Popeil Appeal

I guess I have a lot of nerve, because I have decided to second-guess the great Ron Popeil.

As some readers know, I recently picked up a Ronco Showtime rotisserie oven, unused, on Ebay. I felt I needed it. My dad had one, and it was great. My friend Mike has two of them. You would think nothing with the Popeil name on it could possibly be worth buying, what with all the attention his spray-on hair got, but it isn’t true. The original Showtime was a reasonably well-built product made in South Korea, and it did what he said it would do. It made great food.

It’s very weird that the Showtime has no present-day competitors. George Foreman sold rotisseries, but they vanished from the market. You can get vertical rotisseries, but they’re stupid. The fat runs off the food. No self-basting.

I’m going to guess the food Nazis are behind the vertical rotisserie problem. Who else would drive a policy that dumb? Competent cooking is literally impossible without fat, and fat is good for you, but people are still convinced it’s evil. What kind of fool would spend hundreds of dollars on a machine designed to cleanse food of the very thing that makes it delicious and juicy?

So far, I have cooked four things in the oven: a chicken, a rib roast, and two pork roasts. I learned a couple of things.

1. You have to be careful about applying too much salt, because the rotation of the spits makes it hard for things to run off the food. More of the salt will stay where you put it.

2. Some dishes would probably be better if the oven had a lower heat setting.

The pork roasts I fixed were magnificent. The rib roast I made was fine, but it was too salty. The chicken was done, but not done enough to be tender, and the skin was getting dark when I took it out of the oven.

The Showtime has three settings, but none of them have anything to do with heat. You get one heat setting, and you’re expected to accept it. The spit assembly can be placed in two different positions, one of which is farther from the heat, but the difference in heat that reaches the food is small.

I looked into ways to vary the heat, and I found three solutions, only one of which have I seen applied.

1. Attach a simmerstat to the oven.

2. Buy an AC speed control for power tools and splice it into the heating element circuit.

3. Put a diode and a switch in the same circuit.

A simmerstat is a device found on stove burners. It turns a burner on and off repeatedly. The overall effect is to lower the heat output. Depending on the ratio of on time to off time, you can get plenty of control. Because the simmerstat shuts the juice off instead of shunting it through a resistor, it doesn’t give off a lot of heat. Resistors always use up energy and give off heat. A stove burner coil is a resistor.

I do not know how a speed control works, but since they don’t heat up and catch fire, I know they don’t use big resistors. Maybe they work like simmerstats.

A diode will only pass current in one direction. A heating element in a Showtime oven runs on AC, which means the current switches direction 60 times per second. If you stick a diode in the circuit, half of the time, the circuit will not pass current. That means you should get something like a quarter of the energy output. For DC, it would be a quarter for sure. Don’t ask me about AC, because AC is somewhat different, but half is in the ballpark.

A Youtube genius got himself a big diode and a switch, and he modified his oven. Now he can cook stuff slowly when he wants to.

I considered the alternatives, and I decided to get a diode. A simmerstat or speed control would involve a lot of work to make it part of the oven, and I don’t think I really need a wide range of heat settings. I think high, low, and off will get the job done. I ordered a diode, an SPDT switch, and some spade connectors, and when they get here, I plan to roast a chicken. When I’m done working on the oven, it will look no different than it does now, but for a toggle switch on the control box.

Once the heat issue is solved, my only complaint will be that the top of the little broiler-style drip pan that sits in the bottom of the oven is hard to keep clean.

The oven literature says the pan is nonstick, but to me, it looks like plated steel covered with some kind of ceramic. It sticks to everything. Whenever I use the oven, I cover the pan and grate with foil and poke holes in the top for the grease, but stuff still burns onto the top.

I don’t trust the pan to remain rust-free in the dishwasher, but maybe it will. The new ones do. I need to find out. The dishwasher should remove nearly all of the crud.

I made my second pork roast last night, and it was superb. I will post the recipe, which is extremely simple. Obviously, it will also work in a conventional oven.

INGREDIENTS

pork roast (shoulder)
12 oz. apricot or peach nectar
2 tsp. pressed garlic
1 tsp. sage
1/2 tsp. salt
1 tbsp. butter
1/2 cup sweet Marsala or Harvey’s Bristol Cream

Salt your pork roast and let it sit for a while to take the salt in. Boil the other ingredients together until you get a thick syrup that doesn’t run. Cover the roast with the syrup and roast it however you want. Make sure you burn the outside a little to make a nice crust. You’re looking for around 150° on the inside. I think low and slow is the way to go, followed by increased heat to brown the crust.

I gave a 4-pound roast something like 25 minutes per pound, and it was excellent. Very juicy.

It would probably be even better to double the sauce and reapply it halfway through. It’s easier to apply the sauce once the roast is attached to the spits.

I like to bone my roasts and tie them back up, tightly, with twine. You save maybe $1.50 per pound for 5 minutes’ work. To make tying easy, use a butcher’s knot. Look it up.

You can’t imagine how good this tastes.

Smell the pork package at the store to make sure there is no boar taint. If you get a smelly roast anyway, you can brine it with baking soda to kill the stink.

I look forward to my first low-temperature chicken. Should be wonderful.