To anyone considering switching to an induction hob and hearing anecdotal stories of how some people don’t think they are “as hot” or “slower” than gas. I guarantee these are all related to the pans being used. It is of upmost importance that you get a really good set of pans “designed” for induction.
We have found “tri-ply” stainless steel pans work really well, better than on gas. Cast iron is also brilliant, I inherited loads of them. We have aluminium none stick frying pans with solid stainless steel bases, they work well.
Aluminium pans without a solid steel base are absolutely crap on induction - even the ones that say they work. Avoid them.
If you have any pans with a slightly curved base they won’t work. And you will have to get a Wok with a flat bottom designed specifically for induction.
Make sure you read reviews before you purchase any new pans, and if you are changing your hob to an induction one be prepared for replacing your pans - budget to spend more on them than the hob even.
We are absolutely converted to induction, love it and will never go back. Planning to one day get rid of the gas boiler too.
I recently bought a Polyscience/Breville Control Freak, and I’m increasingly convinced this is the future. It heats dramatically faster than a supposedly high end gas stove I compared it to despite being a lowly 1.6kW or so device. (Gas stoves are stupendously inefficient. That 15kBTU/hr stove may well deliver 15kBTU/hr to the air but not to your pan.). It heats quite evenly. And best of all, it has closed loop temperature control. Want to sauté some onions? Just do it and watch the onions — there is no longer a need to fiddle with a knob to keep the pan at the right temperature.
I wish this type of functionality was more widely available. There is absolutely no need for devices like this to be expensive.
Wow, that Polyscience/Breville Control Freak looks great - if anyone knows of a mid-level/affordable induction cooktop that preforms similarly I'd love to know if one exists.
Currently I have two induction cooktops (counter top models, not built-in hobs) - one from Ikea and one Nuwave brand. The Ikea one looks pretty good, but it lacks precision. Looks like the Ikea one is no longer available in the US, but here it is on their AU website:
The temperature settings go from 20 to 70 degree F increments. In particular, the jump from 210F to 280F really sucks. But it's great for boiling water, cooking pasta, etc.
The Nuwave induction cooktop I have allows 10 degree F increments, which is great for accurate precision. But it doesn't look very good in my opinion.
I'm also in the process of remodeling my kitchen and have a built-in Bertazzoni cooktop, which I've yet to unbox or install. I choose that because my wife wanted physical knobs instead of digital buttons and I agree that that does provide a nicer UI. I'm optimistic the knobs will provide precision temperature control.
Overall, I love cooking with induction - for control and clean air inside the house. However, one other issue I've struggled with is uneven temperature. Originally I thought cast iron would perform well, but it's not great with induction. I recently got some pretty decent stainless steel pots/pans from Tramontina, which are affordably priced compared Allclad, and those heat much more evenly. I also hope that when I install my built-in induction cooktop it will heat more evenly, perhaps with more magnetic rings.
Where does the induction stove measure the temperature? I'm assuming there's a thermometer near the surface of the stove, which I guess is close enough to the food to get good results.
The thing with gas for me at least isn't that the heat is better or anything like that but that I feel like I can control the application of the heat better. You can move the pan around heat-surface (or an isotherm, technically) in 3D whereas with induction (I imagine it's better if you spend enough) for the same price it seems harder to get that feel.
I thought that when I first switched to induction. Then I realised that induction responds instantly to any changes you set in temperature so you don’t need to move the pan about in 3D space, just leave the pan on the stove and drop the heat right down.
I’m now back on gas after a house move and I miss induction so much.
100% - the ability to visually check the flame is crucial. Especially when you're cooking a lot of things quickly at different temperatures. Without that visual cue, you're just guessing every time. Induction is amazing, but harder to work with. There might be a good idea in making stoves that visually show the temperature of what's in the pot versus how much heat is being fed into it. That would maybe convince me to switch off gas.
My favorite way to show people how my induction stove works is to put some cold water in a kettle, pop it on a "burner", then turn it to "power boost". You can instantly see tiny bubbles forming on the bottom, and 20 seconds later it's at a rolling boil so intense you fear it may explode. I have no idea how anyone can say induction is slower than gas. And on the other end, low will slowly melt chocolate or heat a hollandaise without needing to steam a mixing bowl.
All the induction stoves I've tried, here in the EU, are great at boiling one pot of water. They suck at everything else.
E.g. want to boil two pots of water in parallel? No can do - after warming up seemingly forever you will have one pot boiling for 5 seconds, then stopping and letting the other pot boil for five seconds, and so on.
I want to love induction - no gas pipes, so much easier to clean, so much better for air quality - but the regular stuff you can buy in stores just isn't there yet. Just the fact that they use a plug which can carry at most 3kW should be enough proof that you cannot use them for serious cooking.
"To anybody concerned about anecdotal evidence, here's my anecdotal evidence."
Snideness aside, the fact that you have to concern yourself with what pans you buy for an induction stove is enough reason for many to not buy one. You can no longer buy any pan at a store, you must do your research first.
Throw out my current pans and buy even more expensive ones? You're not exactly selling me the induction here.
They’re not necessarily more expensive and you won’t necessarily have to throw anything away they just need to be made with enough ferrous metal that it will work. A simple magnet test will tell you. In fact of all the cookware I have one of my more expensive pots doesn’t work on induction which seemed really odd to me.
Well the gas feeling slower to bringing things to a boil is to be expected; induction is much much much quicker at boiling things (~10 mins on gas vs ~2-3 mins using induction).
I was resoundingly in the 'induction hobs are crap' camp until this NYE when we found ourselves staying away in the countryside in a place with a basic plug-in induction hob. I sighed and presumed my Absolutely Necessary morning tea would take until the heat death of the universe to boil, but nup, it was done in significantly less time than it takes me at home, when using gas.
If a crappy plug-in hob can boil water that quickly, it can cook that quickly too.
Next move I'm getting that sorted out - no more gas! (Mind you, companies are beginning trials here in the UK mixing Hydrogen with the gas supply, so there's a part of me that still wonders at the future benefit/end to end efficiency).
> there's a part of me that still wonders at the future benefit/end to end efficiency
The future is in completely abandoning residential gas infrastructure, which will have immense benefits in allowing us to stop maintaining and expanding millions and millions of miles of leaky underground pipes. No amount of tweaking the mixture will change the fact that electricity is broadly useful for everything, and that gas is only useful for a small number of things that are quickly being overtaken by electricity.
Hell, if we had devices that could instantly summon sufficient quantities of water from thin air, I'd get rid of my water hookup, too, even though water lines aren't nearly as bad for the atmosphere as gas lines are.
But… Why did you think induction hobs were slow? It's almost their whole point that they're fast! Now, admittedly I'm speaking as someone who has never used a gas cooktop, and accustomed to coil-plate or glass-ceramic cooktops (gas hobs are very rare around here), and I guess anything is fast compared to a coil-plate, but still.
Personally, I hate cooking on induction. My parent have it and it never worked for me. I need to see/hear the gas to be able to control the heat properly.
Once they shut off the gas lines due to the energy transition, I’m going to run a gas pipe from the kitchen to my basement and just buy it in canisters.
> Once they shut off the gas lines due to the energy transition,
This won't happen. What will happen instead is that the gas to cook your omelette in the morning will cost three times more than going to a restaurant would and you'll make your own decision about shutting down your gas lines.
Or you can get an induction wok burner with a curved base, which are just phenomenal… i bought a de detreich but there are a number of brands that do them. It’s way hotter than my previous gas wok ring, and also doesn’t produce so much smell because the gas itself is not rising around the pan and carrying vapours away.
I believe they sell induction hobs that project blue light 'flames' to reflect the heat strength as a visual aid. Not sure if any do the audio as well.
Can you clarify, are you certain you're talking about induction? Inductive cooktops are a relatively recent trend, if you grew up with an electric range there's a good chance it was a resistive cooktop, not an inductive cooktop. Resistive cooktops are pretty notoriously unsatisfying.
True, a flat bottom means it isn’t a “classic” Wok but we find them just as usable.
I think there are probably still UX problems to be solved with Induction, the visual feedback on gas is better. We fortunately have knobs on ours (I hate the touch buttons on some).
I have an induction cooktop and my cast iron pans have been terrible. Cast iron has lousy heat conduction and induction stoves do not have even distribution. They negate a lot of the benefits of induction, which is the ability to put a massive amount of heat into the pan very quickly.
High carbon steel pans (the kind used by kitchen services) have been brilliant. Every time I've seen an induction cooktop in use in a commercial service (for example, at my work place cafeteria at the "rice meal" station) they use high carbon steel pans.
The biggest problem: no cooking during power outages, which happen around 2-3x a year.
Surprised to hear you have had a bad experience. We use stainless still pans for all the normal sized pans. It’s large pots/casserole dishes/Dutch ovens we have in cast iron and they work really well. We also have an cast iron skillet that is great, gets very hot very quickly.
You do need to be careful using carbon steel on induction, at least until you get the hang of it: the instant heat makes warpage easy to encounter, especially if the coil is undersized relative to the pan (US portable hobs have tiny diameter coils).
> I have an induction cooktop and my cast iron pans have been terrible. Cast iron has lousy heat conduction and induction stoves do not have even distribution.
