Top reader comment seems apt w/r/t the pollution aspect anyway:
As a scientist (an immunologist) who leads a research lab on lung inflammation including asthma, the cavalier attitude Times columnists have toward scientific references in their articles is appalling.
RMI is a thinktank with an agenda. Not a research institution. And Brady Seals is not a scientist. Note the lack of PhD. She has an MBA and has never worked in science. Nor did she 'author a study'. She authored a REPORT. Which is not peer-reviewed and not published in a reputable journal.
As an immunologist I assure you that scientific evidence does not indicate that 'increase of asthma is on par with living in a home with a smoker'.
And frankly- just walking outdoors in NYC you're exposed to far higher levels of lung-irritating pollutants than you are cooking stir fry on your stove. But that doesn't fit the agenda the Times is pushing with multiple induction stove articles lately all focused on bogus health effects and the (more legitimate) climate concerns.
Before anyone reads this and decides, "oh ya the NYT is lying to me and gas is fine", it's not. Gas in your home is objectively bad for your health, the environment and is overall worse than induction when it comes to the cooking experience in just about all ways.
That being said, It might not be as bad as living with a smoker (as the NYT asserted) but it is bad for you. The YouTuber Climate Town did an excellent video on gas cooking which exposed some very nasty truths of the gas lobbyists and the negative health effects it has on the population.
would love to see an induction stove with a usable UI. everything I have used is designed by a person that never had to cook for more than 1. the automatic off during the slightest spill, and the impossibility to operate buttons with wet/greasy hands, has to be one of the biggest design mistakes in the history of engineering.
my idea of a great time is to invite this engineer to cook with me a 4 course dinner for 8, where everything is timing crucial, and I get to scream at them like Gordon Ramsey the minute the stove switches off and they lost momentum with the heat but can't operate the button because "wet fingers".
the problem isn't induction and consumers cooking with gas, but that we have a culture operating on "ownership and exploitation" of the environment.
I like induction stoves. Easier to clean, and do 90% of what I need doing in a kitchen. Not having to run gas lines is a plus, and for the other 10%, I'm probably working on a grill or using a dedicated burner anyway.
But the UIs are awful.
Stop turning yourself off. Yes, I do intend to cook the thing I put on you for six hours. Just fucking do it.
Give me a knob. Gas stoves use knobs for good reasons. You don't need to invent new UX, just give me a motherfucking knob. A knob without complicated family issues is fine as well.
My stove does not need Bluetooth or WiFi. It's a stove. I expect it to work with minor maintenance for 40+ years. Protocols are going to change a lot between here and there.
I am not installing your app. Not today, not tomorrow, not ever. Baphomet will call up and tell me he got right with Jesus before I install your app.
There has to be a market for people that want appliances that just... work.
Addendum: there are a few induction stoves with knobs, but they are definitely the exception, rather than the rule:
I'm redoing my kitchen (in the US) with induction and ruled out anything with touch controls. I noticed that particular issue as soon as I stepped into the showroom. Thanks for letting me know about the auto-off problem.
The other problem to watch out for is poor reliability due to gradual "cooking" of the circuit board -- after all, the knobs are not physically connected to the power electronics; they're just a digital input to a controller, same as for the touch controlled units.
Other options with knobs were from Miele, Fischer and Paykel, and (less expensively) LG. I believe Samsung also sells a range with knobs; see the photo in the article.
If you're not spilling, you're not cooking hard enough. :)
Gas does provide easier temperature regulation, as the change is (a) instantaneous; and (b) infinitely fine-grained compared to the average "levels" of an induction stove.
A good gas burner also puts out a more consistent heat pattern, as opposed to the "ring of burning" that is common to most induction cooktops.
But for most things, induction is good enough, and I appreciate the day-to-day versatility of "just wipe it down".
> would love to see an induction stove with a usable UI.
I bought an AEG stove last year (similar to [1], but an older model I think). Physical knobs for temperature control, no auto off on spills. Touch interface only for a few convenience features and the extra power mode, which is fine by me. I'm very happy with this stove and like cooking with it just as much as I liked gas when I had it a few years ago.
I use a plug-in 13A unit. It's great for most kinds of cooking - the only time I prefer the performance of my actual stove (a coils-under-glass electric unit) is when I'm boiling water or want a gradual warm-up to low temp. For everything else (searing, stir-fry, deep-fry, steaming), the plug-in induction hob provides better control IMO
The fan and high-pitched pan noise is not my favorite though.
That looks really nice - I might consider that one if I'm switching away from gas later this year
How is it for keeping a constant, low-mid temperature? One of the issues I have with induction is that the heat is applied in bursts rather than as a constant with gas
This means that when frying with some oils, induction will either heat them past their smoke point in the burst or the temperature will be too low in-between bursts
Mine does it in bursts I think (it's fairly obvious when cooking rice, as the water bubbles up periodically), but I've never had a problem with that. I can say that I don't have smoke problems with olive oil, which I believe is one that shouldn't be used with high temperatures.
That said, I'm probably an ok cook at best and I don't eat meat so I can't really say how it would work with that. However, I found that at least the gas range I used when I lived in the UK, wasn't really great for low temperatures either, as the flame tended to not self-sustain properly on low settings.
The killer feature for me personally was actually the steambake thing, as I bake bread weekly. It's not quite as good as directly spraying water into the oven, but still works really well. Obviously independent of the induction top though.
Olive oil has indeed been one of the problematic ones for me - to be fair, it might simply come down to my inexperience cooking with induction
I think I will get some additional cast iron cookware when I make the switch. Hopefully it'll be able to retain the heat better between bursts and make the average temperature more stable :-)
I appreciate that you took the time to answer my question. Hope you have a pleasant day
cast iron is seriously under-rated. they're a tiny bit harder to clean, but they're nonstick without giving you cancer, and you can get them really hot without damaging them.
This is correct. Plus they last for generations ... try that with a coated nonstick pan.
Also, and this might just be me, but they are fun to use because they require a bit of skill to use. This is like how it can be more fun to drive a standard car than an automatic-shift one.
This, then, is a limitation of your induction unit. Mine has two modes: Heating, and Temperature. In temperature mode, the cycling you describe occurs. For this reason I almost never use temperature mode. In heating mode, I get the most consistent rice ever (for me, I'm not a cook, just someone who likes rice). Making pancakes in a cast-iron pan, I find myself occasionally switching between 3 and 3.5 on the heating settings -- these are arbitrary numbers assigned by the manufacturer -- to keep the cast iron at the desired heat. It's trivial. I suppose I should try the temperature setting for this -- unlike making rice in a sauce pan, the cast iron probably would probably compensate for the intermittent heating of temperature mode.
My unit is just single-hob portable induction cooker from Duxtop: 15 heat settings -- think of it like continuous power settings -- and I think? about 10 (cycling) temperature settings.
I'm quite optimistic that a high-end unit such as the one used in the Asian restaurant mentioned in the article would hold constant temps without the annoying recycling -- and believe me, I find the on/off business just as annoying as you find it.
I look forward to a time when I have the room for a full-sized induction cooktop. I think that with a decent induction disk (I think I'll just buy a 3/32" disc of mild steel and avoid the laminated units sold commercially, or even just repurpose a crepe pan) I'll be able to do things like Spanish eggs, where just a portion of the pan must be kept heated.
One thing I've found is that egg pans (small saute pans) with just the right slope for flipping eggs are not easy to find in induction-compatible pans. But I did find one pretty close to perfect, and an induction disc will take allow reuse of my favorite non-induction egg pan.
I'm really sold on induction. It's not best for everything, but I can live with its shortcomings while enjoying its advantages.
I replaced ".de" with ".com" hoping it would then work internationally/display the information in English, but yeah it seems AEG doesn't have a US presence. That's a shame.
It doesn't really matter much as I mainly linked it as an example, but I experimented a bit with the countries and the specific model isn't on the UK site either (they have other ones with knobs there though). If you want to see the one I linked you can choose "Germany" in the "Choose your Country" page and click "Hausgeräte" (top left) followed by "Standherde" and "Standherde" again (what a weird navigation). In the filters select "Kochfeldart > Induktion". It was the first result left.
> would love to see an induction stove with a usable UI.
To me, induction with physical knobs and buttons would be the best. Other than the stupid touch things, induction is just so much better than gas for almost anything.
It does have auto off on spills, but it's not overly sensitive and only triggers if you really let things boil over. Had it 9 months, can highly recommend this cooker.
For us the “one flat surface” is about cleaning instead of aesthetics. We cook all the time and out range constantly has crap spilled on it. Being able to wipe it down in a quick pass is so nice.
That is another big advantage of induction. It gets much less dirty because it’s so easy to wipe clean each time it is used.
That said, it is not necessarily exclusive, we can have a nice flat surface along with a panel with physical knobs on the side. Even with a minimalist look à la Dieter Rams if needed.
My Miele induction cooktop is physical buttons/knobs and has no auto offs. Honestly, I was confused by all of the replies with complaints about induction UI's because it's the first induction cooktop I've owned and it's been a joy. I couldn't go back to gas.
And that is so unbelievably stupid! The flat surface for your pans is already infinitely better than on a gas stove. I want knobs and be able to quickly dial the heat up or down on the burners. I do not really care if I still have to clean the knobs now and then. And I want non-discrete settings. And I do not need the device to beep loudly if I change from '5' to '9' every time I press a button
Induction cookers must have been designed by the same person who designed the door opening and closing mechanism on Virgin train toilets.
For those who haven't experienced that particular abomination, they had sliding quadrant doors and separate buttons for locking and unlocking the doors as opening and closing the door. Originally the colour of the lights around the buttons was the only clue to the state of the lock (I think these have been redesigned). This resulted in the unintended comedy of someone sat down to do the toilet as the next person came along, pressed the door open button and slowly unveiled the person doing their business to the whole carriage of people. Inevitably resulting in a mashing of buttons from both sides trying to get the door to close again.
I've been cooking with induction for a few years. My hardware isn't fancy. I have owned a few countertop units, a format that meets my needs. The model I own now is a robust commercial version, 1800W. Works great with pans up to ~11in diameter (bottom).
UI is typical: buttons to set "heat" and "temp", plus on/off and timer. Good part is than buttons activate mechanical momentary contact switches that have a really solid "clicky" feel.
Overall it's a real pleasure to use, but it has its quirks. The biggest "issue" (not really a gigantic flaw) is the ambiguous controls re: heat and temp. Nominally the heat setting controls wattage, temp supposedly sets limits on temp erature of food. It's just very inconsistent, like setting temp to 160 degrees F doesn't have much to do with actual temperature as measured with a thermometer. But I've gotten used to how it works and very rarely overcook or burn stuff.
In the past I preferred gas, but that's not my first choice now.
What kind of induction stove do you have? Mine just has knobs. I push down and turn them clockwise, physically, and it heats up. I push down and turn them counter-clockwise, it lessens the heat, or turns it off.
It's the same as the gas stoves of my childhood; I'm not sure how it could be simpler. It even has the icons indicating which knob is for which burner. Is your stove postmodern?
Most induction stoves have touch based inputs. They're awful.
I used to have one of those, now I have one with knobs. Couldn't be happier about the change.
We should not accept any health claims without quantification. "Objectively bad for your health" is not particularly relevant, even if I accept that at face value. For example, in right-hand-drive countries, making left turns is "objectively worse" for your health than making right turns.
Even with quantification, you may still want to do it anyway. If I remember the numbers correctly, eating a bacon sandwich everyday increases your risk of dying from heart disease by 25% - that takes the risk in the UK from 4/10000 to 5/10000. ^ Given the second number, I don’t worry about having the odd bacon sandwich. The exact example is irrelevant, rather everything in life has pros and cons, risks and rewards - you have to choose which one works for you. (I write this as an induction hob convert :) )
^ This is based on a vague memory of a lecture on Risk Communication from Prof David Spiegelhalter around 10 years ago.
> If I remember the numbers correctly, eating a bacon sandwich everyday increases your risk of dying from heart disease by 25% - that takes the risk in the UK from 4/10000 to 5/10000. ^ Given the second number, I don’t worry about having the odd bacon sandwich.
The way to stay alive is to reduce a little here and a little there (unless you work as an amatuer bomb technician). Heart disease is a leading cause of death; a 25% improvement would be great. There's not any real relationship between "a bacon sandwich everyday" and "the odd bacon sandwich"; where does anyone talk about the latter?
The host Rollie Williams has a graduate degree in climate change, maybe his style isn't for everyone but he's clearly knowledge and passionate about the subject.
Joking aside, I'm glad he is making these videos in that case. However, I'd say the target audience is teenagers so maybe it's not the best suited for this forum?
Damn, I didn't knew that at 36 years old I was still a teenagers!?
I knew North-American loved to class people by age group, but this is becoming silly.
The NY Times has and talks to many people who are as well or more qualified. Look at the sources in their articles - not just graduate degrees, but leading experts with decades of experience.
> is overall worse than induction when it comes to the cooking experience in just about all ways.
The way you would know this to be true is when professional kitchens are defaulting to induction instead of gas. (I think this has started to happen in a few high end places, which is exciting)
I am putting in a new kitchen soon and it will have a gas hob + electric oven because I love cooking and gas is my default. Every electric hob I have ever used has been garbage, and I am not dropping 2 grand to try induction and maybe discover what sound like familiar issues (ha, I am turning myself off now).
Gas always just works. Apply steady heat - perfect cooking experience. Maybe next time.
Get a standalone induction plate. They're cheap and portable and they let you try it out without a huge expense. I do 90% of all my cooking on a single induction plate I paid ~$60 for. Non-induction electric hobs are trash, and induction is much closer to gas, but more controllable, less messy, and less dangerous. That said, I would strongly recommend against a builtin induction hob. They're expensive as fuck, and eat lots of counter space. The standalone induction plates are amazing, much nicer to work with, and cheaper, and you can put them away when you need the extra space. Restaurant supply shops have standalone induction plates for ~3x the cost of the consumer ones which are phenomenally good, that's what the higher end new kitchens are going for.
> They're expensive as fuck, and eat lots of counter space.
I am comfortable with the latter at least, as my default would be a 5 ring gas hob! I cannot imagine cooking with fewer than 3 rings. (Say, duck breast, mash, veg is a pretty basic meal)
> Get a standalone induction plate. They're cheap and portable and they let you try it out without a huge expense.
That is actually a good shout, and not something I had considered. Am currently "camping" kitchen'd in the utility room with a microwave and a 2 ring camping gas stove. Will have a gander, Thanks :)
You're not always allowed to put them into electric sockets and turn them on all at once, though. There's usually special electric wiring done to handle the load of electric stoves.
In the US, at least, the standard is to have outlets every 4' (I think), and have the outlets alternate circuits. So, you plug into two adjacent outlets (not the same two in the same box, but adjacent boxes) and you'll be on different circuits.
I think it is for kitchens, and it is relatively new. My 25 year old refinished kitchen has the outlets, but not the separate circuits. No nespresso + toast.
> The way you would know this to be true is when professional kitchens are defaulting to induction instead of gas.
That is not how you would know that. There are plenty of industries where people stick to the "tried and true" (for various reasons, some of which might even be reasonable) and chose to neglect efficiency gains or long term health of either their employees or customers.
Hence highlighting that we have seen some of this already!
Side note. The high end ones move first as they discover something better. See the proliferation of technological machines in modern professional kitchens. But the trend gets set and the upper mid range starts to follow and then it will be what chefs want to use because it is best.
In my experience induction is wildly worse than gas for the cooking experience in just about every way. I'm very surprised to see the opposite suggested.
It's slower, less flexible, makes some styles of sauce making impossible, and probably worst of all - invisible.
Has there been some quantum leap in induction cooking I haven't experienced?
I have had asthma since I was a toddler. I see a top-rated immunologist 3 times a year. Not once have they ever asked what kind of stove I have. When I asked about it recently, they laughed about it.
Eh. Gas is not “objectively bad” unless you want to also say cars are “objectively bad”. How many people die every year from from short or long term effects of gas stoves? Compare that to cars.
Every kitchen I’ve ever been in with a gas stove has some sort of ventilation. Open window, fan, hood, etc.
Same for the environment. Let’s look at older style electric coil resistant heat elements. Largely inefficient and the power generated how?
Here’s the difference: bad publications happen but when they’re discovered that leads to retractions and other professional consequences. For example, Andrew Wakefield did get a bad paper into The Lancet but it was retracted and he’s now a former doctor.
You can't trust anyone completely, not even one's Mom. But you can trust some people a lot more than others. If I have cancer, I trust my doctor a lot more than random people on Youtube.
You should be well aware then that doctors are educated by sales reps from companies who have been caught time and time again in spreading false information to doctors. Good luck.
