One of my biggest pleasure is shopping for unusual cooking related articles, from purpose-made equipment to plastic container costs less than a bus fare. However I now rarely shop at upscale cookware merchants like William Sonoma. Rather most of my finds are from my travels and grocery shopping.
I encountered this Japanese stove in an Asian supermarket. It is very unusual because at $230 USD it is relatively expensive compare to other much cheaper Asian stoves they normally carry. It is also unusual because it is jet(ted) for natural gas instead of propane which most people would buy for outdoors use.
If you lived in Japan you would immediately recognize this is one of the very common stoves made for the small kitchens in that country by Rinnai. Rinnai is one of the most recognize brands in Japan for kitchen equipment.
Why spend a princely sum on a sheet metal stove? Good burners. It does not have the "sealed burners" all too common with gas stoves in the West.
Sealed burners are burners that is a marketing ploy at the expense of performance. There are no gas orifices in the center of the burner assembly for spilled sauce to clog up. Also the orifice on the sides are covered by the overhand lip of the cap. While it sound good in reasoning that spillage would not clog up the orifice expose to the top and the side, it creates a cold spot in the center of the pan and the flames on the sides are not well distributed. If you pay close attention to cooking videos from Asia you will see that rarely they have sealed burners. Additionally the grates are much taller so the cookware expose to the hottest point of the flame (remember the Bunsen burner chapter of your high school chemistry textbook?). Enough of me putting down sealed burners.
note there are 9 gas orifices in the center of the burner
The burners on this stove just have a very simple and effective piezoelectric ignitor. There is also a very good thermistor to shut off the gas should the flame got blown out by a gust of wind.
I use this stove in my outdoors kitchen. It's two different size burner allow me to choose one best suits for the job. I have yet to use the very small infra gas broiler which Japanese use it most often for fish.
This stove has became my workhorse stove for outdoor cooking, including roasting coffee.
Where can I buy one I want it for the fish broiler. Roy West roywest1114@msn.com
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comment. When I bought mine about a year ago the store only have one for a rather expensive price. While I found a few online retailer selling for as little of 1/2 the price they were the propane version. I wanted a natural gas version and this was the only one. That was why I wrote this post due to the rarity.
ReplyDeleteYou can try searching for rinnai kg-77fa. I just tried but there is no hit except for some stale site. I infer all the supply in the US has dried up. You can try craigslist as I had seen them.