2010-08-06

The ultimate cooking thing

Most cooking things are defined by how intensely, where, and on what schedule they deliver thermal energy to the thing to be cooked. I'm thinking just about all of the real needs could be served by a radio frequency oven. Not just your typical microwave, but something that can really deliver very high intensities of RF radiation, over some two to three decades of wavelength, statistically can deliver that sort of thing as much evenly as not. Perhaps even measuring absorption measure in 3D, to plan any automated operation, in excess of really just frying out your chosen chickenwing.

To make it more real... Some 2-10kW worth of millimetre radiation in your oven would really very much mimic a grill, with its thermal radiation. If you really want to defrost something, our current microwaves can't do that, because they deposit the heat at the surface, and not throughout. Throughout calls for longer wavelengths.

So those are just two examples of how to do it right. I'm reasonably sure a radio frequency oven can do just about anything, if it's versatile enough as well. It could even serve as a frying pan, if the radiation was in the sub-millimetre range, and in the multiple kilowatt range, from below.

The most ultimate thing would be a completely frequency-wise flat radio frequency amplifier/transmitter, which could give out arbitrary amounts of power, in arbitrary spatial configurations. Yet, in its absence, it'd be nice to have some rapid-switching microwave transmitters in the multiple kilowatt range, with the ability to switch even frequency one or two decades away from our current, typical, 2.4GHz microwave oven central frequency. In both directions... ;)