wtf is 'induction' cooking?

this may be the sound of our culinary future technically that's not a sound or at least it wasn't a sound until your speakers or your headphones turned it into a sound it was not in the air in the room when I shot that footage it is instead electromagnetic interference messing with my camera interference coming from this induction burner which cooks with magnetism these are still pretty rare here in the United States but they're getting more popular most notably in China which accounts for about 60% of the global induction market share according to this industry research report we're gonna learn the science of how induction works why it only works with certain pots and pans and while you might prefer it to gas or electric or not I don't know you do you let's start with a little experiment here's 2 cups of cold tap water in a saucepan on my electric stovetop Brits would call it a hob any stovetop not just an electric one they call it a hob anyway the burner has an inner ring and an outer ring I'm turning them both on so this is the maximum beat to use that I can get out of this thing my thermometer is on Celsius and as you can see this took about four and a half minutes to reach a full boil 100 degrees now same experiment on this little induction hot plate that I've got on full power it takes about three and a half minutes to reach a full boil it got there a minute faster despite the fact that this is an underpowered little mobile hob that I've got here compared to my state of the art electric stove which is an absolute beast and will instantaneously burn a steak if I have heated my pan on high for more than a couple of minutes how is it possible that the puny induction burner heats faster than the beefy electric burner let's go ask dr. Shannon Yee an expert on energy and heat transfer at Georgia Tech when you add more interfaces or more material in between you start to push that heat through and so you're getting different temperature drops along the way with induction heating you're heating the pan directly now what are the thermal interfaces on the electric stove well there's the resistance coil that's the metal coil under the glass electricity heats that up then the heat passes through the ceramic top that's another interface and only then does it reach the pan you're passing electrons around and that's creating an elastic scattering and generating heat in the case of an induction heater using a magnetic field causing electrons to move around and create eddy currents those eddy currents are causing scattering and heating up that way and so you're directly heating the pan right I'm heating a coil and then relying on heat transfer to the panel here's a way to see that difference in action if I take the boiling pot off my electric burner and then touch my thermometer to the glass it really quickly reaches 200 degrees Celsius almost 400 Fahrenheit before my hand gets so hot that I can't hold it there anymore I do the exact same thing on the induction burner and the thermometer reads just 40 degrees Celsius there was just a boiling pan of water on there and even though this thing says caution do not touch and that's good advice I can nonetheless gingerly touch this glass surface that's because the burner wasn't heating the glass it was emitting an alternating magnetic current that heated the pan and in the pan conducted some of that heat back down to the glass and that's good yep you won't hit the other things around minimizes burns or other injuries I'd worry about getting burned in the kitchen I'm sure that my lawyer and the manufacturer of this induction burner would like me to emphasize once again that you really shouldn't just slap your hand right down onto the thing after it's just been heating a screaming hot pan however if you were to do such a thing the burn would probably be way less severe than if you put your hand onto a screaming hot electric burner and for me a guy who has little kids running around the house was reaching up on things that's a really big bonus for induction there's also less heat going out into the air around the pot here I'm holding the tip of the thermometer in thin air right in the crook between the pan and the burner and it's reading like 95 Celsius compare that to 40 degrees Celsius over on the induction burner induction heats up your kitchen way less than electric and way less than gas look I went over to my friend Seth's house he's got a beautiful old gas stove I tried to do the same water boiling experiment there and when it got to around 50 degrees Celsius the thermometer had just stopped working Hey we go [Music] whoa oh my god you built it i melted it yep that's how much he escapes out the side of a gas burner it's a lot of heat which I think probably has particular significance in the professional kitchen one of my favorite celebrity chefs is a big fan of induction despite being an adorably analog man in a digital world that's my man Michel Roux jr. right there he cooked with induction at home for a long time and then in 2014 he brought it into his kitchen at Lagash in London all the souls is getting ready for lunch and what's great about the induction is there's no heat it's lovely it's a great environment to be working in for most of the history of professional cookery kitchens have been miserably hot places to work hence the expression if you can't stand the heat gtfo the kitchen it's kind of profound to think that now all of a sudden it doesn't have to be that way but one reason why professional chefs have traditionally liked gas is that it is responsive when you fiddle with the knob there's less of a lag time between changes that you make here and the food actually getting cooler or hotter to a great extent I think the responsiveness of gas stoves is really overstated when compared to modern high-quality electric ranges this Consumer Reports article that I'm showing you about