Talk to me like an idiot about Aga's!

[Cindy1802]

Just moved into a house which has an aga. We think it's very old, the kitchen was last remodelled in 1990. It's very well kept though.

I have NO idea what I'm doing. And based on that I don't know whether I want to keep it or not, but don't want to make a rash, ignorant decision.

I'm very much a foodie and cook all meals from scratch. I have 2 young boys and a husband to feed while working full time, and therefor batch cook large volumes so don't have to cook every night. Will I be able to do this in a 2 oven aga? I don't know what temperatures the ovens run at or how to find out. It's run on gas.

Can I use normal pots and pans on the hob? Normal oven trays in the oven? I don't even know where to start!

Tell me what I need to know!

An Aga is a bit like a heat pump, it needs to run constantly or else it becomes hopelessly inefficient.

Abd being from the 90s yours will have been made at a time when gas was cheap, so even when working properly it will still be "expensive."

Find the model and look it up online, from there you can get the best operating procedures based on your schedule.

We had a converted electric one so could be switched on and off at the touch of a button. However, it took a long time to heat up as they all do so there’s a benefit to keeping running all the time. They are very expensive. Could you google a local company to come out and check the seals on it and give you a run through?

Best thing ever, hopefully
you will learn to live it. It’s perfect for batch cooking lots of stews/ casserole/ bolognaise etc. less good for oven food like fish fingers, chips pizzas so you would need an air fryer for that sort of thing.

Yes, you have to learn to cook and bake differently when you can’t adjust the temperature. (We likewise bought a house with an old Aga in situ, though we turned it off in summer as it was unbearable, and had a hob in the utility room. If we’d stayed longer in that house we’d have put a gas cooker in the kitchen. )

They are expensive, and take ages to heat up. It was wonderful in the depths of an east Leicestershire winter, but I wouldn’t opt to have one.

Mary Berry loves her Aga, I'm pretty sure she has some books aimed at aga cooking.

Get Mary Berry’s Aga cookbook from the 80s. it covers everything, especially baking which can require some complicated moving between ovens/use of the cold shelf etc. seeing as it’s on all the home it’s worth tweaking your cooking to make use of this - lots of traybakes, stews done in the oven etc rather than hob the job which causes it to lose heat.

You can batch cook in it but be aware that the temperature will drop if the top oven is full and you’re using the hobs. Ditto for big roast dinners - you might need to allow more time than if you were just roasting a chicken with nothing else in the oven. Agas are great though!

I was brought up with Agas - they are great for toast, baked potatoes, overnight porridge and warming your long John’s (my dad ☺️). Actual cooking, not so much… personally, I am not a fan. They’re very difficult to bake in or do anything that might involve adjusting the temperature. I had to do Christmas dinner on one a couple of years ago and it was so stressful. I know people love them, but in my experience they tend to be people that don’t cook much… the Mary Berry Aga cookbook is helpful for you to understand it and get the most from it. You can get them converted to electric - my sister has one converted - but they still seem to take a while to warm up and cool down, which makes a lot of cooking really difficult. In theory, I love them - to me, they are very homely and great at giving you a toasty warm kitchen - in reality, having cooked with a gas oven and hob, I would never go back to an aga. (I am prepared for all the Aga lovers to say the fault lies with me, which likely it does, but having spent the first 18 years of my life with Agas (and a fair few family meals since) I feel I have given them a good go!)

Edited to say - given it’s there, it’s worth spending some time trying to learn to use it, but supplementing it with a hob of some kind and an air frier - the combination can make things much more manageable and in recent years all my family members with Agas have done this.

Agas are amazing but do take some getting used to. You find you move things around (from the hotplate to the bottom oven and back up).

Anything that simmers like pasta or veg you bring to boil on the hotplate and then stick in the bottom oven with a lid on.

The top oven is really hot and the top shelf is a bit like a grill but its so convenient getting home and having a hot oven ready to go any time!

Cheap cuts of meat with some liquid (stock / wine) in the bottom all day will be delicious by dinner.

Is it oil?
We have one which is probably 50 years old. It’s pretty thirsty but we love it. It is cold in our house right now except for in the kitchen.

