This whole argument that “you oppose a forced choice so you must hate poor people” is just a straw-man. Just because you prefer things one way doesn’t mean govt has a business telling me how I should cook my food.
Banning gas stoves would be a huge blow to all the immigrants who rely on cooking techniques (like woks) that don’t work well on resistance coils, and require expensive special equipment to work on induction.
As for those who claim that gas stoves are needed for wok cooking w/ specific techniques, most people who I've actually asked about what they cook on the wok is basically "fried rice", or even worse, they don't actually have a wok at all, and are using the issue as a strawman to complain about government overreach.
What's clearly the case is that homes in China do not generally have the ultra-powered gas wok burners that restaurants do, which is what people are talking about when they talk about what's distinctive about cooking on a wok.
In Hong Kong, it was really down to personal preference. My first apartment came with a normal resistive stove that the landlord swapped to an induction cooktop at my request, and that building (on HK island) didn't even have plumbed gas. It'd been disconnected during a renovation years before I moved in.
> But they are far from ubiquitous and common in the country overall, of that I can assure you.
I actually agree with you here, I was just making a point about the precariousness of using personal anecdata to support a position as broad as "people in China rarely have electric stoves." In a country that big, even the outliers make for an enormous group.
Before I moved to the UK I had literally never seen an electric stove in my life, much less used one, as gas was ubiquitous in the Netherlands. I'm sure you could find it, but it was rare. In the last few years things changed rapidly though, and when I moved back last year there were a number of apartments that had electric or induction) stoves.
Cant you just put a steel plate under any pan, and then it’s induction compatible?
Ideally you’d have compatible pans, but you don’t have to.
I understand not everyone wants to buy or can afford new cookware, but cast iron pans are very cheap. Also see brands such as t-fal that make affordable non-stick aluminum cookware with a small steel bottom to make them induction compatible.
I'd assume nobody would install a resistance stove in a new apartment (since this only applies to those)
The price difference between a resistive 4 element resistive and a inductive cooktop is like 20€ maybe 30€ tops. So a cheap one will cost you between 200€ to 250€
(maybe the pricing in US is totally different but that is what you pay for the cheap stuff here in Finland)
Also induction stoves are quite cheap nowadays (in relation to the overall cost) so it would seem absurd for me to get a resistive one even if you could save $100-200
But if it were 30 apartment units, then the cost difference on paper would amount to $3000-$6000 (and it would probably be judged in this way, rather than the cost difference per unit).
I still like looking on gas a lot better.
New Zealand is ludicrous marked up in terms of consumer goods, and I’ve just checked pricing. The cheapest is resistive electric. Then fractionally more is gas. Induction costs approximately double for 4 hobs (for 2 hobs it’s about 50% more than resistive).
If you count installation, both electric options are going to be less expensive than gas. If the big cable needs running for induction, the cost might be similar to gas.
Not factored in, cleaning. My god is induction nice to maintain.
Gas indoors is now considered a health hazard even with range hood, and while you can still buy gas cooktops, I haven't seen a new build with gas in a long time.
When I was in college, I bought a portable induction cooker off Amazon for $60. It was the best. I could boil a large pot of water in about the same time as the gas stove I had at home. (I never timed it, but it felt basically the same.)
I could have bought four of those induction cookers for less than $250. If I ever built a house (I currently rent an apartment and am stuck with gas), I would at least be tempted to literally do that, instead of spending the money on a "real" cooking range.
Why are full ranges so expensive?
Resistive is just fine. No way I'm throwing out my 20 years old stove to save 2 minutes boiling water. Once the coil is red hot there's virtually no time difference with induction.
That said, upgrading for this reason would be very silly.
A normal electric stove isn't even going to be two minutes slower to boil. Depending on the stoves in question, the resistive stove might even be faster to a boil than the gas stove, even if the gas stove is rated for more BTUs.
I generally prefer induction to gas, but there is one disadvantage - uneven heating of large thin pans. On induction, a part of pan directly above coils can be > 50 degC hotter than its border. This can be mitigated by using pans with thick bottom with good heat conductivity, but then you get higher thermal inertia.
"You don't need it, so you can't have it" is a dangerous argument.
My point is that you need to weigh the advantages and disadvantages. Some individuals wanting baba-ganoush in NY should not be the reason to avoid electrification for the others.
I appreciate that forced illegalisation is off-putting, but like others have said, renters don’t get a choice and landlords will avoid all expenditures. We need a way to help the majority wean off gas.
What stops the others from having an electric stove, while natural gas infrastructure is still available? Are there living units in NY that have natural gas, but no electricity?
> renters don’t get a choice
Electric stovetops are about 30 dollars for two-plate solutions, if you decide for yourself that natural gas is not for you.
From a climate perspective and also from a safety and health perspective.
Gas should be opt-in, not opt-out.
