Speaker 1: Brought to you by Toyota. Let's go places. Welcome to
Speaker 1: Forward Thinking either and welcome to Forward Thinking, the podcast
Speaker 1: that looks at the future and says, oh, Toaster, don't
Speaker 1: you put the burn on me? I'm Jonathan Strickland and
Speaker 1: I'm Joe McCormick, and our other regular host, Laurens Vogelbamba
Speaker 1: is not with us today, but she will be back soon.
Speaker 1: So today, you know, a lot of times Jonathan and
Speaker 1: we talk about some kind of world changing proposition, like
Speaker 1: planetary defense exactly, artificial intelligence, radical life extensions, space elevators,
Speaker 1: colonizing the moon right right right right, the the you know,
Speaker 1: the whole idea of the singularity, where we transform into
Speaker 1: the post human species, where we're part man, part machine.
Speaker 1: All awesome, But sometimes we focus on the little things too.
Speaker 1: And so one question we often like to ask is,
Speaker 1: in this age of innovation, are are some of our
Speaker 1: simplest and most reliable devices and machines actually things that
Speaker 1: still can be improved? Or have we already reached peak toaster?
Speaker 1: Have we already reached peak vacuum cleaner? And today the
Speaker 1: one we wanted to look at was the oven. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the work horse in your kitchen, standard, basic, pretty simple machine.
Speaker 1: Is there any way that ovens could be better than
Speaker 1: they are today? And if there is a way they
Speaker 1: could be better than they are today, is it worth it?
Speaker 1: Should we try to improve this device? Right? And and
Speaker 1: just as a peak behind the curtain, guys, what happens
Speaker 1: sometimes that Joe and I will meet up with some
Speaker 1: of the other folks behind forward thinking and we have
Speaker 1: these big pitch meetings, like one every few months, maybe
Speaker 1: like every once a quarter or something like that. Well,
Speaker 1: we'll get together and we just start throwing out ideas
Speaker 1: about various topics that we can cover. And once in
Speaker 1: a while someone throws out something that on the surfaces.
Speaker 1: You know, you're like, wow, why would we even cover that?
Speaker 1: And then you think, well, know, this is a valid question.
Speaker 1: Can can we take something as established as the oven
Speaker 1: and and make measurable improvements not just tiny improvements? And
Speaker 1: efficiency which is important, don't don't get me wrong. Energy
Speaker 1: efficiency is very important. You want, you know, you want
Speaker 1: to have good efficiency, You want to have a good
Speaker 1: ability to cook food thoroughly and properly. But but how
Speaker 1: much better can we get? And it turned out that
Speaker 1: this was kind of an interesting question to sort of
Speaker 1: rattle around. Yeah, totally. So let's let's take a look
Speaker 1: at the oven. Let's get the old oven out and
Speaker 1: pry the door open and poke it and prod it
Speaker 1: and see if there's anything that can be done with
Speaker 1: this old honky beast. Okay, and now the first question
Speaker 1: we have to ask is how does an oven do
Speaker 1: what it does? How does an oven actually cook food?
Speaker 1: And we're talking specifically about the oven compartment, not the
Speaker 1: not the stovetop or anything, but really the oven itself. Well,
Speaker 1: you may remember from elementary school science class that there
Speaker 1: are three main ways you're gonna get heat transferred from
Speaker 1: one place to another via physics. So one is going
Speaker 1: to be radiation radiant heat, and this does occur in ovens.
Speaker 1: This is heating via electromagnetic radiation, the infrared part of
Speaker 1: the spectrum. It's the same way the Sun heats the Earth.
Speaker 1: There's nothing in between the Earth and the Sun but
Speaker 1: a bunch of space, and yet these electromagnetic rays can
Speaker 1: reach us and and make our planet nice and warm.
Speaker 1: And in the same sense, the heating elements and the
Speaker 1: walls of your oven can radiate heat throughout sending these
Speaker 1: infrared rays towards your frozen lasagna and and bringing it
Speaker 1: to a nice bubbly finish. All right, so that's that's
Speaker 1: one of three. But you said they're two more, right,
Speaker 1: so right, Well, of course there's also conduction. Oh short conduction.
Speaker 1: This is a pretty simple idea. It's where you've got
Speaker 1: the transfer of heat between stuff that's in direct contact
Speaker 1: with one another. Right, So, conducting heat. If you were
Speaker 1: to put some sort of conductive material onto a hot surface,
Speaker 1: that heat would then pass into the the conductive material
Speaker 1: you've pushed put down there. And some stuff conducts heat
Speaker 1: really well, like most metals. Yeah, they're great conductors for heat.
Speaker 1: Some stuff does not conduct heat very well. That's what
Speaker 1: we use as insulators, things like you know, like the
Speaker 1: rubber you might use for a potholder type thing, or
Speaker 1: or maybe air. Actually, just one of the funny things
Speaker 1: that most of the cooking by touching that happens in
Speaker 1: your oven happens because your food is touching air that
Speaker 1: is hot because the oven gets the air hot. But
Speaker 1: air is not a good conductor of heat. One way
Speaker 1: to make it a better conductor of heat is to
Speaker 1: uh is, to augment that through convection. Convection is the
Speaker 1: third form of transfer of heat energy, and this happens
Speaker 1: when you transfer heat energy through a moving fluid like
Speaker 1: air or water, So you have currents of circulation that
Speaker 1: move hot fluid from one place to another. Convection of
Speaker 1: an than most cases, uses fans to circulate hot air
Speaker 1: coming off of the heating elements, and by doing this
Speaker 1: the food usually cooks faster and more evenly. Yeah, you
Speaker 1: get that distribution of heat as opposed to you know,
Speaker 1: if you if you have one source of heat, then
Speaker 1: obviously whatever part of the food is closest to that
Speaker 1: one sort one source is more likely to cook faster
Speaker 1: than the part that's furthest away. Yeah. So by using
Speaker 1: convection and distributing that heat a little more evenly, you
Speaker 1: create something where you're not going to end up with
Speaker 1: alasagna that is bubbling hot on one side but still
Speaker 1: frozen on the other. Right, which, you know, you might
Speaker 1: still get that because ovens are stupid. The ovens are stupid,
Speaker 1: and sometimes even when you do everything correctly, the oven
Speaker 1: itself doesn't. Yeah, and we mentioned the idea of convection ovens.
Speaker 1: These are ovens that are designed specifically to blow that
Speaker 1: hot air around and get it circulating. But even in
Speaker 1: a standard non convection of an there is some natural
Speaker 1: convection that happens just because of uneven heating. Yes, so
Speaker 1: there's there's a little bit of limited airflow right right,
Speaker 1: There's there's no such thing as as an oven where
Speaker 1: the air is completely stationary and isn't moving at all.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's physics would tell us that that's not
Speaker 1: going to happen. Right, But then we have one other
Speaker 1: that we can mention very very briefly, and we're not
Speaker 1: really going to focus on it too much in this episode.
Speaker 1: But of course there are microwave ovens. Microwave ovens don't
Speaker 1: use any of these methods to heat up food. What
Speaker 1: they use is well, they use the radiant method, but
Speaker 1: in this case it's radiating microwaves, not infrared. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: a different kind. So instead of transferring heat directly to
Speaker 1: the food, it transfers energy to the food. Right, different
Speaker 1: kind of energy, electromagnetic energy in the form of microwave radiation, which,
Speaker 1: because water is a polar molecule, has it makes water
Speaker 1: molecules in your food start to vibrate furiously, and this
Speaker 1: turns into heat. Yeah, exactly, that motion is essentially heat, right,
Speaker 1: Molecular movement is heat. If you were to talk about
Speaker 1: the absolent complete absence of molecular movement, that's when you
Speaker 1: get absolute zero. So making molecules move more means they're
Speaker 1: heating up. So using your microwave, it ends up that
Speaker 1: energy ends up getting absorbed by water, by fats, by sugars.
Speaker 1: That's what ends up really heating up food. Um. Theoretically
Speaker 1: it's cooking all the way, like all all the parts
Speaker 1: are cooking at the same time, although that doesn't necessarily
Speaker 1: happen in practice because of lots of different stuff, including
Speaker 1: things like uh, microwave interference. Um. Sometimes it depends upon
Speaker 1: the thickness of the food. But because obviously it's if
Speaker 1: it's thick enough, then the the middle never gets penetrated
Speaker 1: by those microwaves and doesn't cook through whether you put
Speaker 1: an old computer in the microwave with your food, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that also would definitely factor in. I mean, I don't
Speaker 1: typically do that, but I'm learning more about you, Joe. UM.
