opaone-"Does the burner produce fairly even heat across the bottom of the pan?
Generally a star or multi-ring open burner like Bluestar is much better than a sealed burner like Wolf or others"
The goal in many cases is to provide even heat to the food you are cooking. You have three ways to do that.
The burner is one. The BS and AP burners have greater dispersal of heat, and the way the burner is designed with the ports on the sides of the rays, it keeps the flame in a specific area as the heat is turned up. The burner also does not have a cap so this allows the heat to go straight up. If you are interested in high heat cooking with a wok, an uncapped burner is probably one of the most important considerations. This is the BS burner as you turn the heat up.
https://youtu.be/MZdZxyOUX58
Thermador also has a star burner but is capped so as you turn the heat up, you get more flare.
This is Thermador
Ring burners sold today are mostly capped as well so have more flare as you turn them up. This can work well if you typically use high heat wider pans but depends on how they are engineered.
The second chance you have to provide even heat to your food is the interface with the heat source, the cookware. even BS/AP burners while they are pretty good at providing even heat have limitations. In order to take advantage of the burner configuration, you must match the pan size to the burner. If you put a big skillet on the burner, you can have all the heat in the middle. Most people that are concerned about even heat look at the pan because it covers a multitude of shortcomings in the burner. You are stuck with your choice of burners but you can change pans easily. This often gets overlooked in an appliance forum, but there are many websites dedicated to this, and this is one of the most thorough and best, IMO.
https://www.centurylife.org/how-to-choose-cookware/
The third chance to even the heat is cook whatever you are cooking in a liquid.
A comment on cleaning and the term "open" burner. All burners used to be open. The capped burner and sealed burner tray were developed in the '80s to keep food out of the burner ports and inner workings of the range. Viking was the first "prostyle" range in the '90s to be sold and it touted an "open" burner which referred to the burner tray only.
BS came out with an open burner tray. They added a star shaped, uncapped, higher BTU burner which are aspects that truly changed performance. Wolf had what they called a semi open burner. It was still capped so it did not move in the same direction as BS in the way of performance but did break down for cleaning.
opaone griddles-"Among consumer ranges Wolf is the best I'm aware of. Bluestar is less even across its surface, has wider temp swings over time and looses a lot more heat when food is added. "
As you mentioned above there are two aspects of eveness of heat that you might look at in a griddle.
The first is the eveness in temperature across the cooking surface. It doesn't get quite as much discussion as Wolf and BS do but Thermador uses aluminum as the metal for the griddle which has much faster heat transfer and the heating element is electric and zig zagged across the griddle. It might beat the Wolf. It would be interesting to see temperature mapping on all three to make a comparison or at least cook pancakes on all three.
The second aspect of eveness is the ability of the surface to maintain temperature. Wolf takes the approach of using 1/2" steel to provide a reservoir of heat. Thermador takes the approach of using aluminum so that if you place something cold on the griddle, the faster heat transfer allows the heat to rewarm the cold spot and the griddle cools slightly to trigger the heating element to come on. a side note isvtgst tge Wolf will take much longer to preheat or turn the temperature up or down. To determine temperature swing, it would be helpful to know what the parameters are for the thermostats you are comparing, but you would also need temperature mapping to see what happens with the surface. You mentioned Wolf is better than BS on temp swings. Do you have the parameters for the temp swings on BS and Wolf?
In in any discussion of griddles, you need to talk about add on or even separate plug in griddles. While a built in thermostatically controlled griddle gives you the convenience of being able to easily dial in a reproducible setting, many people with a 30" or 36" range are not going to dedicate 2 burners to a built in griddle. If they want a thermostatically controlled griddle you can buy a separate plug in and some do pretty well. You can also buy add on griddles which have their own set of advantages.
-you have the flexibility of burners or griddle, whatever you need
-You can have aluminum, steel, cast iron or multiply cooking surfaces, whatever is best for the type of cooking you are doing.
-bare surface or nonstick and they are easily replaced if need be.
-they can provide almost 50% more cooking area on 2 burners if you get someting like Royal Industries aluminum griddle
-Most built in griddles are limited to 15K BTUs over 2 burners. Some people complain about that. An add on can have whatever is underneath them, potentially 3 times as much heat
-Because you have two burners, you can have two different zones of heat.
So many choices.
Q