that is linked in the description Bernard Lucinda is way more responsive than electric we already established that it heats up food faster now watch what happens when we turn the heat off it takes the boiling water over the electric burner in nearly four minutes to cool down by just 10 degrees C on the induction burner the same trip takes less than a minute that's really important when you're trying to keep something from burning likewise induction burners are probably better than electric at maintaining low constant heat like the bare simmer needed for making stock electric burners have to constantly cycle on and off to maintain a temperature and at the hottest point of that cycle they might burn your sauce a heavy pan helps to mitigate that but it's still a risk induction burners generally only have to cycle when you get them on full blast they'll cycle on and off to avoid meltdown I should say that induction cooktops are generally more expensive though the price is coming down they also only work with certain of pans the pen has to be made of a magnetic metal a ferrous metal ie cast iron or enameled cast iron or steel which of course is mostly iron if you're not sure what you've got put a magnet on it extra points if it's shaped like a horsey if the magnet sticks it's gonna work if it doesn't it's not gonna work I mean it's not gonna hurt anything the pan just isn't gonna get hot I can't for example use my old aluminum stockpot on induction big stock pots like this are often made out of aluminum because aluminum is light it's cheap copper pans won't work pens that are clad where you've got some copper or some aluminum sandwiched between some steel those will generally work the magnet trick will tell another drawback is that induction burners aren't very good for cooking with walks forgive me this is the closest thing that I have to a wok the heat doesn't really kind of wrap up around these sloping edges the way it does with a gas flame for sure with induction the burner has to be actually touching the bottom of the pan or at least be very very close to it that's the same reason by the way why it's probably perfectly safe to cook with induction while wearing a ring people ask me about this when I did my video about cooking and rings I couldn't really test this directly because my wedding ring is made out of gold which is not particularly magnetic but I suppose if you had a steel ring or maybe a nickel ring yab there's sort of a risk that the induction burner could heat up with a ring around your finger and burn you but I just don't think that's very realistic here's how we can test that here's my paring knife it's made of steel it's ferrous i'll grip it tightly and then hold it right next to the induction burner on full-blast and i feel absolutely nothing heating up so yeah the sloped sides of the wok are not going to get very much heat on an induction burner nor will any of the wok if you are pulling it up off the burner to toss the food as traditional stir-fry technique demands which leads us back to the interesting case of China they love their walks in China and yet oddly they also love their induction cooktops one study by the research firm I research found that 82 percent of Chinese survey respondents say they own one of these a standalone dedicated induction burner which is great and many things but not at working a wok this report by allied market research links the popularity of induction with increased health awareness people want to cook with less oil which might mean less stir frying in walks a Chinese viewer of mine told me via Twitter that one of these is very handy and cramped Chinese apartments I imagine it's also safer they're less likely to start a fire then there's the issue of energy efficiency induction probably is a little more efficient than electric though the true degree of that difference is a matter of some debate there's some links about that in the description induction certainly is more energy efficient than gas if you look within the closed system that is your kitchen but you got to think about where the energy comes from how close do you live to your power plant what kind of power plant is it what kind of transmission lines connect you to your power plants do you live in a hot climate or a cold climate all of these things can affect energy efficiency in the broader sense and the energy cost man I couldn't tell you anything about that the price of electricity and gas depends so much on where you live have no idea what is the better buy for you in the long term I can tell you which burner is the noisiest though which is where I will leave you right back where we started no you're not actually going to hear this sound while you're cooking with induction that is the electromagnetic interference acting upon the incredibly cheap audio circuitry that is inside my camera if I switch over to some high-quality audio gear gear that's actually designed to be shielded from interference you can hear what this thing actually sounds like in the room yep that's kind of noisy there's a fan that cools it down there's all these weird clicking and creaking sounds especially at maximum power it's kind of noisy and that is why induction may be a great option for you but for me a guy who makes cooking videos with sound nah not yet

Channel: Adam Ragusea

Views: 740,643

Rating: 4.9338617 out of 5

Keywords: induction cooking, induction cooktop, what is induction cooking, cooking with induction, induction cookware, induction cooktop demo, induction cooktop how it works, induction cooktop vs gas, induction cooktop vs electric, induction cooktop portable, induction cooktop boiling water, induction cooktop review, induction cooktop how to use, what pans work with induction, what pans work with induction hobs, what pans work with induction cooktop

Id: Xn1LUo5ra_A

Length: 10min 46sec (646 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 16 2019