Gas stoves are latest flashpoint in the culture war. Here’s what Sonoma County chefs have to say about it

Since opening his Sonoma restaurant Oso in 2014, chef David Bush has experienced what he calls “10 years of gas envy.”

The restaurant, on the south side of the Sonoma Square, was built in the 1800s and once housed the livery where people kept horses. When he bought it, he plumbed the space for gas, but to use it, the city required him to make structural improvements to the building that were so extensive and expensive that he was forced to come up with another plan.

Since then, Bush and his kitchen crew have turned out dishes to thousands of diners using nothing but an electric convection oven, three induction burners, and a panini press.

“The only flame we have comes from a blow torch that we use to finish dishes,” said Bush. “It’s really difficult, and I don’t think anyone else is going to want to deal with it, but I don’t have a choice.”

The culture wars debate over gas stoves flared like a grease fire a few weeks ago when a study about the deleterious health effects of gas stoves linked them to childhood asthma and other respiratory issues. The study led the U.S. Consumer Product Safety commissioner Richard Trumka Jr. to say his agency would “take action” to address the hazards caused by them.

Contrary to the internet memes and hyperbolic rhetoric, no one is coming to take away anyone’s gas stove — at least not any time soon. But that’s not to say the study, coupled with the role gas appliances may play in climate change, hasn’t caused some to rethink their relationship with them.

Chef Derek Corsino, a pastry chef and culinary instructor at Healdsburg High School was an early adopter of induction technology at a bakery he owned in New York before relocating to Sonoma County.

“There’s a romanticism about cooking with fire, but we need to learn how to move forward from there,” Corsino said. “Just because we’ve always done something doesn’t mean there’s not a more efficient, healthful way of doing things.”

No local gas ban

In December, the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors voted to adopt the California model building codes, which require the use of electric appliances in new residential construction but made an exception for gas cooktops. The move is part of the county’s five-year climate action plan to reduce emissions and become carbon neutral by 2030.

In 2019, the Santa Rosa City Council passed the most stringent local measures, banning use of natural gas in all new buildings three stories and under.

But the county has no requirement for electric appliances in new commercial structures, including restaurants.

Leaving gas cooktops alone — for now — isn’t necessarily a cynical political move.

According to Chad Asay, the director of Sonoma Clean Power’s Advanced Energy Center, gas stoves use relatively little energy — about 1% to 2% of a household’s total consumption, compared to other appliances like water heaters and furnaces. Gas stoves do, however, leak methane as part of their normal operation, and methane is a significant greenhouse gas.

The reluctance to move away from gas stoves isn’t all that surprising. While many consumers may be all-in on technology that controls lights or heating and cooling systems, when technology changes how people cook, it becomes personal given how food and the way it’s prepared is so deeply entwined in tradition, emotions, and memories.

It took almost a century for the gas stove, which was first introduced in the 1820s, to gain widespread acceptance and use. According to Sonoma food historian Kathleen Thompson Hill, gas was far more efficient and cooked more quickly than traditional wood or coal burning stoves, but some people were suspicious (not entirely unfounded) that the stoves might explode or that gas would poison their food. It also took time to install the infrastructure to run gas lines to homes.

An electric future

Now, after a century of using gas stoves, which are especially dominant in California, cooks find themselves at a crossroads, contemplating what a gas-less kitchen might look like. In Sonoma County, it’s possible to see how induction stoves work at the Sonoma Clean Power Advanced Energy Center in downtown Santa Rosa. The classes and demonstrations there make it seem manageable in a home kitchen, albeit with a learning curve.

The reality is quite different for restaurant chefs who turn out meals for dozens, maybe hundreds of people every day, with their success and their livelihoods tied, at least in part, to the reliability, consistency, and comfort of cooking on gas.

Joshua Schwartz, a Windsor-based chef who has cooked in some of America’s top-rated restaurants, now oversees the food program at a Napa winery. He also has a fly-fishing business that takes him from Alaska to the Bahamas and regularly finds himself in kitchens with stoves of varying styles and quality, including kitchens with electric coil burners.

