Cooking Dinner From the Road

Roland Piquepaille writes "After 12 years of development and with the help of NASA's Embedded Web Technology software, the TMIO company is delivering its first smart ovens. You can monitor these refrigerator-ovens from any Internet connection. For example, you can adjust and control the oven settings from your cell phone and be sure that dinner is ready when you get home. But cooking from your office or your car won't come cheap: these ovens carry a price tag of $8,699. Right now, they're only available in North America, but I bet there soon will be distributors in other parts of the world. Read more for additional details about these smart ovens."

OCD

As a sufferer of obsessive-compulsive disorder, it is worth almost ten grand to not have to spend my entire day worrying if I did, indeed, leave the oven on.

Now if they could only port this technology for my coffee maker.

Re:OCD

Yes, but how can you be sure your oven doesn't get a Trojan? Hmm, Mr. OCD? Better checksum your firmware again!

People: Obsolete

Hmm. All has been completed. With this, I no longer need my wife.

Or

I can toss a tv dinner in a toaster oven on an X10 plug, ssh into my box and turn it on with the firecracker module, and save... whatever it costs minus 15 bucks.

Re:Or

I can toss a tv dinner in a toaster oven on an X10 plug, ssh into my box and turn it on with the firecracker module, and save... whatever it costs minus 15 bucks.

I think the idea behind this smart oven is that it refrigerates the stuff while you're gone at work, so you can safely leave that Stouffer's brand frozen pork chop and mashed potatoes in there for 10 or 12 hours (or a week, if you feel like it) without it going bad while you're gone.

Whether that's worth $9000 odd dollars to you is another question, but it is at least more than an oven on a timer.

Just get takeaway

Man if you can afford $9000 for an oven, then why bother

Go out to a funky cafe/resteraunt, and spend that $16 on a well made pizza/pasta/stake and 3 beers.

No wonder it takes $500million to launch a shuttle.

Re:Just get takeaway

Man if you can afford $9000 for an oven, then why bother ...
Go out to a funky cafe/resteraunt, and spend that $16 on a well made pizza/pasta/stake and 3 beers.

You don't understand the term conspicuous consumption do you? You're supposed to spend 9K on the oven, then go the funky cafe. Then you tell your companion "Excuse me for a moment," pull out your blackberry and do a few taps, casually explaining off hand that you're telling the oven to put the Kobe steaks back into the fridge and not to decant the 1855 Château Latour.

Thank you Roland for the Non-Story

First of all, it doesn't take NASA to make a web-enabled oven. Second, if you read to the end of the article, you'll see evidence that this article is actually two or three years old (I'm talking about the 2003 and 2004 awards). And third, who would really benefit from an oven like this? Ask yourself:

When was the last time you used your oven?
Are you willing to prepare a dish in the morning and put it in the oven before you leave for work?
Would you actually trust this thing not to burn down your house?

My point is this: cool idea, but hardly worthy of a front-page post.

Re:Thank you Roland for the Non-Story

who would really benefit from an oven like this? Ask yourself:

When was the last time you used your oven?

Yesterday afternoon. It's winter, after all, and using the oven also heats the house. Plus the food comes out better than when you microwave it.

Are you willing to prepare a dish in the morning and put it in the oven before you leave for work?

Sometimes. Probably not usually, but with an oven like this, you could in theory prepare a few dishes on the weekend, put them in the bottom of the refrigerator for the rest of the weekend, then put Tuesday's dinner in the oven (set to refrigerate) on Monday night before you go to bed.

Also, lots of people who do serious cooking could make use of these on special occasions. For example, on Thanksgiving or Christmas, if you cook a big meal with turkey, ham, dressing, sweet potatoes, a pie or two, etc. there is a LOT of scrambling to do to get it all done. It's not uncommon for people who are hosting a Christmas gathering to get up at like 4:00am or 5:00am to start cooking so that it can be ready at lunch time. If part of that could be prepared the night before and could take itself through the rest of the process automatically, that could seriously cut down on stress in situations like that.

