Cooking with light
Experiments need to be done
There’s a commercial device which cooks food using visible spectrum light. I’m not going to name it here, because I’m about to harsh on it, but I’ll give some thoughts which might resurrect the concept.
The reason visible light is visible is that it isn’t blocked by water, which makes sense, because there’s no point in trying to see something which is blocked by your eyeballs. (There’s a bit of the ultraviolet spectrum which we can’t see. I suspect this is because us long-lived humans would go blind by the time we die if it wasn’t blocked. I even more speculatively suspect that birds don’t have this problem because their retinas can heal, much like how they don’t get tinnitus because their ear canals can heal. But this is all beside the point.) Despite going through water, visible range light doesn’t deeply penetrate most food. Most of the color you see on food is caused by reflections off the surface or close to it.
When using photons to cook food they can heat the surface or deeply penetrate cooking it from the inside. If you just want to heat the surface you’re best off using the wavelengths in a toaster oven. A visible light oven mostly acts like a toaster oven which has trouble cooking brightly colored food. There’s a possible exception to this that if you wish to boil or deep fry food doing it with visible light could possibly heat the food directly and allow it to be cooked much more quickly and efficiently than if you heated all that liquid. For some reason the recipes for the existing ovens don’t suggest this, I’m not sure why.
If you want more deeply penetrating photos the best ones to use, disappointingly but unsurprisingly, are microwaves. That’s why we have microwave ovens, which are great for heating food quickly but don’t produce much in the way of chemical changes in the food.
On a more positive note if you want a wavelength of photons which is both deeply penetrating and actually cooks food there’s one very specific option which seems to not have been tried yet. 808 nanometers is deeply penetrating in meat. Whether 808 is the exact right number or the researchers are having a bit of fun I don’t know, but it’s very close and the range is very narrow. It’s also weirdly specific to meat. That said, it might do a truly fabulous job of getting browning all the way through meat without overcooking it. Experiments are necessary.
All of these devices of course present a severe eye safety hazard, but microwave ovens have a whole list of terrifying safety issues and they’re available everywhere with very few accidents, mostly happening to people who take them apart. So such safety issues can be dealt with.