Gas Stoves

The right likes to make something out of nothing and nothing out of something.  (The left does it too, but to a far less extent.)  The latest example of this concerns gas stoves.  They, meaning the libs, are coming to wrench our gas stoves out of our cold dead hands, or something to that effect.  BTW, the Biden Administration immediately disavowed any interest in banning or further regulating gas stoves.  But that didn't stop, or even slow down, the outrage from the right.

The facts can be related briefly, so I'll do that.  Then I will take a deeper dive into the "controversy" so see if there is any "there" there.

A couple of weeks ago a research group announced their findings.  They reported that gas stoves are a significant source of air pollution in the home.  This air pollution is bad for you, and it is especially bad for children, they continue.  It leads to an increase in the prevalence of childhood asthma.

I know little about asthma and its causes.  Still. it seems reasonable that if gas stoves are a significant source of indoor air pollution, then that could easily lead to an increase in childhood asthma.  As to the main air pollution claim, I am going to dive a bit deeper into that next.  Then I am going to take a serious look at gas stoves, their history, and whether they are worth all the fuss.  Here goes.

Gas stoves work by burning something.  Usually, the "something" is Natural Gas.  Natural Gas is mostly Methane.  Methane consists of one Carbon atom and three Hydrogen atoms.  If you add three Oxygen atoms and rearrange appropriately, you get one molecule of water (2 Hydrogen atoms plus one Oxygen atom) and one molecule of Carbon Dioxide (2 Oxygen atoms and one Carbon atom).  That's the Cliff's Notes version.  The reality is a lot more complicated.

First of all, the three Oxygen atoms come from one and a half Oxygen molecules.  The Oxygen found in air consists of molecules containing two Oxygen atoms.  So, the Methane molecule must be broken up into its constituent parts.  And the Oxygen molecules must be broken up into their constituent parts.  Then the constituent parts must be reassembled into the final result, a molecule of water and a molecule of Carbon Dioxide.

This process is quick, but it is not instantaneous.  And what is actually going on is that multiple processes are taking place simultaneously.  Things are getting knocked apart.  Things are getting glued together.  It is literally a free for all.  And that means that all possible processes are going on at the same time.  What determines the final outcome is what is called the "rate of reaction" of each of the various competing processes.

Some processes have high rates.  Some processes have low rates.  The high-rate processes tend to predominate in the end.  And the rate depends on various factors.  An important one is temperature.  As temperature increases some rates speed up while others slow down.

It takes a deep understanding of Quantum Mechanics and related disciplines to predict how all this is going to shake out.  Fortunately, we can cut to the chase by running the experiment.  We can turn the stove on and see what happens.

And what happens is more complicated than Methane plus Oxygen in yields water plus Carbon Dioxide out.  You see the rate of reaction of the various processes is never zero.  So, we will always get some unburned Methane.  We will also get some Carbon Monoxide (one Carbon plus one Oxygen).  And we will get some soot (pure Carbon).  This is not the end of the list, but it gives you the idea.

But wait, there's more.  Air is not pure Oxygen.  In fact, air is composed of just over 20% Oxygen, just under 80% Nitrogen, and a percent or so of other stuff.  I'm going to focus on the Nitrogen.  Like Oxygen, what's in air is a molecule consisting of two Nitrogen atoms.

But what's important to our discussion is that Nitrogen is capable of combining with both Hydrogen and Carbon to form various molecules.  These are still more processes and like the other processes, their rate of reaction is never zero.  So, as we burn Methane in a stove, we will get some of those too.

So, we have two methods of attack when it comes to determining what the result of operating a gas stove is.  We can perform difficult and complex Quantum Mechanics computations, or we can just fire up the stove and measure the results.  The report is the result of doing the latter.

The tests they performed measured a certain amount of air pollution.  They concluded that the amount of pollution caused by the routine operation of a gas stove was enough to cause problems.  The magnitude of those problems was in line with the problems caused by being subjected to secondhand smoke.  That seems reasonable to me, but it can't hurt to do further research.

