As a student myself I’d appreciate all those recipe sites to have a filter by appliances. Seems half of recipes involving meat requires a stove I don’t have.
Perhaps a single burner induction cooktop is in your budget, which you can use to brown/fry meat.
Otherwise, if you already have a convection oven and don't mind waiting a bit longer, I don't see a good reason for purchasing an air fryer (other than the aforementioned advantage).
It really does work better than my conventional oven.
Edit: oh yeah, add an air fryer and bread machine. And kettle obvs. Preheats water for a pasta pot faster than the stove. Immersion >> conduction heating.
The amount spent on a range buys a lot of gadgets. Not even wiring one up saves a circuit and dedicated run.
I couldn’t live without a dishwasher though…
When I empty it, I’ll let anything that needs another run in for the next run.
Don’t need to run it every night.
So if you’re just starting out this is a great buy. A full size stove will have a larger element and better heat control but you won’t notice. And they are way better than a gas camp stove.
The Control Freak has:
Better heat control. (That’s the entire point. It smokes essentially everything else in the market.)
Painless preheating. Put on your pan, turn it on and set a temp, and go gather ingredients. Done. (Warning: it can substantially overshoot with cast iron, so be a bit careful.)
Element size: it seems to produce more even heat on a 12” or even 14” pan than most gas ranges, even fancy ones. And you can use it with cheaper pans that have thick bottoms and thin sides without burning everything on the side. Your gas burner won’t be able to do this.
Did I mention the heat control? You can cook pancakes without messing up the first batch (350F). You can do soft scrambled eggs pretty easily (240F or so and turn it off a bit before they look done). You can make chai easily (211F or so, then reduce to 185F before adding milk, then wait at least 20 min if not much longer). Perfect golden onions: 300F or so and stir occasionally — they won’t burn. Perfect chopped garlic: 230F or even cooler and be patient, although this is a matter of taste.
Caution: the numbers are a bit different with different pans.
It even doubles as a pretty good deep fryer if you’re careful.
It caused me to change my opinion of cast iron skillets a bit: the high thermal may actually mostly be a crutch that compensates a bit for the lack of closed loop control in most stoves. Once you have closed-loop control, I suspect what you actually want is just enough thermal mass to get good control performance combined with enough thermal conductivity to maintain a decent temperature under inhomogeneous loads (pancakes, onions, etc) while those loads are busily sinking heat from the parts of the pan they’re on. Cast iron has under half the thermal conductivity of aluminum.
I've had a thought in the back of my head to use a temperature probe like that in a temperature control loop on my induction cooktop, could probably do it with an arduino but I also don't want to make my kitchen an electronics project.
Is there nothing like this that is priced reasonably?
A startup called Njori is trying, and mostly failing, to compete.
OTOH an actual built in stove seems to run that much or more, and the ones with fancy names are about that price per element, so if it replaces a built in stove, it’s not so bad.
I had hopes for njori.com, but it’s not clear they know how to make a product. It seems like they overdesigned a product and then tried to get it made by ODMs without having their own in house engineering capabilities.
Toast bread in toaster first, well toasted. Put cheese slices on toast and nuke until it melts.
The result is not mushy, due to the bread already being warm, and the minimal time in the microwave.