When my wife and I were choosing rentals, the only thing I refused to compromise was a gas stove. At least in my case, it's entirely a sensual thing. There's a real joy in lighting the fire, feeling its warmth, making the flame larger and smaller with the knob, and the way it heats up the pan.

I know a lot of older Greeks/Italians are the same way with their gas ovens. There's just something magical about it that turns your time in the kitchen from a chore into something you look forward to.

Sensuals doing some work here though - that flame is sensual, but also gives immediate feedback over temperature/spread. You can lift your pan up and down to control heat over a gradient that radiates above over a larger distance. That lifting and moving of the pan alongside adjusting the flame and seeing it change immediately combines to give you a lot of control. So sensual, yes. A lot more intuitive and powerful, too.

Metal slats are also nicer to hit your a pan against than flat glass for a variety of useful/sensual reasons.

By what measure? Induction wins hands down for control, responsiveness, efficiency, and heat output: https://youtu.be/hX2aZUav-54

Doing a super low temp simmer on gas is hard. Double boilers are only something you need with gas. Induction imho and experience is just better all around. What the video for someone putting it far more eloquently then I ever could.

Try stir-frying with a wok, lift the pan to shake it without losing all heat or not having to be gentle when setting it back down because it's metal-on-metal not metal-on-glass.

Or how about my 11" cast iron; the induction only heats the middle 7". Half the pan is useless.

For the majority of tasks for the majority of people in NA induction is better. Wok cooking is the only one that it makes tricky (not impossible) and your not doing proper wok cooking on basically any NA home gas cooktops anyway. for that you should be using a proper commercial propane burner. If your not doing that the correct pan (one that will hold and spread the heat) and cooktop will be pretty close to gas, unless you want to bash when putting it down I guess.

As for your cast iron maybe use the correctly sized induction element then? It’s cast iron and it doesn’t spread heat well, that’s how it works. You would have the same issue on a resistive element.

Those propane burners are wicked. I still can remember the sounds of when they are turned on and off (Chinese hole in the wall restaurants usually have the kitchen right next to dining).

They make induction cooktops for woks (they are basically slightly bowl shaped), I’m not sure how popular they are in Asia, however.

My cheap gas stove heats my cast iron just fine. Induction seems to have standardized on ~7" and anything more is thousands of dollars.

IKEA sells one with a 10” for 850 Canadian.

Compared to $50-150 for a single-burner unit, that's quite a bit. Plus I like the portability, though I'm probably only using the cast iron under the vent hood.

Ikea has the 36" in stock in the US for 950USD, but the 30" would be tolerable at 800 or 700USD if they were available.

They have zoneless induction cooktops.

They're like $5000.

The side burner of a $150 grill does a fine job, but can't find a wider-diameter induction.

> Try stir-frying with a wok, lift the pan to shake it without losing all heat

In a home context its irrelevant. You're not doing true wok cooking at home anyway, your piddly little small bore home gas feed won't be providing anywhere near the required intensity.

Note that I explicitly said gas is universally superior to electric, not induction. I understand that induction has some advantages over gas. That being said it looks like induction is still much more expensive than gas for a comparable quality range.

You do realise heat transfer works completely differently in each case ? Therefore you cannot possibly replicate what they do. They are not equivalent and yes there are things you can do better in induction but the opposite is also true.

There are few things gas is better at the induction, and for most of them there are workarounds. I would argue that the default for hikes and people just shouldn’t be gas. Induction is safer, cleaner, easier to clean, and more precise.

As I said watch the video it says it better then I

It is true that you can’t blister peppers on induction and you can’t get wok he, but you already basically can’t get that on an indoor stovetop. The actual proposed benefits of gas are so marginal that they do not affect a home cook.

> is universally considered...

No.