And I'm perfectly fine with this being regulated because the free market sold us leaded gasoline 60+ years after they introduced it maliciously, themselves, for example.
And that's setting aside all the other possibilities a torch opens up, like flan or crusting cheese, which are best done from the top.
and the butane torch isnt gonna put in harmful chemicals more than my gas flame?
I haven't made baba ganoush this way so take it with a grain of salt, but the way I've approached fruits with similar water content (i.e. squash or apples) is to bake for an amount of time (which is going to give you a more consistent cook all the way through than roasting anyway) and then finish with the butane torch, for a crispy roasted exterior. If you're using a toaster oven without covering, that will already give you some crispiness on the exterior, so you'll likely be able to get the exterior you want with under a minute of active torching.
The sources I can find seem to indicate that butane actually burns at a lower temperature than natural gas, but you make up for this by putting the flame directly on the food, so I'd guess that the food gets hotter (I wouldn't trust sources that say this confidently, as I can't think of a good way to experimentally verify this). It seems like this gives a higher temperature contrast which gives a higher texture contrast between the interior/exterior of the food. It's subjective whether that's a good thing but I personally think it's better.
> and the butane torch isnt gonna put in harmful chemicals more than my gas flame?
I don't know, and I would distrust most sources that claim to know. Natural gas is used for a lot of things besides cooking, so I'm not sure how much effort is put into the purity of the natural gas mixture, and that's putting aside all the piping between source and destination which could introduce all sorts of stuff from molds to plastics. I'm not aware of anyone making claims about the safety of natural gas flames and food. In contrast, butane torch fuels are often explicitly intended for culinary use, and advertising makes lots of claims such as "Near zero impurities" and "No residual oders"[1] (the misspelling is theirs). Without any credible independent verification, I personally don't think these claims are worth anything.
That said, natural gas is a much more complicated mix of stuff than butane, and the chemical reaction of combustion is much more complicated. Butane, in a perfect combustion, should produce CO2 and water, while natural gas, in a perfect combustion, will produce CO2, CO (carbon monoxide), water, NOx and SOx compounds (the latter mostly due to additives to give it an odor). Perfect combustion is a hypothetical reaction that doesn't exist in real life, however, so I can't say how well that hypothetical reaction translates to practical reality.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Culinary-Universal-Cocktails-Charcute...
Yes but not the teflon coating.
I thought it meant both. I'm not entering in an useless argument, bye!
I assume they exist somewhere, but I've yet to see one.
The main thing that makes electric stoves hard for a professional kitchen is ultimately speed and space. You need every single burner during a rush, and you need to be reacting quick, and there is usually very limited space. If I need to stop the heat on my pan, I need to stop it now. An electric top requires you to actually move the pan off the burner to somewhere else, but good luck finding a spot without butting in on the garde manger or grill guy. A gas stove offers the flexibility of being able to leave food there until its ready to plate.
Is this true of induction? I've never used induction for anything more complicated than pasta, but I would have thought that since the surface (basically) doesn't get hot, turning it off would function the same way as a gas stove.
Please let me know what you’re willing to bet and we’ll take this forward.
Yeah, but not many more relevant ones to the actual cooking.
> I bet if you did a blind tasting you'd not be able to tell the difference.
You can't do a blind cooking. How often do you cook food on the stove yourself? If you do cook quite often and still insist that gas and electric stoves are equivalent, I'd be very surprised.
Now I definitely don't want to say that I definitely can't do without gas stoves — if they have a negative health and environmental impact, I could be easily convinced to switch to induction stoves, for example. But electric really don't cut it in my experience.
Maybe try to cook first?
If we talk about say poppadoms. Doing that without an open flame produces… it produces something…
All of north India eats rotis made this way as their staple.
So then I asked my Indian co-workers who said they do sometimes use the gas stove to do some stuff but they avoid it as it’s not healthy. They said never finish things like roti on gas stove but they do things with eggplants (and some other vegetable) and peel them after. They said it’s better to use a fire and it tastes better.
eg : https://www.alamy.com/preparingindian-rotifulkachapati-puffe...
I have lived with induction cooktop (in Europe) for 3 yrs and resistive cooktops (in US) for ~3yrs as well.
Just because you theoretically have more choice in a free market doesn’t mean you actually do, depending on how desperate you are.
But those would be too good of solutions and spoil the current sneaky plan. Too many goal posts are shifting for justifying a performative-feel-good-climate fight (the point the top-level comment is trying to make).
There is no pure free-market anywhere (and it's a good thing). Let's not justify govt overreach in the garb of imperfect market-capitalism.
If the goal is to fight health risks there’s way to mitigate those risks scientifically in other ways that allows people to keep their preferences. Just saying “science” in a sentence doesn’t make your point scientifically valid, we don’t need to turn science into religion.
Or too take cigarettes example; ban cigarette sales completely instead of banning smoking indoors.
I hope you see the nuance now.