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Carl Quintanilla
Louisville, Kentucky: The years-old battle between microwaves and conventional ovens is over. The old-fashioned ovens won. But manufacturers are planning a new assault. After long spells in the laboratory, they are poised to unveil machines touted as too revolutionary -- and too expensive -- to be called a microwave. The new term is speed cooker.
Here in Louisville, the appliance unit of General Electric Co. is preparing an October launch of a speed-cooking oven called Advantium. Its price: $1,300. "It's the first truly new appliance in 25 years," says David M. Cote, GE's appliance chief.
Next month, Thermador, the appliance-making unit of Bosch Siemens GmbH, is planning to unveil a $5,700 oven for home use called JetDirect, and by year end Maytag Corp. is expected to roll out a $3,000 oven currently called TurboChef. Each vows that its product will replace the traditional microwave and cook just as well as conventional ovens, but far more quickly.
Still use microwave technology
Most of the newproducts still make use of microwave technology, but combine it with something else. GE's Advantium uses white-hot halogen bulbs to brown foods in a way that microwaves can't. Maytag's TurboChef uses a different technology called "jet impingement," which is widely used in commercial pizza ovens. Essentially, the oven blows jets of hot air onto the food at a high velocity -- as great as 96 kilometers an hour in commercial versions -- and that wraps the food in a constant shroud of heat. A microwave element does the rest, cooking the food from the inside.
Only Amana Appliances' oven, called the Wave, has divorced itself completely from the microwave. Already on the market, the Wave relies solely on halogen lamps to cook. "A microwave can turn a great piece of meat into a great piece of shoe leather," says a spokeswoman for Amana, a unit of Houston-based Goodman Co.
Certainly microwave cooking on its own produced too much food that was inedible looking and unevenly cooked. Gail Macnab, a Portland, Oregon,home-economics teacher, got her first microwave 20 years ago and immediately bought several microwavable-food cookbooks. Today, the mother of two uses it to defrost meat. "Microwaved food always comes out kind of blah-looking," she says.
The No.1 reason a microwave is used today: to heat water, to make things like coffee, tea or oatmeal. Just 19 per cent of all home-cooked meals last year came out of microwaves, compared with 20 per cent five years ago, according to market-research firm NPD Group Inc. "There's no question the microwave has had its peak," says Harry Balzer, an NPD vice president. "It held the promise of being a cooking appliance, but it never delivered."
Coming up with something better, though, hasn't been easy. At GE, the Advantium has been in development for nearly four years, a bevy of technological glitches having kept it from hitting the shelves earlier. Two years ago, unsatisfied with its progress, GE scrapped the whole project to start over, taking a charge of $13 million. "Thetechnology wasn't there," says Cote, a longtime GE executive who has headed up the appliance unit since 1996.
To research the uneven-cooking problem, GE engineers developed metal "hamburgers" -- essentially flat sensors with thermocouples -- that "cooked" in the oven to see where heat wasn't reaching food. Result: Advantium's heat is more evenly dispersed in the oven than that of any existing microwave, GE says. Focus groups also told GE that consumers preferred a manual dial to set cooking time, so GE scrapped an earlier prototype that didn't have one.
For all its hype, Advantium still looks and feels like a microwave -- with a side-opening door, electronic controls (other than the dial) and a food carousel. And it's fast, like a microwave. Lasagna takes 15 minutes. A sirloin steak takes six minutes. Chocolate cookies from scratch: five minutes.
The big difference: Thanks to the halogen bulbs inside, chicken comes out crisp on the outside, not just hot.
At a recent lunch at GE's applianceheadquarters, assistants using three Advantium ovens whipped up a king-size meal in half an hour: cashew shrimp stir-fry, peppered beef tenderloin and crescent rolls. The food twirled on the carousel as it cooked, the halogen lights illuminating every few minutes. To this reporter, the end product didn't taste like microwaved food. Which is to say, it was good.
Marshall Jewell, executive chef at La Peche, a Louisville restaurant, tried it last month and was "impressed as hell," he says. His meatloaf, generally averse to microwaves, was evenly cooked on both ends. "I was very surprised," he adds.
Marketing push
Halogen technology does have a downside. Because the lamps are so hot, burning at 1,500 watt each, it is impossible to put paper in the oven because of the risk of fires. Similarly, plastic bowls are restricted because they might melt.
For appliance makers, this is a good time to bring pricey new ovens to market in the US. Consumers are spending more on home appliances these days. Salesof high-end appliances grew 8 per cent annually between 1985 and 1995, compared with just one per cent for cheaper brands, GE says.
Still, GE is aware of the skepticism it will face from consumers who may not want to splurge on an unknown technology. For that reason, it says, it will sell Advantium only to dealers who give in-store demonstrations. "Consumers are too jaded to believe what's on a piece of paper," says Cote. "They went through that with the microwave once before. They have to see it."
The Asian Wall Street Journal
Copyright © 1999 Indian Express Newspapers (Bombay) Ltd.
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