What you see here is a browning test done on 3 different stoves (electric, induction,
and gas).
Here is the biggest burner on each stove.
And here is the second biggest.
Can you guess which stove produced which results?
I am so excited to finally show you all the stovetop testing I did this summer.
If you are in the market for a stove, you’ll learn which questions to ask when choosing
one.
If you are not looking to buy a new stove, you’ll learn how to get the best possible
performance out of what you already have.
The most important metric in evaluating a stove (to me) is the square footage of simultaneous
browning.
Any stove can brown 1 piece of bread or 1 piece of meat, the question is can it do 4
to 8 at the same time and do it evenly.
The reason I am obsessed with this metric is that browning is the most important task
that your stove performs.
It’s the one task that can’t be outsourced to another appliance.
According to consumer reports, the most common tasks people do with their stoves are boiling
water, simmering tomato sauce, and melting chocolate.
Hmm, I don’t know about you, but I melt chocolate at most once a year and for those
occasions there are gazillion ways to do it: a water bath, a microwave, and if you want
perfect precision -- sous-vide.
Simmering tomato sauce -- I guess they are testing if you can maintain a low simmer over
many hours for something like a braise.
I would just put that braise in the oven.
Not only will that maintain a gentle simmer, but will also allow the top of the meat to
brown or the chicken skin to crisp.
For things like stocks, rice, and beans, there is an instant pot.
And about boiling water.
Electric kettles do it exceptionally fast.
You can always start your water in a kettle and then pour it into a pot for actual cooking.
I am not saying that consumer reports tests aren’t useful.
It’s just that to me they are not as important as browning.
A stove can be great at consumer report tests and yet, completely choke when you are browning
a large pan of short ribs, or making grilled cheese for more than 2 people.
More power doesn’t always equal more even browning.
To test the square footage of browning, I used a pan that is 12 inches in diameter with
straight sides.
Yes, it’s a big pan.
Unfortunately, it turned out that my beloved Cuisinart pan was not induction compatible,
so I bought a Misen stainless steel pan with the same dimensions and that’s the pan I
used for all my testing.
To get used to each stove, I browned some wonderbread.
It’s cheap and uniform and gives you a good idea of what to expect from your burner.
Then I browned some zucchini slices.
And finally, I cooked my chicken provencal dish.
This involved searing chicken thighs, then dropping the heat to low to sweat the onions
and make a tomato sauce.
This tested the high heat sear, a low heat sweating of aromatics, and the transition
between the two.
I did all these tasks on the biggest burner.
Then I repeated the bread and zucchini tasks on the second biggest burner.
And here is why.
You don’t need to throw large dinner parties to need more than 1 big burner.
Say you are cooking for 4 people and want to make a seared skirt steak and sauteed asparagus.
The smallest pans that can handle those tasks are two 12 inches skillets with sloped sides.
Any time you are dealing with thin proteins (skirt steak, chicken schnitzel, trout or
some other thin fish), you need a large surface area for browning.
Even to make grilled cheese for 4 people, you’ll need two twelve inch skillets.
Can all stoves handle that?
Turns out, the answer is no.
The stoves I included in my test were all 30 inches wide.
That’s the most common size that people buy.
Obviously if you have room for a 48 inch stove, you’ll get more browning square footage.
But I wanted to see what different types and brands of stoves could do within the constraints
of 30 inches.
You might be wondering why I included 2 gas ranges.
The Wolf gas range is mine and I threw it in for comparison because that’s what I
am used to.
Very few people buy $6,000 stoves, so I wanted to have a more typical gas stove in this test.
Let’s first look at how these stoves brown on their biggest burner.
For these tests I tried to keep the burners at roughly 8 out of 10.
In other words, high, but not the highest.
Here is the Wolf gas stove.
Since the outside of the pan tends to be hotter than the middle of the pan on gas, I’ll
start to flip with the outer pieces.
The browning looks pretty even to me.
The only one that’s a little pale is this one in the middle.
Here is Maytag gas.
Looks every bit as good as Wolf to me.
Everything is brown from the most outer edges to the middle.
Here is GE electric.
Since the center is the hottest part on electric, I’ll start flipping in the center to give
the outer pieces a bit more time.
That’s quite good.
A few outer pieces didn’t get much action, but overall, it’s very good.
And here is KitchenAid induction.
Again, I am starting to flip in the center because on induction that’s the hottest
part too.
It’s all good, except for the edges.
