Cookaholics Bulletin Board

Folks,

So the new place has a nice large kitchen with lots of light (pic below)*. However, its main downside is an electric stove. While the landlord is willing to talk about eventually replacing it with gas, in the short term I need some workarounds for stuff like my wok.

What have people bought/used in the way of portable gas burners? What works and is safe for in-home use?



* yes, I realize that this is not an exciting kitchen for most of you, but consider that my present SF kitchen is appropriately sized for a sailboat and you'll understand why I'm excited about it.

The portable butane burners are quite weak in my experience. They are normally rated about 10,000 BTU, but I suspect even that seems optimistic. A high quality portable induction burner can pump more heat then expected, but won't work for a round bottomed wok; although I hear there are ones in Asia that are actually made for woks. Even then, the 120V ones only go so far (many commercial portables are actually 220V)

I do not believe you can get anything safe for indoors that is will rival a gas stove, especially in the context of woks. If it is a flat bottomed wok, I would think induction would be the best bet and might get you by. If you can convince your landlord to run a 220 outlet and use a flat bottomed wok, you can get *enormous* power in a portable induction burner, heh. Of course, those 220V commercial induction burners sell for some quite serious prices.

Now, if you have a patio, a turkey frier under your wok would be *serious* woking.

Paul,

Well, we do have a yard, but it's Portland; it's really not practical to cook outdoors in the rain.

I am sure you will get more than a few thoughts on your feelings about cooking outdoors.....

Up here we call them 'covered decks, 'covered patios', 'covered balconies', 'covered anything' - even in the garage with the door open.

You just have to adapt because it is worth it. I'm smoking ribs until -20C or more as long as the snow stays away and that is not unusual amongst everyone here and elsewhere.

By the way, the kitchen looks excellent, especially in light of what you had

Wino,

We don't have a covered porch/whatever in the new place.

Grillzebo (used one for quite some years)! Or, raincoat; I've grilled many many times in the rain. I'll admit, Woking wouldn't work so will in the rain.

BTW, pretty nice kitchen, actually. More counter space then I had until the reno this year (which expanded the usable kitchen space a great deal by eliminating the eat-in part). Yours looks like it might take portable island.

Pretty good article on wok burners here:

http://www.whatmyhomewants.com/buy-best-wok-burner/

... looks like there's an Itawani in my future ...

We have a gas cooktop but do the majority of our cooking on an induction hob.

We'd just change to an induction cooktop but it would require a daunting amount of surgery to the countertop.

I'm not sure that I'd be comfortable using a gas burner on a countertop, unless I had a layer of stone under it, or something like that (maybe a pizza stone?). The reflection of the heat seems like it would not be good for the counter, even if it was granite, or something like that. Also, even those 20k burners on my range don't really seem to be enough, once I used that 65k outdoors burner - I get that almost non-stick area down in the bottom of the large wok, and the food gets that smoky - like "wok hay" taste, that even with the 20k burners on my range doesn't really happen, unless I am cooking a very small amount. I still do most of my wok cooking inside, but I just thought I'd share that with you, so you'd know what to expect from the levels of heat they put out.