Induction cooking has been in the news a lot lately -- mostly in the context of how “gas
is evil”.
Today we are not going to analyze the evils of gas.
It’s a complicated topic, and I am not qualified to do it justice, at least not yet, so for
today, we are going to set aside the questions of health and environment and talk about the
cooking performance of induction and what you need to know if you are in the market
for a stove.
Over the last year I had a chance to try a Duxtop portable induction burner, a Frigidaire
induction range that sells for just over a thousand, and a KitchenAid induction range
that sells just over three thousand.
I’ve also talked to people who have exceptionally expensive induction ranges, like the eight
thousand dollar Wolf, but I didn’t have a chance to cook on it.
I figured few people can afford it anyway, and I wanted to concentrate my testing on
the more affordable options.
Induction stoves cook with magnets.
They are not a source of heat.
One thing people love about them is that they keep your kitchen a lot cooler.
Another thing people love is their range.
They can go extremely low and extremely high.
You can boil a pretty big pot of water in a couple of minutes.
They can change the temperature of your pan even faster than gas.
Unlike electric stoves, they are extremely responsive.
Not all cookware works on induction stoves.
If a magnet doesn’t stick to your pan, it won’t work.
Cast iron, carbon steel, and some stainless steel works on induction.
Copper and aluminum don’t.
That’s the basics you could read on any website, but the devil is in the details,
so let’s get to it.
The most important thing about induction is the magnet diameter.
And for some reason, no one talks about it.
You can’t even learn the magnet diameter of each burner from the specs of most induction
stoves.
Here is why it’s so important.
Induction is surgically precise.
There is no hot cloud that you get with gas.
Any part of the pan that is directly over a magnet works.
As soon as it’s not over the magnet even by 1 inch, it doesn’t work at all.
I thought that if I used a really good, very conductive pan, it would somehow spread this
heat out, but it turned out to not be the case.
It spreads it out some.
It gets hot to the touch, but not enough to cook.
Unfortunately, going from a 6 inch magnet to a 9 inch magnet is insanely expensive.
Cook’s Illustrated reviewed portable induction burners and the only one that had a 9 inch
magnet cost $1,200 for 1 burner.
Sure, it had extra bells and whistles, but the biggest difference in performance was
due to the magnet size.
This burner could handle a 12 inch pan, while all the other ones could only handle a 10
inch pan because they had a 6 inch magnet.
In case you are confused about the mismatch in the size of the pan and the magnet, let
me explain.
The pans are measured from the top, edge to edge.
The cooking surface of a 10 inch skillet with sloped sides is only about 7 inches in diameter,
that’s why it performs fine on a 6 inch magnet.
But a 12 inch skillet with the same shape has a cooking surface that is 9 inches in
diameter and that’s too big for a 6 inch magnet to handle.
The advice I hear a lot is that you should try a portable induction burner to see if
you like it before buying a stove.
I have to disagree.
There is no middle ground with portable induction burners.
They either cost one hundred or 12 hundred.
If you don’t mind spending 12 hundred to try a burner, more power to you, but a one
to two hundred burner is not going to give you a good sense of what induction cooking
is like.
I borrowed a Duxtop induction burner and here are the results it produced in an 11 inch
cast iron pan.
On low setting it cycled on and off in fairly long intervals, which didn’t maintain a
steady simmer, and on high heat it had a very loud fan.
Although I found it mostly useless, that’s not at all the case with induction stoves.
Induction is the most expensive cooking surface.
One good burner costs 12 hundred dollars, so when you see a whole induction stove for
that price, please realize that you won’t get even one good burner.
By good, I mean big, so you’ll be limited to the tiny 10 inch pans.
Don’t trust the circles they draw on top of the stove to show you what size pans the
burners can handle.
I found them inaccurate.
Here is what you can expect.
A stove that costs around one thousand won’t handle any big pans.
A stove that costs around three thousand will handle one.
A stove that costs 6 thousand or more, will handle two large pans.
Here is a 12 inch pan with straight sides on KitchenAid’s biggest burner.
And here is it on the second biggest.
I just made a video comparing the browning square footage of gas, electric, and induction.
So if you want more details, the link is below.
To help you get a rough idea of how much more you need to pay to get the same level of quality
and performance from induction as you would from gas, let’s look at Wolf.
A 30” Wolf gas range is listed at 6,000 and the same size Wolf induction range is
listed at over 8 thousand.
To be fair, an induction stove cleans up easily and doesn’t heat up your kitchen as much
as gas, but 8 thousand is an awful lot to pay.
