Inside: Cooking Appliance Features to Make Mealtimes Easier. Collaborative post.
When it comes to cooking, especially when you lead a busy life, you’ll want to make things as quick and easy as possible. Whilst careful planning, meal prep and food management can help to make things easier when it comes to cooking your meals, you can also improve the efficiency at which you operate thanks to the features of modern cooking appliances. So what features can you commonly find on cookers and ovens that’ll make mealtimes much easier?
Easy Clean Electric Hobs
If you’re looking for a new electric hob, there are a few options you can choose from. The classic option is a solid plate hob, but the more modern choice for an electric hob is either a ceramic or induction hob. Whilst they both operate slightly differently (induction heats the pan through magnetism whilst ceramic heats the hob), they look identical, with black tempered glass and a flat surface.
And it’s that flat surface which makes them the easiest hob types to clean, as you don’t need to try and get into all the nooks and crannies that you would find on a gas hob and even a solid plate hob. It can significantly reduce the amount of time it takes to clean up spillages and residue from overspilling pans.
Recirculating Cooker Hoods
When shopping for cooker hoods, there are generally two choices you’ll commonly come across. The first is an extractor cooker hood, which uses a fan to remove grease, smells and smoke from your kitchen and takes it outside. This is a great option to have, but not always the most practical if you’re looking to install a new cooker hood. Instead, you can have a recirculating cooker hood installed instead, which can still remove things like grease and odours from the air using a filter.
Catalytic and Pyrolytic Cleaning
There are a number of automatic cleaning settings available that can help you to clean your oven with ease. Two that you will commonly find are catalytic cleaning and pyrolytic cleaning. Catalytic cleaning involves special catalytic liners that are inside the oven cavity which are designed to trap grease. You can then run the self-cleaning programme roughly once a month to burn off the deposits, wiping away the residue once the cycle is completed.
With pyrolytic cleaning, it’s said to be a little bit easier to use than catalytic cleaning, which means it’s very easy. With this setting, your oven will be heated up to 400ºC, which means all the food deposits will turn to ash. Then all you need to do after the cycle is complete is to sweep away the ash that remains.
Even Cooking With Fan Ovens
One of the biggest drawbacks to older style ovens is the uneven cooking you can experience inside an oven. If you put a tray on the top shelf at the same time as one on the bottom, then it’s likely you’d take them out and they would both be cooked to a different level. However, with a modern electric fan oven, the heat is evenly distributed around the oven cavity, allowing you to enjoy a consistent and even cook across your whole oven.
Multiple Oven Cavities
Need to cook different items at different times and different temperatures? Normally this would involve some temperature and time juggling when having one oven cavity available, but there are many electric ovens, gas and electric cookers and even range cookers that feature multiple oven cavities. This means you don’t need to worry about undercooking or overcooking in your oven ever again.