I don't really have a position on the issue one way or the other, but it is insane how quickly this somewhat small issue (compared to stuff that everyone has been talking about for decades, like abortion) became part of the culture war, I already see "come and take it" memes being made.
:frothingfash: You'll never take away my easy access to fire, Prometheus stole it from the gods for us
Zeus wage war on humanity to take back fire
basically the plot for The Authority in His Dark Materials
Do you just spontaneously lose your cooking skills when you use an electric stove???
My conspiracy theory is that I think this is a grift by the gas companies. Statistically very little gas is used on cooking almost all on heating etc. But almost all gas lobbying spend is based around cooking because it's the easiest place to manipulate folks. Look up the cringe "COOKING WITH GAS!" music videos produced by the gas companies years ago. Climate Town did a great video on this.
What's happening now is that some places are banning natural gas altogether in new buildings, not just gas stoves. This makes huge sense because gas lines are dangerous and very unnecessary in newly built homes. This is really pissing off the natural gas companies.
The gas companies tried for a while to start a culture war by just straight up having the media mischaracterize the new laws as "banning everyone's cheap gas." This is still ongoing.
The new "ban gas stoves" laws strike me as a sort of "legislative overcharging". Similar to when they will charge a pig with intentional murder to avoid them being convicted for manslaughter, they're using these laws to sour people to the concept of regulating natural gas.
Why fight about the real systemic issue ("should new homes have gas lines installed?") when you can endlessly debate the safe liberal issue ("should I be allowed to use a gas stove in my house?")? :chomsky-yes-honey:
you are 100% correct. Climate Town did an episode on this and it's both comprehensive and damning. the "i love my gas stove" is absolutely a corporate manufactured affectation that has been doing a full court press in social media/influencer spaces for some years and it is meant to obscure their efforts to prevent community policy from updating building codes.
gas stoves represent very little of the residential gas usage, but they are the only appliance which uses gas that people can be persuaded to think has some personal value to them. nobody really gives a shit about a gas furnace vs a heat pump or a gas water heater vs electric, so long as they work, and these are the lion's share of gas sales in the home. but the attachment to "cooking with gas" prevents the electrification of the home and demolition of gas lines, smart grid/fully electric building codes, etc.
even in isolation of the broader issues and environmental concerns, there is absolutely zero benefit to gas stoves over electric. it has been studied exhaustively.
It’s Time To Break Up With Our Gas Stoves | Climate Town
check his citations and/or watch the video.
36 votes
93 comments
This was a dark horse struggle session topic to be sure
induction is the future in terms of energy efficiency but idk why anyone would prefer gas over electric
Induction is miles ahead the best option, but old school electric coil burners suuuuuuck compared to gas. It takes twenty minutes for them to get hot and then you have very little control over the temperature because a giant near-molten coil of metal doesn't want to cool very quickly when you need to turn down the temperature.
They (coiled heaters) are also an absolute bitch to clean especially if stuff falls through them. Horrible
At least on mine the coils are removable-- you just pull it up to a diagonal position, then pull it out of the socket.
The coils themselves really are a bitch to clean though. I learned very quickly to never use soap or anything to clean them, just straight water. Or else whatever soap residue is left on the coil will smoke up the next time you use it.
Unfortunately my kitchen was never piped for gas, so I'm stuck with this until I can afford a gas line install or an induction stove.
I learned very quickly to never use soap or anything to clean them, just straight water. Or else whatever soap residue is left on the coil will smoke up the next time you use it.
Yeah I learned that the hard way
usually heats up the pan faster
i cook on a glass topped electric now, the only difference is i start heating my pan a couple of minutes earlier, doesn't bother me tbh :vivian-shrug:Not with induction, it's FAST. The pan is the burner. You can't use a wok on it at all though, only fire can heat a wok properly.
that's great for the people who can afford it i guess
decent glass top electric is ~£300
cheap end induction is ~£800
In my experience it was nice being able to always heat food in a place that had somewhat shaky power.
my power is out due to a light rain plus american heavy duty infrastructure reliability? at least I can still cook on my stove
Edit: I'm wrong
Gas stoves are by far the best for cooking and is the only choice for career chefs
You can instantly turn on and off and adjust the heating mechanism which allows greater control over the temperature of your pan/wok/pot/etc.
All restaurants use gas stoves
That's pretty cool, I guess industrial induction stoves must be a lot better than whatever crap I was using. Mine was not even close to instant
renovated the kitchens of his Manhattan apartment and Hamptons beach house
Stopped reading here. Whatever comes next is irrelevant to real people. Maybe his fusion induced micro-unicorn omni heater is the best thing ever, but I can't afford it. I have electric glasstop stoves and they suck.
what, if, and give me a little bit of rope here, there were building and housing codes that required full electrification and updated appliances? i mean who would resist that? besides landlords/capitalists, who are in the minority.
i guess they would have to recruit "i luv 2 cook with gas only" lumpenproles to re brand it as a cultural issue.
I'm pretty sure even the oven I use for my pizzas is some kind of gas oven, but idk, it has some sort of "boiler" that it randomly decides "needs flushing" and ignores me when I tell it no. I have no idea what it is boiling in there
I've cooked on gas, induction, and electric. I understand that gas is a finite resource that pollutes the planet but as a skilled, passionate cook, gas is by far the best type of stove. Induction is a decent substitute but I find them to be finicky and odd to work with. Caveman brain like when see fire
Induction is far easier to keep clean since it's just a single glass surface, it heats up very quickly and it's also meant to be far better for controlling low heat for stuff like caramel. Caveman brain is a thing though.
Induction stoves absolutely suck. They only work with certain pans. They're either on full or off, you can't simmer anything. Source: had to use one, got rid of it as soon as possible.
All of your points are incorrect. It's possible to modulate the power delivered by induction stoves. They work with all magnetizable materials. Aluminium, copper and glass - which are all very rare types of cooking pans, don't work obviously so you just sell them if you have them and use steel pans.
at best you get pwm, and that's not as common as it should be.
the magnetic materials is a bigger problem than you let on. plenty of recipes call for using glass on the stovetop and several whole-ass kinds of cooking can't be done with steel pans.
using glass on the stovetop
i'm in here defending gas stoves but I haven't the balls to apply gas to glass
I'm afraid to even put my non-borosilicate pyrex in the oven :deeper-sadness:
it works fine. plenty of ceramics were used directly with fire for millennia.
they make metal plates you can use on an induction burner so you can still use those types of cookware, but at that point youre dealing with all the problems of a coil stove.
I'm just afraid of the thermal properties of glass suddenly deciding to do something Fun because some hot spot formed or some area cooled too quickly
I very rarely use glass bakeware, pretty much just to make chicken alfredo because I'm afraid something wrong will happen and it will blow up
ive never had a casserole dish break. my aunt put one straight from a 450 degree oven onto a near freezing marble countertop and it split down the middle though.
if youre worried about the old pyrex shatter just stick to ceramic casserole dishes. they aren't as durable as pyrex and don't have the same cooking properties but they tend to break slowly and in real boring ways.
ive never had a casserole dish break. my aunt put one straight from a 450 degree oven onto a near freezing marble countertop and it split down the middle though.
see that might have been the old pyrex, that's part of what worries me, knowing that old pyrex was pretty durable in terms of thermal shock but they cheaped out and transitioned to more kinetic resistant bakeware. There should be a law against changes like that I tell you hwut
Idk if there was a change, but several lab equipment companies have had to recall borosilicate glassware because of batch issues in the past and there are manufacturers whose shit breaks in different ways or has different refractive indices or whatever. So once you find one you trust stick with it I guess.
in 1998 pyrex stopped using borosilicate glass and used regular soda-lime glass (in amerika, in europe and other places pyrex is still borosilicate). modern amerikan pyrex is no more resistant to heating than any old glass bottle. of course, labs still get the real stuff
Stop lying. If you turned the stove onto "medium" it worked like a cheap microwave. It went "on 30 seconds, off 30 seconds", ensuring that the food either burned from overheating or didn't cook correctly.
Maybe you bought a really cheap or bad version. Mine has multiple power levels and I finely control my cooking temperature.