That’s interesting, can you compare the heat distribution problem to resistive? I have a gas range now, but when I had resistive I would preheat my cast iron in the oven for nice uniform heat distribution
Completely agree. Switched to induction cooktop 9 months ago. Aside from the health benefits (a nice bonus), we also find the cooking experience to be far superior over a gas cooktop.
The issue with induction isn’t speed, not even close. The issue relative to has is the evenness of the heat distribution over a large surface area.
Gas isn’t even remotely worth the downsides but there’s a number of dishes I can make that are easier and higher quality to do on gas, like if I’m trying to sear a large pan full of meat.
You just need an induction hob that has large induction surface (or even +-the whole surface), not usual circles of varying sizes, in case you have oversized pans.
From physics point of view the way you raise temperature of pan has 0 effect on what's happening in the pan.
I have an induction and the heat has been far more even and controllable than it has on gas. Maybe it has to do with the quality of the burner or of the pans?
I love induction. I did however struggle with my carbon steel pan. It just wouldn't season properly. I followed the instructions from the manufacturer, online guides. You name it. The thing would start shedding its coat after a while. It was a mess.
Then we moved to a house with an old electric stove. The pans turned to pure magic. More non-stick than our teflon pans.
Then we moved again to a place with an induction stove and bam: the pans are shit again.
It is obviously me, of course. Heat is heat. But something about induction makes me unable to use carbon steel.
My issue is not the pans, it's using duty cycle to control the amount of energy added. I can't effectively pan fry anything without using cast iron or enough(read: too much) oil to retain some heat mass, because either it gets too hot and past the smoke point of the oil or too low and the food will cool off between heating cycles. The other slight annoyance is coil whine.
Absolutely unmatched for boiling water, and I'm very happy using it with a cast iron dutch oven for slow cooking and soups or stews.
Sounds like you have a glass top electric coil stove, not induction. Induction has a very stable fast heat, cooks like gas. Glass top electric are the one that turn on for 10 seconds off for 30, never the right temp.
I replaced a glass top stove with an induction one last year, couldn't be happier. I can actually fry eggs now.
Yes the stainless steel tri ply pans on an electric stove are pretty awesome. I haven’t really cooked on a gas stove to compare though. Some people think stainless steel pans are worse/cheaper than non stick, but that is not the case. Chefs use stainless steel all the time and prefer it. But the secret is learning to deglaze the pan to free anything stuck to the bottom of the pan in order to make cleaning magnitudes easier.
Stuff that isn't reactive can be well cleaned using ammonia vapor (which will break down grease and burned on grease and so on). Just put it in a bag or other container with some ammonia (no need to submerge, it's the vapor that does the work) and let it sit for a while.
Flat bottom wok doesn’t really work. You lose the heat going up the sides. I bought one of those butane table top burners just for wok use. Induction is great for everything else.
Due to a recent-ish move, I have gone from ~20 years with a gas cooker to induction (with about 6 months of halogen in-between). Induction is pretty good. It lacks the visceral feedback of "how hard am I driving this specific ring/cooking spot right now" that a gas flame has. But, it probably offers more precision.
If you’re willing to use a cast iron wok, Lodge makes one with a flat bottom on the outside but curved on the inside. You have to make some major technique concessions, but it will work on induction, and if you use a butane torch while flipping food you can almost get a wok hei going.
This has sort of been my experience with induction beyond woks too, it often requires technique and equipment concessions. Great for boiling water and sautéing though. The tops also have durability/longevity issues when compared to gas and that isn’t usually acknowledged.
You would need to get a special flat bottom
Wok designed for induction. I believe there are also some induction woks that come with a special plate or ring you place them on to make them work and still have a curved bottom, I have no experience of them.
A good point. Alot of depends on the style of cooking you do, and how heat is used in that cooking style. I personally dont even have a wok, so the idea would never occur to me.
You mean the (non-existent) health effects of non-ionizing radiation exposure?
The damage feels like heat at lower frequencies (sitting in front of a fire oh no!) and a sizzle at higher frequencies (sitting in the sun oh no!). Induction stovetops emit orders of magnitude less than a fire and nothing at higher frequencies. Essentially: they get hot.
The best advice I can give: if you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen.
Well induction has no measurable negative health effects whereas gas is so bad for you that it leads to a I think in the realm of a quarter increase in childhood asthma? In terms of negative health effects there’s combustion and then there’s everything else.
EMFs (such as from induction cooktops) absolutely have an impact on health. A study I cited in another comment indicates that a compliant induction cooktop emits 16x the amount on non-ionizing radiation that’s considered safe.
When we got a nice induction stove we spend years showing off to friends how it could boil a pot of water in about 15 seconds. But the thing we like most about it is how easy it is to clean. :)
Slightly curved _undersides_ works really well on induction in my opinion. Since its contactless its better than the old cast-iron stovetops at least for rounded pans. :)
My wife and I decided to switch to induction after the NYT article on this topic a few months ago.
Not only did we have a gas stove that was probably spiking NO2 levels when we actually used it; we also seemed to have a gas leak. It was not a big one, just a faint smell, but it was hard to pin down. A plumber concluded the connection between the range and the pipe wasn't the problem. No specific part of the range smelled stronger than the rest of it. For all we knew, it might be a hole in a pipe. So we wanted to make gas stop flowing through our unit (a condo within a three-family home, very normal here in Cambridge, Massachusetts) altogether.
We contacted an appliance company about switching to induction. To prepare, they told us, we would first need to upgrade the range power outlet to 40 amps, and cap off the gas pipe behind the range.
The electrical work cost $1800. It could have been much more; we were lucky our circuit breaker was positioned such that they only needed to make two openings in our walls. (They suggested we put little hatch doors in those spots to make future work easier.)
We asked our plumber to not only cap off the gas pipe behind the range, but also put in a valve in the basement, such that gas flow could be shut off to our unit, but also easily turned back on if a future owner wants to reverse what we did. We did this rather than turn off our gas altogether, because we have a gas water heater and still needed gas available there. The plumbing work cost about $300 I think.
To make cooking stay as close as possible to being how great and fast it is with gas, we chose a range with an induction stove: The LG LSE4616ST, which cost $3000.
We were lucky to be able to afford this change for our health. Of course, it would have cost a lot less if we hadn't cared about induction, but still multiple thousands of dollars.
This is the epitome of the current green movement. Proponents want an unnecessary luxury green product subsidized for higher income households, even though there are perfectly fine substitutes that are just as good for the environment at 1/5 the cost you just described. I just can't get on board with a movement like this.
I mean, they could have just fixed their gas leak (lol what the fuck) and bought a nice hood. Even having to suggest people fix their gas leak is comedic and reminds me of how absurd many tech people are. Bragging about transitioning, recommending a subsidy, allowing a gas leak.
So choose the amount you subsidize so that the cheapest reasonable solution becomes affordable to most people. There are induction stoves costing just a few hundred dollars for example. There is no need to subsidize $3k, but subsidizing electrical or plumbing work to replace fossil fuels with electricity makes perfect sense.
We've wound up with subsidies because it is what is politically feasible.
The most efficient approach would be to correctly price the negative externalities of gas on health and environment, but pragmatically politicians understand that enormous carbon taxes are a very quick way to be voted out of office. Accordingly we arrive at the solutions available: subsidies for alternatives and/or a very slow phase in of carbon taxes.
Progressive jurisdictions are straight up banning gas hookups in new developments for environmental and health reasons.
Subsidy in the form of a tax credit (so you need to front the government the money until tax season), so that you can buy something that basically only works if you own a house, into which you've already installed some infrastructure, itself subsidized via tax credit.
I can't help but think it would have been better to subsidize the purchase of used hybrids (or, you know, transit)
I live in an apt and bought a ~$100 induction hot plate and now do about 90% of my cooking on that (formerly used semi-faulty burners on a cheap electric range). In the future when I own my home I plan on just a having a few cheap restaurant induction hot plates at ~$250 each I can replace/upgrade at will. It might not look as classy, but it will do everything I could ever ask it to do.
We should absolutely not be subsodisong someone who has the means to install a $3000 induction range and do $2k worth of additional work at the same time. A semi decent 4 ring induction cooktop can be had for less than £300, and it plugs straight into a wall socket with no electrical work needed. If you're removing a gas stove and making the point safe, I'd say $100 to cap the pipe at the point of the old range (based on me having that work done in my last apartment). Prices may vary with cost of living.
For people using small burners in apartments, single ring plug in induction cooktops are available for about $100 with no other work required.
Typical American wall sockets rarely deliver more than 120V * 15A. Plug in induction hobs targeting the American market clock in at 1800 W spread across all burners, at most. There are no four burner solutions for which this power is sufficient.
We bought a single profesional induction stove, 4.5 kW for a single plate, on ebay, barely used, for 100$. The thing is a beast. You can heat a pot with 50L of water in ~10-15min with it to like 60 + degrees celsius.
Water really does make it obvious. I always used to use an electric kettle to heat water and then pour it into a pan to avoid waiting for it to heat on gas. With an induction hob it's super fast to heat.
It’s very bizarre to me how you can get very inexpensive single burner countertop induction plates ($50-100), but multi-burner built-in cooktops are dramatically more expensive ($1000-4000). Anybody know why this is?