Speaker 1: But yeah, that's that's one of those ovens that we're
Speaker 1: probably not going to concentrate on too much in this episode,
Speaker 1: but figured we might as well, you know, get all
Speaker 1: the way. We're really focusing on the traditional uh oven,
Speaker 1: especially in the Western hemisphere. You know, in the course
Speaker 1: of reading up for this episode, I did read about
Speaker 1: at least one oven that combines traditional oven heating with microwaves.
Speaker 1: I've heard of such things, and I fear them. It
Speaker 1: sounds pretty weird. Sounds like a Frankenstein's Monster of ovens. Okay, Well,
Speaker 1: So one question that I think one reason actually I
Speaker 1: would say that the question of have we reached peak
Speaker 1: oven is kind of interesting is that ovens have been
Speaker 1: around for a long time. I mean, it's obvious that
Speaker 1: we have not yet reached peak cell phone people are
Speaker 1: going to keep redesigning cell phones and obviously making them better. Uh,
Speaker 1: it just hasn't been around all that. That's been around
Speaker 1: since like the nineteen seventies, right, But we've had ovens
Speaker 1: for I mean, at least in basic concept versions of
Speaker 1: ovens for a really long time. Right, We've had We've
Speaker 1: had ovens as we understand them for centuries. We've had
Speaker 1: ovens as in a general concept for millennia. So depending
Speaker 1: on your definition of ovens, they date way back to
Speaker 1: prehistoric times. Now in this case, you have to be
Speaker 1: pretty liberal with your description of what an oven is. Uh.
Speaker 1: In in prehistoric times, it might include a pit and
Speaker 1: you would fill that pit with hot coals, which would
Speaker 1: have ash on them that helps insulate some of the heat.
Speaker 1: And then you would wrap your food in some sort
Speaker 1: of protective covering, most often something like leaves, and you
Speaker 1: would put those on top of the coals, and then
Speaker 1: you would bury it for a while and let it cook,
Speaker 1: traps the heat in, drops the heat in, and uh
Speaker 1: then you dig it up and you've got your nice
Speaker 1: tasty food wrapped in charred leaves. And this is in
Speaker 1: at least some interpretations the type of oven, although clearly
Speaker 1: not something you would go to your local hardware store
Speaker 1: and say, hey, can I see your pits filled with charcoal?
Speaker 1: Like it's not gonna happen. Well, no, I mean this
Speaker 1: sounds like an nice way you get to kind of
Speaker 1: smolder going on. It's different than cooking over an open flame.
Speaker 1: This might be your your earliest ways to do something
Speaker 1: more kin to barbecuing or smoking, or you get a
Speaker 1: kind of low and slow heat. Yeah, ancient civilizations used
Speaker 1: stone or brick ovens fired with wood to bake bread.
Speaker 1: So the Greeks, the Romans, uh, you know, uh, these
Speaker 1: civilizations that were really kind of the forefront of that technology.
Speaker 1: They made those sort of ovens, the same sort of
Speaker 1: stuff you would find in a pizzeria that has the
Speaker 1: wood fired oven in the back. It's really meant for
Speaker 1: like a pretty high temperature oven. And then you had
Speaker 1: variations on brick ovens that continued all the way through
Speaker 1: the medieval times and early Renaissance. By the seventeen hundreds,
Speaker 1: people had started to adopt cast iron stoves and those
Speaker 1: became quite popular. By the eighteen hundreds, people were starting
Speaker 1: to rely on coal as fuel as opposed to would
Speaker 1: and then the first guest stoves appeared in the early
Speaker 1: nineteenth centuries. Around the the mid eighteen twenties, that's when
Speaker 1: you first started seeing them. Uh. And in the late
Speaker 1: inventors began to experiment with electric ovens, although at the
Speaker 1: time during that experimentation they were not terribly efficient. It
Speaker 1: required a lot of energy to to generate the electricity
Speaker 1: necessary to heat up a heating element in cine electrical oven.
Speaker 1: It was not really practical for the first like a
Speaker 1: decade or so of experimentation. Um, it took all it
Speaker 1: took some time for that to find traction, but then
Speaker 1: once it did, it became quite popular. I just had
Speaker 1: a question. I didn't come across this, but I wonder
Speaker 1: if if early oven technology had any dangerous exploding periods. Oh,
Speaker 1: I'm sure. I mean, we're gonna talk a little bit
Speaker 1: about an article we both read where one of the
Speaker 1: things that they mentioned about how ovens can be inefficient
Speaker 1: is that the air expands on the inside, right, so
Speaker 1: it needs to have a place for it to vent
Speaker 1: out of r l that expansion, you know, the oven
Speaker 1: has to contain it, and so you essentially have a
Speaker 1: pressure bomb. You don't have any kind of way. And
Speaker 1: I'm sure there were instances of ovens going boom, and
Speaker 1: we probably don't know much about them because people weren't
Speaker 1: around to tell what happened afterwards, just at whatever place
Speaker 1: they were in. Burned down recipe ever, right, uh man
Speaker 1: talk about a pop tart whackedish mackay d so. Um.
Speaker 1: The microwave came about in the mid nineteen hundreds, like
Speaker 1: six forty seven was pretty much win. An engineer discovered
Speaker 1: the principle behind microwave ovens This was an engineer who
Speaker 1: noticed that whenever he was working near a microwave antenna,
Speaker 1: the candy bar that he had would melt, and so
Speaker 1: he said, huh, there seems to be something going on here,
Speaker 1: and eventually that became the basis of the microwave oven, which,
Speaker 1: by the way, it took some time for people to
Speaker 1: adopt because there were some fears about the nature of
Speaker 1: the radiation um which still happens today. You'll hear people say,
Speaker 1: don't stand in front of that microwave. It really it
Speaker 1: really got a lot better when they started putting doors
Speaker 1: on them. Yeah, exactly when it when you know, the
Speaker 1: early microwave ovens where you had to stand in front
Speaker 1: with a ping pong paddle and just bat them back
Speaker 1: as hard as you could. Those days are over. Also,
Speaker 1: the ones where you had to stick your head inside
Speaker 1: to check on the food. Those weren't very good. The
Speaker 1: old Hansel and Gretel models, Yeah, man, those were the day.
Speaker 1: So over time we've seen lots of different variations on ovens,
Speaker 1: some of which were clearly kind of gimmicky. You know,
Speaker 1: they weren't necessarily a real advance in the technology, but
Speaker 1: it was something to set it apart from competing ovens
Speaker 1: so that you could sell more of them. Well, and
Speaker 1: that's something to keep in mind today because I think
Speaker 1: that same question will apply to a lot of the
Speaker 1: advances that we bring up. Yeah, so let's talk about
Speaker 1: some of the stuff. Like, you know, clearly the older ovens,
Speaker 1: the ones that the precursors to today's ovens, didn't have
Speaker 1: certain things that we rely on today. Uh. And one
Speaker 1: of those is just the thermostat inside the oven, which
Speaker 1: tells you that it's what allows you to preheat en
Speaker 1: oven to a specific temperature, as opposed to just well,
Speaker 1: throw some more wood on and then hopefully we can
Speaker 1: get this hot enough, or if it's too hot, then
Speaker 1: maybe we put some ash on there to cool down
Speaker 1: the fire. Like it's that was a very inexact way
Speaker 1: of going about it. These days, you get a new oven,
Speaker 1: you've got a little digital counter, you program in what
Speaker 1: temperature you want the oven to preheat, and it does
Speaker 1: it all for you. Right. Yeah, it's actually pretty simple machine,
Speaker 1: you know. It's it's like a switch, Yeah, exactly, this
Speaker 1: switch as if it gets up to the temperature you've set,
Speaker 1: then it's time to turn it off, right, And so
Speaker 1: it stops the cycle, the heating cycle at that point,
Speaker 1: and then if the temperature or when not if when
Speaker 1: the temperature drops down to a certain threshold, then the
Speaker 1: thermostatic switches the whole system back on again, so it
Speaker 1: heats back up. So it's a con stint heating and
Speaker 1: cooling process. It's not necessarily doing it very fast. These
Speaker 1: cycles can last a good long while, but it's all
Speaker 1: meant to try and keep the food at the general
Speaker 1: temperature that you chose, general being somewhat of a of
Speaker 1: a generous term depending upon your oven thermostats, right, well,
Speaker 1: depending on your oven, And really this will apply to
Speaker 1: all I mean, no, no oven is going to have
Speaker 1: perfect precision on the temperature inside. There's gonna be some variation.
