Why You Can Trust CNET Frigidaire FPGH3077RF review: Frigidaire gas stove isn't worth its $2,700 price
The Frigidaire FPGH3077RF gas range cooks well, but its design and features fall short.
"Decent" is the strongest word I could muster to describe the $2,700 Frigidaire FPGH3077RF gas range. The stove boils water quicker than many comparable models we've reviewed and it's easy on the eyes, especially if you're down for appliances that mimic the look of professional equipment. But this range's weak performance in bake and broil tests and counterintuitive controls left me wanting more. "Decent" isn't good enough to justify buying a $2,700 product.
Frigidaire FPGH3077RF
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
The $2,700 Frigidaire FPGH3077RF slide-in gas range doesn't live up to promising specs.
Appearance and specs
The Frigidaire FPGH3077RF is a standard 30-inch wide range with a gas cooktop and gas oven. It has a modern look thanks to a stainless-steel, commercial-like finish and slide-in design, which means all of the range's controls and knobs are located on the front of the unit and there's no back panel. That sleek appeal extends to the pared-down control panel on the front of the unit. It's a small square that displays the time and two cook timers that you can set. There are touch controls for you to turn on the oven light, adjust the time and set the timers.
With five gas burners, the cooktop is great for folks who literally have a lot of pots on the fire. Technically, the one in the middle is made up of two parts: a circular burner in the center that's surrounded by an oval burner (you can control each part independently). Frigidaire includes a reversible griddle to use across two burners, a nice accessory for your pancake needs.
The convenient accessories continue in the 5.1-cubic-foot gas oven. There are three different types of racks that come with the oven: a traditional rack, an offset rack for baking roasting larger dishes and a fully extendable gliding rack. There's a meat probe you can plug into the oven wall that will display the temperature of whatever food item in which you place it on the control panel. There is also a convection fan located in the back wall of the oven that is supposed to help circulate hot air better for more even baking.
Performance
On paper, the Frigidaire FPGH3077RF's features are impressive. In practice, the stove's cooking performance didn't live up to its initial promise. Let's start with the baking tests:
I baked the above biscuits according to package instructions. They were so pale that I thought there would still be some raw dough in the middle. Fortunately, the biscuits were cooked throughout, but the biscuits came out this pale after all three test bakes. These results tell me that you'd need to leave items in the oven for a little longer for a better bake.
I also baked two sheets of biscuits on convection bake, the setting that Frigidaire recommends when you're baking on more than one rack. Overall, the sheets of biscuits that baked on the lower level were always slightly browner than those on top, and the biscuits that baked toward the front of the oven were more cooked than the ones toward the back.
The pictures on the left show two sheets of biscuits that were convection baked at the same time. The biscuits in the top left picture baked on a higher rack than the biscuits in the bottom left picture. The pictures on the right show representations of the biscuits' brownness.
The convection fan worked wonders on the convection roast setting. The air circulation produced a golden chicken with crisp skin. Fortunately, the white and dark meat of the bird was still juicy.
The Frigidaire FPGH3077RF roasted a tasty chicken thanks to the convection fan in the back wall of the oven.
And speaking of the convection bake, the oven has a "convection convert" feature that will automatically lower the baking temperature to account for the fact that food cooks faster when a convection fan is in use. Usually, ovens have a button you can press to set the convection convert. But the Frigidaire FPGH3077RF forgoes such a button on that streamlined display I mentioned earlier. Instead, you have to hold down the oven light and clock icons, then select whether you want the feature on or off.
The setting is a minor inconvenience that could get grating if you forget how to enable the convection convert in the middle of a marathon baking session. Tricky controls aren't new to Frigidaire: I had similar issues with the company's FGGF3058RF freestanding gas range.
The oven's broiler cooked up juicy hamburger patties, but it took a long time to get there. Take a look at how long it took the Frigidaire FPGH3077RF to bring six hamburger patties to 145 degrees Fahrenheit compared to other gas ovens:
Hamburger Broiling Test (Gas Models)
The Frigidaire FPGH3077RF took an average of nearly 19 minutes to broil the burgers, a time that trails behind similar and less expensive models such as the KitchenAid KSGB900ESS and the Samsung NX58H9500WS.
The Frigidaire FPGH3077RF performed much better on the cooktop. It took an average of 10.42 minutes to boil 112 ounces of water, which makes this range the third fastest boiler among gas models.
Large Burner Boil Test (Gas Models)
Final thoughts
The Frigidaire FPGH3077RF looks great and completes a few tasks well, such as boiling water and roasting chicken. But overall, its performance is just OK. Skip this Frigidaire and opt for a gas model that provides better cooking results for a little less money, such as the Kenmore 74343.