Forgetting My Old Flame

And learning to love electric stoves

The other week I had a fun piece at The Bulwark, titled “Do Androids Dream of Electric Stoves?” (Yes, I wrote the headline.) This is something I never, ever thought I would write: an acknowledgment that electric stoves can, in fact, cook just fine.

Only about two years ago, I wrote this, basically dismissing the growing health and environmental opinion against gas stoves. Part of what inspired me to write this was that the piece I was responding to appeared in Mother Jones (a publication I respect, but whose political slant is unquestionable.)

I wrote:

The fossil fuel industry is so devious that it devised a type of stove that people like. That’s a very slight exaggeration of a recent investigative piece in Mother Jones.

And also:

Crusading, muckraking, progressive journalism can be fantastic, and it can uncover corporate crimes and corrupt cronyism. But at its worst, it calls you stupid for liking your stove.

I basically couldn’t see this body of gas stove critiques, despite being backed by real science, as much more than condescending paternalism from the left. It seemed to fit a pattern where environmentalists rag on products that normal people like. I liked my gas stove, which we enjoyed for five years in our condo. My parents have a subpar electric coil stove that is hard to cook with, just like the stove in my old grad school apartment. I didn’t like them. And that was that.

Over the last couple of years, though, I did have this nagging feeling that perhaps there was something to all of it—especially the health arguments centered on indoor air pollution. We didn’t have a range hood that vented outside—virtually no apartment-style buildings do, despite many having gas cooking—and around this time I accidentally triggered the carbon monoxide alarm because I’d been running the oven all day. (I did not know you could build up that much CO with a stove. It was the first time I really grokked that the stove was putting something into the air.)

A little over a year ago, one of my cats developed asthma; the first time I’ve ever seen or even heard of this. And I did remember that the fumes from gas stoves can cause or aggravate lung problems. I also noticed that when the stove or oven was running for awhile, there was a detectable smell in the air, like the smell of the little candle chapels in a church. Whatever was in the gas fumes was something I could actually smell. I increasingly grew to dislike it.

However, that still didn’t change much for me. It was too heavily ingrained in me that it’s impossible to cook well or easily with an electric stove. And as we looked for a house, it would soon be possible for us to set up an outside-venting range hood, which would pull out most of the gas fumes, not to mention cooking smoke. (Every kitchen I’ve worked in, in any place I’ve lived, has always set off the fire alarm when you’re doing heavy cooking, like searing steak in cast iron. They are just not set up for that kind of cooking on a regular basis.)

From my new article:

For years—the five years that my wife and I lived in a unit with a gas stove—I had thought I could never use an electric stove again. While we were searching for a house, we considered a gas connection one of our few musts. We barely bothered even looking at all-electric homes. When people said that electric stoves had gotten pretty good, I thought, yeah, yeah, you probably don’t cook much.

But what do you know, we ended up buying an all-electric house, because everything else about it was just right. The price was, relatively speaking, reasonable too. So we felt we had room financially to install propane, buy a gas stove, and convert it to propane. We made sure our HOA permitted propane tanks, and intended to void the contract if it didn’t. We were planning to apply for a permit. We didn’t even want to consider induction, because we didn’t want any more cost sunk into electric cooking. That’s how seriously we refused to consider an electric stove.

And then we made dinner for the first time.

On the electric range, the pans heated up quickly. The temperature control was slow, but it was obviously working. The maximum heat was higher than on our gas model, meaning that foods like steaks and Brussels sprouts developed a tasty crisp edge rather than sautéing or steaming.

Each of our first few meals was a test. Eggs? My old gas stove was ready to sizzle eggs in two minutes, and then the eggs cooked in two minutes. My new electric stove needs about three minutes to get up to temperature, and about three minutes to cook the eggs. I could probably shave that down, but I’m wary of dialing it too hot.

Steak? My big test for this stove was whether it could get a cast iron pan nice and hot and put a serious sear on a steak. I use a Lodge skillet, and on my old stove, I heated it up for five minutes on high before throwing in the steak. Generally the steak would get a minute and a half or so per side, maybe two (I sous vide them, so this is just to sear the outside).

Well. After three minutes, my skillet was smoking, and after just one minute per side, my steak was charred in a way that I had never seen on a stove top. It looked—and tasted!—like it had come off a barbecue grill. (Well, off a gas grill, of course—nothing replaces the flavor of charcoal.) I couldn’t quite believe it. Why did I wonder how anybody could find electric stoves usable, let alone use them every day? The proof was on my plate: this thing cooked a better steak than I’d been able to make in five years. I was sold.

