I imagine it would have to be some sort of impractically large closed-loop steam system, probably running around the perimeter of the pot, with a rotating paddle inside. Not at all practical, but it would be neat.
yes there is , in chemistry they have this weighted object that is put in solution to stir it while its hot.
Those don’t work via the heat tho, the plate has a rotating magnetic field that rotates a magnetic stirrer
I think there is some chemistry equipment that does that?
Stir plates use magnets and magnetic stir bars, and can be used without heat
Made my own stir plate once with a computer fan, magnets, and a potentiometer. I am sure they come with heat if needed. They can come with extremely large stirring bars.
hot plates have a motor and a magnet that couples with a stir bar.
there is however this sort of thing for stoves: https://www.amazon.com/JossaColar-Fireplace-Electric-Accessories-Thermometer/dp/B0BDM14HVM
That’s for a wood stove, to distribute heat throughout the home. While it might be possible to repurpose it, I don’t think it’s very practical
I’ve thought long about this, specifically those devices that use the pizeo electric effect to move a fan.
Problem is that you need a temperature difference to make the effect go. But ideally I’m imagining a fish that swims around the pot converting heat to work.
Ok here’s my pitch: a pot with a steam powered magnetic stir bar system built into a sealed loop in the bottom.
With modern induction cooking this should not be as problematic. You can use the magnetic field to put something in motion
There are things called stovetop fans that look like just a metal base with a fan attached to it, but they have a Peltier module or Stirling engine hidden inside. They use heat from the stove to turn the fan and blow warm air around the room. Should be able to make something using that trick that sticks down into a pot and stirs things. The thickness of the stuff being stirred will be the issue.
There’s a dish that uses thermal density differences to stir itself. It’s called soup.
Self-stirring pots are called soup? Sounds like that could be confusing.
Then my soup isn’t working.
True, there are soups like that.
Well I didn’t want to say anything, but now that you brought it up…
It shouldn’t be difficult at all to add a stirrer that gets spun by the inductive field of an induction stove.
What I’d love to have tough is a pan with built-in temperature sensor, so that I can control the temperature of the pan directly instead of only being able to control the energy output of the stove.
Rice cookers do this, in a very simple way! They operate under four basic facts:
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Assuming you’ve added the correct amount of water, rice is cooked when all the water has boiled away.
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Water’s temperature can’t go over 100°C. After that, any additional energy goes toward boiling it away.
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The temperature of cooked rice and air, without water, can go over 100°C.
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Metals of different elements expand at different rates under different temperature conditions.
So the water gets up to temperature and begins to boil. As it boils away, it cooks the rice. Once it’s all gone, the temperature of the cooked rice (and thus the cooker) begins to rise above 100°; when it does, one half of a strip of two metals touching the cooker expands further than the other, bending the strip, breaking a contact, and opening the switch, which turns off the heating element.
Expanding beyond this very simple mechanism is absolutely possible! But the more configurable you want the temperature to be, the more expensive it gets. I bet the simplest way to do this would be to have a few different little probes you can clip to the inside of the pan, one for each temperature you might want to keep a pan at. Inside each would be a bimetallic strip calibrated to that temperature.
The non plus ultra would be an NFC (or similar technology) temperature sensor, so something that doesn’t just return “temperature is higher/lower than X” but that actually returns a temperature.
That way you could control the target temperature via software.
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Sous vide devices do this but they don’t go above boiling and probably won’t work well with higher viscosity liquids.
Convention currents, but different soups will have different thicknesses and the more heat that’s required, but more likely it is the soup on the bottom will burn. Too many variables to design around.
You could make pots that can use a magnetic stirrer like they use in labs, but then you have to fish out a magnet from your soup.
Convection currents have entered the chat
Bro has never seen boiling water.
I could swear I’ve seen some sort of small three pronged thing that you drop into your pot, and as the liquid boils, it spins and stirs it.
I’ve got one! It’s shit. For anything more viscous than, say, hot chocolate it’s just vibrates in place.
I’m kinda surprised we can’t do this by simply insulating the center-most half of the pot’s bottom. When heated on a burner, this would make the outsides hotter than the core, which ought to cause our soup to rise along the sides of the pot and then roll back to the center, forming a nice current that auto-stirs.
I suspect the reason we don’t do this is that eventually, even insulated, the center would still reach equilibrium & we’d lose our circulation. In order to keep this going, we’d need to change the burners, not the pots. We’d need to design burners to be hot on the outside but cooled at the center.
Extrude the insulated center and it might work.
Presumably you can use something like a Stirling engine to power a stirrer.
