In the month that I’ve owned my Frigidaire Gallery Freestanding Electric Range, the oven is the thing I used the least. We haven’t been entertaining much, and since it’s summer, we’ve been grilling a lot outdoors.
Ironically, the oven is the part of my new range that has the most features, such as:
- Fits-More™ Oven – The range comes with four racks, one of which I had to remove since I didn’t need it and probably won’t unless I conducting a cookie baking marathon. Still, having that option is very cool.
- Effortless™ Oven Rack – The bottom rack extends when you open the door for easy access. I’m still trying to remember to put dishes on that rack to take full advantage of this feature.
- SpaceWise™ Half Rack – I’ve actually shown this to friends who’ve come over. (Yes, I”ve conducted a few range and microwave tours.) You can remove the half rack, which gives you extra height for tall dishes like beer can chicken, while giving you a half rack to put other dishes on. Bet this will come in handy on Thanksgiving.
- Quick Preheat – You can pre-heat the over in less than six minutes. I used this and it works well. You can even watch the temperature zoom up on the oven dial. Neat.
- Keep Warm Setting – I use this a lot, even more than the Keep Warm Zone on the stove top.
- Keep Warm Drawer – You know the drawer you keep your muffin tins in? It’s a warming drawer with a rack. Again, perfect for Thanksgiving, pot lucks and parties. I’ve shown this to friends, and everyone thinks this is awesome.
- Cooking timers – There is a regular timer, of course. There’s also a way to set the baking time, so the oven shuts off and keeps the dish warm when cooking time is over. Setting this up is a bit challenging to figure out without having the manual near by. The only thing I didn’t like about it was that it doesn’t give you a count down to when your dish will be ready. So unless you set the timer on the microwave as a backup, you don’t know exactly when dinner’s ready unless you note the exact minute you put the dish in and wrote it down.
- Push buttons – It’s like the Starship Enterprise (Next Generation). However, I’m not used to setting something and then having to press start. I often set something and forget to press start and wonder why the oven isn’t getting warm. I’ll get used to it, I’m sure.
Here’s some features I haven’t had time to use yet but are intrigued by:
- Add-a-Minute – Easily add a minute to the oven timer in the middle of a cycle without resetting. This will come in handy when I’m baking and things aren’t quite ready yet.
- Auto Shut-Off – As an extra safety measure, the oven will automatically shut off after 6 hours. Don’t you just hate when you realize that you’ve left the oven on all night?
- Power Broil – Added power means you can broil food more evenly. I rarely broil anything except for the cheese on tuna melts. Still…
- Quick Clean – I think I should have run this when I got the appliance. It had an industrial chemical/electrical sort of smell, which did get into the first batch of brownies I made. It’s gone away, but it was odd.
- Delay Start – Set your oven to begin cooking on your schedule. It can be programmed from 1 to 24 hours. This is the “kosher” setting so you can cook on the Sabbath. Still, it freaks me out a bit since I don’t want to use the oven when I’m not home.
- Effortless™ Convection – Yes it’s a convection oven too, something I’ve never used before. Supposedly it takes the guesswork out of convection cooking since it does the converting for you. Frankly, I’m intimidated by it and will have to read up on it more before I experiment with a few fool proof dishes. Once I have it down, I’ll use it to cook more complicated things.
Then there are these features:
- True Convection – With True Convection, you can easily and evenly bake 200 chicken nuggets in 10 minutes.
- Chicken Nugget Button – Easily bake perfect chicken nuggets with the touch of a button.
- Pizza Button – Easily bake perfect pizza at the touch of a button.
Whoa, stop the presses. (Can you say that on a blog?) Chicken nugget and pizza buttons? When I told my sister who lives in Switzerland about this, she was shocked. Oh, you Americans and your fast food, she said. Frankly, I’m a bit disturbed by these buttons. (There’s a chicken nugget setting on my microwave, too.) My kids don’t eat chicken nuggets and have always hated them. My family makes pizza from scratch though we’ve warmed up a few Amy’s gluten free frozen pizzas for my mother-in-law.
Are we such lazy cooks that we need to feed our families such crap? (I’ll admit to making mac and cheese way too often. But I love M&C, too and try to make it from whole wheat noodles, use the organic versions, or use less milk and butter.) Those settings make me sad and a bit angry, too.
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