LPG shortage or rising prices concerns: 6 easy cooking alternatives for Indian kitchens

Waiting a week or more for a cooking gas refill used to be unusual. These days it is becoming normal in many parts of the country. Prices have gone up, deliveries are taking longer and people are starting to ask a question they never really had to ask before, what do I cook on if the cylinder does not show up?

It is a fair question and there are real answers to it. None of them involve tearing your kitchen apart or spending a lot of money. Some of them you can sort out this weekend.

A mix of things has come together at the wrong time. Global energy markets have been unstable for a while. Supply chains took hits they have not fully recovered from. Oil companies are dealing with cost pressures that eventually trickle down to the person waiting for a cylinder at home. In some areas panic bookings have made things worse, one neighbour books early out of fear, others see the delay and do the same, and suddenly everyone is waiting longer than they need to.

Restaurants and small food stalls have felt it too. For a household it is an inconvenience. For a small business it is a genuine problem.

Nobody is saying LPG is disappearing. But relying entirely on one fuel source without any backup is starting to look like a risk that is easy enough to avoid.

Walk into any electronics shop and you will find one for under two thousand rupees. An induction cooktop plugs into a regular socket, heats up in seconds and handles most everyday cooking without any fuss. The only things to keep in mind are that it needs flat bottomed cookware and will not work if the power goes out. For everything else it is fast, clean and does the job properly.

If your kitchen runs on old aluminium vessels or clay pots that do not work on induction, an infrared cooktop solves that problem. It looks similar but heats through radiation rather than magnetism, which means it works with whatever you already own. Slightly heavier on electricity than induction but far more flexible in terms of what you can cook in.

Dal, rice, sabzi, biryani, soup, an electric pressure cooker handles all of it. You load it up, set the timer and walk away. For families where most meals come out of a pressure cooker anyway this is genuinely the most convenient switch. It runs on electricity, takes up very little space and modern versions have enough settings to cook almost anything you would normally make on gas.

A lot of households already own at least one of these and do not think of them as cooking alternatives when the gas runs low — but they absolutely are. An air fryer can handle snacks, roasted vegetables, reheating leftovers and even small meals without touching the stove. A microwave does everything from reheating to steaming to cooking basic dishes faster than gas ever could. An OTG, oven toaster griller, is perfect for baking, grilling and slow cooking things that would otherwise sit on a burner for an hour. If you already have any of these sitting on your kitchen counter, you are more prepared for a gas shortage than you probably realised. The gas cylinder is for the main cooking, everything else can quietly fill in the gaps around it.

This one surprises people but it genuinely works. Small home biogas setups are available in India and they run entirely on kitchen waste such as vegetable peels, leftover food, fruit scraps. The organic waste breaks down inside the unit and produces gas that connects straight to your stove. Getting it up and running takes a few weeks but once it is going it basically pays for itself. If you have a garden or outdoor space it fits in easily and turns something you were throwing away into something genuinely useful.

Not something you would rely on for every meal but for slow cooked food on a sunny afternoon it works surprisingly well. Rice, dal, vegetables and even certain baked things can be done in a solar cooker without using a single unit of gas or electricity. The limitation is obvious — clouds and evenings are not its friends. But in most parts of India there are enough sunny hours in a day to make it worth keeping around as a lighter option that takes pressure off the main stove.

Nobody is asking you to replace your gas stove. The point is just to stop being completely dependent on one thing that has recently shown it can let you down. Even a basic induction cooktop sitting in a kitchen drawer gives you options on the day the cylinder runs dry and the delivery app says three to five working days.

That small bit of preparation is genuinely worth more than it costs.

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