Rasmus

We currently base the width and depth on the Gastronome standard, specifically GN 1/2. It's fairly shallow, but the main reason is to serve small households, and the small size means faster and better control. The height shouldn't be a problem though.

Ok, thanks... My company is developing a precision steamer, so that's why I am curious what else is out there. It's a bit challenging but not THAT hard so I wonder why the current steamers aren't better.

Did you manage to slow cook food in it though? E.g. can you cook a steak to medium rare?

How precise is the Cuisinart? Can you use it instead of sous vide, for say meat?

Do you think they will let you steam at low temperatures (i.e. below 100C) for sous vide? I think Electrolux had an oven like that before, but I don't know how well it worked.

Wouldn't +/- 5C mean that you can't reliably cook say a ribeye medium rare (~54C)? It seems like it could end up being rare or medium instead, whereas sous vide would always be exact...

I was under the impression that Cvap ovens can be used instead of Sous vide. But then I read (I think In Moderniste Cuisine) that they fluctuate +/-5C, which wouldn’t work very well...

I am looking for a "food plating bible" - a book with a lot of good tips and photos for how to plate food. Any advice?

Thank you for that. I will try this.

Can anyone recommend a good yogurt starter to make Greek yogurt? Also: Is it really necessary to buy a yogurt machine? Seems like an exact oven will have the same result.

That may work. Will try that... Thank you!

@teonzo: Interesting. That's kind of what I was looking for. I have to check out that parcooked pasta, or try it perhaps.

@teonzo: When you saw it done in a restaurants (I am interested in commercial kitchen use, btw, not for home), how long did it take to finish the pasta and rice to serve? Also, have you come across the use of a steam oven to finish or cook pasta and rice? The product I hope to find, or make, is par-cooked rice which can be put in a steamer oven for say 5-10 minutes to get ready. And then par-cooked pasta that can be put in a steam oven to finish in say 2 minutes.

@liuzhou: It depends on what rice it is, of course. My point is more that it takes a long time to cook rice, and I am interested in ways of shortening that time to a few minutes, probably by parcooking it.

@TdeV: Sous vide, right. I guess that's basics for par cooking protein. I hope to find methods for vegetables and maybe even pasta. Could that be par cooked? @EliseD: I have found microwave rice, but without having tried it I assumed it wouldn't be very good. I am hoping to find a rice product that I can heat in a pot. Might be the same as the rice though. Do you add water to the bowl when using the microwave?

I wonder if anyone has seen rice that is par cooked, so instead of having to cook the entire ~30 minutes it takes say 5 minutes. I think parboiled rice is different, but I am not sure. In general I am interested in par cooked food products, i.e. packaged food products, if anyone has recommendations. I am also interested in techniques for par cooking.

Maximum market penetration, as we will make our money in other ways.

Not yet... We are doing price studies to understand how best to price it.

Interesting. I will look at that. We will have a bluetooth probe, and also IR sensors to read the temperature from above. For the scale the balance is between features for "power users" and ease of use for regular people. I suppose we could use a volume control style. We have gotten rid of the knob, though we had one in an earlier prototype. I was quite reluctant to do that as I also hate those touch sensors, but we have a massive control screen (17 inches) with touch, so the thinking is that we can build a UI that is easy to use for wide range settings. Currently we are looking at a Timer type setting, like you have in the phone Timer. Rollers, to move up and down. And then combine that with some bookmarked settings. E.g. you could potentially save a shortcut to reach the temperature for melting chocolate.

It's actually a rather complex cooking machine where we use convection heat, steam, grill and induction. www.varm.io. This is an earlier version. We have a "Cvap" effect, where we can do low temperature steam, which in many ways is better than sous vide. But for hot air we have first simulated the air streams and then used thermal imaging to place the TCs. We had to design our own convection heat system, as the standard systems weren't very efficient. For the induction TC we place it at the bottom to measure the pot temperature. Like a rice cooker. It's pretty good, but we are trying to figure out how the bottom temperature of the pot relates to the top, i.e. where the food is. We also have IR sensors so we could read the food surface or pot surface, if empty.

Ok, thanks. I will listen to that.

Yes, I have PID control and it is quite accurate. Many if not most appliances are poorly made why people need to learn to know their flaws. But correctly designed, using digital sensors etc, that isn't necessary. I suppose you are right though that people are used to the power setting, so it may continue for that reason. 100 scale is interesting. Thanks!

I am currently working with an induction stove, and I wonder what scale to use for the controls. Traditionally it would be a relative scale representing the effect, e.g. 1-6, and the user behavior would be to first set the stove to 6 - e.g. to boil up water - and then turn down to 2 - to keep it simmering. But given that we can detect the temperature and use a so called PID algorithm to maintain the temperature, we can let users set a temperature and the stove will then keep it. So my question to this forum is what an ideal scale would be? Would people want to be able to set the temperature of the pot/pan or do they still prefer to just set the relative effect? How many steps should the scale have?