Oh. And more than half of published studies that are used to approve drugs cant be replicated. Oops ?
I know those things! And it doesn't disagree with my GP statement:
> doctors are educated by sales reps ...
That statement goes to the heart of it: "doctors" aren't educated by sales reps, different doctors are and to different degrees. You can trust different doctors to different degrees, and there is a very wide range - some are highly trustworthy, some the opposite. And you never know for sure and all you can do is observe and apply your best judgment. That's true for everyone, including Moms.
One thing I can observe is that doctors obtain MDs, and I've rarely encountered doctors who didn't have deep expertise in medicine, and I know some about how much study is done at medical schools. I can't be absolutely sure, but that's a strong signal that they know far more than I do.
Saying 'you can't trust anyone' is as serious and reasonable as saying 'you can trust everyone'. The world just isn't that simple, but finding who to trust is almost the most important skill.
Do you know what isn't bad for your health? Good, clean healthy home-cooked food. Which, in millions of homes, is cooked swiftly and efficiently on gas ranges.
Politicians and their media lackeys in the media need to stop trying to micro-manage peoples' lives.
The entire world, in general, aspires to rapidly move away from hydrocarbons. To me, that consideration alone would justify the inequality in (B) when you can afford the choice. Other considerations are a nice bonus.
We're already seeing this play out with municipal regulations deemphasizing gas stoves in new construction.
- people with gas stoves need to know the risks to mitigate them. Like paying attention to ventilation, or really ventilate as soon as they put on the stove. All the more so if they don’t have the means or the right to replace their stoves: they’re probably also more vulnerable to health related fees.
- there has been so much advertisement of gas as “fine” that it needs a lot if counterbalance. People are still buying gas stove for new homes for bullshit reasons.
I am a big fan of electrification but an induction range to replace my glasstop is on the order of $3-4,000 (and not in stock anywhere anyway) so I can't blame anyone for sticking with an old reliable gas range.
That's not quite right. In Europe three phase wiring is delivered via a 5 core wire: 3 phases, neutral and earth (ground). You can take any phase wire, and the voltage between that and neutral will be 230V. For higher power devices, the voltage between any two phases will be 400V.
My induction hob can be connected to 1 phase or 3 phase power, there's a dip switch on the back to switch it over. I'd imagine inside it changes the voltage and frequency to something completely different depending on what power level you set the burner to, so the actual supply voltage isn't that important.
I haven't been in houses in all European countries, but I've seen both. I think a range is cheaper (one appliance, one electrical connection), so you find it in cheaper apartments, cheap rentals etc. It might also be the only reasonable option if the kitchen is small.
A separate oven and hob usually means the oven isn't at knee height, which is much nicer. Decent apartments and houses in Europe have this, but so does my relative's million dollar house in the US.
Yes, I have one of these $50 portable cooktops and it works OK but still takes forever to boil water. The expensive ones are actually as good as gas and I was pricing out the freestanding stove+oven, thanks for backing me up xD
I use $30 single pot induction stove everyday. I cook for 3 people. It’s placed on top of old school electric one with spiral elements since we live in a rental. Sometimes I use both, but it’s my go to.
I spent a year and a bit raging at the electric hob in my rented flat every time I cooked something. Replaced it with dual ring plug in induction hob and it’s better in every way, I’m actually able to cook food in a controlled manner again rather than endlessly pulling pans on and off the hob to compensate for a lack of power control.
dunno about the US but in india we use these. converted to US$, its like $18. they last about 2-5 years with good usage and if you are really unlucky with your spillovers and frayed cables, maybe less but other than that these things are reliable as fuck..
why do you have to buy thousands of dollars worth of equipment?
I have one of these and it's good for a portable unit but it takes about 10 minutes to boil water, whereas a high end unit will do it in a fraction of the time. I was also looking at replacing the entire stove, not just a burner, so something like this:
you do understand the boiling of water and basically everything done on an induction cooker is dependent on the energy needed? this one is at 1800W 220V so your high end machine might be 3x or 5x that.
I don’t know where you live but we literally just did this yesterday – we picked a modest $1,300 unit, but there were multiple options at most price points in stock at most stores here in the DC area. I don’t know if there are specific features or brands you require but it doesn’t seem like there’s a massive supply issue or one specific to induction hardware.
Our old induction cooker cost us €600 more than a decade ago. It’s our old one only because we moved and the kitchen in our new flat had a gas one and we’d need to rip all apart and rebuild to remove it. But otherwise we used it for 11 years without any issue, so I would call that reliable.
Citation needed please for the health effects being bogus. NOx emissions from gas stoves seem to be consistently reported as quite high indeed. For example:
All the vents in places I've rented have seemed hilariously ineffective even on the highest and super loud setting. Maybe good ones make a difference but how many people actually have good ones? And how many people actually use them every time the stove is on?
FWIW every single rental I've occupied had never had the screen on the hood cleaned/replaced. They get clogged with grease and stop working, it's an oft neglected maintenance item.
Every rental I've lived in has not had ventilation.
It has had a range hood with a fan... and zero ductwork. The fan pulls up from under the hood, and blows it straight into my face, out the top of the hood.
There are extractors that work without a vent, they filter and release on the same space. I am not saying that was your case, or even if it was, the filters were properly maintained, just saying that those hoods exists. Searching for Recirculating Range Hoods would give more info about those
I find it utterly implausible that these filters have any substantial effect on NOx. There are specialized filters consisting of large beds of modified carbon that will remove NO2. Regular activated carbon AFAICT does not, and these recirculating stove filters do not have massive filters.
I would believe they remove particulates and odors, and that’s about it.
While they have filters (which I've never known people to replace, but that's not necessarily the hood's fault) and I believe they do something with what passes through them... they unambiguously miss the vast majority of the fumes. Even if you cook with the back burners, a massive amount of heat and steam will flow right around every hood I've run across.
Boil some water and watch where the steam goes. Because it's pulling air from around the pot along with it, including the hot waste gasses that heated the pot in the first place.
Even on the highest settings, I've never seen one that even makes a dent, or moves the column at all. They're snake oil and fashion, nothing more. And that's before talking about the ones that don't have any ductwork, and just blow it back out into the room.
Commercial-grade ones that move ridiculous quantities of air definitely work, and a tiny tiny handful of people have these in their homes. The rest have essentially nothing.
Hm, that's not my experience: I used all three options (no hood [student dorm], circulation hood [currently in our house], outside duct hood [parents; last flat]). There is a huge difference between each. Having no hood is obviously not nice, since water vapor and fat end up everywhere. The circulation hood at least reduces the amount of fat. Not sure if by 20 or 80%, but there is a significant difference between turning it on or not. Especially the amount of fatty haze when making hamburgers is reduced a lot. Now for water vapor it does not help so well. It's okay for one pot of water (boiled eggs or pasta with pesto), but when doing some heavy cooking still a lot of water ends up condensing on the windows. With an outside duct (about 2m of duct work) water vapor becomes a non-issue and the amount of fat haze is reduced much better than with the circulation unit.
Also this isn't biased by "I don't cook". Quite the contrary :)
I've heard the grease thing quite a few times, especially with hamburgers, but... tbh it hasn't ever happened to me. And my past two apartments haven't had a range hood at all (just a microwave with a fan we never use).
Is it saturated fats or something? Burgers are definitely a rarity for me, but I cook plenty. It's just generally lean meat and veg/oil/etc.
Regardless of where the steam goes -- if the hood is not vented, it'll just spill the air back out in to the kitchen. The cabinets above our non-vented kitchen hood are always covered in grease from the cooking. I doubt a simple filter will make that air much healthier to breathe in.
interesting... i wonder if it's because of the height constrained by aesthetic inputs.. i'm pretty sure if you stuck the vent like 50cm above the stove it surely can be a bit more than useless...
I think it's really just because there are no objective and enforced standards for it. I used to have a kitchen with a pretty high ceiling and a fume extractor mounted way up high, so high it was controlled by an IR remote, and it worked great while making little sound. Currently I have one of those integrated with a microwave oven that makes a lot of noise, blocks my view of half the range, and doesn't work at all. Plus even if it did work, it would vent right into my eyes, not to the outdoors.
My vent is about 5 feet above the stove. We had to build a little soffit to get it just within code regulations. It has a huge blower that is located in a small attic space about 20 feet away. 100% recommend! You can’t hear it at all and you can watch all the vapor and smoke from the stove waft right up and away into the unit.
The remote eats a pair of CR2450 cells every three months, so that could have been done better.
That sounds like horrible usability; it's going to be in the way all the time, especially if you're a tad tall. I bet that's the far more important reason than aesthetics. I already don't like the regular ones because I need to be careful not to bump my head in to it.
> Pretty easily mitigated with a vent hood which all these tests don't have running.
Almost nobody in New York City (where the NYT is based and focuses its coverage) has a vent hood that vents outside the apartment.
Older buildings don't have a hood at all, and new buildings have hoods which circulate air within the apartment, which doesn't really address concerns about accumulation of environmental pollutants.
>Almost nobody in New York City (where the NYT is based and focuses its coverage) has a vent hood that vents outside the apartment.
Thanks. If this bit of context was clear from the get go it would have been a lot easier for those from EUR where we would expect vents outside the apartment to be the norm. ( Not speaking for all EUR, so there may be places this is not the norm )
As a matter of fact this is the first time I hear about vent circulating within the apartment, and to be honest this sounds quite scary.
They're supposed to be used with a charcoal filter as well as the usual metal filter. They're mostly to trap odors, doubt they do much for air quality.
Many people in the US don't even realize their stove vent is just a filter. They look almost identical to outward venting hoods. Which means the filter medium is never replaced after it fills up with oils either.
> If this bit of context was clear from the get go it would have been a lot easier for those from EUR where we would expect vents outside the apartment to be the norm. ( Not speaking for all EUR, so there may be places this is not the norm )
It is the norm in newer buildings, but there are plenty of older houses or flats blocks in the EU that don’t have a good ventilation system. It’s similarly expensive same in the UK and I cannot say about Norway and Switzerland, but I would think that it is not better in the other non-EU bits of Europe.
I've seen that noted on PSA posts on social media for immigrants - that you should make extra sure that vents lead to outside and not into cupboards when renting a room, because it's rather common where people don't do more than boiling water but hard to realize without prior knowledge.
I could see vent hoods helping, but I don't assume they mitigate the risk. They may not capture the gas sufficiently, quickly enough, etc. Maybe vent hoods in homes are not generally effective.
Also doesn't take into account greenhouse gas/global warming affects on human and global health. (this assumes using more green energy in future to power induction electricity).
Natural gas for cooking is a negligible contributor to climate change. 2.8% of natural gas in the US is used for cooking. On a per-BTU basis (which isn't fair because natural gas has fewer carbons), the natural gas/oil split of US consumption is around 40/60. You're looking at around 1% of CO2 emissions in the US coming from natural gas used directly for cooking.
The thing is "I absolutely must have gas installed in my house for cooking" turns into "well let's buy the gas water heater, and the gas central heating, and the gas dryer" and all of a sudden you're using was more piped-in gas for for non-cooking things than you are for cooking, but "cooking with gas" was the hydrocarbon foot in the door at your house.
Otherwise you might opt for an electric tankless water heater, a heat pump HVAC system, and just an electric dryer.
I've read that the gas industry uses the cooking specifically in advertising and lobying to keep this toehold for the even bigger emissions. [1]
And 2-3% isn't nothing either. Such an easy win. we desperately need to rack up easy points yesterday...
Relatively as in compared to say utility scale production/storage or hell even replacing home heating like you mention.
I wish we could replace our 110 year old giant cast iron steam heater thing. Would have to either replace all the radiators with electric board things (i hate them) or find an electric boiler (which would have to plasma cut apart the old boiler to get it out lol).
Heat pumps sound cool too but all those options have upfront costs which some of my hoa neighbors can't afford. We couldn't get a loan for other repairs we did with longer term than 3 years.
I feel like we live in the same building with an ancient boiler and HOA neighbors who are extremely cost sensitive!
I do wonder if there's a reasonable heat pump retrofit for old buildings with boiler-based heating. Ultimately you're just heating up a liquid and pumping it through everyone's radiator, right? Seems like a sensible product given the number of old buildings with this kind of heating.
Ha are you in denver? A ton of people in cities are in the same boat.
I wanted to get an electric car. But not only do my neighbors not want to split cost of a charger station but also I'd have to pay over 10k to upgrade/fix the electricity - or so I was told.
It seems like it could be even simpler than a heat exchange that I think puts pipes into the ground?
Like it's just creating steam. Can't we just scale up an electric tea kettle? Seems like it would be pretty efficient.
On the west coast there are frequently power outages from downed trees. Gas doesn't go out if you have a tank, so anyone even a little bit rural uses gas if they can.
Hmmm. I grew up in rural Northern California and we had propane that would be trucked in. Is that what you mean by having a tank? I don't live there any more, but my old neighbors tend to be buying backup generators now so they can keep their fridge and internet running when PG&E cuts off power so their distribution lines don't start fires. (This cuts into a whole other issue about people who want to live in the forest asking for extreme subsidies on all the costly electric infrastructure it takes to serve their low density lifestyle.)
Electricity is overall more plugable, versatile and evolvable than appliances that directly consume hydrocarbons. You can meet your source needs using some combination of grid connection, solar, backup generator, backup batteries, etc... - and you can evolve this source side of things over time without being forced to constantly retrofit the load-side systems in your house.
Yes, propane tanks filled by truck is common anywhere it doesn't make sense to run a pipe and the usage is more than makes sense for a hand-carried bottle.
Where i live in the Midwest everyone has gas installed for the furnace and then the builder asks if they want a gas or electric stove. If you ask you can get a heat pump instead of just air conditioning, but it is extra cost and you still need gas heat for the really cold days we get every winter.
Reducing climate impact from energy production requires both reducing it at the point of production and at the point of consumption. By switching to electric energy at the point of consumption, you reduce demand for gas, etc. The production can then be switched to something zero-impact.
> The production can then be switched to something zero-impact.
There's no such thing as zero-impact. Wind farms have an environmental impact. Building solar-sensitive cells require dirty processes that also create pollution and waste as they don't last forever.
In most countries is changing rapidly as renewables ramp up and it’s not uncommon to hear about major countries having entirely renewable days.
The important part to remember is that natural gas infrastructure is always polluting, and tends to leak a fair amount of fuel which is never even used (around me, there are estimated that this is as high as a third of the total usage). That’s all locked in when you use gas, whereas an electric stove can be powered by a mix of sources which change hourly without the owner even having to know about it.
The other thing to consider is that a professionally-managed and monitored power plant is usually better than equipment as maintained by the average person. Lots of people don’t even get their gas appliances checked once a year on average, and you’ll pretty regularly hear about leaks or fires caused by poor maintenance at apartment buildings where you’d think they’d be at least a little more responsible.
doesn't matter. gas pipes leak, and shall appliances aren't efficient, so even if the grid was 100% fossil fuel (which it's not), it still would be more efficient to use electric in the home.
> it still would be more efficient to use electric in the home.
Efficiency wise you may be wrong. Carrying electricity is not efficient (you lose energy with distance) while gas (as long as leaks are limited) is a more efficient store of energy from start to end.
It asserts that cooking with gas "has been shown to be catastrophic for the environment." What's the basis for this assertion? They link to another NYT article that cites a study that says, "annual methane emissions from all gas stoves in U.S. homes have a climate impact comparable to the annual carbon dioxide emissions of 500,000 cars." [1]
That might sound like a lot until you realize there are 280 million cars in the U.S. In other words, the total impact of all gas stoves in U.S. homes is equal to 0.18% that of cars.
This article is conflating all kinds of things. It says traditional cooking "outperforms" modern but is using a metric that essentially nobody cares about (thermal efficiency). It's just motivated reasoning to argue against electricity.
> The main discrepancy with these figures is caused when one doesn't take into account that electricity first needs to be produced in power plants which sometimes convert less than a third of the primary energy into electricity
That is, induction stoves are about 90% efficient at converting electricity to useful heat, but your electricity generation may not be depending on where you live. It's the same argument people make against electric cars and heat pumps.
As the grid decarbonises, electric cooking will become far more favourable than combustion cooking in terms of CO2 until eventually, hopefully, it is entirely zero emission.
Indeed the article doesn't seem to focus on what could have been its strongest argument: wood/biomass already IS carbon neutral, provided it's sustainably farmed. That does, however, exclude the fossil fuels used in production and distribution which may be significant or zero depending on source, but are usually quite low, albeit human resource intensive. If you want to go one layer deep you should aggregate up the carbon output of all the labour going into the production system but I digress.
Thermal efficiency only matters if you consider the carbon intensity of the source of the energy.
