How to heat up bureakos and/or kugels on yom tov

bigmomma

Sat, Sep 18 2010, 6:47 pm

If you dont keep your oven on, (I don't) what is the best way to heat up bureakos and/or kugel on yom tov?

ra_mom

Sat, Sep 18 2010, 8:46 pm

For kugels that need to stay moist, place a disposable pan with some water on a blech, place a disposable pan with food that needs to be heated into the pan of water. Cover tightly. Allow sufficient time to heat.

For bourekas that need to stay crisp, place them in a disposable pan on the blech. Watch that they don't burn.

Shopmiami49

Sun, Sep 19 2010, 2:49 am

ra_mom wrote:

When heating up borekas and such, I usually leave a corner of the pan uncovered so that the condensation doesn't make the food soggy. It works like a charm every time!

bigmomma

Sun, Sep 19 2010, 5:46 am

OP here Thanks for your replies. I usually leave on one medium/high flame so that may be part of my problem. Another problem may be that my blech covers 2 burners only. For all you blech users 3 questions.

1. What size flame is best under the blech so food reheats throughly without burning?

2. How many burners on your stove do you leave on?

3. What size blech do you have, how many burners does it cover?

I always have the problem of having great kugels and other stuff but trouble reheating so all help is appreciated. TIA!

bigmomma

Sun, Sep 19 2010, 6:05 am

pardon my ignorance, heard of a plata, do not know exactly what this is. Is this what it's called when I go to buy it? I live in Brooklyn so probably can buy it anywhere.

chatouli

Sun, Sep 19 2010, 6:26 am

bigmomma wrote:

pardon my ignorance, heard of a plata, do not know exactly what this is. Is this what it's called when I go to buy it? I live in Brooklyn so probably can buy it anywhere.

I bought a new one recently at Happy Home on CIA. It's HUGE and covers all my burners. Just watch out where you put it if not on the stove - I used to have a wooden table where I left it and it burned the table really badly. I think the stove is a good place for it.

It has a lot of advantages over a blech. You can put it on a timer as Raisin said and so your house is not so hot. Also I personally hate leaving gas on for even a whole Shabbos, never mind a three day Yom Tov/Shabbos like we have coming up again twice chu"l.

Mrs Bissli

Sun, Sep 19 2010, 1:47 pm

Another vote for plata. You may have to try it before to see how quickly it heats up and how hot it gets. We got ours from Israel, no heat adjustments, but it gets quite hot so I need to put a metal sheet blech on top to modulate the heat.

For heating up bourekas, I usually line them up on top of waxed paper in a disposable foil pan. I put an inverted cookie sheet underneath the pan so the bourekas don't burn. Kugels/other side dish--I also put them either on blech on top of plata, set on a timer.

trampampam

Sun, Sep 19 2010, 3:46 pm

you can place say 6-8 tealights on a cookie sheet on the bottom shelf and place whatever needs heating on a shelf above.
The only trick is that you can't close the oven door all the way - that will blow the candles out, but placing a towel in the door will do the trick.
It takes about 1/2 h to heat things nicely depending on the number of candles you have there.

Laughing Bag!

Sun, Sep 19 2010, 4:41 pm

I do the double boiler idea too! we hav a hot plate/griddle and put up a big foil pan with water and the food to warm in their smaller foil pan in the water. Even if you have a blech you should be able to do it on YT though! shabbos I usually had only a blech as I just got my own hotplate as a gift (we used to have s/o elses for YT) and didnt put the kugel directly over the flame, I like to leave the flame on a 2.

ra_mom

Sun, Sep 19 2010, 7:13 pm

trampampam wrote:

There was more than one story of ovens blowing up with this method.
Binah retracted this piece of advice after they published it, because many people ended up with explosions r"ll.