Cooking for full time live aboard sailors is a big deal. JollyDogs is equipped with a SMEV 3 burner gas cooktop / oven combination that is big enough for a decent size chicken or rack of lamb – forget a turkey. The oven temperature regulation is lousy, so it’s either “hot as we can get it” or some other mysterious temperature. I’ve tried more than once to correlate the 1 – 6 temperature setting with center of the oven temperature using a precision thermocouple, and found it to be a waste of time. Repeatability is shite. Nevertheless we make cookies and bread and roast dinners and even cakes, and with enough attention things come out OK. We would love to have a larger oven with decent temperature regulation, but they might be hard to come by. The SMEV is a European unit commonly fitted to RV’s and smaller pleasure yachts. The 3-burner arrangement is a bit of a canard, as even with a decent selection of stovetop pans we can never fit more than 2 at a time on the 3 burners. It’s obvious that a better arrangement would be a 2-burner cooktop.
Cooking with liquid petroleum gas (LPG), whether butane or propane, really heats up the inside of the boat. The Seawind 1160 is built with a galley down design (our preference) but when there’s lots of cooking going on, the galley becomes a sweat box for the cook. The gas stove eyes are horribly inefficient and it seems that most of the heat generated simply escapes around the pots and pans and heats the galley up. Perhaps the best feature on the Seawind 1160 is the BBQ grill – ours is an amazing Australian flat griddle unit that we’ve learned to love. Americans generally BBQ in their backyard with a grate equipped grill, so that flames lick up on the food being cooked and bits of that food fall into the burner area. Gives steaks that “good look” but those flames will trash any meat dripping fat if the cook isn’t really on top of things. Australians are a bit more sensible, and use a flat plate griddle type grill, reminiscent of a short order kitchen griddle. I was suspicious at first, but once I got used to how it cooked I became a convert. It’s also a lot more energy efficient than an open grate grill. We use the grill to cook anything from steaks to veggies to searing tuna to cooking a pizza. After much hunting I found a pizza stone that fits perfectly in the grill with the lid closed, put it on the cookie cooling rack in there and voila! Pizza oven! We get great results, and one thing cruisers like is pizza! It’s also one of those meals that’s either unavailable in French Polynesia, or generally overpriced and lousy. We did discover an exception at Cook’s Bay in Mo’orea, Aloo pizza is exceptional and $18 will get you a great pie.
We recently purchased a single burner induction cooktop – reminiscent of a dormitory hot plate. We wanted to figure out if it made sense with the energy we have available on the boat, and whether it was a practical alternative to our LPG cooktop. We’ve been playing with it for a couple of months now, and Isabel is hugely impressed. Only the pan gets hot so the galley stays cool. Temperature regulation is excellent, it has a built in timer that’s very handy, and it will boil water much faster than our electric kettle. The jury is still out on whether we could get by without LPG burners as well, as we tend to eat our biggest and most complex meal at dinner time, and we’re loath to use up too much battery capacity when tomorrow might be gray and rainy. It’s prompted a big change in our thinking – now all we need is a way to keep the pots and pans from sliding around in heavier seas.
What we hope for on the Seawind 1370 is a larger, well-regulated oven, 2-burner inductive cooktop, and the same BBQ grill. Time will tell if we also need a couple of LPG burners. Cooktops eat up counter space and working space on the countertop is a big deal too.
Good cooks deserve well thought out, functional galleys with excellent cookware. That’s my Isabel.
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