Besides, the major problem with combustion cooking is the particulates anyway, which are immensely better on an electric stove. And the article seems to consider convenience as an irrelevance rather than the primary motivating factor of essentially all technological development.
Until the grid decarbonizes, this is what is actually happening. Maybe in the future we will all have houses capable of producing 2kW energy for cooking.
An efficient rocket stove outperforms induction if you take account externalities, which is the right thing to do if you are environmentally minded.
After years of lurking I created an account just to reply to this. While in the context of this article I agree with you - this author clearly has an agenda - the general MBA hate on HN amuses me so I thought I would share my anecdote. Also, Melissa Clark, the author, has a BA and an MFA. Maybe we need to hate on artists doing science?
People’s lives take them down many paths. I am a “scientist” insofar as I have done science - and am an author on two publications in a respected journal (Annals of Botany). The research from my MS in Biology continues to get cited in evolutionary biology and population genetics studies years later. I also have an MBA and am a senior sales leader in a cybersecurity scale up (at some point years ago I decided I wanted to make more money than academia could provide and I made a major pivot). I’m still equally comfortable discussing herkogamy and phenotypic integration as I am GTM strategy and compensation models.
MBA graduates are by far used in companies in the Marketing and Sales departments, so interpreting my comment about them being salesmen as "hate on MBAs" is quite funny, because that's precisely how the hiring market sees them.
Sure, there are scientists who happen to also have MBAs. That's a huge exception, so you won't win points by finding someone who happens to have that profile. MBAs should typically not be trusted to talk about Science because:
- unless they happen to have a multiple education background, they have NEVER been exposed to serious science and the scientific method. Blame it on the fact that Science outside of higher studies is badly taught if you'd like.
- their education is mostly about how to understand the market and optimize how to exploit it through market research, targeting, and marketing.
The second point makes them suspicious from the get go on any topic they touch publicly. Are they acting as naive actors trying to debate or advance one's understand of the subject, or acting as MBAs trying to push a specific agenda for other reasons?
Another quick note: you would probably be surprised by how scientific marketing is. In one point you claim they’ve (MBAs) never been exposed to the scientific method (I would dispute) and then in your second you claim they’re researching and optimizing, which is quite true. How do you think they do that? My marketing team is consistently collecting and measuring data to test effectiveness of campaigns (hypotheses). I’m definitely not defending this article with that point - and it doesn’t make any of them experts on any particular fields within science other than data science. But they’re very much using the scientific method so I found your point to be ironic. Marketing departments now employ data scientists with PhDs and MBAs (my sister is one). So you can dislike their work product but hard to say it isn’t scientific.
Lots of assumptions here. I’m not prepared with data on where MBAs end up but far more of my classmates went into finance than went into sales or marketing. Second place is consulting. Sales (not marketing) is a profession where your base income is typically a fraction of your total comp and additional income only comes from results. Many can’t stand that instability / unpredictability. Contrast that with finance which is perceived as “guaranteed money” if you have the quantitative skills, and does not require one to possess a range of non-technical skills / attributes like charisma, public speaking, empathy, relationship building, etc. My MBA program - and most I’m aware of - do not have a class or curricula on sales, specifically. Baylor is fairly renown for being one of few dedicated sales programs. MBA is a broad, not deep degree. Marketing and strategy are significant parts of the curriculum, but no more so than finance, accounting, economics, and HR. The MBA did not teach me how to negotiate contracts with F500 corporate counsel, or how to navigate the complex, varying procurement models across the enterprise space, or how to get a meeting with a CIO who has never heard of me or my company. I see MBAs among sales leadership but it’s definitely the minority among individual reps (even the ones earning seven figures). I would venture to say your view on MBAs is a bit misinformed. I have much criticism and ire to levy against the MBAs of the world, but I would focus it toward those who are financializing every sector of the economy to the point that Verizon doesn’t want to sell me a $500 phone without a credit check and payment plan.
Like other communities, sadly, HN is egocentric, thinking what they do is important and that everything else - humanities, social sciences, arts, management, government, etc. - is a waste. The world should be run by hackers, of course. I would guess MBA News is similar.
As someone who cooks with gas, I have a hard time believing that any dormant emissions from the stove when not in use are more significant than emissions from searing food itself… especially since natural gas has odors added to it to ensure we smell it.
Absolutely. My high heat cooking produces a good deal of particulate emissions and always sets off the kitchen air filter, but it's all from the food in the pan. It has nothing to do with the burner technology.
I know this because it doesn't happen when I'm boiling.
You made me look it up. Methane has no smell, so they add an odorant. Usually these contain sulfur, so there will be some amount of sulfur dioxide in the combustion products. Sulfur levels as limited to 70ppb, and are typically around 7ppb. This compares to a natural atmospheric level of sulfur dioxide at 1ppb. So unless you are breathing something like 10% combustion product the contribution is negligible.
The rest of the odor molecule is hyrdrogen, carbon, and oxygen, so likely goes to water and carbon dioxide or monoxide.
The problem with this thinking is you're referring to a constant factor; you'd be cooking the same foods either way, searing all the same.
These effects are cumulative, it's not some threshold you cross where the other negatives are no longer relevant because you do something far worse.
It's like people who rationalize eating a pint of ice cream before bed because they had mcdonalds and a beer for lunch already. The appropriate action would be to skip dinner and dessert altogether, but they're doing the opposite due to such wrongheaded thinking.
You should really be thinking "hey, my cooking produces a lot of particulates, I wonder if I can clean up the process elsewhere at least"
I think your analogy is missing the scale. In this case, I think it's likely that the equivalent scale would be worrying about eating a tic tac, when lunchtime is beer and burgers.
> "hey, my cooking produces a lot of particulates, I wonder if I can clean up the process elsewhere at least"
How about not cooking animal products, i save more emmissions that way than spending $2k on an appliance that will be obsolete or irreparable in 5~6 years.
As with ad-hominem, this isn't actually a fallacy - it's just declared as such by people who don't understand Bayesian reasoning. Using informed judgement helps us separate fact from fiction.
Just curious, if we are discussing cooking, safety, health and the environment, why did the author not discuss Teflon™ pans and how "unsafe" and damaging this is not only to health but also the environment?
If you want to make certain forms of energy "illegal" because of some "lung-irritating pollutants", I mean why not start with the unsustainability and cancer risks of these poly type chemicals, no? Especially ones coming in direct contact with your food, and your water supply (a.k.a Dish Washing?)? Never mind the actual environmental damage of manufacturing chemicals like these?
> If you want to make certain forms of energy "illegal" because of some "lung-irritating pollutants", I mean why not start with the unsustainability and cancer risks of these poly type chemicals, no?
This is a fallacy. Regulations can be improved even without being perfect and your pet peeve not being addressed in a specific discussion does not make the discussion useless. Gas is harmful, as well as some antiadhesive coatings. Saying we should not do anything about either because the other would still be bad is not particularly smart. It is also the contorted logic that lobby groups use when they know they are on the wrong side of a public health issue.
This is a fallacy. All materials and compounds are harmful, in certain degrees. Along with gas, anti-adhesive coatings and potentially maybe even some of those glass ceramic compounds those induction cookers use (especially at high heat)? It's a slippery slope.
I didn't say we shouldn't do anything about either, but banning natural gases that are found in nature because of "lung-irritating pollutants" is not particularly smart. I'm not in any lobby groups. I care about freedom and energy independence. Some NYT article pushing an agenda of "all electric" and climate change is contorted logic.
Put all of your trust in some on-grid electric power utility company where in some cases are not stable(cough cough PG&E), all the while power grids are huge targets for foreign "attacks", and even a solar EMP (Nuclear bomb? Solar flare?) could render all electronics useless. All the while, you make cooking with natural gas illegal? I suppose at that point, we could rub sticks together and cook by a wood fire (since the dawn of Man)? Or that is illegal now too?
What are normal people suppose to do without expertise on any subject.
Not against induction cooking but It is very common for these type of reporting that for induction cooking to succeed they must get rid of every single gas stove. And make gas stove cooking as evil. Start a movement, conjure a trend, make hype.
For the others about to Google this: "Reticulated gas is LPG distributed by a network of pipes. These pipes are connected to a storage vessel away from the customers site and multiple customers are serviced from one storage vessel."
> So they are lying, again?
What are normal people suppose to do without expertise on any subject.
This is unfortunately just how the world is. Epistemology is hard, and there are a ton of people out there who make it harder (Three guesses as to whether the author of this article, or any other crappy prestige-publication journalist, thinks they're lying).
It's a scary and confusing world! At some level you just have to internalize that, build the most accurate model that's worth the overhead, and accept that you'll be wrong a lot.
Off-topic, but another area where it seems hard to get good answers is what cooking oil is actually best. E.g., palm oil / coconut oil gets hyped lately, but is it really healthy (in a meaningful way)? Is it gentle on the environment (very likely not).
The industries (merchants of doubt) are so active, it's absolutely nontrivial for a well meaning layman not wanting to invest oddles of time to get to good conclusions.
Just use olive oil for everything except deep frying. It really is the best, and what is used by high end restaurants almost exclusively.
The smoking point is not a problem, the nasty stuff start appearing as couple dozen degrees _above_ the smoking point, so you can use that as an early warning system.
It also contains antioxidants, which bind some of the nasty stuff for a while, so it really is better for you for regular cooking.
Could not disagree more. Olive oil will be spewing smoke and changing flavour well before you get to a sensible temperature for shallow or stir frying. It is very tasty and apparently quite good for you, so it's a great choice for low-temperature cooking, but anywhere smoking point is important, olive oil is not what you're looking for.
The article gets weird a few paragraphs in: people like cooking with gas because it's primal and sensual? Really? Is that the best you can come up with, in an NYT article?
> people like cooking with gas because it's primal and sensual? Really?
Yes, really. I personally love the aesthetics of flames on the stove, and this might lead me to choose a gas stove over the alternatives despite minor downsides like being slower to bring water to a boil. On the other hand, the air quality issue seems like a much more significant downside, though I haven’t researched it much. (I haven’t personally ever had the opportunity to choose the type of stove for a place I’ll be living, so it hasn’t come up. Someday.)
Gas is also universally considered better to cook with than electric
(not induction) which is presumably why every restaurant kitchen uses it. My guess is ‘sensuality’ is not even in the top five considerations when equipping a kitchen.
When my wife and I were choosing rentals, the only thing I refused to compromise was a gas stove. At least in my case, it's entirely a sensual thing. There's a real joy in lighting the fire, feeling its warmth, making the flame larger and smaller with the knob, and the way it heats up the pan.
I know a lot of older Greeks/Italians are the same way with their gas ovens. There's just something magical about it that turns your time in the kitchen from a chore into something you look forward to.
Sensuals doing some work here though - that flame is sensual, but also gives immediate feedback over temperature/spread. You can lift your pan up and down to control heat over a gradient that radiates above over a larger distance. That lifting and moving of the pan alongside adjusting the flame and seeing it change immediately combines to give you a lot of control. So sensual, yes. A lot more intuitive and powerful, too.
Metal slats are also nicer to hit your a pan against than flat glass for a variety of useful/sensual reasons.
By what measure? Induction wins hands down for control, responsiveness, efficiency, and heat output: https://youtu.be/hX2aZUav-54
Doing a super low temp simmer on gas is hard. Double boilers are only something you need with gas. Induction imho and experience is just better all around. What the video for someone putting it far more eloquently then I ever could.
Try stir-frying with a wok, lift the pan to shake it without losing all heat or not having to be gentle when setting it back down because it's metal-on-metal not metal-on-glass.
Or how about my 11" cast iron; the induction only heats the middle 7". Half the pan is useless.
For the majority of tasks for the majority of people in NA induction is better. Wok cooking is the only one that it makes tricky (not impossible) and your not doing proper wok cooking on basically any NA home gas cooktops anyway. for that you should be using a proper commercial propane burner. If your not doing that the correct pan (one that will hold and spread the heat) and cooktop will be pretty close to gas, unless you want to bash when putting it down I guess.
As for your cast iron maybe use the correctly sized induction element then? It’s cast iron and it doesn’t spread heat well, that’s how it works. You would have the same issue on a resistive element.
Those propane burners are wicked. I still can remember the sounds of when they are turned on and off (Chinese hole in the wall restaurants usually have the kitchen right next to dining).
They make induction cooktops for woks (they are basically slightly bowl shaped), I’m not sure how popular they are in Asia, however.
Compared to $50-150 for a single-burner unit, that's quite a bit. Plus I like the portability, though I'm probably only using the cast iron under the vent hood.
Ikea has the 36" in stock in the US for 950USD, but the 30" would be tolerable at 800 or 700USD if they were available.
> Try stir-frying with a wok, lift the pan to shake it without losing all heat
In a home context its irrelevant. You're not doing true wok cooking at home anyway, your piddly little small bore home gas feed won't be providing anywhere near the required intensity.
Note that I explicitly said gas is universally superior to electric, not induction. I understand that induction has some advantages over gas. That being said it looks like induction is still much more expensive than gas for a comparable quality range.
You do realise heat transfer works completely differently in each case ? Therefore you cannot possibly replicate what they do. They are not equivalent and yes there are things you can do better in induction but the opposite is also true.
There are few things gas is better at the induction, and for most of them there are workarounds. I would argue that the default for hikes and people just shouldn’t be gas. Induction is safer, cleaner, easier to clean, and more precise.
As I said watch the video it says it better then I
It is true that you can’t blister peppers on induction and you can’t get wok he, but you already basically can’t get that on an indoor stovetop. The actual proposed benefits of gas are so marginal that they do not affect a home cook.
There are definitely a few more benefits than aesthetics. Comparing to electric stoves rather than induction (which are in the same price range) a few benefits I’ve noticed are:
1. Instant heat off/heat on response. In electric stoves the cook top still remains fairly hot and cooking can happen from residual heat after you turn off the heat. Same issue with turning the heat on. While the gas stove has minimum hearing from the thermal mass after you turn it off
2. Psudeo-grilling ability
3. Cost for gas vs. electricity. In an ideal world the heat output per $ would be exactly the same but there are subsidies, pricing structures, different supporting infrastructure etc.
As the article implies, at the current price point, gas stoves are competing with electric stoves rather than induction stoves. And there are definitely a few benefits.
I like cooking with gas because when my power goes out I can use a match to boil water when the boil water orders go into effect because mains keep bursting.
Also I can make smores when I don't feel like getting a fire going.
I do have an induction plug in hot plate and for actually cooking its really quite good. It boils water faster than all but my 21k btu burner on just 110v, dumps no heat into the room, cools down when I lower the temp as fast as gas, and did I mention it dumps no heat into the room?
As far as air quality taking anything above boiling temperatures inside is super bad for your lungs no matter how you do it. The NO isn't nearly as bad as the particulates created by searing or frying.
Gas is obviously far more resilient, though not immune to more extreme problems. I’ve literally never experienced a gas outage, yet power outages are routine almost everywhere I’ve lived.
>many things that cause electricity to go out ... will put out the gas too
IME, this is objectively false. I've lived in the Northeast my entire life (40+ years). We have on average 2-3 power failures lasting more than a few seconds per year. I have never in my life experienced a natural gas system failure. The pumps that pressurize the gas are themselves powered by gas, and the delivery is not in any way dependent on the power grid; also, as someone else stated, gas lines are buried well underground.
Maybe we have a different opinion on what small is but to run a stove, you will need a whole house generator and the starting point is about $10k and most folks will end up spending twice that.
I like gas ranges because i hate having to “fix the tool”. A gas appliance is almost ethernal because is simple, just a valve. No circuit boards, no microcontrollers, no sensors, no firmware updates. Turn the knob->cook.
This whole comment is simply an appeal to authority fallacy. Could be right or wrong, but it does not support any of their claims with hard data which makes it suspect or low quality.
"I have a PhD and I know better" is not a compelling argument.
So, just to be clear, you've copied in a comment from a random anonymous source, highly voted by other random anonymous people. You're not actually an immunologist that posts on HN (which would probably raise people's likelihood of trusting the comment), the message is actually from a random newspaper commenter, who thinks that bad air in NY when you go outside is a good argument for not increasing air quality inside? And that the NY Times has an agenda to promote induction stoves?
It's weird that they use their immunologist credentials to specifically attack it being worse than second hand smoke (which doesn't seem particularly controversial) as it seems very commonly accepted that it's bad, which you'd think an immunologist would know. Like if you look up any asthma charity for advice on your child's asthma, they're going to have this in the list of avoidable triggers. Why such venom because a reporter has (though probably hasn't) mildly exaggerated a real threat?
> Anything that burns inside the house will create smoke that
can damage your lungs. There are many things you can do to
help protect you and your family’s health from air pollution
inside your home:
> Use the cleanest burning fuel you can find and afford.
