Why the Viking died: a fried preheat motherboard.
Note burn spots on right.
A little while ago, Susan decided to bake some bread. It was an experiment; she wanted to see exactly how much whole wheat flour she could work in to Jim Lahey’s now famous kneadless recipe before the result started to resemble granite.
Susan (who is a great baker) assembled the dough, and put it through its whole 18 hour rising ordeal. Then she cranked up the oven, heated up our ancient white Creuset, caressed and flopped the dough out of the bowl and into the now-hot pot, put it in to bake, set the timer, and walked away. The bell went off, she took the pot out of the oven, and we both stood there, staring. The result looked like a cross between an overweight, pallid foccacia and a single, naked layer of sponge that somehow managed to escape its fate in a Doboschtorte.
The oven was cold. So cold, in fact, that we could grab both the top and bottom elements without even warming our hands. We were mystified.
So we turned on the broiler. It didn’t work. We turned on the convection, but all it did was push around the cold oven air. We left it alone for a few hours and prayed. Then we turned it back on again. Nothing. The oven in our Viking Dual Fuel Six Burner was dead.
To back up: when we moved to our current residence five years ago, I was in the middle of testing recipes for a cookbook whose schedule had been unceremoniously moved up from 12 months to 9 months. The house dates from 1971 and so did the kitchen (see wallpaper, below). The stove, which was a Magic Chef electric range in Harvest Gold, appeared to never have been used.
Yellow, white, and silver foil kitchen wallpaper, circa 1971.
The original owners saved us a swatch, in case we wanted to match it.
Within 2 weeks, I had killed it. Apparently, all burners plus the oven were not meant to work simultaneously.
We considered our options and decided to install the Viking, which required the services of a propane company and two hapless contractors. Nevertheless, we loved it. Other commercial-style ranges had dashboards and digital readouts and looked like Lear Jet cockpits, but our Viking was about as elemental as it got without going the Garland route, which is really what we wanted. Still, I was delighted. Our first dinner was simple: seared King salmon, a tangle of spicy rabe, a bottle of Van Duzer Pinot Noir to celebrate.
So you can imagine my sadness, five years later, when the thing died. It got worse when the very nice repairman came and diagnosed the problem—and especially when he told us flat out that a certain part of the oven had been recalled a year before, but the only people actually informed of the recall were repairmen, not the consumer. Human nature being what it is, everyone out there who knew of this defect just let Viking ovens far and wide take a nosedive, and waited for that fateful $527 phonecall. This bit of information, mind you, came from the repairman.
I guess it’s like owning a Jaguar: really spectacular looking and it certainly does the job, but it also drops bits and pieces along the way when you least expect it.
Anyway, we coughed up the money–we had no choice but to fix it, of course–and now, we have our oven back again and are doing all sorts of things that normal cooks do, like searing on the stovetop and finishing in the oven; baking; roasting; even broiling. It’s a whole new world.
But is there a way around this? Is there a way to avoid the inevitably huge expense of putting in a commercial-style range for some utterly ridiculous figure that you have to incur on the front end, before it drops dead on you on the back end, a mere five years later? Yes. There is.
First: If you have to retrofit your kitchen space anyway, opt not for a commercial-style range (which is essentially just a Magic Chef with more powerful burners, cloaked in a gigantic stainless steel pantsuit), but for an actual commercial range. Not only are they a lot cheaper (I mean a lot, as in a Garland would have run us $2000 for a six burner instead of the $5000 we spent on the Viking), but they also tend to break down a lot less frequently. The only caveat (and it’s a big one) is that you have to fireproof the oven’s enclosure–walls, ceiling, and floor. If you don’t, your insurance company will laugh you out of house and home, and your mortgage bank will be very displeased.
Second: If you’re not going to retrofit your space, get a good-to-great quality home stove. I definitely prefer gas, personally, but it’s not totally necessary. And if you think for two seconds that really good cooks or professional food people would never, ever cook on white or harvest gold home stoves, guess again. Here is an Apartment Therapy blog about the home kitchen of Ignacio Mattos, executive chef at New York’s spectacular Il Buco. Check out Ignacio’s stove. Naomi Duguid and Jeffrey Alford, two of my favorite culinary anthropologists with a string of incredible books under their belts, cook (and recipe test) on a home stove. Why? Because, for one thing, they know their readers are most likely going to do the same thing. For another, a bad-ass commercial-style range with a digital dashboard just doesn’t seem up their alley. It’d be like finding out that they lived in a McMansion and drove a Hummer. Not that there’s inherently anything wrong with living in a McMansion and driving a Hummer. But it’s not for me, and definitely not them.
So maybe, like all things, this is a live-and-learn situation. Commercial-style stoves became all the rage in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when there was a lot of money kicking around and folks needed to out-big and out-glitz each other. I once worked as the editorial director for a Park Avenue-based business that operated from the playroom of a very rich lady’s triplex apartment. Although she was prenatally thin, her kitchen had two Viking six burners in it, but she never, ever (ever) cooked. If she did, and she actually needed twelve burners and two huge ovens, that would have been one thing. But she didn’t. They were there just for show, which I also guess means they never broke, and she didn’t have to spend $527 (times 2).
The flipside of this is necessity and practicality: if someone has a huge manse in the chilly and damp English countryside and kits it out with a 96″ hunter green cast iron AGA that stays on all the time and also keeps the house warm (like Tamasin Day Lewis’ setup in lovely Somerset), well, that’s another thing, too.
Rule Britannia: A small cast iron AGA “cooker.”
Gorgeous, isn’t it?
In truth, I’m not sure that I could ever return to four burners and an oven with that little wire that’s suspended over the food to control all the baking and broiling; that said, the 24″ Magic Chef that served me well for 9 years in my teeny Manhattan apartment was responsible for more than 200 sit-down dinners and countless successful recipe tests.
The moral of the story: it’s true what they say.
Sometimes, size doesn’t count.
Okay; I never comment on blogs….butttt, I was googling about Viking because we have had the ignitors replaced on our five year old range (six burner, plus griddle) three times, and today after a failed creme brulee (after having splurged on a 12 dollar vanilla bean) AND and second-choice eclair in which the Pate a Choux did not rise and looked liked little blonde bricks, we realized that the ignitor must have gone out AGAIN. I should have known something was up since the broiler would suddenly EXPLODE into action every time we used it. OH! What to do? You have to not only figure in the cost of the initial purchase (we won't even go into the story of how the first appliance store ran off with our down payment, never to be heard from again), but also all the food that has been ruined in a debauched oven.
Do you still get these old replies? If not, I feel better that at least my hubs and I are not the only ones with a big chunk of stainless wrapped around a Roper range…..
Wow Amy—so sorry for your travails, although I'm not surprised given what I've heard. Keep me posted!