Western Morning News (Saturday)
Rising energy costs? Don’t feel ‘under pressure...’
Says using the latest technical wizardry to cut energy costs is a no-brainer
Following a recipe is always a bit hit and miss. In the rural South West it sometimes means homecooks must scrabble about looking for alternative ingredients – until recently there was no way our smaller local shops could have carried the increasingly vast range of our burgeoning culinary requirements. The arrival of supermarkets and the ability to shop online has changed that, but now keen cooks have been hit by another hurdle – the rapidly rising cost of actually cooking food.
Estimates vary regarding the cost of powering a domestic oven – obviously it varies depending on which appliance you have, length of cooking time and required temperature – but nowadays a big roast, or a day’s baking, is far from cheap, as a glance at a smart-meter will tell you.
Mindful of this I was struck by a common habit among cookery writers that is both expensive and not at all good for the planet. I’m talking about using a family fan oven to cook a single item or ingredient. I saw a recipe in a national newspaper supplement last weekend requiring half a squash to be roasted for 45 minutes. It would go into the oven all on its own, but was part of a bigger meal – and I’d question the wisdom of instructing thousands of people to crank up an oven for 45 minutes just to cook a bit of squash.
Of course, those who own something like an AGA which remains hot all the time will be paying quite a whack already keeping their appliances running 24/7, so it won’t matter to them if a recipe calls for a single ingredient to be roasted. But the idea of heating a conventional oven to cook just one part of an overall meal seems crazy... Do it multiple times and you’ll add considerable sums to your energy bills.
I cannot understand why so many chefs or cooks writing recipes on a regular basis seem so reluctant to adapt their cooking techniques to more eco-and-wallet-friendly processes – because there’s wonderful new kit out there which can help cut bills and therefore help us to be kinder to the planet.
Even downsizing your oven can help enormously. Prompted by both the summer heatwave and by the energy price-hikes to come, I purchased a Sage smart oven and not only is the appliance much smaller than our family fan oven and vastly more efficient, it is brilliant at cooking whatever you put in it.
Experts say you get a 20% saving in energy by using small convection ovens – my smart-meter suggests it’s more. Back when the kids lived at home and their mates would stop by for meals on a regular basis, such a diminutive oven would not have been up to the job, but now there’s just two of us, it’s all we need.
The Sage is not so diminutive it won’t roast a medium sized chicken and its high-tech programmes allow you to master a host of roasting, baking, toasting and air-frying jobs with ease. Given today’s electricity prices, the oven’s superior efficiency will eventually see a return on its purchase price.
Using the latest technical wizardry to cut energy costs and also help save the planet really does seem a no-brainer.
For example, the latest electronic pressure-cookers are capable of reducing energy costs by a whopping 90%! Try cooking dried pulses in an appliance like the Instant Pot (the pioneer of the electronic pressure cooker revolution) and then do the same in a conventional pan on the hob. Once an electronic pressure-cooker has warmed to sufficient temperature (ie, sealing the interior steel vessel so that its contents are under pressure), it’ll tick-over on less energy than is required by a light bulb. You can’t say that of a hob boiling something like pulses for the best part of an hour!
Pressure cooking creates more savings. Staying with pulses, one home-economics survey claims the dried version costs just a third of a can or jar. Pressure-cooking also allows you to retain more value when it comes to the actual nutrition of food, because cooking in a sealed vessel can reduce the leaching away of vital minerals and vitamins, especially if you lightly steam ingredients under pressure.
So much for modern technology. But I have recently gone down the exact opposite route in a bid to save energy bills. I bought a wood-burner which has an oven above the fire-box. It allows us to heat our cottage in the same way we’ve always done – but while we’re admiring those lovely warming flames through the firebox window, we also see wonderful dishes bubbling away in the window above!
Perhaps it’s wrong to talk about this being opposite to high-tech. The latest wood-burners – such as the Dean Forge Dartmoor Baker Eco wood-burning stove I bought this summer – are, thanks to modern technology, far more efficient than the older generation models.
I paid full-price through a specialist local company, Brendon Hill Stoves, who did a great job of fitting the appliance, but am happy to give Dartmoor-based Dean Forge a mention because the company really does make its excellent stoves from scratch in Devon – whereas many wood-burners sold in the UK will only have been “assembled” here, having actually been manufactured elsewhere. It’s wrong,
I think, that companies can get away with sticking a Union Jack on such goods to give the impression it’s British-made.
Many rural readers will have a wood-burner, and if you’re ever thinking of replacing your old model then why not go for one with an oven and a hot-plate? Especially at present, as ash-dieback spreads. It is a great shame, but there must be millions of tonnes of good firewood being created by this horrible disease.
Since autumn began in earnest, I have been cooking with a fuel that has travelled less than two miles. Local fuel burned in a locally-made stove, which I’d have been lighting anyway to keep the house warm...
And if that isn’t sustainable enough, I’ve been on a mission to make the food as local as possible – hence the shepherd’s pie in today’s recipe (I also have been making apple pies of various kinds from fruit from the garden).
Most ingredients were bought locally, including the regeneratively farmed lamb. The Cornish sea-salt and the cold-pressed rapeseed oil were from a little further afield, but still from the Westcountry.
We’re all keen to reduce energy bills and I’m guessing most of us would like to do what we can to help in the fight against climate change.
But that doesn’t mean we have to go without or wear a hair-shirt.
I am aware there are many people who can’t afford the appliances listed above – although I would say you can now buy an electronic pressure-cooker for around £50. Used daily, it could repay the outlay by the end of this winter, and it will carry on doing so for many years to come.
The point is, kitchens are energy-hungry places because heating anything is an expensive thing to do – but we home-cooks can box clever to reduce our bills and help save the planet.