Gas-stoves are easier to scale that is mostly the reason why most restaurants still use them. 15 fires on full throttle is much easier to achieve than on induction purely of how our current electricity network has been built.
But for a normal household? It really doesn't matter. My father had his own restaurant and at home he used induction because it was much faster for one family dishes.
They're superior for lots of things, but inferior in ways that are very important for many cooks. I cooked professionally so I've got a whole lot more experience than most using stoves— including induction stoves at work.
If a typical home cook was buying a stove for their house, I'd recommend induction without thinking twice, especially if they had kids. Same for anyone in a house without a stove hood. Even in a restaurant, I'd choose induction for pastry work— the precision and consistency are really great. It's also nice to not have all of the heat from 30 90k BTU burners all the time in a small room, too.
But for most uses, having a flame you can see, hear, and feel affords much more expressive heat control than digital displays and pan temperature alone. Most pan work is about feel rather than "heating something at x temperature for y time." Also, being able to pick the pan up a few inches to jostle the contents while still getting nearly the same heat transfer is really important for high heat sautées. It's also much much more expensive to get an induction burner that doesn't have a tiny hot spot in the middle of the pan— even with a relatively small burner, the gas flame still spreads out more, which is critical for things like searing large cuts of meat properly.
My dad is a retired mechanical engineer— he was the chief engineer at a fairly large company for years, and he knows a lot about heat transfer. He won't even entertain the idea that induction stoves are inferior to gas stoves in any way. He's probably also used a stove about two dozen times in his life and standing in front of one he vibes like someone learning to drive. It's the equivalent of his arguing I should use a compass, French curve and templates when figure drawing. Induction being more precise and efficient on paper doesn't make it better in all use cases, and some use cases are really important to some people.
I keep reading the same experience as you did but it's really difficult to imagine it being so without actually having access to an induction stove to try it out. What I care about most is the rapid adjustment from high heat to low heat and vice versa within seconds; this is really important for many Asian cuisines. What I care about next is the amount of heat output at its highest and lowest setting. Of course I can't verify these attributes by looking at induction stoves in a store.
Asia is the largest market for induction cooktops, I wouldn't worry about its ability to cook Asian cuisines. They even make ones that are perfectly shaped for woks.
Are they cost effective? I suppose in the long term you save money by paying for electricity instead of gas, which could offset price differences. I strongly prefer gas stoves over conductive electric ranges, but haven’t tried an induction stove yet.
Probably don't make that much of a difference. I know it does not in my country. If anything, at the same price of gas and electricity, gas is less efficient so induction should be cheaper. Imma say this again : Gas is not efficient.
And since it probably don't make much of a difference, if you have the financial room for it, maybe you can make the sensible choice for society ?
Electricity means a single network and can be clean, gas can't. Gas stoves is the gateway drug to gas heating and the industry knows it which is why they spend so much lobbying for it even though it's a very small part of the gas they sell.
I still find it funny that there is such a fuss about when a mentally ill person finds a ideology to die for and blow themselves up for the cause when it's just as likely and deadly than gas accident but barely no one is able to remember last year street explosion because of gas. Both are fact of life and can be mitigated for but one is apparently very meaningful while the other... "oh well".
I'm definitely not an expert, but I would say nothing of note has changed with our utility bill since we replaced the gas cooktop with an induction cooktop.
The marketing will tell you it's more efficient because all the energy goes into the cooking (heating the pot) instead of heating the room as with gas. But hey, that's marketing.
One other concern was control: we did find out that the power levels on our model were not linear. The first 5 were all low power for low power needs (eggs, sauces, etc) and then 6 through 9 were much larger increments for high power needs (e.g. frying).
Our experiment before committing was using a plug in cooktop. We got a good one, and even though it was "only" 1800W it made many meals. It's power settings were linear but offered us 0-100% in 1% increments (amazing control! Love that thing.)
To be fair, there are losses with induction charging, and I imagine there are similar effects here. But it makes sense that induction cooktops would generate less waste heat than a gas range.
Induction is better than electric but it isn’t as good as gas in my opinion. You can’t use copper cookware, you are very limited on how you apply heat, you can’t use techniques like flambé, you can’t hold food directly over a flame to singe like you can with gas, etc.
Induction is fine for some people but not for everyone. Not to mention in many places they are more expensive to buy and operate. Besides, venting your stove makes gas perfectly safe. The process of cooking creates more harmful gasses anyhow. Burning toast will freak any monitor out.
Just use a portable stove for those rare occasions you need one for a specific technique. Why breath in those nasty gases when making something simple for dinner?