Speaker 1: Some parts of the oven are going to be hotter
Speaker 1: than other parts, and even in general, the average across
Speaker 1: the oven is not going to be exactly what you
Speaker 1: said it to. And then you've got other factors, right,
Speaker 1: like your altitude, like there are other things that come
Speaker 1: into how much how long you need to cook things
Speaker 1: at what temperature, But just speaking from a general sense,
Speaker 1: like let's say you're at sea level, all things being equal, yes,
Speaker 1: your oven could end up having a thermostat that is
Speaker 1: not terribly accurate or has lost acuracy over time, And
Speaker 1: it could mean that when you try and cook stuff,
Speaker 1: even though you're following all the directions and you're absolutely
Speaker 1: certain you're doing so, maybe you're undercooking stuff or overcooking stuff.
Speaker 1: If a thermostat fails, it could potentially lead to something
Speaker 1: really awful, like a fire. Yeah, because if they never
Speaker 1: if it never detects that it's gotten too hot, it
Speaker 1: just keeps getting hotter. You have never thought of that.
Speaker 1: I would just have to assume that modern events have
Speaker 1: some kind of safety measure in place to prevent that.
Speaker 1: But yeah, don't. I mean, it's it's one of those
Speaker 1: things where it's it's a possibility. It's not necessarily a
Speaker 1: likelihood because there usually are fail safes involved, But it
Speaker 1: is one of those things, especially the earlier ovens with thermostats,
Speaker 1: that you had to worry about. Now, granted, most of
Speaker 1: the time thermostats aren't like going super haywire, right, But
Speaker 1: if you suspect that yours is inaccurate or becoming less
Speaker 1: accurate over time, then you can do some various tests
Speaker 1: to make sure like they're there tester or units you
Speaker 1: can have which essentially are thermometers with timers where you
Speaker 1: can put them in for like half an hour to
Speaker 1: see how much variation in the temperature there is over
Speaker 1: at least three cycles of your oven heating up and
Speaker 1: cooling down. And then what you do is you take
Speaker 1: the average amount of temperature there and that'll tell you
Speaker 1: how close or far off from the programmed temperature you
Speaker 1: actually are. And if it's pretty far off, it may
Speaker 1: mean that you need to have your thermostatic calibrated, which
Speaker 1: could require a visit from a repair person. Yeah, because
Speaker 1: I mean if if you have the manual and you
Speaker 1: feel confident in your skills to to take off a
Speaker 1: panel and uh and and act and work on a thermostat,
Speaker 1: then possibly you could do it yourself. Um. I would
Speaker 1: never attempt such a thing because I like having people
Speaker 1: who are certified that kind of stuff doing for me.
Speaker 1: That way, if they break it, I have some recourse.
Speaker 1: But anyway, yes, that's also very important. So another thing
Speaker 1: you can always do, obviously is use food thermometers to
Speaker 1: keep track of how your food is doing. And this
Speaker 1: is probably a good idea either way, because the oven
Speaker 1: temperature is measuring, even if it's measuring it more or
Speaker 1: less accurately, it's measuring the oven temperature, not the food temperature.
Speaker 1: And what matters is the food temperature. Right. And if
Speaker 1: you're if you're cooking a turkey and you think, oh,
Speaker 1: I did this last year and it was perfect, I'm
Speaker 1: going to do it exactly the same way. You have
Speaker 1: to remember turkeys aren't all identical, right, Like, if you
Speaker 1: have one that has thicker, thicker muscle tissue, so that
Speaker 1: you know it's going to take a little longer for
Speaker 1: the heat to be able to cook that food, that meat,
Speaker 1: then clearly you need to keep an eye on that
Speaker 1: sort of stuff. So even as there can be variation
Speaker 1: in ovens, there's also obviously a huge amount of variation
Speaker 1: in the food we put in our ovens. Or even
Speaker 1: something as simple is not remembering which rack you put
Speaker 1: it on. Putting it in a different place in the
Speaker 1: oven can make a difference. Oh sure, yeah, putting putting
Speaker 1: something on the top rack versus the iraq actually does
Speaker 1: make a difference. Um, So these are all factors that
Speaker 1: you have to take into an account. Or how about
Speaker 1: the fact that you've got stuff like a window in
Speaker 1: your oven typically, I mean most people do, right, so
Speaker 1: that you can look through the little window and stare
Speaker 1: and say, does that look golden brown to you? Jonathan? Stop?
Speaker 1: Tell me the definition of golden brown? How is it
Speaker 1: different than golden or brown? Uh? You know, I think
Speaker 1: golden brown. The definition is how can we make something
Speaker 1: sound so enticing as to convince people to buy this oven?
Speaker 1: Cooking all foods to a delicious golden might be a
Speaker 1: little cynical because of certain life choices that are coming
Speaker 1: up to me right now, which involves buying big appliances. Yeah, so, Jonathan,
Speaker 1: are you in the in the market for an oven
Speaker 1: right now? Not right now, but please don't call me
Speaker 1: if you're an oven salesperson because I'm already dealing with
Speaker 1: sales people right now. Anyway, that the idea being that
Speaker 1: the windows is a nice thing to have, and windows
Speaker 1: typically don't allow a whole lot of heat to escape.
Speaker 1: They're double pained. Usually they don't. There's not If the
Speaker 1: seal on your door is fine, that's not allowing a
Speaker 1: lot of heat to escape. That's not a problem. Yeah, Well,
Speaker 1: the problem is that they're not like the walls of
Speaker 1: your oven. What are the walls of your oven supposed
Speaker 1: to do. They're supposed to radiate that heat into the
Speaker 1: chamber of the oven, right, Yeah, they absorbed the heat
Speaker 1: that's created by the heating element and then they're supposed
Speaker 1: to send it right back in. Yeah, but the window
Speaker 1: doesn't really do that. Window the windows ability to do
Speaker 1: that is much more limited compared to the walls the oven.
Speaker 1: So you have this zone on the walls of your
Speaker 1: oven or on a wall of your oven that is
Speaker 1: not equivalent to the others, which again can lead to
Speaker 1: some uneven heating and cooking. Um. I don't know that
Speaker 1: there's necessarily a huge issue for most types of of
Speaker 1: stuff you're gonna be doing in the oven, unless you're
Speaker 1: cooking at particularly high temperatures. So if you're baking something
Speaker 1: in the baking temperature is pretty high, then you might
Speaker 1: run into some problems with this where the unevenness actually
Speaker 1: comes into play, whereas at the lower temperatures it's not
Speaker 1: such a big deal. Um. So, if you're like doing
Speaker 1: something where you're just roasting some vegetables or or something
Speaker 1: along those lines, it's not a big it's not a
Speaker 1: big problem. But if you're baking a cake or something,
Speaker 1: then it might be. Well, this issue brings us to
Speaker 1: one of the main things we're going to talk about
Speaker 1: in this episode, which is an article that the address
Speaker 1: this very topic. Yeah, it was published in twenty in
Speaker 1: the I Triple A Spectrum by Nathan Mirvold and w
Speaker 1: Waite Gibbs, and that it's essentially the same basic topic
Speaker 1: we're talking about today. Can you design a better oven?
Speaker 1: And their answer is oh, yeah, yeah. I get the
Speaker 1: feeling as I read this article that they're they're that
Speaker 1: they could be like the two guys in front of
Speaker 1: a group of people just doing that fast paced pitch
Speaker 1: back and forth. There's like a whole series of kids
Speaker 1: in the hall sketches that are in that in that vein,
Speaker 1: but ovens, right, yeah, they're the worst. Tell me about it.
Speaker 1: A lot of times when I read about Nathan Mervold,
Speaker 1: I feel like I'm getting a very fast pitch on something. Yeah,
Speaker 1: don't get me wrong. I love this article, right I.
Speaker 1: I really enjoyed reading it, and I enjoyed the the
Speaker 1: proposals made in it. I questioned how easy some of
Speaker 1: them are. I mean, he's pretty glib or they are
Speaker 1: pretty glib with some of the explanations of how we
Speaker 1: can improve the oven without going into too much actual
Speaker 1: detail how that would work, but um it is. It's
Speaker 1: fun to read, So let's talk about some of them. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: I think I should let you know. Is basically how
Speaker 1: they start off first sentence, most of us bake, roast,
Speaker 1: and broil our food using a technology that was invented
Speaker 1: five thousand years ago for drying mud bricks. The oven
Speaker 1: already fire got the gate with a with a real
Speaker 1: hard hitting approach. That's a good opener, though, is it
Speaker 1: evokes this feeling of disgust. It's like, I don't want
Speaker 1: to eat mud bricks? What are we in the Stone Age?
