- cross-posted to:
- science
Posting this here because I figure it’s relevant to cooking and the decisions we make about our food and our health. I was kind of hoping for a gas stove in my new apartment (I’d only ever had gas stoves) despite being a huge environmentalist because I’d always been told you can’t get “those good sears” on electric - now that I have an electric stove, I’m here to say that’s bullshit, with the right pots and pans, it can do anything a gas stove can, without the risks.
Reading about this study really opened my eyes to how lucky I am to not be stuck with another gas stove. If anyone here has the means to switch to electric but has been on the fence about it, I hope this can help with that decision.
Some highlights from the article:
“A new Stanford-led analysis finds that a single gas cooktop burner on high or a gas oven set to 350 degrees Fahrenheit can raise indoor levels of the carcinogen benzene above those in secondhand tobacco smoke. Benzene also drifts throughout a home and lingers for hours in home air, according to the paper published June 15 in Environmental Science & Technology.”
“Previous studies focused on leaks from stoves when they are off, and did not directly measure resulting benzene concentrations. The researchers found gas and propane burners and ovens emitted 10 to 50 times more benzene than electric stoves. Induction cooktops emitted no detectable benzene whatsoever.”
“A previous Stanford-led study showed that gas-burning stoves inside U.S. homes leak methane with a climate impact comparable to the carbon dioxide emissions from about 500,000 gasoline-powered cars. They also expose users to pollutants, such as nitrogen dioxide, which can trigger respiratory diseases. A 2013 meta-analysis concluded that children who live in homes with gas stoves had a 42% greater risk of asthma than children living in homes without gas stoves, and a 2022 analysis calculated that 12.7% of childhood asthma in the U.S. is attributable to gas stoves.”
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Depends on the electric stove really. An older coil stove doesn’t tract as fast to changes in temperature, so you really do have to take things off the burner when done cooking (for example). With gas, you turn it off, and there’s virtually no residual heat. Induction is much better about it, and also gets hotter faster than the coil.
I’m looking forward to switching out my gas range for an induction top, some day.
(Edit: am for an, I am not a stove)
Yeah, I grew up with electric coil stoves and that’s all i’ve ever had. But the induction stoves sound so much better, and have been on my lists for long enough that i’ve only been buying induction-ready cookware for more than decade now. The second I stop renting, induction here i come!
Have you tried an induction plate? It’s only one burner obvs but seems like a great way to get the benefits of induction in a rental. I’ve never tried it, just something I considered buying for myself, haha.
Alas, I have too little counter space and too many small kitchen appliances 🤣
We have an old gas stove. We specifically avoid using the oven much. The house has never had an externally vented stove vent hood too. Bad news. We are headed to electric when we get a chance. Not sure what kind yet.
Yep, my old oven always made me feel like hell, and the ventilation was godawful. There was a “vent fan” but I’m not sure if it did anything. In hindsight now I’m like 🙃
I do a lot of high heat cooking on a wok. Unfortunately, that’s not possible on an electric stove
Is the heat the problem, or the shape of the wok? This video has some advice for using a wok on glass-top electric. If it’s the heat concern, then my experience is that, while you have less control over the exact heat than on gas, you can still get to VERY high heat - I accidentally charred my minced garlic to a crisp in 30 seconds the first time I used the stove (quick boil is seriously HOT, even on low heat settings). I switched to using stainless steel pans for most things because they hold a lot of heat, and I’m way too weak for cast iron, but it seems like cast iron is great on electric too.
I’ve used gas, coil, and induction and I’ll have to disagree on them being as good. Coil is just terrible. It takes way too long to adjust the temperature which makes some kinds of cooking incredibly hard. Induction is much more responsive, and I could live with it if I had to but it’s just not as good. It’s prone to hot spots and you need the pan perfectly centered to get even heat distribution and you lose heat any time you lift the pan which makes it a lot harder to do any cooking techniques that require a lot of tossing and without the radiated heat it makes certain pans like woks way less effective as you don’t get the heat going up the sides.
I understand that gas isn’t as healthy, but there are other health optimizations I could do that I think would have a bigger impact on my health. I do hope that this research leads to better regulations and standards to prevent gas leaks and improve ventilation though. Residential hoods are incredibly weak and I wish they were better, and there’s much more that could be done to minimize gas leaks.
Fair enough that for higher-level cooking, it probably isn’t nearly good enough. My current rental has a glasstop stove and I’ve been really happy with it because the main thing I was worried about was the heat level - everyone warned me that getting a good sear was impossible, but my food is still coming out great. I’ve been experimenting with different pans to get better results and it’s been pretty good for me so far. But I don’t really work with recipes that require lifting/tossing because I’m too weak for any of that, even with normal pans 🥴
As far as the difference in health, it’s really staggering. To say it’s less healthy is, of course, accurate, but it also feels like an understatement. Continuous exposure to benzene is extremely harmful, and the fact that it’s highly linked to asthma, lymphoma, and leukemia, and that any amount of exposure is considered unsafe, makes me feel like it’s completely not worth it residentially. I would rather have worse food and better health (said as someone with a lot of health issues ruining my life already).
My current hope is to have an induction/gas mix one day. Boiling and simmering and so on are just so much more efficient with induction, but I need to move and slide around my saute pans a lot. This creates two problems.
First is needing to learn a new cooking style since most induction cooktops either can’t transmit heat very fast vertically, or turn themselves off if they detect the pan isn’t in sufficient contact with the cooktop.
Second is worries I have about the durability of induction cooktops, again with regards to the same sliding and slamming (not too hard, but still) around that happens. Scratches, or even worse, cracks, depending on the exact surface of the induction top would be a huge pain.
An unrelated problem that someone has already pointed out is woks. I have a ridiculous outdoor wok burner already though, that at least solves the indoor air quality problem, at the cost of me hating the summer a little.
You could easily just get a portable induction hob and use that on the side of your gas stove for things that don’t benefit from gas. Also, for boiling water electric kettles are faster and more efficient. I use that already to get water started for soups and stuff and then pour it into a pot to speed things up.