Next, let's take a look at the history of gas stoves.  They seem like they are the sort of thing that has been around forever, but that is wrong.  Their first appearance in their present form is actually quite recent.  Fire goes back a long way.  Gas stoves don't.

The original fire was the campfire, or something similar.  A pile of wood was burned in a relatively open space.  Highly flammable material like tinder was initially set alight using a flint and steel, or a friction contraption.  Small dry sticks were added to make it bigger.  Larger pieces of wood were then added to make it still bigger.  Once it had reached the appropriate size, more wood could periodically be added to keep it going relatively indefinitely.

This open wood fire is very inefficient.  Most of the heat it generates is wasted.  To understand why it is important to dive very shallowly into thermodynamics.  Heat over there is useless.  It needs to be transported over here to the place where it is needed.  There are two methods of heat transference, convection and conduction.  Let's start with the latter.

Heat is like electricity.  It moves easily through some materials - conductors, and poorly through other materials - insulators.  If two conductive materials are in contact with each other, then heat quickly moves from the warmer one to the cooler one.  Something warm like the flame of a fire can quickly transfer heat to something cooler, like a pan on a stove, thus warming the pan up.  The process requires direct contact.  But, if the two materials are both good heat conductors, then heat transfer happens quickly.

It took longer for scientists to understand convection.  Here, contact is not involved.  But if you put your bare hands out toward a campfire, they soon feel warm.  The mystery of what was going on was only solved when infrared waves were discovered.

They are a form of light.  Their frequency is below the "visible" part of the spectrum, so out eyes can not see them.  What's happening in my example is that the campfire is emitting infrared waves.  These waves travel across the gap between the fire and our hands.  When they strike our hands they transfer energy, the energy that warms our hands.

In assessing the efficiency of a system, it is important to focus on how much heat goes where we want.  It is also important to take both conduction and convection into account.  Usually, one is dominant and the other plays little or no part in the process.

In the case of our open campfire, there is no conduction going on.  It is pretty much all convection.  The fire is throwing infrared light out in all directions.  But most of this infrared light never hits anything we are interested in.  Instead, it is wasted.

This waste led to a great innovation, the longhouse.  A longhouse is a relatively large building that is mostly open on the inside.  A campfire is maintained in the center of the floor.  There is a small hole in the roof above the fire that lets the smoke eventually get out.

But by design, pretty much whatever the direction, the walls of the longhouse are there to trap the infrared rays coming from the fire.  Much more of the energy of the fire ends up warming up something useful.

Of course, this arrangement tends to trap a lot of the smoke and soot from the fire inside the longhouse.  So, the air is often pretty nasty.  And this problem led to the next development, the stove.  Instead of a large building the fire is contained in a much smaller ceramic vessel.  Since the vessel surrounds the fire most of the heat ends up warming the vessel.

The vessel, in turn, warms up the room it is in.  (One or two stoves per room were required for the whole thing to work.)  But heating a building with stoves kept the building warm and smoke free at the same time.  Most of the heat the fire in the stove produced went into heating the room, so fuel costs were reasonable.

But ceramic stoves are expensive to build.  And they are slow.  Fire one up and it is likely the better part of a day before you get much warmth out of it.  In Franklin's famous stove, he replaced ceramic with iron and reduced the overall size.  He as able to retain most of the efficiency and all of the smoke reduction, so his design quickly went into widespread use.

All the stoves I described so far are optimized for heating.  But with a little tinkering a stove can be modified to make it a good device for cooking.  For instance, add a separate box next to the firebox.  This becomes what we now call an oven.  Make the top of the stove flat.  Pots and pans can now be placed there and used for food preparation.  Both iron and ceramic stoves were easily modified for use in cooking rather than heating.

And everything I have talked about so far used wood as its fuel.  But with the advent of the industrial revolution, it quickly became apparent that both ceramic and iron stoves could also be adapted to use coal, so they were.  Stoves have since been adapted to use compressed sawdust, wood pellets, and a number of other materials for fuel.  In all cases, the modifications required were modest.

