this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2023
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This article was posted on another community yesterday. Most of the comments were about how awesome gas is and how crappy electric is.
In my adult life I'd always had electric stoves, and they were fine. Two years ago I bought a house with a gas stove and I was so excited because I love cooking and it's supposed to be the best.
I fucking hated it. There's so many cons to gas stoves that people never talk about and I don't get it.
The waste heat is insane. Your pan and pot handles get hot. You can't leave utensils in the pot or pan, they will burn. It directly heats and humidifies the air in your kitchen. It's finicky on low heat and you can sometimes have a burner go out.
And these are just ways that gas sucks to use. I'm not even talking about health impacts.
We switched to induction and it's definitely the best. But I'd rather have resistive electric than gas.
One benefit of electric and induction that's a bit subtler: you can smell what you're cooking better. With gas, there are all these hot gasses coming up around your pan that make smelling things hard.
And how annoying they are to clean. In China, I had a gas stove and it seemed like it left residue on everything. Getting into the nooks and crannies to scour it was also annoying, and one time I accidentally broke one of the burner heads.
My induction stove at home now is just a flat surface. It cooks quick enough, has no fuss, I don't have to worry about carcinogenic fumes, and I can just quickly wipe it down when I'm done if any shit gets on it.
I like everything about electric cook tops with the exception of using a wok.
It’s so weird because I’ve hated every electric stove I used and loved every gas one.
One big reason is that when a gas burner is off it is no longer producing any heat. The number of times I’ve had a boil over or burned food because the heat doesn’t just turn off immediately makes me hate electric. And that’s just one reason.
So take it off the burner.
And then it’s getting cold while I wait for the burner to cool down. Oh, and now the burner is a burn hazard, and whatever boiled over is searing itself to the burners.
I disagree. The burner and grate retain a bunch of heat when you turn the gas off. Maybe not as much as the electric element but it's still a consideration.
Thanks for your response, I appreciate the dialog and wish people didn't downvote you for having an opinion.
There’s going to be latent heat with any burner, even induction. But resistive electric is the absolute worst.
Resistive electric just requires a different technique. If you adapt to it, they work just fine.
The only time I ever enjoyed cooking with gas was when I was doing it professionally. They always seemed sketchy to me in a home kitchen where you don't have a ventilation system than can fully cycle the air in less than a minute. My only complaint with my current glass-top electric is it's only got 1 big burner.