Fastest Oven in the World

The oven that heats up in seconds and cooks an entire meal in minutes.

What's going on.

I'm Rich Demiro.

This is Rich on Tech, and I'm here at a restaurant in Westwood, California, where I'm getting a demo of a new type of high tech oven. It's called the Brava and this thing is really neat. It's kind of like, you know, one of my favorite scenes in a movie is that rehydrator scene and Back to the future too. That's what this reminds me of because it's kind of this new high tech way of cooking.

But enough of me explaining it. John Pleasants is the CEO. Thanks so much for joining me.

Thank you, Rich. I love that analogy. I may, I may, I may plagiarize that. That's okay.

Has anyone ever told you that the first one?

That's literally when I got the pitch for this oven, that's what I thought of. It was like that little tiny pizza they put it in and seconds later it comes out.

To that big pizza.

Great image.

Thank you so describe the Brava oven, like, what is this thing?

Right? So it is a smart countertop oven, but.

What makes it truly different is that it's cooking with infrared light. So think about cooking in the past, right, Convection is what an oven does. Means you heat up the air, you heat up the environment inside some type of oven going back hundreds of years.

Doesn't sound very efficient anymore.

Not very efficient and not very accurate. Right.

The temperature fluctuates a lot in ovens, and also you can't target any one area of the oven. It just trying to get the entire thing into one sort of homogeneous temperature. Of course, people cook with conduction, which is anything over fire or stovetop, when you have something cold touching something.

Hot and the heat transfers.

The big invention after those two technologically was the microwave sixty years ago, and of course that changed everybody's life and it became ubiquitous in households. When they came out, they were super expensive, thousands and thousands of dollars, and now, of course you can get them incredibly cheaply at any mass merchant.

Well Amazon just introduced one for sixty.

Bucks, and they can be much cheaper than that if you got to like Walmart.

But that one, of course has a Lexento, which is their main deal.

But microwaves are really good for some things, and they're really not so good at other things. Right, they don't really cook food. Their reheating is very inconsistent. And I'm not here to slam microwaves. It's just that they have a sort of limited function.

No one's ever thought of a microwave as cooking high quality food.

It's just for heating things up.

Can you never serve something from a microwave to a dinner party?

Yeah?

And what's actually happening with the microwave, which I get, I suppose most many many people know of your audience, is it's simulating water molecules. So it's pretty good for doing a cup of coffee. Matter of fact, it's really great at that a heating liquids. Outside of that, when you get into foods, it really starts to become much less consistent. We have the fourth next big way of cooking,

Right, it is people.

This technology has been for around around for a long time. It's the primary you know, it's a primary part of physics of life.

But we've just harnessed it with.

Some very specific bulbs and then a ton of software feedback loop sensors, AI machine vision that controls these lamps. We have six lamps inside the oven and we're controlling them very specifically to deliver the perfect food result, hopefully every time.

So you've got six lights. There's also a touch screen on the top. Yeah, tell me the function of that touch screen.

That's your basic navigation. It's just like using an iPhone, if you will. You go to there and we have different sections. We have recipes, so our chefs have come up with what we think are fantastic recipes and we'll continue to add daily in perpetuity. And those tend to be multi ingredient items that could be a little trickier if someone didn't want to try to figure that out on their own. But you can also go into combos,

These recipes out with the community.

So everybody who's using Brava can basically be a chef and transfer their expertise to other people in the community.

Okay, so the demo you showed me we took a piece of salmon, we put it in the tray is sort of specially made for your oven. It's divided into three kind of zones, so you put, you know, whatever you put in Zone one. Maybe it's a vegetable zone two, the salmon zone three. Whatever you put in there, you tell the oven what you put in there, so it adjusts those lights accordingly to kind of sear and to cook.

And what is the result?

I mean the salmon and I had tasted fantastic and it tasted like it was seared on the bottom but nicely cooked on the top.

What's going on inside that oven?

It's kind of exactly what you just said, like it. No, you were kind of painting by numbers. When you get into a complicated cook which is in this case, three different ingredients, one of them super sensitive, which is a cherry tomato broccolini which wanted to be seared, a salmon which you wanted to be very very gentle on the inside and see the heck out of the skin on the bottom to.

Make it actually not only edible, but delicious.

Yeah, you need to put it in the right zone and it will take care of itself.

There's just some very few simple steps that you saw.

There's a temperature sensor that goes into the proteins, You put it in the right zone, you pick the right recipe, and you're off and running. If you want to mess with it, and like not, you know, put the put food in the right zone or put the tray on the wrong thing, it can go off. I mean there is some agency each users. You have to do a

And the oven itself does not get hot on the outside. It's a small kind of a table all right, I guess not tabletop.

