| Bookmark this page! Hobs Consider your cooker hobs- those metal, or ceramic appointments atop your oven range where you set the pots and pans that you are heating up- and how inefficiently you could be cooking your food if you are still using an antiquated stove and its archaic cooker hobs. Believe it or not, your cooker hobs actually serve a very important function in heat capture and distribution, and this is true whether or not you are using a gas range or an electric variation.
It is quite important to consider symmetry in your cooker hobs. A symmetric design will allow the hobs to distribute heat evenly throughout your pan, preventing hot spots that could lead to scorched food, or cold spots which could result in portions of your final product being undercooked. For a gas stove, a simple four prong, box design would probably serve best as a cooker hob, as each of the four prongs could absorb heat from the burner, preventing it from being wasted, and distribute it throughout the pan. In an electric stove, a flat, coiled hob is probably your best choice, as it will utilize energy most economically, and will provide an even, well distributed heat source for your cooking needs.
You may also wish to consider the material that you want to use in your cooker hobs. A nice, stainless steel alloy will last you years, and will prove to be moderately efficient at keeping heat where it should be on your range. However, metals radiate energy much more than other materials, so an alloy is not nearly as efficient as other materials for retaining heat. On the other hand, a ceramic cooker hob will retain the maximum amount of heat, and distribute the great majority of it to your pans rather than the environment around it. The only downside to these sorts of cooker hobs though, is that they are very fragile, and if they are handled roughly (ie- if a pan is dropped on them) they could become cracked or broken and require replacing.
You may also want to consider an induction cooker hob. Rather than heating the stovetop to the required temperature, an induction hob will create an oscillating magnetic field that will heat the pot itself, rather than the range. Such equipment is far more energy efficient than either method, though it can also be comparatively quite expensive, and requires ferromagnetic or electrically conductive pans. |