Selecting appliances can be very time consuming. After all, there’s no point in spending hours preparing a meal if your oven won’t cook it properly. Questions about choosing the right oven, stovetop, vent hood and more? Search no further!
Don’t have enough space for a side-by-side fridge? Try a pair of freezer drawers in your kitchen island. They aren’t as deep as the drawer on a bottom-mounted freezer-refrigerator unit, but pairing them up means will give you ample space for any large meals you prepare ahead of time and freeze.
What’s a good guideline for BTUs? This is a case where more is not necessarily better. Unlike restaurant chefs, who require a lot of power on every burner for plenty of high-heat cooking, you’re more likely to want a wide variety of heat options for cooking all the different components of your meal.
Pay attention to the range of BTUs among all the burners. You’ll want some burners that get down to a low simmer of about 3,000 BTUs and perhaps one burner that gets all the way up to 12,000 for boiling a large pot of pasta or stock.
Do I really need a double oven? If you like to bake or entertain, then yes, a double oven is a worthwhile investment. But if you have a small family and don’t have people over very often, you can likely make do with a single oven and a microwave convection oven.
Will I ever use a warming drawer? Yes! You’ll use it to warm plates before serving family-style sides. You’ll use it to keep the kids’ breakfast hot when they take forever to shower in the morning. However, if space was a challenge, a warming drawer might not make sense. You could also choose a large microwave with a keep-warm function.
How high should my vent hood be? If you sear meat often, you may be wary of placing it on the high side. However, sometimes the manufacturer may suggest a height that’s too low for you. The wider your vent hood is than your range, the higher you are able to place it. Ideally, the good should be 6 inches wider than the range.