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Cooking on gas stoves is one of the few genuine, sensory pleasures many food-oriented people (myself included) have in life and it's really sad that there seems

• sealeck 4y ago
  Can you explain how it is a genuine sensory pleasure – do you mean the actual act of cooking or the taste of the food afterwards?
  • Google234 4y ago
    It really matters to me to see the flame when cooking
    • cycrutchfield 4y ago
      Light a candle then
    • sealeck 4y ago
      Does this help you when cooking? I'm an OK but not great cook (or so I like to think) and I tend to just think of a hob as a heat source. I guess the main downside of induction is that you can't pick up the pan?
  • legitster 4y ago
    Gas cooking is very responsive. You can get a similar experience from an induction stove, but the pans have to be much thicker/heavier to get a similar response. Doing a decent stir fry is all but impossible on either induction or standard electric.
    • femiagbabiaka 4y ago
      > Doing a decent stir fry is all but impossible on either induction or standard electric. Not really. Jon Kung makes the positive case for an induction wok better than I can: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooNzRrHA9VY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooNzRrHA9VY. The usage of the wok precedes the gas burner by.. maybe 1500 years? Cooking on an electric range is just something to get used to.
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
• consumer451 4y ago
  I have a gas stove and love it, I love to bbq on wood coals, etc.. I still understand how air quality works. Opening a window when you are combusting indoors is not neuroscience. The fact that this is "political" is just nuts.
  • sealeck 4y ago
    I think it's the concern about CO2 emissions that are political.
    • consumer451 4y ago
      Yeah, which is nuts. What's next? Math is political?
      • sealeck 4y ago
        I don't know – I'm not the one who doesn't think we should reduce CO2 emissions.
        • dang 4y ago
          Sorry for the offtopicness but could you please email me at hn@ycombinator.com? I want to send you a repost invite.
    • das-hinterland 4y ago
      [flagged]
      • crazygringo 4y ago
        > ...annual methane emissions from all gas stoves in U.S. homes have a climate impact comparable to the annual carbon dioxide emissions of 500,000 cars. [1] That doesn't seem like "noise" or "very little" to me. And we don't fix climate change with one big thing but rather by fixing 1,000 smaller things. This is part of the solution, and it's not too small to ignore. [1] https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.1c04707 https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/acs.est.1c04707
• paulcole 4y ago
  > Cooking on gas stoves is one of the few genuine, sensory pleasures many food-oriented people (myself included) have in life I’m not asking this to be snarky but: 1) In your entire life? 2) In the entire life of many people?
  • OJFord 4y ago
    Name some others then? Not GP but it seems obvious to me that anything about fire or cooking is ranking highly on 'sensory pleasures'. Primeval stuff we can be quite detached from.
    • paulcole 4y ago
      I mean I don’t think I need to be crass here but nothing beats the feeling of typing on a mechanical keyboard.
    • djur 4y ago
      I prepare a meal and eat it. Let's assume I'm eating it alone, to avoid bringing in the pleasures of socialization. Sensory pleasures include: the smell + appearance of the ingredients; cutting vegetables with a well-sharpened knife; the sound of food cooking; the smell of food cooking; the visual enjoyment of the completed food; the visual enjoyment of a well-plated meal; the taste, textures, and smells of the meal; the contrast between the meal and any beverages; the feeling of satisfaction from having eaten a good meal. I would say that most of these are at least as pleasurable as interacting with the flame of a gas stove, and often far more pleasurable.
• rovolo 4y ago
  The picture in the article is of a flat top grill, which I imagine is easier for a restaurant to keep clean. Would gas vs electric matter much to you on a flat top where you aren't moving a pan around?
• crazygringo 4y ago
  In a previous apartment that had an electric range, I was prepared to be super bummed out when cooking, and I cook a lot. I was shocked to absolutely fall in love with it. I'm back to gas now in a new apartment and it's sad. Modern electric simply gets so much hotter so much faster. It's like the ultimate luxury. It's true I had to get used to sliding the pan off the heat instead of turning down the gas, but that's easy. For me, there's zero sensory loss. It's not like you really ever even see the flame anyways since it's covered by the pan. Everything sensory about cooking is the sizzle in the pan, not what's heating it underneath. And there's nothing sad about a concerted political effort -- that's what efforts are for, to improve public health by reducing emissions and reducing childhood asthma. (Outdoor charcoal grills are another matter, I'll admit though -- for the heat and the char and the smoke flavor, there's no electric equivalent.)
  • Gigachad 4y ago
    I won't rent an apartment with a gas stove these days. Not only is it extremely slow to heat liquids, it's also an incredible pain in the ass to clean and you have to be extra careful to ventilate the area to reduce the amount of air pollution being created.
    • etrautmann 4y ago
      Yep! So many advantages of induction.
