There are quite a few games being played with simmer information from manufactures these days. All of the BTU numbers being thrown around can be very confusing. Here is some information for you that I hope will allow you to make a good decision. Remember that when making the ultimate choice in appliances, a compromise may need to be made with one feature or another, to get the piece that fits your average or most common daily use requirements.

First of all, please understand that simmering is a cooking process. It does not refer to warming or reheating at all. Water boils (at sea level) at 212 ° F; therefore simmer is a heat value just below a rolling boil at about 190 ° to 200 ° F. Simmering is used to draw full flavor out of foods and most importantly out of the herbs and spices you add to a dish. When you simmer, the food will take on a whole different complexity of flavor than if you had stopped cooking or started to boil rapidly. A long simmer will do wonders for a tomato sauce recipe or mom's stew.

Side note* Do you know why saucepots and stew pots are designed to be wider and shorter than stockpots? It is done purposely so that low simmering heat below can spread evenly across a larger surface area creating gentle heat currents inside the pot to maximize flavor release without scorching the ingredients. Stockpots are narrow and tall to create a rapid current of heat from bottom to top to pull the flavors out of the ingredients, throughout the pot, quickly into the liquid.

Too low of a heat can cause the cooking process to stop and your recipe turns flavorless and too high can, of course, burn the ingredients giving a less desirable flavor to the dish.

Now remember that BTU's are an input rating and not a true test of the heat output. Unfortunately, BTU's are sometimes all we have to compare.

Cast iron burners are very efficient once heated up giving high output flame, but because of their own mass, they are difficult to turn low for simmering because the burner itself absorbs and radiates heat in addition to the flames.

Steel burners absorb little and therefore add much less heat. These would be a good choice if the entire burner (inside ports and outside ports) lit and BTU input was rated between 600 and 900. Unfortunately, most companies now place a cast iron cap on the burner for aesthetic reasons eliminating the center ports and adding mass and heat to their so-called simmer.

One company has come out with a cycling burner, which in theory averages out the heat for a delicate simmer. Still others insert a small burner into the middle of their regular burner to be use only during simmer. This provides low BTU numbers but still has a problem.

"If you concentrate the heat into a small diameter area, even low BTU's like 300 or so, you create a hot spot on the cookware and risk burning the food in that spot and not fully integrating the flavors throughout the rest."

So what is the answer? In restaurants, simmering is done two ways primarily. The burners on a commercial stove can be ordered with what is called a hot top. This is a flat cast iron surface covering the burner below and looks like this:

Notice that the high flame open spider is in the front and the simmering hot top is in the back. The expression "put it on the back burner" comes from this. Your high flame work should always be done in front.

The second method is to use a griddle. Most restaurant chefs will put pots of sauces and the like on the griddle for daylong simmering.

The point is that even heat across the bottom of your cookware is much more important than BTU ratings. My advice is to either add a griddle to your range top and plan to simmer on it or buy what is know in gourmet cookware stores as a diffuser plate. This is typically an 8 to 10 inch round flat cast iron plate that you can simply lay on top of the burner grates to simulate a hot top. Also, look at the Dynasty stove line, which has a large diameter burner that turns down to a low setting of 500 BTU's and a high of 10,000 BTU's. This will insure an even and controlled simmer that will create small bubbles just below a rolling boil, if you use good quality cookware.