No we shouldn't. Whatever you care about, like maybe CO₂, at those prices you can get a better bang for your buck elsewhere. For new installations it might make sense.
It could be that your gas lines are old and porous, leading to slow release of gas. Usually not a problem, unless the space is enclosed or poorly ventilated, in which case it can cause pooling of the gas and possibly an explosion.
Gas is dangerous, lines should be checked every couple of years (pressurized or vacuum tested) and the rubber connection hose for the range should be replaced every five years or so.
Unless there were serious unmentioned complications, that is a ludicrous amount of money to pay for a new 40-amp circuit. Upgrading the entire panel costs less where I live.
We would probably better off not relying on politicians to use what technology wins, but instead tax carbon emissions. And I mean tax it properly at real cost of the externality. Not some fig leaf $1/gallon.
Gas in general may cause incidental gas pollution —but I see a problem by the author. The author mentions high pollution results when cooking —which for the author does using a gas range. However the author doesn’t discuss results from alternate ranges. I have an induction stove and every time I cook the indoor air pollution also spikes (lots of frying). It’s likely less than that caused by gas stoves but never the less creates pollutants in the air.
I have no doubt that gas causes more pollution but they are remiss for not mentioning the cooking process itself causes pollution.
> incidental gas pollution... the author doesn’t discuss results from alternate ranges... "
The alternative ranges produce zero. Combustion heating, cooking and driving produces NO2, electric doesn't. The article is specifically about NO2, it has specific adverse health effects.
> Every time I cook the indoor air pollution also spikes "
What kind of pollution are you measuring? My air purifier reacts to frying too and shows "high pollution', but it just measures particles in the air - it cannot tell apart cancerous coal ash from harmless pollen and frying oil getting in the air.
The food itself can give off emissions — obviously less so if you're doing something like, say, boiling eggs in water, but if you're using high temperatures and oil then it could be significant.
>I have no doubt that gas causes more pollution but they are remiss for not mentioning the cooking process itself causes pollution.
Yes, and the real problem is vents that do not exhaust outside. Even in code crazy California, it is perfectly legal to have vents that just blow the air around.
Author also mentions pollution from the gas furnace though, so no cooking involved. But you're right: would be interesting to know amounts of NO2 released by frying though.
The author is comparing cooking between different types of stoves, not indoor air quality between different activities. I believe you would call this a controlled variable, for example by making sure you cook the same meal, at the same quantity, the same way. Real scientists can correct me.
I enjoy cooking a lot and I cooked on gas stoves, electric ones (the ones that have those red hot spiral things under a glass) and top-of-the-line induction ones. In my opinion (and probably many restaurants' opinions from what I can see through their reactions on bans for gas appliances in new buildings), a gas stove is just unmatched in how much easier and better it makes cooking.
I totally get the desire to switch to electric appliances for many reasons, but I am yet to meet an electric stove of any kind that I remotely enjoyed cooking on. Is this everyone's experience? Did I just not meet the right induction stove yet? Is there some sort of new technology on the horizon that will make electric stoves infinitely better?
I'm the same. I was a huge proponent for gas stoves, until I got a good induction one and wow. It's just as good when it comes to heat, with extra advantages like not throwing extra heat into my kitchen, things never burning onto the actual plate and it just generally being a much neater solution. But yeah the heat can easily match gas, it's great.
And I also agree that the touch controls are absolutely the worst, they are abysmal. I see why they are done this way - it allows the entire plate to be wiped clean very easily. But I still wish you could have separate controls somewhere on the side, with actual tactile knobs.
Tactile feedback? Knobs? What do you think this is, the 1950s? No no. Your next stove should have a touchscreen, maybe not even a screen at all - control everything via your phone using a cloud based platform that connects to your stove./s
I don't know how anyone can cook with these things for exactly the reasons you mention. Cooking can be chaotic with many things to keep track at once. Fingers are wet, or greasy so buttons don't work. Something overflows with just a few tiny drops the thing switches off leading to a problem with something else on the stove that requires constant stirring because now you're forced to clean your hands, dry to spillage from the stove before you can continue. Lift a heavy pot from the stove and put it back down (because it was a wee bit too hot to handle) - BAM! the fucking glass is broken. (I broke already 1 induction stove from my brother and my own Ceran this way).
WTF designed these things? Certainly not a chef!
A bialetti (moka) pot will not work because they're made from aluminum (no induction).
The whole thing upsets me so much that it's very high on my list for deciding if I can live in that country. If there is no gas cooking (most of North of Europe) un/-surprisingly the food is also terrible. Maybe there is sample-bias in my statement but I know literally nobody in my family or friends who owns a ceran/indusction stove and who is actually a great cook.
The only things better for cooking than gas are wood or coal fires. But gas is the next best natural flame.
This is so true, my parents have an induction stove with touch controls. It takes ONE drop of water on the 10x40cm touch control square to make the whole stove top shut down with a beeping alarm sound. If you have buttery fingers it won't recognize any touches (major annoyance when making butter heavy sauces).
On top of that it also relies on long-presses, you have to hold your finger on the "button zones" for 2 seconds, then you can alter the heat, one touch at a time on a 1-10 scale. Takes about 10-20 seconds to adjust the heat.
When I looked for a new stove last year I tried to find one with induction AND knobs. I ended up getting a non-induction stove, with knobs, works well enough although I would swap it for one with induction and knobs any day, haha!
We searched high and low for a stove with an induction top that used knobs and finally settled on a stove from Bertazzoni. Expensive but worth it for us.
IMHO touch controls are popular because they are cheap to make and offer a simple way to integrate the hob onto a counter. For a lot of people that is important. For us (my partner is blind) it is not.
I hate those too. There are a few models left, that have knobs, but they are getting fewer and fewer. No idea why.
Sometimes you need to react really quickly and turn down heat, if it takes you 5 sec more, the food might be burnt already. Lifting the pan might be a good „hack“ though.
- In fact, you can't use them with lots of other things, or in many ways I use my gas stove. Yes, these are "off-label" uses, sometimes not even related to cooking. So? Tools should be flexible, not fight back.
I've had two induction stoves over the last two years, one newer and one a little older. I came from a lifetime of cooking with gas.
First complaint - exactly the same as yours. Even a little boil over can sometimes just shut everything off.
Second complaint - "smart" pan sensing. I have a few pots that don't really fit the rings on the stove perfectly, and they have been relegated to the "useless" corner of the cabinet. The temp setting starts to either flash whenever the pot isn't big enough to cover the ring, or just takes forever to heat up.
Last complaint - some of my pans are not perfectly flat on the bottom, from either a rough life or warping in the oven, etc. Those pans are also useless on the induction hob.
My previous induction cooking top had a very nice system as far as touch controls go. Each of the four zones had a separate ~5cm strip from 0 to 10, and beeped when changed.
After a short while I could easily operate it while not looking, and precision control (half-steps) was easy by simply rolling finger.
Sadly very, very few seems to have this design. Some have a shared control, but having to select the zone and then power is just... not good in comparison. I have that on my current one and I routinely adjust the wrong one, split between forgetting to select zone and it not recognizing my zone selection.
It was still touch though which overall sucks compared to physical controls.
My lg induction stove has normal knobs. It's awesome. I wouldn't go back to gas.
The only thing induction can't do well are cooking hacks that utilize the open flame, like toasting tortillas or roasting peppers on the burner without a pan.
You can def get induction ranges with knobs, I've been appliance shopping recently and saw plenty of them, but at the moment it may be a "luxury" feature that requires getting a model that is a few notches up from the cheapest model.
Of course it's silly that knobs would belong only to "premium" models.
> I love induction. The main annoyance, for me, are the touch controls.
We bought a professional induction stove from a restaurant online on ebay for very cheap. One of the reasons is that all controls were "manual" and with "knobs". The amount of electronics on these is minimal.
I happened to buy a used quality induction stove, that has knobs.
At the time I didn't think a lot about it, but to me it's the best stove I ever used.
I honestly don't know thw reasoning for using toch controls on induction stoves. They are a pain to use for most people.
I looked into this a few months ago and found a stove that came with magnetic knobs you put onto the control area. You turn adjust temperature by turning the knob
Induction plates vary a lot in quality and in the amount of energy they transfer. The more expensive ones can dump a lot of energy into a pan really quickly. Some go up to 3-4KW even. If you are trying to boil a large pan of water/soup/etc., a good induction plate gets the job done very quickly whereas you might have to wait a bit with a gas stove or a cheaper, lower capacity induction plate. Like wise, if you are searing a steak, you'd want a large wattage to get the pan really hot, really quickly.
Gas is nice mainly for things that are really temperature sensitive like searing meat, using a wok, etc. Of course when cooking stuff like that you want good ventilation for this because otherwise you end up with a lot of grease and soot all over the kitchen. So, the pollution of gas matters less if you have that set up correctly.
The main reason gas is so nice for cooking is how quickly you can adjust the temperature. Induction plates also respond really quickly of course. The old fashioned red hot spiral things, are much more tricky because they stay hot for so long; it takes a minute to reduce the heat; or to raise it. I have one at home and I'm used to it but it is still annoying. A neat trick is to simply move pans away from the heat to control it.