There are also designs that are halfway between an open campfire and a stove.  They are used in wood fired pizza ovens, for instance.  In these halfway designs the fire is mostly but not entirely enclosed.  This design is more efficient than an open campfire but far less efficient than a fully enclosed stove.  And that's about where things stood until about 1850.

Spirit stoves and lamps had been around for millennia.  A solid or liquid that vaporizes at a low temperature was used as a fuel.  The device vaporized the fuel which was then burned.  The problem was that fuel for these devices was hard to come by.  So, although the designs for these devices were well known, they were rarely used.

That changed with the discovery of oil and the industry that grew up around it.  It turned out to be relatively easy to "refine" oil into Kerosene, and other similar liquids.  These liquids make excellent fuels for spirit stoves and lamps.

Once the oil industry got going, Kerosene and its ilk became available in large quantities.  And they were cheap.  And that meant that devices that used these fuels quickly became popular.  The revenue stream produced by selling fuel, mostly for lamps, is what powered the explosive growth of the oil industry in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Once these devices came into widespread use, for the first time in history it was practical to conduct business and pleasure after the sun had gone down.  It wasn't until the beginning of the twentieth century that demand for transportation fuels (gasoline and diesel) became great enough to overtake the market for fuels to power spirit lamps and stoves.

Another product of the oil refining business was Propane gas.  It is a more complex molecule than Methane.  It consists of three Carbon and 8 Hydrogen atoms.  When it is burnt even more processes are involved, which means that even more byproducts beyond the usual water and Carbon Dioxide are produced.  But under ideal conditions the combustion products of Propane consist mostly of water and Carbon Dioxide.  Only small amounts of other stuff are produced.

And Propane is an ideal fuel for a spirit stove or lamp.  It eliminates the need to turn the fuel from a solid or a liquid into a gas.  Propane starts out as a gas.  The widespread availability of Propane is the event that led to the development of the modern gas stove.  A gas stove is simply an evolution of the spirit stove.

In the early days Propane was not widely available.  What helped increase its popularity was the observation that it liquifies if subjected to moderate pressure.  Liquid Propane takes up lots less space than the gaseous form.  That makes it easier to transport Propane in bulk.  Even so, economics did not justify its transportation over long distances.  So, availability improved but still remained spotty.

But once the idea had been introduced, people started investigating alternatives to Propane that could be introduced into the many areas where it was not available.  And it turned out that there was a process that could be applied to coal that would produce a gas that could be used like Propane.  Coal can be found in a surprisingly large number of places.  As a result, "gasworks" plants that turned coal into a Propane-like gas were soon popping up all over the place.

Seattle is one of those places.  A gasworks plant operated in the heart of Seattle for many decades.  That allowed people in Seattle to use "gas" (not gasoline but literally a gas) for cooking, heating, and lighting.  The gas was piped into homes and building all over the downtown area.  The same thing took place in many cities and towns scattered across the country.  This substantially expanded the area where gas stoves were practical.

Another method used to expand the area where gas stoves could be used involved setting up a company that used trucks to fill a Propane tank that the customer owned.  Whatever Propane appliances the customer owned could then be fed from the tank.  This service only made sense where conditions were right.  Propane could only be transported relatively short distances economically.

One thing that held the Natural Gas market back for a long time was the stupidity of the oil industry.  Oil and Natural Gas tend to be found in the same places.  But rather than seeing Natural Gas as another source of profit, the industry treated it as an annoyance that needed to be gotten rid of as cheaply as possible.   So, they just "flared" it off.  They set up large, cheap torches and let it burn.  It took them a long time to figure out that Natural Gas was actually valuable.

The thing they missed was that Natural Gas is cheap and easy to transport.  And it does not require a complex and expensive "refinery" to convert it from raw material to salable product.  With Natural Gas, only a few simple steps are necessary to remove impurities.  The "refined" gas can then be sent long distances via a "gas" pipeline.  The pipes in the pipeline can be relatively small and still move large quantities of product.  So, gas pipelines are relatively cheap to construct and very cheap to operate.

