From time to time we are asked What Is That Thing Called an Aga and Why Should I Care? Trixie and I go on and ON about this archaic lump of Midlands metal, so I'm going to tell you a little bit about it (not sure how to address the issue of Caring, but I'll leave that to you).A traditional Aga is a cast-iron radiant cooking stove, that comes in one's choice of more than a dozen beautiful enamel colors {a glimpse of our dark blue one can be seen above}, with several cooking chambers (ovens) accessed from the front and a pair of covered hot plates on top. Classic Aga models have 2, 3, or 4 ovens (see some pix here), all proportionally controlled by a single knob, so if you raise the heat, all chambers and plates will get hotter, and if you lower the heat, they all get cooler, but will stay in the same relative temperature to one another. The stove is on continuously, adding a cheery glow to your kitchen, and the different plates and chambers are calibrated for different tasks (evocative names for each have evolved which give a pretty clear indication of the intended use, therefore the heat level): descending in heat, the Roasting Oven is hottest, then the Baking Oven, then the Simmering Oven, then the Warming Oven... the Boiling Plate is hotter than the Simmering Plate, and the Warming Plate is cooler than either of those.
With only one temperature control for multiple ovens and hot plates, how do you cook? The way I like to explain it is: you don't move the flame, you move the food. Rather than adjust a flame under a frying pan as on a standard gas stove, for instance, you might begin sautéing on the Simmering Plate to get the pan warm, move your pan to the Boiling Plate to really cook things fast, then ease off with another few minutes on the Simmering Plate again. It sounds complex only because it's unfamiliar -- if you cooked on an Aga for a while and suddenly had to pay attention to the height of your under-pan flame and adjust a control knob repeatedly during cooking, that would seem equally strange.
It's a step backward -- this ain't no Turbo Chef -- but if this sort of thing calls out to you (as it did to us), it's simpler and better and more reliable than any other stove, and we think it's also really pretty (much more photogenic than we are!).
What does the Aga do best? Casseroles. Braising. Slow-cooking. Cooking in the ovens is more efficient than doing things on top of the stove (partly because the closed ovens retain heat better than uncovered hot plates), although you can do everything from pancake-making to kettle-boiling to wok-searing on an Aga cooktop. In the ovens, you adjust cooking intensity by moving your dish from oven to oven, or raising/lowering within one oven -- we often begin a casserole in the Baking Oven (first hour or three), then move it to the Simmering Oven for holding until dinner-time, or for slow overnight simmering. We used to cook rice on the stovetop, but no more: it's in-the-oven rice all the time now (and if you want risotto, it's the same darn thing made with arborio rice so look in your recipe files for "baked risotto" and there you are).
Key tools for making the best of an Aga are enameled cast-iron casseroles such as Le Creuset, Staub, and the like. Worth it!! (Oval cassereoles are easier to get in and out of the ovens, by the way)
The stove is silent, and it's ready to go all the time -- one advantage is not having to wait for an oven to preheat before baking, so when the mood strikes, you are ready to begin. When not cooking (or even when you are!) your Aga can be useful warming the room (in Summer this may not sound very nice, but in the colder months it is Heaven) , drying laundry or dishes, keeping dishtowels from perpetual sogginess, and so on. Household critters seem to gravitate toward the thing, and a pet bed often ends up right in front (mind the pooch when opening the oven door!).
In the UK you can still get one of these with a "boiler" -- water heater cistern -- inside, which is sometimes a small country cottage's best hot-water source; in the USA you can only get a multi-oven "cooker."
Americans invariably ask: What About My Thanksgiving Turkey? Aga loves to respond that you can "do" a 14-pounder with ease in the Roasting/Baking Ovens, and I'm sure they know what they're talking about... when you first peek inside the Roasting Oven, however, you may be alarmed by the size of it -- it's not quite a foot wide, but it is more than a foot and a half deep; and because it's a radiant oven you can put food very close to the sides and they won't get all crusty and burned, because all surfaces of the oven are giving off heat (nearly) equally, unlike a standard electric or gas oven that shoots in hot air from the side or bottom (an electric convection oven sends the heat in from one side, but has a fan to circulate the hot air, acting more like a radiant oven than a non-convection one). I say that if your turkey is too big for an Aga, it's probably not an organically-raised one and therefore full of icky hormones, so give it up and get one that has been raised nicely thank you.
Switching recipes from "standard" to Aga-style isn't difficult at all, except that bakers would do well to take notes (which oven, what rack level, how many minutes. if you raised, lowered, or turned the pan and how many minutes after that, etc)... sticky notes become your dear friends... and if you think it's a pain to have to do this you won't think so when all of your friends tell you how GREAT your baking is (maybe they only say this because you're giving them free cake? Naw).
There are plenty of Aga cookbooks on the market -- Mary Berry is our favorite Aga Authority -- but beyond the basic how-to the recipes in all of them are, well, just recipes! No reason why you can't make your own favorites, which is exactly what we do.
About Summer: if the ambient temperature rises higher than that of the stove, it's not going to "exchange" heat into the air -- for example, when it hots up to more than about 85 degrees F outside, it's actually cooler in the kitchen, right by the warm stove. Four years of California Summers and counting...
Do the Aga people pay me to blather on like this? Oh, if only... I forgot to mention, the very best thing I do on the thing is Tea & Toast! Which, now that I mention it, I crave, so it's off to the kitchen for a breakfast-like evening snack,
xo, Dustin
Taken from http://tdustinfannings.blogspot.com/
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