I disagree. For all common tasks (and most uncommon tasks) that Americans do with a stove, non-induction electric stoves are as good or better than gas.

I’ve cooked on both and prefer gas. For pots with curvature (woks), induction doesn’t work well. Induction is nice for boiling water/soups, but frying is better with gas. Gas is also more user friendly as a broiler in the oven for toasting than a slow to heat electric element.

gas is also incredibly wasteful. the efficiency of a resistive element stove is in the 80-90% range while for gas, it is in the 20s if you are lucky. most of the heat in a gas stove is lost to the environment.

The “better” you report is just perception. there is zero evidence or measurements to back that up.

Errr, assuming that your electricity comes from a combustion source and a simple cycle power plant, at _best_ the work derived from the heat is about 35%. You need to account for that in your 80-90% calculation. (That is, .9 * .35 = .315 using the upper range of your guesstimate.)

In other words, the waste heat has already been lost to the environment at the power generation source in that case.

As always "it depends"... (In this case on the power generation mix in your local grid)

The specific mix depends on the local grid, but nobody in the US gets electricity entirely from combustion, unless you're in like an Alaskan village that only has a generator.

I agree there are a couple niche cases like woks, but very few Americans ever use them, and if you do there are easy workarounds like electric woks. Electric ovens are typically better for broiling (https://www.consumerreports.org/appliances/ranges/gas-or-ele..., https://www.consumerreports.org/ranges/how-to-get-the-most-f...). Why do you think frying is better with gas?

Obviously some good gas stoves will still be better than bad electric ones, so I'm not discounting your individual experience, but I don't think your experience generalizes well.

The only thing gas has any claim of being better at is woks. Or anything else that really must have all that extra heat blasting up the sides of the pan. In every other way induction just kicks the crap out of gas. Far more powerful, faster to change heat settings, more precise. I grew up using OG electric coil stoves, had gas for the next 20 years, and induction for the last year. I could never go back to gas. Electric coil at least has the upside of being stupidly hot when you want. The high end temperature for gas isn't great.

This is total nonsense. I used to believe it as someone who only grew up with gas. Now, I've worked as a professional cook and lived in a variety of places with a variety of electric stoves at different price points. Electric is absolutely just as good as gas if you are a competent cook. It makes no difference whatsoever what the source of heat is on my stove anymore.

As a non-chef this has always been my suspicion, so I'll happily support you. I'm sure the immediacy of the temperature change matters to a degree (zing!) but how hard is it to wait a few seconds?

Its not a few seconds. The difference between high and low heat can easily exceed 1-1.5 minutes for gas vs typical electric most people have.

This makes cooking very difficult. When you turn down the knob from high to low, the element continues to cook your food at high to medium heat for another minute. This can burn or overcook your food. The converse of turning the knob from low to high is less bad, but can still be quite problematic.

You can easily anticipate this and turn down the nob early. When you inevitably fail to anticipate it, just remove the pan/pot from the stove for that time period. This is not rocket science. I get headaches from the gas fumes while cooking and I regret making the change every day. Yes I have a powerful vent hood. It is not enough for me personally.

Perhaps you are a better cook than I am. I look at physical signs like color changes, bubbling, texture changes etc, to move on to the next step. I can't always anticipate these changes ahead of time, and if I make a mistake in the anticipation, then getting back to the right temperature can easily add a few minutes to the cooking and potentially cause harm to the taste.

Of course, there are hacks like physically removing the pot that work, but it is added complexity on top of gas stoves.

The above obviously does not mean the gas stoves are objectively better - it only establishes that on one critical dimension gas is better than electric.

> the element continues to cook your food at high to medium heat for another minute

To be fair, so does the cookware. (Probably more so considering the lack of mass in a heating element.)

I have no professional experience, but I've used gas, coil top, glass top induction, and glass top non-induction. Of those four types induction is by far my favorite, but having to replace half of our pots and pans was annoying.

I would not be surprised if professional electric stoves are better, but the consumer experience is lacking. Coil top stoves often heat unevenly. The non-induction glass top experience is overall not great, with them seemingly being a downgrade from coil tops in all aspects other than cleaning and aesthetics.

If they're so bad, then why do so many people have them, and seem to be able to cook good food on them?

I appreciate that there are better stoves out there that might make certain things easier but the stove is not the thing that's holding back my cooking.

> ... downgrade in terms of cookware compatibility.

Induction plate adapters exist [1] - I haven't used one specifically for that purpose, but have used a diffuser plate which works on a similar principle.

The adapters are around AUD $20-50 which sounds like a cheap way to to start migrating your cookware collection to ferro bases.

I gather they're not great -- somewhat inefficient, and will necessarily have a more torpid response to temperature changes on the induction cooktop, shouldn't be used at high-temperatures -- but they do mean you don't have to replace all your cookware instantly.

If someone needs high temp and doesn't have a suitable pan already, cast iron is ridiculously cheap.

[1] https://www.amazon.com.au/s?k=induction+plate+adapter+conver...