Once the industry wised up, they built Natural Gas pipelines everywhere.  As the gas pipeline network was built out, more and more of the country had access to Natural Gas.  A Natural Gas pipeline eventually made it to Seattle.  That obsoleted the gasworks.  The site of Seattle's gasworks was eventually turned into "Gasworks Park".  The park has become very popular.  It has great views and is a prime spot for flying kites.

Over time, more and more of the country could cook with a gas stove, heat water with a gas water heater, heat a home or building with a gas furnace, generally buy a lot of Natural Gas from the industry.  This was helped along by various marketing efforts that claimed that gas was superior to electricity for pretty much everything, but especially for cooking.

So, why should someone put in a gas stove?  According to the industry it was because it was the best tool for the job of cooking food well.  This conveniently hid a lot of extremely relevant history.  What did great cooks do before gas stoves were widely available?  They invented Haute Cuisine.  High-end cooking is pretty much of a French invention.  That's why so much modern cooking terminology is in French.

People have been throwing feasts since time immemorial.  But they were infrequent special events.  And the emphasis was on quantity and variety.  A feast might go on for several days.  It would consist of course after course, each different.  That took the focus away from the quality of any specific course.  And feasts typically involved drinking, a lot of drinking.  This too detracted from a focus on quality.

French royalty in the eighteenth century, and particularly in the nineteenth century, slowly started changing the focus.  Seen one feast - seen them all.  So, they started focusing on presenting courses that were unique and special.  "Come to my event because the food will be amazing and memorable."  Of course, it soon became a competition.  Who could throw the feast with the most amazing food?  Winning this competition took both skill and money.

This is when the celebrity chef was invented.  Someone who could source rare ingredients and then use them to produce something unique and delicious became highly sought after.  And, of course, at some point, one of these chefs said, "I am tired of working for some ignorant noble who treats me badly.  I am going to go out on my own and create a restaurant.  That way I get the glory and respect instead of some fool who was lucky enough to choose his parents well."  And so, the destination restaurant was born.

And as more and more of them opened it became harder and harder to stand out from the crowd.  And what was the market they were catering to?  Snooty people who had a lot of money and wanted to show off.  So, the dishes got more and more elaborate.

And their preparation got more and more labor intensive.  That drove costs up, but that was the point.  That enabled customers to be able to say, "I went to a more expensive restaurant than you did.  Why?  Because I could afford it and you couldn't."

This trend peaked in about 1900, a time before gas stoves were in widespread use.  Haute era cooking, considered by many to be a peak never equaled since, was all done using non-gas stoves.  Haute Cuisine was gradually replaced by Nouvelle Cuisine starting in about 1900.

It was a move away from exotic ingredients and labor-intensive preparation techniques.  The idea was to focus on putting out a quality product that was based on top quality ingredients and simple preparation techniques that highlighted the flavors inherent in the ingredients.

Haute Cuisine often involved changing the characteristics of the ingredients by hiding them under sauces and the like.  Nouvelle Cuisine has gone through a couple of generations of evolution.  But its goals continue to drive much of the thinking that defines how people think about how "good" food should be prepared and judged.

This history makes it obvious that there is nothing inherent in a gas stove that makes it a superior tool for food preparation.  So why do so many highly respected chefs claim to prefer them.  One reason is money.

Not surprisingly, the fossil fuel industry has been providing kickbacks to marquis chefs who tout the supposed superiority of gas stoves.  Cooking schools get subsidies if they teach their students to cook on gas stoves.  This sort of thing tends to create an echo chamber.

But there is more to it.  Consider the modern restaurant.  Starting with Nouvelle Cuisine the industry has been moving away from techniques that require elaborate preparation.  So, what does make a successful modern restaurant?

You expect a menu that features many options.  Most modern restaurants specialize in a specific type of cuisine, say Italian.  But at an Italian restaurant customers expect to be allowed to select from among a large number of different Italian dishes.

