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.

This may be old-fashioned, but have you considered using the stove to cook food and then selling the food? If we need to get technology involved, you could accept payments via square. Hell, you could probably even accept payment via blockchain.

But then again, how will the poor stove manufacturer continue to capture monetary value from your purchase? I just bought some delicious tamales from a coworkers mom, and I doubt she shared any of those ill-gotten gains with Samsung. Clearly this is a sector in need of disruption StoveCoin is sounding better and better. Plus, all the waste heat from mining can make kitchens as hot as operating a gas stove, which is what induction stoves are missing. Let me know when the ICO is happening!

I could buy a bunch of expensive hifi qualitu knobs and potentiometers and build my own panel to control the stove.

And then your toddler throws your phone in the toilet while you're making Christmas dinner, and you can't turn the thing off.

: Ok, burning house down.

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.

https://caffeinetalk.com/using-a-moka-pot-on-an-induction-st...

No fuzz with running extra big wires for stove.

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!

worse, i find myself trying to micro-optimize my use of oven temperature buttons: instead of holding up until the temperature is reached, i repeatedly tap it to make it go faster — but not so fast that the debouncing mistakes 2 presses for just one press, otherwise it’s net slower. i find myself actively making latency v.s. throughput decisions: i can preheat the oven by pressing “on”, dialing in the temperature, and then pressing “start”. or, i can press “on”, “start”, and then dial in the temperature and press “start” an extra time. preheating begins whenever you first press “start”, so this shaves off 5 seconds of preheat latency at the cost of 1 extra second spent on an extra button press.

i get irrationally angry every time i use a digital oven. the digital oven is like some looking glass into a half-dozen interlinking societal systems that have managed to settle into some totally unsatisfying equilibria… and they’ve stayed there for decades. it’s legitimately depressing.

man, in the kitchen, keep the controls simple.

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.

Edit: I read further and realized you got single plates too. The search continues....

https://universal.bertazzoni.com/products/professional-serie...

SMEG also has induction stoves with knobs but we don’t trust that brand.

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.

How long have you cooked with a gas stove? I would wager that if you spent decades cooking on induction you would have similar complaints about gas. I love cooking with gas, but also I love cooking with electric, and I imagine I could love cooking with induction. (3 minutes to boil sounds brilliant, who needs a dedicated electric teakettle.) The stuff I could do with precise control down to 100 degrees F, I don't even know but that sounds like it requires patience but allows wonders that are impossible with gas.

Not to say gas can't work wonders that are impossible with induction, but they're different tools and it's not fair to judge simply on the basis of a few missing features.

Also there are pans that don't work as well with gas in my experience. I suspect that if anyone lived with an induction stove for decades and tried to replace it with a gas stove they would also be complaining that half their pans don't work anymore, or at least don't work for the task they've been used for anymore.

I 100% run my vent while cooking. Curious how much of the bad gas I vent…

But it sounds like induction legitimately makes double boilers obsolete (and rather quaint and limited to be restricted to 212F when you have the free, precise choice of even heat at any temperature between 100F and 500F.)

Buy a cast-iron wok from Staub, they work wonderfully.

It weighs about 30% more than our old carbon steel wok, which doesn’t matter much in practice.

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.

Something like that is what I bought.

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.

It's really weird. Granular and immediate control should be such an easy thing to do with electric.

It almost seems as if manufacturers are adding in these "steps" to make it more user friendly in the sense that you can say "I've turned it up to 3".

Is there any technical reason to have discrete steps?

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.

edit: the boost is more powerful (3.7kW for the largest zone), but still. That's time limited (10 minutes or less), and limits the current to the other zone on the same phase.

The speed with which it heats things is actually kind of scary. I can take one of my 9" iron skillets from dead cold to smoking hot in under 20 seconds.

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 use a 50s-era GM Frigidaire electric stove+oven and it doesn't modulate current to control temperature. It's quite a gas-like pleasure to cook with, prior to this I'd only ever experienced electrics like you're describing and they're awful.

And this is modulation of current - think of it as a very slow PWM.

But I must admit I have not disassembled the thing to understand its workings.

I don't even bother with heavy copper-clad pots and pans anymore, which were necessary before. This thing behaves like a gas stove.

So it's the heating element thermal inertia that differs, to smooth out the temperature?

Edit:

Looking at [0], what you're describing seems to be known as an "infinite switch".

That's not what the old stoves like mine has, this is just a rotary switch with 5 selectable presets. I assume it's changing the resistance.

Worth noting is also the even older Kalgoorlie [1] style stove, which changed the number of heating elements connected to regulate temperature.

This repair guide [2] describes both infinite and rotary switch controls on a high-level:

  When the heating element is on, the heater inside the switch is on. The bimetal heats
  (along with the element) until the contacts open. Then the bimetal cools (along with
  the elements) until the contacts close again.

  There are also fixed-temperature switches that vary the voltage going to the heating
  elements to maintain fixed, pre-set temperatures. These are usually push-button or
  rotary switches with fixed settings such as warm, low, medium and high.

  In fixed-temperature switch controls, heat levels are varied by applying different 
  voltages (110V or 220V) to different coils of different resistances.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_stove#Kalgoorlie_Stov...

[2] https://www.appliancerepair.net/oven-repair-4.html

> I assume it's changing the resistance.

This isn’t feasible since you would need a resistor that was as big as the burner and essentially dropped as much heat as a stove element - for instance you would need a dummy load to dump as much waste heat as the burner itself to get a medium setting. In theory one could use a variac or multitap transformer - but again those would be relatively huge and heavy for the currents involved.

My parents have a different brand induction which does seem to have longer pulse cycles - maybe one every 5s or so. That is probably the effect you're describing - it'll go from essentially off to too hot and back. It's obviously a manufacture specific thing.

The GP was praising an induction hob, which is the third type.

Induction are very different from radiant electric and require cookware of particular materials. They are amazing in some respects and limited in others.

From a glance though both have smooth glassy surfaces that look modern.

The cheapest option apparently called a solid plate hob in Britain. Those coils are inside a ceramic (I think) plate. The cheapest ones cost about £80. They're difficult to damage, so you find them in the cheapest rented apartments (students etc): https://www.currys.co.uk/gbuk/household-appliances/cooking/h...

"Ceramic" hobs refers to the one with heating elements below glass/ceramic. Starts from £110, but it's a bit easier to damage. Many rented homes would have this, since it looks fancy and clean.: https://www.currys.co.uk/gbuk/household-appliances/cooking/h...

Induction hobs start at £180: https://www.currys.co.uk/gbuk/household-appliances/cooking/h...

Most ordinary (cheap or expensive) cookware sold in Europe is compatible with an induction hob, but not necessarily everything.

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 have a gas range with a high quality induction plate built into it. So I can boil water faster. But I hardly cook on it, for that gas is king.

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.