I make stir fry on an electric cooktop all of the time, and it's not even induction. Have I just been dreaming?

Maybe.

A typical 2500W electric burner is equivalent to about 8,500 BTU/hr.

The biggest gas burner on my decent Samsung range is 22,000 BTU/hr.

A high end wok jet ring burner typically found in restaurants (or in some people's homes who like to stir fry) can reach 160,000 BTU/hr.

You can't really get wok hei (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wok#Wok_hei) without that amount of heat and proper preparation & cooking technique.

i wonder if this type of niche use case would be best served by an lp gas tank type situation rather than outfitting an entire building with gas piping.

my guess is, most people in most cooking situations would never need restaurant grade stove tops. but like we do now, us nerds with nerdy niche cases will figure out how to do it for ourselves with elaborate projects :p

That might seem niche from a Eurocentric perspective, but a gas burner is probably the most ubiquitous cooking appliance around the world. A lot of the worlds cuisine has been developed around cooking on top of one.

Sure, but high BTU (restaurant grade)? Most people are going to have a learning curve as they burn food trying to get used to the insane heat output.

Wow, TIL. All of my stir-fridays have been a lie.

The traditional method for cooking a stir fry is in a wok and at a very high temperature. Induction doesn’t get hot enough, and it’s not possible to heat a wok on one anyway. You can make a stir fry in a pan, and at a lower temperature, but it’s going to taste completely different.

> Induction doesn’t get hot enough, and it’s not possible to heat a wok on one anyway. You can make a stir fry in a pan

This is not true at all. I have been cooking with my wok for years using induction. Only real requirement is that your wok has a flat bottom which while not 100% traditional works just fine.

If your wok has a flat bottom, then it’s not a wok. The circular shape of a wok diffuses heat up the sides, which a flat bottom pan doesn’t do. A flat bottom pan also doesn’t allow you to toss whatever it is you’re frying properly. If an induction cooktop was capable of providing the appropriate amount of heat, this would simple end up burning some of the food. However, it most certainly is not. An induction cooktop _might_ be capable of heating a pan up to the appropriate temperature (I’m skeptical about that), but it can’t keep it there. That temperature will drop the moment you put anything in it, and if you want to properly stir fry something, you need your wok to keep that scalding temperature the whole time you’re cooking.

You can cook food in a flat bottom frying pan on an induction cooktop, but you can’t do anything close to a traditional stir fry technique.

A wok with a flat bottom is wok with a flat bottom not a normal flat bottom pan.

As for heat my 11kW induction top has never failed to keep any wok/pan hot enough for stir frying.

According to this convertor I found online https://www.stovesareus.co.uk/kilowatt-conversion it is roughly equilevant to a 37000 BTU/h burner.

> A wok with a flat bottom is wok with a flat bottom not a normal flat bottom pan.

And this was done to fit western stoves. It is not traditional and changes the method of cooking as well as heat distribution. Woks need round bottoms.

In Europe, there is more electric than gas cooking. However, the voltage is higher - 230 nominal, with three phase being very standard as well (400v phase to phase).

The issue is that the lower voltage ~115 requires higher currents (over twice) which translates to more copper everywhere, beefer silicon for SMPS converters that are even used for induction tops.

U.S. residential induction (and ceramic, electric coil, etc.) cooktops are all 240V.

The biggest problems with gas stove tops are not emissions but the impact on air quality indoors (NO2 in particular) and the risk of fire/explosion.

If the building codes don’t require safe gas installations that seems like a problem that could be resolved by updating the codes to require safe gas installations. That doesn’t appear to be the basis of the policy described in the article though.

But once you use gas only for cooking, maintaining all the expensive and dangerous infrastructure isn't worth it and more.

Much cheaper to put a nice electric induction cooktop into every kitchen than to run gas onto every floor.