Lowest Gas Flame Too Hot to Simmer? Here Is the Real Fix

Move the pan before you touch the knob. Put the pot on the smallest burner, slide it half off centre so only one edge of the base sits over the fire, and drop a thick diffuser plate underneath if that is still not enough. The lowest flame on a gas hob is too hot to simmer for a dull mechanical reason: LOW is a screw setting inside each burner valve, and the factory sets that screw high enough for the flame to survive being knocked about, not low enough to babysit a pot of rice.

Nothing in the Houseland cookware range turns a burner down for you, so I am not going to pretend a pan is the answer. What a pan changes is where the heat goes once it has arrived. Below is the order I work through, cheapest first, and the point where I stop improvising and make the manufacturer fix it.

Why is the lowest flame on my gas hob still too hot to simmer?

Because LOW is a screw, not a floor. GE's service sheet for its gas ranges states that the top burner valves carry low flame and simmer adjustment screws in the centre of the control valve shafts, reached with a thin flat blade about 3/32 in across once the knob is pulled off. Somebody set that screw at a bench, and they were not thinking about your rice.

They were thinking about two stability tests, both printed on that same sheet. Test one turns the knob from HI to LOW in one quick movement. Test two opens and shuts the oven door underneath a burner already on LOW. If the flame dies in either test, the instruction is to increase the flame size and test again. The factory LOW is the smallest flame that survives a slammed oven door, not the smallest flame that will hold a milk sauce at 190 °F.

Burner rating is the other half of it, and on that sheet the small right rear burner is rated 5,000 BTU/hr while the big front burner is rated 15,000, so the small one is already the gentlest thing on the hob at full tilt. Its LOW is a fraction of 5,000, and on a badly set valve that fraction is still more heat than a pot of rice can absorb without foaming over the rim.

What temperature are you actually aiming for?

A simmer is 180 to 205 °F. The Spruce Eats puts the culinary range at 180 F to 205 F and poaching lower again, 140 to 180 °F, which is why an egg falls apart in a pot that is only simmering. Collagen in a tough cut starts turning to gelatin from around 160 °F, so a stew never needs the last 30 °F you are wrestling with.

Clip a probe thermometer to the side of the pot for 20 minutes and the argument is over. A reading pinned at 212 °F means you are boiling, whatever the knob says. A pot holding 185 to 200 °F with one bubble breaking every second or two is simmering, and you can stop fiddling with it.

Altitude moves the ceiling down onto the target. Water boils lower as you climb, so the usable band shrinks:

Those boiling points come from the Engineering ToolBox altitude table. At 5,000 ft only about 7 °F separates a working simmer from a rolling boil, which is why a recipe that behaves at sea level climbs out of the pot in Denver.

How do I hold a simmer tonight without touching the stove?

Work down this list and stop when the bubbling calms down. Each of the 7 steps costs less than the one under it.

1. Smallest burner first. GE also warns that flames should never extend past the bottom of the pan, so a 6 in pot on a 15,000 BTU burner is heating the room, the handles and the sides of the pot rather than the food. Match the flame to the base.
2. Slide the pot off centre. Park half the base over the flame and half over bare grate. You lose even heating, which is fine for a stew and wrong for anything with milk in it.
3. Put a diffuser under it. A heat diffuser, flame tamer or simmering plate sits between burner and pan to make the heat gentler and more even. Buy a thick one, and buy one without a handle so it is not tied to a single pot size.
4. Use the heaviest pot you own. Mass does not reduce the heat arriving, it stops the ring of metal directly over the flame from running far hotter than the rest, which is what scorches the bottom and leaves you scraping burnt food off the pan afterwards. Bring it up slowly, the same way you would preheat a pan by the water test, rather than blasting it and pulling back.
5. Stop the lid trapping the foam. Rice and pasta climb out because starch traps steam as foam long before the water itself turns violent. Leave the lid ajar or lay a wooden spoon across the rim so the foam collapses.
6. Move the pot to the oven. A covered pot at the lowest oven setting holds a stew steadier for 3 hours than any burner will, and nobody has to stand there stirring it.
7. Buy a portable induction plate. Its bottom setting goes under anything a gas valve can do. The base has to be magnetic, so check the pan for induction before you spend anything.

