Cone: October Green Team Tip - Energy-Saving Cooking
October Green Team Tip - Energy-Saving Cooking
Practice Energy-Saving Cooking with Greenyour.com
Stovetop strategies
- Match the pot size to the burner size. A 6-inch pot on an 8-inch burner wastes more than 40 percent of the burner's heat. Choosing a smaller electric burner can save you about $36 annually. Likewise, setting a smaller gas flame can save about $18.
- Cover pots and pans to keep heat in. This will cook your food quicker and keep your kitchen cooler.
- Use good quality cookware with a flat bottom. This is especially important when cooking on an electric stove. Electric heating elements are less efficient if they do not have good contact with a flat-bottomed pan. Boiling water to cook spaghetti, for example, could use 50 percent more energy if you use a cheap pan with a warped bottom.
- Use high-conductivity pots. Copper-bottom and cast iron cookware heat up faster than steel pans and can reduce your cooking time.
- Keep the stovetop clean and shiny. When your stove's surface around the heating element becomes blackened from heavy use, it can absorb a lot of heat, which reduces the heat element’s efficiency. Keep your stovetop surface shiny so it reflects heat up to the cookware.
Oven strategies
- Minimize or eliminate preheating. But only if your recipe won't be affected. Also, turn off your oven shortly before the food is completely done. The oven’s heat should be adequate to finish things up.
- Bake with ceramic, glass or cast iron. These types of cookware retain heat so you can lower the oven temperature by about 25°F.
- Maximize your oven usage. Ovens don’t cook foods efficiently. Only about 6 percent of the energy from a typical oven is actually absorbed by the food. So save your oven for large or multiple dishes.
- Use a smaller oven. If you’re just warming up leftovers or cooking for less than a half hour, use a toaster oven. Doing so, minimizes the oven area that must be heated and uses about one-third to one-half the power that would be used by your stove’s oven. Microwave ovens are even more efficient—using about two-thirds less energy—because cooking times are significantly shortened.
- Keep the oven racks clear. Improve air flow by staggering multiple pans and don’t lay foil on the racks to catch drips.
- Don’t peek! Every time you open the oven door, the temperature drops by 25°F to 50°F.
- Use the oven’s self-cleaning feature. Do this right after you’ve cooked a meal to take advantage of the residual heat.
- Use the right cooking appliance for the job. If you’re slow-cooking a roast, a crockpot is ideal because it uses less energy for foods needing long cooking times. Pressure cookers reduce cooking times because they cook foods at higher temperatures, reducing energy use 50 to 75 percent.
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