1727

Cast iron will definitely get hot spots as it’s a relatively poor heat conductor, but it’s so thick that it won’t warp. Worst case, it’ll crack. Carbon steep is much thinner and also a poor conductor, so what happens there is the center heats up much faster than the outside and it’s no longer flat, it spins. Sometimes cooling down corrects that, sometimes not.

1728

Another reason a glass cooktop can shatter is if the bottoms of your pans are rough. Scratches build up. So if you do the shake the pan thing, lift it up first.

1729

Not a kitchen gadget but an outdoor cooking gadget, my Traeger became too flavorful from my beef jerky drippings and critters chewed through a bunch of wires. Managed to take it apart and patch/solder everything back, and it works! That brief period where I was into building drones from scratch has really paid off down the line.

1730

How do you like your Traeger? My neighbor got one. He’s still learning on it. I have the EZ-BAKE equivalent for smoking, a Masterbuilt electric smoker. It’s okay, just nothing above 250 degrees, ever. Just wondering if the Traeger is really the bees knees or hype or a bit of both?

1731

It’s pretty great for what it is, but that said, I don’t know that it’s particularly better from any of the dozen knockoffs that have come out that do the same thing. It was expensive even as a floor demo from a buddy’s business.

High points would be the set it and forget it, it does hold temperature quite well. It’s also pretty efficient, I do 4 hour jerky smokes at 160 and use maybe $2-$3 of fuel, or something like ribs at 275 and not much different for a 3 hour cook. Even a 12 hour brisket you can maybe get done without refilling the hopper, and the Walmart pellets work perfectly fine (Pit Boss) and are maybe $13 bucks for 3 hoppers’ worth. The actual grill grate is very high quality, that may be a difference from others, with a lot of use the coating is still flawless as best I can tell, I usually pull it out and hit it with a pressure washer, then rub it down with a rag and neutral cooking oil. Fifty or so cooks, never cleaned the inside until my recent adventure, it’s very efficient at turning those wood pellets into dust.

Drawbacks, it does top out at 450 degrees, so no Big Green Egg shenanigans. Other than that, I can’t complain other than to say don’t put something juicy and tasty on the hopper lid while transferring the meat to the grill, I’m pretty sure those little drips are what flavored up my wiring, which is somewhat exposed between the control/hopper and the grill.

In the end, I’d say that it’s a great unit that delivers on its promises, but the price is probably about 30% higher than it needs to be for what it is. Try a Pit Boss from Walmart and see if it doesn’t do everything I just said, like most innovations that become commodities, there’s not a whole lot of Tesla-level innovation here, just a heating element, a feed auger, and a circuit board with sensors.

1732

The main burner in my 3 year-old induction is scratched to hell.

I use disposable razor scrapers. The razors don’t seem to last long at all (they get rusty and gnarly)

I was playing around with the knife sharpener and filed a heavy-duty utility scrapper. I was wondering if it would be a good idea to clean the glass with it but I didn’t want to risk it.

1733

Funny you mentioned that. I know a guy who went full in with a BGE and now has a Trager too. “Convenience,” was his biggest word on the Trager. For what it’s worth he had to make a custom (and very heavy) mobile cart for his BGE, a special programmed fan for air flow he used an Arduino for, and all kinds of knick knacks for arranging things inside, etc. And you know what he uses it for now? Burgers. Not very often either. It’s part of that cost thing you mentioned and chasing the latest and greatest. I have no issues at all with a knock off if it works well.

But I do have quite a bit of that with the electric. I have a temp probe, remotes for startup/shutdown, etc. It burns wood chips very slowly and I’ve yet to go through the three bags I got with it initially, 3 years ago. I do covet getting a better bark and smoke ring though just for the feeling I really did smoke something with nothing but wood. An electric feels a bit like adding a smoke box to a gas grill. You’re there but your not.

1734

I get you, if you’re going for max smoke ring then you’re probably talking about building a smoker from scratch and tending it. I don’t think the Trager adds any real heat from the electric aspect, that’s just the igniter for the pellets (called a “Hot Rod.”) All the heat comes from burning wood, though in pellet form.

1735

I got some of these, they are good for some things. Not as good as I wanted to get some of my heavily used pans clean on the surface that is touching the range, though. That’s years of stain that doesn’t “stick out” perceptibly. Might replace (some) elbow grease on a stovetop though.

1736

An interesting problem, I originally thought we were talking about buildup on the bottoms of the pans, which has a much more aggressive answer. I’ll say this, tons of salt over the shoulder, I finally got fed up with the mineral deposits in my toilet and chipped them off with a steel chisel, and it worked. I don’t know what the Rockwell rating of oven tops is vs. tool steel, but a careful hand might do the same without damage.

1737

Well, we have always had gas stoves and with luck always will. I’m just very used to using gas at this point.

1738

Gas is the best for everything other than boiling water, heating up your house, and possibly (lets be honest, probably) offering delicious carcinogens. It goes up the side of the pan so hotspots are minimized.

1739

We heat with fuel oil, because, well, when we bought the house up here in the frozen wastelands, that’s pretty much what everyone used. Seems to work well enough. Electric would bankrupt anyone in our winters, there’s no natural gas municipal lines where we live, and woodstoves are a PITA.

1740

I just bought a new gas stove this summer. And while I did check out induction stove tops, I am probably always going to go with gas for cooking. The stove is really nice and it even has a nice double burner that boils water super fast. I do have a portable induction plate though and used that often when I need to boil water or heat oil super fast but I have used it a lot less since I got the new stove. I guess I just prefer using flame to cook.

1741

If we had the counter space there are so many things I’d love to have, including an induction plate. And an air fryer. And a standing mixer. And…yeah. But we have a kitchen that dates to the 1970s when, apparently, Americans only ate TV dinners. They sure as hell didn’t do any real cooking in these kitchens.

1742

We have the tiniest kitchen ever. It’s so tiny we’ve spread out the extras we use in the kitchen into the dining room, and extra storage in the garage.

We have this eyesore (but also very handy) storage in the dining room. Since it’s just the two of us, no bit deal but man what I wouldn’t give for a huge kitchen.

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Yes, that is also a gaming PC to the right of it. My gaming station is downstairs while I’m working on redoing the home office.

1743

Same small kitchen issue. I have a storage shelf like that where I put the microwave when I put in a range hood vs the microwave thing (I also destroy microwave doors pretty quick with all the soups). And now I also have a cabinet in the living room for more stuff.

Briefly thought about moving the kitchen wall back into the garage a bit (have no idea if that was even feasible. load bearing walls, jerry) but when I mapped out the gained counter space it wasn’t enough unless I really pushed into the garage and I like my car there.

Previous owner was an architect and they really opened up the plan vs other houses in the neighborhood I saw. My hunch is they improved things as much as they could.

1744

Funny you mention remodeling and changing the floorplan, we’ve thought about that as well. There is a smaller unit up the street that recently did that and my wife has similar ideas about extending the kitchen out and changing the dining room to a dinette area within the kitchen. The problem is right in the middle of the two working walls we have the front door on one side and the master bedroom door on the other. Just, not a good floor plan overall.

1745

If it wasn’t for my horse, i wouldn’t have spent that year in college. :)

1746

What’s even funnier is our kitchen was in fact enlarged by the previous owner; before that it was pretty much a freakin’ phone booth. We have looked into a free-standing shelf rig but my wife is pretty adamant about getting one that is made of wood and looks like furniture rather than simply something utilitarian. And we have more things that need doing ahead of that in priority…