Range? What range? Well, that combination Stove/Oven thing that you cook on? That’s called a Kitchen Range. I dunno why either. It only has one range: VERY SHORT. Like, that thing doesn’t cook things even 2 feet away! What’s the deal?
Anyway, lets talk about your range and how it’s affecting your cooking! From heat distribution, how they heat, convection vs conventional and more, lets dig in.
HEAT SOURCE:
So your range is going to be either gas or electric…unless you are at home on the prairie or have an old, old house then you might have a wood burning stove. That’s…a whole different topic and we’re NOT going to get into that right now. For the intents of this article, we’re talking electric vs gas.
GAS: Gas is nice and easy because it comes in one of two variants: Natural and Propane, but functionally they work the same, so we only need this writeup, vs electric. You’ll see what I mean later. Gas works by setting gas on fire and…fire is hot. It’s that simple.
+Visual Confirmation: You can SEE that fire. How do you know if your burner is hot? Is it on fire? Yup, it’s hot. How hot is it? Well, how big are the flames? It’s that easy.
+Fine Control: When you turn off the fire, the fire goes out. This means that there’s very little residual heat on that burner (most of it is in your pan) and your cooking will cease at very normal, expected rates.
+Limited need for electricity: Your stove will still work even without power. Why? Because the electricity is only used for the spark starter. A match will light your burner just as well. Your oven will probably NOT work, however, because the thermostat inside won’t be powered.
-Maintenance: A gas stove should last you for life, but they do need the occasional bit of servicing. Dust, soot and other things can build up in pipes and burners when they’re off and can cause airflow problems. Airflow problems result in unclean burns of gas which results in a gassy flavor being left in the air. This is doubly a problem in the oven.
ELECTRIC: Electric stoves come in a range of types. Today we’re gonna talk about the most common three: The conventional Coil Burner, Glass Top and Induction.
COIL: The most common stove, though they’re starting to be replaced more and more with Glass Top. Coil stoves have a coiled resister that plugs into the range and gets heated with direct current
+Cheap: These ranges are old as teeth and easy/cheap to manufacture
+Easy to take apart or repair: They’re also made modular these days. The coils themselves are replaceable through most hardware stores.
+Works with anything: These are durable ranges. You can cook with whatever you want on these things without worrying about it.
-Burners age out: After long periods of use the burners will wear out and need replacing, else they develop hot and cool zones.
-Annoying to clean: Anyone who’s ever had to disassemble a coil stove top to clean it knows the tedium to clean it.
-Coils retain heat: When you turn off the burner, the burner stops getting hotter, but the heat that’s already there is kept, this can cause over cooking if you’re not paying attention.
Glass Top: These are much like coil and some in fact even use a coil, while others use a lamp, to provide heat to a ceramic or glass surface.
+Sleek looking: They look nice. Hard to argue with that.
+Easy to clean: There’s no nooks or crannies, outside the knobs) for things to fall into
+Less heat retention: The reason the burner and only the burner is hot and not the whole glass/ceramic top is that these materials don’t distribute heat well. They don’t like holding onto heat and give it up easy, so the surface will let go of most of it’s heat pretty quickly.
-Potentially uneven heating: Bulb heaters don’t tend to suffer from this, but many coil heated will glow when you turn them on and you can usually see a black void where there’s less coil This spot will be cooler. It probably won’t affect much, but can cause uneven cooking.
-More expensive to repair: Enough said
-Delicate surface: While it’s pretty tough stuff, you’re going to want to be careful with dropping things on it or sliding particularly heavy pots/pans around. For instance, while you can use a Cast Iron pan on one just fine, you’ll want to be mindful of how you set it down and you’re definitely not going to want to slide it from one burner to the next in fear of scratching that smooth surface.
INDUCTION: Induction is the odd man out here. While the other two run DC electrons through a high density resistor to create heat in much the same way most heaters do, induction actually runs AC current through a coil which in turn causes electron movement magnetically in your cookware.
+Direct Heating: The cookware is heated directly, this removes the middle man that is the burner. This will result in faster heating with a finer tune of control much like gas will.
+Cool cooktop: All the heat in your cooktop is transferred there from your pan. This results in less burnt-on food resulting in quicker cleanup.
-Pan Selection: Not all pans conduct that magnetic field the same way. Take a fridge magnet shopping with you, if it doesn’t stick to the pan, don’t buy it.
-Expensive: Most induction tops are more expensive than other ranges.
