Better Cooking with Gas

In the last post I wrote about why it's healthier to cook with electric stove inside the house and keep the gas cooking outside on the kitchen deck. This post is about cooking more efficiently with gas stove.

When natural gas is combined with oxygen and ignited it creates heat and we see the blue flame dancing under the cooking vessel. As the cooking vessel (like the skillet or the pot) heats up it transfers the heat to the content and we cook the food by adjusting the heat intensity by turning the gas knob. So how can we make gas cooking more energy efficient? What if you could cook at the medium heat intensity at the low setting? How about if the pot can absorb and transfer more heat to the food for the same amount of gas burned?

We found a pot that does just that. It's called Turbo Pot and the bottom of the pot has fins that increase the surface area that can absorb heat from the flame. 

Few weeks ago I made a batch of tomato-jalapeño jam using the large harvest from my garden using the Turbo Pot pictured above. I set up my cutting board and the large bowl of tomatoes on the portable table next to the gas stove on the deck. After placing the pot with chopped ginger, onion, and jalapeño I cut the tomatoes as fast as I can and tossed them into the pot. If you're interested in the tomato-jalapeño jam recipe I used this one here.​ It simmered nicely on the lowest gas setting for over 2 hours while the jam reduced down. Had I been using my other stock pot I would have had to use a higher gas setting, maybe a medium instead of the low setting I used with Turbo Pot. 

During the month of September I made couple of batches of tomato-jalapeño ​jam, ketchup, and pasta sauce. (Can you tell I had lots of tomatoes in my back yard?) Each time I used the Turbo Pot for 2-4 hours to at the lowest gas setting. When I looked at my utility bill this turned out to be only 2 therms of gas, which I think is pretty good for all that cooking!