Induction plates don't have that problem. But I really hate the touch controls many of these things have. They are very fiddly; especially with wet hands and they also can get hot. I'd prefer to have some old fashioned dials. But in terms of instant, fine grained control, they are actually pretty good.
I do a lot of cooking and I prefer electric. I'm sure it's because I've cooked on electric ranges my entire life, the kind where the pan sits directly on the spiral heating element. I only ever cook with gas when I'm visiting a friend or relative.
Gas stoves are great at bringing a pot of water to a boil. But they are not so good at very low heat, like leaving a covered pot to simmer. Most gas ranges don't go as low as I would like, and I need to watch the pot more carefully and stir more frequently than I would at home.
I'm sure most of my issues are familiarity. If I had spent my life cooking with gas, my techniques would have developed to work better with gas. But now that I'm set in my ways I will stick with electric.
A proper induction range will boil water much faster than gas. Under two minutes to take a full pasta pot—8 quarts (7.5L) of water—from tap-cold (50F/10C) to a rolling boil. Do not confuse them with resistive coil electric stoves, which are inferior in every way! Unless you're dead set on aluminum cookware.
Many gas ranges have a concentric simmer burner on at least one of the burners for this reason. It’s a low heat level that allows delicate cooking with all the intuitive feel of a flame.
My gas stove has an XLO mode, it actually will cycle on and off automatically. Makes a little clicking noise, but it's very effective for the lowest of simmers.
the stoves here have two rings with the inner ring being small enough that i can leave a dry pan on it for hours without it getting noticeable hotter than at the start. when cooking something i can leave it unattended for several minutes or longer.
In terms of fine control, induction is a game changer (me resisting moving from gas for a long time). I use lower, more precise cooking techniques more now. For high-temperature (e.g. searing a steak) stuff, there's something different about how it heats. I haven't worked out what it is yet, as induction gets the pan insanely hot really fast (on 'boost mode'); almost too hot, which should be excellent, but seems wierd, and sometimes seems to burn the pan. But for that kind of cooking I use the gas BBQ outside mostly.
Having bought an induction stove when refitting our kitchen, then replacing it with a different one a couple of months later, I can advise that the size of the elements matters. The 'linked zones' thing seems to be rubbish, and doesn't heat evenly (maybe it does on really high end stuff). I now have a three-element stove (60cm) - one really big one and two smaller ones. I don't think I've ever used 4 burners at once anyway...
I just wish there was an API for induction stoves; interfacing with a thermometer to keep a certain temperature, or for a set time, or even a removably physical control panel (i.e. knobs) that would let you put it away and keep the flat-top thing (which is actually really nice when you need the bench space).
We bought a professional "manual" (no fancy electronics) from a restaurant (with knobs and no touch), for 100$ each. And built our own system with that.
You can set the knob, and turn it on and off with a relee, connected to a raspberry pi. We have temperature sensors on the "food side" of the pans and pots, since what we care about is the temperature that the food feels.
99% of the time we don't use it with the pis, but have a couple of recipes as Jupyter notebooks that we use the temp control and temp staging with.
One advantage of induction over gas here, is that the thermal mass of some induction pots and pans is almost zero, and temperature changes are instantaneous, so from the point of view of control algorithms, programming induction cooking is infinitely better than any other system that i've used, cause you don't have to solve a PDE to regulate the temperature. YOu can just turn it on if its too cold and off if its too hot, and that's it. +-0.5C of accuracy, which at the 100$ level for a single plate is unbeatable.
Induction is very good, in different situations than gad. With induction, you have a reliable temperature control and can heat the whole pan uniformly, even at low temperatures. It’s very easy to let something simmer for hours or heat something just so it does not cool too much.
One of the main issue with common domestic gas stoves is that the heat is not well distributed, and good pans don’t necessarily have a great thermal conductivity. This is a problem when what you’re hearing is not liquid enough to redistribute heat by convection. Another is that you don’t control the temperature of the flame, just its size. So temperature control is always finicky, particularly at low temperatures.
So personally I go for induction most of the time, and a barbecue when I need a flame.
I was able to get the most even heating with a high quality (but not insanely expensive) induction stove. Boiling water in about a minute, insane. And because the heating element is necessarily closed loop you don't have the regulation problems you do with an ohmic heater.
A gas stove is a lot more powerful (10-60kW vs 1-3kW) but a lot of that heat simply escapes upwards.
Its not about power or speed for me. Whenever i visit my parents i hate cooking anything because the electric stoves release heat in bursts then turn off for a bit then a huge burst. It’s impossible to cook anything the way you want . Normally i just go for overcooking everything. But in general i find cooking relaxing and that stove turns it into something that makes me mad every morning.
Maybe this is specific to the stove they have though. I have and will continue to use gas because of this.
I love cooking on gas. As you mentioned the convenience is unmatched and it is a pleasure compared to cooking using induction or hot plate. Induction certainly seemed more efficient with how fast it used to boil water, but when cooking food, gas always wins for me. Not to mention, lot of pans I have will not work on induction or hotplate.
a gas stove is just unmatched in how much easier and better it makes cooking.
I agree with you there. I've had gas for the last ten years, and recently moved to a place with induction. It's a significant change.
I had regular electric for a long time before I had gas, so there was an adjustment period there, too, but I got used to it pretty quickly. But induction is somehow very different from either of those two.
I've been on induction for six months, and I still have such a very hard time with temperature control that I cook at home a lot less than I used to. It has a thousand controls, but only seems to have two settings: surface of the sun, and off.
That said, I'm OK with the move toward eliminating natural gas in homes. I just wish I ended up with a regular electric stove top instead of induction. But it's an apartment, so you get what you get.
> I totally get the desire to switch to electric appliances for many reasons, but I am yet to meet an electric stove of any kind that I remotely enjoyed cooking on. Is this everyone's experience?
We bought a profesional induction plate, 4.5kW, 100$ on ebay. Performance wise, its ~4x better than the 4kW gas stove it replaced. The time required to heat 50L of water to 60C went down from 60min with gas to about 10-15 min with induction.
Instantaneously hot, and instantaneously cold. For us it opened a lot of new ways of cooking.
What kind of cooking do you prefer doing on a gas stove over an induction stove?
Obviously the same pots and pans don't work on both, but if you have a top of the line induction stove you know this already.
What kind of cooking requires raising the temp of 50L of water by 60C? I'm open to the induction stove thing but I don't understand why its proponents are so focused on the speed of boiling large amounts of water. Is this the primary cooking activity of many ordinary families?
> What kind of cooking do you prefer doing on a gas stove over an induction stove?
I haven't cooked much on induction stoves. I only do so at my parents' place. So among the few things I cooked on both induction and stove, I know I prefer gas for cooking steaks and making scrambled eggs.
I know part of my frustration is with the touch controls, though, and I presume some of it is due to my lack of intuition with what setting is good for what sort of "cooking I want to apply to food".
I do agree with one of the replies to your comment, though: it seems like everyone just talks about how good induction is at boiling water and not much else specifically. I have an electric kettle for that job so it's not some alluring aspect to me.
First they came for rough and tumble, then the cigarettes, then the lightbulbs, and now prometheus fire. Before you know it you're in a Darth Vader pod and you have no mouth but you must scream. Wealth inequality has gotten so dramatic that the state probably profits 10x more off people existing than the people do themselves, so the state cares 10x more about people living as long as possible than the people might themselves; as such, the state will show no hesitancy in making any tradeoffs that maximize long-term economic value extraction. https://youtu.be/tetwGGL997s?t=159
Well, that was a nice read. Now I'm going to go cook lunch on the woodstove. To me, not everything is about safety and health; some things are about what my family likes. We like to work together cutting wood and stacking it for the winter. We like the feel of wood heat. My kids are proud that they can cook on an appliance most people never even attempt. We like the feeling of a tie to the past, that we're doing tasks our great-great grandparents would recognize.
I think we as a society are over-prioritizing personal safety. I cringe whenever a business sends me a notification saying, "Your safety is our #1 priority!" and proceeds to explain why I won't be allowed to do yet another thing I am accustomed to do. My safety isn't my #1 priority, and I certainly don't want the companies I do business with to decide how safe I have to be. I'd rather live the way I want to live, and I'm not really bothered if my happiness cuts ten years off my life; I'd prefer seventy years of living to eighty years of not dying.
> I'd rather live the way I want to live, and I'm not really bothered if my happiness cuts ten years off my life; I'd prefer seventy years of living to eighty years of not dying.
This is a mis-framing of the relevant tradeoffs. Your options aren't a truncated life of joy vs. a longer life of asceticism. The tradeoff might instead be that one of your kids gets asthma and suffers with the condition for their entire life. Or maybe you get cancer and, yes, you die earlier, but it's not an instant death. Maybe you live with that cancer for a decade of treatment and remission and treatment again and ultimately an intense suffering like you've never experienced.
So instead of dying in your sleep at 80, you die of lung cancer at 70, which you were diagnosed with at 60, after a decade of struggling with the emphysema you discovered when you were 50.
You're not just rolling the dice on a shorter life weighed against a happier one; you're rolling for an increased likelihood of a much worse life (that's also shorter).
You're right that safety isn't always #1. But I hope you're thinking about the actual tradeoffs involved and not some kind of idealized version of them.
