That seems like

that would be useful. Yeah. I mean when you get to the more complicated types of dishes that you would have to deal with that typically require a greater knowledge

and expertise. Uh, something like a really smart oven would become an incredibly handy right, things like the roads you were talking about, or a souflay something where you know, you're like, oh, yeah, the souffl is an example of a thing that like thirty seconds of difference, I think can make it, can just ruin it right, so that this is where it would really come in handy in And while maybe we would all love to have the skill set of a master chef, truth is, most of

us don't have the time and energy to devote to getting to that level of expertise. So it's sure to be nice to have technologies pick up the slack. You know.

There's another thing that I do want to be fair here also, I think I may have a prejudice against smart ovens and new types of cooking technologies like this because I've got sunk costs like I've I've spent a lot of time in my life already trying to develop skills and strategies for working with dumb ovens and so so you know, it could just be me be me going like I don't need that. I've learned all this stuff already. Yeah see, I've gotten to the point where

I learned all that stuff. But if it's gonna save me time and I can go and play some more Xbox while I if my oven takes care of everything, I'm going to go that route. I watch it bake on your smartphone. Yeah, yeah, I'm not much. I don't use the oven all that much in myself. I do some roasted vegetables and that's like my thing. Otherwise, the oven is my wife's domain, and the stovetop is my kingdom, so that that's kind of and and the grill as well, that is kind of where I might I rule over

that area. And then my wife is more likely to use the oven than I am. Uh. But that's that's perhaps why I would be ready to hand that stuff over to the robots. I don't really deal with it that much already. Okay, here's a question. If we all start having ovens that have cameras in them watching our food cook, is the government going to start spying on our food? What do you mean start so on that note that pretty much wraps up this episode Forward Thinking.

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