“It’s hard to go from high heat to low heat with electric,” he said. “It’s definitely more challenging, and I burned a lot of things, but I’ve found ways of making do.”

Induction burners are different from a standard electric cooktop, though. They create heat through electromagnetism, and are more efficient because they waste very little energy. Induction stoves cost more than a regular electric or gas varieties, and sometimes require the purchase of new cookware needed to make the stoves work. Heat is created when magnetic pots and pans — like cast iron or some types of stainless steel — make contact with the magnetic coil beneath the stove’s smooth surface.

It’s that contact that poses a challenge, particularly in restaurant kitchens, where cooks have a reflexive instinct to pick up a saute pans as they cook. On induction, as soon as the pan is removed from the surface, the heat goes away.

“I try to train the cooks to leave the pan on the burner and stir with their tongs or a spoon, but the natural process is to grab that pan and flip whatever’s in there,” said Bush.

Having an all-electric kitchen with limited burner capacity has forced Bush to completely rethink how he plans and executes a menu. He leans heavily on cold food like oysters, crudo, and poke. Instead of Bordelaise, a classic French sauce made in a pan, he uses chimichurri as a garnish for steak.

“It’s changed me as a chef, from the reliance on having the equipment I need or want, into finding new ways to create great food and great flavor,” said Bush. “It’s personal growth through adversity.”

Induction offers advantages for some applications, and many restaurant kitchens do use it for its precision, but not exclusively. Water boils more quickly. Schwartz says it’s great for simmering and braising.

“From a pastry aspect, the inconsistencies of gas go completely away,” Corsino said. “That early experience (with induction), it’s changed the way I teach now, because I saw the value when the technology was still in its infancy.”

Corsino’s students learn on a variety of kitchen equipment, including portable induction stoves. That exposure, he says may lead some to choose induction cooktops for dorm rooms or influence their decisions about kitchen design when buying a home. Still others may have restaurants of their own and help lead the industry to becoming increasingly electrified, which he’s hopeful for.

Technology, infrastructure not ready

Bush and Schwartz don’t have an issue with induction itself. They’re both highly skilled chefs who often use technology to push culinary boundaries, so they are far from being Luddites. What holds back advancement, they say, isn’t an unwillingness among chefs to embrace something new, but rather fledgling technology and outdated infrastructure.

“It seems like the cart’s before the horse,” when the talk comes to fully electric kitchens, Schwartz said. “It would be different if there was a cutting-edge cooking surface (for commercial use) and they said ‘now we want to do this.’”

Bush knows all too well the technological limitations of induction for the volume of cooking done in restaurants. Since opening Oso, he’s gone through what he estimates is a minimum of 20 induction cookers.

“They just don’t last like gas stoves do,” he said. “The buttons eventually fail, they burn out, they have a pretty short life span.”

There’s no warning when they’re about to go on the fritz, either. He’s had induction cookers go out in the middle of service, which brings the kitchen to a temporary standstill while they haul out the defective burner and bring in a new one that Bush has always at the ready.

Replacing them is costly, and there’s the issue of the waste created by defunct appliances, which has its own environmental impact.

Additionally, Bush doesn’t think the current infrastructure in Sonoma County is enough to support fully electrified restaurants.

“Restaurants draw an incredible amount of energy; everything about the place is lit up and just humming,” he said. “If we had 10 induction cookers, that would require another PG&E substation put in the middle of Sonoma.”

Maybe someday the resources will be there, but Bush hopes it won’t be an expense city and county governments pass along to people like him.

“They’re constantly stacking infrastructure (improvements) that should have been put in a long time ago onto whoever wants to open a business,” he said.

If there ever comes a time when restaurants are forced to forge ahead in a gasless future, Schwartz is pragmatic.

“The heartbeat of a chef is to adapt to changes,” he said. “It takes a skilled chef to be able to do that.”

You can reach Staff Writer Jennifer Graue at 707-521-5262 or jennifer.graue@pressdemocrat.com.