Regardless of the type of cuisine, how long are customers willing to wait between when they order and when the food arrives?  Customers used to have more patience.  One trick restaurants used to use was to serve the meal a course at a time.

The appetizer would come out.  Then a little later the soup would arrive.  And after more delay the entree would arrive.  And so it went through the entire meal.  This allowed the restaurant to stretch things out, leaving it more time to prepare the various dishes.

But even with this kind of distraction only allowed the restaurant to stretch things out so far.  Even customers at high-end restaurants were only willing to wait so long.  Then there is the whole "fast-food" segment.  It is now, and has been for some time, far larger than the high-end segment of the business.  Its success owes to the fact that it succeeded in reducing wait times to at most a few minutes.

The find dining segment of the market argues that they provide a far superior dining experience.  But still, they feel some pressure as a result of the existence of the fast-food segment.  They know that they have at most twenty to thirty minutes to get the entree in front of the customer.  And the high-end segment now has something new to worry about.  There is now a "fast casual" segment.

This market segment pitches the idea that they deliver a far superior product than the fast-food segment.  It may not be as good as what a high-end restaurant is capable of, but it is darn good.  And they get the food in front of the customer far quicker than their high-end brethren.  Fast casual has seen considerable success in the past decade or so.  And this has put even more pressure on even high-end restaurants to speed things up.

The TV show "Chopped" showcases what goes on in the kitchen of a modern high-end restaurant.  Contestants are tasked with cooking a complete course in 15-30 minutes, depending on the segment.  For each course they are presented with four "mandatory" ingredients.  The mandatory ingredients are chosen to clash with each other.  That has to result in a lot of bad food.  But it also results in good TV.  The show is very popular.

To succeed a contestant has to have a bag of tricks and hacks for getting things done in a hurry.  And a substantial component of a contestant's score depends on making the dish look pretty.  Everything but the clashing ingredients accurately mirrors the operation of the kitchen of a modern restaurant.  Chefs must be able to quickly prepare a wide variety of dishes.

Done well, these dishes may require a wide assortment of techniques.  But the kitchen is too small and too short staffed to do all those different things well.  And they have no time.  Each chef is required to be working on several dishes at once.  He can't put much attention and care into any one dish.  Thus, trick and hacks, particularly time saving hacks are critical.

Is this the best way to prepare great food?  No!  But if the restaurant can't get the food on the table fast enough, it won't matter how great it is.  People will go to the "good enough" restaurant that features faster service.

The modern restaurant kitchen is where the gas stove shines.  Different dishes require different cooking temperatures.  The temperature of each burner of a gas stove can be changed independently of the other burners.  And it can be changed instantly.

It can be instantly cranked up to provide a lot of heat under this dish.  Then it can be cranked down instantly to more slowly and gently warm that dish.  That's a lifesaver in a modern restaurant kitchen.  But does it product the best end result?  Let's see.

But first let's take a look at the history of gas stove's modern competition, the electric stove.  Each dates back to the second half of the nineteenth century.  The spirit stove evolved into the gas stove pretty quickly.  It took longer for the design of the electric stove to mature.

The science behind the electric stove is extremely simple.  I mentioned conductors and insulators above.  It is not a binary situation.  Materials exist at every point in the scale between fully conductive and fully insulating.

Consider a material that is down toward the fully conducting end of the scale, but not quite at the end.  It conducts pretty well but puts up some resistance.  To get a little more technical, a certain amount of power goes in one end.  A lesser amount comes out the other end.

The amount of resistance measures how much the power gets diminished.  So, what happens to the power that has disappeared?  The "conservation of energy" law tells us that it must go somewhere.  The answer is that it gets converted into heat.  And, in fact, the conversion ratio is 100%.  All of the power that has disappeared gets converted into heat.  That is great news if what you are trying to do is produce heat.  And that's exactly what a stove does.

So, to make an electric stove all you need to do is to push some electric power through a wire that has some resistance.  Easy - peasy.  And if the wire has little resistance then only a small percentage of the electric power gets converted into heat.  More resistance results in a higher percentage getting converted.  Selecting wire that has the right amount of resistance for use in the stove allow the top temperature the wire reaches to be dialed in.  You don't want the wire to get so hot that it melts.

