Thursday, July 5, 2007

Two Appliances for Slow Cooking Meat

A few months ago, everyone at work was suddenly mad for the Farberware Open Hearth Smokeless Broiler, an electric rotating meat rotisserie thing-y that was apparently the wedding gift of choice during the 1960's. The succulence of meats (so juicy! so tender!) slow cooked over a bottom heating element for four hours, has been so celebrated, I find myself eying them on eBay.

What stops me? In a word, storage: our teensy 1925 kitchen barely has the counterspace for the coffee grinder, much less a large single-use appliance.

Especially when the slow cooker, the multi-tasking Crock Pot, is working out so well. Just last week Foodgoat discovered yet another tasty thing it can do: it can make corned beef.

The nearby deli makes a decent corned beef sandwich - for $8. We can pick up a corned beef package from the grocery store for less than that, plop it (fat meticulously trimmed off, as per Foodgoat standard policy) into the slow cooker at night with water and the packet of herbs that it comes with, and in the morning ...

A muy delicioso pile of corned beef, tender and juicy, ready for several day's worth of personalized and yummy (and inexpensive) sandwiches for lunch.

But I still want to try a Farberware Open Hearth Smokeless Broiler, storage and possible fire hazard be damned. Because then I could put on a very large chunk of pork, or possibly a very tiny whole pig. Because roasting for hours and turning on a spit is the how lechon (tasty, tasty lechon) is made.

And now that I think about it, there is always room for lechon.

6 comments:

  1. Yeah, I dunno. I had one a few years ago here at work. I did a few chickens, I think. The heating element wasn't close enough to the bird to cook it well, at all. So, I fashioned a aluminum foil tent and made a real oven out of it. That worked okay, took too damned long though. And the power cord was too small and got all melty.

    Biggles

    ReplyDelete
  2. The only special-use appliance I own is a chocolate fondue fountain, and yes, I get a lot of use out of it.

    Space is also a limiting factor for me. If I had more room, I think I'd have all kinds of gadgets.

    ReplyDelete
  3. that's nice.

    btw, Have you heard about http://www.piratr.com before? It's the Singapore First Online sharing site.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anonymous5:20 AM

    I'm having horrible flashbacks from my 70's childhood....It was my job as a child to disassemble and hand-wash the family Farberware indoor grill- which was used almost daily. What a HUGE pain in the ass! Nothing cooked on this grill/rotesserie tastes good enough to justify the hassle OR the storage problem.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I would recommend avoiding it for several reasons. Its looks diffucult to clean. How does it really "cook"? And if you are lacking kitchen space this piece of equipment doesn't rationalize itself.

    ReplyDelete
  6. If you have a lot of "special use appliances", the best thing to do is find an out-of-the-way place to store them, yet still give you easy access.

    For example, I hung shelves in a hall closet to keep my rotisserie, food processors, deep fryer, panini grill, etc. The key is to make everything reachable WITHOUT needing to move ANYTHING. Otherwise, you won't use these appliances.

    Alternatives are shelves or cabinets in your garage or basement. Wrap the appliances in big plastic bags to keep out dust and bugs so they are ready to use.

    ReplyDelete