Roll_Bones
Master Chef
Aluminum cooks damned well. It can lend an off flavor and color to sauces and pan reductions though. For straight browning, nothing really beats it.
In what way can AL add or subtract and flavor?
Oh well, people talk about hot spots like something's wrong. Nothing is wrong, that's where the food goes! Don't put it around the outside of the pan like petals on daisy. It looks as stupid as it is.
If through some quirk of material physics some isolated spot near the outside of the pan manages to get hotter than where the flame is then that's a pan you should unload. I've personally never seen it. Ever. But I suppose it could happen.
Happy Cooking. Heat is good!
Cheers,
Pope Charlie
There is a school of thought regarding electric burners. One school of thought is if its bad in any way or manner it will not work at all.
Meaning, these hot spots are actually where the pan and the burner make the very best contact. I was and still do believe that a electric burner cannot be partially good. It either heats up or it doesn't.
But:
Not so long ago, I notice my electric oven was not getting up to temperature. Guess what? It was the element.
So evidently, current is able to pass through the element in a reduced or overly high fashion should the element/burner still be intact.
Reason: Its not a light bulb and can still partially allow current to flow with no regard to the wattage or the voltage provided the electrical path is still present.
I learned a lesson on the oven element. But it was bad and could not be use to cook anything. It could have been used to keep something warm though.
This is not even true on an electric range. (Let's just forget the one element on my stove that has a hot spot, I still have three elements that work as expected.) The entire bottom of my pans sit on the heating element. The middle is no hotter than the edges.
I have an experiment, if you're up for it. Move the burner that has a hot spot to another location on the range top. Lets see if this hot spot follows the burner or is it possibly not a burner issue?
I am very curious as to your findings!
Should this hot spot follow the burner, I would be quite surprised.