Nathan Myhrvold’s Recipe for a Better Oven
A very long but interesting article on how to improve ovens several ways.
Most of us bake, roast, and broil our food using a technology that was invented 5,000 years ago for drying mud bricks: the oven. The original oven was clay, heated by a wood fire. Today, the typical oven is a box covered in shiny steel or sparkling enamel, powered by gas or electricity. But inside the oven, little has changed.
Is a brick dryer really the best system for cooking food? Not even close. The typical modern oven—even a US $10,000 unit used by professional chefs or a $5,000 model used in a high-end home kitchen—has a host of problems. It can’t cook food equally well whether full or nearly empty, left alone or regularly checked, or with food placed in any position inside. Yet oven manufacturers could solve every problem with existing technology, if only they would apply it.
The problems with ovens start as soon as you turn them on. Preheating always seems to take an unreasonably long time because ovens waste most of the hot air they generate. The actual amount of energy required to reach baking temperature is quite small: Just 42 kilojoules will heat 0.14 cubic meters of air to 250 °C. The heating element in a typical domestic electric oven supplies this much energy in a mere 21 seconds.
More: Nathan Myhrvold’s Recipe for a Better Oven - IEEE Spectrum