Recovery time. You may be able to preheat a pan, particularly a heavy gauge one, enough to get an initial sear. The problem occurs after that. As the temp drops, a low BTU burner cannot provide enough heat to get the pan back up to a reasonable cooking temp.

An obvious example is cooking pasta. You get the pot to a rolling boil, add the pasta, and with a low BTU burner, the pasta sits there in tepid water for several minutes before you can get it back to a boil. Similar problems in all kinds of scenarios: browning meat for example. Again, you may get the first side of your short ribs to brown, but with a low heat burner, you can't keep the kind of heat up that you need to get an equally intense sear on sides 2, 3, and 4.

Yes, the type of pan makes some difference: a triple clad pan will make more out of a low BTU burner than a cheapo paper-thin single layer SS pan, but it will in no way make up for the lack of heat.

In the end, for day to day cooking, 12K vs 18K BTU's probably don't make much of a difference. And yes, there is a "testosterone driven" component that drives some folks (who, me???) to want to brag on their nuclear output ranges. But I will hazard that as your cooking skills improve, and you try more diverse recipes and styles of cooking that there will come a point where you just love the fact that you can really sear the &%^&*@ out of your foie gras when you need to.

Another factor is *where* the heat is distributed. On one extreme is induction cooking which directly heats the cookware. The only loss is the cookware then heating the air and cooktop. Many argue and can pretty convincingly support that the better open-burner designs get more of the heat to the cookware than most (if not all) of the home sealed-burner designs.

As clinresga points out, the higher output burners excel in two things:
1) Getting a big pot boiling faster
2) *Keeping* the temperature on a pot or pan high throughout cooking

In my opinion, the biggest advantage of gas over (conventional or non-induction glass-top) electric is *control* of temperature. You can nearly instantaneously adjust the amount of heat that the pan is receiving from the burner. After you cook on gas, the ability to get the pan to the right temperature and then *keep* it there is something that becomes "expected" and something of a frustration when you do have to cook on electric.

15, 18, 22? Meh, mainly marketing. For the same burner design, you'll see the 22 kBTU/hr burner, for example, take around 10 minutes to boil a given pot of water vs. 15 min for the 15 kTU/hr burner. In my mind, there are bigger differences between open- and sealed-burner to be considered than between 18 or 22 kBTU/hr.

These are both good responses and believe it or not, the sales person is actually correct.. kind of. Higher BTU *does* in fact cook food faster but there are many factors involved. Keep in mind that the "BTU" that people throw around in the appliance world in not actaully BTU. It's BTU/hr. A BTU is the amount of energy it takes to raise the temp of one pound of water by one degree F at standard pressure.

That means as a rough example let's say you want to cook a medium rare stake (140-145F) which starts out at 45F. So you need to raise the core temp of the steak by 100F. Assuming everything else is equal, then cooking that steak will be 2 times faster with a 20kBTU/hr burner vs a 10kBTU/hr burner. Of course reality is, cooking that steak at 20kBTU/hr is probably going to char the outside before the center is up to temp if it's a thick cut. So, buying that bigger burner won't do you any good because you've got to turn it down to 10kBTU/hr anyways. But it does allow you to control when you want to sear and when you want to cook.

Thank you, everyone, for your expertise. What I don't understand about amcook's explanation, however, is that one doesn't turn down the BTUs, one turns down the flame, right?

Yes, you turn down the flame. The trick with these high-powered ranges is learning how low to keep the flame not how high. Something that you might have cooked on high with an old range you would now cook on medium or even medium low. Cooking on high will certainly cook it faster but it may also burn it. High is usually reserved for boiling water and stir-frying in a wok.

sfjeff
In my opinion, the biggest advantage of gas over (conventional or non-induction glass-top) electric is *control* of temperature. You can nearly instantaneously adjust the amount of heat that the pan is receiving from the burner. After you cook on gas, the ability to get the pan to the right temperature and then *keep* it there is something that becomes "expected" and something of a frustration when you do have to cook on electric.

I agree but the pans are what I wonder about. I had used all thick bottom pans. Now with the 22k large area burner I tend to use thin ones. My weird logic logic tells me you got a Ferrari burner and you put throw a thick bottom pan on it you down rated the performance to a diesel tractor trailer rig. Now if I going to simmer I use the thick pan. For the pasta water I use a thin stainless large area bottom pot. I hate to say it but after all of the years of buying all high dollar thick bottom pots I have had to drag out my old hand me down revere ware copper clad pots. I love to deep fry in the big stock pot. I love every one of the frying pans. As a rule I use no aluminum or Teflon coated pans.

We're drifting off a bit, but probably a reasonable tangent. "Thick" cookware can be used for two reasons. As you suggest, using thick cookware can help to mitigate the temperature drop and are especially useful when the burner isn't powerful enough for the cooking style. Cast iron pans are a great example of cookware that "hold" a lot of heat.

Another reason to use "thick" cookware is to get uniformity of heat. Getting away from a thin, relatively poor conductor of heat (e.g., stainless steel) and using a better conductor, such as copper or aluminum, means that the heat flows from warmer to cooler places (such as where your food has taken heat from the metal) more quickly. Cladding of copper (such as the RevereWare pieces) or adding of an aluminum disk to the bottom are ways that allow the benefits of a stainless steel inner surface to be combined with the better heat conductivity. All-Clad shows a somewhat different cladding approach, as the "original" commercial pieces were effectively all-aluminum pots (excellent conductor) with a stainless steel liner.

