The trick with fries is to maintain the oil at 375 when you dump a load of cold french fries in. All the other options, the temperature drops way low and takes forever to come back. That’s how you make mashed potatoes. The induction is able to keep the temperature which keeps the fries crispy.
I make fries for gatherings of 10 plus people probably a half dozen times a year, so it’s something I’m careful with. I got invited to a fish fry for 15 people this Saturday. When I asked who was doing the fries, I got an awkward silence lol. Guess I’m cooking.
Yes, and once the pan heats up, it radiates heat into the room. Basically, all that heat end up in your kitchen, and unless your pans are insulated, a lot of it ends up in the kitchen quickly.
I grew up with an electric range. I’ve honestly never noticed any difference in “using the stove heats the kitchen” between stove tops. I have noticed a big difference between ovens, though.
My sister hates her glass top. It probably doesn’t help that it shattered immediately after she got it, and while it was replaced under warranty, it’s always felt fragile to her. But she finds it oppressive to have to worry about babying the stove.
I have gas, and we have a little chip in one of the grates. Something heavy must have dropped on it. I vaguely recall it happening, but don’t remember the details. I never notice the damage except when I’m cleaning the grate, which i might do if rice boiled over and i didn’t notice right away. But i suspect we’d have needed a new sheet of glass of it had been glass.
I can put my hand right next to the flame, and it’s barely warm. I often do this if I’ve dropped something. I really don’t think there’s a ton more heat leakage with a gas stovetop than an electric one.
I wonder if you had some weird inefficient gas stove, or if you let the flames go out wider than the pot.
She was worried about having to “learn to cook all over again”. Like if she has a recipe that says to cook something for 7-8 minutes over medium-high heat… that it would somehow be different on the induction stove.
I’m not sure that’s really true in practice, but it was what she worried about. So she mainly uses induction for boiling water. Tea, veggies, pasta…
I would consider needing a special cleaner and cloth to be burdensome. But she worries more about placing a pot on the stove carelessly. Scratching the glass if she moves the pan while cooking. That sort of thing.
As i said, it’s probably relevant that her first sheet of glass literally shattered as she tried to use it.
Any reason for this? Was it a separate cooktop or part of range?
I have a wall oven and glass cooktop, both electric. The cooktop looks fragile, but I have not really been careful with how I treat it. It’s 15+ years old, and I opted to keep it when replacing the countertops, but if something happened to it, I would not be upset and would look at gas or induction. I can easily run a gas line to convert.
I could see how a heavy metal tool dropped on the edge would shatter it, but it’s been surprisingly durable with normal use.
Hmmm, I’ve had 3 gas stoves, and not only is the air around the burner exposed to a great deal more heat than with a cooktop, but the pans themselves get hotter. I can’t touch the lids with the gas stove. Except when I had Revere Ware which actually has a handle that’s not metal (smart… not sure why more pan-makers don’t do this). It’s annoying.
Maybe the surrounding stove doesn’t get super hot, but if I’m standing in front of the pan stirring something then I do. And I’ve gone back & forth from electric to gas to electric to gas and it’s extremely noticeable, IMO.
Separate cooktop. It was brand new. There may well have been a flaw that made it more brittle than they are supposed to be. The replacement has lasted for years. I wouldn’t say it looks new, but it continues to work fine.
Perhaps. My mother only ever had electric her whole life and she’s the one who taught me to cook. Is there some trick to it?
ETA: We also had electric ranges in the home ec room at school in both junior high and high school. I didn’t learn a ton there about cooking that I didn’t already know, but I picked up a few things. Nothing about cooking with gas though, other than maybe “make sure the burners are really all the way off when you’re done”.
That was definitely a huge problem with the range that I’m sure must have been the most expensive. It was a Viking Professional series 6 burner stove and all 6 burners were HUGE!!! It was impossible to keep the flame contained under the pot for all but my 12 qt stock pot and the largest of my 4 frying pans. It was really meant for a restaurant, not a home.
I did notice that the heat leakage was way worse with that gas stove than the other two.
This is probably my parents mistake, turning a large burner on wide open to heat up water for Mac n cheese. Their kitchen seems to really heat up.
My cooktop has different sized circles to fit different sizes pots, so most of the heat will go directly to the pot. I don’t notice much excess heat at all compared to theirs.
It’s probably a problem with my other stoves too… I’ve never had a gas burner small enough for a 1.5 qt saucepan. I rarely use it though, but I did with electric all the time. Cooking for one or two people I don’t need humongous pans.
And I make a concerted effort to ensure that the pans are directly over the flame. It’s a lot more effort than with an electric stove (either coils or cooktop) where it’s very easy to see if the pan is or isn’t covering the burner. But it is an effort I expend because I don’t like my kitchen being 15 degrees warmer than the rest of the house. And it helps, but not enough. There’s just so much space between the flame and the pan and that means the ambient air is being heated.
You get this a little with the electric coils because there’s air underneath them exposed to the heat. But not nearly as much as the gas flame.
There’s basically no leakage with the cooktop. It’s very pleasant.
And on that note, the groceries aren’t going to buy themselves and the pies certainly aren’t going to bake themselves, so I’m off for a bit… cooking in a too-hot kitchen.
Oh, yeah. Those aren’t designed for home use, and I’m sure that thing did leak heat like the dickens. Commercial kitchens are always hot. That’s one of the reasons they have such strict rules about chilling stuff that isn’t being heated. Food spoils a LOT faster at 85F than at 70f, which is the temp my kitchen tends to run in heating season. It may also be that if the stove warms my kitchen from 70 to 72 i don’t mind.
I have a large burner, a small one, and two medium ones. I do almost all my cooking over the medium ones, which fit all my pots and pans except the tiny one i melt butter in. I basically only use the large one for boiling water and for the wok, and i use the small one for simmering.
