Cooking and Humidity
I've been thinking about humidity in food preparation recently. It seems like, after temperature, humidity levels are the most important thing in cooking, with 'soggy' and 'dry' being failure modes just below 'raw' and 'burnt' in their prominence.

Some systemic humidity problems seem like they should have technical solutions. The first is freezer burn. Cold air holds onto less humidity than warm air, so every time you open your freezer some warm air holding on to more humidity than the air previously in the freezer is let in. That air is then cooled off, forcing it to let go of moisture, which then crystallizes on your food, and voila, freezer burn. When you wrap food in plastic you're limiting the amount of warm air its ever exposed to, thus hopefully reducing the amount of freezer burn to the amount of moisture that was trapped in the plastic initially. Wrapping in plastic works fairly well, but it would be nice to have a freezer which regulated moisture levels, to eliminate the need for plastic and so that foods which themselves let go of or took on moisture at different temperature levels wouldn't get damaged. I'm not sure what sort of mechanism would be good for regulating moisture in a freezer though, especially with the requirement that the thermal efficiency should be damaged as little as possible.

The second big moisture issue is in cooking. When you bake food in an oven, the air gets warmed up, causing it to be able to absorb more moisture, thus drying out your food. Adding more moisture to the air in the oven can fix that problem. It should be possible to make an oven which does this automatically using a mechanism similar to the one which puts oil in your car engine, but a simpler approach is to calculate how much water will be needed, preheat the oven to the desired cooking temperature, then add the right amount of water in a pot, and when the pot starts to boil add the food. If anyone cares to point out how to calculate the appropriate amount of water for a given size oven and cooking temperature I'd appreciate it (yeah, I know, this is basic high school physics, but it's easier to ask the lazyweb). I'd also appreciate it if anybody can point out a fish recipe on the web of the form 'season to taste, then cook at X degrees for Y minutes'. Online recipes seem to really not like being simple. Fish seems like the most obvious dish to try, because it's notorious for drying out easily. Suggestions of particularly fickle fish would be appreciated as well.

Update: I was basically wrong about freezer burn. The phenomenon I described is the cause of frost build-up in old fashioned freezers, but modern freezers which auto-defrost do so by drying out the air, and the dryness is what causes freezer burn. See comments for some discussion and links.