But there was one more test: wok stir fries. And here too, the new stove clearly and noticeably outperformed the old one. On my old gas stovetop, vegetables that produce some water, like spinach or cabbage, used to sort of steam, with a pool of water forming in the bottom of the wok that wouldn’t quite disappear. With the new stove, the amount of steam rising out of the wok while I stir fry is so great that I have steam in my face the whole time. The vegetables come out drier and greener, because they’re cooking higher but shorter. It is true that you can’t shoosh the wok on the fragile glass top. But you sure can get distinctively wok-fried dishes on it.

With each new task performed on the stove, my wife and I would look at each other, unbelieving, and sort of be like, “This stove kind of works well, doesn’t it?….” We never specifically decided not to install propane. We just fell in love with this stove over the course of a couple of weeks. I’d forgotten my old flame.

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It was interesting, reading comments on my piece. Folks who disagreed with my conclusion basically said exactly the things I used to say. Now, my conclusion isn’t that we should ban gas hookups (the Upper Midwest would have a word), much less that you should throw out your working gas stove. (You should, however, get an external range hood if at all possible, or at least crack a window while cooking or baking.)

It’s rather that if I was mistaken, you might be mistaken too, and that if you have relatively little experience with a decent electric model, you might be pleasantly surprised by what you can buy these days. And that’s not even counting induction, which by most accounts is superior.

There were some valid counterpoints, though. One is that gas stoves can still function in power outages. That’s a very good counterpoint. Another is that gas stove quality is less price sensitive: the cheapest gas stove still cooks well enough, while the cheapest electric is far inferior to a midrange or high-end model. A third point is that—while you can remove pans from hot burners to stop overcooking—this isn’t so convenient if you frequently use three or four burners. Hence, perhaps, the idea that gas is friendlier to serious cooking. You also can’t really shoosh pans around on a glass top. For some cooks, that could be a deal breaker.

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A couple of folks wondered which electric stove I had, that amazed me so much. My Bulwark piece wasn’t a product review, exactly, so I’ll tell you here. It’s a GE Profile, model number PB911SJ2SS. It isn’t made anymore, but there are a couple of very similar models, likely with the same internals. The prices range from under $1,000 to about $1,200, depending on exact model, retailer, sales, etc.

It has one feature I didn’t like at first, but have grown to like a lot: it has no dials! Instead, there are touch buttons with lights to show you where you’re at on the virtual dial.

I like knowing exactly where on the dial I am, because sometimes with these stoves a slight change on the dial can mean a big change in heat output. With this interface, you can recall exactly which setting gives you the right results. It makes electric cooking replicable in a way I’ve never felt before.

Reading various reviews, I noticed two things. One, lots of people said it’s very good for the price. Two, a few mentioned having bad memories of electric stoves and being pleasantly surprised.

So are they all good these days? Nope. My parents’ recent coil model—also a GE!—has poor temperature control. Cooking with that stove involves the sort of low-level struggle I always associated with electric cooking. My wife’s friend has an inexpensive glass-top model in her apartment, and it is decidedly average. It reminds me of a poor glass top my parents had years ago. (Mostly, it takes a long time to heat up, whereas my GE model heats up almost as fast as gas, which I pretty much thought was impossible.) So yes, if you’re shopping for an electric stove, the particulars of the model seem to matter more.

But I’ll leave you with the heart of the lesson I learned from all of this:

I realized as I used this stove that much of what I had always perceived as the inferiority of electric stoves—in addition to not using great ones—was simply trying to force it to do what I wanted and not adapt to it. For one meal I was reducing a sauce, and since the burners retain so much heat, you can’t just turn them off and leave the pan on the burner. You have to remove it completely. So I moved the pan, and the sauce stopped bubbling almost immediately. Then, just to test the heat retention, I moved the pan back to the burner, and it started bubbling again. Yes, that’s what happens when you apply heat to a frying pan and then remove the heat. But I was still amazed. You can’t get something to stop cooking on an electric stove was such a deeply ingrained thought for me that I couldn’t believe I could control what the food did by just using the stove the right way.

Read the whole thing. And happy New Year!

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Related Reading:

Simple Dishwashers

Corned Beef? Turn On the Oven

Plant-Based Patties, Italian Peasant Style

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