And that is literally the design used for early electric stoves.  A wire with the appropriate amount of resistance, usually coiled so that it would put out more heat per foot without melting, was placed in a ceramic tray.  Ceramics can withstand high temperatures and are electrical insulators.  So, they supported the wire and kept it from touching things it wasn't supposed to.  An electric stove is not supposed to electrocute its operator.

This worked pretty well.  But it was still too easy for the wire to break or a person to get shocked.  So, a material called "Calrod" was developed.  The hot wire was surrounded by material that conducted heat but was an electrical insulator.  You could still burn yourself, but the shock hazard was eliminated.  Inexpensive stoves, like the one I own, still use Calrod.

But some thought that Calrod was not stylish enough.  That led to the third generation of electric stove design.  In these stoves the electric wire is cleverly imbedded in a flat surface so that some parts function as burners, but the rest of the surface stays cool.  This led to a more stylish electric stove but one that was less functional.

The original "wire in a ceramic tray" design depended completely on convection.  Putting a metal pan in contact with a wire carrying electric current is only good for electrocuting people.  So, by design the hot wire threw off a lot of infrared radiation.  The radiation striking the pan caused it to heat up.

Calrod enabled conduction to be the primary method of heat transfer as it eliminated the electrocution problem.  For this to work the pan needed to be in contact with the Calrod.  Neither the pan nor the Calrod was completely flat.  But both were close enough to flat to make everything work.

Modern flat-top stoves also rely on conduction.  But by design the surface is super-flat.  This means that if the pan is not extremely flat, then there is insufficient contact between the pan and the hot part of the flat-top.

So, people who get these modern flat-top stoves have to buy special pots and pans that have an extremely flat bottom.  Even with the right pots and pans flat-top stoves don't work as well as an old fashioned Calrod stove.  But they look nicer, and that is enough for a lot of people.

This discussion of the various pros and cons of electric stoves provides exactly the right context to discuss the pros and cons of gas stoves.  Gas stoves rely heavily on conduction.  The gas burner consists of a large number of tiny flames.  Why?  To put a large part of the bottom of the pan in contact with an open flame.  The hot gasses in the flame use conduction to transfer heat to the pan.

Seems like it should work well, right?  Actually, it doesn't work nearly as well as people think.  Those little flames guarantee that there will be hotter spots where the flame is and cooler spots where it isn't.  But wait!  It gets worse.  The gas flame is blue, right?  It is.  But notice that it is not all one color of blue.  Part of the flame is a lighter blue and part is a darker blue.

The color tells you how much energy is involved.  The different colors indicate different amounts of energy.  So, even the parts of the pan that are in direct contact with flame are in direct contact with flames of different temperatures.  But wait!  It gets worse.

As a kid I learned the hard way that you can have an invisible flame.  It may be invisible, but it can still burn you.  That's because the invisible part of the flame is putting out infrared light, light your eyes can't see.

A large part of the gas flame is invisible.  It is putting out a still different amount of energy because it's at a still different temperature.  All this means is that gas stoves do not provide even heat.  And that's why chefs like copper pans.

Copper is an excellent conductor of both electricity and heat.  These pans contain a layer of copper across their bottoms.  The copper quickly distributes heat from the hotter parts to the cooler ones.  This, in effect, evens out the uneven heat the gas stove provides.

Electric stoves do a much better job of providing an even heat.  Even heat means that all the food in the pan cooks at the same rate, a necessity if you want the dish to turn out well.

And there are lots of foods that require convection rather than conduction to cook properly.  Most meats fall into this category.  A bar-b-que or smoker is generally considered to be the best way to cook meat.  Both are convection devices.  One cut of meat that can be cooked quickly is a steak.  And the best way to cook a steak is to grill it.  Restaurants go to great lengths to prepare a steak so that it appears to have been grilled on a bar-b-que.

