ShareThisBy EDIE LAU
Tuesday, November 21, 2006
Thanksgiving is a time of excess, but gorging on food need not require gorging on energy.
Little things you do in the kitchen, from keeping lids on cooking pots to resisting the urge to peek in the oven over and over, can help keep electricity and gas use from spiking higher than necessary over the holiday, experts in household energy consumption say.
While no one keeps statistics on energy use on Thanksgiving Day specifically, it's common sense that the flurry of activity in the kitchen puts a higher-than-usual household demand on energy, and for that reason, the California Energy Commission recently prepared a tip sheet for an "energy-wise" Thanksgiving. The Sacramento Bee asked other energy-use specialists to chime in as well. Here are the highlights:
Oven:
_ When preparing to roast the turkey, skip preheating. "The only time you need to preheat is when you're doing a delicate cake or cookies or biscuits _ something that's leavened," said Fern Hunt, a food scientist retired from Ohio State University.
_ Don't let heat escape the oven by opening the oven door to peek at the food. Use the oven window if you have one. For basting, bring out the turkey and close the oven. Otherwise, "you're just heating kitchen air," Hunt said.
_ Cook several items at once. Just be sure there's room enough around each dish for heat to circulate.
_ Using glass or ceramic pans, you can turn down the temperature 25 degrees. This little-known fact, repeated in many cookbooks, was checked out in class experiments at Ohio State in years past, Hunt said.
It works because heat transfers differently through glass and ceramic compared with metal. "Glass lets radiant heat pass right through it to the food," Hunt said. "Metal reflects some as well as absorbs some."
_ With electric ovens, turn off the heat several minutes before food is fully cooked. If the oven door remains closed, the stored heat is sufficient to finish the job.
Stovetop
_ Cover pots. Without a lid, "the steam evaporating from pots carries away a lot of heat and the food will take longer to cook," said Rich Brown, a scientist in the Energy Analysis Department of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.
_ Match the size of the pan to the heating element. You want to direct heat to the food rather than the surrounding air.
_ Use clean burners and reflectors. Clean reflectors direct heat back to the pan rather than absorb it.
Refrigerator
_ Help the refrigerator and freezer operate at top efficiency by keeping the doors closed as much as possible. Think ahead about what you need to take out or put away to minimize the number of times you open the door.
_ A full refrigerator is a more efficient refrigerator. That's because there is less cold air to spill out when the door is opened, Brown said. Do, however, leave enough space around items to allow cold air to circulate.
_ If you keep a second refrigerator in the garage to store food for occasions such as Thanksgiving and Christmas, consider unplugging it after the holidays. A 20-year-old refrigerator can cost $100 or more a year to operate, Brown said.
Dishwasher
_ Good news for tired cooks: If your dishwasher is new, running it almost certainly requires less water and energy than washing dishes by hand, especially if you're the kind of washer who lets a steady stream of hot water flow.
_ No need to rinse dishes headed for the dishwasher. Just scrape off food scraps with a spoon or fork.
_ For those without a dishwasher or who prefer to wash by hand, use two sinks if available _ one with hot water and detergent, the other with cold water for a quick rinse.
