KITCHEN EQUIPMENT - PROFESSIONAL RANGES - NYTimes.com

By PIERRE FRANEY

Published: September 16, 1981

When home cooks get serious they start to cast covetous eyes on their neighbors' professional ranges. The restaurant range they usually buy, when they do decide to splurge, is a Garland. When I set up my own kitchen several years ago, I chose a Wolf instead.

The decision was relatively easy. I'd worked with both stoves in restaurants over the years. I felt that if I were going to spend a lot of money on a range for my home I wanted it to be the sturdiest I could find; I wanted it to suffer abuse gladly.

In my experience and that of others I've talked to, both the Wolf and the Garland proved to be good pieces of equipment - but the Garland appears to be more balky and less heavy. The relative heaviness of the Wolf gives me the sense of sturdiness, and so far that sense has not been betrayed.

Brands aside, there is a real question as to whether even serious cooks actually need a professional range. A friend of mine who knows a lot about food feels she cooks too infrequently to justify buying one. The puny flame that comes from her range, she says, can be adequate as long as she puts her iron pan on it and lets it heat long enough to get truly hot .

I can do without that inconvenience, though. And I suspect many others, even those who cook infrequently but want to do it well, would agree. The B.T.U.'s delivered by the flame of my Wolf (17,500) are about three times greater than those of standard ranges. What that means is that for someone who cooks at high flame, as I do, the stove is not a source of frustration. It does what one wants it to do.

In buying any professional range, an important decision revolves around the number of burners: four, six, eight. I have six, and even with the enormous amount of cooking I do, I rarely have all of them going at once. Simply for cooking, four is plenty. But what you find is that the six burners actually provide you with a good deal more maneuv ering room.

With just four burners, if you put a casserole and a saute pan on the range, you find you're running out of work space. So I would recommend six burners for anyone who has a kitchen that can take a range that size. The difference in width is about 23 inches for four burners and 29 for six. The difference in price is not great. A basic four-burner Wolf is $1,016. The six-burner is $1,226.

Professional stoves are offered with many variations. I chose to have two ovens - I might be doing bread and pastry at the same time - rather than the storage area that the second oven might have been.

Instead of a salamander broiler over the range, I have a long shelf. For me, it is important to have warm places to move food as it is done and to keep utensils that I need quickly. It turns out that the griddle my stove came with, off to the left of the burners, is used very little for its original purpose. But I call it my landing space, the perfect area to drop a hot pot just as it is removed from the flame. Since it is always warm, I use it to proof my bread as well.

Wolf ranges, manufactured on the West Coast, are sold in this region through Goldberger Kaufmann in Baldwin, L.I.

Illustrations: Photo of Wolf range