Efficient cooking

Which is better: a gas or electric range? Most serious cooks prefer gas, because it delivers heat instantly and is highly controllable. I used to be in the gas cooking camp. But I switched to electric nearly 20 years ago when my two daughters were very young, and I've been surprised at how satisfactory the electric cooking has been. My decision was fueled by studies I read back in the 1980s about possible long-term impacts of breathing gas combustion products in homes, particularly by children. With gas cooktops, it turns out that a lot of the energy content of the gas is not transferred to the food, so cooking efficiency is fairly low: about 40 percent, compared with 74 percent for electric, according to a study by Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). More>