"Grill marks" are part of the bar-b-que experience.  Ignoring them for the moment, the meat is being cooked by a heat source that is not in direct contact with the steak.  Instead, it is several inches below the meat.  It is possible to do that with a gas stove.  But what about those critical grill marks?

In a bar-b-que the heat is provided by a fire that is a few inches below the meat.  The resulting convection does the bulk of the cooking.  But a bar-b-que has a "grill" consisting of narrow metal bars that hold up the meat.  They get heated up for the same reason the meat does.  But they are in direct contact with the meat, and they are hot.  So, they burn small stripes in the meat.  These stripes are called grill marks.

Chefs aspire to use a gas stove to replicate the total bar-b-que experience including the grill marks.  A  standard gas stove needs help, so they use a trick.  They place a large slab of iron on top of the stove.  It typically covers two burners.  The slab has ridges and troughs in it.

The gas stove heats the iron slab.  The iron slab gets hot enough to radiate a lot of infrared light.  That replicates the bar-b-que experience when it comes to cooking most of the meat.  The ridges reproduce the grill marks.

But it's a cheat.  It produces a good steak but not a great steak.  To understand what's still missing, let's consider the smoker.  This is the best device for cooking cuts of meat that need to be cooked slowly.  Smoking meat takes between hours and weeks, depending on the effect desired.  And a wood fire is critical to proper smoking.  No other fuel will do.

Why wood?  It's not just the slow cooking that is important.  It's the smoke.  Lots of kinds of wood are aromatic when they burn.  These aromatic components get absorbed into the meat and contribute to the final flavor.

Most smoking processes depend on using a fire composed of the right kind of wood.  Choosing the best kind of wood to use in smoking a specific cut of a certain kind of meat has been raised to an art form.  But a wide variety of woods can be used to good effect.  A good match is still better than adding no aromatic component at all.  So, not only does the fire need to be a wood fire, but it needs to be a wood fire composed of the right kind of wood.

Bar-b-que often takes a page from the wood smoker playbook.  A fire that uses the right kind of wood adds just the right subtle additional flavor to the finished product.  As a substitute, wood chips of the right kind can be mixed in with the regular fuel.  This does not work quite as well, but it can transfer some of the aromatic flavor to the meat.  And some is better than none.

But there is really no place to put some burning aromatic wood chips in the gas stove - iron slab setup.  Other processes for injecting this aromatic component are possible.  But none of them do as good a job as doing it right in the first place.  And this is what separates a good steak cooked on a gas stove from a great steak cooked over a wood fired bar-b-que.  And it is impossible to properly "low and slow" smoke meat on a gas stove.

Another technique for cooking meat that achieves superior results is the rotisserie.  A thin skewer is run through the meat.  The Skewer is used to hold the meat well above a fire.  The skewer-meat combination is rotated continuously so that the meat is cooked evenly on all sides.  This process is another one that depends on convection.

Theoretically, a gas stove could be used as the heat source for a rotisserie.  A contraption could be set up to hold the skewer of meat well above the burners and to slowly rotate it.  But the process would be wildly inefficient.  Most of the heat produced by the stove would go to where the meat isn't.  

Electric rotisseries, on the other hand, work just fine.  That's because everything can be enclosed.  Like the fire in the longhouse, the heat put off by the electric "burner" can be redirected into the meat by the enclosure.  And, since rotisserie cooking is another "low and slow" technique, not much heat is needed.

Rotisseries slowly cooking whole chickens used to be a standard feature of supermarkets.  They were "powered" by electric light bulbs.  Most of the light put out by an old style "incandescent" light bulb was infrared light.  So, they made an excellent heat source for this situation.  Both supermarket rotisserie chicken and incandescent light bulbs have mostly become a thing of the past.

Electric ovens work better than gas ovens for the same reason.  They are convection devices, so they depend on infrared.  Heated electric wires naturally give off large amounts of infrared light.  Gas ovens require tricks and work arounds to achieve a similar result.

And the "convection oven" is mostly a marketing gimmick.  A fan is added to push the air around, and to make it seem like it is something special.  But a standard, unmodified electric oven makes a fine convection oven.