Aga tips:

Do as much cooking as you can in the oven. When you have hobs open the aga loses heat really fast, so best to keep that to a minimum.

If you have two ovens they are roasting (top) and warming . The ovens are really capacious, and I can do a full christmas dinner in ours.

If you want to bake in a 2 oven Aga you can put a metal shelf in the top of the roasting oven to cool it down.

The hobs are boiling (right) and simmering (left). The floor of the roasting oven can also be used to simmer things.

Normal pots, pans and tins all work. You can buy tins that sit direct on the runners and so then you can “stack” the oven like jenga and fit more in.

Meat does very well in an Aga because it is a metal box and no steam is lost. Chips not so much (I do those in an air fryer).

Now our Aga is lit I will be using it for drying clothes (on racks), boiling water, making toast and cooking so it is multi purpose!

Oh - if you need to know what temperature the ovens are just buy an oven thermometer and measure it. But since you won’t be able to adjust the temp much you might as just accept one oven as hot and the other as warm and go from there! Since we had an Aga I find that with a proper oven I cook everything on 190, so…

Agree with every word of this. I grew up with Agas. Moved into a house that had one after years of cooking on a normal cooker. I tolerate the Aga because it is here, but if I could justify the expense of replacing/remodeling the kitchen, it would go.

We switched it off this summer, and used a portable induction hob along with a single combi oven. So much easier and saved £100/month in gas.

I love my Aga - I inherited it when we moved 10 years ago . We turn it off in the summer as it just makes the house too hot , though that’s a plus point in the winter . It works if you want to take advantage of it’s always on nature and cook whenever you want - if you wfh it’s ideal - I make a big soup most days in the winter in the bottom aga with minimal effort from me for lunch . It’s great for baking for the kids lunchboxes too .

Aga have their own cookbook which gives the basics of how to use it - but you’ve been given some good advice here too . We tend not to open the top plates that much to cook - most things go inside if you know how

Pyrex is good in it if you don’t want expensive kit .

Forgot to say there is aga YouTube too which would really help you get started !

You can dry all your washing above it (on a 'Sheila maid'/pulley drying rack) all year round.

Thanks all, some good advice.

Do I need to be turning it down overnight? My husband is fretting over the cost of running it permanently and saw something online last night about turning down the dial, out of the green zone, and then turned it up again this morning, in prep to make some porridge.

(Should I make porridge on the hot plate or bottom oven?!)

Well, that’s the snag — ours, which was old, took a long time to come back to full heat, so it was useless if you’d turned it down and got home or got up in the morning and needed to cook immediately. We made porridge in the microwave throughout our Aga-owning years!

You can go to visit the AGA shops for guidance and if you look at their website there is an AGA cookbook. We found not all our existing cookware worked on it and bought the AGA shop starter kit which worked really well.

The positives are food is wonderful and no waiting for an oven to come to temp.

BUT even at energy prices from ten years ago our bills were unbelievable. We had to turn it off late June to early Sept as it also made the house incredibly hot.

We got a quote for removing it but it was pricey in our case due to the way it was installed, so we stuck with it. I would investigate this removal option as well!

We also did this which was brilliant

You also need to get it serviced every year. I would definitely talk to a local servicing company now as a pp suggested to get it checked and to get advice

All I will say is, you will see lots of people with Agas also have another method of cooking especially in summer but no one with, say, an electric cooker thinks “oh, I’ll put in an Aga as a backup to keep my fuel bills down in summer 😂

I grew up with several Agas. Essentially:

Bottom of the bottom oven is cool - top of the top oven is like a grill. Mary Berry (and other) cook books will tell you where in the temp gradient to cook things, and you will soon get used to where in which oven equates to what temperature/Gas mark. It’s no great rocket science. You can also get cold sheets (like big baking trays) to cool down the oven temperature a bit as needed.

They are fine for fish fingers and oven chips.

The bottom oven us excellent for cooking porridge and bacon overnight, and jacket spuds through the day. Aga jackets are fantastic. I seem to remember DM cooking oranges for marmalade in the bottom oven too. The bottom of the top oven was good for roasts.

My grandparents was oil fired, and also did their hot water and radiators.
DM’s didn’t do that, but her downstairs was essentially one large room with the Aga at one end, and it heated the room fine on it’s own radiation.

