I am fortunate to have friends who put up with my obsessions and crazy experiments. D + TW had me over for lunch today and let me play with their Kenmore Elite. Since it's impossible for me to play with different BTU burners on my own range (they are all 9,000), I thought it would be fun to sear the same thing on their most powerful (18,000 btu) and least powerful (5,000 btu) burners to see the difference. Chicken breasts seemed like good test material. They show off browning well due to their pale color, and are relatively cheap (so in case searing on 5,000btu burner is a bad idea, I wouldn't waste much money).
The 18,000 btu burner definitely had some umph when turned on high -- too much umph for a 10 inch skillet I was using. The flames were hugging my skillet from the sides and I had to turn it down a few notches to get them to stay under the skillet. I imagine it would be nice for a 12 inch skillet. The skillet came to temp in about 2 minutes and the chicken breasts browned beautifully and quickly. I kept lowering the heat to keep them from burning. Towards the end I was on medium-low. I was very happy with the color I got (see the picture above).
The best part of all these experiments was having lunch with D+TW. They made a great salad with falafel mix and wheat berries with mushroom broth.
No comments:
Post a Comment