On Sun, 15 Jan 2006 14:49:31 +0000, Peter Parry wrote:


As the Aga lacks any form of controllable hob, has wildly fluctuating
oven temperatures and has no grill there are many things which can't
be done on it as well as on a conventional oven.

Never used a hob instead of an oven meself

Seriously though, totally agree on grilling and stir frying. The toast IS a
little better since it takes longer and its less violently heated. I
wouldn't 'die' for it though. Its good, but not that good.

The hob technique is simply a question of realising both the temperatures
on the hobs, and the inevitable deacy of those if you go in for prolonged
hob work, and the chances of dropping the oven temps if you do.

The aga is promarliy a damned good oven, the hobs are useful, but a lot of
modern style food seems to be based on what chefs can turn out in fancy
restaurants in 5 minutes - a lot of stir fry, grill and flash frying. The
Aga comes from a more lesiurely age when meals were preapred in advance.

I'd back roast meat and two veg in an aga aginst any competition anywhere.

Also cake and bread baking, pizzas and the like.

Thats it basically. If you want lightly seared tuna steaks on a bed of
couscous with roquette salad and a balsamic drizzled garnish, an aga is of
very little use to you.

If you want roast pork, roast potatoes, roast parsnips, red cabbage and
apple simmered for seveal hours in the bottom oven, hot plates and a place
to stand the Rioja to warm it, frankly an aga is unbeatable.

As ar as strir frying goes, even an electric hob is a real struggle. Only
gas really carries the hot gases up around the curved sides and heats a wok
properly, although I have had a fair successes on an openb charcoal fire.
We actually find that the best a;lternatie is to roast vegetables at the
top of the oven after tossng in a coating of oil.

Steaming is easy - put your puddings ins a 'bain marie' in the bottom
oven..

Scrambled eggs? again I use the microwave..it is far less likley to
separate the millk. Its also fantastic for CRISPY bacon..suaages and bacon
may be fried, but I tend to use the oven instead. Chips - REAL chips - are
done in a wok on te hot hob...whilst fried eggs are dne on teh cooler one

Pasta and sauces - its perfect. Garlic bread in the oven, sauce made on the
cooler hob, and the pasta boils on the hot hob.

The biggest danger of te aga - and its reputatin for gghahstly food - comes
from stupid housewives who have discocvered that the warming oven means
never having to time your meals properly..meat that gest cooked too early,
and just about anything else, goes in there to wait for te veg to be ready.
Result is soggy and disgusting.

But then in any other scenario, it would be worse - over cooked meat or raw
vegetables..

Serious grilling of
any sort and stir frying are two obvious examples (yes - I know Aga
will sell you a vastly overpriced Philip Harben frying pan they call
a "flat bottom wok" but I prefer a real wok).

As I said, those are not really much good even on an electric hob.


and certainly better than can be achieved in fan ovens and the
like.

Matthew Fort of the Gruniad has written a rather nice piece on the
Aga
(http://www.waitrose.com/food_drink/w...cs/0509032.asp)

"It is a life-support, lifestyle system designed for people who don't
really like cooking, who like playing at cooking, for whom the image
of cooking is more important than the reality."


Ther are sadly a lot of aga owners like that. There are also a fair few who
are not.

"To take one small example, let us say that you want to cook a
traditional Sunday lunch for a group of eight: roast meat, roast
potatoes, Yorkshire puddings, carrots, greens of some variety, gravy
and a nice treacle tart. That's not unreasonable is it?

Well, you can forget about the Yorkshire pudding and the treacle tart
for a start. You see, when you start opening and shutting those
boiling plates and simmering plates (to cook the veg and make the
gravy), you immediately start reducing the heat in the ovens (which
is being reduced anyway because you are cooking the meat in one of
them and continually opening the others as you try to keep things
warm or cook them). If you're lucky, you will just about get the fat
hot enough to roast the potatoes, but you'll have to make the treacle
tart the day before and nothing, but nothing, will save the Yorkshire
puddings. They will be as flabby as an old man's dewlap. My mother
was unable to make a decent Yorkshire pudding in the 30 years she
cooked on an Aga. Of course, you could sacrifice the roast potatoes,
but that isn't a serious option in our house.

This is just rotten technique.

We use roasting dishes with covers that can be removed to adjust teh heat,
make sure the oven is hot to start with, and te majority of te roasting is
done BEFIRE teh vegetables are set to boil.

The treacle tart goes in just as the main course is removed, at the top of
te hot oven, which will be down from its 210C to about 180C - just right
for te tart. By the time the main course is finsihed, the tart will be
perfect.

The yiorkshire puds go in late, on te oven top, when te meat has been put
in te bottom oven to alow the temperature to stabilise. Its better than
'tresting it' as the outside cools off less.

The gravy and te veg are all doen last of all on the top whils the roast
potatoes are still roasting and the puds are baking.


I grew up with an Aga. I would like to say that I learnt to cook on
an Aga but it simply wouldn't be true. As a cook, you learn survival
techniques on an Aga; how to get by, how to rescue disaster, how to
take pleasure in small triumphs. But you don't learn how to cook. "


It sounds like he still can't.

