Comparing gas vs. electric stoves in a test kitchen

Los Angeles is on a course to phase out gas-powered living. The L.A. City Council voted in May to ban gas stoves in all new buildings constructed in city limits, joining more than 50 cities in California to do so. Citing the ongoing climate crisis, the council made this decision because emissions from gas hookups powering stoves, furnaces and water heaters contribute to carbon dioxide pollution, which leads to more destructive wildfires, more intense droughts and deadlier heat waves.

Going gas-free is clearly better for the environment, but gas stoves are still the most common cooktops in the country, and are considered vital to certain cuisines and techniques. Switching to induction or electric over time will be a big adjustment. Because we still have many years of gas-stove cooking ahead of us, the L.A. Times test kitchen is equipped with both gaspowered ranges and induction cooktops. Each for now have benefits for executing great cooking at home and are useful in testing our recipes.

Gas-powered stoves are the standard for me and most professional cooks I know. First, we can count that most people making our recipes at home are using gas. Heat levels are given in high, medium and low because no matter what the dials on your stove say, you can judge the flame from a gas burner by those three metrics, with the eye.

Gas offers the cook a nimble maneuverability in terms of heat levels that is slower and clunkier with electric. It also allows you to use whatever pans you have, something induction can't do, because induction requires magnetic material in the pots to react with the copper coils in the stove. And when it comes to the sheer amount of heat gas can produce, it once again bests electric and induction, which can't reach jet-enginelevels of hot for searing steaks or making charkissed stir-fries.

I'm neither a fan nor a detractor of induction and electric cooking, but I have found that although the experience of cooking on them is different from cooking with gas, by and large, you can get pretty much the same results.

Electric cooktops conduct heat thermally, meaning, from hot coil to hot pan to your food. This is just like a gas flame, except the heat is concentrated on the bottom of the pan with electric versus wherever the flame touches the pan, which can sometimes be the sides too, with gas.

With induction, however, the things you can do are both limited and expanded. Induction cooking works by electric coils heating copper wiring that reacts with magnetic material in certain pots and pans to transmit heat. This means that the heat transfer is faster than gas or regular electric — that pot of water to make pasta will come to a boil faster. It also means that the pans you use will heat up quicker. Instead of waiting several minutes for a pan on a gas stove to get hot, pans on induction stoves are hot in under a minute.

There are drawbacks to induction, of course. You can get the pan hot quicker, but it can't maintain nor reach the heat levels required for stirfrying and steak-searing that gas can. And because induction heat requires certain pots and pans, you may be having to buy a new cookware set to use it.