The Shabbat Food Warmer Cooks!

This post may make absolutely no sense to someone who doesn't "keep Shabbat" in the Orthodox Jewish way. Sorry. But if you have one of these electric food warmers, then you still may find this post useful. 

A food warmer/platta is a low heat electric surface which is not usually meant for cooking. It comes in handy when you need to keep food nice and warm, but don't want a flame underneath. It's safe for ceramics and other materials which will explode on a cooking flame. A friend of mine, who's a potter, instructs people buying her clay dishes not to put them directly on a hot surface. They can take the heat if the heating or cooking surface starts off cold.

On Shabbat we're not supposed to cook, so if we heat up food to serve at a Shabbat meal we can't do it on a direct heat surface. I have a collection of metal objects like that round one in the picture which goes on the "platta," heater. The water stays all the time, since it already boiled up before Shabbat, before I put it on there.

There are many people who put the cold food directly on the platta on Shabbat insisting that the heater doesn't get hot enough to cook and/or that the metal surface is the "extra layer" between the heating elements and the pot.

On Simchat Torah, a holiday when it's permitted to cook, I put most of the pots and baking dishes directly on the platta. Today and last night when I took them off they were boiling/bubbling. That proves that the heating elements are hot/strong enough to cook, so I firmly believe that we must use something between the pot and the platta.