Countertop is what we call it. You countertop kind of bigger than a standard toaster oven.

Slightly bigger than a radiotoaster of and I think it's twelve by thirteen by fourteen in terms of a cubic space.

Got kind of a rubber top which you can almost you can set like a hot plate on absolutely so.

Once you take the tray out, you can put it on there.

And as an illumining case, you know, we wanted to make it designed to look kind of high tech and cool, and that aluminum casing also is protecting for temperature, so that the oven itself that you touched.

Doesn't get too hot, and the camera inside. Yeah, tell me about the functionality because there's no window on the door. Correct, probably for cooking reasons. I'm guessing the way you're cooking. Tell me about the camera.

The camera has two main functions.

The first is is that as you as you point out, you can actually see what's going on inside the oven, and we send it to your phone, so you can see what's going on when you're in the living room, not in the kitchen, to see where it where's my cook and we'll show you the time, the temperature, where everything is, as well as the view of the oven.

So wait, that's perfect because I do this thing when I broil salmon where I'm checking it every one minute, I'm pulling out the salmon to see.

And the heat's coming on and then you might have to take it out and see it later in the top I mean all that stuff, right, So you basically can can watch all that.

So that's the I'm gonna call it.

The UXX part of the experience. The more complicated thing is using it for a machine vision. So we'll use the example of toast where you say, okay, I like my toast a certain shade of brown. Well that's out of a continual of you know, an infinite number of shades of brown, right, you get very very specific there. So we're using the camera to do things like look at the specific piece of toast and monitor its color.

At different color levels, so you have.

To be able to watch the differentiation in the texture of the toast. And this is a lot of algorithms and machine vision going on. It's basically a neural network where we've pumped in tens of thousands of different photographs of what's going on with toast, so that it is learning from that consistently and watching what's happening in the pock marks of the toast so they can deliver you the perfect toast. That's where the thing gets pretty complicated.

It sounds great and we tried it. It's the food tasted fantastic. I'm really impressed. But the reality is it's an expensive device.

Yep.

It's one thousand dollars yep. And to some people that may be fine. I mean, we're spending one thousand dollars on a cell phone now, yep. And then of in is something this can actually save you money, I believe over the term of a couple of years, or even maybe in the first year by not eating out as much. Yeah, if yeah, if we have it.

Is nine ninety five, we have a finance plan that can be as low as thirty two dollars a month. And if you just use that number or it'll exaggerated up to fifty.

Dollars a month. For a second, if you're eating out, you.

Know, I don't know, eight, ten, twelve, fifteen times a month because it's sort of your go to.

If you just knocked one of those nights off.

You basically would be paying for the oven in real time because you'd be saving fifty dollars a month, right, and it's also healthier and so and then again, what's your time worth? Like, you know, if you're saving how long did it take you to go out to get to get a meal when you could have been ten minutes been eating something you have better quality with, less healthier and healthier. Right, So when you start to think about all those things, what's my time worth? What's my

And I'm not eating out, I'm not spending that money.

When you think about it in that context, I would argue it is not cheap, and it is nine hundred ninety five dollars, But boyd is it if it really if you really bring in your life, it can change it and I feel like it can pay itself back in matters of months, not years.

Okay, do you think you're going to change the kitchen with this? I mean the microwave was kind of like the last revolution in the kitchen. We've had assorted gadgets come and go. Is this the next big wave in cooking?

I think yes.

So this way of cooking within thread light is more precise, more energy efficient, makes better tasting and healthier food. So when I say that and stand by that comment, I think that I'm making this up now. Twenty five percent of all ovens worldwide and fifteen or years will have this technology in it. I mean, it is a better it is a it is a step function change in the way people can cook. I hope Proves continues to

And you said pizza. I mentioned the pizza at the beginning with Back to the Future. Yeah, so you can just stick I mean, clearly, we're gonna hope people make nice you know, flaming Yon's and salmon and you know, lamb in this thing.

But the reality is a lot of people are going to stick a pizza in there.

It's great, It's perfect because you want pizza really hot.

You want that bottom stone that it sits on in this case, on our on our trays. You want that thing to get up to you know, you want that oven at eight hundred degrees or whatever. Right, so you need intense power and that's, you know, thankfully what we have in this thing.

John Pleasant, CEO of Brava, the oven that is trying to change the way we cook in the kitchen.

Thanks for joining me, Rich, Thank you so much.

I really appreciate it.

Thanks for a good meal too, all right.

Man, And if you want to learn more about the Brava Oven, you can look in the show notes or go to my website rich on tech dot tv to see some pictures and.

Video, and you can also see the meal that I ate from it. Thanks so much for listening.

I'm Rich Termiro.

I'll talk to you real soon.