A great war, one of unspeakable consequences for the culinare, of an impact so profound and meaningful, a fercious debate of epic proportions rages and you must declare your allegience or face a lifetime of uncooked food. Well, not really; only for the purposes of creating dramatic effect and to catch your attention to something seemingly insignificant. When was the last time you thought about your stovetop and gave serious consideration to whether it suits your purposes aptly?
It makes sense to consider the implications of how important the right stovetop can be to your lifestyle and your methods of cooking in the kitchen - whether you like to let off a little gas while you cook and love to throw your weight around, or perhaps you like to let things heat up under the glassy surface while the bubbles rise in that pot of pasta or even a fetish for allowing thousands of electrical molecules work their magic, until they’re red in the face.
But why make such a big fuss about a cooking stove - they’re all the same, right? Definitely not! Food and food products each pertain to a metric of manipulating and maintaining chemistry in what we cook, and so long as we are in control of what appliances fill our kitchen, it’s time to review some of the important tenets of stove-choosing and the pathways to more successful results with your dishes.
Early hominoids (our furry ancestors) loved fire - it amazed them to no end and they loved to experiment with it. Of course, somewhere along the lines they probably realised, “Oh, ouch! It’s hot!” and so decided that their fingers and toes should be kept inside the vehicle at all times during the evolutionary leap. But boy, turning that delicious raw animal over the flames makes for good eating, they thought. And why wouldn’t it? These days the closest we have to an open fire is a personal favourite - natural gas stoves. I am convinced that natural gas is the best way to cook and that it is the best candidate for presidential election to rule the appliances and utensils of the kitchen.
Natural gas stoves work wonders because of their even-heat distribution method. They are also very quick to reach top heat, they are ‘compatible’ with setting alight everything from your kitchen apron (I’m joking) to your cast iron wok, are a very pretty alternative to black electrical elements and are wonderfully easy to maintain and clean.
But not all that glitters is gold, for it would be necessary to consider a few downsides as well. Firstly, Natural gas is undoubtedly expensive, and nobody wants an additional bill to add to the pile — electrical cooktops don’t have that problem. Gas is also quite volatile, so you have to be careful of young children and their wandering hands around controls that might just cause an accident — again, electrical cooktops are immune here. Gas cooktops are expensive to purchase and to have installed, and they require periodic checking of the bayonet fittings to ensure gas is not leaking at an exponential rate that might cause you to become nauseated and misappropriate the sugar for the salt jar, for example.
Induction cooktops aren’t without their merits and pitfalls either, however. Thankfully, these cooktops are widely available, are stylish and come in a range of options and price ranges. They are versatile for pots and pans and have many advanced features such as instant on and near instant cooldown. For more expensive models which rely solely on magnetic induction processes, heat up is almost instantaneous and heat distribution is superb.
However, a few issues need to be taken into account here. Induction cooktops are a pain to clean, requiring special cleaning products to remove cooked-in surface stains to maintain that “just-brushed” appearance that your whitegoods salesperson (dressed like a dentist) would disapprove of the usage of “other” household products. You usually require ’special’ pots and pans that protect the surface of cheaper models, the element rings are often smaller than standard electric or gas concentric circles and nobody can get away with resisting the temptation to touch that pretty glowing, ebbing red. The elements are strikingly hot and keep their heat while the dial is turned up, so anything so much as a light touch can mean a pretty severe burn.
Who needs to consider electrical coils and terracotta elements, anwyay? They’re slow to heat up, burn up electricity like there’s no sundown, stain and ding and bother us all with their unsightly appearance.
If it were left to me, I’d put everybody onto gas simply for the fact we get to return to earlier days without the immense feeling of guilt of dressing up like Julius Caesar’s toga simply to yield the same effect. Gas gives you the liberty to maintain “heatiness” in the pans and woks and pots that you simply can’t find with other types. It’s worth giving it a whirl if you haven’t already.
Posted 2 months, 2 days ago. in Special Events.
I, too, am partial to gas. I like the feel of the heat and being able to toss whatever I’m cooking with the flames licking the bottom of my pan. But induction cooktops make slow cooking, poaching, confiting, deep frying and other cooking methods where a constant temperature all very doable on the stove, where it might have required clip-on thermometers and constantly monitoring the flame before. It’s also much safer to leave a vat of stock or a stew gently cooking away overnight on an induction stove than it is on an open gas flame.
But makers (and buyers) of electric stoves with those blasted coils and stuff all need to be shot.
W., yes that’s right; magnetic induction cooktops are cool to the touch - I suppose I should have made mention to them in this post to discourage any potential buyers to the product — I sought here to discuss only standard induction cooktops which are amazingly attractive when turned on burn like you wouldn’t believe when you touch them.
Gas isn’t such a worrier, really. You’re definitely right that an induction won’t cause you the concern of the house catching fire or worse that an induction hasn’t the concern for. There’s really only a need for thermostats and the like when we’re getting super controlling over our cooking process, and usually a good intuition about the height and heat of the flame develops with a bit of practise is all we ever need.
It’s not stovetop politics at the end of the day; it is merely a reason for inciting a bit of comparative interest in the market.
My mistake - when you mentioned the special pans, I presumed you were talking about the magnetic sort, since the other electric/induction cooktops don’t require magnetic surfaces.However, I imagine that if one were just starting out in the kitchen, a magnetic induction cooktop might be quite handy - while I admit to using terms like “cook over a medium-high heat” in my own recipes, phrases and descriptives like that are really - as you mentioned - intuitive, and for someone who may not know the difference between poaching and simmering, it’s probably a lot easier to have a less abstract guide.That said, this of course only works with cooktops that allow you to select the temperature in terms of degrees, as compared to those very ill-defined “numbers” like a heat scale of 1 through 10.Further, to give an example on the other end of the spectrum, I haven’t been able to confit any duck since having moved to HK since my stupid oven only runs for up to 90 minutes at a shot (and I like to cook the duck over 8 hours or so), and I’m not about to leave a pot of liquid fat over an open flame while I’m asleep! I also haven’t been able to poach fish (I want the heat of the oil to be maintained at a steady 65C) because I lost my old instant-read thermometer where the probe was attached by a long wire which enabled me to leave it in while I went elsewhere, listening out for the beep if the temperature went too high. I now only have one that needs to be held in place, and doesn’t beep. I don’t really consider myself a scientist in the kitchen or anything of the sort, but there ARE many processes where a good control (as opposed to being super controlling) over heat are required, and many of those are such where intuition - as much as I use it - just doesn’t cut it.