I can’t stand the heat in the kitchen.
One of the biggest irritations in my life is domestic stoves. Or hobs if you want to be posh. I think they are generally unfit for purpose. Here is why:
They are too small. My hob is pretty much standard in terms of size, but it only has room for one pan of any usable diameter, the other four burners are relegated to being suitable only for miniature potlets. You see, if I try to put too many pans of a proper size on the hob, the heat for each pan goes off centre. This offends me in two ways: My sense of symmetry is like, disrespected and stuff (this has the potential to cause my delicate sense of equilibrium to unravel) and the hot pans at the front come into contact with the knobs, causing them to melt (yes, the designers of the hob need a thorough beating).
They are not hot enough. You Own a wok and a domestic cooker? Throw the wok away. There’s no point having one if you have a domestic cooker because to make a good stir-fry, you need very controllable heat. You need to be able to go from a gentle 5mm blue flame to a roaring four foot afterburner jet of intense heat within seconds. You want your hair to singe, your mascara to melt and the fire alarm to go off when you’re stir-frying, otherwise, no matter how hot your Ken Hom wok gets, it cools down the minute you bung in your ingredients and you end up with a stir-simmer instead.
Your hob is electric. Get rid.
I am a photographer and amongst other things I shoot in various commercial kitchens. The biggest difference between domestic kitchens and commercial ones, is that heat – proper, intense, volcanic heat is always on tap. I watched a chef cooking up Chinese dishes that I was photographing (and then eating. Can you eat the best part of 15 Chinese dishes in a single day?) and his burners were scary. Like looking into Hades. The whole range sits in a bloody great bath of water and when he wants to prep an order, there’s a loud roar as he gets his oil up to temperature – and when he adds the ingredients, its the Great Fire of Wimbledon. Flames, steam, tornadoes, lightning, the lot! It takes just seconds to produce the lightest, freshest-tasting Chinese and Thai dishes.
Stir-fry Prawns cooked to perfection
The downside of this is that my camera and lenses and lighting brollies get thoroughly greasy in just a couple of hours, but let me tell you, the food is lovely. Cooked with proper heat.
Of course there is a way around this weakness in domestic cookers. You can cook smaller quantities so that the wok won’t lose too much heat, but what a drag that would be. Also, those domestic smoke hoods… they too are unfit for purpose… watch them when your pan starts flaming – they’ll start flaming too. Soon, everything will be flaming…tragedy awaits.
Domestic stoves are a nightmare. Those ghastly electric rings are the worst in terms of heat control. They don’t simmer properly. Solid plate electric hobs are nearly as bad, but the worst, the absolute worst are ceramics hobs. Have you ever tried to keep a ceramic hob clean? They are reasonably o.k. in terms of heat control, certainly better than the standard solid plate or rings, but the ghastly, inevitable burnt-on residue is disgusting. The standard proprietary cleaner only partially works and they recommend that you get a special scraper to scrape the build-op off. Horrible
I like your idea of food; it’s real and hearty. Not like the kind of ‘lettuce with carrot lattice’ some foodies would have us slim down on. As Mark Twain put it: The only way to keep your health is to eat what you don’t want, drink what you don’t like and do what you’d rather not.
I like simple, hearty food because my clumsy sausage fingers just don’t cut it as tools for preparing delicate little food sculptures.