Roast or Fried Food and the Wastefulness of Oven Cooking

There are many of reasons for using an oven and principally they centre around cooking food. Keeping food warm and warming plates and offering a warm place for yeast to act on bread and buns are others.

An oven is  a massive and mostly metal box with adjustable shelves which may or may not be open wired or closed.

The whole shebang requires a great deal of heat to raise to an appropriate temperature at which recipes provide a base-line.This heat and the heat that remains after the cooking is done is, most of the time, wasted and this is a serious drawback of ovens especially for heating prepared dishes which have been bought. The packaging almost 100% insists on the over being brought up to a certain high temperature and the waste here is even more marked because the heating up (and cooling down)  time occupies a large percentage of the total paid for. Obviously the cost of heating up is the real loss but in moderate and warm climates the cooling down cost is one involving the air conditioner.

So much would be oven cooking can be done in a fry pan with a lid or in a pot with a lid as in pot roast and can be done on a flicker of flame.

In the case of a pot roast the lid is usually a good fit and this means the heat is intense and will tend to quickly cook the meat shrinking it somewhat as the flesh contract and expresses the juices. If however the lid can be just raised a bit throughout the cooking the escaping moisture will dry the skin off a little and allow it to seal the meat and keep the juices in the flesh.

The same applies to using a pan and here I use a couple of chopsticks to raise the lid from the rim again allowing a drying effect rather than a wet stewing effect on the surface of the meat.

In a way we are trying to reduce the amount of energy used in an oven and I must admit it sometime difficult to get a really small flicker of flame from a gas ring and then I use a diffuser -  a perforated metal plate that sits under the pot or pan.

Quite often cooks will dust meat in a mixture of flour, herbs and spices and this in hot fat will quickly caramelise and produce a skin and then the heat can be really cut down. Also after dipping in flour like this the meat can be dipped in a batter again with salt and spices. Then the meat is put into a deep fryer where fat instantly seals the batter around the meat and the meat cooks through quickly and without losing its juices. This is the basis of Kentucky Fried Chicken and of course you can do this at home.  But I hope you won’t - because the batter hold a mass of fat even when the meat is cooked and sat to drain and this fat is typically bad for you having been heated many times and possibly in the first instance not being an upmarket or healthy fat - Repeatedly heated fat is really bad for you usually as it contains a lot of trans fats. Also it requires a lot of energy heating up the volume of fat needed for deep frying and that is what we are trying to avoid.