1001 kitchen tips #8 - Grilling with your aga

Title deeds, keys, code for the security system.... there are many things you need when you are moving in to your house. An aga or rayburn is another. When most people navigate towards the kitchen, it makes sense for that to be the warmest room of the house. And there's the different temperature zones which make catering so easy. You can dry your clothes on it after walking all day in the Cotswolds, keep the croissants from breakfast warm in the warming oven for your mid-morning coffee, and you can even make toast with the special toast maker.

But what about grilling? There is a new grill adaptation for electric agas, but for the old traditonal types without one I take along a blow torch. The trick about grilling is that it takes along time for the food you are grilling to get up to the correct teperature. When it is up to that temperaure it will brown/ gratinate almost instantly. So let the aga do the heating, and your blow torch the browning/ gratinating.

For example the cod topped with welsh rarebit dish I did really needed to be grilled to brown the rarebit. So I put it in the roasting oven which gives you the extreme heat you get with a grill. Then when hot and almost melted, I finished the top with the blow torch. Also for grilled asparagus gratinated with parmesan - the parmesan can be melted in the roasting oven of the aga, then gratinated with the blow torch. Of course, you can use this method with your conventional oven too - it saves heating up the grill just for a few seconds use.