Quote:
Originally Posted by Chef
The problem is the nature of the heat. When you turn a gas burner up or down you get an immediate change in the temperature of the burner. With a standard electric range the heating element gradually heats up and cools down. This means it is easier to have precise control of the temperature of your pans with gas. When you are working a saute station having your pans at the temperature you want them is important in cooking things correctly. I've worked on electric ranges before. The challenge is that you have to anticipate the speed at which they heat up or cool down, it is much more difficult and throws off the timing of cooking. Also they will still cook your pan even after you have turned them off. This means that you have to remove your pan from the range and find a place to put it while you are doing other things. That little bit of time is a big deal when you are cooking 8 or 12 pans at once. It is easier to be able to turn off the gas and leave it there. Cooking on an electric range in a restaurant is possible but it is about twice as difficult as working a gas range and requires completely relearning how to cook saute.
Cooking saute well, especially in a busy upscale restaurant, requires a lot more brain power than non-restaurant people realize. Most great fine dining saute cooks are in about the 80th percentile of intelligence or higher. One of the challenges of a head chef is to find people who are smart enough to get an advanced degree but are instead willing to work for $16 an hour in a hot, cramped, unpleasant space without breaks and live completely detached from normal life (which is why cooks tend to be immigrants or weirdos, that is where you find smart people without degrees). By changing from gas to electric and making saute harder, you now may need a saute cook in the 90th percentile of IQ rather than the 80th. That is going to make staffing the kitchen harder.
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I was very aware of those features of gas ("instant" heat and "instant" no-heat-anymore) but I appreciate all the extra info... and it's true that in my case, it was a very small, very exclusive restaurant (always full and you had to reserve way ahead of time) with ONE chef who was one of this city's best and I assume he knew his equipment extremely well. When you're familiar with your stove you pretty soon will be able to tell exactly where to set the elements and how long to wait. He also had counter space to put anything he wanted to get off the heat anytime.
If you have big volume and several chefs, I agree that in this case it's a factor that makes things more complicated (with no advantage at the restaurant level, as you don't "see" the reduction in GHG vs clean electric).