Microwave ovens have dubious value due to possible damage to nutrients and their inability to cook food literally. They could also be faster.
This oven consists of a bath of molten salt with an elastic bed. Its interior is above eight hundred degrees centigrade. When you want to cook something, you drop the raw ingredient, possibly a potato, from a considerable height into the bath. The considerable heat of the molten salt cooks the food almost instantly, from the outside in, and the object then bounces off the bottom back up into your gloved hands, glazed in salt. Instant cooking and seasoning in seconds.-- nineteenthly, Aug 30 2008 www.archive.org: Pa`ve http://web.archive....ry.com/user/Pa_60vefor nineteenthly [jutta, Aug 30 2008] An example of cannibal cuisine using this process http://newsimg.bbc....1515_solo203300.jpg [normzone, Aug 30 2008] wouldn't the weight of the salt reduce the springiness of the bed? and isn't salt bad for your ealth?-- po, Aug 30 2008 Oh yes. Well, i did think of dropping it straight through, but i don't know how to hold the liquid in place. Maybe spray it? Isn't it an improvement on molten lava though? That was my first idea.
Fish can be cooked inside a block of salt. You could chisel it off after.
The point would be to cook something extremely fast, basically.-- nineteenthly, Aug 30 2008 you could possibly rig up some device say a long tube in a doughnut shape roughly 17 miles in circumference and perhaps below the surface under the london tube by about 300 feet and get your culinary ingredients whizzing around that somehow - obviously people would have to take turns and it would be incredibly expensive...-- po, Aug 30 2008 /basically/ I've not seen molten salt as a method of cooking in any basic cook book. Surely the point would be to cook something extremely fast, complicatedly? [+] though I suggest the steam explosions would be, well, interesting-- david_scothern, Aug 30 2008 Yeah, I agree. The reason microwaves can cook faster is that they can penetrate and cook evenly. This is just a deep fat fryer raised to an extreme. The heat still has to come from the outside and run counter the current of the boiling water which is going out.-- MisterQED, Aug 30 2008 [Po], yes, a pina collider in fact, which is on the HB somewhere. One of these days i'll come up with a method of cooking which doesn't also cause the food to explode.How about freeze-drying the food first?Oh no! Pina collider's gone! Was it lost in the crash?-- nineteenthly, Aug 30 2008 It's post-crash. (Someone linked to it in 2005.) The author deleted their account; I forgot (if I ever knew) what caused that.-- jutta, Aug 30 2008 That's tragic, it was brilliant. I wonder what else is gone.-- nineteenthly, Aug 30 2008 Ah, [Pa ' ve]. I was thinking of him the other day when another new baker was expressing some insecurities.-- normzone, Aug 30 2008 Salt won't do it. The skin temperate of a potato in an oven is 212F or less. You're increasing it to 800F, so the rate of conduction is increased by a factor of 4. If it took you an hour before, now it takes 15 minutes. Of course, the potato won't cook successfully anyway, as it will disintegrate and carbonize, leaving you with a handful of salty charcoal.-- ldischler, Aug 30 2008 Shouldn't all that be in kelvin, [ldischler]? If so, it doesn't help my case. I think salt melts at around eleven hundred kelvin. I do baked spuds at around six hundred kelvin and they can also be buried in bonfires, which are quite a bit hotter.
OK, so something non-toxic with a higher melting point than salt. How about this then? You seal the food in a vacuum chamber and weigh it each day until its weight stops dropping - no more water. You then flood the vacuum chamber with argon, and a trap door opens, dropping the food from an enormous height into a bath of liquid carbon. It bounces back up and the trap door closes again. You then fill the chamber with steam at low pressure (i.e. not very hot steam) which you gradually increase, rehydrating the "food". It might help with flatulence or poisoning.
[Jutta], thanks for the link. That's a whole lot of ideas gone. I do remember [pa`ve]. The name used to make me think of peacocks.-- nineteenthly, Aug 30 2008 Wasn't pa've Nickthegreat?-- blissmiss, Aug 30 2008 I have a vague inkling of something happening but i don't know what. [Nickthegreat] seems still to be here and [Pa`ve] isn't here under that name any more. Their ideas look quite different. I'm tempted to try some kind of textual analysis, but i should probably try to get a life instead.-- nineteenthly, Aug 30 2008 okay, freeze-dried carbohydrates.. carbon... Aldose... ldischler, have you made sugar?-- Voice, Sep 01 2008 There's some of that on here.-- nineteenthly, Sep 01 2008 There may be a game played between annotators here, but i am an outsider everywhere, including here. My wit is not so quick or creative as that of many others, i don't have a scientific education and my lifestyle is marginal in many ways. Look at my annotations elsewhere. There are frequently no responses to them, probably an indication of my lack of wit or charm, and i'm often the last person to annotate, implying that i tend to miss the Zeitgeist. The same applies to many of my ideas, which often stir little interest in others. There may be insiders on this page, but i'm certainly not one of them. There's a lot of evidence against that proposition on the HB - just look at my stuff and you'll see it. Everyone is a potential outsider and in some situations this is more noticeable than others.
