MarkinScottsdale's Profile
Please help me find some decent cookware!
BUY ALL-CLAD STAINLESS inside and out. Worth the money, lasts forever, no maintenance. Start with a "set" of eight pieces or so, often on sale, and add to it as you can. It may take you 2 years or more to amass a large set of "everything you could possibly want" but doing it a little at a time makes it painless and you'll only buy this ONE TIME in your entire lifetime. BTW: they work on INDUCTION, RAdiant Electric, and Gas. One of the few that do work on all three. So no matter where you move or what kind of cooking stove you have in the future, they will work and be great! They are NOT budget stuff. But then there is no economy in buying a set only to throw it away in two or three years and buy it again! This is a ONE TIME investment and it lasts for your lifetime and probably for your kids lifetimes as well. I cannot say enough good things about them. BTW: I did have a riveted on handle come loose, and I sent it back to ALL-CLAD and they fixed or replaced it for free and sent me a small sauce pan with lid as an "apology" for the inconvenience! AMAZING company too!
French Copper Pots = lined with TIN or STEEL?
We've got a large collection of copper cookware. Some old, some new. All together we have maybe 30 pieces of it. Most of it is tinned. We use them as needed, keep the outside cleaned and polished three or four times a year, and when the tin lining gets a little spotty, we send it out for re-tinning. The cost ranges from 30 to 90 dollars per pot and includes the lid if they need it. While not cheap, we usually on do three or four pieces every year or so. If you are willing to put up with cleaning copper, then the cost of a re-tin job is negligible and if you're careful, you'll only need to do it once every ten years or so per pot. The other thing is we've found lots of copper at yard sales and garage sales, and bought hand-hammered heavy french pots (like Williams Sonoma used to sell for $500 and up per pot!) and got them for ten or twenty dollars (sometimes less) and then send those out for relining. The places we send them to (listed below) knock out the dents, straighten the lids, and generally refurbish them to like new condition as part of their service. They even replace rivets on handles if needed! WELL worth the money. To see a $10 garage sale find come back looking like a $1200 dollar pot is AMAZING. I've got a few pieces of copper lined with stainless steel. No maintenance, but they are NOT the same. If you're a serious cook, use the real stuff and bite the bullet on relining it every few years. You'll ultimately be glad you did. These things are nearly indestructible and can be passed on to future generations if you want to. Given the cost of new ones - if you can buy them at any price today - it's worth taking care of the existing ones!
Induction vs. Gas Stove [moved from Home Cooking]
We moved into a house that had NO GAS at all. Not even propane. And it had a "cheap" GE radiant electric cooktop. My partner is a CCA Trained Chef. NOT HAPPY CAMPER at all! In fact he all but quit cooking on the electric cooktop because it was so hard to control. In desperation for a decent meal, I bought an Induction Cooktop and pulled the old radiant one out. The model I got was a viking Hybrid so it had 3 radiant burners and 3 or 2 induction burners. My "chef" loved it. In fact he liked it better than gas! (NEVER thought that would happen.) We moved again 2 years later and the new house has propane for cooking and came with a GE Profile cooktop (five burner gas). I ended up pulling the GE and bought the new MIELE Modules. We've got an 18k btu Wok burner, 2 regular gas burners, and two high powered induction burners. Total space used is 45" across. The vent hood was only 36", so I was careful to position the gas High output in the middle, and the induction and gas low out put burners on either side of it. Works great! And the "chef" in the family now uses the Induction FAR more than he does the gas burners! So much so, that we're talking about replacing the small dual gas burner unit with another induction burner module giving us four induction burners and the one high output gas / wok burner. As for me - I use a French Press for coffee and am desperate for coffee in the morning. The Induction Burners can bring our stainless teapot to a rolling boil in 3 minutes or less. The gas burner takes five and the radiant electric used to take nine minutes (I've timed them all while pacing and awaiting the right temp for my coffee to be made!) The teapot holds almost a gallon of water! To boil that in thee minutes is AMAZING and does NOT heat up the kitchen doing so! Even better. While I'm no serious cook, I notice that just frying an egg or making soup, I gravitate to the induction burners as my first choice. The control and adjustment of temp is FASTER on induction than it is on gas, believe it or not. Also, we are in ARIZONA and our temps in the summer are well over 100 degrees all day and most of the night too. Using the induction keeps the kitchen a LOT cooler and yet, we still have the gas when we really need it for a particular application. The "trick" with induction is to get the highest powered burners you can find. 3000 watt and up are what I'd recommend. You may only use the full power once in a while, but it's nice to have it when you want/need it. Often times it's cheaper to buy a 1 or 2 burner induction unit and place it beside a 1 or 2 burner radiant electric or gas unit than it is to buy a hybrid rangetop. check the prices and do the math. Also a 1 or 2 burner induction usually doesn't need a 50 amp circuit for running it. They do nicely with a 20 or 25 amp 220 v circuit. So if wiring is minimal, you may want to consider the induction units vs radiant electric on that basis alone.
