Are you tired of twiddling your thumbs waiting for your oven to preheat? Do you dream of perfectly cooked meals in a fraction of the time? Well, get ready to be amazed because there’s a new player in town that claims to revolutionise oven technology. Imagine cooking a roast in just 30 minutes or baking cookies with lightning-fast precision.
Is This a Giant Leap For Oven Technology? You’re the Judge explores this groundbreaking innovation and its potential impact on our culinary world. In this blog post, we will dive deep into the advancements made by industry leaders and discuss whether this is truly a game-changer or just another gimmick. So buckle up and prepare to have your mind blown as we uncover the truth behind this exciting leap forward in oven technology.
The latest Neff, Bosch or Samsung ovens might all seem like they’ve come a long way from heating food over a fire, but have they really? Instead of some flaming logs, you’ve now got a gleaming metal appliance, but it’s still essentially the same age-old system. But is oven technology about to take a giant leap for mankind?
Problems With How Modern Ovens Work
The main things that an oven is designed to do are to cook your food at a certain temperature and to do so evenly. It sounds deceptively simple, but it’s more complicated than you might think. For instance…
Problems With Cooking at a Certain Temperature – Cooking Evenly
Are you tired of dealing with unevenly cooked meals despite setting your oven at the recommended temperature? If so, you’re not alone. Many home cooks face this frustrating problem, resulting in dishes that are overcooked on one side and undercooked on the other. The issue lies within the oven itself – its ability to maintain a consistent temperature throughout the cooking process. This inconsistency can be attributed to various factors, such as poor insulation, outdated thermostat systems, or even faulty heating elements.
The Thermostat Is Best-Guess at Best!
If you’ve ever set your oven to a certain temperature and then tried to measure how accurate it is, you’re bound to be disappointed. The problem is that the thermostat inside your oven is usually linked to a probe that doesn’t do the job of measuring the actual heat inside your oven too well. Depending on where it’s situated, you could end up with a reading that’s often in the double-digits of degrees Celsius off of the real temperature and even more at particularly low or high heat.
Humidity Isn’t Measured
When you cook using your oven, the liquid evaporates from the surface of your food. This cools the food but raises the humidity of the air inside your oven. This is even more noticeable the larger the surface area of the food you’re preparing – and the more food you add – which means if you’re cooking a large batch, it’ll tend to cook faster.
Modern combi-ovens battle this with some effectiveness, but they’re generally very expensive. Keeping your oven – and the temperature probe, if it’s visible – clean can be of help, which is one of the reasons why regular oven cleaning is so vital.
Packed or Empty, Strangely Positioned Food, Leave Food to Cook or Check?
These are only some of the factors that can determine how evenly food cooks. Manufacturers still seem to struggle to take these factors into account when designing an oven. Usually, leaving it to your skills as the user to figure out the best way to do these things with your particular kitchen appliance through trial and error.
In particular, whenever you open the door to check on your food, you let out most of the heated air, which your oven will struggle to compensate for. But without being able to rely on your thermostat, how else are you going to figure out whether your food is done?
The Science of How an Oven Works
With this in mind, you can be forgiven for thinking that the part of your oven you need to heat is the air inside it. It’s not, though – it’s the walls. And depending on the location of the heating element inside your oven, it can take a significant portion of the time for the heat to reach them.
Also, if you look at the inside of your oven, you’ll see that the walls are rarely uniform (remember the inside of the door) and vary in distance from the elements. This means they don’t heat up evenly.
Any dirt on the walls will also affect how well and how evenly they radiate heat, so keep an eye on how often you undertake washing. Or simply hire professional oven cleaners to do away with this aspect of the problem.
The Future of Oven Technology – Solving Problems By the Numbers
Let’s take a look at further issues with ovens.
Alternative Heating Systems
Gas catalysis appears to be a potential technology of the future for oven manufacturers looking for ways to generate a more reliable level of heat. These are highly energy efficient but can’t reach the highest temperatures. Nor are they affordable enough yet for 99% of households.
Problems with Evenness
Some sort of rotisserie system could theoretically solve some of these issues, but you can’t cook everything on a spit! Perhaps if the heat in the oven itself could rotate around the walls? Halogen heating systems appear to offer some promise in this regard.
Opening the Door and Related Issues
What if there was a way to stop the hot air from escaping when you opened the door to check on your food’s progress? How about some sort of fan to keep the warm air inside while the door is open?
For positioning problems and the over and under-cooking that they can lead to, how about some sort of sensor to determine the food’s location? Could that not then be used to send on-the-fly temperature adjustments to the thermostat? Or even just a warning to you on an exterior screen?
Walls and Doors and Unevenness
While we’re on the subject of a screen, why not a camera inside the oven? You could then take a look at your food cooking without opening the door, potentially solving most of the heat loss problem and possibly even negating the need for having a glass part of your oven at all.
Conclusions
Modern ovens, for all their shiny exterior appearance compared to older models, are still languishing behind potential upgrades that even existing technology could make possible.
Thankfully, some oven manufacturers are starting to see that the time has come to take at least a small step forward.