Cooking on a Plancha

Why buy a plancha instead of a barbecue?

We have gone out for tapas to bars and restaurants and we have eaten wonderful grilled dishes in the best restaurants for years, perhaps decades. The plancha is a very Spanish way of cooking that however we have relegated in our homes to diet foods with very little culinary value, when plancha cooking is completely the opposite, it is health, and above all enjoying food.

The problem lies in that we do not have a good plancha at home like in tapas bars and restaurants. Our home appliances scarcely reach 200ºC and end up cooking the food instead of grilling them, and therefore they lose all their juices and end up dry, insipid and boring.

This problem is about to end for you, because you have discovered the definitive roasting plancha. The cooking plancha allows you to get a real professional electric plancha for your daily cooking, while the gas roasting planchas for the garden allow you to cook large food amounts for those celebrations with your relatives and friends.

You cook straight away, you turn the plancha on and in 5 minutes you are cooking like a real chef, you cook without suffering the infernal heat of embers, having a drink while you chat to your guests, and when you finish cooking you take everything to the table at the same time. Afterwards, the plancha is cleaned in 5 minutes and you do not have to worry about the embers, costly cleaning, etc. It is a cooking method designed for you to have a good time, not to take hours lighting the fire, making embers, cleaning ash, etc.

Our society has got used to loving barbecue cooking and looking down on plancha-grilled food, but a change in mentality has arrived. Plancha-cooking, as long as we cook with a professional plancha, gives us the real food taste, conserving their own internal juices and insulating the food from the fuel. A T-bone steak should taste like a T-bone steak, not like a oak wood. Chops should taste like chops, not like  vine shoots. Fish should taste like fish, not like coal.

In short, the main advantages of plancha cooking are:

1) A plancha is ready to cook in 5 or 10 minutes, depending on the model.

2) A real plancha reaches a temperature of 270º-300ºC, which allows roasting food quickly. This temperature allows sealing food as fast as possible to maintain its internal juices and be able to enjoy tasty food that melt in your mouth. With lower temperatures with other kitchen appliances, food cooks and does not stop expelling its inner water, and therefore at the end goes hard and not at all appetising.

3) With a plancha we can cook all types of small or chopped food that on a barbecue would end up falling into the embers. Everything can be grilled: meat, fish, sea food, wild mushrooms, vegetables, omelettes...

4) The plancha allows easily and efficiently managing the temperature, just by turning the gas knob. There are not too few embers, too many embers, the food does not get charred.

5) It is friendly. Thanks to its trolley, you can take it wherever you want and you can cook next to the table, next to your guests. As it does not give of the unbearable heat of barbecues, you can stand near to it and cook with everybody with you.

6) It doesn't produce the sweltering heat of barbecues, allowing you to be surrounded by your friends while you cook.

7) Plancha cooking is healthy. Well, we knew that already, no? There is no contact with the flame, something that ought to be banned as unhealthy and the food does not get burned. Furthermore, only a little oil is necessary, and we therefore cook with less fat.

8) As well as healthy, plancha cooking is above all tasty! Of course it is healthy, very healthy! But it is above all tasty and imaginative. When food seal quickly, they maintain their own and natural juices inside them, this concentrates their tastes and allows reencountering the real food taste.

9) It is quick and easy to prepare. Are you in charge of lighting the fire? Then this message is for you. You arrive, you turn it on, you wait for 5 minutes and cook. You do not have to look for wood, you do not light the fire, you do not wait for a long time, you do not get the embers ready, you do not get hot, you do not get burned... If you are the person who gets the fire ready, you know what I am referring to.

10) It is quick and easy to clean. As well as lighting the fire do you clean the embers? Then I am not going to explain what you do to you, but rather what you are missing out on... You finish cooking, throw ice cubes on the surface of the still hot plancha plate and like magic the remains of food come off. Use a spatula to scrape the surface and help the ice to reach all the corners descaling the whole plate. Then clean the almost already clean plate with soapy water, rinse it, dry it well and cover it with a thin layer of oil to protect it until you use it again. You cover it well with its stainless steel cover for the plancha and the PVC cover, and have a rest!

The plancha, the new cooker that will replace our old barbecue. Quick, healthy, tasty and clean, the outdoor cooker of the future.