New Stove

We usually host a Fourth of July get-together. It started out as a barbecue, evolved through a catering phase, and now is pretty much a crockpot Italian beef affair. That’s Pat’s is the perfect Italian beef and is native to the Chicagoland area. Use this beef and your guests will be happy while you will have enough stock left over to make a nice beef soup. But I digress.

Our oven had been giving us some trouble in the week leading up to the Fourth, and the burners have always been a little problematic (the stove was in the house when we moved in about ten years ago). My cooking partner decided to make a batch of brownies during the party and the oven would not come up to temperature. No problem, just bake them a little longer, right? Hah! The brownies ended up a pan of gooey glop inside a thin chocolate pastry crust. Good thing we weren’t relying on them as our only dessert.

This was the last straw for that stove. On the fifth, I did a little research on the web; on the sixth, we went out and ordered this little beauty:


Unfortunately, because of the construction of our house, which I won’t detail here, the gas pipe enters the kitchen through the floor instead of the wall, so the stove has to jut out a few inches beyond the cabinets. (Great design, eh?) And, as you can see, we were limited by space to a standard 30” stove. But for all of that, this range is a joy to work with.

It’s a dual fuel range: gas cook top for better heat control and electric ovens for more even baking temperatures. Yep, I said ovens, plural. The little one at the top heats to 350° in about five minutes and is perfect for french fries, garlic bread…anything short: the interior is about 5½ inches high. The lower oven can be run in either standard or convection mode. One shelf has rollers, so it comes forward almost effortlessly, and one rack can be converted to half width so you can cook something tall next to two shorter dishes.

But the reason I was attracted to this model initially is its cook top. I don’t know about you, but I have not had a stove capable of a true simmer since I was a little kid living in my parents’ house. This stove has two burners that not only simmer, but actually burn low enough to heat delicate sauces without the cook’s undivided attention. It also has two power burners (one 12,000 BTU and one 16,000) and one all-purpose burner.



The trouble with the old stove was that, even using a heat diffuser, the lowest burner setting kept liquids at a boil a fair amount higher than a simmer. One of the first things I used to test out the ability of the simmer burners on this new baby was rice. We cook rice on the stovetop because we don’t have room for a rice cooker in our little kitchen. On the old stove, because of the higher temperatures, our rice was, well, inconsistent, and often boiled over. The first time I made rice on the new stove, I used the power burner to bring the water to a boil and then moved the pot to a simmer burner on low. It was too low! Joy of joys! A burner that actually warms gently.

I’ve since learned the appropriate setting for rice, but have also had to adjust to the short time it takes the ovens to come up to temperature. You know how you sort of get a rhythm going when you put a meal together? You start out gathering your stuff, paring your vegetables, and, at some point a timer goes off in your head telling you that it’s time to start the oven? Yeh, I did that and when the oven rang out it’s up-to-temperature notice, I still had about ten minutes to go. Same thing getting used to the power burners.

I’m not completely competent with this new stove yet, but I’m sure enjoying the learning process.