Products I Would Like to See

The first steps in making hummus bi tahini are soaking the dried chickpeas over night — “hummus” is Arabic for “chickpea” — and then simmering them for about an hour. In order to simmer them I have to spend ten or fifteen minutes bringing them to a boil and then adjusting the burner — in my case induction — to find the right setting. If I get it a little too high I come back into the kitchen fifteen minutes later to find that the pot has boiled over onto the stove.

There is a simple technological solution — a thermostatic burner. Have a sensor that detects the temperature of the bottom of the pot, better yet of its contents, and set the burner to increase its power if the temperature is below 212°, decrease if above.

Some induction cook-tops or ranges have this feature, although my experience with one induction hotplate suggests that the control is not very precise and allows for only a small number of temperature settings. So far as I can tell, no electric ranges or cook-tops have it. Several brands have sensi-temp technology, a button in the middle of a coil burner that turns the burner off if the pan gets too hot, but it is a safety precaution against fire not the input to a thermostatic control. Presumably the same technology could be adapted for my purpose but hasn’t been. As far as I can tell it is only available on coil burner stoves, not on the much more common smooth top electric ranges.

The temperature of the bottom of the pan, which is what both the induction burners and the coil burners with sensi-temp measure, is a pretty good proxy for the temperature of its contents but one could do better. For baking bread I use a thermometer that consists of a probe I can stick into the bread connected by a cable to a unit outside the oven that shows the temperature reading and beeps at me when it gets to my preset temperature — 205°F for my standard sourdough bread. It works for measuring the temperature of the contents of a pot too, useful when warming milk to make fresh cheese for one of our medieval recipes. There is no reason why a range could not have a socket to plug the cable into and use the temperature reading from inside the pot to control the power.

High end stoves sometimes come with a probe that plugs into the inside of the oven to tell you the temperature of the roast or loaf of bread the probe is in. So far as I know none of them have taken the next step of offering the option of having the temperature reading from the probe control the oven, turning it off when the food reaches the desired temperature. One problem with doing that is that even when an oven is turned off it still takes quite a while to cool down, so would keep cooking the food. To solve that, have a convection oven blow room temperature air through the oven until the oven temperature is no longer hotter than the food temperature — heat flows from hotter to cooler, not the other way.

Speaking about cheese making, I have another improvement to suggest. Milk has to be heated slowly, to the temperature a little below boiling where you add vinegar or lemon juice to get the curds to form. Ideally this involves continually stirring it for an hour or two; if you don’t, milk sticks to the hot bottom of the pot. When, after removing the curds, you empty out the whey to transfer it to a smaller pot to boil it down to make gjetost,¹ you find a thin layer of scorched milk at the bottom of the pan.

Chemists solved the stirring problem a long time ago with a magnetic stir bar placed in a container of liquid and spun by an external magnetic field. I don’t think it could work on an induction burner, since induction only works for pots that a magnet will stick to, but there is no obvious reason why it can’t work on an electric burner.²

An alternative that would work on induction as well as radiant or gas burners would be a lid with a shaft running from its center down to a stirring blade driven by a small electric motor in the lid. As far as I know it doesn’t exist but I don’t see why it couldn’t. Ideally it would be adjustable to fit on pots of different sizes.

There is one more thing I would like to see for sale — a hybrid range, equipped with both induction and electric burners. I like induction, my wife doesn’t, and twenty-some years ago we solved the problem by getting a range that had two induction burners and two radiant burners. The surface glass has started to crack. We can’t get it repaired because the part is no longer available and we can’t replace it because nobody, as far as I can tell, makes a hybrid range any more. The closest we can come is a range with radiant burners for her plus one or two induction hot plates for me.

Home Cooling

The inexpensive way of keeping a house cool is by opening windows in the evening when it gets cool out, closing them in the morning when it gets hot. It should be straightforward to automate the process.

Start with the case of a house being built. Build in one vent with fan low down and another high up. Couple the fans to an indoor and an outdoor thermometer and a control module that lets you set your preferred minimum internal temperature, say 70°. Program the module to open the vents and turn on the fans, with the low fan blowing air into the house and the high fan blowing it out, any time the outside temperature is lower than the inside temperature and the inside temperature is above your desired minimum. You are targeting the minimum not the optimum because the house will warm up during the day when the outside air is warm and the vents closed. For times when you are heating rather than cooling, program it to either shut the vents entirely or bring in warm air during the day, if there is any, shut down at night.

There are circumstances where this won’t work, most obviously if the temperature never gets cool enough in the evening to cool the house, in which case you may want air conditioning as well. But it should work in many climates and at least reduce your air conditioning bill in the rest. Fans are a lot cheaper than air conditioners.

So far I have assumed the system is being incorporated in a newly built house. To retrofit it into an existing house, replace the vents with fans each set into a partially open window like a window air conditioner. If that isn’t sufficient, replace the lower one with a window air conditioner controlled as I have described, blowing cool outside air in when the weather isn’t too hot for that to be sufficient, functioning as an air conditioner when it is.

So far as know, the only version of this approach that now exists is an attic fan that turns on when the air in the attic gets too hot. Does anyone know of something that comes closer to what I have described?

An Improved Silverware Tray

Putting away the silverware (actually stainless), it occurred to me that another product I would like to see would be a silverware organizer with adjustable partitions. The one we have has a compartment for teaspoons wider than the spoons, with the result that the spoons end up in a disorganized heap rather than the neat nested pile that my sense of order, my taste for low entropy, prefers. Much the same is true of the forks, although in that case I have devised an arrangement, with two forks lying on their side to fill the extra space and keep the rest in order, that solves the problem. Reducing both compartments to their optimum width might free up enough space in the tray for an additional compartment to separate the medium size spoons from the large spoons and so bring more order to that part of the tray.

Amazon does have expandable silverware organizers, but I can’t find anything closer to my idea.

There are earlier suggestions of products I would like to see in earlier posts, Concerning Baths and Showers  and Gadgets I Would Like To See. The latter has some overlap with this post but this is the improved version.

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1. Strictly speaking brunost since it’s made from cow’s milk rather than goat’s milk. If any of my readers know the secret of getting the texture as well as the taste of the commercial version, let me know. Mine comes out too brittle to be properly spreadable.

2. My wife objects that what you need is something that actually scrapes the bottom of the pan to keep stuff from sticking to it. My theory is that if the liquid is always moving things won’t stick but since I don’t actually have a burner with a magnetic stirring rod we can’t do the experiment.