[Sca-cooks] OOP: Stove info wanted

[lilinah at earthlink.net]

My personal preference is for gas stove. I have never had trouble
baking in a gas oven.

I hate electric. I've never had one in my own apartments, but at my
parent's in Santa Barbara and at friends' houses (in San Diego, my
mom has good gas burners on a central island - no ventilation
problems and the ceiling is not black :-). I gather that the new ones
work better, but, i still doubt they are as fine-tunable as gas. I'm
used to eye balling the flame to adjust temperature, not just
trusting some dial that says "lo - med - hi" and hoping the pan
doesn't burn on the bottom.

A hood is useful for ventilation, but i haven't had one in my
apartments... They're also helpful if you're doing a bunch of baking
on a hot day...

As for more features:
i like two ovens, so i can bake a pie and make a savory dish that
require different temperatures at the same time. But, well, i haven't
had two ovens in a very long time - not since the absolutely
wonderful early 1950's stove with the griddle in the middle.

The griddle in the middle - I hardly ever use a broiler, but i found
myself using that griddle a whole bunch, after i took the stove apart
and got all the gunk out - i think it hadn't been functional for
years. I used it for homemade chapatis and all sorts of other stuff -
but NOT bacon or anything high in grease.

I dream about that stove - it was a Wedgewood... it had cast iron
heat diffusers over the burners that were exactly the right size for
warming up a tortilla... and the burners had flames coming from the
outside of the ring and the inside of the ring, which allowed for
finer temperature adjustment. New stoves i've been using lack this
and are harder to fine tune.

There's a shop here in Berkeley CA that sells old stoves... maybe i
should cruise by and see if they have my old 1950's dream Wedgewood...

Anahita