This article, lets get to grips with "dormitory/share-house cooking." The true origin of so many great (and a few, um ... not so great) food and cooking hacks.
If you ever shared housing or were in a dormitory / "roomies" kind of situation you know how it goes. You go to make a cup of coffee and someone says "mind my eggs!" and you know that you'll have to wait until someone's snack is cooked and then have to rinse the kettle out and fill it with fresh, non-chicken-butt-fruit-flavoured water. *sigh* that's the third time this week...
But the fact remains - electric kettles are good to make your daily cuppa, but can also cook eggs or even (not recommended though) pasta. We don't need to scrimp and use ours for a cooking vessel any more, we're all growed up - but I would use it if I was short of a saucepan (or burner to put it on) to boil an egg or three. (I don't really recommend cooking pasta in an electric jug or kettle because after a while the element gets coated with minerals from the water and those aren't the nicest things to find crumbles of in your spaghetti...
Use it as a quick way to get boiling water to dissolve sugar, salt, butter, or whatever for adding to meals where water's part of the recipe, or to pour a bath to sit a dish in to soften butter or what-have-you. I've also used hot water from it to soften diced onions in a glass before frying, that sort of thing. dissolve and premix a bouillon cube and a few spices and herbs before adding to cooking, saves wondering if anyone is going to get a glob of half-dissolved stock cube in their moutful...
Here's a thing you can do to decide whether to use the electric kettle, a saucepan or stove-top kettle, or the hot water tap: Does it need to be boiling? If not then the tap would probably do. Except. How much water would you need to waste to get hot water? You probably think that I over-think things, and maybe I do. But bear with me.
I tried this experiment once. The hot water system was at the other side of the house to the kitchen. It took a little while for hot water to get there and I wanted to know how much I wasted every morning. I used a clean 3litre milk jug, and ran the tap (one morning before any water had been run) until the water was warm. Two point two litres. 2.2L. Every time anyone runs the tap haf an hour after it was last used. In this house we're in now, it's two point seven litres. Almost three litres.
So now we do the dishes every two days, we rinse everything in cold water before stacking, and when I want to do the dishes, I collect the cold water. Sincee also filter our drinking water, the solution's easy - collect the cold water in a plastic milk jugs, put it through our water filter jug and then into a cleanwater dispenser we use for making drinks and food. We save literally thousands of litres every year from just flushing uselessly away.
And that's why the electric kettle\jug is an important part of my kitchen.
But back to the conumdrum
So it's probably going to be easier to boil a small amount of water on the stove or in the kettle. If you have a gas stove, there are emissions from burning. If you use the electric stove or kettle, there are still greenhouse gas emissions from burning fuel at the power station, but a power station is far more effective than our gas stoves so boiling that small amount of water is better done in the electric kettle. And as more coal, gas, and diesel oil power stations being closed in favour of solar and wind energy, it's becoming a no-brainer. Use the force!
The kettle has had decades of design gone into it to make it efficient at turning electricity into heat, although induction cooktops may be catching up to that efficiency - I may do some testing on this, but will need to buy a decent accurate power meter. For now, I take it as read that boiling half a litre of water in the kettle is less wasteful than wasting over three litres of water, and then the hot water system having to heat over three litres of water just for my cupful of hot water.
So for me it's the kettle. And if I know I'll need to use it multiple times in the next half hour, filling it up and then just re-heating each time I need boiling water uses less energy than heating each quantity of water separately. Help me buy that power meter and a decent quality induction cooktop to test with and I'll do an article on it. (I do have an induction cooktop but it's of unknown origin because I bought it at a thrift shop, and it's pretty ancient and most likely not indicative of state of the art ICTs. And a good power meter can be had for not too much if you know where to look, and I do.) So yes please - go to the footer, to that snazzy graphic I made, and support my blogs and tests and research.
Now For The Toasters
Electric toasters too have gone from a brick with a power cord to computeriesed things that promise to make fifty shades of burnt on your choice of eleventy different varieties of baked cereal doughs, but instead of becoming more useful they've basically become a brick with a power cord that toasts bread to as much browning as you can handle.