The only thing that used to annoy me was that the hotter hot plate was not big enough to make toast and boil the kettle at the same time. Easily solved with an electric kettle or toaster!

We used to dry damp clothes on the hotplate lids. They came out so fresh crisp.

My grandparentsand DM only ever used to turn their Agas off in August. (GPs had an immersion heater for the hot water by then), and had a portable electric ring for that period. My aunt was a huge baker, and never turned her Aga off. Just opened the windows! She died last month at nearly 97. I still use her Aga scones recipe she taught me as a child, 50 years ago. I swear they don’t taste as good in an electric oven.

We inherited an Aga when we moved in. I adapted to cooking with it, that was fine (and I have to say, it made the best pancakes ever).

But. We may as well have been burning £20 notes every minute, it was so expensive. We didn’t have the space to have a separate cooker for summer (when we viewed the house in the summer, they basically had to have every door and window open as it was unbearably hot - on a fairly standard 20 degree day). The whole ‘you can dry clothes over it’ never made sense to me - I didn’t need clothes hanging over me while I was cooking, and then my clothes smelled of food. I also managed to burn some clothes. I think if you have someone in the house for much of the day to enjoy the warmth, dry your clothes when not cooking, great, but we were all out of the house for 12 hours a day.

I’m afraid we had ours removed after a few months of living with it, and I’ve not regretted it once.

OP- what fuel is your aga? Oil, electric or gas?

We bought a derelict property a few years ago which had a 1990's aga in it. Ours is gas. It is had been electric or oil, we wouldn't have kept it. I'm a competent cook and make nearly every meal from scratch. It did take me a while to get use to it but I love it now.

When we renovated, we added a 2nd oven which we use in the summer when we turn the aga off. The ovens are very deep, so there is more space than you might realise. Did the previous owner leave you any pots/pans for it? I initially used what I had, but the trays that fit the runner are very good. Aga pots (see pic) can be stacked which is great. I bought all of mine from ebay for a fraction of the cost of the new ones. I also bought a Mary Berry aga book for about £1. You tube also has lots of basic tutorials.

As someone else said, you need to get used to using the ovens more and the stove top less. Even for veg and steaming veg which took me a while to get used to. Heat comes from all sides in the aga, so it makes the most incredible yorkshires and pastries, pies etc.

I have a drying rack like the photo. It folds down when not in use. I don't use it when cooking though and have never had an issue with clothes smelling of food!

If you mix your porridge/water or milk at night, you sit the pot at the back of the aga on the left- on the top of it- not inside. By morning its perfectly done!

I have chef pads on top of each lid. I can then put a hot pan from the oven on top without scratching the steel. You can buy all manner of colours and patterns, but IMO, plain black on both sides is the best. Any other colour becomes filthy from the bottom of pans. I did have Christmas ones I bring out, but the rest of the time, they're just black.

Bake-o-glide make circles that fit the aga top. You can then make toast, cook eggs etc directly on it. Aga also make a round toasting rack, but I only used it once as found it just as easy to put the bread directly on the circle. Bake-o-glide also make lots of other shapes for pans. I did find a rectangular one at ASDA for a fraction of the cost which I use on trays. You can also buy circular things that attach to the open lid and protect the inside from cooking splashes.

I don't know about oil/electric ones, but ours is gas and gets serviced every 1-2 yrs depending if we turn it off or not. I rang 8 companies before finding one that covered our area AND could do gas. The aga website has a list of engineers on their site, but the vast majority no longer did aga, didn't do gas or didn't cover our area- despite the website saying otherwise.

These is an entire thread all about agas which I'll try to find.⭐️All Things Aga Related⭐️ | Mumsnet

Super helpful post, thank you!

Ours is gas.

Do you turn yours down overnight or if you are out all day?

Just back - when it’s on we don’t turn ours down - ours is about 50 years old though . We also run ours a little less hot than it should be which works for us . Also I have a Sheila’s maid pulley in the utility room just behind the wall the Aga is on which is great for drying clothes in the winter . I tend to not open the top much . I use a kettle to boil water and then cook things like pasta rice or potatoes in the bottom Aga . Even a stirfry gets done in a dish in the Aga .