Professional quality! Blazing hot! Packed with BTUs!! These are some of the phrases that get tossed around when talking about dream kitchens and high-end cooktops. But what is a BTU, and how many should your stove have? Is bigger better, when it comes to BTUs?
What's a BTU?
British thermal units (BTU or Btu) are the units that measure the heat given off by your gas burner. One BTU will raise the heat of one pound of water by one degree Fahrenheit.
What about electric stoves? Do they have BTUs too?
The heating power of electric stoves tends to be measured in watts, instead of BTUs. You can directly convert a heat measurement in watts to BTUs (per hour).
More BTUs are automatically better than less, right?
Not necessarily! The macho stoves with enormous amounts of BTUs and crazy high flames are very fun to play with, and great for restaurants that are constantly putting out high-heat seared food. But in a home kitchen, the premium you will pay for a lot of extra BTUs is not necessarily better. Professional ranges can scorch your cookware and be hard to handle on a normal schedule of cooking.
How many BTUs should my stove have?
This is the key question, right? A home stove has, on average, about 7000 BTUs per burner. Some burners are lower, designed for simmering and low-heat cooking, and may put out 3000 to 5000 BTUs. And there may be one monster burner on a range that goes up to 12,000. (That's the one you always put your pasta pot on!)
Ultimately, you want to make sure your stove has enough BTUs to quickly boil a large pot of water, but that there is a large and effective dynamic range between all the burners. You need to be able to simmer on low, fry on medium, and sear on high. If your stove jumps quickly from low to high heat or doesn't ever do low heat at all, that's not very helpful. A responsive dynamic range and easy control is more important than sheer BTU numbers.
The one other place that BTU numbers come into play is choosing a range vent hood. Hoods are calibrated to handle certain amounts of BTUs, so when you are picking out a new hood, make sure you know how many BTUs your stove puts out.
Do you have a high BTU range?
Related: Survey: Is Your Oven Gas or Electric?
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i'm not sure what the btu's are on 2 of the burners on my stove, but one big one has 19,000 btu's and one teeny one only puts out about 1000.
i have old-school calphalon cookware, a couple le creuset dutch ovens, and some vintage cast-iron. i do most of my cooking on that one large burner and i haven't noticed it scorching any of my cookware.
Mine has a variety: 17k, 14k, two 9ks , and a 5k or 6k simmer burner.
I love the 17k for boiling water, searing, and stir-frying, but I have to be careful not to burn foods and let oils get beyond their smoke points.
I can't remember the CFMs of the range hood.
I've never heard of this, but it seems odd that a British Thermal Unit would be calculated using Fahrenheit, given that the US is the only major country that uses °F.
@rosiegreenie: we used to use farenheit too, we just converted a while back.
(although ironically in Britain I imagine we would use Joules these days)
Yes, BTU aren't the whole story. BTU ratings of burners are in fact - BTU's per hour. Using the approximate relationship 'a pint's a pound the world around,' 1050
BTU/lb heat of vaporization, and assuming the 19,000 rating in the first post. A gallon of water should go from 62F to 212F in about 3.8 minutes and boil away in 3.3 minutes. That does not happen - most of the heat is spilling around the pot and going into the kitchen or out the hood. As such, the characteristics of the pot and the fit of the bottom of the pot to the size of the burner are large factors in the capture efficiency of the BTU's that are coming out of the burner.
There is some insight here into the induction burner where the heat is generated in the pot and the losses are not as great, that is, the heat generated is more directly transfered into the contents of the pot and not as much energy is spilled into the surroundings.
Thanks for the math phoxx!
That's why I boil my pasta water in an electric kettle now. My electric kettle will go through two boils before my pasta pot simmers!
Piss off jiandan. Everybody else: please report spammers the second you see them.
Ur, the above post was in reference to a person spamming about hair straighteners who's now been deleted. I'm not just weird.