Teleidoscope

Thu, Aug 02, 2007

Stoves

Posted at 8:39 pm MDT to Technology

Still contemplating stoves.

Nonna always had gas stoves. There was a hurricane or something that hit the Hartford area -- must have been 1956, probably not as late as 1957 -- and knocked out the power for a day or so. We all went over to Nonna and Nonno's house because they had a gas stove available for heating baby bottles. The baby involved was probably my brother Larry, who is about 18 months younger than I am. If it was a different baby, it might have been later.

My Mom's first (or maybe second) stove had a built in deep fat fryer. She hardly ever used it: she said it was messy to use, and fried food was not a huge part of the traditional cuisine on either side of the family. But I remember she made homemade doughnuts at least once, maybe more often. When we moved to Montville, the stove that was built into the house was just ordinary.

Looking at the options on stoves on-line, I'm still trying to decide if I want to go to the trouble and expense of switching my kitchen over to a gas stove (or what they call a mixed fuel: gas stove top with electric ovens). It really looks to me like in the stoves with high end oven features, the ones with gas cooktops are made for cooking and the smoothtop electric ones are made to be pretty and fairly useless. Electric stoves with burner coils and bowls to catch spillovers don't seem to have the serious ovens.

I rarely use more than two burners at a time on the top of the stove, except when I'm canning or doing Thanksgiving. But I definitely want a stovetop that will survive a canning kettle. Also castiron skillets and the chickenfryer (a very deep skillet-like cast iron pan that I use for making risotto).

What I am definitely lusting after in the way of upscale oven features is a warming drawer/bread proofer or a bread proofing cycle. A stove that will hold things at 85 to 90 F for hours, while the house is at about 70 would be wonderful. Most regular ovens have 150, or at best 120, as their lowest setting. And most methods I've tried to warm things just a little have no thermostatic control so they end up too cold or too hot. (Generally too hot. It's amazing how much heat an oven light puts out if you leave it on for a few hours.)

A sealed coil oven (if the oven is electric) would be nice to have, so the coil is not in the open getting dripped on by spills and the oven stone could sit on the bottom of the oven instead of on a rack. Three racks would be nice to have, more for the flexibility of more rack location options than a need for baking three batches at once.

The oven I had in Boston would ring an alarm when it finished preheating to the temperature you set, and it had a nice precise digital oven thermostat so I didn't have to guess whether 350 was at the 3 or the 0 on the dial. That oven was the only thing I kind of miss about that apartment, which was quite annoying otherwise.

permanent link || trackback || 0 comments || Add a comment