![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Appliances
Jan. 4th, 2006 12:49 pmI hate buying expensive devices without researching them and without being really clear on what my requirements are. Part of the research process is to learn enough about the features to decide what's worth paying extra for.
It looks like we're going to redo our kitchen soon and the most important applicance is the cooktop. That's where we spend most of our cooking time. Second is the oven - large enough to fit a turkey in, and convection. We're going to install it in the wall and are currently evaluating the tradeoffs between a single unit with a microwave and an oven; a single oven and a microwave with convection, or a double oven and a microwave.
Then there's the dishwasher and refrigerator. After a few basic requirements I don't care much about those.
So the cooktop. We went to a large showroom and discovered that we much preferred the "rangetops" to "cooktops". A rangetop looks like the top of a stove taken off leaving the oven behind. It has control knobs on the front, and it fills in the counter area completely from front to back - so if you're putting in an expensive countertop instead of buying a long slab cutting out and throwing away a 3-foot section to drop the cooktop into, you just reduce the amount you need by 3 feet.
I've also been learning about the power of burners. From what I've read, older ranges had burners around 9,000 BTU. New cooktops provide several different sizes ranging from 6,000 to 14K or 15K. My current range has larger burners that are probably around 12K. It's frustrating to try to cook in a wok because as soon as you put anything in it, it cools down and won't sear.
So I found this:
(but with six burners instead of the griddle on the 36in model)
The six-burner model has one low-temperature simmer burner, 3 15K burners and two 22K burners.
The only drawback is that we have to install serious ventilation to deal with the clouds of steam that will arise from the wok.
If we were really serious we could get something like this:
The wok burner is 30K. Awesome.
It looks like we're going to redo our kitchen soon and the most important applicance is the cooktop. That's where we spend most of our cooking time. Second is the oven - large enough to fit a turkey in, and convection. We're going to install it in the wall and are currently evaluating the tradeoffs between a single unit with a microwave and an oven; a single oven and a microwave with convection, or a double oven and a microwave.
Then there's the dishwasher and refrigerator. After a few basic requirements I don't care much about those.
So the cooktop. We went to a large showroom and discovered that we much preferred the "rangetops" to "cooktops". A rangetop looks like the top of a stove taken off leaving the oven behind. It has control knobs on the front, and it fills in the counter area completely from front to back - so if you're putting in an expensive countertop instead of buying a long slab cutting out and throwing away a 3-foot section to drop the cooktop into, you just reduce the amount you need by 3 feet.
I've also been learning about the power of burners. From what I've read, older ranges had burners around 9,000 BTU. New cooktops provide several different sizes ranging from 6,000 to 14K or 15K. My current range has larger burners that are probably around 12K. It's frustrating to try to cook in a wok because as soon as you put anything in it, it cools down and won't sear.
So I found this:
(but with six burners instead of the griddle on the 36in model)
The six-burner model has one low-temperature simmer burner, 3 15K burners and two 22K burners.
The only drawback is that we have to install serious ventilation to deal with the clouds of steam that will arise from the wok.
If we were really serious we could get something like this:
The wok burner is 30K. Awesome.
