I’m here in Europe where I’ve never ever seen anyone using a gas stove, ever. Not even the old timey stove in my grandparents’ tiny summer home. I’m almost 40 years old. Seriously, gas stoves are ancient and not efficient.
Europe, I’ve seen induction only in airbnbs, everyone has gas at home
Northern Europe here, everyone has either induction or electric glass/ceramic.
I have induction, live in an apartment, not an Airbnb. You live in eastern Europe by any chance? Maybe less far along technology wise?
I do, yes. But people are renovating and modernizing their homes and I don’t know anyone who chose induction - they are available here, and so is electricity.
Habit maybe? Just like Americans seem to be stuck in the past because of fear of progress.
I’m in Europe too, and I’ve seen a lot of them, and I think they are still standard in restaurants. I’ve owned gas stoves in 2 of my apartments.
In restaurants seems like it’s like some sort of tradition, even though it’s much less efficient than induction.
Gas is much faster to heat and cool. Also it’s harder to flambe with electricity.
I don’t think gas is faster to heat and cool than induction…
Flambeing should be possible with just using something else to ignite, right? Shouldn’t be that hard.
Going from a 1 to a 7 back to a 1 takes about 20 minutes on an induction.
Takes 30s with gas.
Yeah, you can ignite with other sources, but it’s not as available or as cool looking.
Going from a 1 to a 7 back to a 1 takes about 20 minutes on an induction.
Bullshit, it takes seconds. On my consumer grade home hob even. Not even sure what a “7” means, but from highest heat (14, or even the P(ower) mode) to lowest heat (1) takes probably 30 seconds or less on my hob as well.
Induction is very responsive both up and down. Not sure what kind of garbage/faulty equipment you’ve tried that takes twenty minutes, but that is not representative in any way whatsoever.
Hmm. Maybe I’m confusing electric convection hobs with induction.
Gas is often greatly cheaper than electricity (4x cheaper in Britain for instance) so that really adds up in commercial usage.
I guess gas would have to be a quarter as efficient as induction for it to be worth it. I don’t know of exact numbers regarding that. Interesting point.
deleted by creator
Yes, but ovens are expensive.
A quality electric makes a big difference fwiw. I’ve gone through several types depending on where I lived. I gotta admit that gas is my favorite to cook on. Just so many ways to control heat, where the heat is, and how quickly the heat can be changed. Most electric cooktops and ovens are shit unless you buy an upper tier brand, and even then heating a big coil under a glass top is inefficient AF.
Just switched to induction. While not the same as gas, and it does have a few peculiarities, it is by far better than standard electric cooktops. Way fast, more efficient, easy. These need to come down in price to help win over people used to gas.
I have found gas consistently shit for cooking at low temperatures because you can’t turn it down low enough. Minimum power on the lowest ring, nope, still far too hot right in the middle of the pan.
So put the pan on the edge of the burner…
Now the edge burns instead, while the other side remains cold. How is this helping?
Seems like a pretty shitty gas stove, to be honest.
Sounds to me like you need better pans that don’t have paper thin ass bottoms
Guess I was lucky? Our burner had a very low setting, perfect for low heat and reducing things like jams or whatever.
Electric is horrible. It’s either full on or off. No moderation other than time.
Huh, never seen an electric cooker that is full on/off. That sounds terrible.
Yeah, a good number of electrics do that. 100% or 0%, and they pulse between the two.
I think the core thing I have learned is getting a decent gas stove is easy. But it’s real easy to get a shit electric.
If you have a gas stove and can’t afford, or don’t want to switch to electric, keep a window open in the kitchen while you cook. This is especially important if your over-the-range hood does not vent to the outside (yes, that’s a thing.) If your hood does vent to the outside, turn it on every time you cook and you’re golden.
Yeah, I’m going to open a window every time I want to fry a couple of eggs or bake a loaf of bread at -25F/-32C.
Just how many hours a day do you think any stove is continuously on? That 3D printer you might own runs far, far longer.
If you don’t want to poison yourself with fumes, then yes.
Then you must only breathe the finest purified filtered canned air. And not the dirty polluted air in whatever big city you live in.
I actually have more air quality measures in my home than most and I have multiple sensors measuring the quality of the air. I be been measuring it long enough to know exactly what causes my air quality to decrease.
I also do not live in or near a big city.
Your ignorance is not equal to my knowledge situation. I wouldn’t expect a willfully ignorant person to believe this.
Indeed, we’re going with an induction stove top and a speed oven. Adios gas!
