apartment therapy changing the world, one room at a time

Personally, I hate my electric glass cooktop and mourn the loss of my gas cooktop (due to moving) like it was my best friend.

I guess the one good thing about them is that I think they are easier to clean.

Hi Jenny... I'm planning a new kitchen remodel and I'm purposely going to put in another electric glass top. I agree with most everything Faith said but I think it heats up quite fast. It helps to have perfectly flat cookware for good contact. I've also heard they're energy efficient and they don't put out any fossil fuel combustion contaminates into the air you breathe. Most evenings I just clean it with soap and water and I buff it 'till it shines with a cleaner I got from Sears. I probably do that once a week. I've had mine for over 10 years and I have only 1 scratch on one of the back burners. I only got it last year from a vintage cast-iron frying pan and it's not very obvious. (the new cast-iron is much more glass friendly)

Sadly we moved into an electric-stove house in the summer after living with a yummy gas stove for a few years. The only redeeming part is that its an old jennaire stove, so it works pretty good and looks kind cool. I do like the oven part though... but after over 6months I am still not used to the burners that don't automatically react to reducing or increasing heat. p.s. We think that the timer sounds like fairies.

I rent and I have an electric stove. It sucks. The burners are all uneven and the oil is always pooling on one side of the pan. I have to jiggle the pan constantly if I want even oil distribution. It's a pain to clean. The oven is completely out of whack (50-100 degrees off) so it's impossible to operate without an oven thermometer. If I could change to a gas stove, I'd do it in a nanosecond. But for now I just suck it up and cook anyway.

I've had to use stove tops like this a few times.

One trick that helped me out was to always leave one extra burner on really low. That way, if you are cooking something at a high heat, say boiling something, and you want to adjust to a lower heat, you can shift it over to another burner without having to wait for the hot burner to cool down to the right temp.

As far as cleaning goes, I just saw an ad I think for a cleaner designed for these same cook tops. Not sure how effective it is but perhaps it's something you'd like to explore.

I dislike my electric stove too. But I've learned to adjust. And you can blister red peppers, under the broiler.

I'm with burrda -- my last three stoves have been electric glass tops, and I love them. They heat very fast and distribute the heat evenly.

There's no natural gas service where we live. Propane is outlandishly expensive, and the set-up around here costs almost as much as a high-end range (nearly $1000 with a tank -- no one will sell gas around here without renting you a tank).

hey, at least you can actually simmer things.
in every apartment i've had, the burners seemed to have two settings: off, and high.

Jenny, I feel for you. In our new house we have a gas fireplace, gas furnace, and gas water heater, but for some unknown reason the cooker is not. The stove is smoothtop glass electric. I would love to swap it out for gas, but we just can't afford to replace an appliance that is still it perfect working order. So I've chosen to just suck it up and adjust. :)

It takes some time to get used to it, but you can do it. Accept the fact that a pot or two may boil over. Tinker with the controls as you would with any new cooker and learn what it gives you. Within a month you'll probably have learned the various quirks of your new cooker & learned to adjust. It'll never be the same as your gas stove, but you can still make great food on electric. Good luck!

I once was on a rotation for work for 6 months. They put me up in a furnished apartment that had a "full" kitchen. It was laid out well but the stove was electric and the pots and pans were chinsey. I still did just fine. Friends I had over complimented me on my cooking just as often as they did when I had a gas stove and my nice pots and pans.

The only things I really had problems with were remembering that the burner was still hot for a long while once off and umm... You know, that's it.

Think of it as a chance to expand your abilities as a chef. If you can cook anywhere, you're set. All you really need is a sharp knife and a willingness to learn.

Well, a sucky stove is a sucky stove no matter what it runs on. I have an electric flat top, and I'm quite happy with it--it does everything I need it to do, and I cook a lot, using all sorts of methods. And as someone else pointed out, I can blister peppers under the broiler. Something I do not miss about gas stoves is the occasional smell of gas if it doesn't light right away, or waking up to the smell of gas fumes filling the house when the pilot light would go out.

Electric stoves are generally better at _showing you_ that they're on - with indicators, or coils that are glowing hot. In a bright kitchen, I've caught an elbow or an oven mitt in a flame that I thought I'd turned off more than once. But of course, if you're not daft and are capable of remembering that you left the burner on, this is just a small comfort.

Generally speaking, an electric stove will bring water to boil faster than a gas one.

That's all I've got.

I was dreading moving into my apartment with a glass top electric stove, but I've been pleasantly surprised at how well it has performed for me over the last two years.

It doesn't take as much time to heat up as older models, and the minor adjustments in technique quickly became habit.

It hasn't hampered my cooking in any significant way, and I cook every day. Yeah, I'd still prefer a gas stove, but if I an electric stove is the worst thing about a new place, then you have nothing to worry about. It's just not that bad. I promise!

(The other thing is, electric ovens are great! They're generally superior to their gas brethren. So it might be a good time to focus on your baking.)

