Induction Stoves -- Watch Before You Buy One!

induction cooking has been in the news a lot lately mostly in the context of how gases evil today we're not going to analyze the evils of gas it's a complicated topic and I'm not qualified to do it justice at least not yet so for today we're going to set aside the questions of health and environment and talk about the cooking performance of induction and what you need to know if you're in the market for a stove over the last year I had the chance to try a duckstop portable induction burner a Frigidaire induction wrench that sells for just over a thousand and the KitchenAid induction wrench that sells just over three thousand I've also talked to people who have exceptionally expensive induction ranges like the eight thousand dollar wolf but I didn't have a chance to cook on it I figured few people can afford it anyway and I wanted to concentrate my testing on the more affordable options induction stoves cook with magnets they are not a source of heat one thing people love about them is that they keep your kitchen a lot cooler another thing people love is their range they can go extremely low and extremely high you can boil a pretty big pot of water in a couple of minutes they can change the temperature of your pan even faster than gas unlike electric stoves they are extremely responsive not all cookware works on induction stoves if a Mac that doesn't stick to your pan it won't work cast iron carbon steel and some stainless steel works on induction copper and aluminum don't that's the basics you could read on any website but the devil is in the details so let's get to it the most important thing about induction is the magnet diameter and for some reason no one talks about it you can't even learn the magnet diameter of each burner from the specs of most induction stoves here's why it's so important induction is surgically precise there is no hot Cloud that you get with gas any part of the pen that is directly over a magnet works as soon as it's not over the magnet even by one inch it doesn't work at all I thought that if I used a really good very conductive pen it would somehow spread this heat out but it turned out to not be the case it spreads it out some it gets hot to the touch but not enough to cook unfortunately going from a six inch magnet to a nine inch magnet is insanely expensive Cook's Illustrated reviewed portable induction burners and the only one that had a 9-inch magnet cost twelve hundred dollars for one burner so it had extra bells and whistles but the biggest difference in performance was due to the magnet size this burner could handle a 12 inch pen while all the other ones could only handle a 10 inch pen because they had a six inch magnet in case you're confused about the mismatch in the size of the pen and the magnet let me explain the pens are measured from the top edge to edge the cooking surface of a 10 inch Skillet with sloped sets is only about seven inches in diameter that's why it performs fine on a six inch magnet but a 12 inch Skillet with the same shape has a cooking surface that is 9 inches in diameter and that's too big for a six inch magnet to handle the advice I hear a lot is that you should try a portable induction burner to see if you like it before buying a stove I have to disagree there is no middle ground with portable induction burners that they either cost 100 or 1200 if you don't mind spending 1200 to try a burner more power to you but a 1 to 200 burner is not going to give you a good sense of what induction cooking is like I borrowed the duckstep induction burner and here are the results It produced in an 11 inch cast iron pan on low setting it's cycled on and off in Fairly long intervals which didn't maintain a steady simmer and on high heat it had a very loud fan although I found it mostly useless that's not at all the case with induction stoves induction is the most expensive cooking surface one good burner costs twelve hundred dollars so when you see a whole induction stove for that price please realize that you won't get even one good burner by good I mean big so you'll be limited to the tiny 10 inch pants don't trust the circles they draw on top of the stove to show you what size pants the burners can handle I found them inaccurate here's what you can expect a stove that costs around 1000 won't handle any big pens as though that costs around 3 000 will handle one a stove that costs 6 000 or more will handle two large pins here is a 12 inch pan with straight sides on kitchenaid's biggest burner and here it is on the second biggest I just made a video comparing the Browning square footage of gas electric and induction so if you want more details the link is below to help you get the rough idea of how much more you need to pay to get the same level of quality and performance from induction as you would from gas let's look at Wolf a 30 inch Wolf gas range is listed at 6 000 and the same size wolf induction wrenches listed at over 8 000. to be fair an induction stove cleans up easily and doesn't heat up your kitchen as much as gas but 8 000 does an awful lot to pay induction stoves make noises what kind of noise and how much noise depends on how much you paid for the stove let's take a mid-priced kitchen lid as an example if you set your burner to 5 or higher it runs continuously but below 5 it Cycles on and off and makes a soft clicking noise like this