Reheating rice without a microwave blows. also any saucy dish like beans or curry. I ain’t wanna simmer anew in a pot every time I want a bowl of red beans and rice. Microwave is non-negotiable.
stusser
1708
The nuker is perfectly fine used appropriately. If you reheat pizza in one you should be cruxified, your throat cut, and your tongue pulled through the hole in what’s colloquially called a Columbian necktie. But for reheating fried rice or curry, it’s unparalleled.
RichVR
1709
Slice or two of pizza on a sheet of aluminum foil in a toaster oven works fine.
No breads are to be microwaved, except VERY BRIEFLY for heating flatbreads or pastries.
Not a kitchen gadget, per se, but our gas (LP) range seems to have gone belly up. Well, the most important part, the stove top burners, still works fine, but the control panel is dead and thus we can’t use the oven, etc. It’s over 10 years old, the burner flames are uneven, it won’t stay level, and overall is kind of shot anyhow, so I should not be surprised. It’s a GE Profile, a line that does not have the best reviews on places like Consumer Reports, but also isn’t the worst.
Repairing it would require getting someone to come out and most likely tell me the electronics (control board for the control panel) are shot; new boards run one or two hundred dollars. I’m not really willing to put that plus labor costs into a 10 year old stove, so we’re thinking we will just replace it. Of course, it’s never that simple. Supposedly any LP-converted gas stove (and they all pretty much are easily switched) should work, but some folks have said that there can be issues if you are switching brands of range.
And then there’s the format. Our existing broke range is a stand-alone model that we are using as a slide-in. The only differences are that stand-alones have finished sides (irrelevant in this case) and the control panel on the front, rather than the rear (very relevant). I’m sort of thinking that one reason our control panel died is that, being in the back, it got a healthy helping of heat and grease as the range hood sucked up air from the stove top. Certainly the control panel gets grimy very easily. So I think I want to get a slide-in model, which of course all cost more than the stand-alones it seems.
In any event, we’re probably going with a Samsung model, one of the ones that gets review scores on Consumer Reports in the mid-70s, which is quite good for gas ranges. Oh, we of course also need a new range hood, because our old one has a broken light fixture, and the filters it uses are super hard to find as the model is discontinued. Yay!
Guess I’m posting to see if anyone has any experience recently buying a gas range and has anything to suggest or warn about.
No advice on the stove but you may want to consider a range hood that uses baffle filters instead of mesh filters. The baffles don’t wear out, and you can just dump them in a dishwasher to clean them.
Not a bad bit of advice, but I went ahead and got another mesh filter unit largely because they didn’t have anything else in my price range (at least this brand still has mesh filters available!).
Ended up buying a very nice Samsung slide-in unit from Home Depot, for the range. Of course, they don’t do installs on gas, so I am now having to look around for an installer. Of course, few companies actually list “gas stove installation,” but rather do it as a sideline for HVAC work or whatever. Finding an installer should be fun!
If you have trusted HVAC guy, that’s probably a good choice. When I was installing our AC, I had them run a natural gas line to the backyard for a natural gas BBQ since to avoid dealing with propane and propane accessories.
Skipper
1715
Of all the strange and sometimes stupid kitchen gadgets we have, our Big and Loud timer does that job so well you can’t miss it. I can hear it upstairs, even in my work from home office. My mobile phone is never in my pocket when I need it, and that timer sits right beside the stove and is loud enough to hear over any movie. I got it from Thermoworks on an open box sale for $25.
Of course after responding to @TheWombat about his range, today I hear a loud bang from the stove as I am cooking some soup for lunch. After I take the pot of the stove, I can see that the glass cooktop has now got a nice set of cracks and some missing glass bits. The glass cooktop replacement is $750 CAD + taxes and labour but there’s no replacement part to be had, and it could be up to a year before anybody can get a hold of one. This after a very expensive burner replacement on this stove earlier this year. I am not buying a GE Profile stove again.
So if my further search for a replacement part comes up empty, I’ll need to replace the stove. Would induction be less likely to cause whatever thermal shock that caused the cooktop to crack? If we do, there’s added expense as we have some cookware that probably won’t work with induction.
stusser
1717
Yes it would be much less likely to crack, as the induction burner itself doesn’t get hot, only the bottom of your pan does. Do be warned that some pans have issues with warping on induction as it causes intense heat only where the magnetic fields touch the pan. Seems to be most common in carbon steel pans, stainless stuff like all-clad with the aluminum layer doesn’t have that problem as it’s much more conductive/responsive.
Skipper
1718
Short answer: maybe. The surface for induction doesn’t get nearly as hot, I can even put a paper towel between the stove top and my pan and cook with induction. It isn’t recommended but you can infer the surface doesn’t get as hot under the pan, and certainly around the pan you can usually touch the surface without it even feeling hot.
But what made your cooktop crack? Heat or stress or poor construction? Could happen with any unit if the latter.
That being said, I LOVE my induction stove. It’s flipping fast.
Yet another reason to not get a GE it seems. I’ve never tried induction, though it seems really nice. Anything is better than old-school electric burners though! Those things are awful for any serious cooking. Electric ovens, though, are great.
I was bringing soup to a boil so the burner was on max at the time so possibly heat combined with a flaw in the glass. There is a point from which all the cracks radiate out from. The pot was just sitting on the stove untouched so there was no impact to the glass. Alternatively, it could be a malfunctioning temperature sensor in the burner unit letting things get too hot. It was a malfunctioning sensor that caused me to replace the burner in an earlier repair. The sensor thought the stove was hot even when nothing was turned on. Unsurprisingly, the burner would not heat up much and you couldn’t even get a pot of water to boil.
Skipper
1721
It’s been a long while since I had a glass cooktop until getting this induction unit. It sure looks pretty when clean but when not … ugg. I’ve heard of people scratching them but not breaking them. Now I know that’s a possibility at least.
stusser
1722
Induction is extremely fast and doesn’t generate a lot of waste heat, but the heat it does generate is extremely localized on the pan, so you will need to heat your pans on lower heat for a longer time rather than just blasting them or you’ll get hot spots. Not a problem for boiling water (where induction is amazing) but if you’re frying eggs or whatever it is an adjustment.
Also the warping, but that’s only a problem on very cheap stainless or carbon-steel. If you’re a carbon steel fanatic, induction probably isn’t a good idea.
Oh god, yeah, my glass (non-induction electric) cooktop is grotesque at this point with a thick ring of burnt-on-god-knows-what on each eye. Every fucking Youtube video and blog article on how to clean them just says “haha combine baking soda, vinegar, and soap and then scrub like the dickens” and I’m just like “FUCK YOUR NATURAL ASS REMEDIES GIVE ME A GODDAMN TOXIC CHEMICAL THAT WILL DISSOLVE THIS SHIT”
Seems like the main Cerambryte product on Amazon comes with a scraper blade and pads, so, I may grab that today. Though the idea of taking a straight razor to my cooktop still FEELS crazy.
Skipper
1726
We’ve had little adjustment. I only have a carbon steel wok which has worked fine so far, kind of hard to warp a wok though with so little bottom area.
Probably the biggest adjustment after ditching anything that was a solid aluminum vessel has been that our stove turns off when not in contact with a vessel of nearly the same size as the induction coil underneath. So small stuff only on the small burner, and on the super-large burner, only some really large things. You get used to it, but it is a difference for sure. Most of our induction stuff is pretty heavy bottomed though so hot spots haven’t been something I’ve seen much. Even the cast iron heats up quickly on it.
