Kitchen Gadgetry

OH yeah… mmm… love a homemade sauce. I use my enameled cast iron dutch oven to make chicken noodle soups and currys. So good at keeping the temperature hot throughout the whole soup.

The Le Creusets are just too pricey though to even justify purchasing for 90% of home users. For the price of an LC, you could go through 3-4 Lodge cast iron ovens, which probably won’t happen in a lifetime. I would recommend the Lodge one to anyone, and if it is something you use every day and need the best of the best get an LC oven.

There is a “how it’s made” episode on making the enameled cast iron dutch ovens that is pretty cool to watch. I believe the ones they showed being made were Le Creusets. The process in making them was very fancy.

I love my Lodge enameled dutch oven. I even bake bread in it.

It’s now $216.59 inc. shipping for the 220v versions (~£152) of the Anova precision cooker.

Tempting!

Arise thread!

So some retard (me) when they were designing their kitchen, forgot to have a duct installed for their range hood. I don’t do much cooking outside of the occasional cast iron grilled steak, so this was just not something I thought about. Well after a few steaks I am starting to get weary of the way the smoke takes over the house and the lovely grease layer that sits on every surface of the kitchen. So now I’m looking into a ductless range hood and was wondering if anyone here has had any experience with them. Everyone online seems to have the same input that a ducted system is better (thanks guys!) but no one really gives any hands on experience with a properly filtered ductless system. Obviously ducted is better, but will a ductless hood make a noticeable difference with the smoke and the grease or is it kitchen snake oil?

I have one (our apartment wasn’t ever built w/ a ducted hood in mind), and I can’t say I’ve been very impressed with it, even after replacing the filters with something better. Mind you, I cook VERY fragrant food (lots of Indian, Thai, Chinese, etc.) and use a deep fryer semi-regularly, so I’m just about the worst-case scenario for that kinda thing, but it definitely doesn’t keep up with me in the kitchen.

Is it marginally better than just letting the food cook? Yeah, somewhat, sure. But the apartment still gets smoky, scents still cling to the whole place, and grease still winds up at least near the stove, and cleaning the actual hood is not what I’d consider fun.

In essence, it will improve things. Depending on your particular threshold for annoyance with cooking smells/smoke, it might not improve it enough to justify the expense, noise, and modest added complication.

I have a little hood built into a microwave over my stove. I firmly believe there is no fan at all. Instead there’s a little speaker that makes a fan-like sound. It doesn’t do dick.

To stop your entire kitchen from being covered in a film of sticky grease, get a splatter screen. Otherwise, open a window.

Possibly relevant to your interests, MattN: how to install a kitchen exhaust fan.

This explains a lot. When I first moved into my house, the first thing I checked was the filter in my ductless hood. It was clean. I figured the previous tenants were good people. After lots of cooking I have changed my theory. The filter is clean because the fan does nothing. Smoke that goes into the hood remains unmoved by any air flow. I have a small desk fan by the kitchen window. Open the window and fan on high is the only way to go.

To clarify there isn’t actually a little speaker. There is a fan, it just does nothing except make a fan noise.

There really is no substitute for an externally vented hood. I miss the one in may previous home more than I miss the range. I look forward to putting a hood and a range where I live now, but it is a few years off.

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk

This.

-xtien

I got that. :)

Anova are having a Mother’s Day sale. Use the Use Code: LUVMOMWIFI to get $30 off the Anova Precision Cooker Wifi making it $169.

Alton Brown does a quick look at some silly gadgets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgFeVlw2Ywg

He’s basically just messing around with crap they’ve thrown at contestants on his Cutthroat Kitchen show.

One of my sadder moments was when I got tired of that and stumbled onto Guy’s Grocery Games. I wish I could take that back.

-xtien

If you see any food program with Guy or Rachael in it, you run. You run so very hard and never look back.

You’d think I would know that by now. I had a lapse when I ran out of food shows on my Netflix.

Won’t happen again.

-xtien

Our fan started to make a weird noise, like a playing card in the spokes of a bike kind of noise. I figured the filter had warped and was contacting the fan. When I took it all apart to clean it, there was a huge leaf in there, dried out from autumn and the heat of cooking.

At least it wasn’t a snake. At last I have found an advantage to living in California instead of Australia!

-xtien

I wound up getting a Vegeghetti spiralizer. It looks like a pair of cones joined at the tip. Not nearly as sophisticated as what nKoan has but it does the job and has the advantage of taking up very little shelf space, and the whole thing can just be tossed in the dishwasher.

I’m not well versed on the girth of Australian snakes but can’t you put a mesh or something on the outside of the duct?