The eco-kitchen

How to green your cooking space

By Nancy Schatz Alton

December 29, 2008

My friends think of me as a green gal, especially when we’re talking about the heart of the home. My refrigerator is stocked with vegetables from “my” farm, a local CSA that happens to be one of country’s oldest. I usually buy organic food, and I seldom buy paper towels. Even the kitchen floor — a wonderful swirly red Marmoleum — is eco-friendly.

But sometimes my kitchen is surely less green than brown. I occasionally cave to my husband’s love of paper towels, buying a roll now and then. And I’ve been known to preheat the oven — an old electric beast — a full 30 minutes before the chicken is ready for roasting.

Once in a while — say, around New Year’s, when everybody’s trying to clean up, clean out, and generally spiff up their lives — I dream of a brand-new kitchen that’s as green as you can get. Until then, however, here’s a primer on making your current kitchen as ecologically sound as possible, from using your appliances more efficiently to cleaning with earth-friendly products.

How green is your kitchen?

Energy drains

The refrigerator

A home’s heating and cooling devices are its biggest energy drains, and kitchen appliances suck up roughly 30 percent of household energy usage. The number-one culprit is the refrigerator.

“If you bought your refrigerator before 2001, it’s really inefficient,” says Solvie Karlstrom, the assistant editor of National Geographic’s green consumer publication the Green Guide.

If you can afford to replace one kitchen appliance, the refrigerator is your best bet, says LEED-accredited architect Kathleen Smith, who co-wrote The Northwest Green Home Primer. “It can improve your quality of life. You can hear [old refrigerators] all day. With a new one, a sense of peace sets in.”

To keep your current cold-storage unit running at its optimum energy level, Karlstrom recommends that you:

• Keep the refrigerator between 37 and 40 degrees and the freezer at 5 degrees. Check the fridge temperature by putting a glass of water with a thermometer on the middle shelf and leaving it there for 24 hours.
• Crowd your freezer with food, then raise the temperature a degree or two. The frozen foods will cool each other.
• Don’t use the fridge top for storage. This blocks air circulation, forcing the compressor to work harder.
• Cover your food. Liquids evaporate, which causes the compressor to do more work. And let foods cool down before you refrigerate them.
• Check the door seal. Place a dollar bill near the seal and shut the door. If it doesn’t stay in place, call a refrigerator repair service to replace your seals.
• Pull your refrigerator out from the wall once a year and vacuum the coils.

The oven/stove

Once I haul food out of the fridge, it usually heads for the stovetop or oven. But Karlstrom says I should retain my summer cooking mindset — that is, cooking as little as possible — all year long.

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“If you skip using your oven two times every week, you’ll save 230 pounds of CO2 a year,” she says.

Tips to keep in mind when cooking on the stovetop or in the oven:

• Keep the oven door closed. Energy escapes each time you open it, increasing cooking time.
• Use the correct size burner for the pot.
• Defrost food before cooking it.
• Put lids on pots.
• Turn off the burner or the oven before you finish cooking. Residual heat — even on a gas burner — will finish the cooking process.

Despite what most recipes tell you, says food writer Jess Thomson, preheating the oven isn’t always necessary. Thomson doesn’t preheat her oven when something needs to bake for a long time and has a “done” point that’s relatively flexible — for example, bacon, roasted garlic, beets, or baked potatoes.

“But it’s definitely not OK to skip preheating when baking [cakes or breads], because the rate at which different ingredients melt/interact is crucial,” Thomson adds. “Also, anything that cooks quickly requires a preheated oven. If you want to finish a steak at 400 degrees for five minutes, you’re depending on the oven be a certain temperature to cook it correctly.”

Figure out how long your oven takes to preheat, so you don’t waste energy keeping it hot. Thomson’s oven, for example, only takes 10 minutes to preheat, so she avoids turning it on until the last possible moment.

Natural gas versus electric power

Because my electric oven seems to be almost as old as I am, I sometimes debate replacing it, wondering if gas would be a greener option. Gas versus electric, of course, is a hotly debated topic.

“On a basic level, gas does the job with less energy. It can provide instant heat and greater control over the level of heat, especially if you are using a newer gas stove with an electronic ignition which uses about 40 percent less gas than stoves with a pilot light,” says architect Smith. “But a key question is where you are actually getting your energy from.”

Natural gas is a non-renewable fossil fuel. Much of the electricity in the U.S. comes from coal-powered plants, but this depends on the region where you live; the East Coast and the Midwest are more likely to have coal-plant power.

“The positive side of having an electric stove is that you might have the option of getting your energy from a renewable source,” says Smith. Check with your local power company for green power buying options.

Small appliances

Frankly, I’ll probably stick with my old electric range until it dies. Besides, smaller appliances — such as microwaves and toaster ovens — are the best way to avoid using my energy-sucking stove.

Heating food in the microwave uses two-thirds less energy than using an oven, says editor Karlstrom. Still, I often reheat leftovers on the stovetop just because they taste better than food warmed in my microwave. Timing is usually what pushes me to open the microwave door: it’s the quickest way of heating food and therefore stopping the screaming of my hungry youngsters.

If I had more counter space, I’d cram a toaster oven alongside the microwave. Karlstrom says that using one is twice as efficient as turning on my stove.

Cooking with a pressure cooker can lessen cooking time and energy by up to 70 percent, according to Fagor Pressure Cookers. “I know some people are afraid of them, but I recommend reading the best book ever [for this]: Cooking Under Pressure, by Lorna Sass,” says Goldie Caughlan, the nutrition educator for Seattle-based PCC Natural Markets. “When my kids were little, I kept two pressure cookers, which are so useful for grains and beans and chicken and pot roast.”

Caughlan also uses bamboo stacking steamers to cook on her stovetop. “You heat water in your wok, and place two or three stacked steamers, with beets on the bottom and greens on the top, for example,” she says.

Of course, there are countless products on the marketplace that supposedly will save you time and energy. “People should seriously ask, ‘What is an essential item versus what becomes a gadget?’” says Smith. “Ask, ‘What recipes am I going to make in [the new item] and how often am I going to make it?’ If you are going to use it only a couple of times a year or even once a month, it’s not worth it. It’s taking up space, and there is a body of energy used in having it manufactured.”