Bad workman etc.

I learnt to cook on a one ring gas hob in college.


Generally people who criticise storage cookers have never tried one or
read something in a magazine, both of which make their comments
meaningless. If they have tried one, then either they had a very
old or badly set up one or themselves are unable to cook, since it is
really very easy.

Of course it is easy as it limits what you can do - it is glorified
haybox cooking. The one I had was perfectly well set up by Aga.
Every six months its own fitter turned up to service it at vast
expense (and this also meant three days downtime - one to cool, one
to be serviced and one to heat up again) - a cooker that needs 6
monthly servicing - I ask you! (I didn't own it BTW). However you
looked at from any objective viewpoint it was large, obsolete and
inefficient. As Fort says:-


Mad. I turn mine off the night before, the man comes in and is gone again
by 2pm, and its up o temp by teh time the next meal is readu to be cooked -
or would be if the annual service awasn;t arrianged to coincide with the
summer, when its off anyway.

This must ahve been an old coal fired one...those are vile, but when you
haven't got an elternative, they do work..just. however they need to be
filled up with coal at least 4 hours before cooking starts, because any
attempt to pile coal on later will simply LOWER teh temperature.


"So what precisely is an Aga? An icon, a status symbol, a domestic
statement, and a companion to the golden retriever, the faded jeans
with the crease down the legs and the Ralph Lauren something or
other, the four-wheel drive, the 2.4 children called Jack and Daisy
and Ch-, and the holiday home in Tuscany. An Aga is anything but a
machine to cook on.


No, its a n attactive space heater, that can be harnessed to provide free
energy for a certain style of traditional cooking, which it does very well
indeed.

IF you have the intelligence to understand how it works.


Think of it like the ancient family retriever: much loved, but dozy
and smelly and with dodgy back legs. It's time to have it put down. "

Another good article is at
http://www.ovolopublishing.co.uk/hou...-aga-help.html

"The Aga cookbook is full of Aga versions of recipes. They can take a
very simple conventional recipe ("Cook for two hours at 200 degrees
C") and turn it into a major epic ("Put on the boiling plate for ten
minutes. Cover and move to the simmering plate for 30 minutes.
Transfer to a shallow pan and leave it in the simmering oven
overnight. Finish off with 45 minutes in the baking oven before
serving.")"

Even Agas own suggestion for making something as simple as a steamed
pudding (6 mins in microwave) is a masterpiece of fiddle - "Boil hard
on the boiling plate for 10 minutes, before moving to the simmering
plate for a further 20 minutes. Check to see if it needs topping
up... After this initial 30 minute start, transfer the whole pan,
water and all, to the simmering oven for 2 1/2 hours" (The 6 min
microwave version also tastes rather better than the Aga one).

It doesn't actually.


Other cooks have remarked similarly:-

"it does have a major drawback - it is most certainly not an accurate
cooking tool that can maintain a uniform temperature without
fluctuation. Leave one of the lids up and the temperature drops;
leave both lids up and it drops even more; open the oven door and it
plummets dramatically. We discovered this flaw while trying to cook a
piece of pork shoulder at 70C for 12 hours. At such a low
temperature, a 10C drop meant that the meat would not cook. In fact,
we soon worked out that the temperature fluctuations were up to 25%
in either direction, and when my wife telephoned Aga to inquire about
this, she was told that it was quite normal."

"depending on what we were making, we had to make sure that nothing
else was being cooked on top, to open and close the oven door to cool
it down, to leave the oven door open for a few minutes or switch the
meat from one oven to another."


I have never found it that bad.

You do get an imediate drop on opening te doors, but it son goes away - the
air mass is trivial compared to the mass of the cast iron.

Using tehobs does reduce oven temperarres - but not by 25%. I see about a
30 deg C variation on 200-210 C on tehe maoin oven, and a lot less on te
cool oven - noramlly from around 105C down to 95C or so.

The chap who wrote that probably came under your heading of "are
unable to cook", his name is Hester Blumenthal.


Yep. a nouvae ****** undoubtedly.

Other celebrity chefs of course are quite effusive in their
endorsement - Jamie Oliver waxes lyrical about them as underwear
dryers omitting to mention that Aga paid him "undisclosed amounts" to
supply and fit an oven for him. Other Agas regularly appear because
the shows producers "happen" to have one fitted free by Aga in the
kitchen they use for filming (usually the producers own kitchen). As
Aga said "Our famous customers come to us because we are discreet,
and we do not discuss the arrangements we have with them,". It's
nice to know you are contributing to such worthy causes when buying
an Aga :-).

I don't think they are the greatest cookers ever made, and people
who buy them as fashion statements won;t be able to cook on them
just by gazing at pictures in magainbes, either.

But they are servicable enough if you take the trouble to play to their
strengths and work around the weaknesses.

I didn't buy ours purely as a cooker. Its there to add warmth (phsyical and
aesthetic) to a very large kitchen, and being well aware of its
limitations, it has the aga companion electric cooker bolted on the side
(which has even SMALLER ovens..)

That plus a microwave covers all the bases we need.