Speaker 1: Not hardly. But they do go on to talk about
Speaker 1: some of the problems with ovens today and that you know,
Speaker 1: I am not an oven engineer, but based on the
Speaker 1: way they explain, and most of these things make sense
Speaker 1: to me. Uh So, Number one, they argue that the
Speaker 1: oven is not well designed to cook food equally well
Speaker 1: under varying conditions. For for all the things that we
Speaker 1: use ovens to do, our ovens are okay at doing
Speaker 1: them all, but not perfect at doing all of them right.
Speaker 1: So they're not going to cook food equally l depending
Speaker 1: on the load, meaning you know how much food is
Speaker 1: in the oven. It's going to vary if it's full
Speaker 1: versus mostly empty. Based on the placement of the food,
Speaker 1: you might just get better cooking on the top rack
Speaker 1: that on the bottom. Uh. And frequency of checking how
Speaker 1: how much are you checking on the food? Opening the
Speaker 1: door looking inside to see Yeah, opening the door is
Speaker 1: a bad idea in general. We'll talk a little more
Speaker 1: about that in a little bit later, but yeah, don't like.
Speaker 1: It's so tempting to do because one, you want to
Speaker 1: get a chance to look at it, and too, you
Speaker 1: want to release that sweet, sweet aroma of whatever it
Speaker 1: is that's in the oven and fill that the whole
Speaker 1: kitchen with that scent. Is you should you should resist
Speaker 1: that temptations an incredibly pleasurable sensation, Which is why I
Speaker 1: have to remind myself not to do that very thing
Speaker 1: of opening the oven door every five minutes. I'm I've
Speaker 1: been guilty of it before, is what I'm saying. I
Speaker 1: have to, especially when the food you're working on is
Speaker 1: really good. I've got one thing I won't share my
Speaker 1: whole recipe on the podcast, but one of the things
Speaker 1: I really love making in the oven lately is an
Speaker 1: oven baked all day red sauce like a tomato sauce.
Speaker 1: Uh and so, and when you bake it in the
Speaker 1: oven instead of on the stovetop, you get some browning
Speaker 1: on the surface of the Yeah, you do it on
Speaker 1: a low heat, but you just leave it going in
Speaker 1: the oven for a long time and when it makes
Speaker 1: it really rich and delicious, it's awesome. I'm gonna ask
Speaker 1: you for that recipe later. Uh, we're not. But we're
Speaker 1: not here to talk about a recipe. That's that's a
Speaker 1: Chuff Watson episodes. You can go listen to some crazy
Speaker 1: recipes in that show. Okay, So moving on to more
Speaker 1: of the problems with ovens they mentioned. Another one is
Speaker 1: that the oven wastes a lot of heat energy. We
Speaker 1: we alluded to some of this earlier. For for one example,
Speaker 1: air is a very poor conductor of heat, and yet
Speaker 1: it's what has to conduct the heat from the heating
Speaker 1: element to the walls of the oven. Uh. And then
Speaker 1: the walls from the oven retained the heat that allows
Speaker 1: the oven to maintain its temperature. So, as we said earlier,
Speaker 1: as the air heats up, it expands, it takes up
Speaker 1: more space in order to keep the oven from exploding
Speaker 1: as the air expands, You've got to vent some of
Speaker 1: that air out of the oven, which is just purely
Speaker 1: wasted energy unless you're also trying to heat your kitchen
Speaker 1: at the same time. Another admission I'll make is that
Speaker 1: I've done that before I was in graduate school. I
Speaker 1: think about um like so so one of the things,
Speaker 1: it's funny that you put lasagna in as the example earlier,
Speaker 1: One of the things my mom used to make that
Speaker 1: I thought was amazing was a phenomenal lasagna, Like she
Speaker 1: just made a killer lasagna. And my birthdays in the
Speaker 1: summer and I she would ask me, like, do you
Speaker 1: want me to make that lasagna for your birthday? Like, yes, please,
Speaker 1: because it's awesome, which was a huge thing. I mean
Speaker 1: it was. It was a several hours to put this
Speaker 1: all together and get it to work right. It's a
Speaker 1: multi stage process, and of course the last part of
Speaker 1: it was putting the lasagna in the oven and allowing
Speaker 1: it to make my birthdays in late June. I grew
Speaker 1: up in a in in rural Georgia. It would turn
Speaker 1: the house into just a like you might as well
Speaker 1: open the doors. You're actually gonna get cooler opening the
Speaker 1: doors in late June and Georgia than you would um
Speaker 1: having the air condition you go because it's just not
Speaker 1: going to be able to handle that. And that's that's
Speaker 1: tough because you're sitting there thinking like, Wow, this is
Speaker 1: actually energy that we could be using to cook the food,
Speaker 1: but instead it's being wasted on making the house almost uninhabitable. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so so that is a problem. And then you've also
Speaker 1: got the problem with the oven doesn't heat up as
Speaker 1: fast as it could. That this this is more with
Speaker 1: traditional ovens. I've tended to notice the convection ovens heat
Speaker 1: up pretty fast. Yeah, I've got a on mine. I
Speaker 1: have an option called rapid preheat, which turns on the
Speaker 1: convection fans and heats up much faster. And uh it's
Speaker 1: it's remarkable how much, sir, the rapid preheat is compared
Speaker 1: to just if I do a regular preheat. Yeah. Another
Speaker 1: one is just generally ovens don't cook as evenly as
Speaker 1: they could, especially as they could if you had like
Speaker 1: a rotisserie or something. I mean you can have some
Speaker 1: ovens equipped with something like this. Uh. Then there are
Speaker 1: other things with the oven doesn't know with precision how
Speaker 1: hot it is. We mentioned that there's variable humidity and
Speaker 1: this leads to different outcomes. And so essentially the two
Speaker 1: guys behind this article claim that the that we have
Speaker 1: all the technology to fix these problems today. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: love the idea that again, just getting that vision of
Speaker 1: the two guys standing in front of the group just
Speaker 1: saying the future of ovens is hot, hot, hot, Well, Jonathan,
Speaker 1: I think it is hot, hot, hot. Well that might
Speaker 1: be because you've read the article as well and saw
Speaker 1: that they've talked about a lot of different proposed changes
Speaker 1: to the oven that they claim will make the oven
Speaker 1: far more efficient and effective in cooking foods. Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: I'm going to start with one that I either, you know,
Speaker 1: I want to give them the benefit of the doubt
Speaker 1: and just say maybe I don't really understand the purpose,
Speaker 1: but I was a little iffy on this first one.
Speaker 1: So one is an oven that varies its heat transfer
Speaker 1: method depending on at what temperature you're cooking. And so
Speaker 1: I'm going to read a quote by them, and the
Speaker 1: quote is at two hundred degrees celsius or below, convection
Speaker 1: moves most to the heat, but at four hundred degrees celsius,
Speaker 1: radiant energy starts doing a fair amount of the heat transfer.
Speaker 1: At eight hundred degrees celsius, radiation overwhelms convection. There, they're
Speaker 1: just talking about the natural ways that heat transfer changes
Speaker 1: at different temperatures. Uh, they continue, why couldn't we have
Speaker 1: an oven designed to cook primarily by convection at low
Speaker 1: temperatures that switches to radiant heat for high temperature baking.
Speaker 1: So two hundred degrees celsius, that's they're talking about convection there.
Speaker 1: That's four hundred degrees fahrenheit. If you're used to cooking
Speaker 1: fahrenheit temperatures, Uh, four hundred degrees celsius is seven hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty degrees fahrenheit, and that's where it starts shifting
Speaker 1: to radiant heat. Um eight hundred degrees celsius is like
Speaker 1: fifteen hundred degrees fahrenheits so blowing glass. And unless you're
Speaker 1: operating a restaurant with like a pizza oven or some
Speaker 1: incredibly very unusually hot oven, I don't see the appeal
Speaker 1: Like at home, who cooks it temperatures like this? Yeah?
Speaker 1: I um, I don't think I've ever pushed mine above
Speaker 1: four fifty fahrenheit at home because I almost everything I
Speaker 1: cooked requires that temperature or lower, so it would be
Speaker 1: very rare. But then I'm also not a baker. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean there there are some things that are very
Speaker 1: nice to have a very hot oven for. I'm not
Speaker 1: sure about fifteen hundred degrees fahrenheit. That seems it might
Speaker 1: be a tad excessive, but yeah, my oven does not
Speaker 1: go anywhere near seven hundred and fifty degrees fahrenheit four
Speaker 1: d re celsius where the radiant heat starts kicking in.
