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Many years ago I had a buddy that liked to argue how his gas stove was faster than my electric resistance model. Granted this was decades ago before they started up-rating the burner output of the premium gas models today. Back then the comparison was a 10,000BTU gas burner against a 2,600 watt (8,870 BTU) Whirlpool element.

We agreed on a test using the same stockpot with an identical weight of water. The test started with the water at 70 deg F and concluding when the temp rose to 210 deg F according to a digital thermocouple meter that was fixed in a central point is the water. We chose not to judge when it was boiling as that is somewhat ambiguous.

We ran the test at his house and the following weekend we duplicated the test at my house. The gas stove took ~23 minutes, my electric stove was 14 minutes... Due to the superior thermal coupling I think that electric range would beat a modern 18,000BTU burner too.

Induction should certainly perform every bit as well, if not better as it's coupling is better still. It is all about the energy into the pan, something where gas performs poorly.

Gas cooking makes sense in a commercial kitchen where the burners are huge and seldom throttled. They are also under a proper hood and fire suppression system. But at home things are vastly different. I frequently get the comment "I cook on gas because it is what the professionals use", I always ask why they don't have slick tires on their cars too as the professional drivers drive on those. The roles are quite different. It is just a shame that induction hasn't been marketed better.
 
Oh, I dunno. I haven't used an induction cooktop yet. I gather that aluminum cookware wouldn't fare too well on an induction burner. The cookware must have some iron in it to work with induction.

 

Gas may be slower to heat, but ... there are many types of cooking that depend more on mild heat than on intense heat. Unless one likes burnt food, that is.

 

Heat control thus is a very important part of fine cooking.

 

IMHO, heat control is a weak part of traditional electric coil cooktops. With gas you can more quickly moderate the heat. With electric coil burners, the moderation takes longer, and may require removing the pan from the burner so the food doesn't burn to a crisp.

 

I've always preferred cooking with gas over coil electric. The results are what really matter, not the speed of the boil.

 

 

 

 

https://cookeryspace.com/aluminum-pans-induction-cooktops/
 
Conventional electric coil top cooking

Has a far greater range of heats from high to low that a gas burner gas is always burning at the same temperature.

Any chef knows if you’re cooking something very delicate you don’t let the pan sit on a hot burner including a gas burner you move the pan when you’re done. If you’ve ever watched chefs cook on gas they don’t bend over and turn the heat up and down they move the pan around.

I grew up watching Julia Child who always cooked on electric on television turn out things perfectly over and over again on a regular all electric cooktop .

It really does make a difference if you don’t have high heat it’s almost impossible to cook pasta on a gas burner because you can’t get it to boil fast enough and consistently enough pasta ends up just soaking it it doesn’t cook properly.

Induction certainly is nice because of the quick adjustment however that’s far from its biggest advantage the efficiency but not having to stand over gas fumes and the easy cleanup and the complete safety it’s impossible to start a fire on an induction cooktop you can put a pan full of cooking oil on induction set it on high and go to work your house will still be there when you get back.

Jon
 
I grew up with a gas range

And I still have a gas range in my outdoor kitchen that does get used mostly the oven though the burners are so miserable.

They are good for certain cooking operations and when you don’t care about Speed.

Except for some really sophisticated newer gas range designs you just can’t turn the heat down low enough, and then usually it’s only on one or two burners at best.

The best cooktop design I’ve seen in the last 40 years or the Thermidor‘s were they actually cycled the flame off completely when you get it down into the low simmer areas.

Over the years I have done a lot of cooking, and I’m going to be hosting Thanksgiving again this year

Hi Suds how many people are you cooking for this year?

John
 
There is a reason that double boilers exist, and that is due to having to cook over a flame.

A gas burner can never have it's temperature reduced, they always remain at about 2100F, but yes the heat output can be reduced.

Resistance electric can be throttled for both element temp and and thermal output. Induction of course is even more controllable.

Yes one can possibly melt a chocolate bar over a gas burner if the pan bottom is thick enough (to spread the high heat) and the chocolate is stirred. But on an electric burner on low neither of those need be a concern.

Electric (and induction) is faster and more controllable. The only valid argument against an electric resistance heat source is that it has far more thermal inertia so it won't react instantly if the user doesn't anticipate needed changes. The other issue is that people that cook on gas have trouble with a heat source with that much power so they tend to burn things. The highest setting on an electric range should only ever be used if the cookware is full of water.

It really comes down to learning how to use a given tool. You can't drive a manual transmission vehicle as if it were an automatic, the operator needs to learn the differences to reap the benefits. Of course users will have preferences and there is no problem with that, use what you wish. But empirical performance is a different thing then personal opinion.
 
Professional chefs prefer gas cooktops?

I don’t think they really have a choice.

They’re mostly forced to cook on gas because that’s what the restaurants have and an awful lot of restaurants are starting to use induction.

And when you watch professional chefs cook on gas, stoves and restaurants, they don’t turn the heat up and down generally they just move the pans around so the quick adjustment is not really a feature.

Have a grown-up watching chef’s like Julia child cook on electric you can see how simple and easy it is with superior results because you can actually smell what you’re cooking not smelling the gas.

John
 
"I can count the number of significant electric outages I've encountered in my 50+ years in the single digits."