That all depends on what you're cooking. I have used just about all types of cooking contraptions there are ranging from an open fire through a pit fire, several types of "cultivated" fires (wood-fired stoves, BBQs etc), propane/butane/methane gas burners of various types, coil/cast_iron/ceramic/halogen electric and induction stoves. I normally cook on a wood-fired stove seeing how as I live on a farm in the Swedish countryside with plenty of forest on my doorstep which I also use to heat the house and whose branches I cut up for the stove. I do have one of those cast-iron resistance heated electric ranges next to the wood-fired stove but I only use it as a parking lot for pans etc. I also have a few single-hob induction plates around which I sometimes use outside when we're not supposed to light fires due to extreme drought etc. When I lived in the Netherlands I bought a "gas-free" house which meant I had to use electricity for cooking. Induction was supposed to be the bees knees so I built myself a range with an induction cooker on top and a hot-air oven underneath it. The thing worked fine for some types of cooking but it royally sucked for e.g. stir-fry cooking using a wok. Even the flat-bottom version I got did not come close to the real thing on a gas stove or wood fire.
Now, more than 20 years later I regularly use my mother's new induction stove when I visit her in the Netherlands. That thing still sucks for stir-frying, no matter which pan I use. There is just not enough power to be had on a residential induction cooker to reach the quick heat needed to make a good nasi goreng (i.e. Indonesian-Dutch fried rice). On the wood-fired stove here at home I use a Chinese wok which hangs directly in the fire and as such is close to perfect. The sad part of this is that my mother's previous range had a special wok burner which, while not as capable as the wood-fired stove, at least made it possible to quickly reach a good heat and keep it. Alas, she felt she needed to go with the flow and had that range swapped out for an anaemic induction cooker which is supposed to be able to run 2 plates at max power (~2 kW) at the same time but does not even seem to be capable of that without dropping one of them a notch down.
If you're comparing commercial induction cookers to gas stoves the comparison might hold. There are special induction plates for using a round-bottomed wok which may also lead to better results. Those are not what most people will get at home when they replace their "dangerous" gas range though.
Induction's pro's are its reaction speed, cleanliness, electrical efficiency and sometimes price (single-hob plates at e.g. IKEA are dirt-cheap) but that is about it. Its cons are the lack of power in most residential ranges, the lack of fine-grained control, the sensitivity of the ceramic top plate - it gets scratched easily when you have an 'active' cooking style as well is liable to break when confronted with heavy cast-iron skillets in the hands of inexperienced users, this is true for all ceramic cookers and not specific to induction - and the power electronics (I have repaired two induction cookers already, one of them (a commercial single-hob plate) had a blown out capacitor (literally - loads of black smoke blew out off the thing), the other (Siemens) suffered from a whole bank of broken power transistors (RJH60T4 IGBTs). Finally, confusingly in the light of my remark about single-hob plates being cheap, its often high price. Induction still seems to be priced as a "luxury" good while in reality it is fairly cheap to produce, the only relatively expensive part being the power electronics (where "expensive" means "a few tens of euro's for the requisite transistors and capacitors as well as the copper induction coils).
A proper extractor fan mitigates the problem entirely.
For a lot of cooking, gas is simply superior in almost every way to induction or electric. Induction has a few advantages in certain situations, but not many - gas is more flexible.
Now there is something to be said about people using insufficient extraction or not maintaining their ventilation/extraction systems for sure, or grossly underspeccing them so that they aren’t worth a shit.
A simple Airthings or Awair air quality monitor shows you the VOC rate in the home and it is easy to see how a fan keeps the levels at zero or even just opening a window drops the pollutant rate to almost zero very very quickly after cooking.
It’s a requirement in rentals in Ireland - though the code hasn’t historically been properly enforced.
Our landlady recently had our extractor serviced and checked by a contractor (among other much neglected tasks) as the city council was finally beginning to conduct inspections.
I repair rental homes and most of the homes I work on have a proper fan vented to the outside. These homes I work on are all single family detached homes.
Roasting/charring peppers is one I find much easier to do with a gas stove. A lot of the food I like to cook involves this step - fire roast some peppers, let them steam, remove the charred skin, and so on. Adds a real depth of flavour.
I could break out a blowtorch, or kinda badly do it in an oven (the taste is not the same/as deep as with fire), but the ability to just pop it on the flame for a minute is the best.
I’ve also found that I have much easier time controlling temperature with flame than even the really nice induction stoves, even with a LOT of practice.
Where induction is amazing IMO is delivering a lot of heat fast, so boiling water or getting a pan up to a high temp for searing.
Honestly, my preferred setup if I was building a kitchen would be a hybrid setup - one side gas, the other side induction.
Resistive heating? Sure. Those things are nasty. But otherwise... nothing beats 7.2 kW of inductive energy transfer straight into the bottom of your pan.
Current place I rent has those awful resistive heating stovetop, previous place had induction. I miss gas - for some stuff I now have to either use a small camp stove type gas thing or a blowtorch, electric (resistive or induction) simply is no fucking good at all for some cooking tasks.
Resistive sucks, induction does not. If you have induction pans, they will heat up faster than any gas stove. Boil water in less than 2 minutes. No gas or resistance electric range can come close to the energy transfer.
You absolutely can. You just need a roasting pan compatible with induction. An induction cooktop beats any other type in my experience. 1) I’m not breathing in harmful chemicals. 2) I’m not waiting around for the pots to get warm. 3) I feel like induction cooks faster than gas but I don’t have evidence. 4) While it’s more expensive to get into, it’s a lot healthier for you in terms of air quality and cooking quality.
