Friday, January 21, 2005

Burning food on my Japanese Stove

One thing larger than life is the amount of fire you can get out of your Japanese stove. I was cooking my beefy stew today and I was having a hard time to get my beef to simmer under a warm flame. The amount of heat is about three times that of any American stove I've ever encountered and the flames are about 3 times as big. It is kinda scary when I ignite my stove. It is like a small explosion. It only takes a few seconds to warm up your food and a couple of minutes to burn your food. The same goes with the oven. Tiny ovens are usually built into Japanese stoves. They are used by the Japanese to cook fish. They are big enough to place one small sized fish (about the size of caps lock key to enter key on your computer keyboard). Well, I tried to bake a pie in the oven. I didn't realize that it was a broiler. Flames come out from the top and is equally distributed in a rectangle shape. Looks like a blue rectanglar box of fire. It didn't take long before I started smelling smoke. I quickly turned off the oven and the crust was black and charred while the bottom of the pie was still frozen. Hmm... I guess I'm not supposed to use the oven to bake small pies. Lesson learned. Instead of throwing away the pie, I popped it in the microwave and ate it. It was actually very delicious. The charred part actually gave the pie a slight grilled flavor. But I'm not going to do that again.

No comments: