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Comment by netsharc | Hacker News Reader

The article gets weird a few paragraphs in: people like cooking with gas because it's primal and sensual? Really? Is that the best you can come up with, in an NYT article?

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> people like cooking with gas because it's primal and sensual? Really?

Yes, really. I personally love the aesthetics of flames on the stove, and this might lead me to choose a gas stove over the alternatives despite minor downsides like being slower to bring water to a boil. On the other hand, the air quality issue seems like a much more significant downside, though I haven’t researched it much. (I haven’t personally ever had the opportunity to choose the type of stove for a place I’ll be living, so it hasn’t come up. Someday.)

Gas is also universally considered better to cook with than electric (not induction) which is presumably why every restaurant kitchen uses it. My guess is ‘sensuality’ is not even in the top five considerations when equipping a kitchen.

When my wife and I were choosing rentals, the only thing I refused to compromise was a gas stove. At least in my case, it's entirely a sensual thing. There's a real joy in lighting the fire, feeling its warmth, making the flame larger and smaller with the knob, and the way it heats up the pan.

I know a lot of older Greeks/Italians are the same way with their gas ovens. There's just something magical about it that turns your time in the kitchen from a chore into something you look forward to.

Sensuals doing some work here though - that flame is sensual, but also gives immediate feedback over temperature/spread. You can lift your pan up and down to control heat over a gradient that radiates above over a larger distance. That lifting and moving of the pan alongside adjusting the flame and seeing it change immediately combines to give you a lot of control. So sensual, yes. A lot more intuitive and powerful, too.

Metal slats are also nicer to hit your a pan against than flat glass for a variety of useful/sensual reasons.

By what measure? Induction wins hands down for control, responsiveness, efficiency, and heat output: https://youtu.be/hX2aZUav-54

Doing a super low temp simmer on gas is hard. Double boilers are only something you need with gas. Induction imho and experience is just better all around. What the video for someone putting it far more eloquently then I ever could.

Try stir-frying with a wok, lift the pan to shake it without losing all heat or not having to be gentle when setting it back down because it's metal-on-metal not metal-on-glass.

Or how about my 11" cast iron; the induction only heats the middle 7". Half the pan is useless.

For the majority of tasks for the majority of people in NA induction is better. Wok cooking is the only one that it makes tricky (not impossible) and your not doing proper wok cooking on basically any NA home gas cooktops anyway. for that you should be using a proper commercial propane burner. If your not doing that the correct pan (one that will hold and spread the heat) and cooktop will be pretty close to gas, unless you want to bash when putting it down I guess.

As for your cast iron maybe use the correctly sized induction element then? It’s cast iron and it doesn’t spread heat well, that’s how it works. You would have the same issue on a resistive element.

Those propane burners are wicked. I still can remember the sounds of when they are turned on and off (Chinese hole in the wall restaurants usually have the kitchen right next to dining).

They make induction cooktops for woks (they are basically slightly bowl shaped), I’m not sure how popular they are in Asia, however.

My cheap gas stove heats my cast iron just fine. Induction seems to have standardized on ~7" and anything more is thousands of dollars.

IKEA sells one with a 10” for 850 Canadian.

Compared to $50-150 for a single-burner unit, that's quite a bit. Plus I like the portability, though I'm probably only using the cast iron under the vent hood.

Ikea has the 36" in stock in the US for 950USD, but the 30" would be tolerable at 800 or 700USD if they were available.

They have zoneless induction cooktops.

They're like $5000.

The side burner of a $150 grill does a fine job, but can't find a wider-diameter induction.

> Try stir-frying with a wok, lift the pan to shake it without losing all heat

In a home context its irrelevant. You're not doing true wok cooking at home anyway, your piddly little small bore home gas feed won't be providing anywhere near the required intensity.

Note that I explicitly said gas is universally superior to electric, not induction. I understand that induction has some advantages over gas. That being said it looks like induction is still much more expensive than gas for a comparable quality range.

You do realise heat transfer works completely differently in each case ? Therefore you cannot possibly replicate what they do. They are not equivalent and yes there are things you can do better in induction but the opposite is also true.

There are few things gas is better at the induction, and for most of them there are workarounds. I would argue that the default for hikes and people just shouldn’t be gas. Induction is safer, cleaner, easier to clean, and more precise.

As I said watch the video it says it better then I

It is true that you can’t blister peppers on induction and you can’t get wok he, but you already basically can’t get that on an indoor stovetop. The actual proposed benefits of gas are so marginal that they do not affect a home cook.

> is universally considered...

No.

There are definitely a few more benefits than aesthetics. Comparing to electric stoves rather than induction (which are in the same price range) a few benefits I’ve noticed are:

1. Instant heat off/heat on response. In electric stoves the cook top still remains fairly hot and cooking can happen from residual heat after you turn off the heat. Same issue with turning the heat on. While the gas stove has minimum hearing from the thermal mass after you turn it off

2. Psudeo-grilling ability

3. Cost for gas vs. electricity. In an ideal world the heat output per $ would be exactly the same but there are subsidies, pricing structures, different supporting infrastructure etc.

As the article implies, at the current price point, gas stoves are competing with electric stoves rather than induction stoves. And there are definitely a few benefits.

I like cooking with gas because when my power goes out I can use a match to boil water when the boil water orders go into effect because mains keep bursting.

Also I can make smores when I don't feel like getting a fire going.

I do have an induction plug in hot plate and for actually cooking its really quite good. It boils water faster than all but my 21k btu burner on just 110v, dumps no heat into the room, cools down when I lower the temp as fast as gas, and did I mention it dumps no heat into the room?

As far as air quality taking anything above boiling temperatures inside is super bad for your lungs no matter how you do it. The NO isn't nearly as bad as the particulates created by searing or frying.

When I put a log burner in my house I choose one with a flat top for this reason. I get your point.

But many things that cause electricity to go out (floods, earthquakes... Russian invasion) will put out the gas too

I’m 41. I’ve had countless power outages in my life. 0 gas outages.

I know it does happen but because the lines are buried it’s at least 2 orders of magnitude less likely.

> will put out the gas too

Gas is obviously far more resilient, though not immune to more extreme problems. I’ve literally never experienced a gas outage, yet power outages are routine almost everywhere I’ve lived.

>many things that cause electricity to go out ... will put out the gas too

IME, this is objectively false. I've lived in the Northeast my entire life (40+ years). We have on average 2-3 power failures lasting more than a few seconds per year. I have never in my life experienced a natural gas system failure. The pumps that pressurize the gas are themselves powered by gas, and the delivery is not in any way dependent on the power grid; also, as someone else stated, gas lines are buried well underground.

I don't have mains gas. My gas hob uses propane.

I have a gas line to my grill outside. Induction inside.

> when my power goes out I can use a match to boil water

A generator is a small investment to fix this and many other problems, without causing indoor air pollution.

Maybe we have a different opinion on what small is but to run a stove, you will need a whole house generator and the starting point is about $10k and most folks will end up spending twice that.

I like gas ranges because i hate having to “fix the tool”. A gas appliance is almost ethernal because is simple, just a valve. No circuit boards, no microcontrollers, no sensors, no firmware updates. Turn the knob->cook.

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