Dave wrote:

the problem is, do you want the field 'inside' the meat, or in the air
around the meat? The problem is made harder because the steak is not only a
dielectric material, which changes the magnitude of the field, but is also
moderately conductive, which essentially shorts out the field. also, the
properties depend on the direction of the field... you might want to see if
your library has this article:
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freea...rnumber=300250 . personally
i would probably go the other way and suspend the meat on an insulating net
horizontally and put a plate above and below it that are bigger than the
steak. it is much easier to generate a uniform field between large parallel
conductive plates than with wires... as a first approximation make the
plates about double the largest dimension of the steak. it may be
acceptible to set the steak on one of the plates (sterilize it first) and
just suspend the other one above it.

Thank you! In hindsight, obviously applying a field top to bottom will
be easier than side-to-side!

I need to research it, but I should be able to calculate the voltage
required to generate the 1v/cm field in the steak if I know the
dielectric constant of the "meat"...

One question, what if the plates both touch the steak and I use a
smaller voltage? I guess since steak is conductive, keeping the plates
at a 1V/cm potential may actually sink a lot of current through the
steak and cook it after all.