    • jwestbury 4y ago
      > Not only is it extremely slow to heat liquids This isn't a function of fuel, it's a function of output, which varies model-by-model. I have an electric stove/hob in my flat in London, and it takes -- no joke -- well over 30 minutes to boil two litres of water. Conversely, my last house in the US before moving to the UK had a 25,000 BTU gas burner which was so hot that you could barely use it. It boiled water extremely quickly, and it was great for seasoning cast iron because of how quickly it would reach temperature and polymerise the oil. The whole setup was also easy to clean, as pretty much the entire thing came apart. Sure, not quite as easy as a glass top, but it also wouldn't get scratched all to hell by sliding my cast iron around.
• bmelton 4y ago
  I like induction stoves, and I am a foodie who really likes to cook, but where a few years ago, I thought that induction would surely take over for every indoor application everywhere, but I've come to accept that as wrong after discovering the joys of cooking on a wok. For those who haven't, the beauty of a wok is that flames can creep up the sides of the wok -- the whole surface is "hot" but gets hotter as you descend into the bowl, so that you can sear steaks and vegetables really quickly, then add other ingredients. The sides need to be hot -- it doesn't work on a flat cooktop -- so that you can add sauces to the outside of the wok and they'll do this magic caramelization trick as they descend the bowl of the wok. As your slower-cooking ingredients are finished cooking, you sort of push them up the sides of the wok and then add in your faster ingredients so that everything comes together in a single pot, beautifully cooked, all at the same time. I've tried and tried to replicate the experience on induction, but I can't, and I can't imagine anything that does. I have a komodo grill and bought an insert that allows me to use a wok on it, but while it's very good, it still isn't quite the same (can't "turn down" a bed of coals as quickly or precisely, for instance,) isn't really an option for most apartment dwellers, and tho I do not know, I don't suspect that firing up a bunch of carbonized coals is somehow better for the environment than gas (but it might be?) For woks alone, I suspect there'll always be a justification for open flames. Would love to hear more impressions from those who grew up with or have cultural ties to wok cooking.
  • crazygringo 4y ago
    I agree with you, but it's not like you can cook in a wok on a normal residental gas stove anyways. The burners aren't nearly strong enough, nor are people's ventilation systems usually strong enough. I think of authentic stir fry enthusiasts like I think of Neapolitan pizza enthusiasts -- they can invest in the special equipment. But they don't really have anything to do with average kitchens.
    • xapata 4y ago
      Easiest way to do that wok style cooking is outside. Otherwise it's many thousands of dollars for the range and the hood.
    • 4y ago
• denkmoon 4y ago
  From your name I'm assuming you're an aussie? Do you _really_ think bbqs are going away? Do you really think that there is a "concerted political effort", here in Australia, to remove gas stoves?
• decremental 4y ago
  It was only a few months ago that eliminating gas stoves was a whacky right wing conspiracy theory. Now it's getting rolled out and the narrative shifts to "yes it's true and it's a good thing."
  • djur 4y ago
    The wacky right-wing conspiracy theory is that "they" were going to come and take gas stoves out of people's homes. This is not happening.
    • decremental 4y ago
      [flagged]
• danans 4y ago
  > it's really sad that there seems to be a concerted political effort to take it away. No such effort exists. The effort is to educate the public about the health risks of indoor combustion cooking and the greenhouse gas emissions associated with natural gas appliances. If you are referring to the ban on natural gas in new housing in some areas, the vast majority of existing housing in those areas still has natural gas.
• darth_avocado 4y ago
  One thing that bums me about the whole air quality conversation is that as much as we talk about the gas stovetops, no one seems to bother about the other things that contribute to poor indoor quality: 1. Gas ovens 2. What you’re cooking. Frying chicken on an induction stovetop is probably going to do more damage to the air quality than gas stoves with industrial exhausts (I have the latter) 3. House layout. This one possibly bothers me the most. There are so many houses with poorly designed ventilation. Replacing stovetops is not going to significantly improve air quality. My open kitchen with really good exhausts are going to have much better air quality with a gas stove than most houses with an electric one. 4. Other household items. Hundreds of other products like cleaning agents still will continue to pollute indoor air with carcinogens but no one will ban them.
  • crazygringo 4y ago
    1 - Gas ovens go together with gas stoves, it goes without saying. I don't think anybody's using an electric range with a gas oven. Electric ranges go with electric ovens 2 - Frying chicken results in some particulate matter (PM10) but that doesn't seem to be a global warming concern or an asthma concern, and it settles out of the air quickly. But if you have an "industrial exhaust" as you say, all the oil gets sucked out anyways so it doesn't even matter 3 - Poorly designed ventilation is precisely where switching to electric has the biggest benefit, not the smallest, since cooking is the #1 source of indoor particulate matter and CO2 4 - This is why lots of people clean with gentler cleaning products. But they don't seem to contribute to global warming or asthma in the same way from what we know, and most people aren't using crazy harsh cleaning chemicals multiple times daily the way they do the stove, so it seems like a much smaller issue
• OJFord 4y ago
  It objectively doesn't matter unless you're using the flame - phulkas blown up directly in the flame or a wok fully engulfed (not merely bottom-heated, however big the ring).
• D13Fd 4y ago
  Yeah, screw the climate. Winter sucks anyway, right?
• etrautmann 4y ago
  “All I want to do is smoke inside this restaurant - leave me alone to smoke in peace”