I love cooking with gas.  Next to some wicked orgy with myself and a dozen hotties, surely cooking with gas is life’s greatest pleasure.  But there is one significant problem with cooking with gas.  Here I spill my solution.

Gas has a great intense and direct heat.  It works for nearly any task and works well.  But if I were in a postion where I could build my own kitchen I would include one high-efficiency, low-capability electric burner in the mix.  Here is why.

The one great failing of gas is simmering.  Simmering with gas invariably leaves a thick crust at the bottom of the pot where the intense heat has glammed onto particles of your sauce and married them not with one another but with the very pot in which they stew.

This is no good.  Sure, for small things you can use a double boiler.  This really does the trick of calming the heat and making sure your creation is protected from the flames.  However, when you are making a couple gallons of marinara sauce, building a massive double boiler–though this sounds like a fun project–is really out of the question.

My solution is to invert a cast iron skillet over the burner and place the pot on top of it.

The inverted skillet captures all the heat energy emitting form the burner, but the pan also acts to disperse that heat throughout its own material.

This does reduce the efficiency of the burner, but if you didn’t build your own kitchen with one electric burner this is a viable substitute.  Most of the heat energy does pass into the bottom of the pot, but it passes into the entire bottom surface of the pot eliminated the aforementioned hotspots which would otherwise lead to crusting.

Using my burner on its lowest setting, my sauces will eventually come to a boil and of course crust–it probably takes a couple of hours before boiling occurs.  However, implementing this solution I am able to simmer without boiling or crusting indefinitely.  This weekend I cooked a red sauce for about 20 hours using this solution and the sauce, though hot, neither boiled nor crusted while the skillet was in play.

Happy hunting.