Thanksgiving and Christmas are just around the corner as the holiday season draws near. If you are like many, you will spend a lot of time in your kitchen the next few months baking, cooking and roasting delectable meats and poultry in your oven. You have an older oven and have had to call your Horsham appliance repair service a few times this last year for oven repair. But with the holiday season looming, you don’t want to take any chances so you are in the market for a new oven.
Before making such a big purchase, we offer some advice.
Remember buying your first mattress, getting it home and setting it up? You then toyed with the idea of tearing off the tags. But then you took a good close look at your new mattress and noticed all sorts of things you missed when you were trying it out at the mattress store. All too often we don’t get up close and personal with the things we buy until we have made the purchase and brought the item home.
Ovens are a prime example of this, we don’t take the time to thoroughly look them over before making the purchase. After all, they are all pretty similar, right?
Broiler Settings
Traditional electric ovens usually have a fixed broiler setting of around 500 degrees. Now, if you are cooking steaks, say New York Strips, and they are all about the same thickness, a fixed broiler setting is probably fine. But if you want to broil chicken wings or an Ahi fillet, a fixed broiler will leave you with a charred mess. Many newer ovens address this problem by offering a broiler with variable settings which lets you match the heat to the task at hand. This means you can have a nice grilled tuna steak without having to fire up the outdoor grill.
Oven Racks
Have you ever read a recipe that instructs you to put the dish on the center oven rack only to discover your oven doesn’t have a center rack? Conventional ovens use radiant heat to cook food, which means food placement is of utmost importance. Baking a pizza on the bottom rack will garner different results than baking a pizza on the top rack.
This is why it is important to open the oven door and take a look at the options before you make a purchase. You could also opt for a convection oven.
The Window
Sure, that oven with a solid door looks pretty cool, but it also means that every time you want to check on a dish, you have to open the door. If you are baking something like cookies, opening the door will increase the cooking time and this also wastes a lot of energy. For these reasons, you might want to consider an oven with a window.
There is good news, modern oven glass doors are as easy as ever to clean. There are cleaners available formulated to cut through the grease and grime that accumulates on glass oven doors.