Findings like this, like all societal issues from climate to pandemic, are naturally read as “What should I do?” when they should be read as “What should society incentivize?”
Sure electric instead of gas, bike instead of car, N95 instead of cloth, are all beneficial choices on an individual level, but it’s much more important for authorities to create incentives to encourage optimal behaviors.
Want to use a wood stove and understand the risks? Great! But maybe building codes are stricter to discourage using them in new construction and/or regulations require proper ventilation.
We shouldn’t expect every individual consumer to be an expert on indoor pollution, carbon emissions, and viral transmission. You’ll never get the kind of aggregate behavior needed for significant change, and the people most likely to suffer are those who don’t have the leisure time and ability to install NO2 sensors all over their house and contact friends who are experts.
> Findings like this, like all societal issues from climate to pandemic, are naturally read as “What should I do?” when they should be read as “What should society incentivize?”
I could not disagree more. First, I value personal freedom, and an important part of exercising freedom responsibly is being informed. Good information helps you make a choice that wisely balances what you want with what's wise. I read things like this with the question, "What should I do about this?" hanging in my mind, because that's the relevant question: do I alter my life based on this information, and if so, how?
"Authorities creating incentives to encourage optimal behaviors" is nice talk that is either a) a euphemism for making it illegal to do as you please, or b) a euphemism for making it prohibitively expensive to do as you please. In either case, it comes down to forcing people to act against their preferences but in accordance with the will of the authorities, which I can't agree to.
To me, that reads like a response to an all-or-nothing strawperson. Nobody says you should sacrifice 100% to safety and nobody 100% disregards it (if the wood stove had a 25% chance of maiming your children, of course you wouldn't use it). Everyone makes that trade-off.
If we can save and significantly improve lots of lives by improving appliances, that seems like a good outcome. I personally don't want resperitory problems - for myself, my family, or my neighbors - it makes it hard to enjoy all those other risky things I love.
> I cringe whenever a business sends me a notification saying, "Your safety is our #1 priority!" and proceeds to explain why I won't be allowed to do yet another thing I am accustomed to do.
I don't recall ever receiving a notice from a business telling me that I am not allowed to do something (other than for IP). Who is sending these notices? Can you provide an example?
The consequences are non existent for almost everyone. How many people have issues with strong causal link to indoor NO2 pollution in houses with vented gas appliances? Leaving that aside, lots of costs are socialized so why are we randomly picking out this one? Why not start banning specific recipes and ingredients if we are so concerned about socialized health costs? No more fried chicken for anyone! To me these bans and taxes are just political cohorts with power retaining their private benefit without restraint while restricting others who think and live differently.
> I think we as a society are over-prioritizing personal safety.
This is called safetyism. It’s the notion that perfectly safe conditions are worth the immense tradeoff they require, like removing individual freedom and agency. But it is also the recent trend of claiming safety matters above all other factors to an absolute degree, and that everyone should be forced to value it as such. We see this manifested in political actions that are absolute (mandates, bans etc). There are other definitions for safetyism as well (https://quillette.com/2018/09/02/is-safetyism-destroying-a-g... ). But my point is that life isn’t one size fits all and our policies shouldn’t be either.
Thanks for sharing your experience of working with wood alongside your family. These experiences and their value are unknown to most city dwellers, and they default to assigning zero value on these things when they propose banning everything that isn’t part of their own life. I get what you’re saying about a wood stove. There is value in that ritual and tradition and life’s pleasures. I personally love a gas range for a similar reason, which is that cooking over a flame is culturally important to me. I also find it is simply far better than my induction top for most cooking (except boiling water, for which I have a $20 electric kettle anyways).
In the case of gas stoves and gas furnaces, it’s astonishing that people ignore that most new setups vent to the outside, which is required in many areas. Even if NO2 is elevated, my feeling is that not everything in life has to be 100% clean or safe, since life inherently comes with risks and it is up to each individual to make personal choices about what risks to tolerate for the benefits. Most people cooking daily with gas stoves live long healthy lives and don’t have issues stemming from NO2 exposure and very few are sensitive enough that a minor elevation of NO2 would cause health issues. This is only a problem for the most sensitive of people.
So are gas ranges really a problem or just an overblown fear by proponents of safetyism or climate activists used to justify top down gas bans?
Apparently unpopular opinion: despite growing up with gas stoves and cooking every day I do not find them any better at it than decent electric ones (not talking about induction). Granted, my kitchen is not Michelin rated, but I have no idea what fancy temperature control people are constantly raving over with gas. Electric has a bit of thernal inertia, yes. If you cooked more than a few times on your own, you know what it's like, and it's not a problem. This gas hype is very puzzling.
So, here is an example. To make yogurt, I first heat up milk to just below boiling for about half-an-hour (this denatures the whey in the milk making for a thicker yogurt). If it boils, then it will usually boil over and make a mess. My electric stove heats on an on-off cycle. That means it goes through periods of being a lot hotter than average, and a lot cooler than average. If I set the electric stove so that the average is at the target temperature, then when the cycle goes up, it boils over. So I have to set it so that the average is below the target temperature, or constantly monitor it and adjust the stove. This is the type of temperature control a gas stove (and and induction i guess) affords.
Then why don't electric stove makers make the stove cycle run at a higher frequency, reducing the deviations? Or provide a larger diversity of max power outputs on different burners of the stove, or something.
Seems like this problem would have been solved long ago if enough people actually cared about it...
Yes, the fact that heat on electric is controlled by switching on and off cycle is what prevents me from switching to it (I believe induction does the same to control the heat).
We need no fancy control or michelen rated appliance, just a basic gas stove allows us better control than electric stove.
I might have only experienced olderand cheaper electric hobs, but the thermal inertia is more than a bit. Off to low or low to high can take minutes, and the same for cooling down. With gas o have instant increases and decreases in energy.
Induction hobs are much better in thst regard, but they fail in other ways - eg with gas i can lift the pan slightly above to shake it ans mix the food, with induction the second i get a few mm above the surface, the pan stops being heated.
Its a massive change in process and feel... Its a bit like going fron riding a motorbike (extremely responsive) to piloting a canal boat where action and effect can be minutes apart.
I don’t think it’s a “problem” per say, but it’s different. The flame indicates temperature in a way most people understand. Have you used a wok? How about cast iron? There’s a lot of nuance to certain dishes and methods that don’t work as well on an electric stove. The flame itself rises and hits the pan in three dimensions and a more distributed way.
I’m not saying it’s not okay (I’ve used an electric stove for a few years). But it’s not “puzzling” why people would like a flame to cook.
I hated my old electric stove, took forever to heat up, and forever to cool down. Thermal inertia was a problem because I am not Michelin rated, when it is too hot or too cold, I like being able to fix my mistake quickly. I have a gas stove now, and being able to turn a knob when my pan is about to overflow and have it instantly settle down is nice.
I think there are some nice electric stoves that use infrared heating and are plenty powerful and reasonably reactive, maybe that's what you have. Induction, of course, is even better.
Maybe the problem is really about price and quality. A gas stove will always work, even the cheapest gas stove has good temperature control and power. Even a camping stove can do decent cooking. You can also put anything on top of it, including your cheap bent aluminium frying pans. Cheap electric stoves lack power, and electric stoves, induction in particular require good quality, compatible cookware to work correctly.
Another problem with cheap electric stoves (especially induction) is that a lot of them have absolutely terrible capacitive switches that work half of the time. I never had this issue with knobs on a gas stove, even the cheap ones.
> Another problem with cheap electric stoves (especially induction) is that a lot of them have absolutely terrible capacitive switches that work half of the time. I never had this issue with knobs on a gas stove, even the cheap ones.
I didn't think people were using electric stoves to be a superset of induction stoves. As far as I can tell, there is no such thing as a cheap inductive stove, and the break down (where I live) is: low end - electric stoves, mid end - gas stoves, high end - induction stoves. Induction just has a lot of advantages in speed and cleanup.
It isn't so much average temperature control as much as being able to very finely choose where you want to apply the temperature. If you're making a stew that doesn't really matter, Induction is easier to clean, nothing wrong with it, for searing a steak I've always felt slightly limited by induction.
I'd take anything over the awful "student house electric oven" I have now though.
the thing that annoys me most about my crappy electric is that it only has 2 power levels, on and off, and duty cycles them at a really slow rate (upwards of a minute) for other power levels.
The temperature is all over the map.
I had to simmer something at 180F and it took me 30 minutes to find the right power setting and a big pot of water to stabilize the temperature.
Do the American home building standards not take account of this?
Fairly certain it's already law for a while in other places, e.g. if you have a gas stove or central heating then you need greater ventilation and maybe carbon monoxide alarms and so forth.
New houses in some places aren't allowed to have gas connections at all, which is partly greenhouse gas related, but the health benefits and cost savings are part of the discussion. No new home today should be built around the assumption that gas is a sensible fuel source.
Good induction is light years better than good gas stoves.
Ours has 4.5kW _per plate_, and its awesome. Silent, instantaneously hot, instantaneously cold, full control over the heat, no gases, etc.
For heating and hot water, "remote heat" is infinitely cheaper, both in acquisition and maintenance costs, and infinitely more environmentally friendly than gas and electric heating.
