I don’t understand why stovetops don’t have temperature dials like ovens do. It really sucks when I figure out the optimal egg-frying setting on my stove at home, then have to go through the procedure all over again on my in-laws’ stove.
At first, I thought this was a result of the wide range* of cookingware available for the stovetop. It’s a lot easier to regulate a temperature in the oven where there’s less variety in pans and cooking sheets, and also less influence from room temperature.
But this argument doesn’t hold much water. The oven needs to bring food up to temperature, just like a range. In doing so, it needs to heat the dish, just like a range. And the food in the oven will (hopefully) never reach the oven’s temperature, just like with a range. The key procedures with oven cooking are: (1) preheat to a specific temperature; (2) cook at that temperature for a specific length of time. Just like with a range. (Except, I guess, for boiling water.)
The more I think of it, the more astounded I am that consumers put up with this. Surely there has to be stovetop ranges out there that let you pick the desired temperature.
Electric skillets have what you are asking for. It kind of sucks in practice. They are good for frying stuff, and not much else. (you can’t get a nice steady simmer going for example) They even suck for frying bacon (either you can burn it, or wait forever for it to get crispy)
Typically, when cooking on the stovetop, the goal is NOT to bring the dish to a certain temperature and hold it there. The oven burner is heating the air inside the oven. A stove is heating the pot and the food inside it. You can heat air (within limits) to as high a temp. as you want. You can only heat the food to the point where boiling occurs.
For example, you want to heat something up fairly quickly…but not so fast that it burns. You do this by adjusting the burner to flame/power level that will do this (based on experience). A thermostat would give it full power untill it got to X degrees.
Next, you maybe want to simmer it for a while. Just barely boiling. But the boiling temperature changes as the water evaporates from the mixture. So you don’t want a constant temperature, what you want is a constant amount of watts or btu/min going into the pot. The boiling off of the water controls the temperature perfectly.
Now say you want to reduce that sauce you simmered for the last half hour. No problem, crank up the burner. This does NOT raise the pan temperature, as that is established by the boiling point of the mixture. It does increase the speed that water evaporates though.
I agree that it is a pain to have to recalibrate to each stove. This is one reason I prefer gas ranges. It is not to hard to develop a calibrated eyeball that can judge the flame by appearance. With electric you just have to have blind faith in the dial markings.
With an oven, it’s easy to monitor the temperature of an enclosed space. Stick a thermometer in and measure how hot the inside of the oven is.
With a stovetop range, what do you measure? The temperature of the heating element? The temperature of the outside of the pan? The temperature of the contents of the pan? The ambient temperature of the room as the stove heats it up?
And what mechanism do you use to measure with? For anything except the temp of the actual heating element, you would need some kind of external thermometer that the user would have to deal with in some way.
Think about this for a few minutes and try to come up with some kind of workable solution to measuring/controlling the temperature. It’s harder than it would seem at first glance.
Actually, it does, and in addition to the variety of cookware there’s the variety of foodstuffs and whether or not a lid is on. In an oven, you know the temperature of everything inside except the interior of the food, and that is either measured if needed or known to be suitable from centuries of experience. On the range, there are different temperatures among the burner, the bottom of the pan, the middle of the pan, the top of the pan, etc., etc… Apples and oranges.
Further, ovens and ranges are not expected to do the same thing. If they were, you could bake a cake in a pan on the range, or fry an egg in a pan in the oven. I assume you can see why neither of those is feasible.
Back in the 1960’s, you could buy a gas range with a Burner With A Brain®. It had a little spring-loaded sensor in the middle of the burner and a control knob with degree marks. It worked very well, until the thermocouple broke, and then it didn’t work at all. Replacing the BWAB was expensive, and after doing that once or twice, owners just resigned themselves to having a 3-burner range. When a dish called for “remove from heat,” you’d put it on the dead BWAB.
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Is that just a regionalism? A “range” is normally a single piece stove/oven. The thing underneath is the oven, and the thing on top is a stove. If you have a built in oven and a separate built-in stove or cooktop, then you don’t have a range. Right?
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I don’t know if it’s a regionalism or if I’m simply using the term wrong. My mom’s been using “range” to describe the stovetop as long as I can remember. She was born and raised in Texas if that helps. (She’s also been known to switch from saying “soda” to “pop” and back again at least two or three times.)
You could tote your stove to the mil’s domacile.
All of the cooking shows that I have taken note of use GAS for cooking, frying, baking, etc. Stove top burners are adjustable on continually variable basis. Still have thermostat control for oven. Run the broiler wide open.
Gas is GOOD!
I second (or third, or whatever we’re at) the suggestion of a gas stove. You can just look at the flame and know whether it’s too high or too low. I can’t imagine ever going back to an electric stove now, I wouldn’t know how to cook anything.
Asknott nailed it. In addition to the gas models, there were also electric stoves (ranges, cooktops, whatever) with thermostatically controlled burners. As in the gas models, the thermostat was temperamental, prone to failure, and expensive to replace. In 6 years of repairing appliances, I only repaired one. The rest were converted to normal use by replacing the control knob. Gas models were much more expensive to convert and thus became extra counter space.
As to why thermostatic burners aren’t more common, as already stated, they’re not particularly useful. An oven is used to holsd a given volume at a set temperature for a length of time. A stove is used to apply a certain amount of heat for a length of time and heat applied doesn’t correlate directly to temperature due to the wide variety of cooking utensils and foods involved.
Finally, why gas is so overwhelmingly superior to electric, a gas flame is continuously variable, i.e., when you set a low flame, you have a continuous low flame. An electric stove element only has two states - On or Off. To simulate a low flame, the element switches on and off at more or less regular intervals. If you have a small volume of stuff in a pan, even a short On interval can cause it to scorch. Of course, if gas is not an option (as in my case), you just have to learn to deal with it.
I saw an episode of Good Eats where Alton Brown used an infrared digital thermometer to measure the temperature of a pan (or griddle, I can’t remember). The thermometer was very similar to this type.
If you had one of those you could measure the pan when you’re frying an egg, and then when you use another pan/cooktop you’ll know what temperature to aim for. For example, Alton suggests 325 to 350F for omelets, 370 for frying okra.
Ya know, it might’ve been one of those episodes that started me wondering about this. Good stuff. Except the okra episode - that stuff is evil, and I automatically suspect anyone apologizing for it.
My experience is that stove meant the appliance that included the cooktop and oven in one. “Stove” and “range” seem interchangeable for the whole shebang in one unit:
My parents had a gas cooktop with a “Burner with a Brain” from the 1960’s and I don’t think I ever saw it used my entire childhood. The stove finally died and when my parents got a new range a couple of years ago my mom commented on how nice it was to have 4 burners instead of 3.
So, as to the OP… seems to be a good idea at first thought, but in reality it just doesn’t work.
I called them “stoves” until the first time I bought one. The store and Consumer Reports called them “ranges,” so I switched. It seems silly, and I wouldn’t want a free-range range.
There was a brief time when you could get a range with a rotating magnet in one burner. You’d put a matching thing in the pot, making it “self stirring.” It’s just hard to make something that will endure the heat in the middle of a burner.
I’d say, even more important is that gas flames change temperature instantly. Electric stove elements heat slowly and then cool down slowly, making it harder to control the cooking.