Speaker 1: Uh So, yeah, I also don't really know how they
Speaker 1: propose this works, other than the fans just stopped blowing
Speaker 1: for convection and the you just concentrate all the heating
Speaker 1: elements directly behind the oven walls. Well, this could have
Speaker 1: this this may be able to tie into something that
Speaker 1: comes up later in their suggestions, which is variable emittant
Speaker 1: surfaces also got you well, And then they also mentioned
Speaker 1: something else that I talked about earlier, the idea that
Speaker 1: when you open that oven door, you are releasing a
Speaker 1: lot of heat, thus cooling the interior of the oven,
Speaker 1: making it less efficient over time. Right, This idea that
Speaker 1: you really shouldn't do that. I've seen a lot of
Speaker 1: different um places kind of site, although I haven't seen
Speaker 1: the actual uh source of the information that it drops
Speaker 1: the temperature by about twenty five degrees fahrenheit when you're
Speaker 1: just just opening the door to look in and then
Speaker 1: closing it, and that means the whole system has to
Speaker 1: warm up again. There's this inadvertent cooling that's happened. It
Speaker 1: messes things up. In other words, yeah, um, so the
Speaker 1: authors of this piece actually say that people are just
Speaker 1: always going to open the door and check. There's no
Speaker 1: way to convince them not to do it. So instead
Speaker 1: of just having an instruction manual that says, don't open
Speaker 1: the door to check, just look through the window, they
Speaker 1: say that you can protect the oven cavity from heat
Speaker 1: loss by having the door frame equipped with blowers that
Speaker 1: generate a curtain of air to prevent hot air from escaping.
Speaker 1: This would work kind of like you may have seen
Speaker 1: some cooler cooler containers at the grocery store like this
Speaker 1: that have an air curtain that blows across the surface.
Speaker 1: I've walked into buildings that use this where they have
Speaker 1: like the air curtain just on the other side of
Speaker 1: the doors. That lead into the building, and as soon
Speaker 1: as those doors open, the air curtain starts blowing down
Speaker 1: and it prevents the cold air from inside the building.
Speaker 1: A being again, we're in Georgia where it gets pretty
Speaker 1: hot in the summer, So in order to reduce the
Speaker 1: energy uh consumption of a building, you might install something
Speaker 1: like that so that you don't you're not constantly losing
Speaker 1: the air conditioned air and having to cool it over
Speaker 1: and over again. Yeah, that being said, I wonder what
Speaker 1: it would feel like if your hand came in contact
Speaker 1: with the curtain of hot air. Um, Well, I wonder
Speaker 1: what temperature the curtain is. Yeah, it may not be.
Speaker 1: It may not be at the same temperature as whatever
Speaker 1: the internal temperature of the oven is. I don't know,
Speaker 1: but it does sound like that could be a toasty encounter.
Speaker 1: I granted it, air is a poor conductor of heat.
Speaker 1: It's not like you would immediately get burned, but you
Speaker 1: would feel how hot it was pretty quickly. Well, we've
Speaker 1: probably had the experience if you've peeked in an oven,
Speaker 1: like opening the door up and having the hot air
Speaker 1: come out and kind of kind of scald your face.
Speaker 1: But I bet one thing you've noticed. Is it's even
Speaker 1: and worse if there's something steaming in the oven? Yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: because well, I mean then you've got water, which is
Speaker 1: a better conductor in the sense that once it hits you,
Speaker 1: it's gonna continue to release that that heat. It's not
Speaker 1: not a better conductor so much as it holds onto
Speaker 1: that heat pretty well and then it when it gets
Speaker 1: on you. Uh, steam burns are no joke. But but anyway,
Speaker 1: so creating this curtain would help reduce the heat loss
Speaker 1: from people being nosy and opening up the oven door
Speaker 1: before they're supposed to. So depending on how expensive that
Speaker 1: would be to do, how safe it would be, maybe
Speaker 1: I don't know, I might just kind of go with,
Speaker 1: like maybe some text on the door that says do
Speaker 1: not open during cooking. Yeah, I mean I could see this,
Speaker 1: and I don't know, because in a professional kitchen people
Speaker 1: know better. But so, but it's hard for me to
Speaker 1: imagine something quite that extravagant in a home kitchen. Although
Speaker 1: to be fair, we've seen some pretty extravagant appliances come
Speaker 1: out over the last you know, ten years. So well,
Speaker 1: let's talk about some of the other UH advances that
Speaker 1: they've proposed. Okay, here's one that's incredibly simple. They just
Speaker 1: suggest adding more reflective surfaces inside of the oven to
Speaker 1: create more even browning during broiling. Yeah. They actually talk
Speaker 1: about how in broiling, a lot of people will create
Speaker 1: kind of a um a little almost like a collar
Speaker 1: out of aluminum foil, like home hacks that just have
Speaker 1: like foil things to reflect more of the heat back in. Right,
Speaker 1: And they said, well, there's no reason why oven manufacturers
Speaker 1: couldn't just build this in to begin with, so that
Speaker 1: it's part of the system as opposed to something that
Speaker 1: people have to hack together to make it happen. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Another argument they make is that on while we're talking
Speaker 1: about broilers, you could replace the flame. Yeah, this is
Speaker 1: assuming you've got a gas broiler. You could replace the
Speaker 1: flame broilers with gas catalysis, so of course. Yeah. Well,
Speaker 1: so what they say is you could have flameless catalytic
Speaker 1: broilers that would take incoming gas just regularly you know gas,
Speaker 1: and then filter it through a catalytic metal that's bound
Speaker 1: to a ceramic plate. And the catalytic metal would make
Speaker 1: the gas oxidized in the presence of air, and this
Speaker 1: gives off carbon dioxide, water, vapor, and heat and then
Speaker 1: the heat gets absorbed by the ceramic plate, and then
Speaker 1: the plate radiates it evenly throughout the oven. They claim
Speaker 1: this brown's food more evenly and it's very energy efficient. Well, again,
Speaker 1: we can't assess the veracity of these claims. Jonathan and
Speaker 1: I have not done extensive testing on prototype ovens, so
Speaker 1: I guess we'll just have to take their word for
Speaker 1: it at this point. Though, I will note that though
Speaker 1: I usually wouldn't recommend reading the comments on an article,
Speaker 1: the comments below this article were interesting. A lot of
Speaker 1: them seem to be from the engineering readership at the
Speaker 1: I Triple A Spectrum, arguing with the wisdom of some
Speaker 1: of the suggestions made in this article. Interesting and they
Speaker 1: also had some other suggestions as well, including getting read
Speaker 1: of that window so that all the interior facing surfaces
Speaker 1: of the oven were pretty much identical. That you don't
Speaker 1: have to worry about that one surface no longer radiating
Speaker 1: heat back at the same level as everything else. But Jonathan,
Speaker 1: if you get rid of the window, how are you
Speaker 1: going to check on your food without opening the door?
Speaker 1: You put a camera in it. Hey, now that's pretty smart,
Speaker 1: And that's actually one feature of a product that we're
Speaker 1: going to talk about later in the episode. Yeah, Actually,
Speaker 1: I've seen a couple of different uh appliance manufacturers talk
Speaker 1: about having cameras installed inside the ovens to to be
Speaker 1: able to track that kind of stuff without again having
Speaker 1: to peer through a grease stained window or crack open
Speaker 1: the oven door and ruin everything. And now the sou
Speaker 1: flea will go crazy and rampage of the down. So
Speaker 1: there was that, and then there are you know, we
Speaker 1: talked a little bit about some of the alternatives to
Speaker 1: the electric and gas ovens, or the typical electric ovens. Anyway,
Speaker 1: the typical electrical oven as um heating elements that you
Speaker 1: are are essentially giant resistors, right you run they get
Speaker 1: hot when the electricity goes through them. Yeah, you run
Speaker 1: the current through them, and because they resist the flow
Speaker 1: of electricity, that a lot of that energy is converted
Speaker 1: over to heat, and that's what you used to heat
Speaker 1: stuff up. Well, there are other ways you can use
Speaker 1: electricity to generate heat, although not directly or as directly
Speaker 1: as that, For example, halogen lamps. This is like a
Speaker 1: really giant, industry sized version of an easy bake oven,
Speaker 1: which would just use a tiny little lightbulb, but um, Yeah,
Speaker 1: you use a halogen lamp to generate heat and cook food,
Speaker 1: and it has the same basic set up as any
Speaker 1: other oven, although in this case the heating chamber may
Speaker 1: be made out of glass instead of uh, you know,
Speaker 1: the stainless deal or whatever material, ceramic, whatever tiled materials
Speaker 1: the oven that you would be using normally. But it's
Speaker 1: radiant heat, it is, and it can distribute the heat
Speaker 1: with fans, so there's also confection cooking in there. But
Speaker 1: the heat itself comes from the halogen lamp, which is
Speaker 1: projecting infrared light, so not visible light, but infrared light,
Speaker 1: the same sort of stuff. The heats are planet from
Speaker 1: the sun. So um, it's it's one of the alternative
Speaker 1: approaches that, according to some people, would be far more
Speaker 1: efficient than our conventional ovens. Yeah, and this is also
Speaker 1: mere bolding. Gibbs suggest using halogen lamps as one possible
Speaker 1: way to create rapid pulses of heat to simulate the
Speaker 1: even cooking effects of a Rotisseriye, So you've seen rotisserie
Speaker 1: chickens and stuff at the grocery store before, at the
Speaker 1: you know some restaurants, haven't. You put it on skewer
Speaker 1: and then you rotate it over the fire or near
Speaker 1: the heating element. So turning the food as it cooks
Speaker 1: is a good thing to do because it creates gentler,
Speaker 1: more even heating because one part of the food heats
Speaker 1: as it moves towards the heat source, and then as
Speaker 1: it moves a way, the heat on the surface can
Speaker 1: dissipate inside the food. Uh and the authors claim you
Speaker 1: can recreate this this gentle and even heating effect with
Speaker 1: pulses rather than steady direct heat and regular heating elements
Speaker 1: would have trouble creating fast pulses like this, but they
Speaker 1: suggest that you could create fast pulses of heat by
Speaker 1: having oven walls that quickly change their conductance, for example.