Electricity is the cleanest and does not create any
household air pollution
> many installed gas stoves/cooktops have a constantly burning pilot light.
Not for many decades surely. I'm 66 and I haven't used a gas stove that had a pilot light for at least forty years, all have had piezo-electric or mains electric ignition. But then again, I live in Norway now and formerly England not the US.
> And Brady Seals is not a scientist. Note the lack of PhD.
Why do you think you need a PhD to be a scientist? Many famous scientists, even some distinguished professors, don’t have a PhD. A PhD isn’t even the only type of doctorate!
Are you in tech? Then an obvious example is Simon Peyton Jones. Full professor, Fellow of the Royal Society, ACM Fellow, Senior Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research. No doctoral degree of any kind. Really think he can't claim to be a scientist?
I fitted an AEG induction hob in our kitchen about 3 years ago. It is absolutely amazing. It's so controllable - you can go from "barely hot enough to melt chocolate" to "so hot your pans start discolouring and everything burns" - and back again - in seconds (and everything in-between obviously).
I always thought gas was the best for cooking. But I was wrong - induction is. Gas is great for medium-high power cooking, but it falls apart for lower temps, and it's very hard to get it consistent. The only time I really miss gas is when stir frying - you can't really use woks on induction.
It's true that most induction cooktops/ranges aren't great for woks, but in principle the induction surface doesn't have to be flat -- it can be a concave shape to match the wok.
In fact these exist -- if you search for "induction wok burners" you can see some pictures. (I only recently became aware of this after watching this video of a chef who uses induction cooking in a small kitchen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooNzRrHA9VY)
Perhaps in the future there will be cooktops that include a wok depression on the surface, similar to how some gas stoves today include a built-in wok ring.
You’ll never really get wok hei with induction. It’s a mistake to think of a wok as just a differently shaped pan. Proper wok cooking is cooking is actually mechanically different. It’s mostly done with the hot air that rises up the side of the wok. Modernist cuisine has a great cutaway illustration on this.
The food is constantly flipped into the air above the wok where it is heated by the extremely hot air.
Of course very few homes in the western world have gas burners powerful enough for that anyway. I actually practice on a turkey fryer.
> It’s mostly done with the hot air that rises up the side of the wok.
I am not a cook, but I find it difficult to believe that the heat going by the sides of the pan is cooking the food, rather than the heat going through the pan and heating the air above the pan.
This is because where I've seen someone cooking on a wok, the food barely goes past the edge of the pan.
A sufficiently wok-shaped induction stove will induce the same heat as that going through the pan.
Afaik there is a motion of tossing food in a wok where you throw the food past the rim and catch it again. The moment the food passes the rim, a small flame ignites from the high heat and food oils, creating complex flavors. If you go to Asian restaurants with a wok station or to Southeast Asia/south China you can see this in action.
Wok Hei translates to “breath of the wok” for a reason. The food is constantly in the air, which allows it to dry out. The food spends most of its time not even touching the wok so no, you can’t do it on induction.
Here’s a good description from the Michelin guide:
> The food is constantly in the air, which allows it to dry out
Thank you for treating my ignorance!
Since in order to keep it in the air you have to constantly raise the pot from the cooker, and since induction can't work too far, it is clear why it doesn't work.
Correct! Watch someone who is doing it right and you’ll see the wok and food are in near constant motion. It just can’t be done with anything other than fire.
And there’s no way most of us in the west would know this. Not many people outside of the kitchen a Chinese restaurant would ever see someone do it right here. Most of us just treat a wok like a funny shaped pan.
I’ve been trying to learn the technique for a few years and I’m not great at it.
In a home context its irrelevant. You're not doing true wok cooking at home anyway, your piddly little small bore home gas feed won't be providing anywhere near the required intensity.
Yep. All of the “I want wok hei” complaints are nonsense because virtually no indoor burner ever gets that hot. If you cook in a wok often and want the restaurant taste then an outdoor propane burner does the trick for only a few hundred bucks.
Kenji Lopez-Alt, of Seriouseats and “The Food Lab” fame, is coming out with his new book, “The Wok”, here is his travel rig: https://www.instagram.com/p/CaxbNwdvOTR/. I’ve had a similar wok hob for years, and while fitting the wok to the curvature of the hob is essential, once you’ve got that figured out, it’s an absolute joy to use. Even, fast, powerful heat - nowhere near to a commercial gas hob, but neither is my gas range at home. My next home or kitchen reno will be induction, not even considering gas.
Isn't the reason why woks need gas also that the gas creates a smooth heat gradient up the sides of the wok? How far away from the surface of the stove can an induction element heat a pan?
You're correct, but times change, and the carbon steel wok over a giant burner isn't very suitable for apartment cooking anyway. There are now works designed for use on induction (with aluminium conduction to achieve a heat gradient), and they work pretty well. Also much healthier for the occupants, not as hot in the kitchen and cheaper to operate.
In countries with 240v/10A sockets a plug in electric wok is fine for home cooking. On 110v/15A it is still better than electric radiative cooking, but not as good as gas.
> There are now works designed for use on induction (with aluminium conduction to achieve a heat gradient), and they work pretty well.
This perspective drives me crazy. OK, so induction cooktops are good for the environment. But flat bottom woks are not woks, and you can’t do wok cooking on an induction cooktop. The only people who think that you can, are people who completely lack an understanding of wok cooking techniques.
Why do you think Alibaba (click the link!) has a thousand induction cookers, including ones with a spherical wok shape? You're saying the Chinese don't know how to stir fry?!
I have lived in various places around Asia for about 30 years, including almost my entire childhood. I have spent a tremendous amount of time and effort learning traditional cooking methods from the places I have lived, and I have never ever seen an induction wok cooker in the wild. Alibaba is filled with all sorts of completely useless inventions that never accomplish anything other than a small amount of buyers regret.
I know for a fact that you are arguing from a position of ignorance here, because it is physically impossible for an induction cooktop to replicate what gas provides a wok, which is hot air, something induction surfaces don’t produce. So I’d recommend that you do at least a small amount of research on the topic before you resort to such low effort (and hilariously inaccurate) ad-homs.
It sounds like the induction element cradles the wok. I don’t know about the thermal gradient thing (seems plausible) but in principle you could make a gradient in the field strength right?
I would have thought that a bigger drawback would be that you can’t get even heat input while tossing the wok, though I’m not sure how essential that is
The coils are light enough that you could have them under spring-pressure and lubricated against the wok, so medium tossing height won't affect heat transfer.
It's just a ~1mm thick planar coil out of "Litz wire", covered by a glass plate in a normal stove top.
See https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Induktionskochfeld_S... for what's under the plate. The center silver thing is likely a thermostat/temperature sensor. The electronics may need to be a bit less ignorant to handle a flexible coil, but tracking the tank's resonance isn't even a difficult task; a Royer/Baxandall oscillator could probably be made to work.
No it’s actually because you cook with the extremely hot jet of air that rises up over the sides! You can get that from induction since it doesn’t heat the air.
I've never understood why we need 4 or 5 burner ranges, possibly with a slight size variations. I really only ever want one high power burner and one simmer burner. A dedicated wok burner sounds like a great addition. Another option would be to abandon the dedicated range entirely, and have a variety of countertop induction units that can be stored away when not in use. I don't think you could sell a home with a kitchen like that but it would be a big win for versatility, especially in small homes.
> I've never understood why we need 4 or 5 burner ranges, possibly with a slight size variations. I really only ever want one high power burner and one simmer burner.
I don't mean this to sound rude, though I know it will, but this is the literal definition of "argument from ignorance."
You don't use more than two burners, so you don't know why a stove needs more than two.
I personally frequently cook with three or all four burners. Further, there are meals where I might use the two small back burners, and meals where I might use the two large front ones.
I guess you could be describing a need for stoves that came with just two burners, for those who couldn't imagine using more. But, seriously, would you have bought a two-burner model if it had been available, knowing that you might have wished for more even one night a year?
IMO, this would be a major advantage of countertop units. Buy two or four or six or eight, store them away in the cabinet when they’re not in use and enjoy the extra counterspace, bring them out when you need them.
It’s not THAT much of an advantage, since the area of unused burners can be already used as extra counter space, since it flat and resilient. Actually that seems like a major advantage over a gas stove, that’s rarely mentioned.
I thought about doing this, but it didn't make any sense for me. The countertop units are inefficient in terms of space compared to regular stovetops. This isn't suprising, due to component sharing, the need for a case, etc. As soon as you regularly use two of them, you might as well have a stovetop.
There are also down considerations of power (wiring and maximum output) and noise (induction units have fans, which are less noticeable in stovetops), safety (accident risk from cables, tilting, etc) and convenience.
It might work if your everyday usage involves zero to one units. Which is certainly possible, if you don't cook much, but even if you are and you're using other heat sources like a rice cooker, oven, grill, microwave, etc.
Not a terrible idea to have one around when you're limited by your normal capacity, or when you want to simmer a stew at a buffet, or your stovetop breaks or you are redoing your kitchen.
Perhaps because you will want to cook 4-5 things at the same time?
Aor of Indian households when preparing a traditional lunch will have 5-6 items (in the south, particularly in a Brahmin household, you will have one sambhar, one rasam, three vegetable currys, rice, and a fried item usually appalam). This entire meal takes three hours or so to prepare from scratch on my stove (a three burner lpg stove).
Two more usable burners will cut this down to about 2 hours
I am pretty amateur at cooking, and I use three burners most of the time that I'm making a proper meal. I'm pretty surprised to hear that this wouldn't be very common for the average cook.
South India consists of fives states and one Union Territory, all with different languages, culture and culinary styles. A meal in a Brahmin household in Hyderabad will be very different to one in Chennai with probably only rice being the common feature. Curry is too generic to be a useful descriptor.
It's hard to make broad generalizations. But having been to all six divisions and having lived in three of them, I feel very confident in saying that a household that cooks three different curries, sambar and rasam for a single meal is very atypical. What GP described sounds closer to a restaurant set course meal and not something a household would cook on a day to day basis.
I helped prepare lunch in a Punjabi household this afternoon, and on the stove there was rice, two subjis, chai and a roti tawa all at the same time. I would consider this a typical (if not modest) lunch routine amongst the many Punjabi households in which I have had lunch.
> and on the stove there was rice, two subjis, chai and a roti tawa all at the same time.
So, they had 5 burners?
Anyways, my comment was more about the number of dishes. Two curries as in your example is fairly typical. Three curries, a sambar and a rasam like the GP said is definitely not. Chai at lunchtime does sound strange to me but then again, I'm not really familiar with Punjabi culinary preferences.
I think there's both a practical and aesthetic reason.
The practical reason is that people have different sized pots and pans. I don't want to put my small sauce pan on a large burner that will waste the majority of its heating surface. Similarly, I need a large surface to heat a big pan.
The aesthetic is that a lot of cooktops are combination stove/oven and thus have to be big enough for the oven bit. Once you already have that surface area, you might as well fill it up to make it seem more substantial. A stovetop with room for 4/5 burners will look like the manufacturer skimped out if it has only 2 burners.
One day I want a kitchen in which I can have every cool appliance -c steam toasters, waffle irons, cheese toast makers, microwave ovens, air fryers, fat fryers, gas hobs, induction hobs....
I got a flat bottom wok that I am happy stir frying on my induction cooktop. The flat bottom gets rippin hot and the sides only warm. Have to work within that smaller hot zone but I prefer the wok to skillet for containing the mess.
Lodge makes a flat-bottom cast iron wok (the interior cooking surface is completely rounded, however). It's too heavy for my kitchen scale, but according to my bathroom scale it is between 11 and 12 pounds. You'll need two hands to move it around :)
There is no such thing. A round bottom is a defining feature of a wok. If it doesn’t have a round bottom it isn’t a wok by definition. A round bottom is essential to how a wok is used.
Here's[1] Kenji talking about a "flat-bottomed wok". My Chinese friends cook on a flat bottomed wok and call it a wok. So I'm sorry, but your linguistic rigidity is misplaced.
Yes, and that’s a defining feature of a wok. You can use a flat bottom wok and add a shitload of oil but that kind of changes the dish, and not for the better.
Not sure what you’re trying to say. A wok is a very specific type of cookware for specific uses cases. The round bottom is the entire point of a wok. A flat bottom wok is like a square wheel.
Cannot imagine why op wrote “flat bottomed wok” instead of “A pan similar in shape to a wok, but with a flat bottom, so that it can be used on induction cooktops but still allows for the tossing motion that cooks use to mix ingredients in a wok”
Easy tossing for stir fry is just one feature of a wok. For example, the round bottom causes liquids to pool in the center.
I’m not saying that large flat bottom frying pans with high edges aren’t useful, I have one and it’s probably my most used pan, it’s just not a complete replacement for a wok.
You're being argumentative instead of clarifying what you're trying to say. If you've read the other comments in this thread, then you can see there are things being sold as woks that have a flat bottom on the outside but still have a curved surface on the inside. Do these also offend your notion of what may be referred to as a wok?
Yes, woks are made of thin sheet steel. This allows them to heat up and cool down instantly. If it has a flat outside and round inside then it must have a lot of mass and thus cannot cool down instantly when removed from heat. Again, an essential feature of a wok.
My flat bottom wok is still made from a thin sheet of carbon steel. It heats and cools instantly, performing the essential function of a wok. The bottom has a flat surface inside and out. You're tilting at windmills, mate.
> It heats and cools instantly, performing the essential function of a wok. The bottom has a flat surface inside and out.
It performs one essential function, it needs both a round shape and has to be made of thin sheet steel. You can only have one if you need to place it on a flat induction stove: either it’s thin and flat on the inside, or it’s round on the inside but thick.
Instead of arguing, why don't you educate? You're clearly passionate about this issue. We've covered the importance of thin carbon steel. Why is the round bottom so essential that without it we can't call it a wok?
> Why is the round bottom so essential that without it we can't call it a wok?
you need the round bottom to be able to scoop up the food and churn it. Try using a spatula on a flat bottom "wok" and flip the food to churn it - it doesn't work very well.
There's also an edge between the flat bottom and the round sides. This causes food to get "stuck" there under high heat - leading to burning. A wok is round all the way, so the spatula scrapes everywhere evenly, and you leave no burnt bits.
A flat bottom "wok" is just a pan with high edges.
kenji just released his new book (700 pages) on woks. while OP is correct about the heat deltas, it makes no difference in practice if you have the right technique. if you want to dispute that, you're going to be disputing someone who wrote a book about this over 4 years and made thousands of recipes.
That idiom isn’t really applicable to online discussion forums, at least not unless the user in question has actually been shadowbanned.
The idiom comes for fighting battles with absolutely devastating casualties to capture positions of very low strategic importance. Establishing consensus that woks may only have round bottoms may fulfil the last part, but having people write a few counter-arguments is by no means a devastating loss, it’s just the discussion forum serving its intended purpose.
In our previous house we cooked with gas, we had a fantastic stove with a wok burner. Amazing thing. With our new house we - against my best judgement - went for induction.
It's amazing, way better than our old gas stove. I'll never go back.
Yup - induction heats up quicker, although you have to use a heavy iron wok which sits still. It probably says more about how bad the consumer wok rings are though. If you have a commercial one you'd never switch from gas.
I found those burners too weak for stir-frying. I suspect that unless you have special ventilation, a burner that's hot enough for wok cooking will not be safe for indoor use.
Ours is used outside because that's where the gas bottle has to be kept and because apparently it generates too much carbon monoxide to be safely used inside. And because we have three small children and this thing burns with a foot-high flame like a jet afterburner. It's great fun
I suppose if you have one of those round made-for-wok induction hobs. the flat ones just don't heat the sides of a wok and you can't even use a round bottom work. far from "excellent".
Do you wrangle the wok on the surface (or a frying pan) for a sauté[0]? What I'm really trying to find out is: how durable is the work surface? Does it deal well with pans being slid over it, and on/off it?
I have microscratches on the ceramic surface but nothing horrible. The instructions said explicitly to lift pots and not drag them. I don't baby it and it's fine.
And if you're worried about it just buy a silicone cooktop mat to put between the ceramic and the pan, something you can't do on any other cooking surface.
When frying potato pancakes, we went outside, took a countertop induction plate, and covered the area in old newspapers. I.e., cover the plate/table in newspapers, put the pan on top.
I can only recommend such tactics for messy cooking; it's indeed the real "killer" feature of induction that even gas can't match.
It was on sale at my local grocery store, no idea the name. It is lightweight carbon steel, means it gets hot in a flash and is easy to move around with one hand. I probably paid thirty bucks for it, nothing special.
