Max Demian wrote
Rod Speed wrote
NY wrote
Rod Speed wrote

It isnt even clear that much gas is burnt in power
stations instead of being used for cooking directly
either given that few have gas ovens anymore.

Yes, I was surprised when I bought a new house in 2000, with cooker
already fitted by the builder, to find that the hob was gas but the oven
was electric. Electric

Yeah, almost universal now, gas ovens dont work very well at all.

Fine for hobs, but not ovens.

ovens do have the big advantage that they can be easily controlled by a
timer to come on later in the day,

And work much better than gas ovens even
when you dont need a delayed start.

Gas ovens heat up much more quickly.

But very little of what you cook in an oven is cooked
in such a short time that that matters much. The only
thing I can think of that does is pizzas.

I used to bake bread in a gas oven;

But the bread takes a long time to bake the loaf,
so the heat up time saved is minimal given that
it takes quite a while to heat up the lump of
dough, let alone the time to bake it.

I raised it in the oven set very low and just increased the setting for
baking. No need for pre-heat.

I dont bother to preheat electric ovens except
when cooking pizzas, the oven heats up quickly
enough so that it makes no difference in practice.

It does with pizzas because they are best done in
a stinking hot oven and it does take a while to get
an electric oven that hot, and the pizza itself heats
up quite quickly and cooks very quickly too, but there
isnt much else that is cooked in an oven like that.

Do they still use gas marks rather than degrees Celsius in gas ovens? I
haven't seen an explanation why gas ovens use these arbitrary numbers
rather than degrees (Fahrenheit or Celsius),

Basically because thats how they work, what you set
is the valve position, there is no thermostat like there
is with an electric oven. And there isnt that much that
need the oven temp set very accurately to cook it
properly either, its really just a few basic temps,
stinking hot, very hot, quite hot, quite cool, barely
warm for bread raising etc.

though I have some ideas why it might have happened.

Its pretty obvious really given how gas ovens work.