We’ve had a microwave as an economical home appliance for a long time. Why do we not have a common appliance for cooling food in seconds?
In: Engineering
They exist in commercial kitchens and are called blast chillers. They’re incredibly expensive to run and quite large and heavy – the physics of making things cold is far more energy intensive than heating them up. Additionally, household demand for cooling just doesn’t exist to any great extent – most people don’t cook batch products like commercial kitchens, so they can be cooled in a normal way (spread out over a larger surface area and then transferred to the fridge) without being in the danger temp zone for too long, and anyway, most people aren’t as concerned about food hygiene at home as a professional kitchen would be. At best, the demand might be to get your beers cool fast, but a soggy paper towel round them in the freezer generally does the job.
Ultimately, all these elements mean that it wouldn’t be commercially viable to bring them to market as domestic appliances.
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