Sure, if you live in a remote region or a third world country, then you get what you can get. But in any modern first world city, there is no quality in the solution space in which gas is better than the alternatives, and as a whole, gas is just substantially worse.
Interesting. We are gas everything in the great white north, but the only reason is the almost prohibitive cost differential. I would not claim that gas is "nicer" than alternatives.
NO2 is also produced by diesel and gasoline combustion and is a significant pollutant in most cities; its value changes during the day (Windy.com has this info if you are curious). I don't see that the author is controlling for the outside value. Some of the variance could be regional air quality (e.g. the low values around Christmas).
I don't know, but actually (again, according to Windy) NO2 spikes at night across the U.S., but less on weekends. Industrial processes? Furnaces? Weather? Bad data? This is why they should have an "outside" control away from any house exhausts.
I'm also not saying the gas stove has no effect, just that they don't seem to be controlling for ambient NO2.
Readit News
We have found “tri-ply” stainless steel pans work really well, better than on gas. Cast iron is also brilliant, I inherited loads of them. We have aluminium none stick frying pans with solid stainless steel bases, they work well.
Aluminium pans without a solid steel base are absolutely crap on induction - even the ones that say they work. Avoid them.
If you have any pans with a slightly curved base they won’t work. And you will have to get a Wok with a flat bottom designed specifically for induction.
Make sure you read reviews before you purchase any new pans, and if you are changing your hob to an induction one be prepared for replacing your pans - budget to spend more on them than the hob even.
We are absolutely converted to induction, love it and will never go back. Planning to one day get rid of the gas boiler too.
I wish this type of functionality was more widely available. There is absolutely no need for devices like this to be expensive.
Currently I have two induction cooktops (counter top models, not built-in hobs) - one from Ikea and one Nuwave brand. The Ikea one looks pretty good, but it lacks precision. Looks like the Ikea one is no longer available in the US, but here it is on their AU website:
https://www.ikea.com/au/en/p/tillreda-portable-induction-hob...
The temperature settings go from 20 to 70 degree F increments. In particular, the jump from 210F to 280F really sucks. But it's great for boiling water, cooking pasta, etc.
The Nuwave induction cooktop I have allows 10 degree F increments, which is great for accurate precision. But it doesn't look very good in my opinion.
I'm also in the process of remodeling my kitchen and have a built-in Bertazzoni cooktop, which I've yet to unbox or install. I choose that because my wife wanted physical knobs instead of digital buttons and I agree that that does provide a nicer UI. I'm optimistic the knobs will provide precision temperature control.
Overall, I love cooking with induction - for control and clean air inside the house. However, one other issue I've struggled with is uneven temperature. Originally I thought cast iron would perform well, but it's not great with induction. I recently got some pretty decent stainless steel pots/pans from Tramontina, which are affordably priced compared Allclad, and those heat much more evenly. I also hope that when I install my built-in induction cooktop it will heat more evenly, perhaps with more magnetic rings.
They were as low as $1,000 over December.
They are amazing. I believe that eventually (maybe 10 years from now) you’ll be able to get a 4 burner stove top with the same features.
Deleted Comment
Definitely an electric oven though.
I’m now back on gas after a house move and I miss induction so much.
E.g. want to boil two pots of water in parallel? No can do - after warming up seemingly forever you will have one pot boiling for 5 seconds, then stopping and letting the other pot boil for five seconds, and so on.
I want to love induction - no gas pipes, so much easier to clean, so much better for air quality - but the regular stuff you can buy in stores just isn't there yet. Just the fact that they use a plug which can carry at most 3kW should be enough proof that you cannot use them for serious cooking.
Deleted Comment
Snideness aside, the fact that you have to concern yourself with what pans you buy for an induction stove is enough reason for many to not buy one. You can no longer buy any pan at a store, you must do your research first.
Throw out my current pans and buy even more expensive ones? You're not exactly selling me the induction here.
Anecdotally, the gas feels slower. It seems to take an age to bring things up to the boil compared to my old induction.
Also, cleaning up after spills is a pain compared to a glass surface.
Deleted Comment
If a crappy plug-in hob can boil water that quickly, it can cook that quickly too.
Next move I'm getting that sorted out - no more gas! (Mind you, companies are beginning trials here in the UK mixing Hydrogen with the gas supply, so there's a part of me that still wonders at the future benefit/end to end efficiency).
The future is in completely abandoning residential gas infrastructure, which will have immense benefits in allowing us to stop maintaining and expanding millions and millions of miles of leaky underground pipes. No amount of tweaking the mixture will change the fact that electricity is broadly useful for everything, and that gas is only useful for a small number of things that are quickly being overtaken by electricity.
Hell, if we had devices that could instantly summon sufficient quantities of water from thin air, I'd get rid of my water hookup, too, even though water lines aren't nearly as bad for the atmosphere as gas lines are.
If it has a flat bottom, then it’s not a wok.
Personally, I hate cooking on induction. My parent have it and it never worked for me. I need to see/hear the gas to be able to control the heat properly.
Once they shut off the gas lines due to the energy transition, I’m going to run a gas pipe from the kitchen to my basement and just buy it in canisters.
This won't happen. What will happen instead is that the gas to cook your omelette in the morning will cost three times more than going to a restaurant would and you'll make your own decision about shutting down your gas lines.
https://www.theverge.com/2015/1/6/7504115/samsungs-virtual-f...
It has a flat bottom "outside", inside it has the same shape as a normal wok.
Can you clarify, are you certain you're talking about induction? Inductive cooktops are a relatively recent trend, if you grew up with an electric range there's a good chance it was a resistive cooktop, not an inductive cooktop. Resistive cooktops are pretty notoriously unsatisfying.
I think there are probably still UX problems to be solved with Induction, the visual feedback on gas is better. We fortunately have knobs on ours (I hate the touch buttons on some).
High carbon steel pans (the kind used by kitchen services) have been brilliant. Every time I've seen an induction cooktop in use in a commercial service (for example, at my work place cafeteria at the "rice meal" station) they use high carbon steel pans.
The biggest problem: no cooking during power outages, which happen around 2-3x a year.
All our cast iron is Le Creuset.
Cast iron has never been quick on any type of stovetop.
I agree about carbon steel though. Underappreciated although gaining more attention.
That’s interesting, can you compare the heat distribution problem to resistive? I have a gas range now, but when I had resistive I would preheat my cast iron in the oven for nice uniform heat distribution
Gas isn’t even remotely worth the downsides but there’s a number of dishes I can make that are easier and higher quality to do on gas, like if I’m trying to sear a large pan full of meat.
From physics point of view the way you raise temperature of pan has 0 effect on what's happening in the pan.
Then we moved to a house with an old electric stove. The pans turned to pure magic. More non-stick than our teflon pans.
Then we moved again to a place with an induction stove and bam: the pans are shit again.
It is obviously me, of course. Heat is heat. But something about induction makes me unable to use carbon steel.
Absolutely unmatched for boiling water, and I'm very happy using it with a cast iron dutch oven for slow cooking and soups or stews.
Stuff that isn't reactive can be well cleaned using ammonia vapor (which will break down grease and burned on grease and so on). Just put it in a bag or other container with some ammonia (no need to submerge, it's the vapor that does the work) and let it sit for a while.
I could never have that in my kitchen :(
Not tried a wok, yet, though.
On gas we have a wok ring that just sits on top of the burner.
This has sort of been my experience with induction beyond woks too, it often requires technique and equipment concessions. Great for boiling water and sautéing though. The tops also have durability/longevity issues when compared to gas and that isn’t usually acknowledged.
You would need to get a special flat bottom Wok designed for induction. I believe there are also some induction woks that come with a special plate or ring you place them on to make them work and still have a curved bottom, I have no experience of them.
The damage feels like heat at lower frequencies (sitting in front of a fire oh no!) and a sizzle at higher frequencies (sitting in the sun oh no!). Induction stovetops emit orders of magnitude less than a fire and nothing at higher frequencies. Essentially: they get hot.
The best advice I can give: if you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen.
https://www.cdc.gov/nceh/radiation/nonionizing_radiation.htm...
Deleted Comment
Not only did we have a gas stove that was probably spiking NO2 levels when we actually used it; we also seemed to have a gas leak. It was not a big one, just a faint smell, but it was hard to pin down. A plumber concluded the connection between the range and the pipe wasn't the problem. No specific part of the range smelled stronger than the rest of it. For all we knew, it might be a hole in a pipe. So we wanted to make gas stop flowing through our unit (a condo within a three-family home, very normal here in Cambridge, Massachusetts) altogether.
We contacted an appliance company about switching to induction. To prepare, they told us, we would first need to upgrade the range power outlet to 40 amps, and cap off the gas pipe behind the range.
The electrical work cost $1800. It could have been much more; we were lucky our circuit breaker was positioned such that they only needed to make two openings in our walls. (They suggested we put little hatch doors in those spots to make future work easier.)
We asked our plumber to not only cap off the gas pipe behind the range, but also put in a valve in the basement, such that gas flow could be shut off to our unit, but also easily turned back on if a future owner wants to reverse what we did. We did this rather than turn off our gas altogether, because we have a gas water heater and still needed gas available there. The plumbing work cost about $300 I think.
