What have you found challenging to cook? I moved from gas to glass top electric and had heard horror stories (had always had gas stoves before) but despite regularly cooking meals for the family I haven’t run into anything problematic beyond worrying my cast iron will scratch the glass top (no issues so far).
I had a lot of trouble cooking on a halogen electic -- pulse on, pulse off -- stove and all those problems went away when I got an induction. For years I thought I was a terrible cook but it was always that terrible electric cooktop. The only thing that cooktop did well was boil water.
The most frustating thing I tried to cook was good, crispy hashbrowns. Believe me, I tried everything and the results were always soggy, greasy horror. When I switched to induction (and replaced all my non-ferrous pans) the results were perfect everytime.
Induction seems to be the holy grail of cooking: electric (so it's clean and doesn't use fossil fuel from Russia), and highly controllable and repeatable. Everything else should just be banned, gas because it's polluting and problematic, and other types of electric because they just suck.
There are a few reasons people prefer gas:
- heat output
- heat distribution
- responsiveness to inputs
- durability/ease of cleaning
I'm in the same boat and have found glass top actually produces more heat than a previous gas range. This isn't surprising at all numerically but people seem to automatically assume gas ranges are hotter even though you can literally just compare the numbers. Distribution is roughly the same or even better - gas tends to heat in a ring (where the flames are) whereas my glass top electric heats the entire circle. This is true even for wok cooking (although I have a flat-bottomed wok).
Responsiveness to inputs is a real problem, there's a significant lag to temperature changes. Although, this is already something every cook has to deal with - different pans heat at different rates, and the amount of food in the pan is a factor too. You kind of just learn to account for it.
Surprisingly the last point has been the worst for me - I'm always worried about putting pans down softly, and still have a few scratches. Cleaning is really easy for stuff that will wipe off, and near impossible for everything else. Spills with sugar/starch content need to be cleaned immediately or they'll be burned in forever. You can sort of scrape stuff off with a razor blade but you risk scratching the surface. I'm not sure why, given that glass ought to be harder than metal, but it happens nonetheless. With older coil/gas stoves you had drip pans or could line underneath the hob with foil, and just throw the foil away when it got dirty.
The temp change part makes sense and I can see how figuring out how to account for that across multiple pans could be challenging for folks that haven’t worked with it before.
Cleaning I’ve had no scratches using bar keepers friends to make a paste and scrape off, ymmv.
Came across this mother Jones article [1] on the success of the gas branding to promote gas stoves which was fascinating.
Induction ranges are almost all really bad except at the very high end. I have one that will intermittently scorch a 4-inch diameter annulus in the center of the pan while leaving everything else untouched. The only thing it's practical for is boiling water, which is enough of a benefit for me to justify its existence.
My dad is a professional cook (retired, but used to own a restaurant in France). He only uses induction. While he did not get the cheapest one, he did not take the high end either.
One thing to consider is that quality of the pans and pots. Nowadays while they are all induction friendly, some provide a better heat distribution than other.
If asking my dad, the main benefit he sees is the control.
Electric stoves used to suck, low powered, annoying, and they made temperature control difficult.
New induction units are more powerful than gas, respond more quickly, and have temperature based controls. So you can blast and boil a quart of water more quickly, or set it to temperature and it will quickly approach it and maintain it, no more melted pots.
With induction the heat (or lack of) is literally inside the pot/pan. So it's already ahead of any combustion outside the pot/pan. Granted not much, but still it's not behind.
Also crazy easier to clean, nice flat surface, and there's not much heat outside the pot/pan to cook stuff on.
Hope that comes with a price drop. Gas is the only option right now if you want cheap and well-performing. Last I checked (maybe a year ago?) the cheapest induction ranges were well into the middle tier of prices. Which makes the fact that I keep seeing stuff about their tending to stop working after only a few years, or suffering from very-fragile surfaces that are easy to crack and ruin, even more of a turn-off.
Maybe the ranges are cheap. But the price of natural gas has soared over the past year. Right now, it's cheap again, but it seems that prices are a lot more volatile than electricity, which will benefit from alternative sources of production and storage.
in socal the price of natgas is soaring. they expect this next month to be 3x more expensive than last month which was also more expensive than before. went from $27 to $75 and probably now going to be $200+ for the same amount of use. we'll see. https://www.ocregister.com/2023/01/06/your-natural-gas-bills...
Yes, gas stoves are an unfortunate victim of climate policies enacted at the local level as city governments aim to ban all natural gas appliances in new construction in their misguided attempt to save the planet. Don't get me wrong, there is plenty they can do, but banning gas stoves is a ridiculous overstep.
Cities are able to take this action because they know they have no intention of building anything ever again, so the impact to actual residents and voters is zero. I should know: my city of Berkeley was the first to ban them. It is pure greenwashing.
The final insult is single-family home construction and remodel can elect to use gas if they want.
That's fine for your city, but sucks for those of us living in the midwest. I can't speak for every city, but our growing city likes to model its policies after CA policies, so we get thousands of newly built electric-only homes & apartments.
>but our growing city likes to model its policies after CA policies
Who elects your city leaders? This is your own fault. If your city liked to model its policies after Russian policies, or Saudi Arabian policies, would that be those countries' fault?
It's hard for a regulation like this to be retroactive. There are a lot of gas stoves in use. It's not feasible to replace them all, for various reasons. So, restricting to new construction makes sense.
Most bay area cities need to build more than they are, but I know that new construction in Berkeley is not zero. One of the last times I was there, I saw some new apartments going up.
> Cities are able to take this action because they know they have no intention of building anything ever again,
California cities don’t, since their choice now is between “approve enough new housing voluntarily” or “lose the ability to reject new housing entirely”.
Builder's remedy expansion under the Housing Crisis Act of 2019 has changed the landscape fundamentally.
If the threat of using the builder's remedy successfully gets cities to change behavior, isn't that working correctly despite no "builder's remedy project breaking ground"?
I'd imagine also that these things take years. First for the law to take effect, since that can't be immediate, and then for any enforcement of it to go through
the courts.
