A General Post About Cookware

Some years ago, nonstick cookware was all the rage.  It continues to be popular among people stuck with cooking duties with which they're unfamiliar!

After all, nobody wants to be stuck cleaning burnt-on food off the bottom of a fry pan.  (Unfortunately, non-stick coatings are made out of a type of plastic that does not react with anything, which is why it is nonstick.  But they're impossible to destroy—well, hard to, anyway—which means they stay in landfills for hundreds of years, which is an alarming thing, and considered a biohazard.  Dupont is vilified for inventing Teflon, and justly so.)  There are ways to avoid burnt-on food, and with modern equipment, and a Little know how, you can avoid the need for Teflon coatings. 

• Avoid very high cooking temperatures.  Only a very few cooking procedures actually need super-hot pans, and only for a brief period of time—searing a steak, for instance.  Even boiling water can be done with moderate heat; using the highest available temperature does not boil the water faster. 
• Using low temperatures makes the pan heat more uniformly across the base, which makes super-hot 'hot spots' less likely.  Those hot-spots are the places where food burns. 
• Cooking newbies (or 'noobs' which are usually guys) are often in a hurry, and so use super high temperatures, to get food cooked quickly!  That often gets food burned, which in turn gets the frustrated cook interested in nonstick.  If the cook uses low temperatures, then cast iron or ceramic-coated cookware works perfectly well. 
• If you do use cast-iron cookware, many of the recipes you use—but not all—can be completed in the oven.  That's an expert-level procedure. 

ARch 

A New Burner!

The term 'burner' could mean many things.  I'm using it in the sense of one of those round things on which you cook—be it your spaghetti, or boil your water—and, in our home, possibly a curry of some sort.  Or fry your eggs.  You name it. 

You might think that I'm punching above my weight, here; after all I haven't certified in the culinary arts.  But I've taken freshman physics—and in my case, it was probably closer to sophomore- junior level—and that gave me a firm theoretical foundation for many aspects of food preparation, which I followed up with several years of actual cooking.  (Of course, I made an awful mess in our tiny kitchen, which I cleaned up about three times a year, but not more frequently.)

A little after I remarried, my wife and I made a deal with a friend who was moving into a new home, which had a hardly used glass-top range, which they wanted to swap out for a gas range.  (Glass-tops are all-electric.)  We used that range with great satisfaction, for close to 10 years. 

An aside: from the point of view of physics, a glass top range is almost the least efficient cooking system you could have.  The electric burner under the glass heats up fairly quickly, but then it must heat up the glass, which in turn heats up the cookware.  The electric element also heats up the space between the element and the glass, which takes a long time to cool down, once you turn the burner off, and that indirectly tells you how much heat is being wasted.  The entire space under the glass is sealed off, so we must infer what is there; but there's no doubt that there is a separation between the heating coil and the glass. 

About a year ago, we found the controls of the two front burners were screwed up; they could only be set at Off, or Full.  If you're at all experienced at cooking, you know that Off and Full are not good enough.  The back burners were fully functional, but we gazed at the defective front burners, teary-eyed, as we limped along, with our aging range, and our aging selves. 

It so happened that I saw on Amazon an Induction range—actually, not an entire range, but a single burner—and I thought I would send out for it, just in the spirit of experimentation.  Only cookware that can be magnetized will work on this gadget, but we tried it out, and it did work pretty well!  Like magic, in fact; it makes a humming sound, and gets just as hot as you want.  Once you turn it off, the actual burner is 'off', but still, the burner surface—in this case, also made of Gorilla Glass, or some such thing—takes a while to cool, and so does your cookware, which was cast iron, or heavy aluminum with a steel base.  Well, the most rapid-heating system is gas, but once you shut off the gas, cast-iron takes its own sweet time to cool.

Unfortunately, all the vessels we could use with the induction burner were sort of large: a huge 5-quart pressure cooker, and the 12-inch cast-iron set, which none of us liked to use, because they were hard on our wrists, being super heavy.  They were okay for a pot-roast, or a stir-fry. (Katie got used to doing the latter, but I had to take the thing out to the table once it was cooked.)

So we put the induction burner right over where the front right burner used to be, and we boxed happily on.  We also had a set of non-stick cookware that worked fine on Mr. Induction.  (It looked stupid, to have an induction thing right on top of the unused burner, but Katie and I are good at disregarding appearances.)

But I was getting frustrated at not having a medium-sized cookpot for things like soup, or oatmeal, or a dozen different things for cooking which the enormous cast-iron things (or the pressure-cooker) would be overkill. 

So, I sent out for a 2½ -quart steel / polished aluminum cook pot!  It just arrived yesterday, so we haven't had time to put it through its places.  That's next!

Arch