I am a mere wannabe.-- nineteenthly, Sep 01 2008 Can I be a wannabe to?-- xxobot, Sep 02 2008 //wannabe too//-- blissmiss, Sep 02 2008 I wannabe II-- normzone, Sep 02 2008 You'd need to be III-- blissmiss, Sep 02 2008 nineteenthly, lets look at this from a more objective point of view. Either there are mysterious insider games going on or there aren't. Another problem you're having is that you feel left outside in particular. Either you are being left out or you're not. This leaves us with a 2x2 grid of possibility.1:There are insider games and many people are being left out. In this case, why is it important for you to get on the inside too? If you have a good reason for wanting this, you've already done the prerequisite coursework (many ideas and annos) and there is no clear way in besides being invited so your best option is to not worry about it and wait. 2:There are insider games and only you are being left out. In this case it is clear that you will never be invited "in" and your best option is not worry about it and participate to the degree that gives you the most benefit for your time.3:There are no insider games, and no one is being left out. In this case your best option is not worry about it and participate to the degree that gives you the most benefit for your time. 4:There are no insider games, but you are being left out by every single other half baker. In this case your best option is not worry about it and participate to the degree that gives you the most benefit for your time. In every case the most reasonable thing to do is not worry about insider games or being left out! Now I percieved some time ago whats really going on here: Some halfbakers know each other in real life: personally. They may have introduced each other or, less likely, met through the HB and started long term relationships of any kind. The people who know each other personally share more than would be reasonable to explain in a limited forum of ideas. Thats it! really! No conspiracies or evil plots, no leaving out of people, no social stigma. The simple fact is, no one is likely to invite a complete stranger from a random message board into their private and real life gatherings, even if they know others on the same message board.-- Voice, Sep 03 2008 Thanks, [Voice]. I think one of the interesting things about this place is that you can observe interactions between people which are quite extensively archived, and i think it's probably a goldmine for research in that way. I know someone tried this before and presumably it went well. I think that, for me, what goes on here socially reflects what goes on for me in real life quite closely, but one difference is that it's all recorded and, theoretically, can be traced. I have had many conversations where i say something and it falls flat in face to face interaction, and it happens here too. However, unlike the real world, this is all recorded. Similarly, in real life i tend to rant a lot, and i do that here.
It's like i said before. This place is not just a lab for humour but also for social interaction generally.
Anyway, thanks again.-- nineteenthly, Sep 04 2008 And, on that note, [HegelStone] seems to have gone, which i personally think is a shame.-- nineteenthly, Sep 04 2008 seconded-- pertinax, Sep 04 2008 III'ed :-)-- blissmiss, Sep 04 2008 Will s/he ever read these? Learned helplessness, innit?-- nineteenthly, Sep 04 2008 innwhat?
I mean, expressing friendly thoughts is a good habit to get into, even if it's highly uncertain whether their object will ever read them. Learned helplessness, on the other hand, is just damned depressing. Not the same thing at all.-- pertinax, Sep 05 2008 What i had in mind was that [HegelStone] seemed to conclude that this place is some kind of exclusive club of which i am a member, then deleted her/his account (i really think they were male but can't remember why). He may still be lurking, but if he isn't, he won't read the friendly comments, so he won't get a counterexample to his perceived negative experiences, so we can be as nice as we like to him but he will never know, or if he does, we will never know he knows. In other words, learned helplessness. His behaviour has resulted in him missing out, and if he does that a lot, his world probably seems a pretty dark place, or at least his HB is. I say this because i also have elements of that. I buggered off for two days after i wrote that anno about being a wannabe, so i missed out on the positive comments made by [Voice] and others for a while.
I liked [HegelStone] and i miss him.
Not the happy cuddle club though, is it?-- nineteenthly, Sep 05 2008 //Shouldn't all that be in kelvin//
Not really. It' a matter of temperature differentials, not absolute temperature. In a normal oven at 400 F, most of the temperature differential is in the boundary layer of air outside the potato. The skin of the potato is thus much cooler (probably around 200), and the rate of conduction into the potato is dependent on the bulk conductivity of potato (close to water), and the temperature differential (about 100 degrees between the skin and the core). When you use molten salt, the skin effect mostly disappears, and the surface temp of the potato is now somewhere close to 800. So the conduction is several times faster...or would be except that the potato actually explodes due to steam pressure.-- ldischler, Sep 05 2008 Oh wow, we're on-topic again!
That suggests another solution. Pressurise the potato to raise the boiling point of water. The melting point of the substance in which it's immersed would also rise, but maybe there's some substance which would be molten at the critical point of water. What you do, therefore, is pressurise your spud to many times atmospheric pressure, then do something like drop it in a bath of molten tin under the same pressure. The water would then expand, but not boil, and the cooking would still be quicker. It then bounces off some steel springs, and the cooking time is determined by the depth of the bath of molten tin. You'd probably need to fire it into the tin in order to overcome buoyancy. You can then peel off the layer of tin on the surface with a tin opener, and adjust the strength of the cannon to alter cooking times.-- nineteenthly, Sep 05 2008 drop it from the stratosphere and it will be baked in seconds.
On second thought that is a bad way to bake this idea.-- pashute, Aug 07 2012 random, halfbakery