this post was submitted on 07 Dec 2023
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It’s the oven, not the stovetops, where gas is most useful.
Gas ovens give moist heat which is good for baking moist foods like cakes. Electric ovens give dry heat which is good for foods that should be crispy (pizza crust). Ideally an oven would offer both kinds of fuels. Europe lacks in this regard (no thermostatic gas ovens anymore!).
Energy efficiency aside, the stovetop debate is somewhat silly in comparison because you can cook anything on either stove and adapt to the control.
I started baking bread during the pandemic and bought a spray bottle and filled it water.
Does the trick for me.
My electric oven has some sort of steam-bake option.
Wouldn't it be far more ideal for the electric oven to have a way of introducing moisture instead of requiring all the components for a separate fuel source?
It does. Stick a pan with water in it in the oven with your baked item. This is necessary even for gas ovens, if you require a moist cooking chamber.
The air inside a gas oven isn't especially wet at 400°F, because of the inverse relationship of temperature and relative humidity.
A simpler design is an advantage in itself but it doesn’t cover all factors (e.g. pricing).
If your closest power plant burns fossil fuels, then there’s a big inefficiency at the power plant which still has the emissions followed by a considerable inefficiency in the transmission of electricity and still some heat loss from the wall to the food in converting electric back to heat. Electric heat is more efficient if you only measure from the wall to the food. It’s overall less efficient because you have fuel → heat → steam → turbine → electricity → transmission → heat conversion (lossy at every step), when you could simply have fuel → transmission → heat. And as a consequence electric is usually more costly. Exceptionally, some regions manipulate the energy pricing in order to make electric nearly as economical as gas.
So whether gas makes economical sense depends on where you are. The prices can also swing especially in Europe due to the Russian war. Thus having both options is ideal once you consider pricing (esp. fluctuating pricing). Having both options hedges against price swings and at the same time gives you the option to choose the kind of heat you need for what you’re preparing.
power outages
Some folks live out in the sticks and have frequent power losses. Every storm is likely to cause a power outage in some remote areas where the power lines are near trees. And because those communities are small, response time is slow. So the power can be out for days. Several times this happened to someone in my family when they had a cake in their electric oven. The cake would have been ruined had they not had the option to transfer the cake to a propane gas grill.
Seems like you could just add some water to the oven and get the best of both worlds from an electric oven in that case.