Kitchen Renovation...meet Otto!

This morning we hit an all time low of sorts. The novelty of eating out for every meal has worn off, and cold sandwiches and salads, made in the apartment, aren’t exactly comfort foods.

This morning...

Stray had slept in for a change and felt like eggs for breakfast. How are we going to cook them? Our cooking facilities total a toaster and an electric kettle. After fossicking around he came up with this....

Notice how white the tile grout is Mum!

OK, ignore the jar of Vegemite, the thing on the left containing the presently uncracked egg is a cut down plastic drink bottle. The theory: grease the container with butter, crack the egg in and place it in the metal cup of boiling water.

Of course it had to be weighted down...

with a heavy object to stop it bobbling to the top.

Looks like it’s working????

...but it’s about now that we discuss the fact that heat, when applied to some plastics, can release carcinogenic properties and besides, the newly carved out cooking pot has been sucked all out of shape. Obviously a onetime use ONLY culinary masterpiece.

After a couple changes of boiling water and five minutes later, he had this. A little runny...could have done with a minute more, but very edible.

This afternoon...

We now have one of these.

An induction cook top named Otto. I know nothing about these and the instruction manual is in Thai, as one would expect. I fast forward to some pictures, pictures are easy. I thought I should start with the drawings of cooking pots with the ‘don’t go there’ crosses over them. Like this, but replace the dog with various shaped cooking pots. 

After half an hour of translating, I know that the little picture pots were made of glass, ceramic, copper, aluminium (shouldn’t be cooking in that anyway) or a round bottomed wok! DON'T COOK IN THESE. So what is induction? Simply put it’s where the heat is generated within the cooking pot...not by the surface of the cook top. Huh?

Apparently there’s a curly thing of copper wire inside...Wiki can explain the rest:

"An alternating electric current is made to flow through the coil, which produces an oscillating magnetic field which creates heat in the cooking vessel over it in two different ways. Principally, it induces an electric current in the pot, which produces resistive heating proportional to the square of the current and to the electrical resistance of the vessel. Secondly, it also creates magnetic hysteresis losses in the pot due to its ferromagnetic nature. The first effect dominates: hysteresis losses typically account for less than ten percent of the total heat generated."

Cool...so, what can I cook in? Anything I can stick a fridge magnet to! Thank god it came with its own pot.

Induction cooking is said to be much safer (burning myself wise) and more energy efficient. It’s also meant to be really smart, sensing if there’s even a pot on it, or not...or if you’ve burnt your dinner dry! I wonder if it cleans itself?

We haven’t used it yet...I’m still translating the control knobs...SERIOUSLY!

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