I’m suprised there are developed countries were gas stoves still are used, unless power is non-existant or in low quantity due to poor grid or fully off-grid.
What’s even more sad is that in the USA it’s seen as woke to give up your gas stove.
Hahahaha, well, its a spectacle to observe.
Well because it is woke. And that’s a good thing. Acknowledging that gas stoves cause indoor pollution is woke as fuck.
So sick and tired of “woke” being used as a negative term, because the republicans labeled it as such. They hate it so much because they hate change, even if it’s positive change for the betterment of society.
Stay safe. Stay woke.
it’s like they consider asthma a badge of pride.
these fucks are making their kids suffer, again, for their silly stupid ideas
It also seems safer to only attach each house to one sort of potentially deadly infrastructure.
Can we choose because I vote geothermal
Sign me up for the fusion reactor
I was thinking of the electrical grid :-) And then heating with heat exchange either to air or to ground, which of course also requires electrical power.
Edit: Unless you want to go autonomous with regards to electrical power. Then the energy storage would become the potentially deadly local infrastructure, I suppose.
plus electricity is crazy flexible. you can easily transform electric power into other types of power, such as mechanical power (rotary movement), lighting, heat, computation.
with gas, you can only really turn it into heat. for all other uses, you’d first have to translate it into electric power or use a very bulky combustion engine.
Growing up we usedgas. Mother’s home (not our childhood home) also has gas. I’m in a home that is wired for either but had electric when I moved in. We had to replace the stove and I choose to keep it electric which surprised my mom. “But gas baking is so much nicer!” And no it’s not. Electric interior was much easier and nicer to use. But she didn’t bake much so lol.
gas baking is so much nicer!
This is odd to me, as someone who has owned both gas and electric. Baking is pretty comparable between the two. Preheat oven, put in item for amount of time. Though, our gas oven’s exhaust would really heat up the kitchen, which was not so great in the summer.
Usually when people praise gas it’s about stovetop performance. As gas instantly changes temperature and lets you use things like woks. I have also heard people praise them for working in power outages just fine.
The glass top electrics are so damn easy to clean though. That alone has made them the winner for me. On the other side, every exposed coil electric I have used sucked ass and I would pick a gas well before I pick one of those.
I’d rather have health than maybe marginally better cooking experiences
It’s not marginally. It’s a superior all issues aside.
Gas? What are you talking about?
Yeah gas is amazing.
Gas is dogshit. You’ve never used induction.
I have. You haven’t used a proper gas stove.
LOL if you have to get a “proper” stove to beat a 49$ IKEA portable induction cooktop, you’ve already lost.
GTFOH with your bullshit. Gas. FFS.
I had gas stoves my whole life until about 5 years ago I when I moved into this home I live in now that doesn’t have gas lines in the neighborhood. I have a glass top electric stove, not induction and after about a week of adjustment it suits my purposes just fine and I got used to it and it wasn’t a big deal at all. I cook pretty much every meal my family and I eat at home too with 0 issues.
Electrics are all I’ve used for the last 30 years
I feel like the health benefits I get being able to cook proper, healthy Asian style food with my wok outweigh the health risks of a gas stove.
You can use wok with electric stove
“No, you don’t understand. It’s a different kind of heat.” - them, probably.
Yes, it is. Cooking on fire isn’t the same as cooking on an electric stove.
Its more like you can’t use a wok on a cheap electric stove, but you can use it on a cheap gas stove. That’s it. You get what you pay for and landlords are parasites, so if you rent gas is what you prefer.
With wok specifically, you either have the specific Chinese high burner that you absolutely can not and should not have in your house, or you can’t do fancy tossing. I am unsure fancy tossing actually achieves anything, but even if it is, you can’t do proper technique at your home kitchen anyway, even with the highest quality flame burner.
Shouldn’t you be using your outdoor kitchen to do that properly.
hmm, which kitchen shall i use for this meal?
mfr most of us are grateful to be able to access a kitchen at all, American Suburbia-ass take
No experience with Asian culture, I see.
For what it’s worth I have an induction stove and if I put my steel wok on it empty I can made the bottom third of it glow red hot within about 10 seconds of powering it on.
Gas is absolutely not necessary for this, but there is a grain of truth to the fact that outside of induction stovetops, practically all radiant electric stoves do indeed suck ass.
Well fuck me. According to the downvotes I should really switch to an electric stove (which I can’t because my kitchen doesn’t have the proper outlet for it, so I need to convince the landlord to install it) and then I can cook food with electricity generated by burning coal or uranium.
Thanks for making me a better human being, I guess.