It's important to understand that on a gas range or regular electric range, the knob controls power, i.e. the amount of heat you're putting into your cookware per second. And if those two are your only options, then the gas range is much better than an electric range, because you can change the amount of power very quickly, there's no lag.
But with an induction range, or a ceramic glass range, the knob controls temperature, i.e. there's a thermostat somewhere that regulates the power. And this gives you a lot more control, especially at lower temperatures. But it's not unique to induction ranges, any ceramic glass range can do the same, although they have more "lag" than an induction range.
Is that true of ceramic glass ranges? I had one once and I’m fairly sure whoever made that thing couldn’t even spell thermostat let alone add one. Pretty sure the knob was just a potentiometer.
There are electric stoves (contact heating; cast iron plates (european style)) with a thermostat in the center, and my induction plate only has a power dial.
Yeah, gas doesn't have a thermostat usually, but the other types are usually not incompatible and as such there exist both variants.
Right I’m not debating that they exist but I think most of the flat ceramic tops we have here modulate power rather than temp. That is one great thing about induction. You can reduce a sauce without risking a runaway boil if you don’t monitor it closely at the right time.
The knobs on my induction range control power, they go from 1 through 9 to B. Maybe US ranges are different. I was wondering why they're double the price.
Main problem with induction or electric is that once you lift your pan to say toss food, the pan stars to cool. With gas you can still have some fire contact to keep the pan hot. Also you can control which part of the pan is hot if you tilt it at an angle. These are something you won’t miss till it’s gone
> but it falls apart for lower temps, and it's very hard to get it consistent.
There are gas hobs that make it easy; I like my cooktop with FlameSelect exactly for this, it has 9 discrete positions and exact flame size for each position.
If a flat bottom wok works for you you’re not doing wok cooking right. But if you like the results then it’s just a funny shaped pan and nothing wrong with that.
I did not know that induction cooking is a novelty (or at least worthy of an article) in the US. When you go to an appliance shop in France they would be 90% of the offer (and 9% gas, 1% vitro-electric).
BTW the big photo on the top of the article is not induction but vitro-ceramic (the first version of something that would look at glass and not have flames, but this is not induction, just heating of a tingie under the glass plate)
Having used gaz since childhood for 30 years, the move to induction was fantastic. The only drawback is that you cannot cook with the cookware tilted (to pour some liquid into a small puddle and heat it directly, for instance)
FWIW, what you call vitro-ceramic is known in the UK as a halogen hob. It comprises a vitro-ceramic surface on top of a halogen bulb; we chose to name the whole thing after different parts!
I’ve always wondered how Italians will handle the transition when it inevitably happens, that tilting & just a ton more movement in general over the flame seems super common there
Italians are very good at not changing things if they don’t want to. If they believe something to be the best way, they will continue doing it regardless what the rest of the world thinks.
I get what you're talking about but you can actually pick up an induction pan for a bit and shuffle things around and then put it back on the pan.
It's not 100% exactly the same heat distribution but when you pick your pan off of the fire it's also not getting mots of that heat either.
Somebody can correct me if I'm wrong about this (apparently wok cooking "needs the fire"), but like... I dunno, I've done a lot of stir fries and messing around with pots on an induction thing. The "auto-turn-off" thing only happens for me if I really leave it picked up for a couple minutes, otherwise it just re-engages pretty quickly.
The only drawback I see with the shuffling is that I do not want to drag my pan on the induction table itself, something I would do on a gas appliance (because the thing you put the pan on (surrounding the flame) is not fragile).
I do not know actually if this is a real concern but would prefer others to chek instead of me :)
As for the "flame" - I feel that the heating with induction is much faster and consistent than gas.
My guess: cast-iron cookware and induction stovetops designed for them. That gives you pretty much the best of both worlds, with the ability to retain heat while manipulating the pan while still having extremely precise temperature control.
There are shaped induction systems, most commonly for woks or industrial heating applications. However, as it needs to very closely match the external shape of the cookware, the technical and commercial viability of a generic system would be relatively low, which is why you don't often see them marketed.
Culinary back water would be unfair, but definitely laggards when it comes to innovation, especially if there is some regulation involved, doubly slow if there are entrenched interests. America is quicker to innovate if someone can make a buck.
As another commenter said, it was electric but "vitro ceramic", so terrible performance and pretty dangerous. This actually gave gas a "better rap".
Now I honestly only use gas at the moment because I moved in recently enough that I haven't bother to change - but it's getting higher on n my list every day...
As one anecdote, since there’s no flame (vs gas stove) and the surface is happy to heat whatever is on it (vs induction which needs a magnetic metal) — my cousin burned down their family home by setting her book bag on the stove after school one day. It’s unclear how it got turned on but the end result was pretty terrible for them and likely wouldn’t have happened with a different stove.
Right, but you'd notice if there was a flame burning when you set your bag on it, unlike the electric element. This was 20+ years ago though, and I believe they all have the illuminated cooking positions when the burners are active now.
You can still use electric stoves, just don't use the induction one. Ceramics cooktops uses old-school heating elements, which is less efficient than induction but works on any pots. Some brands even offer hybrid stoves which have both heating elements and induction zones.
I switched from gas to induction during a kitchen remodel about 18 months ago. Took a couple of days to get used to, but it is considerably better than gas. Zero regrets. Faster, more precise, holds temperature better. E.g., I fry an egg on 6. Every time, I can reproduce my ideal fried egg (unless I break the yolk).
When I was shopping for appliances about half of the salespeople tried to talk me into gas, but a few loved induction and boosted my confidence to take the plunge.
Look at consumer reports ratings for induction cooktops, they universally score 98+ points. The best gas cooktops top out below the worst induction cooktops.
Commenting here as I don't think it's really worth a top level.
I feel it really depends on the person. For most Americans, induction is great. It's dead simple, repeatable, etc. But, I hate it!
I cook on cast iron. My wife cooks with a stir fry pan or wok. We went from gas to induction and both of us absolutely hated it. It's so hard to cook if you learned in a natural fire environment.
I hate having gas at all, I just wish there was a way to mimic its behavior.
I cook a lot on carbon steel and love it on induction. Seems to heat more evenly than on gas and heats up faster. Maybe you'd like it - seasons and performs the same as cast iron, but less material. Matfer Bourgeat is the brand I have.
Let me know when you can buy one of decent quality in the US with actual physical controls instead of some insane touch system designed by somebody who has apparently never actually been in a kitchen and marketed to people who won't use it but just want a thing that looks cool.
Ugh, my parents have an oven like that. Press the "bake" button and it'll happily tell you you have to press the "on" button first. Infuriating design, and you have to mash your thumb for a good 1-2 seconds before it reads the press, too.
Or our old Samsung washing machine, that wouldn't let you turn it off and on again without listening to the startup and shutdown songs first. (Our newer LG is much better in this regard.)
Even in Germany there are very few left with knobs... I think a price comparison listed like 10 models... Miele had/has some... Then there is neff with a "puck" thingy, somewhere in the middle and then some high priced stuff...
[1] actually lists a few more, was looking for something bigger than 60cm (23inch??) wide.
Those are standalone induction cooktops. It's common to install a cooktop on top of an oven by the same manufacturer. In that category, there are still many devices (from many manufactures, low and high end) with rotating knobs, integrated into the oven component.
well, maybe was common, with a bit of money and a new kitchen I would guess it is more common to separate the two entities and not have the oven on the floor... also very neat for the dishwasher if you have the space :-)
No, I think they are common and will be common for the foreseeable future even for most new construction, but I can't be bothered to find any references, which are unlikely to be publicly available anyway.
If you select "EU" from the flag drop-down on the top left, you get an English version of the page (seems to be properly translated).
Should be more useful for sharing with a primarily-non-German audience. (The site itself is awesome, though; a very effective parametric price comparison site made by people that actually understand technology and know how important details are. It's owned by the publisher behind "c't", the big European/German non-tabloid computer magazine.)
That is the sad truth. It is absolutely maddening the control schemes on every induction cooktop I've used. It's like an 80's car dashboard and radio. Nothing is obvious or makes sense--the most simple action like turn up the power is a complex process of multiple presses, different modes, etc.
I consider the induction touch controls one of the few places where the touch controls actually make sense. It makes cleaning the entire range trivial. Which given how messy I tend to cook, I have to do a lot.
I think the problem is that nobody buys hobs with dials anymore. When they have the choice, most people prefer the sleek look and easy cleaning.
And the controls aren't all terrible. We have a cheap electric Ikea hob (non-induction), and the controls are decent. It has digits from 0-9 for each heater, so you can set every heater to the right power with a single touch.
If you spill something it starts beeping, and you have about 10 seconds to wipe the controls with a rag, or it turns off. It's annoying the first time it happens, but it's not a big deal in practice.
I use this hob everyday to cook for 5 people, so it's not like sensor controls are useless.
It also has some advantages, like individual timers for each heater. And the little one can't reach the controls and mess with them.
Are there any like that anywhere? I would think part of the problem is that induction settings are usually in discrete steps so a knob, which is what I assume you mean by physical control, may not be any better than a simple +\- control and would stick up from a seamless cooktop. Also, the highest end ones like Thermadors seem to focus on making the entire cooktop usable which kind of breaks the discrete burner area paradigm that knobs would suggest. Closest I’ve seems is a little puck on Samsung cooktops that you can use to adjust the controls but I would hate worrying about losing it.
I want 200 discrete settings then, so a knob is better. Or at least I think I want that considering how many micro adjustments I make on all stoves I've used before
I don't know what it is about induction that makes a rheostatic-like control unfeasible but the most I've seen is about 20 levels so you might be waiting a while.
Many more are a problem without a knob to speed through the steps.
There's no reason an induction hob can't be run with delta-sigma over it's normal low-resolution PWM to get accurate, high-resolution average power control.
1% power accuracy is easy, 0.1% is a few bucks more per "burner".
The problem I've seen with some induction hobs is that the low power settings are basically 1 second on / 5 seconds off, which is kinda annoying when the liquid goes between boiling violently / not boiling at all. Maybe thicker pots would help smoothing that out, though.
Indeed, I will never buy a stove without physical knobs. Add to that a stove top that can handle some real usage without breaking up. My circles have had too many reports on cracked induction or ceramic tops. Kettles can get heavy and hands get weak, and especially when you're busy in the kitchen the cooking ware do inevitably bang onto the stove top occasionally.
Mine doesn't have physical knobs, either. And worse, it has a flashing red indicator light, that blinks when it is plugged in and turned OFF. So maddening, had to wire up an external switch just to keep from getting angry every time I walked past it. Still, it is great for cooking, and worth putting up with these minor annoyances.
I suspect we will finally see a return to buttons in a couple years. I'm picturing an iPhone with a side ridge of multiple buttons. Like, little mini haptic-feedback touchpads (like the main pads on macbooks....but smaller)
"Although induction technology has been around for decades and is established in Europe, it has yet to catch on extensively here. According to Consumer Reports, induction cooktops and ranges are installed in only under 5 percent of homes in the United States."
That's why, for a european like me, an article like this one seems totally extraneous to hacker news front page
They aren't as popular in the US because they're considered commercial appliances and it's assumed you are on a business budget if you want to buy one. This means the store carries like 3 models and they cost literally ten times as much as a traditional glass cooktop. $250 vs. $2500.
> They aren't as popular in the US because they're considered commercial appliances and it's assumed you are on a business budget if you want to buy one.
No, there are plenty of consumer models. But they aren't as popular because the US has significantly more abundant, domestically produced, and (largely, because of that and not taking climate seriously) cheaper natural gas, and has only recently started in some localities having residential electric-only rules for new construction.
Electric stoves are very common even where natural gas is available, and even more common where it isn't.
The only induction stoves I can find are very high end models. I'm thinking about it, but for the cost I can install gas (including plumbing) and save money.
Even on the high end there is often on model with induction so if you want some other option as well you are stuck.
Induction stoves do indeed seem to be more expensive in the U.S, but they don't seem to be entirely out of budget for the average consumer: IKEA sells a few for around $600-800.
IKEA in Sweden where I live has induction stoves for as cheap as $300, and I would assume that similar prices will become available in the U.S in the future.
It's not like they are drop-in replacements for whatever you've got, either.
I was interested in these about 15 years ago when I bought a house. They want a dedicated circuit with a 240V outlet and 40 or 50 amp breaker. My house has a gas range, so I don't already have a 240V outlet there, and I've only got 100 amp service at the panel - which claims 100 amps is the max it's rated for. I decided it was not worth the hassle.
I've had electric stovs with 100 amp service before, not a problem even if the ac was also on. 40 amp is standard for kitchen stoves so it is very common ,but obviously if you have gas they won't install wires for electric.
I bought a newer home (2016) with a gas range and it doesn’t have the wiring either. We desperately want induction plus a outdoor vented range hood, so we are considering a partial remodel to do it. The idea is to bring in an electrician, replace our 150A panel with a 200A one, bring up wiring for induction into the kitchen, and wrap wiring around the house for a level 2 EV charger (another want, might as well knock it out together if we have to get an electrician in anyways).
My house was built 6 years ago but is already outdated in this respect. Replacing the panel is a pain as it requires shutting of electrical service for the day and an inspection from the city when they switch it back on. At least our meter and outdoor wire to the grid are already 200A…I hope.
A 150A panel should accommodate both your induction stove and EV charger. The stove's 50A rating assumes you are running all burners are running simultaneously, which is rare. You need 200A if you going fully electric (for hot water, HVAC, oven and clothes dryer).
Our hot water is gas, but our HVAC (heat pump), dryer is already electric. The oven would be electric also, but it’s rarely used. Anyways, I would let an electrician make the call, but my feeling is that EV level 2 charging and induction would put us over when a 150A panel could handle.
Yeah, heat pump and dryer can push you over, especially if you are in a colder climate. Miele makes a 115V/20A heat pump dryer that you might consider even if you go to 200A.
Also most stoves (at least here) seem to allow de-rating by configuring them to self-limit their current draw to accommodate breakers/circuits not sized large enough to handle their full capacity.
Just for reference: IKEA has a countertop model that runs on 240V 10A (2kW; 175mm), sold for 39.90 EUR in Germany. Subtracting VAT and converting to USD, that's a hair under 40 USD pre-tax.
I expect that proper adapters from NEMA 240V to Schuko are legal to operate? If so, you'd be cheaper off just importing these (104.867.94).
Yeah, I know I'm comparing against walk-in store products. Still.
There are more commercial versions available but they do tend to compete at the higher end of the market. Induction is a specific choice you have to make here and people who make uncommon choices tend to be in higher budgets.
It will probably change soon though. A lot of laws are being proposed to not add new gas hookups for new construction. Induction will have to become the higher end default for electric ranges.
There is also good to remember that these units at least higher powered are designed for 3-phase 400V that is 3 230V phases. Which I have understood isn't very common or easily available in households in some places around the world.
I haven't seen a stove yet in Germany (residential at least) that can't cope with all the phase inputs tied to the same phase.
They are just 3-phase because the utility demands 10+ kW loads to be 3-phase loads, and they often exceed that slightly.
Check out the install guide on e.g. some IKEA built-in models, specifically regarding the wiring instructions.
And US residential does have 240V single-phase available.
Appliances tend to have a lot of regulations around them. The chance you could commercially import a bunch of appliances from the EU into the USA legally and without substantial modifications is very low.
it is not just the cost of the unit, there are alot of other costs that would go into converting to elec from gas, including running a new outlet, and if you have an older home could require upgrading your entire electrical service.
As a fellow German I didn't go induction on purpose, because I prefer the ceramic hob cooking experience. "Pans cannot be used" wasn't part of the decision. Having "control nobs" on the front rather than a touch area on the cooking surface was a hard requirement for me though and seems to be getting rarer every year.
I'm actually amazed how much people love induction here, but I guess that's also because it's mostly compared to gas?
What? Ceramic cook tops are crap, they get stained easily, scratched easily, and in the US at least, the way they work to "adjust" the temperature is to cycle on and off every few seconds.
Oh and if any of your pots or pans get warped, they become completely unusable!
Drop anything heavy on it, and the cook top breaks.
I once waited for 20 minutes for a small pot of water to boil on a ceramic cook top.
The old fashion coil burners are better than the stupid glass top ones.
My ceramic cooktop is basically stain and scratchfree after using it for cooking 4-5 times a week for 8 years. It's incredibly easy to clean as you can literally scratch of everything that doesn't just wipe away.
The temperature does cycle on and off usually based on a thermometer, so it does hold the selected temperature. I don't get why that's a drawback for you? The cooktop will literally be kept to your selected temperature.
Also the induction cooktops I know use the same kind of glass or ceramic plate on top, so you have the same advantages/disadvantages in regards to scratching, cleaning and breaking it.