To make cooking stay as close as possible to being how great and fast it is with gas, we chose a range with an induction stove: The LG LSE4616ST, which cost $3000.
We were lucky to be able to afford this change for our health. Of course, it would have cost a lot less if we hadn't cared about induction, but still multiple thousands of dollars.
We should be subsidizing conversions like this.
This is the epitome of the current green movement. Proponents want an unnecessary luxury green product subsidized for higher income households, even though there are perfectly fine substitutes that are just as good for the environment at 1/5 the cost you just described. I just can't get on board with a movement like this.
The most efficient approach would be to correctly price the negative externalities of gas on health and environment, but pragmatically politicians understand that enormous carbon taxes are a very quick way to be voted out of office. Accordingly we arrive at the solutions available: subsidies for alternatives and/or a very slow phase in of carbon taxes.
Progressive jurisdictions are straight up banning gas hookups in new developments for environmental and health reasons.
Subsidy in the form of a tax credit (so you need to front the government the money until tax season), so that you can buy something that basically only works if you own a house, into which you've already installed some infrastructure, itself subsidized via tax credit.
I can't help but think it would have been better to subsidize the purchase of used hybrids (or, you know, transit)
https://www.currys.co.uk/gbuk/household-appliances/cooking/h...
(Comparing BestBuy.com, where they are all fancy and start at $1000.)
For people using small burners in apartments, single ring plug in induction cooktops are available for about $100 with no other work required.
Yeah, but it doesn't have wifi. The one for $3000 is wifi enabled. Shame it doesn't have an LCD, means Doom is kinda of hard to run on it.
With gas it takes an hour.
No we shouldn't. Whatever you care about, like maybe CO₂, at those prices you can get a better bang for your buck elsewhere. For new installations it might make sense.
Gas is dangerous, lines should be checked every couple of years (pressurized or vacuum tested) and the rubber connection hose for the range should be replaced every five years or so.
For less than 8 hours of work I'm sure.. I'm in the wrong profession.
It could be worse, try doing this in an old building in NYC.
I have no doubt that gas causes more pollution but they are remiss for not mentioning the cooking process itself causes pollution.
The alternative ranges produce zero. Combustion heating, cooking and driving produces NO2, electric doesn't. The article is specifically about NO2, it has specific adverse health effects.
> Every time I cook the indoor air pollution also spikes "
What kind of pollution are you measuring? My air purifier reacts to frying too and shows "high pollution', but it just measures particles in the air - it cannot tell apart cancerous coal ash from harmless pollen and frying oil getting in the air.
Yes, and the real problem is vents that do not exhaust outside. Even in code crazy California, it is perfectly legal to have vents that just blow the air around.
I totally get the desire to switch to electric appliances for many reasons, but I am yet to meet an electric stove of any kind that I remotely enjoyed cooking on. Is this everyone's experience? Did I just not meet the right induction stove yet? Is there some sort of new technology on the horizon that will make electric stoves infinitely better?
You regulate up or down in steps, and the controls sometimes have trouble recognizing your fingers if they are wet. There’s also no tactile feedback.
I’d much rather turn a knob.
Then it would be perfect.
And I also agree that the touch controls are absolutely the worst, they are abysmal. I see why they are done this way - it allows the entire plate to be wiped clean very easily. But I still wish you could have separate controls somewhere on the side, with actual tactile knobs.
WTF designed these things? Certainly not a chef!
A bialetti (moka) pot will not work because they're made from aluminum (no induction).
The whole thing upsets me so much that it's very high on my list for deciding if I can live in that country. If there is no gas cooking (most of North of Europe) un/-surprisingly the food is also terrible. Maybe there is sample-bias in my statement but I know literally nobody in my family or friends who owns a ceran/indusction stove and who is actually a great cook.
The only things better for cooking than gas are wood or coal fires. But gas is the next best natural flame.
When I looked for a new stove last year I tried to find one with induction AND knobs. I ended up getting a non-induction stove, with knobs, works well enough although I would swap it for one with induction and knobs any day, haha!
IMHO touch controls are popular because they are cheap to make and offer a simple way to integrate the hob onto a counter. For a lot of people that is important. For us (my partner is blind) it is not.
Sometimes you need to react really quickly and turn down heat, if it takes you 5 sec more, the food might be burnt already. Lifting the pan might be a good „hack“ though.
- You can't use a wok on them.
- In fact, you can't use them with lots of other things, or in many ways I use my gas stove. Yes, these are "off-label" uses, sometimes not even related to cooking. So? Tools should be flexible, not fight back.
First complaint - exactly the same as yours. Even a little boil over can sometimes just shut everything off.
Second complaint - "smart" pan sensing. I have a few pots that don't really fit the rings on the stove perfectly, and they have been relegated to the "useless" corner of the cabinet. The temp setting starts to either flash whenever the pot isn't big enough to cover the ring, or just takes forever to heat up.
Last complaint - some of my pans are not perfectly flat on the bottom, from either a rough life or warping in the oven, etc. Those pans are also useless on the induction hob.
After a short while I could easily operate it while not looking, and precision control (half-steps) was easy by simply rolling finger.
Sadly very, very few seems to have this design. Some have a shared control, but having to select the zone and then power is just... not good in comparison. I have that on my current one and I routinely adjust the wrong one, split between forgetting to select zone and it not recognizing my zone selection.
It was still touch though which overall sucks compared to physical controls.
The only thing induction can't do well are cooking hacks that utilize the open flame, like toasting tortillas or roasting peppers on the burner without a pan.
Of course it's silly that knobs would belong only to "premium" models.
We bought a professional induction stove from a restaurant online on ebay for very cheap. One of the reasons is that all controls were "manual" and with "knobs". The amount of electronics on these is minimal.
I have induction with knobs. It's no different. I suspect it's just a knob on the user side, and there's still the big steps behind-the-scenes.
My stove's induction knobs give me tactile feedback, but lack the granular control that a real analog knob has.
I honestly don't know thw reasoning for using toch controls on induction stoves. They are a pain to use for most people.
The are big plus is it doubles as extra worktop as it’s just so big (and flat).
Gas is nice mainly for things that are really temperature sensitive like searing meat, using a wok, etc. Of course when cooking stuff like that you want good ventilation for this because otherwise you end up with a lot of grease and soot all over the kitchen. So, the pollution of gas matters less if you have that set up correctly.
The main reason gas is so nice for cooking is how quickly you can adjust the temperature. Induction plates also respond really quickly of course. The old fashioned red hot spiral things, are much more tricky because they stay hot for so long; it takes a minute to reduce the heat; or to raise it. I have one at home and I'm used to it but it is still annoying. A neat trick is to simply move pans away from the heat to control it.
Induction plates don't have that problem. But I really hate the touch controls many of these things have. They are very fiddly; especially with wet hands and they also can get hot. I'd prefer to have some old fashioned dials. But in terms of instant, fine grained control, they are actually pretty good.
Gas stoves are great at bringing a pot of water to a boil. But they are not so good at very low heat, like leaving a covered pot to simmer. Most gas ranges don't go as low as I would like, and I need to watch the pot more carefully and stir more frequently than I would at home.
I'm sure most of my issues are familiarity. If I had spent my life cooking with gas, my techniques would have developed to work better with gas. But now that I'm set in my ways I will stick with electric.
Having bought an induction stove when refitting our kitchen, then replacing it with a different one a couple of months later, I can advise that the size of the elements matters. The 'linked zones' thing seems to be rubbish, and doesn't heat evenly (maybe it does on really high end stuff). I now have a three-element stove (60cm) - one really big one and two smaller ones. I don't think I've ever used 4 burners at once anyway...
I just wish there was an API for induction stoves; interfacing with a thermometer to keep a certain temperature, or for a set time, or even a removably physical control panel (i.e. knobs) that would let you put it away and keep the flat-top thing (which is actually really nice when you need the bench space).
Edit: https://www.hafactory.it/2015/10/19/miele-news-about-tempera...
You can set the knob, and turn it on and off with a relee, connected to a raspberry pi. We have temperature sensors on the "food side" of the pans and pots, since what we care about is the temperature that the food feels.
99% of the time we don't use it with the pis, but have a couple of recipes as Jupyter notebooks that we use the temp control and temp staging with.
One advantage of induction over gas here, is that the thermal mass of some induction pots and pans is almost zero, and temperature changes are instantaneous, so from the point of view of control algorithms, programming induction cooking is infinitely better than any other system that i've used, cause you don't have to solve a PDE to regulate the temperature. YOu can just turn it on if its too cold and off if its too hot, and that's it. +-0.5C of accuracy, which at the 100$ level for a single plate is unbeatable.
We spent ~400$ for 3 heats. 100% recommend.
One of the main issue with common domestic gas stoves is that the heat is not well distributed, and good pans don’t necessarily have a great thermal conductivity. This is a problem when what you’re hearing is not liquid enough to redistribute heat by convection. Another is that you don’t control the temperature of the flame, just its size. So temperature control is always finicky, particularly at low temperatures.
So personally I go for induction most of the time, and a barbecue when I need a flame.
A gas stove is a lot more powerful (10-60kW vs 1-3kW) but a lot of that heat simply escapes upwards.
Maybe this is specific to the stove they have though. I have and will continue to use gas because of this.
