Cooking with an electric stove, in this case a quotidian Hotpoint, turns out to be not so bad.
We have been cooking on a four-burner Hotpoint range, and it’s not bad. The coils heat up quickly and cool down almost as fast, and the dials to control temperature are accurate and consistent. As a result, we’re abandoning our belief that electric stoves are without exception an abomination.
This was a surprise. Almost all rental units come with electric stoves (I guess they’re easier to install, maintain and replace) and we gave up on the search for a place with a gas stove. Our experience so far (in a temporary rental while our main house is readied for sale) has been that control is pretty good as long as you allow a bit of time for the coils to come to temperature, much as you’d do when cooking with a cast iron skillet. On highest setting, the biggest burner will boil a pot of water almost as fast as the 25000 BTU burners on our Bluestar. It’s night and day compared to previous generation electric stoves that would take forever to heat then burn your food.
On the biggest burner, the Hotpoint boils water almost as fast’s on my BlueStar.
There are rumors, and not from the cooking community, that politicians are conspiring to take away our gas stoves. These fears appear to be unfounded; the chairman of the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission has gone out of his way to say the agency has no desire to ban gas stoves but just wants to make them safer. Still, electricity is a cleaner form of energy than natural gas. The California Air Resources Board is floating a ban on gas furnaces and heaters, and New York City has restricted the use of fossil fuels in new large buildings.
We love our BlueStar Platinum, and will sorely miss it when the day comes, but we no longer feel that an electric future will be all bad.
They’ll have to pry our gas stove out of my cold, dead hands.
That’s the spirit!
Have you ever cooked on an electric smoothtop? Not quite as good, IMO. I’m not talking induction, the radiant smoothtops. Slow… But you can adapt, I’ve used my sisters many times. Boiling water and using heavy pans on a coiltop is nice, simmering is easier on electric too. One disadvantage is pans the aren’t flat. They will work, but hotspots and whatnot. I have a low end gas stove in my apartment, but used coiltops in the past. In an apartment the key thing in a kitchen is the hood. Does it vent outside, or is it a hairdryer? Any working stove type works for me.
They’ll have to pry our gas stove out of my cold, dead, burnt fingers.
Fixed it for you.
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Thank you!