Your choices seem reasonable. For a simmer, control and even temperature are important, so a better-quality pan is important. With pasta water you have the water to carry heat and nothing to burn on; no reason to spend top dollar on a pot that "just" boils water. However, if you use that same pot for simmering stew, which doesn't circulate as easily as water, something with at least a disk bottom would be "safer" in keeping that stew from sticking.

First, I'm going to go against conventional wisdom and make the claim that a good even heating burner will allow you to use more "cheap" pans rather than require more expensive cookware. I see so many posts asking, "now I have my XYZ high power range, what kind of high-end cookware do I need." From my personal experience, I've found that a good burner will make more use out of old non-clad cookware because you don't need your cookware to do as much to distribute and/or hold heat. Pots and pans that I pretty much wrote off and was ready to take to Goodwill when I had my sealed Viking are now back in use with the Bluestar.

Second, to add a bit to the "thick" vs "thin" discussion.. I do a lot of wok cooking. Let's just say I've made spaghetti sauce in a wok. :) I've used standard machine pressed, hand hammered, cast iron, and even stainless (gack!). My favorite is the hand hammered high iron steel even though I love cast iron and use cast iron skillets almost exclusively. I know many argue that cast iron is better for stir frying because of better heat retention. There is some truth to this and I would probably prefer cast iron on a lower power or electric burner but a 22k burner with a traditional hand hammered wok gives me so much more control. When I shut off the burner, the heat dissipates almost immediately. I can go from searing to simmer quickly which is necessary for many dishes with harder to cook veggies. Then when I need to go back on high to burn off excess liquid, that takes seconds instead of minutes. Also, if I'm making several dishes, I can go from dish to dish very quickly and simply rinse the wok in between. No way can you stick a hot cast iron wok under water without it cracking. One of these days, I'm going to put in one of those wok ranges with a faucet and drainage. Bluestar needs to offer that next. :)

So with a good even heating high power burner, you can use a much wider range of cookware and decide what works best for you. We have a plain very thin stainless steel pot that was part of my wife's college cookware set that we are still using. We've almost gotten rid of it several times but with the more even heating burners, we're using it all the time to make boil pasta or steam veggies.

I have been told--and reasoned myself--that a higher BTU gas stove can utilize a greater range of quality pots/pans, for all the reasons that have been mentioned. Cheap pans have been especially recommended for the errant pasta pot.

I have a range of very good quality pots and pans, that I am slowly adding to. (Demeyere, some copper, etc.) When I am searing or whatnot, I find that if I turn the temperature up after searing the first batch, I am able to keep a decent temperature to sear the rest of whatever I am doing.

I will be buying a gas stovetop in a few years, and am trying to figure out the optimal BTU level for what I do. I like cooking and searing the **&$%# out of things, but at the same time, the stove is not on constant use. I was contemplating a stove that had one burner devoted to a high BTU.

I've been searching for these explanations for months. Thanks everyone! I have a cooktop with four burners each with a different BTU rating and burner ring size. My confusion is pot size in relation to burner size. Do you select burner based on pan size or method of cooking or what you're cooking? For example 12" skillet, browning meat ... large burner on medium high or mid-large burner on high. Isn't there some rule about the flames reaching the edge of the pan but not moving up the sides? Things were so much easier when all four burners were the same size! Can anyone comment?

If they were all the same physical size, but differing output, the answer would be "whichever one you can turn down or up enough to get the job done" -- so "cooking technique" would dictate.

With the size variation (I'm guessing you have a sealed-burner design), it gets a little more complicated. Sealed-burner ranges generally have a cool spot in the center (put a fry pan of water on one and see where the bubbles form when it hits simmer). As a result, I'd try to minimize the size of that and modify the previous to prefer the smallest burner (meaning hopefully the smallest cool spot) that has spare capacity for what you're doing. Better, in my opinion, to have a little larger across-bottom variance than have to shuffle pots when you need to turn it up more. Better-quality pots will help mitigate this.

After saying all that, I'd say the answer in reality becomes something like, "I use the big one for boiling pasta water, the little one for risotto and covered simmering, and then whatever is comfortable to stir."

I agree with sfjeff that using a pan a bit larger than the burner is a good idea. This is especially true for sealed burners. The large burner on my old sealed viking was almost unusable even for wok cooking because there was such a large "cold" spot in the middle and all the heat was around the edge. Open burners (especially those with an open center) give you much more flexibility due to the additional airflow which actually helps to pull the flame to the middle. I've used a 6-8 pan and skillet on the largest burner with my current cooktop which has an open burner design with just a little heat lost up the sides. In general, the bigger the bottom surface is on your cooking vessel the less heat is lost which means more heat is available for cooking. The general rule of thumb if I want maximum cooking power is to have a pot/pan/skillet that is about an inch or two larger in diameter than the flame on high without a pan over it. Once you put the pan over the flame, it will flare out a little but still stay reasonably contained underneath which means less wasted heat.

On the other hand, if my goal is to simmer, I'll use whatever burner provides the lowest (or correct) level of simmer for what I'm doing.. assuming you've got pans that have a clad bottom. For thin soups this doesn't even matter but for thick soups/stews/rice/chocolate/etc, you want even heat distribution so clad pans or a diffusion disk might be necessary.

Thanks for your answer folks, the larger pan size answer works well for me. I don't do wok cooking, and most grilling is done outside so the high, high heat is not that much of a factor. It's funny, my old cooktop had open burners, and I traded up to this one with sealed burners---who knew? Well I guess the trade off is that this cooktop looks new inspite of several years of cooking on it. Thanks again good practical advice.