Kitchen 101: Oven and Stove

I've decided to make a few 'Kitchen 101' posts to share the things that have taken me years of trial and painful error to learn. Most of these things are specifically applicable to baking and desserts, but I do my fair share of savoury cooking as well.


Before you can cook anything, you need a well-equipped kitchen. So my first Kitchen 101 posts will be about all the things you need in order to do all the things that I know you want to do. But before you can even start to stock your kitchen, you need an oven and a stove.


Yes, I know, that's really obvious. And yes, you might assume that everyone already has those things so I shouldn't bother. But the truth is that not everyone does. I've been in apartments so tiny that they barely had a sink, let alone a big ole oven and four-burner stove. And my parents, who have a large and beautiful kitchen with acres of black granite bench and a ten-foot-high pantry, sadly let a friend talk them into getting a two-burner stove. My mother has regretted this decision for seventeen years. So to start the basic equipment spiel, I will indeed start very basic and say that you need an oven, and a stove.


Ideally, I would be cooking in a fan-forced digitally controlled double-oven (my parents do have one of those!) and have a shiny, stainless steel gas or induction six-burner stove. However my oven is older than I am and takes 20 minutes to heat up and the four-burner electric stove is also older than I am and takes 20 minutes to cool down. This is ok. Very few people have much say in their oven and stove. If you are renting you have no say whatsoever and even if you own your place, like we do, replacing them is an enormous and costly undertaking. Gas isn't available to everyone and induction is extremely expensive to install - especially since you have to purchase a whole new set of pots and pans to go with it.

If you have a crappy oven, like I do, the trick is to make friends with it. Learn its quirks and idiosyncracies. You might need to go 5-10 degrees higher than each recipe specifies, or cook for 10 minutes or so longer. You may (and this is what I do) have to do a dry run of more or less everything in order to know what is going to work. Fortunately I now have a set of standard 'base recipes' which I know well and can adapt to a large variety of situations.


The way to work with an old electric stove is to imagine that each burner only has one temperature setting. You might have two hot burners, a medium burner and a low burner. If you are going to cook something that requires a high heat followed by a lower heat (for example poaching eggs, which I do almost every day), you will need two burners dedicated to this dish. If you are cooking a large meal in a small kitchen this can take a lot of planning and organisation!


I should also note that along with your 'extremely basic' kitchen equipment you need a fridge and freezer. Do I really need to go into detail? Even if you don't cook at all, you need them. That's all.


Next time on Kitchen 101: Small Appliances and Why I Can't Throw Out My Microwave.