I am so fucking ocd and anxious that I twist the knobs off like 5 times before I walk away and I would still say that gas is the superior cooking method and idk maybe y'all just don't cook enough
I would use one too if I could that shit's cheap as fuck for me and climate change is gonna kill my dead fucking ass anyway
i can't though I ain't got no hookups so I pay $8 to do two loads of laundry with one coming out half dry
I have a house built in the 1930s, and it was set up for a gas dryer. When we moved in, the gas line in the laundry closet was just sitting there uncapped with a little switch on it, despite the house coming with a standard washer/dryer. We made the people we bought it from cap that shit before we even set foot inside. What a fucking insane safety hazard; it's crazy that that used to be standard.
When I was a kid I woke up with a massive headache, went down stairs and realized the stove knob was turned just enough that gas had been leaking out. In my half asleep and gas-exposed state I couldn't remember what direction you turn the knob and just flicked it. Luckily I picked the right way because if I had turned it the other way and lit the pilot light I imagine at best I would have lost my eyebrows.
You foiled your dad’s plan to free himself from his obligations
They are proven to cause asthma and gas leaks causing GHG emissions. Some people will bitch and moan, but inevitably gas is going away.
Gas stoves:
- are fast to heat up
- go up and down temperature quickly and smoothly
- work without electricity
They also produce poisonous gas as a waste product and cause massive degradation of indoor air quality because housing codes often don't require vent hoods to actually vent outside.
Maybe people are mad because induction cooking is seen as bougie and they like their gas stoves. And the gas stoves would be fine if ventilation construction codes weren't basically non-existent.
Maybe people are mad because induction cooking is seen as bougie and they like their gas stoves
This is wild to me because where I live gas stoves are far and away the bougiest. Only super fucking rich people have gas stoves, poor people have the electric coils and middle class people have the glass top electric, or induction if it’s been redone in the last few years.
This is my experience, too. The massive gas range in the kitchen that gets used a handful of times per year is like a codpiece for your kitchen.
And those are the only gas stoves that exist here outside of restaurants. Something they put in in a several thousand dollar kitchen renovation and hardly use because they hardly cook.
You either die a hero or live long enough to (blurily) see yourself become the villain.
Gas stoves are bad now BECAUSE WE GOTTA GIVE ALL OUR GAS TO THE TOTALLY NOT FASCIST UKRAINE
What, you want to cook food for your family and keep them warm?
WHY DONT YOU JUST MARRY PUTLER YOU DAMN NAZI TANKIE
wat?
The whole point of the US cutting off Russian gas is that the US profits from it. So gas is going to be "good' now and you can see that in the green-washing that "natural gas" gets.
Look, I'm drunk and stupid, do not expect anything I say to be coherent
:meow-popcorn:
This thread is funny to read from a country with no natural gas lines to houses.
edit: nice ratio, 57/125, I wonder how it'll be doing when I next check in
Also if gas is officially bad then landlords should be forced to buy everyone induction
Electric stoves are just so much better. I can accept that when they were new they were bad, but a modern one gets just as hot as a gas stove more cheaply and is way easier to clean.
But it heats up then stops then heats, providing inconsistent heat. Gas provides consistent heat, much better for cooking
It doesn't matter how the energy is being generated by the stove, what matters is the temperature of your pot/pan, which goes up and down smoothly regardless of what the stove is doing.
You know what provides even more consistent heat?
https://www.lowtechmagazine.com/2014/07/cooking-pot-insulation-key-to-sustainable-cooking.html
They're better at not using gas and that's about it.
Source: I have one. Sucks.
this makes literally zero sense to me. I even have a 20 year old GE Spectra and it makes zero sense to me.
I can't light a cigarette on my range but whatevs.
I understand and agree that it's slower to heat up. Know what I do? Turn it on high.
try cleaning your burners because that shouldn't be happening
A 1.3% chance of maybe changing my 79 year life expectancy by one week in either direction doesn't bother me that much.
Maybe it's not installed right, there shouldn't be "fumes" unless it's fucked up and not mixing fuel and oxygen properly
For example, i can heat a fork up over the flame and burn off my warts. :FrogPog:
Trailer park boys taught me you can hot-knife on just about anything.
Gas is too expensive, firewood is the new meta. Smells like carcinogens :wholesome:
This but unironically. I use an electric element but will often do simple meals or boil water on the wood stove in my tiny living space (for heating, not cooking) for the pure efficiency of being able to use the heat I'm already producing.
Also I installed and can maintain the wood stove myself. Not a fucking chance with gas/propane.
the thing about carcinogens is so many of them smell amazing