People have relatively short memories.  It doesn't take them long to think that the way things are now is the way they have always been.  They go to a modern restaurant and eat food that tastes good to them.  They think, "the chef here uses a gas stove.  Therefore, gas stoves must be the best way to cook food."  This is reinforced by the many cooking shows on TV and cable.  Without fail they use gas stoves.

Modern restaurants, of necessity, serve food that can be prepared quickly.  Gas stoves facilitate their ability to move from order to food-on-the table quickly.  But part of what's going on is that restaurants don't put dishes on the menu if they that can't be prepared quickly using a gas stove.

Or, worse yet, people forget that a dish could have been prepared better if the chef had enough time to do so.  I have eaten a lot of baked potatoes in restaurants.  Some of them have been very good restaurants.  I have yet to be served a decent baked potato by any of them.  It's not the chef's fault.  It is just that it is literally impossible to prepare a good baked potato in a restaurant environment.

My mother was, at best, an adequate cook.  But she could cook a baked potato that was far superior to the best one I have ever eaten in a restaurant.  The reason was simple:  time.  My mother knew how many people she would be feeding, and she knew when dinner would be served.  And we ate what she put in front of us, so she only had to prepare a few dishes.

She knew all these things more than a day in advance so she could plan and prepare accordingly.  In spite of the fact that she wasn't in a class with professional chefs she was able to put food in front of us that was often superior to the best restaurant food.  She could out cook professionals because she could do things that they couldn't.

Back to the baked potato because it provides a good example of what I am talking about.  I shudder when I see foil wrapping a baked potato.  Foil is never used in its proper preparation.  Instead, potatoes are placed naked on the bottom shelf of an oven that has been preheated to a low temperature.  The potatoes are washed and poked with a fork a few times.  But that is the extent of the preparation that takes place before they go into the oven.

There they bake for an hour or so.  Towards the end they can be "forked" to determine how long it will be before they are done.  They go straight from oven to plate.  Their skin should be hard and crusty.  Their insides should be warm and fluffy.  Add a little butter, and maybe a bit of salt and pepper, and you have a baked potato that is superior to anything prepared under standard restaurant conditions.

Notice that no fancy techniques or special equipment is required.  And the only "skill" my mother needed to master was that of being able to determine how close to "done" the potato was simply by sticking a fork in it.  That was a skill my mother was easily able to master.  Any chef would be able to too.  Contrast that to the much more difficult skills a restaurant chef must master in order to turn out a far inferior baked potato.

Most baked potatoes that I encounter in a restaurant have skin that is thin and damp and not anywhere close to being completely cooked.  The insides are also underdone.  They are not fluffy.  The potato has obviously been cooked.  But it is still closer to hard than soft.

In theory a restaurant could properly prepare baked potatoes.  But they don't know in advance how many they will need nor when they will need them.  So, they would have to throw out 80-90% of them in order to have enough properly cooked baked potatoes on hand at all times.  That is a cost a restaurant can not afford to absorb.  So, they do what they must.

And it's not just baked potatoes.  Meat from old animals used to constitute a large proportion of the meat we consumed.  But meat from old animals starts out tough.  There are ways to render it tender but they are time consuming.  Meat from old animals is often more flavorful than meat from young animals.  So, we are missing out on that too.  But only a few old people now remember what properly prepared meat from old animals tastes like.

Restaurants don't serve tough meet to customers because customers don't like it.  So, dishes that depend on properly prepared meat from old animals are off the menu.  Instead, we get young and tender but bland meat.  And restaurants and cooking shows tell us what "good" food is, so we don't even get these things at home where it is still practical to employ the necessary techniques.

Gas stoves are better at a few things corn, peas, and other small vegetables that can be cooked quickly.  But they are a poor option when it comes to the proper preparation of lots of dishes.  But the economic environment modern restaurants operate under forces them to err on the side of speed.  And, if it's speed you need, then a gas stove is your best bet.  But if it's the widest variety of great food you want, then look elsewhere.