The global shift to cleaner cooking methods is gaining momentum, with many countries considering electricity as a viable alternative to reduce carbon emissions. Cooking raises temperatures and humidity in residential kitchens, impacting comfort and increasing energy consumption. This study employed scenarios with and without kitchen air conditioning and focused on the comparative benchmark between electric cooking and gas cooking through an experiment on the unifying cooking heating effect (CHE), meaning that the heat gained by the substance in the pot was the same for both methods. Subsequent experiments explored thermal comfort under different conditions. The findings revealed that air conditioning notably enhances the thermal environment during electric cooking compared to gas cooking. At 21 °C with air conditioning for gas cooking, the overall thermal sensation vote (TSV) increases by 0.827 units (a 68.9 % rise), while the thermal comfort vote (TCV) decreases by 1.74 units (an 89.7 % reduction) compared with electric cooking at 25 °C. Furthermore, carbon emission analysis demonstrated the clear advantage of electric cooking over gas, which showed a 25 % reduction (0.50 kgCO2/h) in Shanghai. Considering cooking only, and assuming a 50 % shift to electric cooking in Shanghai's residential buildings, this could lead to a substantial reduction of 1.07 million tons of carbon emissions (a 9.98 % decrease) as well as 4.09 million tons of direct carbon emissions. These reductions account for 5.21 % and 19.99 % respectively of Shanghai's operational carbon emissions from residential buildings, respectively. A phased transition from gas to electric cooking is recommended to leverage these environmental benefits.