Back in the day, we had wooden countertops and the toasters had a single element in the middle and you had to flip the toast over by hand to toast the other side. They could also be easily cleaned. And they could be laid on their side without overheating the electronics (they didn't have any) or melting casings. And thus a legend was born, of making cheese toasties by laying a toaster on its side. But these days none of those apply.
I've seen the odd viral Tiktok or Youtube video that suggests that people have cooked steaks and made meals in their toaster but I suggest you put those right along the troll videos of perpetual motion electricity generators and magic potions that guarantee you a longer stronger donger.
When I make dipping triangles of Lebanese bread or tortillas I've found I can drop them into many toasters to turn them into crisp dipping chips, but have to be careful because they can slip down beside the lift bar if I'm not careful. Not a pretty smell when they catch fire.
The toaster can only do four to six triangles at a time, also, and the average round of Lebanese bread or khobz or tortilla makes between six to twelve chips. By the time I've processed two or three rounds by toaster, it proves more convenient, quicker, and less wasteful of energy to make the whole batch in an air fryer or tabletop convection oven. And it comes with the added convenience of being able to see when they're dry and crisp because the convection fan starts lifting them around
When it's cold I sometimes hold the butter dish above the toaster while waiting for the toast. Having my fingers so near ensures I don't overheat the dish and end up with a heat-cracked butter dish but with the butter warm enough on a cold morning to allow the butter to be spreadable.
Toasted Sandwich Makers / Panini Presses
I'm going to emphasize here - anything with a flat heat iron on the bottom (and preferably a flat heat iron on top like the panini press - although I've owned one with searing ribs on top that wasn't too bad) is okay, those ones that are divided into sections or have any kind of pattern on the bottom will end in burnt-on mess. Also non-stick, and always be careful of the surface and only use plastic and wooden implements and a wet cloth with detergent for cleaning, no harsh scrubbers or chemicals.
But now you're firmly in "cook my steak' territory - although that's not something I recommend. I've also fried eggs on them (not the best unless you just want a flat mess) and made nice flat bacon but they don't get hot enough to make those things crispy.
You can also place a nice thin layer of seasoned hamburger or sausage mince between two slices of bread or tortilla/khobz/pita and then the meat cooks in the time it takes the bread to brown up properly, but it is a bit of a hit or miss affair until you get to know how hot your device gets.
With steak I have oiled, salted, and seasoned "minute steaks" which are just thin (5mm) slices of steak cuts and they do cook well but the frypan on an electric or induction cooker seem better. But you can in theory make a steak and eggs on a flat toaster.
Once the non-stick coating gets a scratch or two they stop working quite so well, so one of ours is now a plastics processing press and the new one has been working fine for around ten years because I only ever wipe it out with paper towel while it's still hot to avoid having to use excessive pressure or friction to clean it.
Nice touches to add to a toastie are to butter the outsides of the bread slices and dip them in a mix of fine cheddar and parmesan cheeses before toasting, or doing that to both sides of a single thicker slice of bread and making steakhouse cheese toast. (A la Sizzler's restaurants, if you know of them.)
Toastie presses also make great pikelets, and I tried making crumpets but either my recipe was off or the plate didn't get hot enough. But I still think it should be possible. Let me know.
Waffle Irons
Waffle irons get a bit hotter than a sandwich press I think. If you look for "Webspoon World" on Youtube and search his videos he has innovative uses for almost every kind of kitchen appliance and tool, and is worth a follow. Oh look! I've made the link above go straight to that video! How convenient!
Out Of The Left Field
I found that our local ALDI was selling a vertical kebab maker, and also found that if you make pretzel dough, roll it out into 5mm - 7mm thin worms and wrap them around the skewers, you can make some great "twistie pretzels" on them. You can of course also make great kebab sticks fairly quickly, and if you make a firm mix of appropriately spiced ground meat and mold it around the skewers, you can make meat similar to gyros.
Anyway - please share this, donate.
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