ceramic oven dish on gas ring???

lg123

hi all, i have another quickone here. making jamies hunter chicken stew this evening. (http://www.jamieoliver.com/recipes/meat-recipes/hunter-s-chicken-stew-pollo-alla-cacciat)

i am about to brown the chicken, the thing is i have a ceramic dish i was going to cook this in, would it be safe to put this on the gas ring? apologies if this is a stupid question.

Eviledna

No, AFAIK it's only cast iron you can use with a direct flame. Better safe than sorry!

taztastic

Accidentally put a ceramic dish on a still hot electric ring. It exploded everywhere with horrendiously hot, sharp ceramic bits and flying carrot.

Half terrifying, half hilarious... all messy.

lg123

i done it in the pan and transferred to oven dish after. must get a nice steel dish i can put on the hob. thanks

The Sweeper

Some ceramics are usable over an open gas flame, but the trick is usually to steep the ceramic in water first and start the flame low. Examples would be teracotta cookware and tierra negra colombian black pottery for instance, as well as some oriental clay pots for cooking.

Your standard oven ceramic dish would most probably not respond well to direct flame.

Mr. Presentable

It's a heat distribution thing. Ceramics are just not that good at it and will shatter, whereas metals distribute well and won't.

Honey-ec

LG123, if it's any good to you, Aldi had enamelled cast-iron casserole dishes (in the style of Le Creuset) just before Christmas. My local store still had a few last week, might be worth checking out if there are any near you. They were about €35. I bought one when they first came in during the summer and I use it all the time.

shrapnel222

Minesajackdaniels wrote: »

Some ceramics are usable over an open gas flame, but the trick is usually to steep the ceramic in water first and start the flame low. Examples would be teracotta cookware and tierra negra colombian black pottery for instance, as well as some oriental clay pots for cooking.

Your standard oven ceramic dish would most probably not respond well to direct flame.

i have a couple of those and they are just brilliant. they stay piping hot for so long it's ridiculous. you almost still need gloves to take them off the table when clearing up after a meal.

The Sweeper

They are seriously attractive pots, but they're wickedly expensive. I've seen one or two cracked ones as well, through just not enough seasoning and overzealous application of heat to a pot that hadn't been steeped.

It has to be said, poster Minder, me, and our other brother are a bit gadget mad between the three of us. You're pretty much guaranteed that if it's reasonably well known, one of us will own one or more of it. (We like to cook). The non-boardsie brother has a few colombian black pottery items. Some of them perform better than others, as though the quality control on the product isn't brilliant (but hey, they're hand made clay bowls so that could well happen).

We're all cooking on gas/electric combo range cookers. Non-posting bro has noticed with the colombian pottery that first, it's very porous and he believes it's great for things like serving at the table - soak and heat the dish in the oven, then tip a cooked stew into it for instance, and then bring it to the table and it'll stay hot for hours with the lid on. He does say, however, that the pot being porous will seep liquid, so he puts it on a folded tea towel on a cork mat on the tablecloth - because if you're too drunk to clean up after dinner (us? never! ) and you come down the next morning, there'll be a lovely white ring on your table top where the bowl has been seeping away happily all night.

He also had one saute pan in black pottery, used it on the hob and it just cracked in two on the heat. At the time, those pots were anything up to £120 STG apiece, and he was NOT happy. I don't believe there was a returns policy in place at the time either - or at least if there was, he never availed of it.

Other clay cookware - I had some cheap terracotta cooking dishes a while back. One split in two on me, and I made the filling for a steak and kidney pie in an oven dish a few years ago and the bloody thing STILL smells of steak and kidney filling TO THIS DAY. Given that, I'd say if you have a personal signature dish that you love cooking, it may benefit from the use of a porous clay pot to cook it in, because the essence of the dish will permeate the pot utterly!

I have some wire-bound vietnamese clay pots that I have come to love. I'm sure Minder has some other asiatic clay pots kicking around in his cavernous kitchen. My vietnamese clay pots are glazed inside, but unglazed everywhere else. You do need to steep them before use, but the wire mesh helps distribute heat around the pot while cooking. They do quite a nice job - I got them from the Wok Shop online in San Francisco (and had them shipped to Australia along with a bunch of carbon steel woks because I was having no joy shopping for such things in the Australian bush.)