From CNN article linked below
Though proper ventilation with a fan or hood that leads outside can minimize health risks, according to CNN reporting, many homes don’t have adequate ventilation.
This should sound alarm bells for the 38% of American households that rely on gas for their cooking.
It should also sound the alarm for chefs in commercial kitchens that run on gas.
Chef Chris Galarza used to be one of them. The 33-year-old New Jersey native spent the formative years of his career cooking over a gas burner. The heat from the flames that licked the sides of his pans, combined with the constant stream of gas pollutants he was breathing in during his long shifts, often made the chef and his colleagues physically ill.
“In between rushes, we would go to the bathroom to throw up,” he recalls. “We were experiencing nausea, vomiting, headaches, lightheadedness,” symptoms which have been tied to indoor air pollution and extreme heat.
It wasn’t until Galarza happened to take a job in an all-electric kitchen and his symptoms disappeared that he started connecting the dots between his health and the gas stoves he had been accustomed to using.
“I realized, ‘Wow, I’ve been poisoning myself as a chef in the pursuit of my craft and my career.’ I began to ask myself, ‘Why am I doing this?’” It was then that Galarza decided he would center his career around helping commercial kitchens become electric.
In 2019, Galarza founded Forward Dining Solutions, a culinary consultancy dedicated to helping companies create fully-electric kitchens. As cities from coast to coast – including Berkley, San Francisco, New York City – have slowly started banning natural gas stoves in new buildings, Galarza has been there to not only help ease the transition to electric, but to educate chefs on why it is the way of the future.
And to the gas stove holdouts who remain skeptical that electric cooking can produce gourmet food, Galarza is here to allay your concerns.
“It’s not true at all that gas stoves cook better,” he says. “In fact, you can cook about 38.6 pounds of food per hour with your gas range, and it’s going to take time and elbow grease to clean and degrease it afterward. With induction, you can cook 70.9 pounds of food per hour – nearly double the amount of food – and your clean up is going to be a lot easier.”
Induction stoves use electricity to create a magnetic field and generate heat right in the cookware instead of on the surface of the stovetop. “Because the stove itself doesn’t get as hot, if you spill something on your induction range, it won’t burn onto the surface or require scrubbing to remove,” explains Galarza.
For their part, some restaurants are also committing to electric appliances. Brooklyn pizzeria Oma Grassa has been lauded for the crispy texture of its pizza crust, which is made possible by an electric oven, the top and bottom of which can be headed to different temperatures.
There are, of course, some culinary feats that require an open flame – achieving a light, stovetop char on a tortilla without dirtying a pan, for instance. But, as one Twitter user pointed out: “You can like something without having to defend every single aspect of it. Almost all good things have drawbacks.”
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Induction is very popular in European commercial kitchens. Fagor is a large producer of induction ranges.