The induction gave me the sharpest fall off.
You can even see it within a single piece.
Here we are cooking, and here we are not.
If we are to judge by the largest burner alone, I’d say all these stoves did well.
Gas did slightly better, but not by much.
But what happens when we try the second largest burner?
On my Wolf stove, I have 3 identical burners of 15,000 BTU each, and they produce near
identical results.
On the Maytag stove, the 2 front burners looked identical.
The only trouble was that one of them had a very uneven flame.
Here is what happened to my wonder bread if I kept my pan centered over the flame.
The owner of this stove said that he periodically rotated his pan to deal with this unevenness.
But there is another option.
I shifted the pan a couple of inches towards the bigger flame to distribute it over a larger
area and got very nice browning without rotating my pan.
With this little adjustment, my toast browned very evenly and so did zucchini.
If your gas range has an uneven flame it is most likely caused by clogged ports and a
service technician can easily fix that for you.
If you don’t want to pay for the service call, you might be able to do it yourself.
I’ll link to a YouTube video in the description below on how to do it, so that you don’t
have to put up with uneven flames.
On an electric stove, the second biggest burner didn’t do nearly as well.
Way more of the periphery stayed completely pale.
And on an induction stove, the difference between the largest burner and the second
largest was the most drastic.
The largest pan I could get good performance on using the second largest burner on KitchenAid
induction was a 10 inch with sloped sides.
Since I knew that going into my zucchini test, I wanted to see if I could come up with some
hack to make this smaller burner perform a little better.
I tried preheating my pan on the biggest burner and then moving it to the smaller burner to
cook the zucchini, and even with that the outside pieces stayed completely pale.
This gives you a rough idea of how much simultaneous browning you can get on each stove.
Both gas ranges gave me 182 square inches.
GE Electric gave me 154 square inches.
Although it struggled with a 12 inch pan with straight sides on the second burner, a 12
inch pan with sloped sides would work fine.
And KitchenAid induction gave me only 132 square inches.
You might be wondering why I didn’t include any back burners in my calculation of browning
square footage?
That’s because once you put 2 skillets on the front burners, almost nothing fits in
the back.
Now that you get a rough idea of how much browning these stoves are capable of, let’s
cook something real.
Let’s make a chicken braise.
For the electric and induction stoves, I’ll use the biggest burner.
The chicken thighs browned reasonably well on all stoves.
Here they are on Wolf gas.
On Maytag gas.
On electric.
And on induction.
Eclectic and induction are not as even, but perfectly acceptable.
Once the chicken browned on the second side, I needed to drop my heat before adding the
onions.
On gas and induction the adjustment was almost instant and didn’t require any planning.
On electric not so much.
To get the right amount of heat for the onions, I had to turn down my heat as soon as I flipped
the chicken.
Basically, I had to anticipate it, and adjust the setting roughly 2 minutes ahead.
If you didn’t plan ahead, you’d need to move your pan off the burner and wait for
the burner to calm down.
I know many owners of electric stoves who preheat another burner to low and move the
pan to get a quick high to low transition.
But I do have a bit of good news about modern electric stoves (or at least GE Profile).
It pleasantly surprised me with how quickly it heated up.
Some electric burners heat up so slowly that you need to start preheating them before you
start to chop your vegetables.
But GE profile got to moderately high heat in about 3 minutes.
For comparison, my Wolf range preheated the same pan to roughly the same temperature in
2 minutes.
Yes, it’s a difference, but not a huge one.
The onions did well on all stoves.
I didn’t feel that one stove did any better than another, but that’s probably because
onions get stirred once in a while, so any unevenness in the heat is not as noticeable.
I wasn’t testing how low the burners can go during a simmer.
But here is an interesting observation.
Here is the sauce simmering on electric -- I am getting bubbles everywhere.
And here it is simmering on induction and I am not getting any bubbles on the periphery.
The bubbling area is roughly 8 and half inches in diameter.
If I am reducing stock, it doesn’t matter, but if I am cooking beans or braising meat
on the stove top, it would be important to use a pan with a smaller diameter.
Maytag gas stove had the same issue.
It might have been even worse.
The lower the heat, the smaller the area that actually simmers.
And I completely forgot to record a low simmer on Wolf, but I’d imagine it wouldn’t be
very different from Maytag.
Long story short.
If you want an even and gentle simmer on the stove top, electric and induction are indeed
way better than gas.