-Humming: The sensitive of hearing beware, most people won’t notice or care, but some ranges DO humm or buzz at an irritating frequency to some.
How to tell if your burner is heating evenly:
I described the sugar test in the Pots and Pans article linked here (link) and it’s still my go to. Dust a pan with plain, white sugar so it’s evenly coated. Now put it on your burner at medium heat and wait for the sugar to melt. Does it melt evenly? Which parts are melted or maybe even burnt before the sugar is melted in others. These are your hot vs cool spots.
OVENS:
Ovens are NOT all made equal, not by a long shot. While all of them are heated in more or less similar ways, that is to say they usually have a heat source on top and bottom, sometimes in the back as well, how they maintain that heat can vary wildly. You see, the problem is the thermostat. Yup, just like the one in your house. How an oven knows to add more heat or less heat is based on a thermostat and much like the one in your house, not all of them are made equal. Ever notice your oven cycle? This is when it turns on for a while, but then clicks off? This is because your thermostat noticed it got too cool in the oven and kicked on the heater, once it got too hot, it kicked it off again. This causes an inconsistent level of heat in your oven and the heat shifts like a sine wave. Does your oven do this a lot or a little? Does that matter? Not really, assuming the variance is small.
What we really need to know is how much variance does your thermostat allow in your oven. How do we find that out? With a meat thermometer that allows you to keep the oven door closed. This can be wired, wireless, whatever but you don’t want to open the oven. A cheap BBQ thermometer works fine, just make sure it’s accurate by calibrating on something known like a glass of ice water.
+Place the thermometer in the oven and leave the probe on a rack as close to centered in the oven as possible. Close the door. Do not open it for the rest of the test.
+Set the oven to 350 degrees.
+Once the oven has “confirmed” it’s preheated in whatever manner it does that, check your reading.
+Now keep an eye on the thermometer for the next half hour or so. Maybe run this test while you’re prepping for dinner.
+Record the highest and lowest temperatures you see.*
*If you have a “smart” thermometer many of those can actually track min/max temps during cooking for you.
+Take the average of the two values, that’s your ovens “Actual” temp. Subtract 350 and that’s your “offset” value.
Now that you have your offset value, you know how far to “offset” your temperatures to get more accurate cooking. For example, some ovens will treat your “350” that you set it to as the MINIMUM, instead of average temp, so maybe your numbers come out looking like 351 for your low and 372 for your high giving you an average temp of 361.5. This would tell us we need to lower out cooking temp about 10 degrees to get the correct average cooking, which might explain why our cookies are getting a little more chocolate brown than golden brown. Alternatively, we could be working on a range that tries to average, but comes out with temps closer to 323 and 361 which averages out to 342 and we’d want to turn our oven up by 10 degrees instead.
Some, fancier ranges have adjustments you can make to the oven. Consult your owners manual and you might be able to tighten that range up a bit or shift it to get your offset number hovering closer to your target number.
CONVECTION VS CONVENTIONAL:
A conventional oven is a box that gets hot. A convection oven has a fan that circulates the air. This means that the oven tends to get more even distribution of heat and keeps the hot air moving over your food. This will dramatically improve the quality of baking when you have multiple things in the oven at once and will actually reduce cook times because hot air is being moved over your food and we’re not relying on just thermodynamics to move heat to your food. Convection is great, but shouldn’t always be used. Delicate pastries, desserts, quick breads and so forth usually WANT that slower climb in temperature. A good rule of thumb is if something starts out runny, you probably don’t want to use convection. Probably. Your recipe may vary.
BROILERS:
What is a broiler? What is it for?!?! Well in most ovens the broiler setting turns on JUST the top heater and turns it up to MAXIMUM. When using this you usually want to put your rack near the top so you can get your food as close as possible to the broilers. Why? Crispiness! The broiler can get VERY hot and is great for rapid browning, charring and toasting. Do you want to crisp your bacon? Evenly char your veg? Get a nice golden brown crispy toasting to your garlic bread? The broiler is your tool of choice. But be careful, they get HOT and take some time to warm up. It’s very easy to burn things under your broiler so give it a moment to warm up and then keep a close eye on it, literal seconds can be the difference between perfectly charred or toasted and burnt. My advice is to leave the oven door at least partially open and once something goes under the broiler, what you are now doing is nothing but waiting for it to come out. Peek regularly and use your nose. The slightest smell of burn is your sign to check it again.
So hopefully you have a better idea of how to use your range and how to make sure you’re getting the best you can out of it! As always, please hit me with questions.