Would you actually trust this thing not to burn down your house?

There are millions of people who are perfectly comfortable going out or even going on vacation and leaving running appliances that work by burning explosive gases. If you don't believe me, then answer this: when you go out of town, do you turn off the natural gas supply to your water heater and furnace? Do you even think about it possibly burning your house down?

under the hood

Did anyone else see the headline and thing the link was going to teach us how to look dinner on the engine block?

Re:under the hood

Did anyone else see the headline and thing the link was going to teach us how to look dinner on the engine block?

Well, I did. I used to have a job that meant I'd regularly be driving from between minesites in the north of Western Australia. I'd always use the heat from the exhaust manifold of whatever car I was driving to heat up pies and other food.

The turbo shroud on a Holden Rodeo (not sure what the US equivalent is - probably an Isuzu) was just the right size to hold a pie or foil-wrapped meal. Landcruisers were good for the heat, but had no secure area for the food - I lost a couple of meals until I worked out how to wire it them place properly.

It wasn't an original idea of mine either - Manifold Destiny has been around for years. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0375751408/qid=90 4512153/sr=1-1/002-8127825-7704826?n=283155 [amazon.com]

I already have one

It's called a Crock pot. Ribs, soup, chili, stew, chicken, it beats other types of cooking hands down. Set it in the morning, it is done when I get home. The food doesn't get burnt. You can get one for less than $40. What is the upside of this oven?

$699 for the oven and...

$8000.00 to cover the cost of the manufacturer's liability insurance.

Smart vs Accessible

These ovens don't seem very smart, just accessible. I would call them smart if they were able to cook food -- detecting when it's ready -- without any human intervention.

Cheaper option

Once again, NASA comes up with the high cost, over-engineered solution to a simple problem...

1. Wrap food carefully, and completely, in foil.
2. Place food parcel carefully on engine block; secure with wire if necessary.
3. Drive home.

For the average commuter, your dinner [unm.edu] is now cooked.

Did anyone else think Road Kill from the title?

Heh... I thought that this was going to be story about either road kill meals or some sort of cooking in the engine compartment of a car. Too bad it wasn't, an $8000 dollar oven with a timer isn't much interest to me.

Burning Dinner from the Road

Is anybody else uncomfortable with the idea of buggy computers and insecure networks controlling the operations of appliances that are known to be fire hazards?

I'd much rather be home to monitor the operation of my cooking, frankly. Unless I can use one of those smellometer devices with my cell phone to tell whether or not something's burning. :)

The other irony is if we have all these mobile devices that make it unnecessary to be in the office, why wouldn't I just stay home with my oven in the first place?

Of course the reality is that for most people, mobile devices are actually excuses not to stay home.

I haven't noticed anyone pointing this out:

I'm no professional chef, but I really like to cook. In fact I've been cooking more than ever since I remodelled my kitchen at the end of '05. Naturally, while deciding what to do for the kitchen, my wife and I watched a number of TV shows on the subject.

We saw ovens much like this, and I always have several problems with the concept. First and foremost: Most oven cooking calls for a preheated oven, and foods generally turn out best if they are given a chance to warm up to room temperature before putting them in to cook. So frankly, this would be 10 thousand dollars spent on an item of limited utility. I don't mind having the remote control, because that would allow me to preheat the thing before I get home from work. But I sure don't want my bread dough sitting in the oven as it does so!

Besides, I got a 36" commercial-style range, with two 22K BTU burners, one 18K BTU burner, one 9K BTU simmer-burner, a charbroiler, an oven that will hold full size commercial bun pans, and a 30K BTU ceramic broiler all for roughly half the price of this device. I guess I'll bite the bullet and turn the knob when I want it hot.

Re:I'm sorry but..

There are fast food restaurants in nearly every country on earth. This is much less lazy than fast food - you still have to prepare your food. So, if you are correct, why are there fast food restaurants outside the US?

What could possibly be lazier than going to a "drive-thru" and buying a substance that doesn't even resemble food, and eating it in the car?