Speaker 1: So their ideas that you might do this with variable
Speaker 1: emittance coatings, and this would mean a stuff where a stuff,
Speaker 1: This would mean some some stuff coding the oven walls
Speaker 1: where you can apply electrical current and this changes the
Speaker 1: transparency or reflectivity of the surface. And I think the
Speaker 1: idea here would be that you could repetitively apply the
Speaker 1: current to the oven walls to have them alternately reflecting
Speaker 1: heat in word toward the food and then giving it
Speaker 1: a rest for a minute. This seems like incredibly complicated
Speaker 1: advance to what has previously been a relatively simple appliance. Um.
Speaker 1: But but of course they also suggest haligen lamps. Yes,
Speaker 1: I was saying, that's one way you could maybe create
Speaker 1: fast pulses of heat to get that slow even effect.
Speaker 1: And there were some other ones we could talk about,
Speaker 1: for example, using ceramic elements heating elements, so you would
Speaker 1: use intermetallic ceramic compounds, which have the features you would
Speaker 1: want in an oven, that's being that they're electrically conductive
Speaker 1: and also that they have a relatively high melting point
Speaker 1: somewhere north of two thousand degrees celsius, so they're going
Speaker 1: to be uh sturdy enough to withstand the temperatures of
Speaker 1: your your oven. And uh they are said to be
Speaker 1: more efficient than other types of of heating elements, so
Speaker 1: that's also an alternative. But then what about water vapor? Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is the thing. So they talk extensively about controlled
Speaker 1: water vapor ovens in their in their piece. And I
Speaker 1: don't know, maybe I'm weird, but I would tend to
Speaker 1: think if you're oven is full of steam, it's not
Speaker 1: really an oven. It's more of a steam cooker. I
Speaker 1: mean This is a it's not just a proposal of
Speaker 1: there is controlled vapor ovens or or a thing that
Speaker 1: that exists out there. You can buy them now. Then
Speaker 1: there are various different kinds of them, but they essentially
Speaker 1: use like a tray of water or something like that
Speaker 1: to maintain a level of human set level of humidity
Speaker 1: inside the oven. And this can be useful for certain things,
Speaker 1: you know, for getting a certain even type of cooking,
Speaker 1: for controlling the humidity. It seems like it would prevent
Speaker 1: the kind of browning that you want on the outside
Speaker 1: of foods when you normally do roasting in the oven.
Speaker 1: But there are also some variable models I read about.
Speaker 1: They sound very expensive, but you can like essentially turn
Speaker 1: on and off the roasting versus steaming options, and so
Speaker 1: I guess that's another thing that you could do if
Speaker 1: you wanted. But anyway, I wanted to point out again
Speaker 1: I mentioned this a minute ago, but if you go
Speaker 1: and read this article, I actually thought there was some
Speaker 1: interesting conversation in the comments section where people were talking
Speaker 1: about some criticisms of their ideas, like how much would
Speaker 1: all this cost? Would it really make enough of a
Speaker 1: difference to justify the price and the materials. Right. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if you if you were to say, like, here's the
Speaker 1: Oven of the future. It costs a year seventy five
Speaker 1: thousand dollars, you might say, well, you know, if my
Speaker 1: cupcake is a little gooey on the inside, I'm just
Speaker 1: gonna live with it. I can stop up that goo
Speaker 1: with all of my paper money, right exactly, all the
Speaker 1: money that I did not spend on the Oven of
Speaker 1: the Future. But but there are some ovens, a couple
Speaker 1: of them that we wanted to highlight just as sort
Speaker 1: of markers of where things are going right now. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so if you, if you just look it up on
Speaker 1: the internet, say, what are people touting right now? Is
Speaker 1: the smart oven of the future, you know, the most
Speaker 1: cutting edge of an out there. So we looked around
Speaker 1: just to see what what was on people's minds. Now,
Speaker 1: there was one product that I found several pieces about
Speaker 1: that was announced back in I think the first time.
Speaker 1: I don't know, there might have been uh proposals earlier,
Speaker 1: but it's first started really getting pressed in and it's
Speaker 1: called June June the Oven, like like Cleaver, I didn't
Speaker 1: think about that connection. I'm just that's the first thing
Speaker 1: that making dinner Yeah, okay, so June claims to be well,
Speaker 1: June doesn't personally claim to be The people who create
Speaker 1: June claim that it is an intelligent oven or a
Speaker 1: computer that cooks. Now, if June does claim to be
Speaker 1: an intelligent of it, and we should probably listen at
Speaker 1: that point, because something has happened. Yes, get inside me.
Speaker 1: June has become sentient. I'll show you why you created me.
Speaker 1: It's a smallish countertop of it, about the size of
Speaker 1: a toaster oven. Actually that has about one cubic foot
Speaker 1: of cavity space, so it's not huge. It's not going
Speaker 1: to make a big Thanksgiving turkey, but it'll it'll make
Speaker 1: you know most of the stuff you'd be roasting as
Speaker 1: long as it's not gigantic. And it as carbon fiber
Speaker 1: heating elements convection fans, so it's got some some good
Speaker 1: heating technology in there. Uh. It has a digital core
Speaker 1: temperature probe. Now you could just buy one of these
Speaker 1: separately and use it with your regular oven, but this
Speaker 1: one is linked to the oven itself and supposedly interacts
Speaker 1: with June's smart elements, so it's got like a This
Speaker 1: is a probe you plug into your food and June
Speaker 1: the oven knows how hot your food is on the inside. So,
Speaker 1: in other words, June the oven would continue cooking your
Speaker 1: turkey when you thought, oh, it's got to be done
Speaker 1: by now, but June's like, no, this is not the
Speaker 1: right internal temperature for it to be safe for human consumption.
Speaker 1: So I'm not gonna stop cooking just yet. Well, I
Speaker 1: haven't used a June oven, and the details on that
Speaker 1: are a little bit uh difficult, but it seems that
Speaker 1: it could have that functionality as long as it's had
Speaker 1: the right programming. So not necessarily uh outwardly stated as
Speaker 1: this is a feature, but is possible that it could
Speaker 1: be a feature based upon the vague wording that we
Speaker 1: do have access to. Yes, all right, they're all so
Speaker 1: weight sensors. That mean you could use the top of
Speaker 1: the oven as a kitchen scale. That sounds handy, But
Speaker 1: then again, you could also just have a separate kitchen scale. Yeah,
Speaker 1: but Joe, come on this way, Yes, save space. I
Speaker 1: don't know how many counters you got in your kitchen, Joe,
Speaker 1: but I got so few counters I gotta I gotta
Speaker 1: maximize the space I got. That's true if you have
Speaker 1: very little counterspace. This might actually be useful. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: actually I like that idea a lot, although it does
Speaker 1: suggest to me that you would probably have to, you know,
Speaker 1: constantly be cleaning the top of your oven. I mean
Speaker 1: you you would likely be using little containers and you'd
Speaker 1: have to weigh the containers first. That four ounces of honey,
Speaker 1: I just poured four ounces of directly on top of
Speaker 1: the oven. Yeah, um, okay, what what was I making
Speaker 1: in it? I don't know. It was like a very
Speaker 1: very sweet bread. Yeah maybe. Uh So. Of course it
Speaker 1: has WiFi connectivity, which is needed for system updates. But
Speaker 1: also this is so this is so you can connect
Speaker 1: to your phone for the smart elements, so being a
Speaker 1: smart oven it yet, like I said, it connects to
Speaker 1: an app on your smartphone for remote cooking, which means
Speaker 1: you can use your phone to adjust temperature time and
Speaker 1: you can get push notifications when your food is ready
Speaker 1: if you're I don't know, not in a position to
Speaker 1: hear the oven. Uh so that's not bad. But and
Speaker 1: we was out working on the car in the garage exactly.
