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Frigidaire's electric cooktop offers sleek design, flexible heating options

Frigidaire's 36-inch built-in electric cooktop is designed to provide flexible cooking areas to the chef with an attractive beveled edge design that blends well with countertops.

Kim Girard
Kim Girard has written about business and technology for more than a decade, as an editor at CNET News.com, senior writer at Business 2.0 magazine and online writer at Red Herring. As a freelancer, she's written for publications including Fast Company, CIO and Berkeley's Haas School of Business. She also assisted Business Week's Peter Burrows with his 2003 book Backfire, which covered the travails of controversial Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina. An avid cook, she's blogged about the joy of cheap wine and thinks about food most days in ways some find obsessive.
Kim Girard

Frigidaire's 36-inch built-in Gallery Series electric cooktop, with a flexible bridge element and a warm and serve zone, has a flush look bevel-edge design to blend well with a countertop.

Instead of an electric touch pad, this model has removable control knobs located in the top front of the heating surface so you don't have to reach across the stove to turn it on.

This cooktop offers varied configurations for pots and pans. Frigidaire

The cooktop's heat elements include a 6-inch radiant ribbon for smaller pots and an expandable 6-inch to 9-inch element. An additional 7-inch bridge element accommodates one or two pans. (Or you can use front, bridge, and back elements together to create an 18-inch by 7-inch heating area for a griddle or big pan.)

For a wide range of cooking from simmer to boil, this cooktop delivers 800 watts to 2,500 watts of heat. It also offers a 100-watt warm and serve zone to keep dishes ready while you cook other things.

Five indicator lights provide an alert to when a burner is hot, or whether the burner is turned on or off.

A smooth ceramic cooking surface makes for easy cleanup, and the bevel-edged surface is designed to blend with counters.

The cooktop is available in bisque, black, or white. It costs about $799.99.

There aren't many online reviews of this cooktop, but for overall rate of needed repairs of electric cooktops, Frigidaire ranks third (fewest repairs necessary), behind GE and Kenmore, according to Consumer Reports.