I watched quite a few youtube videos of the Omnia being tested yesterday, and came to the conclusion that most people start off burning everything.
I thought that the gas burners they use look pretty fierce to me, and don't seem to come with a little simmering ring, which are pretty standard in Portugal. Looking at the pattern of the way things got burned, it seemed to me that there was far too much heat on the bottom and not enough at the top so stuff was burning at the bottom but not cooking through properly. Some were also burning on the outside, but I think only when the size of the gas ring was rather excessive in my opinion.
I also thought that these stove-top ovens were designed for fuel economy and were likely used over a physically much smaller flame.
Some of the testers discovered that if you used a 'flame tamer' over the flame, stuff wouldn't burn but, as they also stop the heat rising freely up the central vent, the food takes even longer than normal to cook.
Commenters on the videos seemed split between
'stuff always burns in them' and
'you need a smaller flame!'
The conclusion I came to was that I needed to do my first experiment over a low flame, and the simmering ring on my gas stove would be about right.
Cute rosy mug for scale because I didn't want to burn my bananas...
The ring will turn down more than that, and also the main rings will burn with just the middle bit lit, which I think is even smaller. This seemed a good place to start though.
After a lot of thought, I decided that the first test would involve chouriço. That stuff is already cooked during processing, and is fine if eaten a bit burned or a bit 'raw' so it should be a fairly safe test that yields edible results even if we mess the cooking up first time.
Here's what it looks like cooked on a traditional chouriço cooker.
Austin started setting the oven up. He put the funnel thing in place, that sends the heat up the centre of the oven. Then stuck his hand over to see how effective it was at sending the heat straight up.
It's VERY effective! In fact, it works very much like the heat riser of a rocket mass heater.
And now his hand is all hurty. Or at least
'a little bit ouchy' in his own words.
Sigh...
Anyway, he prepped the chouriço and popped one in each side of the cooker. No grease, just as it was, to see what happened. Then put it over the heat riser and put the lid on, with vents open.
Within a couple of minutes, steam was coming out of the vents and sizzly noises were happening. When he opened it to have a look, it was starting to stick and overcook at the bottom, even on the simmering ring, so he flipped the chouriço over and turned the ring down.
At which point they looked like this...
Cooking time in all was about the same as for any other way of cooking, just using a lot less fuel.
And this is how the meal looked. Not the healthiest in the world, but a classic mix of Portuguese and Brit, with a tin of baked beans and corn bread to go with the chouriço.
I think a future experiment will involve attempting to cook over a tea-light, if I can figure out how to set it up so the candle gets proper air-flow else the heat-riser funnel thing will block the air supply and put it out. I have no idea if it would work, but it would be fun to find out! Sort of a
'how low can you go' test. I'm also quite keen to test it on the rocket mass heater cook-top, but that's not likely to be lit for months now.
Now, what to attempt to cook in it next...
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