Speaker 1: And so we've talked about functionality like this before as
Speaker 1: a sort of obvious place for kitchen appliances to go
Speaker 1: for a while. Yeah, and so this is sort of
Speaker 1: the Internet of Things applied to the kitchen. And uh,
Speaker 1: this isn't the only oven that offers connectivity and links
Speaker 1: to a smartphone app. Some full size ovens already on
Speaker 1: the market have versions of this, though just from a
Speaker 1: quick peek at the reviews, it didn't sound like most
Speaker 1: of these apps are very impressive yet. I think it's
Speaker 1: the same path we saw smart TVs take. So when
Speaker 1: smart TVs first came out, it was all about the
Speaker 1: widgets that you would have on your screen, which really
Speaker 1: just took up screen space. And we're not terribly responsive
Speaker 1: or necessarily helpful, and so it ended up being kind
Speaker 1: of a a non starter for a lot of people.
Speaker 1: It wasn't until about three or four generations later that
Speaker 1: we started seeing smart TVs that actually work the way
Speaker 1: people want them to. Yeah. Uh. So the app also
Speaker 1: has also has some sort of library recipe library feature.
Speaker 1: I'm honestly never really impressed with stuff like this, because
Speaker 1: we already have a searchabowl recipe library. It's called the
Speaker 1: Internet and now that way hang on though, if it
Speaker 1: has a direct line to Chef Watson okay, okay, well, no, okay,
Speaker 1: I do want to be fair. I guess I can
Speaker 1: see the appeal of a specialized library, Like if it
Speaker 1: has instructions tailored specifically to this oven, right, so it
Speaker 1: can tell you exactly how long to uh to you
Speaker 1: know how long it needs to cook because it knows
Speaker 1: all the parameters, or if it doesn't even need to
Speaker 1: tell you, like if you can select select a recipe
Speaker 1: for the oven, as long as you put the right
Speaker 1: ingredients in, it knows automatically what to do and just
Speaker 1: does it itself, so your job is just the prep
Speaker 1: and and putting it together, and then it takes care
Speaker 1: of everything else. So if that is a feature that
Speaker 1: it's smartness offers, that might be a helpful feature to somebody. Um,
Speaker 1: But then again, I would say if the oven does
Speaker 1: actually need special instructions, that makes me worry that it
Speaker 1: will not perform as expected on standard recipes written for
Speaker 1: standard ovens. We'll talk a little bit more about that
Speaker 1: and the other oven that I'll be covering in just
Speaker 1: a minute. Yeah. So then there's another feature, and I
Speaker 1: think this one for me is the real true big
Speaker 1: selling point. Internal digital camera heat resistant. So it's got
Speaker 1: a what it calls food recognition. Supposedly, the oven has
Speaker 1: some ability to look at what food you stick inside
Speaker 1: it and to make cooking recommendations to match, and so
Speaker 1: this might be useful, especially to novice cooks. But I'm
Speaker 1: a little skep t goal. I think they're trying to
Speaker 1: be humble about it. They're not saying like it's going
Speaker 1: to recognize anything you put in there, but it might
Speaker 1: recognize something that's yeah. I mean again, considering the variation
Speaker 1: of food it is, it's hard for me to imagine
Speaker 1: how that works. I mean, granted, we've seen things about
Speaker 1: machine learning, like the whole idea that a I can
Speaker 1: learn the concept of a cat by looking at all
Speaker 1: these different pictures of cats and be able to tell
Speaker 1: the difference in general between cats and people, with some exceptions. Somehow,
Speaker 1: I doubt it's quite there. But here's where here's where
Speaker 1: I think the real serious appeal is, at least to me.
Speaker 1: You can see what your food looks like remotely via
Speaker 1: video feed to your smartphone, and the oven software will
Speaker 1: create time labs the video of the cooking process. Now,
Speaker 1: this will clearly be a huge hit. Did you remember
Speaker 1: a few years ago when Netflix had a thing where
Speaker 1: they released on April Fool's Day. Uh, I think it
Speaker 1: was a video of bacon cooking, but it was backwards,
Speaker 1: so in other words, it started at the end where
Speaker 1: bacon was fully cooked, and then if you watched it
Speaker 1: over the course of like forty five minutes, you would
Speaker 1: watch the bacon uncooked. That's kind of cool forty five minutes, Joe,
Speaker 1: if you watched the whole thing, I mean I had
Speaker 1: it on. I didn't. I wouldn't say that I watched
Speaker 1: it the whole time, but I definitely had it on. No,
Speaker 1: this seems very useful for making gifts, and it seems
Speaker 1: useful for definitely going to be useful for people who,
Speaker 1: for example, we're in a food blog or something like
Speaker 1: you want they want to show how the food looks
Speaker 1: when it's cooking. If you've got a YouTube channel and
Speaker 1: it's all about ways to cook different things, this could
Speaker 1: be a really useful tool. Yeah. So the camera seems
Speaker 1: to me, like hands down the most appealing part of
Speaker 1: this product, especially that you can check what that You
Speaker 1: can check the camera from your phone, so you could
Speaker 1: be in the other room and look at what your
Speaker 1: food looks like. Right now this is what I beating
Speaker 1: if only I were in the other room. No, I
Speaker 1: think that's actually a pretty cool feature if it could
Speaker 1: be affordable. And okay, well that's that's a good point,
Speaker 1: if it could be affordable. So how much is this
Speaker 1: oven gonna cost? Well, the last figure I saw is
Speaker 1: it's going to be about dollars. I mean it's this
Speaker 1: is like a countertop oven. Yeah, there there are full
Speaker 1: size ovens that don't cost this much. Yeah, this isn't.
Speaker 1: This isn't a full oven with stove top. This is
Speaker 1: a countertop appliance that you could put next to your microwave. Yes, yes,
Speaker 1: that's true. And now I do want to say it's
Speaker 1: not the only oven on the market with the camera.
Speaker 1: I did a search and found some press about an
Speaker 1: Electroluxe oven that also has a built in camera and
Speaker 1: smart connectivity. Though the camera appears to be in the
Speaker 1: handle peeking through the window, rather than inside the oven,
Speaker 1: so it's essentially the same view you would have if
Speaker 1: you were bent down looking through the little window. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so I think the inside the oven view is kind
Speaker 1: of crucial. The heat resistant camera that can look down
Speaker 1: from the ceiling of the oven and and see with
Speaker 1: clarity and high rez what's actually happening inside right thumbs
Speaker 1: up for that. Yeah, I love the idea that you
Speaker 1: can have like like the equivalent of food selfies. And
Speaker 1: but the product has not been released yet. June got
Speaker 1: some press in is supposed to ship in spring. Obviously
Speaker 1: that hasn't happened yet and the ship date has been
Speaker 1: pushed back to the end of Well, I want to
Speaker 1: talk about another one that's not too different from what
Speaker 1: you were just talking about, apart from one or two
Speaker 1: um important points, called the Tovalla oven. And this one
Speaker 1: is again about the size of like a microwave oven.
Speaker 1: It's a countertop oven, so so similar to June in
Speaker 1: that respect, but this one actually can use different ways
Speaker 1: to cook food, including conventional oven uh, the convection oven approach,
Speaker 1: and also steaming. And the big selling point is that
Speaker 1: can automatically set itself to cook prepackaged fresh food automatically, So,
Speaker 1: in other words, you would subscribe to this food service.
Speaker 1: It's kind of like the Curig coffee maker of ovens.
Speaker 1: Right like you would buy you get fresh ingredients that
Speaker 1: are already preseasoned, pre prepared. They're in a little package
Speaker 1: that's got a barcode on the top. You scan the
Speaker 1: barcode with this device A seven. You remove the foil
Speaker 1: it's at the top of it, You place the container in,
Speaker 1: and it does all the rest of the work. It
Speaker 1: cooks it exactly as long as it needs to in
Speaker 1: the right method, and then afterward you're supposed to end
Speaker 1: up with they perfect, perfectly cooked dish of whatever it
Speaker 1: was that you ordered, Which is a very clever approach, right,
Speaker 1: this idea of I don't I don't have to worry
Speaker 1: about all the prep work which is very time consuming.