A diffuser vs a heavier pan vs an induction plate: which one fixes it?

None of them lowers the flame; they change where its heat lands, and each one fails somewhere different. That distinction is worth paying attention to, because a cook on Ask MetaFilter bought a diffuser for this exact problem and reported back that beans still burned on the bottom of an enamelled cast iron pot and rice still boiled over, on the smallest burner, at the lowest possible setting.

I sell pans, so take this from me rather than from an advert: a Houseland pot is not the cure for a burner that will not turn down, and a diffuser is not a guaranteed cure either.

From the shop

Cookware

Our cookware collection is where the heavy based pots and lidded pans live. A thicker base will not lower your flame by a single degree, but it decides how evenly the heat that does arrive is spread across the food touching the metal.

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Is the hob faulty, or is that just how gas behaves?

A new range that cannot hold rice at a simmer on its smallest burner is a service call, not a personality. On the Discuss Cooking forum a cook with a new gas range described exactly this: 1 cup of rice and 2 cups of water on a 5,000 BTU burner, boiling over unless it was stirred every minute or so. The replies were unanimous that this is not normal gas behaviour and that the burners needed adjusting under warranty rather than papering over with an accessory.

GE says the same in milder language: service may be able to adjust the valves to give better control at the LO setting. Two other causes are worth ruling out before you spend a penny. A range converted between natural gas and propane without the matching orifices runs every burner far above its rating, LOW included. On one GE sheet the same 5,000 BTU burner takes a 0.042 in (1.07 mm) orifice on natural gas and a 0.025 in (0.63 mm) orifice on propane, and the supply pressure differs too, 4 in of water column against 10 in. Feed a propane range through natural gas jets and the flame has nowhere to be but enormous.

The free check is the burner cap. GE lists wrong or badly seated caps and blocked burner slots among the reasons a flame looks and behaves wrong. Lift the cap off a cold burner, confirm it belongs to that burner, sit it flat, and clear the slots with a pin.

How should I adjust the low flame screw myself?

Only once the warranty has run out, and only on gas that has not been converted; anything touching orifices or propane conversion belongs to a technician. What follows is the adjustment GE gives its own service people, in their order.

1. Light at least 2 other surface burners and leave them running.
2. Light the burner you want to change and turn its knob to LOW.
3. Pull the knob straight off the shaft.
4. Shine a torch down the valve shaft. The adjustment screw sits in the centre, and a thin flat blade about 3/32 in wide is what reaches it.
5. Turn it in small steps, watching the flame rather than the screw.
6. Test 1: spin the knob from HI to LOW in a single movement. If the flame dies, open the screw a little and test again.
7. Test 2: with the burner on LOW, open and shut the oven door quickly. If the draught blows the flame out, open the screw and test again.
8. Refit the knob, then repeat on every burner you cook on.

Expect the screwdriver to be the hard part. Cooks in that Ask MetaFilter thread went to three hardware shops before finding a blade long enough and thin enough to reach the socket.

What I'd do

Buy the thermometer before the diffuser. One cook with a probe in the pot tells you whether you have a hob problem or a habit problem, and it is the cheapest thing on this page.

If the range is under warranty and the small burner cannot hold rice at 195 °F, ring the manufacturer and make them adjust the valves. That is the fix, and it costs nothing. Out of warranty, set the screw yourself against the two stability tests, then keep a thick handleless diffuser in a drawer for the long milky jobs. If the pot scorches at every setting, the pot is the problem rather than the hob, and the Houseland cookware collection is where I would start looking for a heavier base.

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