Every elective stove I’ve used has sucked for controlling the temperature. I’ll deal with a little air pollution to have my food actually come out how I want it. Maybe induction ones are better but those are expensive.
That’s a skill issue.
Honesty it is, I feel bad for anyone struggling with poor tools but once you really learn to cook, you can turn any source of heat into good cooking.
I lived for nearly a decade with a rusty old piece of shit from the 80’s, loose coils that only worked when you pressed down on one side, weird temperature controls that I eventually had to override, lots of problems to overcome. Did some of the best cooking of my life on that thing.
Congratulations, I’ve cooked on all sorts of things too. Doesn’t mean some weren’t objectively better than others. I personally don’t want to deal with a shitty heat source that I have to fight with to get it to work properly and is slow as shit to actually heat up.
I think it might simply be a matter of getting used to it. For example, i can cook well enough with an electric (induction) furnace but it’s difficult for me to use a gas stove without burning my food.
I lived for nearly a decade with an old stove with loose coils, did some of my best cooking in my life on that piece of rusted shit.
Seriously, give me a goddamn heat source and I will turn it into the finest shit you ever ate.
Yes, induction stoves are the solution. The way I went about it is I bought a secondhand hob for just $110. Works brilliantly, controls just as well as gas. As a bonus, pumping all the energy straight into the cookware makes it heat things up REAL fast.
Regular electric stove is very inert, making it straight up impossible to do a lot of stuff.
Never heard of these limitations. All I know is you can’t prep a tortilla the right way on gas stoves.
I know little of cooking tortillas, but to me the main limiter with gas cooking is that it cuts off at certain gas pressure, not allowing you to use it at very low heating.
Also, it mainly heats in a certain ring and not equally through the whole surface, which might probably be critical for tortillas unless you have a big cast iron pan.
As a foil: I grew up with an electric oven. Used an electric ofen through the 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s, and finally got a gas oven in 2017.
Because I was concerned about gas in the home, methane, CO, etc. I invested in a bunch of sensors so I’d know the moment any of it became an issue.
It’s been almost 9 years now, and I’ve yet to experience an issue.
However, that whole “you can use it when the power’s out” thing: can’t use the oven; the valve is electric. On my first gas range, the range wouldn’t even come on without electricity.
The pots and pans I use now are designed for gas and heat up fast, maintain an even heat, and cool down fast.
Essentially, I think not all devices are created equal.
I like not depending on a single utility for my energy needs, but at the same time wouldn’t shed a tear if methane production vanished tomorrow (I’d probably convert to propane short term and electric long-term).
I like not depending on a single utility for my energy needs
We had an extended outage in our neighborhood. Just over a week. I let the neighbors know I had enough wood and charcoal to keep the smoker at 275 all week and we could pop on the propane grills if we needed something hotter (I have been blessed with an abundance of backyard cookery). Fed half the neighborhood at some point that week, everyone at least got some ribs.
Last thing I want the folk on my street to do is go hungry, especially if all what’s wrong is the electricity.
Did any of those sensors measure nitrogen dioxide?
Yes, actually. I can see the level go up slightly when the burners go on, but when the ventilation fan kicks in, the levels go back down almost immediately.
Yeah that’s why. Most people don’t have a real vent in their homes. It’s the recirculating one or nothing.
That’s what should actually be illegal. I see those everywhere now, and I can’t believe they were ever allowed. Mine is bad enough as a ceiling vent without hood but at least it does vent outside
What metrics did you monitor? With my air quality monitor I’d see CO2, particulate, nox skyrocket in rooms even far away from the gas stove. If you got a carbon monoxide detector + explosive gas detector then yeah you wouldn’t get any alarms with normal use, but those aren’t the only pollutants to monitor.
Co2, CO, particulates, NO2 and volatile organics.
I guess it’s down to venting?
One unexpected change with induction is the handles of my cast iron skillets take much longer to get hot. If I cook something relatively fast, like an egg, I can now pick up the cast iron bare handed!
But if I wanted to cook during a power outage, I have a propane grill.
Actually, it’s kind of amusing that my main grill is a pellet grill with powered auger to feed the pellets, so I can’t use that in a power outage
Gas stoves have a place, and I’m not about to take away anyone’s choice on the matter. With all that being said, to the title of this article, I say “duh”… Honestly, who thought that cooking using an open flame inside your home was somehow safer than the alternative?
I use electric, I’ve pretty much always used electric. I will continue to use some form of electric stove. I want to have complete control over the heat going into my cookware, and while it may not be as flashy or as quick to use electric, I can’t see any situation where electric would not be safer.