Speaker 1: I get fresh ingredients as supposed to frozen. You don't
Speaker 1: have to deal with like food recognition. If you have
Speaker 1: a barcode, right, it just it knows immediately which recipe
Speaker 1: that is, and it already follows the pre programmed steps
Speaker 1: that as to follow in order to cook that particular meal. UH.
Speaker 1: You can also use it as an oven, there's UH.
Speaker 1: And it also has a smartphone component where you can
Speaker 1: use a smartphone to control the oven. You can you
Speaker 1: select which method of cooking and what temperature and all
Speaker 1: that kind of stuff, so you can use it like
Speaker 1: a regular oven too. You don't have to follow this
Speaker 1: prefab approach. But if you did, then it makes things
Speaker 1: fairly simple, and I can see the appeal for this definitely.
Speaker 1: I mean, especially when you see services like Blue Apron
Speaker 1: out there where you can order meals and essentially it's
Speaker 1: all the ingredients and you you prepare it and you
Speaker 1: put together and cook it. That that's, you know, fairly popular.
Speaker 1: But imagine one where you don't have to do all
Speaker 1: the prep work and it's just super fast. Um, and
Speaker 1: it's fresh food as opposed to frozen food. I could
Speaker 1: see the appeal. This one is priced at around four
Speaker 1: hundred dollars and it started off as a Kickstarter campaign,
Speaker 1: although the creators say the reason they went with the
Speaker 1: Kickstarter route was not to fund the the company, but
Speaker 1: rather to help build up awareness. So in other words,
Speaker 1: they said that they were going to be making this anyway.
Speaker 1: I don't know how I got through Kickstarter that way,
Speaker 1: but then I don't always understand our Kickstarter approves certain
Speaker 1: things and disapproves other things, but this was but it
Speaker 1: was kind of like a marketing campaign as opposed to
Speaker 1: we need the starting capital to actually put this thing together.
Speaker 1: At least that's what they have said. Um, So I'm
Speaker 1: keeping an eye on this because if it actually works
Speaker 1: as advertised and and people have a good impression of it,
Speaker 1: I could see myself getting something like this because I
Speaker 1: could imagine it being really useful on those days when
Speaker 1: I walk home. By the time I get to the house,
Speaker 1: I'm tired. It's it's an hour of walking, and um,
Speaker 1: I would like to be able to rest. And I'm
Speaker 1: the cook in our family. So I start to have
Speaker 1: incredible sympathy for my poor mom who would come home
Speaker 1: from a full day of teaching elementary school to a
Speaker 1: home gotta make lasagna for Jonathan home with two kids
Speaker 1: who are like, what's for dinner as soon as you
Speaker 1: walked through the door. So, uh, yeah, I love you, Mom.
Speaker 1: So I feel a lot of sympathy for her these days,
Speaker 1: and something like this, which would be incredibly convenient if
Speaker 1: in fact it works as it is proposed to do,
Speaker 1: seems really attractive to me. Yeah, well, we we seem
Speaker 1: Yet again, this often happens with cutting edge technologies where
Speaker 1: we're in a sort of middle period of smartness. Yeah
Speaker 1: we're getting smart ovens, but it might be right to
Speaker 1: call them sophomoric. You know, they're sort of smart now.
Speaker 1: If an oven could be really smart, like really truly smart,
Speaker 1: then obviously that that would be a big help to
Speaker 1: lots of people. But there's I have a lot of
Speaker 1: questions with stuff at this point, Like I would be
Speaker 1: curious to see how something like June works once it's
Speaker 1: actually released, like how the food recognition elements and things
Speaker 1: like this that have been claimed and in their marketing
Speaker 1: in the past. To what extent do stuff like that
Speaker 1: really works so far? Does it really have an impact
Speaker 1: or is it just again a gimmick to sell a
Speaker 1: particular brand of technology. Yeah, I mean if you could,
Speaker 1: if you could take the human guesswork out of cooking
Speaker 1: and just put some cookie batter in and have the
Speaker 1: oven no when the cookies are ready. When they're ready,
Speaker 1: it turns itself off and opens the door. Okay, I
Speaker 1: mean that seems cool, But do do you trust it? Right?
Speaker 1: That's I mean, that's a question that I think right
Speaker 1: now we could say probably no, but maybe maybe the
Speaker 1: answer no won't be no forever. So I've got another
Speaker 1: basic functionality that I could personally see being very useful
Speaker 1: in ovens in the future, and that that would be
Speaker 1: the ability to have adaptive smart cooking or adaptive automated
Speaker 1: smart cooking based on food temperature as opposed to oven temperature,
Speaker 1: and so you would probably want to have the ability
Speaker 1: to have multiple different readers and different points of input.
Speaker 1: But here's an example. So you're making a standing rib
Speaker 1: roast on Christmas Day. It's a big, expensive piece of
Speaker 1: meat and you don't want to mess it up. Now. Ideally,
Speaker 1: this piece of meat should have a gentle, pink, medium
Speaker 1: rare on the inside and be crackling crusty dark brown
Speaker 1: on the outside. This difference is ideal, but it's often
Speaker 1: difficult to achieve because there are lots of different tricks
Speaker 1: and strategies cooks have to use to try to get it.
Speaker 1: And if you're not interested in reading up on all
Speaker 1: the best recipes and tricks to get that that contrast
Speaker 1: between the medium rare exterior and the crispy, dark brown outside,
Speaker 1: you could just tell the oven that, well, I want
Speaker 1: the roast when it's done to have an internal temperature
Speaker 1: of a hundred and thirty degrees fahrenheit and the exterior
Speaker 1: to be this color. And if the oven is smart
Speaker 1: enough to know how to do that without you, you know,
Speaker 1: messing with it over and over again. That seems like
Speaker 1: that would be useful. Yeah. I mean when you get
Speaker 1: to the more complicated types of dishes that you would
Speaker 1: have to deal with that typically require a greater knowledge
Speaker 1: and expertise. Uh, something like a really smart oven would
Speaker 1: become an incredibly handy right, things like the roads you
Speaker 1: were talking about, or a souflay something where you know,
Speaker 1: you're like, oh, yeah, the souffl is an example of
Speaker 1: a thing that like thirty seconds of difference, I think
Speaker 1: can make it, can just ruin it right, so that
Speaker 1: this is where it would really come in handy in
Speaker 1: And while maybe we would all love to have the
Speaker 1: skill set of a master chef, truth is, most of
Speaker 1: us don't have the time and energy to devote to
Speaker 1: getting to that level of expertise. So it's sure to
Speaker 1: be nice to have technologies pick up the slack. You know.
Speaker 1: There's another thing that I do want to be fair
Speaker 1: here also, I think I may have a prejudice against
Speaker 1: smart ovens and new types of cooking technologies like this
Speaker 1: because I've got sunk costs like I've I've spent a
Speaker 1: lot of time in my life already trying to develop
Speaker 1: skills and strategies for working with dumb ovens and so
Speaker 1: so you know, it could just be me be me
Speaker 1: going like I don't need that. I've learned all this
Speaker 1: stuff already. Yeah see, I've gotten to the point where
Speaker 1: I learned all that stuff. But if it's gonna save
Speaker 1: me time and I can go and play some more
Speaker 1: Xbox while I if my oven takes care of everything,
Speaker 1: I'm going to go that route. I watch it bake
Speaker 1: on your smartphone. Yeah, yeah, I'm not much. I don't
Speaker 1: use the oven all that much in myself. I do
Speaker 1: some roasted vegetables and that's like my thing. Otherwise, the
Speaker 1: oven is my wife's domain, and the stovetop is my kingdom,
Speaker 1: so that that's kind of and and the grill as well,
Speaker 1: that is kind of where I might I rule over
Speaker 1: that area. And then my wife is more likely to
Speaker 1: use the oven than I am. Uh. But that's that's
Speaker 1: perhaps why I would be ready to hand that stuff
Speaker 1: over to the robots. I don't really deal with it
Speaker 1: that much already. Okay, here's a question. If we all
Speaker 1: start having ovens that have cameras in them watching our
Speaker 1: food cook, is the government going to start spying on
Speaker 1: our food? What do you mean start so on that
Speaker 1: note that pretty much wraps up this episode Forward Thinking.
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