Rather Leftfield Question Regarding Cooking/Boiling

[Dismas]

Hi ladies and gents,

 

So I have a bit of a conundrum. I'm a restaurateur, doing a series of pop-ups, and am about to do our first Crawfish Boil in a couple of days. But, there's a problem. My chef says the burners the premises we're taking up residence in for the night doesn't have a burner/stove with a high enough temperature output to keep the water at a constant rolling boil even when adding in room temperature ingredients rather than letting the temp of the liquid drop.We're not allowed to bring in any other equipment or use any other part of the building in order to cook, so using an external burner is not an option.

 

So, my question is, how can I counteract this? I had an idea but I also don't know how valid it is, so wanted to check with you lovely people if you had a better idea. If I put the pot into an even larger pot, creating a water bath/bain marie of sorts, would that help? I would imagine having an external pot of boiling hot water constantly surrounding and heating the smaller pot would help keep the temperature constant, or at least recover from a temperature drop much quicker. Am I wrong? Any better ideas?

 

Many thanks

[swansont]

The smaller pot will be held right at the boiling point, because that's the temperature of the water in the outer pot. But it will insulate it somewhat — the burners add a lot of energy because the coils/flame are at a much higher temperature. The point of the bain marie is to keep the inner container from being exposed to high temperatures. It's possible this system would take longer to recover from being cooled — it depends on the details.

 

You (and/or your chef) probably already know this if you run a restaurant, but since you can't get a bigger burner … one of the easiest ways to be more efficient is to just put a top on the pot. Insulation around the pot would help as well.

 

You could also heat the added ingredients in a separate pot, and add them closer to or at boiling, however that's a physics solution with no regard to the effect it will have on the food.

[PureGenius]

Maybe use some thinner pots as the heat transfer will then be a faster and less likely to lose heat when adding ingredients.This way the water should be easily kept at a higher temp. Anyways I'm not sure but good luck. Also I think swan is right the double pot is to insure you don't go over a certain temperature so I don't think it would help, but it's really an interesting problem.

Edited August 22, 2013 by PureGenius