The one I have is 15 years old and though it still looks great, a close inspection will reveal regular use. Nothing a good professional buffing wouldn’t take care of, but there’s clear evidence of usual wear-and-tear. I can’t imagine owning one and not using it.
I love to cook and my late husband and I loved to entertain together. The stove unit was a planned splurge. Looking at the cost for comparable units today, I have zero regrets. I still entertain regularly and the stove gets frequent workouts.
Gone are the days of making Hollandaise sauce on the tiny space between 4 miserable electric coil burners using only the radiant heat from the oven unit, because the goddamn burners were impossible to control with enough precision to keep it from curdling. No more shuffling one pan off to make room for another pan on. No more hunting for the “right” burner. They’re all tiny heat to full monty.
That doesn’t mean the surface is bendy, it means there are multiple zones that recognize and heat a vessel.
It looks sort of like this:
This design means I can put basically anything I want anywhere I want (as long as it’s induction capable), and only the zones with a vessel will be activated. If I put a small saucepan at front right, only that one zone will be triggered. At the opposite end of the scale, I have a big Le Creuset griddle that covers all four zones, and that works just fine too.
It’s pretty nifty, all things considered. I still prefer gas, overall, but this is a close second.
Our current one has 4 burners - it’s the old-style ceramic coil burner that you can’t really find any more; standard size. The house I grew up in had a much wider cooktop. Still 4 burners, but room for a built in flat griddle in the middle back. If I had space for such a thing, I would not get a built-in grill - too inflexible; I’d go for an extra burner, perhaps.
The right front burner seems to be the one that gets the most use. On ours, that, and the back left burner, are the larger ones. I’ve almost never had 4 pots boiling; rare even to have 3.
The idea of something that could be two single burners, or one extra large one, has some appeal.
We just got our new induction cooktop (ordered in December, finally delivered last week). I think this is the one we got. It looks like we can use the left-hand burners as a single large one. And the back right one is more toward the middle, rather than directly behind the right front one - interesting design decision that lets the right front burner handle larger pots.
you know my grandma had a double oven stove and i never understood it as a kid until the year i had ot help with thanksgiving dinner…when your feeding 25 people 2 ovens are definatly needed
I have 36 inch stove with four burners and a grill in the center. I liked the idea of a grille…I was wrong.
We have pretty big and strong range hood, but if you think you can grill a steak inside in the winter, you are are mistaken. Sets off every smoke alarm in the house.
Mine has little cast aluminum bases and removable iron caps that make up the burner. Each size of burner is literally a different size - I couldn’t fit a regular base in a simmer burner area.
Our house had a double wall oven as well. At one point, one or the other had failed, and Mom had it removed, and set the microwave in the empty space. Ultimately she replaced the pair and put the microwave elsewhere.
The popularity of double ovens seems to vary widely. When we were house hunting 30+ years, we were looking at townhouses and nothing had anything other than the generic range (burners and single oven). Our current house, built in the 1990s, has a double wall oven - and you’ll often see those where the top oven has all the features and the bottom is basic: our top oven had digital controls and was self-cleaning but the bottom had dials and no cleaning cycle. When we replaced it, we opted for a pair with all digital (though only the top has convection).
A friend did a MAJOR kitchen remodel including extending the house a bit. She put garbage disposals in both sides of the sink (which I envy) but a generic range with single oven.
I insisted on this when we were designing our kitchen. But our second (smaller) oven is a combi. It does regular baking, plus convection, plus microwaving, plus it has a steaming function. It’s brilliant.
A lot of them, at least the last time I looked (which was quite a while ago), had the problem that neither of them was large enough to hold my turkey roaster.
Which doesn’t get used often; but when I want to use it, I really want to use it.
I went the next step. I added two large ovens below the counter on our install and instead of a microwave we put in an combi oven. So I get three ovens. I almost added a warming drawer too but it would have raised the microwave too high.
I had a co-worker years ago who had two sets of double ovens. Her avocation was Christmas cookie baker, so for about a week a year, all of those ovens were working at capacity (well, almost capacity). I knew her slightly, but then she was Shanghai’d onto a horrible project I’d been working on, and we got to know each other better. I was highly pleased to be one of the invitees to her baking day party…and get a couple of dozen cookies, too!
Yes. I have the standard four hob top, but the back two hobs are occupied by a toaster and an egg cooker (we cook a lot of eggs and for various boring reasons the egg cooker is actually more convenient than boiling).
At Christmas I will move those things aside and use the hobs, and perhaps at other times too, in theory. So it’s still useful. Besides, it’s a free-standing cooker, not built in, and the part under the hob needs to be big enough for the oven, so four hobs it is.
