This is an opinion poll of sorts which is why it is here.
For those dopers who have experience cooking on a natural gas range and on an electrical range, which do you prefer?
Mrs. Prefect and I are in the market for a new stove since our current 10 year-old range’s Ceran top shattered and will cost us %66 of a new stove to replace. I have been intrigued with natural gas ranges, but have no experience with them. I have heard they are the cat’s ass for cooking once you get the hang of it.
As a collorary, is there anything to look out for? Must have features, must not have features?
Well, my experience with electric ranges is they’re much slower to adjust to the desired temperature than gas. Plus, there are a lot of fun things one can do with an open flame.
Gas is the best. Period. Only good thing with electric would be one of the sealed-glass surfaces, since that’s the easiest thing in the world to clean. But other than that ease of cleaning … gas.
Every gas stove I’ve had we ended up lighting the burners with matches sooner or later - something always mucks the self-ignition. Unfortunately, we couldn’t find one with a pilot light for the oven - evidently they don’t make them anymore. They’re all electric ignition with cutouts to prevent gas from flowing if the power is off.
Definitely look for a sealed top - makes cleanup much, MUCH easier. I also recommend the ones that have touching grates so that you can slide pans from one burner to another - very handy if you’re playing musical pots while you’re cooking.
While I love gas now, it was hard for me to learn it after spending my formative years growing up with electric. There WAS a learning curve for me. Now, though, I wouldn’t go back to electric burners, but I do prefer electric in the oven.
Really? My family had a gas stove for at least ten years, and it always performed beautifully. We never had to light it with a match or even get it repaired. Then we moved, and are now stuck with a crap-ass electric, which doesn’t work very well and is harder to clean.
Gas, absolutely. Much easier to clean, cheaper in use, responds much faster. I moved into an apartment with state of the art induction-cooking system. While I’m used to it now, I still miss my gas-stove.
Don’t go for a fancy stove. Oldfashioned is best, all modern extras are just gilding the lily.
A good gas stove is far superior to an electric range. My parents were actually prety good with letting me use our stove while I was growing up (one of my favorite things was boxed mac adn cheese, and they realized it was a lot easier to just teach me how to use the dam stove myself.) It was an electric, but then when I was about 12 or so we added an addition to our house, put the klitchen in there and got all new appliances, including a fancy gas stove. Good GOD was that so much better. You can actually go right from a boil to a simmer.
My current apartment has an electric range and I realzied after having been spoiled with gas for the last ten years how horrible they truly are.
This is in our price range well, not really, but we gotta have a stove. We installed a dishwasher after Christmas which necessitated about $1200 in kitchen maintenance. Which means we can’t justify too much more than a grand, before installation. We can get this stove for $900.
And, it’s not even close. I’d rather cook with crappy pans, crappy knives, and crappy utensils while wearing a hair-apron rather than cook on electric.