Some glass top stovs work better than others. I won't go back to coils, but I currently have a glass top that bad. However I've has glass tops that were good so I know they exist. But I'll take gas over electric anyday. (I have never used induction so I reserve the right to change that stance)
I have induction with the control nobs to the front in the oven. That does exist, I guess you have to buy it together with the oven.
Induction is greatly superior to electric heating plates, ceramic or even metal, as it is much faster and more energy efficient. Whenever you use it you never want to go back.
Built-in separate cooktops are only the fashion trend right now, there isn’t anything intrinsic in induction that require such controls. This goes hand in hand with the separate built-in oven trend (often with a second oven or a microwave). Kitchen renovation fashion, I guess.
Yea I know it exists, it was just really rare from my limited shopping experience.
I have used induction a couple of times when cooking at my parents house and in a friends kitchen and I happily stay with my ceramic cooktop. Induction is much quicker and more energy efficient, but I just like that I literally control the heat on a fixed size cookfield rather than controlling the strength of the current, where effective heat will depend on the size of the pan.
Don't have one, but used to have cheap counter top thing. I think only pan or similar I can't use is my ceramic dutch oven. Never browned anything in that one either, so it is pretty academical... Just need to check the pans you pick up and you will be fine in general.
It may be that your cookware is no good. For safety reasons all control systems for induction appliances have a feature to automatically turn off when they detect that the generated field is not being received by a large enough target surface, since otherwise it would be a fire risk. Try changing cookware, you may find the issue goes away.
Yes, it won't work without a pan on it. Doesn't work with aluminium. Is relatively cold to the touch despite having just been used to boil a kettle. Says 'Induction Hob' on it.
Can absolutely recommend the upgrade, these stoves are far superior to PWM style "2000W or off" ones. I can even melt chocolate without a water bath on mine, they can keep temperatures as low as 55°C / 131°F steadily no problem. :D
I just have to be pedantic and say that what you are describing is the very opposite of PWM, which runs at high frequencies (e.g. 30kHz), varying the duty cycle over the tiny slice of time. The only problem with good PWM is audible harmonics, usually only children can hear them.
> I just have to be pedantic and say that what you are describing is the very opposite of PWM, which runs at high frequencies (e.g. 30kHz), varying the duty cycle over the tiny slice of time.
Yes, this is correct. What parent is describing is generally referred to as bang-bang control [1].
I disagree. The definition of what is high and what is low frequency depends on what you are comparing.
If you are comparing electric capacitances of electric circuits vs the thermal capacitance of a macroscopic object, 1 Hz might be a high enough frequency for doing pwm.
Also, the 'exact opposite' would simply be a gas hob. Yeah you might not call something that clicks on and off every 10 seconds 'PWM' but it's not that far removed
To be even more pedantic, the grandparent could absolutely be describing PWM - PWM is pulse width modulation - it means that there's a fundamental frequency, and within each cycle the stove is "on" for a period and "off" for the rest. The "on" period length is varied (modulated) based on the power requirement.
What "PWM" doesn't define is the fundamental frequency. It could be 0.1 Hz or 10 MHz. Just because the fundamental frequency is slow doesn't make it not PWM.
Those whines drive me crazy and I’m 34! Do any induction cooktops not have that terrible whine? At least with the duxtop portable induction I had to return it because the whine was so bad.
Which leads to the question : which ones do not have a whine? Does the breville? Or which? It’s not something any reviews I’ve seen talk about
They can work at frequencies and with electronic designs that are far out into the ultrasonic range.
You may want to check out those that apparently can handle non-magnetic cookware; those apparently run on higher frequencies to make up for the weaker magnetic effect.
I'm in the UK and I've never knowingly been in a home that has an induction cooker or know anyone in my personal life with one. Gas is perhaps 90% of what I experience, with the occasional halogen.
I moved to a UK home with induction. Its not on the gas grid though. Some homes use bottled gas but I think induction is common for that situation. Otherwise I know some apartments with induction. But overall yes, mostly gas hob, although everyone in uk has electric ovens unlike US.
Have a Samsung induction. Induction kicks ass: incredibly fast to heat up, incredibly fast to reduce heat, good temperature control, dead easy to clean, surfaces stay relatively cool, etc. Flat(ish)-bottom wok works well. I highly recommend upgrading to induction stovetops.
Had a cast-iron pan on “hi” or “powerboost”. It heated up so fast it cracked. It was like a gunshot, scared the bejeezsus outta me. Surprisingly, it did not shatter the oven top.
Advice: don’t buy Samsung. Their products are always garbage. The stove’s convection no longer works. The dishwasher doesn’t clean well and plastic bits have disintegrated. The fridge has an icing-up problem. Every Samsung product is shit. Spend the extra dosh, get something from a better manufacturer.
Our GE Cafe Induction Oven https://www.cafeappliances.com/appliance/Cafe-30-Smart-Slide... had board failure in the first 6 months, the first board appeared to have a cooling shroud installed improperly (covid quality issues?), so we were hopeful, 3 months later the replacement failed. We are now awaiting our Gas replacement stove.
I've had a Samsung fridge for years and it works really well. Don't know about anything else though. Here in the EU I tend to prefer Electrolux/Frigidaire and Bosch.
This article is, in one respect, quite misleading. It compares gas ranges to a specific induction hob: the Breville Control Freak. This device is not actually complicated per se, but it is a masterpiece of good (or at least decent) UX and control design in a way that makes it almost incomparable to anything else on the market. Cooking with it is a rather different experience than using any normal stove.
There’s actually a large learning curve. With a normal stove of any sort, you set a power level. Different stoves have different degrees of responsiveness, differing levels of UI annoyance (knobs at one end; phone apps at the other), and different abilities to work well at low power, but they do fundamentally the same thing. The Control Freak knob does not control power; it controls _tempererature_. To boil pasta, you set it to 240 (F) or so. To carmelize onions, something like 330 will do it, and the onions won’t burn. Want to keep your stew warm? Set it to 160 and ignore it. If you put someone who hasn’t used one before in front of one, they get rather confused until they get the hang of it. If you out someone used to it in front of a normal stove, they’re disappointed.
Yeah, we splurged on a Control Freak 3 years ago; it was on sale because they were phasing out the ones with the NEMA 5-20 plugs, honestly it's better if you have the 20A hookup.
The idea we had was that we'd use it for Cantonese hot pot, and just put it away in its case for storage the rest of the time.
We were dead wrong. It takes up a lot of counter space in our apartment kitchen, but since we unboxed it it has never moved from the counter for the last 3 years.
It has replaced our hob for 80% of cooking (in general, we only use the hob when we need to cook two things at once), and when it's not in use for other things, we leave a kettle on top of it.
It's also industrially specced so we can actually leave it on forever -- when we have a stew we want to eat tomorrow, sometimes we just leave it at 65°C until we want to eat it the next day.
It's so amazing I wish it came in a 4 hob configuration and we can replace our stovetops completely (GE has something similar, but we've had terrible experiences with GE appliances).
I'm German and switched to induction from (old) electric after moving to a nicer apartment.
Despite ostensibly knowing about its responsiveness before I still ended up with slightly underdone food for the first week - if you turn off the stove, it will get cold almost immediately, no/little residual heat to make use of.
It also comes with the vaguely flashy feature of letting you run one stove plate with twice the energy by temporarily disabling its neighbor. Since the dial goes up to 9.5 regularly, I call the power boost setting "19" and relish in the knowledge that I'm 8 steps ahead of Spinal Tap.
Now I want a cook top with a burner that goes to 11. My last gas stove had a 'hot' burner. Problem was the scaling doesn't match the other burners.
I have a glass top range now and it sucks. Problem is most of the good induction units in the US are built in cooktops. Good ranges (combined cooktop+oven) are $$$$.
> Problem is most of the good induction units in the US are built in cooktops. Good ranges (combined cooktop+oven) are $$$$.
Build one yourself, that's what I did when I bought my house in the Netherlands somewhere in the 90's. I wanted induction and a hot-air oven but did not want to pay for the privilege. I built a heavy wooden frame sized to fit the oven and the induction cooker, made a drawer for oven utensils in the bottom and a hard-wood ring around the hole for the induction cooker. Wooded sides make of glued floor boards. Once the hardware arrived I could simply drop and slide it in place, wire it up to the connection box I made on the back and plug it in - voila, an induction range with hot-air oven on the somewhat-less-expensive. I sold the house 5 years later and moved to Sweden where I now cook on a wood-burning stove, from the future to the past. I like the past better, it also fits my rather dynamic cooking style - sliding and banging heavy cast-iron pans around is far less precarious on a cast-iron stove.
We are thinking about doing something similar for our kitchen. We currently have a gas range with a over range microwave, but want to replace all that with an induction cook top and a dedicated range hood vented outside (under cabinet or built-in, 700 CFM or so). We lose our microwave and our oven, so we have ti replace those somewhere. I’m liking the microwave oven combos (not the combined microwave convection oven, though that is cool also), which we would have to build a new cabinet for elsewhere, not beneath the cooktop (or maybe a drawer microwave beneath the cook top and the oven…somewhere else?).
I think that's because most homes do not have sufficient electrical power to run everything at once.
For example: 50A for the heat pump, 50A to charge your car, 50A for the range, 30A for the dryer, 30A for the water heater = 210A (all my examples are for 240V) + various lights and other things. Homes in the US are most commonly wired for 100, 150, or 200A.
So they'll run the range at 30A instead, but that means you can't use all the burners at the same time at full power.
If we are actually going to fully electrify the home 200A or more service is going to have to become the starting point. Residential panels > 200A in the US are rare (from what I read most power companies won't even supply such service), and that might need to change.
Induction cooking is good. UI is terrible: touch screen that only allows control over one heat source at a time. Please, please please give me knobs like the ones in gas tops
The better European induction cooktops have an individual touch slider control per "ring". I have some family members with those and that control model makes the touch thing a non-issue. No need to wait while pressing +/- either, you just plonk your finger down roughly where you want to be and slide to fine-tune.
Depends on brand. I have one with 4 distinct controls for each heat source. But when I was changing my stove, this was something I looked for - I've used those that can set only one heat source at the time, and they are infuriating for me too.
As for knobs, I'm willing to bet that there are some induction stoves with knobs.
crazy that they would put a touch screen. Ones in Japan are just like little plus/minus arrows (plus button serving as the per-heat-source on button as well). Built-in timer and everything.
The buttons are those little plastic overlays on simple button, so super easy to clean, usable when dirty... and definitely dirt cheap.
American appliance designers should really try just copying good foreign products one of these days. Y'all are in million dollar homes with appliance setups worse than student appartments in many places
Not only is the UI terrible (wet hands and touch based interfaces are terrible), but pets may accidentally turn on the induction if they are prone to walking across your kitchen counter.
This should not be a concern (the danger due to pets, not the terrible UI, which is, indeed, terrible): All modern induction cooktops will not actually engage unless they "feel" a metallic mass which reacts to the magnetic field. If there's nothing, or anything else than an induction-compatible pan/pot on top of the hob, it won't do anything and will turn itself off after 30ish seconds.
So unless you leave pans and pots on the hobs when you're not cooking, you're good.
I can't say enough good things about my induction cooktop. It's as responsive as gas, but puts out more power than a home gas stove. Plus, it's incredibly easy to clean. Love it.
Warning to anyone thinking about buying one of those portable induction cooktop ("just to see what all the fuss is about"): if it plugs into a standard 120V socket, it's probably not going to boil water any faster than your existing stove! In fact, mine boils even slower than my electric stove. Apparently, the portable ones only go up to around 1800W. If you want to experience the true boil-the-oceans power of induction, you have to get a full range that runs on 240V; those can draw closer to 7000W.
Granted, you can still benefit from the precise temperature setting and the ease of cleaning, but don't expect it to be an apples-to-apples comparison.
You either got a shit induction cooktop or an amazing electric stove. Maybe both? I have an 1800W portable induction cooktop and while it's not perfect, it's definitely way faster than my electric stove. At least 5x faster at boiling water, I'd say.
Same experience, I grabbed an 1800W induction cook top in January to test the waters for an inevitable range replacement. It has bubbles forming at the bottom of the pot before the normal stove even gets an empty pan hot. Since then it has had a permanent spot in the kitchen, in fact I can't remember the last thing I used the regular stove for...
It also helped me find out that my kitchen counter outlets share the circuit with my fridge. The breaker quickly tripped when I was making toast, boiling water, and the fridge compressor cycled on!
120V is only standard in a part of the world. It's much more helpful to talk about power -- where I am 3 kW is limiting on a standard socket, at 230V. What is it for the US (I don't know!)
Note -- electric hobs and ovens are often wired into far far chunkier circuits and the high efficiency of induction is a big boon. It's wonderful to cook on -- all the responsiveness of gas, none of the pm2.5. It's just a shame that per kWh, electricity is a lot more expensive.
This house I just bought (in the US) has a really odd kitchen that includes a gas cooktop combined with an electric double oven. It's wired directly to the breaker box in the basement with a 35-amp fuse.
How often do you broil? I have an electric oven and probably use the broiler about 3 times every two years.
Everyone's cooking styles and needs are different, I guess. It's never been an issue for me. If I leave the oven door ajar, the broiler will stay on and do it's job. An electric oven works far better than gas for baking however which is something we do regularly.
Do you have a source for amp standards? My limited search suggests much of EU have 10A plugs. Also here in AU our standard is also 10A along with our NZ family.
In the US ranges typically come with 50A 240V outlets - and as much as that is, it's actually not enough to run the oven plus all 4 burners at the same time.
A low end range has 16K BTU for the oven, plus 4 10K burners = 56,000 BTU = 16.5kWatt.
But the 50A outlet can only deliver 50 * 240 * 80% = 9,600 watt.
I have 2 of the duxtop’s linked in the article as my only range. Before going to this setup I tested them against my gas range and they were 2 to 3 minutes faster at boiling water.
The issue with the portable ones is the quality differential. You’ve got extremely cheap ones that are more plate warmers than cooking appliances and you e got the control freak that is a piece of future tech. But if you get ones that a caterer would use they tend to do the job.
> But induction stoves are expensive. Starting around $1,000, they’re twice the price of a basic gas range.
When I was in college, I wanted to be able to make pasta in my dorm room. The dining hall was fine, but it was my first time away from home, and I missed cooking pasta.
The rules said that hotplates weren't allowed in dorms, so I bought a portable induction cooker for $60 off Amazon. It can't be a hotplate if it doesn't get hot! (And I didn't exactly ask permission.)
For $60, it was great. It was small and light and plugged into a normal outlet, but could boil water in about the same time as a normal stove.
If my apartment didn't already come with a gas stove, I could easily forego a standard range in favor of a couple of these portable cookers. I've never used a "real" induction range, but $1,000 seems awfully expensive compared to $60 per burner...
A comparable gas burner would be $15-20 but nobody would let you use it indoors, so there’s no market for it.
Look on Home Depot or Lowes website. Full cooktop w oven is a totally separate market than gluing four hot plates together. Induction has been a high-end thing for a long time, so there aren’t bargain basement induction ranges. Stuff for sale in the US is competing with mid to high end gas.
Out of curiosity, do you use Cloudflare DNS? Cloudflare doesn't support EDNS IP location (ostensibly for privacy), which Archive.today uses for geolocation-based multicast resolution.
Archive.today's maintainer decided they didn't want to deal with it, so they intentionally return incorrect DNS results to Cloudflare IPs. Cloudflare's CEO has stated they could just detect and override it, but that would be essentially MITMing DNS, which felt like an overreach: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828702
I have a pretty strong doubt that the emissions from gas + cooking are significantly worse than the fine particulate put off from cooking methods like pan frying or burning anything even slightly.
There is also probably a statistics abuse here with the "emissions while not in use" is more likely large rare leakage incidents rather than median kinds of events. Keeping in mind that the amount of methane lost to the atmosphere from petroleum production is absolutely enormous, undercounted, and would certainly dwarf any gas leaks from your kitchen.
But this is the kind of "bad for you" thing which appeals to many people that want to do good and are easily sold ideas by others who don't know what they're really talking about but are good at getting attention.
There's plenty of evidence out there that fine particulate has a significant impact on long term health.
You can easily measure the impacts of cooking by buying a particle counter and making some stirfry or burning some cookies in the oven. I have, it's easy to measure PM2.5 air quality in your apartment worse than the worse city in the world after a bit of pan frying which if you don't actively do quite a bit will linger for hours.
You'd have to come up with a model of nitrogen oxides produced by gas stoves and their long term health effects and compare them to fine particles in poorly ventilated / filtered air in homes.
Amateur home cook offering my experience using a portable induction cooktop next to my electric stove top. I'm in the US, so my induction cooktop is an anemic 1800 watt one because it's 120V, instead of the beefier European/Asian models that are 3500W 220V versions.
