Is Induction Cooking Ready to Go Mainstream?(nytimes.com) |
Is Induction Cooking Ready to Go Mainstream?(nytimes.com) |
Upside: It's like cooking with gas, without the risk of fire. It looks slick. If you get a good and powerful model, the install footprint is small and cooking on it is very reproducable... (setting 7 on burner 3 with this pan is always the same). You can also get maintain lower temperatures than you can with other stovetops, negating the need in some cases for a double-boiler and making it easy to keep food warm - there are a plethora of other technical coolies too - like how as soon as I lift up the pan to dump the pasta, the power to the element shuts of. It's more efficient. The cat can walk on it and even though he hits the buttons, he can't turn it on - elements are reactive, they won't activate if they don't sense enough ferrous material above them.
Downside: It's ceramic. Don't drop stuff on it. Downside: It's ceramic, if you like to sautee stuff by lifting up the pan and/or sliding the pan around, it will just scratch up your cooktop.
A professional restaurant, for this reason, would probably benefit from both gas and induction at the same time.
Most down in North Carolina are all-electric - or were, when I lived down there several years ago.
Between induction stovetops and insanely wide bandwidth pipes there in Scandinavia, it pretty much is the future compared to much of the US :)
Safety features and all that - they thought of that already.
Rings, watches - all safe.
I prefer gas or standard electric hobs personally; more fine grained control and actually a little more predictable in my experience.
Overall and right now it's of limited practical value. Still makes for a cool story and discussion starter on transhumanism.
They aren't really much faster than gas - just a lot more energy efficient... I know mine is faster than previous gas stoves that I purchased, but I also went out of the way to make sure I had high-powered elements because I hate waiting .
If it's so fast - why wouldn't you just turn it on after you chop everything? No need to pre-heat when things heat up so fast....
We'll that's an essay in itself - it's quite an inefficient way to cook, I went through a stage a while back where I quite religiously prepped everything before beginning to cook a meal. Not fun.
> They aren't really much faster than gas
Example: I find doing sauces a lot easier on gas (particularly things like white sauce or gravy) because the heating is generally a lot slower and more gradual. It is a pain with induction having to tweak up the heat every few minutes to make sure it doesn't heat too fast.
Control with gas is as granular as induction I would say (we had an electric hob a few years ago that had a dial - but only 4 actual settings...)
I personally find our induction hob heats faster than gas - could just be particular circumstances though.