Banning gas stoves would be a huge blow to all the immigrants who rely on cooking techniques (like woks) that don’t work well on resistance coils, and require expensive special equipment to work on induction.

If I were in a minority community in one of these places I would support a ban on ovens and see how they like it. It’s not just Asian people who indulge in energy wasteful cooking techniques, but of course only one of those is under the ban hammer.

As for those who claim that gas stoves are needed for wok cooking w/ specific techniques, most people who I've actually asked about what they cook on the wok is basically "fried rice", or even worse, they don't actually have a wok at all, and are using the issue as a strawman to complain about government overreach.

The issue isn’t whether you can use Asian cooking techniques on cheap electric ranges. People in China are poor and will put up with a lot of adversity. The issue is whether the burden is differential. Is going from an electric resistance range to a gas range a bigger step down for Asians than for white people? And I think the concerns about that are real.

What’s galling about this is that, in NYC, which is driving this madness, white people mostly don’t even cook at home. They shouldn’t get any say in this gas stoves issue.

Citation for this?

What's clearly the case is that homes in China do not generally have the ultra-powered gas wok burners that restaurants do, which is what people are talking about when they talk about what's distinctive about cooking on a wok.

Now, it's possible that the small number of good, experienced cooks should not be catered to by society because the vast ocean of the unwashed, of which you are a part, are needlessly destroying the earth's atmosphere by using gas to no benefit, which argument, if you made it, I would listen to. But you very obviously don't cook anything with sophisticated preparation whereby you tilt the pan to control the temp with one hand while whisking with the other, or similar in a round bottomed wok.

you're a passionate lefty, just own it and make that be your argument

source: passionate former lefty, I could have written your playbook

Here's the thing, one of you is lying and it is clear which one it is.

Had you spent any actual time in China, and not a major metropolis you would realise two things:

1) Their electric system is.. lets just call it "shitty". 2) The vast majority of the population cant afford an electric stove, or the electricity needed to run it.

So tell us, from your decade of experience in China how do they cook?

I've been married to a Chinese for 25 years, own a home in China and have been there many times...

Our house in China lacks an electric stove, and in fact NO ONE in our entire apartment complex has an electric stove. Probably because the complex itself almost certainly cant support the power draw to run all those electric stoves.

I never checked, but i'd guess the kitchen doesnt have the hookup for an electric stove...

Not helpful.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

Edit: we've had to ask you this more than once before:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32655788 (Aug 2022)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24256585 (Aug 2020)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23950934 (July 2020)

Worse, it looks like you've been using HN primarily to post this kind of thing. Please stop! We have to ban accounts that do that and I don't want to ban you.

In Hong Kong, it was really down to personal preference. My first apartment came with a normal resistive stove that the landlord swapped to an induction cooktop at my request, and that building (on HK island) didn't even have plumbed gas. It'd been disconnected during a renovation years before I moved in.

> But they are far from ubiquitous and common in the country overall, of that I can assure you.

I actually agree with you here, I was just making a point about the precariousness of using personal anecdata to support a position as broad as "people in China rarely have electric stoves." In a country that big, even the outliers make for an enormous group.

Before I moved to the UK I had literally never seen an electric stove in my life, much less used one, as gas was ubiquitous in the Netherlands. I'm sure you could find it, but it was rare. In the last few years things changed rapidly though, and when I moved back last year there were a number of apartments that had electric or induction) stoves.

Cant you just put a steel plate under any pan, and then it’s induction compatible?

Ideally you’d have compatible pans, but you don’t have to.

I understand not everyone wants to buy or can afford new cookware, but cast iron pans are very cheap. Also see brands such as t-fal that make affordable non-stick aluminum cookware with a small steel bottom to make them induction compatible.

I'd assume nobody would install a resistance stove in a new apartment (since this only applies to those)

The price difference between a resistive 4 element resistive and a inductive cooktop is like 20€ maybe 30€ tops. So a cheap one will cost you between 200€ to 250€

(maybe the pricing in US is totally different but that is what you pay for the cheap stuff here in Finland)

Also induction stoves are quite cheap nowadays (in relation to the overall cost) so it would seem absurd for me to get a resistive one even if you could save $100-200

But if it were 30 apartment units, then the cost difference on paper would amount to $3000-$6000 (and it would probably be judged in this way, rather than the cost difference per unit).

I still like looking on gas a lot better.

New Zealand is ludicrous marked up in terms of consumer goods, and I’ve just checked pricing. The cheapest is resistive electric. Then fractionally more is gas. Induction costs approximately double for 4 hobs (for 2 hobs it’s about 50% more than resistive).

If you count installation, both electric options are going to be less expensive than gas. If the big cable needs running for induction, the cost might be similar to gas.

Not factored in, cleaning. My god is induction nice to maintain.

Gas indoors is now considered a health hazard even with range hood, and while you can still buy gas cooktops, I haven't seen a new build with gas in a long time.

When I was in college, I bought a portable induction cooker off Amazon for $60. It was the best. I could boil a large pot of water in about the same time as the gas stove I had at home. (I never timed it, but it felt basically the same.)

I could have bought four of those induction cookers for less than $250. If I ever built a house (I currently rent an apartment and am stuck with gas), I would at least be tempted to literally do that, instead of spending the money on a "real" cooking range.

Why are full ranges so expensive?

Resistive is just fine. No way I'm throwing out my 20 years old stove to save 2 minutes boiling water. Once the coil is red hot there's virtually no time difference with induction.

That said, upgrading for this reason would be very silly.

A normal electric stove isn't even going to be two minutes slower to boil. Depending on the stoves in question, the resistive stove might even be faster to a boil than the gas stove, even if the gas stove is rated for more BTUs.

I generally prefer induction to gas, but there is one disadvantage - uneven heating of large thin pans. On induction, a part of pan directly above coils can be > 50 degC hotter than its border. This can be mitigated by using pans with thick bottom with good heat conductivity, but then you get higher thermal inertia.