Due to the differences in the required cooking temperature and techniques, various dishes have different requirements for stoves and cooking utensils. In recent years, the kitchen equipment industry has developed many new kitchen-specific devices based on the needs of culinary development.
Stove: Stoves have different power levels. For example, the Cantonese-style stove, also known as the Guangdong-style stove, has a large body, a large combustion chamber, large cooking utensils, and high power. It is suitable for quick stir-frying. Other names for stoves may vary, but the structural principles are not significantly different. The size can be adjusted according to the environment and actual needs, making it slightly smaller in size and having moderate power.
2. Stove for stewing dishes: A stove specifically designed for stewing vegetables, fish, and meat. It has a gentle heat that quickly brings water to a boil and then maintains a low heat for slow cooking until the soup is just right and the stewed food is tender and soft. Most of these stoves have multiple burners, such as a three-burner stewing stove or a five-burner fish stewing stove.
3. Cooking Stove: A stove specially designed for making soups, stews, and braises, such as low soup stoves and baozi stoves. The low soup stove can be used for cooking chicken soup, bone soup, and braising beef, etc. The baozi stove is a multi-burner stove that can simultaneously prepare different flavors of dishes for multiple tables of guests.
4. Oven: In cooking techniques, although baking belongs to the same category, different cooking methods require different levels of heat and have different requirements for equipment. Therefore, there are many types of oven appliances, such as duck roasting oven, pig roasting oven, pancake roasting oven, pizza oven, and oven, etc.
5. Griddle Pan: The definition of "frying" in cooking techniques is: add a small amount of oil, heat it over medium-low heat, place the flattened raw materials that have been processed with batter on the pan, and make the surface of the raw materials turn golden brown to complete the dish. Since the processing methods of equipment such as electric griddles, grilling pans, and iron plate grills are the same as the "frying" technique, they are classified as griddle pans.
6. Steamer: The technique of "steaming" is widely applied in the preparation of both main and side dishes. Before the emergence of steamer ovens, the main tools used were steamer baskets and steamer pans. Nowadays, most of them use electricity as the heat source, which is convenient for cleaning and easy to control the cooking temperature. The seafood steamer oven is not only used for steaming seafood but can also be used for boiling soup, braising, steaming dumplings, and other various cooking processes. Restaurants use the original steamer baskets for steaming buns, and large-scale production can also be carried out using steamer ovens.
7. Deep Fryer: The most commonly used deep fryer is the electric deep fryer. It is developed based on the traditional stove-based frying method. It uses electricity as the heat source, allowing for easy temperature control. The fryer is relatively small and easy to clean.
8. Cooking over the stove: Cooking is one of the most primitive techniques in cooking methods, and it is widely applicable to the processing and preparation of main and side dishes. Large pots and steam compartment stoves can cook a large amount of soup, dishes, porridge, and noodles at once. The steam compartment stove uses steam as the heat source and the pot body can be overturned to facilitate the loading and unloading of materials. The noodle cooking stove is a specially designed stove for cooking multiple types of noodles at once. It can cook dumplings, wontons, noodles, etc. and can also add soup, ingredients, and garnishes according to the guests' needs, solving the problems of high energy consumption, limited varieties, slow speed, and difficulty in catering to different tastes in large pot cooking.
The various cooked food kitchen equipment mentioned above are classified based on the requirements of cooking techniques, ensuring the technical means needed for various cooking methods. Many cooking devices have evolved from stoves. As can be seen from the above introduction, many types of stoves can perform interchangeable functions.