Depends on where you live. When I lived in the Bay Area, it rarely went out. All of the lines in my region were underground, which probably kept the power more stable. Now that I live in the country, it's always going out. The neighbor behind me has a high position in electric company that supply's the town so he's very on top of issues that affects our area. Neighbors in front of me had a tree fall on the power lines last week during the night. White noise machine stopped, which woke me up, and the whole house generator kicked in 8 seconds later. Just went back to sleep. There's enough power outages that I eliminated the weekly exercising mode on the generator.
 
A good, experienced chef or cook can cook on anything. They just adapt to the equipment thats available. I agree with John that the reason most professional chefs cook on gas is just because thats what happens to be available in almost every restaurant kitchen.

I too learned to cook many things by watching Julia Child juggle the pans on her electric burners on TV. And electric is what I first learned to cook on. Having used both gas and electric stoves over the last 60 years I’ll take the low heat control of electric over gas if given the choice.

Also, the high heat of electric is focused directly on the cooking surface of the pan instead of the flames of a gas burner on high flame licking up the sides of the pan and burning my hands rather than actually boiling the contents of the pan. Its wasted energy.

And gas is dirty too.

But I respect those that chose gas over electric. Its a personal choice. But neither makes you a better cook. Only skill and experience can do that.

Eddie
 
Reply #51

Last year there were high winds in my area around 9pm on the day before thanksgiving, the power company cut the power off to reduce risk of wildfire if there happened to be a electrical equipment failure. Thought it would have been on by morning but nope, it didn’t come on until Friday at 9am. Instead of having turkey for dinner on thanksgiving, I ended up having McDonald’s instead since there was no power.

Basically the power company (SoCal Edison) had to do updates to all the equipment and has been at least 12+ planned power outages for maintenance and such. Those planned power outages did help to update most of the equipment but didn’t get a chance to update everything and one day on September 5th, I saw the sky beginning to darken and it wasn’t a cloud and noticed the sky was a golden brown color and knew that was NOT a good sign, stepped outside to see smoke billowing from up the hill from me and thought it was a house fire that got out of control and caused a fire from up the hill from me, ended up having to move most of my stuff (yes, even moved all my machines) to another location incase if the fire spread to my house down the hill. Pretty much the whole neighborhood had to evacuate because of the Fairview fire that happened (yep, that was up the hill from me) but decided to stay (all necessary items and belongings were moved to another location) just incase if someone decided to loot and rob houses around the neighborhood. That entire week was hell, barely got any sleep and had to get up several times in the middle of the night since I could still see a faint glow up in the hills at night. Thankfully it rained later that week and didn’t have anything to worry about after that.

A few weeks ago I was talking to a neighbor I hadn’t seen in awhile, chatted for awhile and just catching up on things that happened in the past few months. The neighbor mentioned the Fairview fire since that’s one event everyone in my neighborhood will never forget and turns out that fire was sparked by a transformer that was arcing, a few people reported on it but the power company didn’t react fast enough or rather wasn’t able to get to it because of bureaucracy from the state and Riverside County. This is why electrical equipment needs to be updated every year instead of putting it off for years then get sued from fires that were sparked from old and outdated equipment.
 
Julia Child’s cooking appliances

She had various ranges in her home. She did have an old Garland gas stove that she likes. She also had a Westinghouse electric range in the same kitchen much of the time when she was in Cambridge.

And it may have seemed logical, but they only had electricity in the studio, but in the last series she did with Joc Papon, she was cooking on an electric cooktop while he had a gas cooktop on the same island so it was definitely a choice to cook on the electricity for her for the most part.

But like any good cook she clearly could cook on either, and I can cook on gas you can make up for the shortcomings of it pretty easily .

Somewhere my brother, Jeff made a recording of Julia Child when she was a guest on a show demonstrating some cooking and they were using a Maytag electric coil top cooktop. It was something that Maytag got when they bought out Hardwick.

And apparently it wasn’t performing well in the studio and Julia, Child said, this is unusual electricity usually cooks well and then she looks at the name on the cooktop and she says Maytag she says where is that little man we need to call him, it was hysterical. I’m sure if anybody from Maytag saw that clip they rolled over horror after her remarks lol.

Actually, this might have been the real beginnings of the end of a Maytag company when this happened.
John
 
Induction in Commercial Kitchens

I have a feeling that commercials kitchens in Europe are adopting induction at a faster rate than in the US.

 

Having read this thread, I snapped this photo last week of the kitchen when I stayed at a Holiday Inn near Heathrow airport.

 

Mostly induction in this kitchen but there is also one gas too (rear left).  Neat idea to have a mix of heat sources.

marky_mark-2022112908251305744_1.jpg
 
Induction is especially valuable when exhaust/ventilation is a problem (so a hotel kitchen, club kitchen, senior living kitchen etc would be exactly where it would be used the most).

I would suspect that most every Courtyard/Hilton Garden/Holiday Inn/pick your moderate level hotel that cooks a breakfast and maybe pub grub at night is being built with induction or is already induction for cooktops (probably with a Rational or other steam/microwave/infrared/impingement oven device) and may just have a single grill (with only sufficient ventilation for that grill).

Legacy places may still have gas, but as they get remodeled/kitchens shrunk they'll go right to induction and look like that hotel kitchen.
 
One reason Europe might be switching to induction might be because of relations with Russia, where they used to get a lot of their natural gas.  There is fear that the gas supply is or may be cut off so use of electricity keep energy in Europe.
 

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