I agree with you there. I've had gas for the last ten years, and recently moved to a place with induction. It's a significant change.
I had regular electric for a long time before I had gas, so there was an adjustment period there, too, but I got used to it pretty quickly. But induction is somehow very different from either of those two.
I've been on induction for six months, and I still have such a very hard time with temperature control that I cook at home a lot less than I used to. It has a thousand controls, but only seems to have two settings: surface of the sun, and off.
That said, I'm OK with the move toward eliminating natural gas in homes. I just wish I ended up with a regular electric stove top instead of induction. But it's an apartment, so you get what you get.
We bought a profesional induction plate, 4.5kW, 100$ on ebay. Performance wise, its ~4x better than the 4kW gas stove it replaced. The time required to heat 50L of water to 60C went down from 60min with gas to about 10-15 min with induction.
Instantaneously hot, and instantaneously cold. For us it opened a lot of new ways of cooking.
What kind of cooking do you prefer doing on a gas stove over an induction stove?
Obviously the same pots and pans don't work on both, but if you have a top of the line induction stove you know this already.
I haven't cooked much on induction stoves. I only do so at my parents' place. So among the few things I cooked on both induction and stove, I know I prefer gas for cooking steaks and making scrambled eggs.
I know part of my frustration is with the touch controls, though, and I presume some of it is due to my lack of intuition with what setting is good for what sort of "cooking I want to apply to food".
I do agree with one of the replies to your comment, though: it seems like everyone just talks about how good induction is at boiling water and not much else specifically. I have an electric kettle for that job so it's not some alluring aspect to me.
Induction took some getting used to, but outside of a few very specific things (mainly stir-fry), it's better than gas across the board for me.
I think we as a society are over-prioritizing personal safety. I cringe whenever a business sends me a notification saying, "Your safety is our #1 priority!" and proceeds to explain why I won't be allowed to do yet another thing I am accustomed to do. My safety isn't my #1 priority, and I certainly don't want the companies I do business with to decide how safe I have to be. I'd rather live the way I want to live, and I'm not really bothered if my happiness cuts ten years off my life; I'd prefer seventy years of living to eighty years of not dying.
This is a mis-framing of the relevant tradeoffs. Your options aren't a truncated life of joy vs. a longer life of asceticism. The tradeoff might instead be that one of your kids gets asthma and suffers with the condition for their entire life. Or maybe you get cancer and, yes, you die earlier, but it's not an instant death. Maybe you live with that cancer for a decade of treatment and remission and treatment again and ultimately an intense suffering like you've never experienced.
So instead of dying in your sleep at 80, you die of lung cancer at 70, which you were diagnosed with at 60, after a decade of struggling with the emphysema you discovered when you were 50.
You're not just rolling the dice on a shorter life weighed against a happier one; you're rolling for an increased likelihood of a much worse life (that's also shorter).
You're right that safety isn't always #1. But I hope you're thinking about the actual tradeoffs involved and not some kind of idealized version of them.
Sure electric instead of gas, bike instead of car, N95 instead of cloth, are all beneficial choices on an individual level, but it’s much more important for authorities to create incentives to encourage optimal behaviors.
Want to use a wood stove and understand the risks? Great! But maybe building codes are stricter to discourage using them in new construction and/or regulations require proper ventilation.
We shouldn’t expect every individual consumer to be an expert on indoor pollution, carbon emissions, and viral transmission. You’ll never get the kind of aggregate behavior needed for significant change, and the people most likely to suffer are those who don’t have the leisure time and ability to install NO2 sensors all over their house and contact friends who are experts.
I could not disagree more. First, I value personal freedom, and an important part of exercising freedom responsibly is being informed. Good information helps you make a choice that wisely balances what you want with what's wise. I read things like this with the question, "What should I do about this?" hanging in my mind, because that's the relevant question: do I alter my life based on this information, and if so, how?
"Authorities creating incentives to encourage optimal behaviors" is nice talk that is either a) a euphemism for making it illegal to do as you please, or b) a euphemism for making it prohibitively expensive to do as you please. In either case, it comes down to forcing people to act against their preferences but in accordance with the will of the authorities, which I can't agree to.
If we can save and significantly improve lots of lives by improving appliances, that seems like a good outcome. I personally don't want resperitory problems - for myself, my family, or my neighbors - it makes it hard to enjoy all those other risky things I love.
> I cringe whenever a business sends me a notification saying, "Your safety is our #1 priority!" and proceeds to explain why I won't be allowed to do yet another thing I am accustomed to do.
I don't recall ever receiving a notice from a business telling me that I am not allowed to do something (other than for IP). Who is sending these notices? Can you provide an example?
Deleted Comment
You're going to be disappointed then. Closer to 40 years of living, 30 years of being imprisoned by your failing health.
I support your right to make stupid decisions but at least make sure they're accurate and informed stupid decisions.
This is called safetyism. It’s the notion that perfectly safe conditions are worth the immense tradeoff they require, like removing individual freedom and agency. But it is also the recent trend of claiming safety matters above all other factors to an absolute degree, and that everyone should be forced to value it as such. We see this manifested in political actions that are absolute (mandates, bans etc). There are other definitions for safetyism as well (https://quillette.com/2018/09/02/is-safetyism-destroying-a-g... ). But my point is that life isn’t one size fits all and our policies shouldn’t be either.
Thanks for sharing your experience of working with wood alongside your family. These experiences and their value are unknown to most city dwellers, and they default to assigning zero value on these things when they propose banning everything that isn’t part of their own life. I get what you’re saying about a wood stove. There is value in that ritual and tradition and life’s pleasures. I personally love a gas range for a similar reason, which is that cooking over a flame is culturally important to me. I also find it is simply far better than my induction top for most cooking (except boiling water, for which I have a $20 electric kettle anyways).
In the case of gas stoves and gas furnaces, it’s astonishing that people ignore that most new setups vent to the outside, which is required in many areas. Even if NO2 is elevated, my feeling is that not everything in life has to be 100% clean or safe, since life inherently comes with risks and it is up to each individual to make personal choices about what risks to tolerate for the benefits. Most people cooking daily with gas stoves live long healthy lives and don’t have issues stemming from NO2 exposure and very few are sensitive enough that a minor elevation of NO2 would cause health issues. This is only a problem for the most sensitive of people.
So are gas ranges really a problem or just an overblown fear by proponents of safetyism or climate activists used to justify top down gas bans?
Seems like this problem would have been solved long ago if enough people actually cared about it...
Induction hobs are much better in thst regard, but they fail in other ways - eg with gas i can lift the pan slightly above to shake it ans mix the food, with induction the second i get a few mm above the surface, the pan stops being heated.
Its a massive change in process and feel... Its a bit like going fron riding a motorbike (extremely responsive) to piloting a canal boat where action and effect can be minutes apart.
I don’t think it’s a “problem” per say, but it’s different. The flame indicates temperature in a way most people understand. Have you used a wok? How about cast iron? There’s a lot of nuance to certain dishes and methods that don’t work as well on an electric stove. The flame itself rises and hits the pan in three dimensions and a more distributed way.
I’m not saying it’s not okay (I’ve used an electric stove for a few years). But it’s not “puzzling” why people would like a flame to cook.
I think there are some nice electric stoves that use infrared heating and are plenty powerful and reasonably reactive, maybe that's what you have. Induction, of course, is even better.
Maybe the problem is really about price and quality. A gas stove will always work, even the cheapest gas stove has good temperature control and power. Even a camping stove can do decent cooking. You can also put anything on top of it, including your cheap bent aluminium frying pans. Cheap electric stoves lack power, and electric stoves, induction in particular require good quality, compatible cookware to work correctly.
Another problem with cheap electric stoves (especially induction) is that a lot of them have absolutely terrible capacitive switches that work half of the time. I never had this issue with knobs on a gas stove, even the cheap ones.
I didn't think people were using electric stoves to be a superset of induction stoves. As far as I can tell, there is no such thing as a cheap inductive stove, and the break down (where I live) is: low end - electric stoves, mid end - gas stoves, high end - induction stoves. Induction just has a lot of advantages in speed and cleanup.
I'd take anything over the awful "student house electric oven" I have now though.
The temperature is all over the map.
I had to simmer something at 180F and it took me 30 minutes to find the right power setting and a big pot of water to stabilize the temperature.
Dead Comment
Do the American home building standards not take account of this?
Fairly certain it's already law for a while in other places, e.g. if you have a gas stove or central heating then you need greater ventilation and maybe carbon monoxide alarms and so forth.
New houses in some places aren't allowed to have gas connections at all, which is partly greenhouse gas related, but the health benefits and cost savings are part of the discussion. No new home today should be built around the assumption that gas is a sensible fuel source.
Gas furnace, stove, dryer and water heater are much nicer than the electric counterparts
For heating and hot water, "remote heat" is infinitely cheaper, both in acquisition and maintenance costs, and infinitely more environmentally friendly than gas and electric heating.
Sure, if you live in a remote region or a third world country, then you get what you can get. But in any modern first world city, there is no quality in the solution space in which gas is better than the alternatives, and as a whole, gas is just substantially worse.
I'm also not saying the gas stove has no effect, just that they don't seem to be controlling for ambient NO2.