That out of the way, here are the positives from my perspective:
* induction boils a pot of water dramatically faster
* the pots, in general, heat up much faster and reach cooking temperatures VERY fast (as in, under two minutes)
* the surface itself only heats up as a result of the pan itself back-heating the surface of the cooktop.
* fixed, known heat settings for specific temperatures.
* almost instant pan response to temperature setting changes.
Here are the downsides from my perspective:
* No fine control of the "heat". I have eight temperature settings ranging from 140F to 460F. That's a wide range with only ten steps, so I frequently wish I had more fine control of the settings, especially at the lower end. The steps are 140F, 212F, 260F, 300F, 350F, 400F, 425F, and 460F.
* Fan noise. The unit has a built-in fan that is very noticeable.
* It's much easier to burn sauces, because the heat right at the cooking surface seems to be much hotter because it hasn't radiated throughout the whole pan yet. (Please feel free to just say "git gud" at my poor skills.) I don't really know how to articulate this well, but I find myself adjusting for a certain level of boiling, but being surprised at how hot the bottom of the pan actually is, which leads to a burned sauce.
* Only works with certain pans. Most of my cookware is newer and designed to work with induction stoves, but I have a complete set of expensive stainless cookware that I inherited from my mother, and it doesn't work with the induction burner. Works great with cast iron and enameled cast iron, and I have a nonstick aluminum pan that has an iron plate on the bottom, so it works fine. I also have an all-clad stainless frying pan that is triple-layer, and one of those layers is iron, so it works well also. Any non-magnetic pans will not work (copper, aluminum, and older stainless pans).
I use my induction burner when I am cooking something for a long time outside, when I am boiling pasta or making lighter soups, and for deep frying.
I use my conventional electric stove when I am cooking meat, sauces, or thicker stews.
> I'm in the US, so my induction cooktop is an anemic 1800 watt one because it's 120V, instead of the beefier European/Asian models that are 3500W 220V versions.
If you ever wish to 'upgrade', what you can do is change a plug in your kitchen from the typical NEMA 5-{15,20} to a NEMA 6-{15,20} and then wire it in the panel to 240V, as there are 'commercial' induction cookers available:
Those all have two issues: MUCH higher cost (I got mine for $50) and they still don't offer refined power/temp controls. It's just in large steps. I did find one that uses a reflective thermostat to set the EXACT temperature you want and they said it's accurate to within 1.8 degrees F, but it costs over $1,000 for one burner. My current setup is fine, but if I was going to spend that kind of money on a new stove, it would be for a gas convection oven, not just one stovetop burner.
A quick glance at amazon.co.uk shows high-wattage induction cooktops that are relatively cheap, e.g. https://www.amazon.co.uk/GIONIEN-Domino-Induction-Hob-Electr... is a dual-burner 3500W model that takes 220V-240V (unclear if it's ok on 208V?) for £109.99 (USD$143). 60 Hz would be a leap of faith, but is probably fine.
Then we're back to having to upgrade an outlet in my house and wire it into the panel, which would cost $400 at least. And the only thing I'm getting for that price is more wattage, but not finer control over the temperature, so I'll stick to my current setup.
Do you only have a single “burner” running off 120V outlet, or multiple?
Considering a custom dual fuel setup. Since I’m limited by a 125AMP panel and we are almost maxed out between an electric heat pump, washer/dryer and maybe an EV.
I have a single "burner" that I got from Amazon for $50. It is a 120V, 1800W version. If I were buying a stove/oven for my house, I'd still buy a gas stovetop with an electric convection oven in a heartbeat. I had one in a previous house and I miss it constantly. It had two very large burners and two smaller burners. I loved the exact control with almost instant response of cooking on a gas stove. I work in the energy industry, so I don't lose much sleep over it.
They make stoves that are gas top with an electric convection oven. I've owned one and I checked just now and they're still available. They're the best of both worlds for our household.
The problem with induction stovetops in my experience is that they really don't play nicely with Asian (particularly Chinese) cooking. Trying to stir-fry on one is maddening.
Usually any discussion about induction stoves seems to wholly revolve around European-centric cuisines, which is why I'm surprised to see this article quote a positive experience from a self-described "Kind of Chinese" restaurant. I genuinely wonder how they manage it and what I'm missing.
I love induction stoves, I'm always a bit sad when people tell me they dislike induction cooking.
I wish there was more granular heat control aka faster on/off switching/temperature modulation, some stoves are really bad which makes frying especially complicated as the heat comes in pulses of seconds.
Btw. for my new apartment I was wondering if there are ways to avoid scratches on the induction glass plate and turns out there are protective silicone mats, which also help against slipping. Anyone tried those yet?
I switched from induction to gas after a kitchen renovation. My experience is that induction is more efficient and powerful than gas, but is also much more uneven, more picky about cookware, and does not work well with “professional” cooking techniques which were created around gas and wood stoves.
I gave induction a solid trial run and in the end, it didn’t cut it. The stupid controls design made it even worse.
Also, gas is not dangerous from fumes at all if you have an externally vented hood, which you should have with ANY cooktop, as cooking fumes are worse for health than the byproducts of a blue flame.
Whoever wrote this article doesn’t know what they’re talking about and clearly doesn’t gourmet cook regularly.
> My experience is that induction is more efficient and powerful than gas, but is also much more uneven, more picky about cookware, and does not work well with “professional” cooking techniques which were created around gas and wood stoves
Anyone else's may vary, but my experience differed from this:
1 I found induction to produce a very even heat - much more even than a gas stove, where there's a heat spike wherever any individual gas jet hits. Quite noticeable with cast iron on a gas stove.
2. Yes, certainly induction needs specific kinds of cookware. All mine work fine.
3 What "professional" cooking techniques don't work?
4 Agree on controls, but that goes for most modern consumer devices, unfortunately...
5 Saying the author "clearly doesn't gourmet cook regularly" is very elitist and a non-constructive criticism.
I wonder if perhaps your induction was a bad model? Or are you confident it wasn't a halogen stove?
I used induction in EU while traveling and found it really great which us why I switched to it initially when back in the US. The available models (at any price) in the US are all subpar. Commonly you will have a single 7” diameter induction ring in a 10” burner, which is /horribly/ uneven compared to any other range type.
Look in cooking forums, it’s well understood at this point that radiant is the most even, induction is the least even, and gas is in the middle. But gas has the advantage of working with any cookware (including warped or wobbly/spun pans) and can be used in tilted/lifted cooking techniques that don’t work on induction or radiant and are common in gourmet cooking done in the French tradition.
I really wanted induction to work for me. It’s so much safer and more energy efficient (e.g. cheaper) than other options, but it just sucked in the US. Even EU brands sold in US use subpar designs and the quality cooktops sold in EU are not available here.
If you want to know conclusively how even your cooktop is do a flour scorch test or use a thermal imaging device. I know from scorch test that induction was significantly worse (and from behavior while cooking). Try using cast iron on induction and you’ll hate life.
I share this experience and I'm also moving from induction back to gas after around 6 years of use.
I've experienced the uneven heat (liquid boiling right over the coil, cold next to it), shitty duty-cycle pulsing (no way of getting a proper low flame) and actually insuficient power when e.g. deep frying (it would throttle back when too hot and temperature actually dropped).
And terrible capacitive controls.
I've moved places and my kitchen now vents straight outside, so the choice is clear for me: gas.
Its annoying and I could certainly see this happening as different pans do have different noises, for me I'm not sure I could have found an egg pan without noise on the induction I had until it died.
it's the cookware. move it around a bit. you can also try using a paper towel in between the hob and pan. (haven't had one catch fire - before you ask :))
Cooking with natural gas is thought by some people to be very good, but food YouTuber Adam Ragusea is not a fan of it in the home he recently moved into:
I don't buy it, sorry. Electric ovens are garbage, and there's no such thing as an induction oven. Most of the health concerns are probably solved by requiring the installation of range hoods.
I don't believe the claims about burning natural gas being the causal factor here either. I rather think that culprit is aerosolized oil, and houses with gas ranges are simply more likely to cook with oil at temperatures hot enough to aerosolize it. I think this conclusion is reasonable at least because people who like cooking also are more likely to be more comfortable with cooking at higher temperature, and also are more likely to prioritize cooking with gas when considering homes.
The most salient argument against gas is not that it's worse than induction. In fact, I think it's pretty obvious that they are complimentary, and that gas is more universal. Instead, it is that piping natural gas to houses requires maintaining enormous amounts of infrastructure.
I will happily purchase a stove that contains some induction and some gas, and even prioritize the induction whenever I can. But the argument that induction is "better" is made by people who do not spend a lot of time in the kitchen. Induction cooking has existed for a long time. Restaurants have largely not made the switch for a reason.
> Electric ovens are garbage, and there's no such thing as an induction oven.
I am afraid of losing my gas broiler if I go to an induction system. That is very nice to have.
However, I don't get why everyone says gas is harder to clean. Last time I owned a glass cooktop I spent forever cleaning it, and it never looked perfect. Gas cooktops are easy peasy, remove grate, wipe up. Glass cooktop: Get special scrubber, note it doesn't work. Spray on magic glass cooktop spray, wipe clean, no luck. Get out a "glass cooktop" straight edge razor and spend 15+ minutes scrapping it off, slip a bit and now you have a permanent scratch.
Glass cooktops suck.
In terms of speed of changing temperature, gas and induction are pretty identical here, with the exception of those super sweet Chinese gas stove setups with the foot pedal to control the gas flow. Those things are awesome, but it is perfectly possible to hook that same pedal up to an IC that controls the induction element.
There's your error. That spray-on stuff sucks. It does not work as advertised.
What you need is the stuff that is largely solid and dry, comes in a jar and which has a sand-like feel to it. Sorry, I don't know the name or brands of that stuff in the US, but it probably exists there as well (the German name of the stuff I use translates to English into something like "cleaning stone"). You take a sponge, put some water on it, rub some of the sand-like substance out of the jar and scrub the junk from the cooktop with that water-sand-solution. The cleaning agent works like sandpaper and is thus much more effective against dried and/or burned-on residue than chemical-only solutions. You only need the razor tool for the really hard cases.
I usually clean my glass cooktop in about 60 seconds this way, and it is actually clean afterwards (ok, maybe add 30 seconds for an additional wipe with glass cleaner to get that pristine "just-installed" look). With the gas ones, even though I love cooking on them when I sometimes find one in a holiday home (because it surely does satisfy that primal urge to tame and use fire), I hate the cleaning, it takes forever because removing the grates and cleaning those takes a few minutes already, and forget about them ever looking like new again. And the cooktop itself also never actually feels "clean" except after a one-hour cleaning marathon because there are so many little edges especially around the burners in which the dirt will inevitably hide during casual cleaning, while the glass one is just a big slab of plain glass, with no place for dirt to hide and accumulate.
The article explains pretty well the advantages of induction. I had induction in my last appartment, gas before and currently a glass-ceramic cooktop (without induction). Induction was clearly the best. Very fast to make water boil, no issues with the gas sometimes not starting to burn or other maintenance work the gas needed. And I see no reason to doubt the negative health effects of gas, burning stuff is always bad.
Being able to select a target temperature would be awesome for cooking, my induction stove couldn't do that.
> Electric ovens are garbage
What, why? All ovens I have ever seen outside of pizza places are electric. Why should a thing that just needs to get hot at the sides be bad if it gets hot by electricity? That's nonsensical.
> In fact, I think it's pretty obvious that they are complimentary, and that gas is more universal.
Not a fact at all. As I see it, there is simply no positive of gas compared to induction, not a single one. Thus there is nothing complementary about it. You are just used to it - or seen broader, it's simply one more technological area where the US seems to be stuck in the past.
I have never had any luck broiling anything inside an electric oven. The heating elements just don't cut it.
As to the non-universality of induction. Many cooking techniques require you to be pretty active with your pan. Perhaps to toss the contents to stir, perhaps to collect hot oil that you are spooning over your fish to brown the top. Many techniques depend on the pan having different temperature at different spots. In particular they require you to use a pan whose geometry is fundamentally incompatible with your induction surface. Induction cooktops do some things better than gas ranges, no question, but they do not do everything better, and there are some things that they don't do at all.
Burning things is not always bad. Smoke is basically always bad, aerosolized oils are usually bad, but the product of combusting natural gas is almost entirely carbon dioxide and water vapor. Vent hoods are for oil particulate, and oil particulate contains all sorts of nasty shit for your lungs.
You are talking about an oven and the article is talking about cooktops, those are different things right? There are also new kinds of convection ovens with air circulation to consider (so they support air frying), but that is a totally different topic.
I agree with the AQI aspect: get a good range hood that is vented to the outside (not just recirculating).
It's curious to me that you would say that, since electric ovens are generally preferred for their more even and consistent heating. For a gas stove to maintain a certain heat, it has to be continuously cycling a gas element that necessarily only burns at one temperature. Also, electric ovens don't impart extra moisture to the cooking cavity.
Electric ovens are essentially incapable of broiling, which is one of the most important things that an oven does. All other functions are close to parity, but why would I buy an oven that is functionally without a broiler?
I've used lots of electric broilers, and a fair number of gas broilers, and have never found one better or worse. I would have said that the main difference is that it's hard to get a dry heat with gas, and hard to get a moist heat with electric. But this is more of an issue for breads and meringues, neither of which gets broiled.
Could you explain more about how you find it "incapable of broiling"? I'm wondering if you might be using it wrong. You may have to preheat for a couple minutes, and may have to leave the door slightly open to prevent the thermostat from cycling. Or maybe I've never fully utilized a gas broiler and don't realize what I'm missing.
Sounds like you maybe you have one of these fancy electric infrared broilers. I did not know these existed for electric ovens. I certainly have never seen one.
You seem pretty misinformed. Electric ovens aren’t garbage - most high end homes built today with separate ovens and ranges have electric convection ovens and built-in gas ranges.
If you try out induction, you’d realize it’s superior to gas in a lot of ways. The reason it’s not adopted is that induction cooktops are expensive and you have to throw out any nonconductive pans. Your comment about restaurants is more tuned to this than gas being superior - high end restaurants are starting to use induction more bc of the degree of control. Alinea uses induction. Low to mid restaurants are buying the cheapest thing they can, and that’s usually the gas range they inherited.
Natural gas is far cheaper, so I'll stick with that. Even though I love the idea of an easy to clean stovetop. My electric bill is already out of control (California).
I’m in a the SFBAY and paying 30¢/kw all-in after taxes/fees for tier 1 usage, and this is absolutely a concern. Electric costs are out of control due to wildfires and I have no incentive to switch to anything electric right now.
My local utility company is set to introduce a major rate hike for both electric and gas, but the per-unit of energy for gas is still far cheaper. Electric is getting so bad it might make sense to swap out my electric dryer for a gas one, even though it’s perfectly functional.
You might want to do the math. Induction is quite a lot more efficient at actually heating the food. Even regular electric is more efficient at heating the food than gas.
Have you done that math? The "even if 100% efficient" doesn't sound right to me. Wouldn't that imply gas cooking is 25% efficient?
Admittedly, induction isn't 100% efficient, but it's very efficient! A gas flame heats up everything around it, whereas induction only heats up your cookware. The surface of an induction stove without any cookware is cool to the touch; in other cases, it's warm only due to the heat radiated back from your cookware.
Induction also heats up the power electronics inside the cooker. That's why they need a beefy cooling fan.
I have done the math... Induction is 84% efficient, and gas is 40% efficient. So for most people, gas is still cheaper, unless you live in an area with very cheap hydroelectric.
Gas is 40% efficient at heating food? Where are you getting these numbers? I have no counter information here, but that just doesn't seem intuitively correct at all. With gas, you're creating a fire that is heating up everything around it!
Note that the 84% number is for a prototype model... 77% is for an on-the-market model, and it is beaten in efficiency by conventional electric for cookware matched in size to the heating ring.
Also, while gas is 'just a flame', the heat mostly rises, and right above it is the pan. Noticing that the pan, the hob, and the room feel warm/hot afterwards can be deceptive because the specific heat capacity of metal is 8x lower than that of the water in the food you're cooking, so you'd likely underestimate the efficiency.
so long as you applying your open flame to metal is more efficient than a natural gas plant is at converting it to electricity and an induction is and applying that to your cookware. I'd be curious to see the numbers there... but if I were a betting I'd think induction would be better.
they don’t glow from heat but they can glow by design: for safety reasons, some have lights that simulate glowing from heat. I guess the choice of image is a little curious, given the primary distinction between induction vs. traditional is, typically, the absence of external heat.
At risk of sounding dangerously stupid, what exactly is the safety concern? Given that induction is cool to the touch, it's not obvious to me how you'd hurt yourself (which is doubtless another major advantage of gas).