Induction stoves make noise.
What kind of noise, and how much noise depends on how much you paid for the stove.
Let’s take a mid-priced KitchenAid as an example.
If you set your burner to 5 or higher, it runs continuously, but below 5, it cycles
on and off and makes a soft clicking noise, like this.
If you are not sensitive to ticking clocks, it probably wouldn’t bother you.
But if you are sensitive to repetitive noises, it’s good to know.
Unfortunately, it didn’t occur to me to record the hum that happened on the high settings.
It’s a continuous fan sort of hum.
I had the hood going and with the hood, the stove noise just blended in.
It wasn’t nearly as loud as the portable burners.
But again, it’s good to know about these things.
Switching to induction will almost certainly mean changing some of your cookware.
The only materials that are not questionable are cast iron and carbon steel.
I thought that stainless steel would work, but that’s not always the case.
Some of my stainless steel pans worked because they had ferrous material added to their composition,
but some didn’t.
If a magnet doesn’t stick to your pan, it doesn’t work on induction.
What turned out to be tricky is figuring out if a pan would work when purchasing it online.
My stainless steel cuisinart pan is supposed to work on induction according to the description
on amazon, but a magnet doesn’t stick to it.
I tried it on induction and sure enough -- it didn’t work.
Several people who reviewed it said that it didn’t work for them either.
There is also a significant difference in performance between the pans that are completely
covered with magnetic material on the outside and the pans that have a perforated magnetic
disk inserted into their bottoms, like this Misen non-stick pan.
See how the periphery of this pan is not browning?
This pan is a perfect size for the magnet it is on, but the magnetic ring is not as
big as the pan's bottom.
This means a much smaller cooking surface than you’d expect.
I find that you can often save some money by buying stock pots and even some braising
pans with a thick disk on the bottom and thin sides.
If you’ll be simmering liquids in them anyway, why splurge on thick sides.
But none of them are induction compatible, so to switch to induction, I’d have to replace
them all with more expensive models.
The subject of pan warping on induction stoves rarely comes up.
I’ve seen Cook’s Illustrated mention it in passing, but that’s it.
Well, I’ve seen it happen in real life.
If you don’t want a lot of ruined pans, you need to take it very seriously.
Induction changes the temperature of your pan faster than any other cooking tool.
Way faster than gas.
Boiling water in 90 seconds and having your pan go from cold to burning in a snap comes
at a cost.
It’s not very kind to your pans.
If the size of the magnet matches the bottom of your pan really well, the entire bottom
of the pan is heating up together, but if the magnet is smaller than the cooking surface,
it creates a huge difference in temperature between the center of the cooking surface
and the periphery.
This selective heating can cause your pan to warp.
Maybe not from a single use, but from repeated use.
Don’t panic, there is a lot you can do to prevent that.
For pots where you are cooking wet things, it’s not really an issue.
The water or whatever liquid you have inside will absorb some of the energy, which will
reduce the strain on the metal.
If you are heating a skillet, put some oil into it right away.
Do not heat it empty.
And don’t set it on high heat right away.
Even if that’s the setting you eventually need, get to it gradually.
Start your pan on medium heat for a couple of minutes before cranking it up to the setting
you need.
I would also avoid using a bigger pan than the magnet can handle.
Some induction burners can interfere with electronics that are brought really close
to them.
This can affect your meat thermometers.
My thermometer worked fine, but if your thermometer is acting strange, just turn off your burner
before you use it.
If you wear a pacemaker, you might want to talk to your doctor about how close you can
get to induction stoves without interference.
So am I still dead set on a gas range?
Until recently, the answer was yes.
Now I feel like I could be ok with induction.
What changed my mind was not trying an induction stove and finding it so impressive.
Nope.
What changed my mind was finding a back up in the form of a 15,000 btu butane burner.
For everyday cooking, the limited square footage of browning that mid-price induction stoves
provide is totally fine.
Most of the time, I don’t need two 12 inch pans going at the same time.
But when I teach, I do need more cooking area, and I need the flexibility to put any pot
on any burner to help students see it better.
I hope that as induction ranges become more mainstream, they will become better and cheaper.
I wish some appliance company would hire me as a consultant to help them design a good
one.
You know that in my previous life, I was a usability engineer.
Of course what’s good for usability is often bad for marketing, so I doubt that will ever
happen, but I can dream.
Do you have an induction stove?
Let me know in the comments below what brand and model you have and your likes and dislikes.
Here are more thought provoking culinary videos for you to check out and if you are ever in
the Boston area, maybe I’ll see you in one of my classes.