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I have an Corning glass topped range, purchased around 1976.
The only problem that I have had is that you can't use some pans.
The stove came with a set of glass pans, but over the years they
have broken. You can use metal pans only if the bottom is flat.
I am now in the market for a new stove -the burners on the glass
topped are not heating up like they used to. I am not going to
buy another, since I have found I like to cook in cast iron.
The major plus for this stove is the ease in cleaning the top,
nothing can spill into the burner.
Also, Corning no longer makes a stove. I think it was bought
out by Amana (sp?).
Linda
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| There are actually two different kinds of glass-surfaced cooktops. The
one which was described in .1 has ceramic elements, which work pretty
much like other electric elements, except, as mentioned, they're
easier to clean up, but require a flat pot. There's one other
disadvantage which my wife felt made them not preferable to ordinary
electric burners - it's even harder to tell when/where an element is
still hot.
The other kind of glass cooktop is the induction cooktop. This is the
newer type (the ceramic elements have been around for at least 20
years). The advantage of this type is that the cooktop, itself, never
actually gets hot. It induces heat in the bottom of the pan with
magnetic fields (analogous to the way a microwave oven heats the food,
not the oven). The cooktop becomes hot from contact with the pan, but
nothing like a ceramic burner. The main problem is that only iron and
steel pans will work, I think - can anyone confirm this? At least
non-metal pans won't work, that's for sure. I've also heard that the
pan bottoms don't heat as evenly as on other burners, so you could get
hot spots. I've heard from only one person who has an induction
cooktop, and they don't have strong feelings about it one way or the
other. They also don't cook much, so it's still not much information.
My wife and I cook a lot, and our first preference is for gas, then
conventional electric (we owned a solid-burner range for 5 years and
found lots of problems with that kind of cooktop).
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