Obviously, any glass top is a joy to clean compared to gas.
Induction was particularly wonderful since it cooled off very quickly, so I didn’t
have to wait to wipe it down.
Electric took a while to cool off, so I had to wait to clean it.
And because it was white, it wasn’t as easy as I expected.
Even the tiniest amount of grease burned into the surface of the burners and looked bad.
While I was using one burner, the other one got slightly splattered.
I wiped it down before using it but didn’t wash it with soap and here is what happened.
Of course on a black burner it wouldn’t be noticeable.
That being said, even this white flat top cleaned up very quickly and easily.
The owner of this stove showed me a wonderful cleaning product that made the burnt on grease
come right off.
Gas was, of course, the worst when it came to cleaning.
I always feel terrible for people who get gas stoves with stainless steel tops.
Those are hopeless.
You’ll never scrub all that splattering grease from them.
Even if the front of your stove is stainless, what you want on top is black enamel.
This way the polymerized grease -- that’s the hardened stuff -- doesn’t show.
There are all sorts of nooks and crannies with gas stoves, which requires a lot of scrubbing.
And you can’t get them super wet or your igniters start clicking and stop working until
they dry out.
If cleanliness is more important to you than the browning square footage, gas stove might
be a bad choice.
Keeping it spotless is almost impossible.
See, even after I scrubbed everything, I still have some hardened grease.
To me that’s part of life.
But maybe someone in the comments will give me a cleaning tip of how to get rid of it.
And don’t even get me started on cleaning the grates.
They are a real pain in the ass.
I wish I could just put them on my grill and have everything burn off, but I can’t because
they have little rubber feel that are not removable.
I find it hilarious that 30 inch ranges try to squeeze in 5 burners.
If you ask me, even 4 is one too many.
Unless your pans are miniscule, only 3 reasonable pans can fit on a 30 inch stove.
When you are shopping for a stove, bring a 12 inch, 10 inch, and 8 inch pans to the store
and play with them.
See what actually fits.
This is the one place where a Wolf would beat any of the other stoves.
I can do this.
Or this.
On Maytag gas, I can do this or just have two 12 inch pans in the front with nothing
in the back.
On GE Profile Electric, I could fit a 12 with straight sides, 12 with sloped sides and one
8 inch.
KitchenAid Induction gave me the least room.
All I could fit was a 12 and a 10 inch.
I could sort of squeeze an 8 inch behind the 10 inch, but it wasn’t positioned right
over the magnet.
Probably ok for simmering something, but not for browning.
Also pay attention to where the big burners are.
I’ve never met a cook who wants a big burner in the back and a little one in the front,
but many stoves do that.
I noticed some interesting grate designs lately.
Things like this.
I would bring your smallest pans to the showroom to make sure they don’t wobble.
And don’t only test them smack over the burner.
Move them a few inches this way and that to make sure they are still steady.
If the flame is uneven, you might need to shift a bit to one side or the other and you
want to make sure your little pot can do it without tipping over.
If you are shopping for a gas stove to use on propane, check the specs to see what kind
of burner output you’ll get.
It’s not always the same as the output for gas.
Just because the propane output isn’t listed in the specs doesn’t mean that it’s equivalent
to gas.
That’s how I ended up with a Wolf.
It’s terribly overpriced, but it’s one of the few companies that could guarantee
good output on propane.
I know that some viewers were hoping that I would give them specific stove model recommendations.
But I can’t really do that.
That is kind of like asking a YouTube psychologist for a spouse recommendation.
What makes a great spouse for person A might make a terrible spouse for person B. All I
can do is help you figure out what questions to ask and what tests to do.
Oh and also how to work around inevitable imperfection.
There is no such thing as a perfect spouse or a perfect stove.
The biggest advice I can give you is to try a stove before buying it.
Ask what your friends and family have.
Offer to bring your pots and pans and to cook them dinner on their stove.
You’d be surprised how many people would be more than happy to let you do that.
So, a huge thanks to all the wonderful cooks who volunteered their stoves for this video.
To Afiq for not only volunteering his stove, but also his time to help me plan this project.
And to Chris Portal for teaching me how to shoot off-site.
As with everything in cooking, the answer is “it depends”.
I have so much more to tell you about induction.
But it will need to wait till next week since this video is getting awfully long.
Stay tuned, don’t forget to subscribe, and if you are ever in the Boston area maybe I’ll
see you in one of my classes.