Whoops - Chris actually wrote that post, just fyi everyone. But I also have only (!!) lived with electric stoves and agree with everything Chris said here. I still stand by electric ovens though. My ideal setup would be half gas/half induction range, with an electric oven. :-)

I grew up with electric stoves, learned to cook on gas, worked with a gas stove, and spent 6 years cooking with gas before going back to electric (renter).

Gas stoves are fun (fire!), but I think there are major pros and cons for both. The immediacy of response on gas is obviously a big plus, but if my pan gets too hot on electric, I do something terribly innovative while I wait for the burner to cool: I remove the pan from the heat. Shocking, I know, but it works.

Here's the big disadvantage of gas: it throws off (ie., wastes) massive quantities of heat. Electric is more efficient in that the heat from the coils goes to your pan, and not into the radiant atmosphere (at least, nowhere to the degree of a gas burner). Where I live now (Texas) this is a huge plus, because it's usually hovering around "hot" anyway, and I can't resist the temptation to let the a/c kick in and cool things down. When I had a gas stove, in warmer months, I'd end up using my electric countertop skillet whenever possible.

Where I used to live (New York) there was no a/c to cool things down. Cooking in the summer sucked.

If you have the flat-top electric stove, then the gimpy coils and cleaning problems should be much less of an issue for you.

I don't think turning on the burners in advance is a good idea, unless you mean, with a pot on it. It's too easy to forget and burn/scorch yourself, a towel, a dish, etc. If it's a decent electric stove, it shouldn't take that long. Put a lid on the pot when you're bringing things to a boil. I can boil water for a pound of spaghetti in about 5-7 minutes.

I don't know how much you bake, but electric ovens tend to maintain a much more even heat than gas ovens as I understand it. This is good for all baking, but especially things like popovers, souffles, and yeast breads to a lesser extent. It also means your cookies are less likely to burn on the bottom.

On the stove front, I can't help much; Every single place I've lived in the past 6 years has been electric (except for a studio apt I sublet for about 2.5 months once). So I don't have much experience with the differences.

Bubble: I too have a coil-type electric cooktop that tilts my pans, but I've figured out a solution. I put a level on top of the (obviously, not hot) burner and added quarters between the drip pan and the cooktop until the burner is even. I keep the quarters in a drawer when I'm not using them. Hope you see this and it helps.

I was just thinking last night that it was nice not to have the pilot lights blow out every time I opened a window, which is what always happened in the last apartment we had.

I also heat my cooking water in an electric kettle, while the burner and pot heat up with just a little water in them. That seems to be the fastest way to get a pot boiling on our standard burner electric stove.

I have a 1962 Frigidair Flair...Won't trade no way no how.

In my dream kitchen I have two cook tops: one is electric and one is gas :) With an electric range, I can tell my husband put the griddle on "5" and wait five minutes, and he will be able to perfectly cook his grilled cheese sandwich. This also works for the five year old granddaughter.

I think making candy comes out better using electric, but have no empirical data to prove it.

*Some* electric stoves may have good indicators of when a burner is hot. The standard coil or disk element models will not change color til the burner is set to medium high, but low is quite enough to burn you. I hate cleaning an electric stove because it's so hard to be sure that everything is cool to the touch.

IMO, electric stoves work very well with sandwich cookware (think Calphalon and similar manufacturers). The pans have fast heat response, so taking them off the heat works well. I like them less when I'm using cast iron, since the heat response is much slower. I can still get perfect steaks, but it is a bit of a contortionist act. Heat the pan while empty, sear one side, flip steaks, turn off the heat. Let residual heat sear the second side. Check for doneness, turn the heat back on if the steaks are too blue-rare for your taste. Other high heat and variable heat dishes can be just as finicky, and all the fussing means they take longer than on gas.

Electric *does* handle stable temperature cooking well. Soups, sauces, braises... simple food is much easier than on gas.

Totally agree with Mary. My last custom home had gas and coming from electric coil I was in heaven. That being said, when I moved to this house I had electric coil and an older stove. I hated to cook - the cleaning and difficulty to obtain even heat. I was gifted with a smooth top electric this past holiday season. I now cook every day and find it so much more enjoyable. Easy to clean, fast response, and able to start high-med or med-low, adjust the heat and cook

LOL, I now know how to use an electric stove, but back in the early 90s, I did not. We moved to an apartment that had an electric stove, my first one, and the thing got super hot! The first time I used my skillet on it, it got so hot, I couldn't separate the skillet from the coil when I realized things were getting out of control. I turned off the stove and left the apartment for awhile, waiting outside for the smoke alarm to stop going off.

I do much better now and our electric stove is still fairly new and easy to control. It actually has low, medium and high temps and they're accurate. The oven temp was way off but the manual had directions on how to fix it.

this post makes me feel better about my new apartments electric, and tiny, stove.