With the increasing interest in gourmet cookery, fuelled by the proliferation of television cookery shows imploring people to spend more and more on expensive ingredients and fancy kitchens, gas cookers have rocketed in popularity. As a result, the cooker manufacturers have responded with an increasing range of ever more exotic gas cookers aimed at satisfying the culinary desires of this growing market. A cooker could well turn out to be one of the most important purchases you ever make.

Most people who are serious about cookery tend to opt for gas cookers over their electrical equivalents. Gas cookers can heat food more quickly, and offer more precise control of the heat throughout the cooking process. Electric cookers tend to be preferred by those who are more concerned with saving money than the quality of their cooked food.

When you begin to look for a gas cooker, the first thing you should consider is the way that you tend to cook, and perhaps the way that you would like to cook in future. Check out the features that are available on various models, and decide which ones you couldn't live without, and which ones you'd be unlikely to use. A good basic gas cooker can be bought new for around ?300.

Unless you are planning to do some fairly elaborate, large scale cookery, you might not need anything more than a basic model. As you begin to start looking at the more expensive cookers, you will notice that they usually have a lot more in the way of features, which may or may not be useful to you depending on your circumstances and cooking habits.The more expensive cookers tend to fall into the ?professional? category, and feature a less homely, more industrial-looking sturdy stainless steel aesthetic. Although the more expensive cookers certainly look the business, you may well ask yourself whether you are really going to need all that cooking power, or whether it will just end up being a bigger cleaning chore than it needs to be.

It will certainly help you to feel more like one of the professional chefs that you see on television, and if this is what you are after, then a professional cooker may be just the ticket. If you are just looking to cook one or two meals a day however, a professional gas cooker, costing upwards of three thousand pounds, could well be seen as a needless extravagance. If the aesthetics of your kitchen are important to you, but you don't feel you can justify the expense or hassle of a professional cooker, then there are many semi-professional cookers which share the architectural looks of a professional cooker but have a slimmed down feature set.