foreign if you are not sensitive to ticking clocks it probably wouldn't bother you but if you are sensitive to repetitive noises it it's good to know unfortunately it didn't occur to me to record The Hum that happened on the high settings it's a continuous fan sort of hum I had the hood going and with the hood the stove noise just Blended in it wasn't nearly as loud as the portable burners but again it's good to know about these things switching to induction will almost certainly mean changing some of your cookware the only materials that are not questionable are cast iron and carbon steel I thought that stainless steel would work but that's not always the case some of my stainless steel pans worked because they had ferrous material added to their composition but some didn't if a magnet doesn't stick to your pen it doesn't work on induction what turned out to be tricky is figuring out if a pen would work when purchasing it online my stainless steel Cuisinart pen is supposed to work on induction according to the description on Amazon but a magnet doesn't stick to it I tried it on induction and sure enough it didn't work several people who reviewed it said that it didn't work for them either there is also a significant difference in performance between the pants that I completely covered with Magnetic material on the outside and the pants that have a perforated magnetic disc inserted into their bottoms like this missing non-stick pen see how the periphery of this pen is not Browning this pan is a perfect size for the magnet it is on but the magnetic ring is not as big as the Pen's bottom this means a much smaller cooking surface than you'd expect I find that you can often save some money by buying stock pots and even some braising pans with a thick disc on the bottom and thin sides if you'll be simmering liquids in them anyway why is flurgeon thick sides but none of them are induction compatible so to switch to induction I'd have to replace them all with more expensive models the subject of pen warping on induction stoves rarely comes up I've seen Cooks Illustrated mention it in passing but that's it well I've seen it happen in real life if you don't want a lot of ruined pants you need to take it very seriously induction changes the temperature of your pan faster than any other cooking tool way faster than gas boiling water in 90 seconds and having your pan go from cold to burning in a snap comes at a cost it's not very kind to your pants if the size of the magnet matches the bottom of your pen really well the entire bottom of the pan is heating up together but if the magnet is smaller than the cooking surface it creates a huge difference in temperature between the center of the cooking surface and the periphery this selective heating can cause your pen to warp maybe not from a single use but from repeated use Don't Panic there is a lot you can do to prevent that for parts where you're cooking wet things it's not really an issue the water whatever liquid you have inside will absorb some of the energy which will reduce the strain on the metal if you are heating a skillet put some oil into it right away do not hit it empty and don't set it on high heat right away even if that's the setting you eventually need to get to it gradually start your pan on a medium heat for a couple of minutes before cranking it up to the setting you need I would also avoid using a bigger pan than the magnet cam handle some induction burners can interfere with electronics that are brought really close to them this can affect your meat thermometers my thermometer worked fine but if your thermometer is acting strange just turn off your burner before you use it if you wear a peacemaker you might want to talk to your doctor about how close you can get to induction stoves without interference foreign until recently the answer was yes now I feel like I could be okay with induction what changed my mind was not trying an induction stove and finding it so impressive nope what changed my mind was finding a backup in the form of a 15 000 BTU butane burner for everyday cooking The Limited square footage of Browning that mid-priced induction stoves provide is totally fine most of the time I don't need two 12-inch pans going at the same time but when I teach I do need more cooking area and I need the flexibility to put any pot on any burner to help students see it better I hope that as induction ranges become more mainstream they will become better and cheaper I wish some appliance company would hire me as a consultant to help them design a good one you know that in my previous life I was a usability engineer so of course what's good for usability is often bad for marketing so I doubt that will ever happen but I can dream do you have an induction stove let me know in the comments below what brand and model you have and your likes and dislikes here are more thought provoking culinary videos for you to check out and if you are ever in the Boston area maybe I'll see you in one of my classes foreign [Music]

Channel: Helen Rennie

Views: 537,878

Keywords: induction, induction cooking, induction burners, induction stoves, induction cooktops, induction warp, induction noise, induction electronics, induction pans, induction compatible pans, induction cookware, helenrennie, helen rennie

Id: _CrI33N-Sjg

Length: 12min 19sec (739 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 15 2022