There are lots of natural, practical methods to take full advantage of the instant heating power of gas. Choose equipment that is enclosed and insulated, keeping the power within the appliance (or absorbed by the food). Cook at the lowest temperature, or in the largest volume, feasible. Especially for solid-top ranges, use flat-bottomed cookware that makes full contact with the cooking surface. Curves and dents in pots and pans end up wasting money.
The bottoms from the cookware should be about 1 inch wider than the diameter from the burner. Although you will find occasions for “big” flames and kitchen showmanship, for most cooking duties, it is adequate that the gas flame tips barely touch the bottoms of the cookware and do not lap up over the sides. Burners should be adjusted accordingly.
Do not keep pots at a boil when simmering them would be sufficient, and cover them to hold in heat. A typical tendency would be to turn equipment on early to let it “heat up.” Again, this is a waste of fuel and time. For open-top ranges, preheating is simply not essential; for griddles, low or medium flames are sufficient for just about any kind of frying.
Water pressure booster pump do not need much, if any, preheating; gas ovens, solid-top ranges, and steamers could be preheated, but no a lot more than 10 minutes.Energy saving is an additional good reason numerous ranges and griddles are built as adjoining, temperature-controlled, multiple-burner sections. During slow times, learn to group food items about the least feasible number of parts, which eliminates the need to maintain the whole cooking surface hot.
Regular cleaning and maintenance from the appliances are two important keys to wise use of natural gas, but you will also find energy-saving innovations in the works. One is a concept known as heat transfer fluids (HTF). The idea would be to power several pieces of equipment with a single burner, utilizing a series of pipes and a heated fluid that runs via the pipes to various appliances.
(The heated fluid can’t be water because its pressure would become too high and create steam.) The fluid may also be run through a heat exchanger, if necessary, to boost its temperature along the way. A major hotel chain testing an early HTF system uses the same heating fluid to do such disparate tasks as drying laundry and frying chicken. At this writing, researchers are looking for an entirely nontoxic fluid, simply because a leak or accident may release some of it into the food.