They're not cold to the touch once they've been used: the induction process heats the pan, but heat from the pan will transfer back to the glass. If you use an induction cooker for 20 minutes, and then immediately place your hand on the glass, your hand will be burned.
My (Samsung) induction-capable cooktop has resistive heating as a "backup" for cookware that is not induction-compatible. Theoretically this can be disabled using an app, although the app has never worked.
I did a quick read in the article and while it gets in conclusion that induction has only 15% efficiency compared to a typical open fire, it is considering also the conversion of heat in energy by a thermoelectric (that is the actual inefficient process). While I understand the point of the article this is not a valid general conclusion of the efficiency of induction cookers, since you can have much more efficient ways of producing energy.
Induction cooks by themselves are very efficient in converting energy to heat (90% efficiency, according another claim in the article).
The problem is "induction cooks by themselves" is a fictional entity. How do you get 2kW power autonomously in a cities where the majority of the world population lives nowadays?
That figures includes all losses from the entire power generation chain, it's hard to take seriously. The heat transfer energy efficiency of an induction stove is about 80-90 %, which is much better than for let's say an electric oven or even a gas stove. Also, electricity for induction can be generated from renewable sources, unlike for gas or open fire cooking.
The large majority of people use the grid, so it's very relevant IMO.
But yes, if you somehow have your own source of energy to power a 2kW it's excellent.
It's not that they are inefficient per se, rather they are taking the power generation losses into account, which will always be >0 when compared to directly burning fuel.
"perils" is just a tad dramatic here. And while there are many advantages to induction over gas (the faster boiling times have me sold alone), there are some disadvantages in my opinion to placing even more reliance on a electrical grid that we learn each day is more fragile than we once thought.
I think today more than ever we can agree that relying on gas may put any country in a far more precarious position. Remember that you can make enough electricity at home if need be, even if at a hefty cost maybe. The same cannot be said for the gas to power your stove and heating for any reasonable cost.
No, I don't think we can agree on that, especially not in America, where a mere 3 short years ago, we had an abundance of natural gas, and prices plummeting to near record lows (adjusted for inflation). The current situation we are in is due to bad policy.
So you do not agree that relying on gas may put any country in a far more precarious situation? It's happening as we speak to countries which did exactly that so your agreement was not actually sought, it was a mere figure of speech. It also doesn't help your argument when you go on to confirm that even countries with large reserves can put themselves in such a precarious situation with no help from the outside.
The truth of the matter is that any country would be in a more secure position relying on resources that are regenerable, can be produced locally, and whose network can cope with a higher measure of decentralization. They make both the grid/network and the country itself more resilient regardless of "policy".
As I said, you can't make your own gas and an outage for the wholly centralized gas distribution system can have dire consequences that would be lessened or even eliminated for setups like rooftop solar and heat-pump.
The price of every type of fossil fuel is a gigantic lie that future generations will pay for. So what if the downpayment is lower, when it’s such a minuscule portion of the loan?
Not just the grid but the fickle nature of power electronics.
Our induction cooktop fried its driver circuitry last year and we were stuck cooking off a camp stove for weeks while waiting for a part from Germany. Old school cooking methods are less high tech and more repairable.
In early 2014 numerous pipes were shut down in the eastern US because supply was not enough to meet demand due to a polar vortex.
Compressor stations break down, suppliers fail to deliver gas, mercaptan might not be available, control systems are subject to cyber attack. My point is simply that any energy delivery system has weaknesses.
It's a great point, and plays into my larger point. We shouldn't put all our eggs in one basket. Having multiple power delivery options is great. Diversification is great. Electrifying everything is going to lead to some unforeseen consequences. When the power goes out, and it's below freezing, people die. But we aren't spending as much securing and solidifying our electrical grid and power delivery as we are onboarding more and more stuff onto it.
As long as gas is used to produce electricity the energy delivery systems are not independent.
In a home the two systems generally serve different purposes so I am not sure the value of having both is as high as you suggest. My gas furnace/hot water heater won’t turn on, for good reason, without electricity. The only thing that works when the power is out is my stove top (not the oven) if I manually ignite it. They would work if I used a generator but that is third supply and it shouldn’t be lost that the output of the generator is electricity. That generator could itself be powered by natural gas but that is not common.
I used an induction stove for 6 weeks and despised it. Maybe the one I used isn’t the same as what others are using but it would turn on and off over and over again and I found the temperature to be completely unpredictable. I hated it
This was my experience as well. Very finicky surface that required the pan to be in exactly the right place, and touch controls that were a pain in the ass to use. And we were cooking Chinese food, so no woks. I'll stick with gas, myself.
I have experienced cheap induction tops that do that. The better ones don't. Mine you can tell it a temperature and it sticks it there, so I can basically tell it to slowly simmer a curry or stew and it does the simmering for me. I walk away for hours at a time. It's been more than a decade, so when I have to cook on anything else but that induction top, I find that I burn everything from neglect.
One problem with induction cooking is that the magnetic fields can prevent the correct operation of certain implanted medical devices such as Implanted Cardioverter Defibrillators and pacemakers.
I had an induction hob unit fitted in my kitchen ten years ago (replacing gas) and loved it for the instant controllability (although not the controls themselves, as covered elsewhere here). But last year I had an ICD implanted after an episode of cardiac fibrillation, and was advised by the NHS arrhythmia nurses not to use the hob (or at least to keep an arms length away from active hobs). So because I love cooking I had it replaced with a ceramic unit, which is much less satisfactory. It's made by the same company (NEF) that made the old induction hob and in fact has identical controls and physical footprint. But it's less responsive than induction (or gas) because of the residual heat and harder to clean than induction because the surface gets scorchingly hot which can burn spills on.
So having used gas, induction and ceramic, I'd definitely pick induction as my favourite, except for the one small problem that can stop my ICD sensing imminent sudden cardiac death or (unlikely) reset my ICD which would trigger an annoying warning buzzer inside my chest (but that's a whole different topic)
All of these cases for or against are irrelevant. I will continue to cook with gas, long after mains gas is switched off, because I like cooking with gas.
Just like car enthusiasts would rather drive a 1960s Mustang than a safer, more efficient 2020s Camry or N64 fans would rather play with original hardware on a CRT than an emulator with 60fps, 4k native rendering on a 90" OLED.
The hob is big enough to fit a large pan but only heats a 10cm circle in the middle. (And I have tried it with many induction-safe pots and pans.)
Rather than physical buttons, it has touch sensors that react to moisture. So a few drops of water spilling out of the pot cause it to turn off or stop working.
As others have mentioned, you really can’t shake and shuttle the pan along the surface of the cooktop—it’ll scratch. That ruins the neat & clean look if that’s important to you. You’ll need to adapt to that.
Some use silicon pads (shown in one image in the article) to prevent inadvertent scratching. I don’t trust those—they can melt at 400+F and you’ll never get that off the stove. I use LoMi cloth (Nomex-like?). They’re not going to melt.
To me, the limits of induction (no lifting, shuttling, shifting) are worth it for precise temperature control, less ambient heat (huge exhaust blower not needed), and the neat and clean look. My wife disliked the “patina” on our gas range. Not a problem any more.
I absolutely hate my induction jobs. Touch interface does not work unless your fingers are completely clean and dry. Therefore it does not respond to touch while I’m cooking.
It turns itself off and I cannot turn it back on again. This happens on a daily basis.
I have an induction cooktop form Cooktek, which I originally bought in 2007, which I carry around with me everywhere.
One more thing about how it is great. Since it heats the pan directly instead of the air underneath the pan, you can boil water for pasta without heating up the kitchen. Now, many of you have A/C to keep your kitchen comfortable, but then you are heating up the kitchen with the stove and then cooling it down with the A/C ...
My friends are not convinced. I get responses anywhere from no way to it's ok for me maybe but they really just love the feel of cooking on gas. These are supposedly environmentalists, too.
I wonder how canning works, especially since most pressure canners are aluminum, most induction stove tops are glass (weight limits), and bands/lids on 4oz jars are less than 4" above the stove (do they heat?).
Installed an induction cooktop from Smeg a couple years ago. It’s not top of the line but it offers granular enough control. I was a doubter at first but it was the right thing to do to avoid using gas and to electrify more appliances in our home.
I quite like it. I don’t miss gas. I’m not a chef but I do a fair amount of cooking and even an entry-level cooktop will serve most well. Best part for me is easy on and easy off. The surface heats up very quickly and cools down fast enough that I can reuse the cooktop as part of the counter. A major bonus for tight kitchen spaces.
I’m working on a renovation but will be sticking with gas. EMFs from induction cooking exceed the legal limit and we like to cook on high heat. If you are not fully covering the induction burner, using a silicone handle, and standing at least a foot away you can be getting an unhealthy dose of emf. It’s non ionizing but it’s so intense that I am personally concerned.
Also the noise, and reliability to look at, the one I have and am now getting rid of had a motherboard larger than an e-atx board inside of it. I have no clue why it needs that much circuitry, it does have wifi, but really seems insane.
For me I was sold on the speed and my wife honestly liked the fact that it never burned on food, she also liked the safety aspect of the stovetop never being hot, but none of those really matter if the replacement motherboard dies after 3 months on a $4000 range.
my local library will let you check out a portable induction hob.
The last time i checked, the waiting list was about a month long, which certainly speaks to the interest in the idea.
As long as my rangeware doesn't warp, I'm all for more even heating! It didn't occur to me until very recently that a reason why pans might warp on an induction hob is that they can now heat up fast enough to thermal shock on the way up, not just on the way down (by, e.g., taking the pan you just seared meat off in and dunking it in cold dishwater)
Older stainless steel pans do not work. Stainless is not magnetic. Most newer stainless pans have a layer of iron sandwiched between stainless layers on the bottom of the pan. I have a set of older stainless pans I inherited from my mother and they do not work with my induction burner.
Plus, y’know, there’s always ReStore, Goodwill, Pawn shops, Value Village, and Senior Center thrift shops. Good pots and pans are inexpensive. Matched sets less so, but still excellent value for cost.
Most of the pans you have already bought are likely to work. I think thin copper ones are only ones not likely to work. Most other general cookware at least here support induction as well. Including the cheapish stuff.
Get thicker pans if you're experiencing warping. I had loads of problem with inexpensive but thin tri-ply aluminum/stainless cookware. I switched to big thick cast iron and carbon steel, and 8mm thick aluminum disc base nonstick/stainless and have never had a warping problem since.
I have an induction stove. It works (fine-grained temperature, fast heating, easy cleaning, no heat in kitchen) but I find stove cooking in general to be unsatisfying. It just seems like a very tricky way to cook food. For starters, you have to use some kind of oil, and most oil is not even good for you when heated at high temperatures. I would much prefer to cook everything on a bbq or some kind of oven method. That bbq taste is so obvious and special, and oven cooking is so easy.
Look I'm as environmentally conscious as the next guy, but here's the thing I don't quite get about induction - how am I supposed to use a wok, a tagine, or basically anything that is either a non-metallic pan or where you need a flame for the cooking technique? Every time I've talked to induction owners, their answer has been that there are many cuisines they simply don't cook and types of cooking vessels that they don't use.
I like induction but it's hard to find portable induction with a true hob size larger than 6". Any cookware outside the induction disk zone only gets warm, not really hot.
The largest one I could find is the Max Burton 6600 which claims a 9" induction disk but the middle 3 inches of the disk is not energized.
I suppose for a 15 amp plug there's only so much area it can safely heat.
If you disassemble one, you can quite easily change the shape and size of the heating area. It's all flexible wire that you can re-route as you please.
In winter, when people don't open their windows the pollution will accumulate.
Induction cooking is not just better because of less pollution at home, it's cheaper than gas cooking and is easy on the power grid, many solar installations can power it directly.
I prefer a ceramic stove top as they're not finicky about the metal of the cookware. The one in my kitchen gets glowing hot in an instant and transfers heat so fast that it's almost like an induction stove.
Does anyone know of an induction hob with adjustability that doesn’t suck? My current one has 200-300 watt jumps between power output settings and it seems stupid that I can’t adjust in 5 or 10 watt increments instead!
There is some dividing line between crappy ones that pulse on and off. And the better ones with fine PWM control. I don't know where that is and the product literature is unhelpful. I suspect it's in the $250 range.
All I can say is I tried a $60 unit, a $75 unit and a $120 unit and they suck. All of them pulse on and off at lower power settings.
For those interested in such things, I found this interesting thread [1] with lots of brand names to look into, although no easy answers.
Looking at Vollrath's line, their 59300 Mirage Cadet hob at $350 has only 20 power settings, and the 59500P Mirage Pro at $680 has 100 levels (but with not-great reviews...).
Ok, so, perhaps a silly question (forget about environmental advantage/disadvantage): is gas a problem if I turn on a very strong exhaust fan right above my stove?
Electronic temperature control using induction plus the quick-cool benefit of a stovetop pressure cooker. I love that a hot cooker at full pressure can be moved to the sink and cooled with tap water so it can be safely opened in less than a minute. Can't really do that with an instapot, gotta wait.
Induction hobs cut out a loss leader for gas: gas stoves. Once you have gas in your home it makes sense to install the main moneymaker: a gas furnace for heating. It's how they upsell.
Induction hobs are great in the fight against global warming.
If the energy you use for heat is generated by gas, it's more efficient to burn it directly, and the emissions produced from manufacturing all the new stoves likely out way the emissions produced over the stoves lifetime.
So, I'd say it's only helpful if you are getting a new stove anyway.
Of course, one also has to consider the leakage of methane that occurs with all the residential natural gas distribution, which is significant. Methane being 25x the greenhouse potential of CO2 means there's a lot of hidden environmental impact.
I think it's more likely to be a marketing campaign that's capitalizing on the Ukraine crisis. Articles like this were popping up last year, but it's ramped up a lot lately.
In a world where Putin's bombs fall nearby, and millions of Ukrainians are without electricity, the (propane-tank fueled) gas stove is another small step towards resiliance in the face of crisis.
With induction charging you're trying to charge a battery and unfortunately producing heat in the process which is unwanted and entirely a waste.
With induction stoves pretty much all the electricity is converted to heat in the bottom of the pan which is exactly what you want. A minor portion is lost elsewhere in the circuitry but not much in the grand scheme of things.
Efficiency refers to the ration between what you put in towards a goal and how much of it actually turned into that goal. Things that produce rhat with electricity tend to be 100% efficient because any waste usually happens to be heat.
An induction stove certain shouldn't have lower efficiency compared to a regular electric stove so maybe check if it's not a local issue.
> Happily, there is induction, which uses electromagnets to efficiently heat cookware without the inherent pollution of fossil fuels like natural gas.
Yet about half of the electricity in NY is generated with natural gas[1], so most of the "benefits" this article touts, especially pollution, don't really exist. The other half comes from nuclear/hydro combined and renewables accounting for a tad. Same for electric car owners who think they're helping the environment. Nope, you just shifted the problem to where you don't directly see it but they contribute just as much. Probably more with the all of the inefficiencies added up from each steps of going from natural gas->steam->turbine->transmission lines->multiple transformers->charging car battery.
>Yet about half of the electricity in NY is generated with natural gas[1), so most of the "benefits" this article touts, especially pollution, don't really exist.
You're right in that from a strict energy perspective, burning gas to cook food is more efficient than converting energy to electricity and then utilizing it to cook food [1], but that only addresses one small part of the downsides of cooking with gas. Among other things, these are the things that come to mind right away:
- Induction has the potential to be emissionless, gas can never achieve that. At its best, gas can be carbon-neutral if it is not fossil-sourced.
- Induction has zero local emissions, while gas is not great for indoor air quality.
- Induction can't leak lethal gasses into the home where it exists
- Induction is much less likely to cause an indoor fire and burn down the home where it's installed
>Same for electric car owners who think they're helping the environment. Nope, you just shifted the problem to where you don't directly see it but they contribute just as much. Probably more with the all of the inefficiencies added up from each steps of going from natural gas+steam+turbine→transmission lines-+multiple transformerscharging car battery.
The concern of direct energy efficiency is still the same as for induction vs gas, but to imply that it would be worse for the environment is abject nonsense. EVs perform better from an environmental perspective in all but the worst grids in the world (basically 100% coal power), and only get better as grids become carbon-free, while ICEs remain awful.
I'll agree that EVs are not the solution to our transportation-energy concerns, though. The solution is bicycles and trains, and transitioning away entirely from the car, which in all its forms is terrible from an energy-efficiency perspective.
Gas can be carbon negative. If you make methane from syngas by gasifying or pyrolyzing biomass, you're still left with either ash, or carbon black, depending on the process used. This is solid carbon that was pulled out of the atmosphere by a plant, that can be sequestered away.
