I peel depending on the usage, and depending on how my ginger looks like. If it’s fresh, young ginger and the skin looks good, I often don’t peel it if I need slices just to add flavor to a dish or to braise it. If I’m using a microplane, I often find not peeling it is ok too.
However, if I’m making fine where it’s likely to get consumed, I do remove the skin just to make sure the texture is ok. Probably no need to, but I prefer it peeled. When I make sauce for dumplings, as an example, I always peel the ginger (as well as when I’ve tried to make pickled ginger, like gari in Japanese restaurants).
I wash everything before it goes into my food prep. With all the food borne llnesses, contamination and chemical issues it just makes sense to me. As to peeling ginger, I do with a paring knife and the peels go into my stock container in the freezer or to ‘the girls’; my egg suppliers. I am thinking someone out there has come up with a specific mechanical ginger peeler like some of the other convenience kitchen tools: avocado slicer, banana hanger, etc.
I’m going off topic, but as it relates to warping Mauviel and Matfer steel pans, I recently watched a youtube video (and will see if I can find it again) where they poster tested pans on induction, flame, and regular electric hobs.
Using an IR thermometer, he found that for electric and induction heated to medium and medium high heats, there was a much higher temperature distribution between the edges/sides of the pans vs. the centers, as compared to flame heat. The difference between pan center and sides for the induction and electric was hundreds of degrees Fahrenheit. His thinking is this is more likely to cause warpage.
In my own excessive reading of hundreds of reviews (esp. 1- and 2-star reviews) of carbon steel pans, it was always induction or flat-top electric users who complained about warpage after a few uses. I thought this was because it wouldn’t be as noticeable on a standard flame grating (vs. the flat surfaces where wobble would be more noticeable) but after watching the test video, it may be that one is inherently less likely to warp a pan at high heat with the apparently more-even heating one gets with flame.
Edit - Here’s the video. I didn’t remember all the details quite right, but the basics of what I wrote above are correct.
I’m also not sure how accurate that type of thermometer is. Not that I have reason to doubt, I just haven’t tested them.
CCE
(Keyrock the unfrozen caveman lawyer; your world frightens & confuses me)
47
Indeed. I always get a chuckle when I see some fru-fru chicken marketed as “Only Vegetarian Fed!”, thinking, “Chickens are not supposed to be vegetarians!”.
They’re omnivores, like humans, pigs, most other birds, etc.
(Edit - for that matter you also see chicken in the US labeled as “Raised Without Hormones!” which is silly given it’s not lawful to use hormones in US chicken production.)
Wow… where do I start? There are a couple of issues here. The first is he is using a cheapo induction hob that most likely has an element of 6 inches (or less) with a 12 inch pan. Is there any wonder the center is hotter than the sides? His testing here is completely invalid. While I do get that gas does more to heat the sides of the pan, when do you need that? As long as the electric/induction element matches the bottom of your pan you’ll be ok.
A good one is very accurate (not sure what he is using as I see no brand - nor do I recognize it), but the following reservations apply to all of them:
1.) They will only give you accurate results from materials that have a high emissivity (the efficiency of a surface to emit thermal energy). This includes cast iron and most organic materials, but not stainless or carbon steel (unless severely oxidized).
2.) Different IR thermometers have different dispersion, i.e. they measure an area which is essentially a cone from the thermometer to the surface being measured. Some can be very narrow, others can be quite wide.
3.) The laser dot does not indicate the center of the circle being measured. Depending on the design it can be either above or below that circle.
4.) IR thermometers can’t see through “anything”! Let’s say you have one millimeter of oil in a cast iron pan. The thermometer will tell you the temp of the surface of the oil, and not the pan underneath it.
Given the above facts, even his ceramic cooktop measurements are invalid… pointing to areas in the pan that have organics, and then to the non-seasoned sides of the pan (whose poor emissivity will result in a much lower reading than reality)… not to mention he started on a too small element, and then transferred it to a larger one assuming that would immediately correct the issue.
Plus he heats one of the pans to over 600° on gas and then moves to electric and sees warping (of course if it warped on the gas grate he wouldn’t have noticed it).
And his other tests with stainless and cast iron were only done on a tiny induction hob with pans that were way too big for it.
So IMHO, the guy is a clown, with little to no understanding of the tools he is using, nor the equipment he is testing with them. Welcome to YouTube. (c;
I have a Milwaukee 2267-20, which has a reasonably narrow 10:1 dispersion. This means that at one foot away, the temperature read is an average of a 1.5 inch circle of the surface (at 3 feet away, it would be a 3.6 inch circle). On a ceramic cooktop where the element is as least as big as the bottom of the pan, I have never seen these kinds of differences from the middle to edges of the bottom of the pan with either cast iron and stainless or carbon steel (this is with oil in the pan - which is the only way to get an accurate reading other than cast iron). In fact, I have both a gas and ceramic cooktop and find the ceramic one more consistent.
With that said, I have actually warped a 12" Lodge cast iron skillet… by setting it to medium/high to heat up, and then forgetting about it for way too long. Warpage was minor and it is still usable, but it no longer sits completely flat on my ceramic cooktop. Bottom line, if you’ve got nothing in a pan while waiting for it to heat up, consider 450° “smokin’ hot”… 5-6 hundred is warp city. Plus, don’t walk away until you add food to it. (c;
Ok, thanks for reading my rant on this vid (which is less than accurate). I get that many here prefer gas, but up here it is propane (that is really pricey and not all that environmentally friendly) and I get better results from my Frigidaire Gallery ceramic than I do my GE Profile gas (but I do have to move pans on the former). I’d love to replace the Frigidaire with a Miele Powerflex induction, but they cost thousands!
2 Likes
CCE
(Keyrock the unfrozen caveman lawyer; your world frightens & confuses me)
49
Thanks Scott, really appreciate all the extra info.
Touching your comment on the warped lodge cast iron - I’ve put some really fouled ones (garage sale buys) in the self-clean cycle that is supposedly as hot as 900°F, without any damage. But of course that would be completely even heating.
Now I just got to figure out how to jimmy the auto door lock so I can use the self-clean cycle as a super hot pizza oven.
I had a ceramic top here for about the first 12 years before remodeling the kitchen and getting a gas stove. I liked it okay but I have a number of pans I like to use for big jobs, mostly hard-anodized aluminum, that have just enough roundness on the exterior bottom that they made poor contact with the flat top and would heat unevenly, and rock. So they were shelved the whole time except to use in the oven. That’s my main reason for liking gas over ceramic, plus the visual aspect - being able to see the flame height is something my Neanderthal brain finds useful. I never got used to the numbers on the electric glasstop, even in 12 years, to intuitively understand how hot I’d be at which number setting.
Induction spreads energy differently from electric or gas–relying on liquids in a pan to distribute the vibrations. The software on my Vollrath leads the induction coil to turbo and overshoot a temperature target–even with liquids in the pan.
I use an IR temperature gun to help me watch for and control the turbo effects–and I’ve not had any warpage in over five years.
My last warped pan was on an old style electric range with a Revere wear pan–didn’t even notice it until I switched to induction–and watched it spin like a top on that ceramic surface!
Yup. If you cook on gas, you will not notice a warped pan unless it is crazy warped. On induction or ceramic you’ll notice the slightest warp.
When I moved from gas to ceramic, I had a number of pans (the worst being a favorite Calphalon aluminum wok) that I noticed were warped, all only previously used on gas. Heat and an empty pan is the issue, not the cooktop.
