Apartment quirk #4: Stove/Oven

We love the restaurant-quality gas stove/oven the owner bought for her kitchen here in the apartment. The flame underneath the burner roars to a superior scorching hot temperature, perfect for quickly searing meat and seafood in a cast-iron skillet or for sauteeing vegetables. We have a gas stove at home as well, but the flame doesn't get nearly as big or as hot.

The quirky part is the gas oven. For the first two weeks we were here, David and I were stumped as to how to light it. We sent an email to the owner, but didn't receive a reply. We experimented with trying to light it our own way, but stopped quickly fearing that we would cause an explosion of some sort. We tried searching for a downloadable instruction manual on the internet, to no avail. Finally, the owner replied to our query and here are her instructions:

"Here's how to light the oven. For that I use a match (as opposed to the "sparker"--I don't really know what to call it--which I use to light the burners). There is a hole at the bottom of the oven floor. Turn on the oven burner, remembering to hold it in as you do for the burners, and insert the match in the hole till it lights. Keep holding it in and on for up to 30 seconds, to be sure it stays lit. As with the burners, if it shuts off, start over. Look carefully at the setting for the oven when it's turned off. As I recall, that position is rather counter-intuitive. I can remember once or twice thinking I had turned the oven off, but I had really turned it to the highest position. The shelf has become warped, if the word is appropriate for metal, so usually when it begins heating, you hear a loud noise from the metal responding to the heat. The store that sells it is up near La Villette (because there was once a slaughterhouse there, and certain restaurant supply stores were located nearby, as with Les Halles). But I noticed that a Restoration-Hardware type store called Resonances, located near La Madeleine, sells that make of stove, so if you had other questions, you might have them answered there."

Lighting the oven is a two-handed job and still somewhat of a challenge, but we've finally gotten the hang of it. I can rarely light the oven on the first try -- it usually takes at least two to three attempts for me.

But here's the other funny thing: we still haven't figured out how to set the oven at an exact temperature because the oven knob has numbers in place of temperature settings. So when I roast vegetables, I've discovered it's best to set the oven to '6'; for reheating roast chicken or fruit tarts, I use 'somewhere between 2 and 3'. For roasting seafood, I use '4' or '5' depending on the thickness and type of fish. Because I haven't figured out the intricacies and nuances of this fancy oven yet, I've been a little hesitant to embark on any big baking adventures while here.