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.

I bet the Breville cooktop is much better than mine, but you don't need to spend anywhere near that amount to get something decent.

www.njori.com is a currently-vaporware device that looks potentially even better than the Control Freak and is substantially less expensive.

Essentially disposable nonstick pans (pay a small premium for induction compatibility).

Enameled cast iron Dutch ovens.

Very high end nitride-coated pans from Hestan, compatible with any induction stove except Hestan Cue.

Plain old cast iron.

Magnetic steel comals.

Carbon steel seasonable pans, paella pans, etc.

A flat-bottom wok.

All of those work on induction stoves, and all work on a device like the Control Freak. Just put them on and set a temperature.

On the other hand, the GE range has an app and buttons. Where’s the knob?

Definitely an electric oven though.

I’m now back on gas after a house move and I miss induction so much.

Hmm... My electric hob seems to control temperature by the amount of time the heating elements are active (+presumably a thermostat). There's a red light when the heating elements are active (or hot but switched off), and a definite click sound when the heating elements come on. You can see the heat immediately turn on when you change to a higher temp, and when you change to a lower temp it seems to just leave the application of heat off longer (I guess allowing elements to cool down to whatever the thermostat says they should be).

With a resistive hob (ceramic hob is the industry name) you’re relying on a large lump of stone (hence the name ceramic hob) to be a heat store and even out the elements lumpy power output. Problem with this approach is that it takes forever for the stone to heat up and cool down, so the hob is slow to respond.

With an induction hob, your heating pan directly with a electromagnetic field, the only thermal mass in the entire system is the pan. The hob can instantly change its power output, because its not relying on a stone to store energy, and thus has zero thermal mass.

So induction hob react at the speed of your pan, you have lightweight pan, then the pan temperature will change almost instantly. You got a heavy cast iron pan, then the pan will take a little longer to shed the extra heat.

FYI: If the hob glows when heating, it’s not induction. It’s a ceramic hob. Ceramic hobs are crap and give induction hobs a really bad name because the look the same when off. You can only tell if an induction hob is, if there’s a pan on top. They’re incapable of creating heat without a pan on top.

It absolutely does when the pulses are on the order of ten seconds long, as in many electric ranges. But yes, the thermal mass of the heated coil/cooktop are also a major factor.

In ceramic hobs, they usually don’t have proper power control systems. They normally rely on a set of thermal switches to disconnect the main heating element when the ceramic element gets hot enough. The entire control system is analog and relies physical phenomena like wax expansion etc. Phenomena that is well know to be unresponsive, but very cheap.

Induction doesn’t work by producing heat. It works by using electro magnets to excite the metal pots causing them to heat. This makes induction much more efficient than conventional electric (more efficient than gas too) but also fast to react to adjustments in heat settings because you’re not relying on conduction.

https://www.ukwhitegoods.co.uk/help/buying-advice/cooking-pr...

EDIT: from the link, a ceramic hob matches most closely

I still lift the pan to cool things a bit on an induction top; most units will give you 2 or 3 seconds before auto-off when you do so.

Why you may ask? My cheap induction hob has slowly failing membrane keys.

They are more easy to work with, IMO. Just get a good one.

https://www.samsung.com/nz/cooking-appliances/cooktops/induc...

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.

Now, about your issue with parallel cooking: you indeed can not send Max Power to two pots if they are on the same rail. However, even the cheapest ranges I've ever seen have 4 burners, two rails. Which means you _could_ boil two pots of water, as long as you use the correct two burners. You learn pretty quickly which burners share a rail. I'd imagine the really nice ones have a transformer per burner so it's never an issue.

And as long as you're not trying to send boil-in-20-seconds kind of power, you can use all the burners without noticing anything.

We used to live in an apartment with single phase, there we had to somewhat limit the induction top to about 5,5kW and once again I practically never enocuntered it maxing out.

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.

A cast iron pan at Wal-Mart is roughly the same price as a non-stick skillet and will outlast it by decades. Even if you don't want the Wal-Mart brand, you can buy Lodge, which is respected enough even by cast iron fanatics, and is cheaper even than mid range non stick or aluminum/steel skillets.

If one is willing to perform possible repairs, they can prevent tossing out the original embedded energy cost of manufacturing and delivering the original cast iron product (and many other items), which if one is so inclined, makes choosing the non-gas stove option and re-gearing for it (assuming they have say, only ceramic cookware) for ecological reasons as one decision factor an even more energy-thrifty choice.

We throw away an astonishing amount of goods that in past generations would be repaired, because we heavily externalize the costs of doing so, since we're such a poor civilization in Banks' The Culture sense. Like externalizing the pipeline leak costs of supporting the gas infrastructure that sits behind the gas stove.

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.

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.

Gas tankless water heaters are still sometimes a cost-efficient per-therm choice if you are already plumbed for gas [1] [2].

I've yet to find a calculator that figures the TCO (including costs that are externalized today, like pipe losses to the environment) between tankless water heaters using natural gas, propane, resistive electric, induction electric, and heat pump versions of those types, though. There are many different situations, so what is overall systemically efficient in one situation will not be suitable for another.

It would come as little surprise to most HN readers that I have a number of very expensive resistive air heaters that we call computers laying around for my work, so in my particular situation, a heat pump water heater works extremely well. However, I'm still unsure of the TCO after all the maintenance and repair is accounted for over the decades I will own the heat pump as it is undeniably more complex than more common water heaters. So I will give a nod to resistive water heaters as a likely good TCO choice in most situations after all costs are said and done [3].

[1] https://www.ruud.com/products/water-heaters/tankless-water-h...

[2] https://www.waterheaterleakinginfo.com/gas-vs-electric/

[3] https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/is-induction-heating-m...

All new builds and renovations should be encouraged to deploy full-electric.

- ed: Sorry, I should've specified - I meant 'in the UK' for the large amount of existing gas infrastructure.

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.

This is the same thing I say to petrol heads about gas. Sure, there might be some left for enthusiasts. But enthusiasts alone will not be able to afford the massive economies of scale that make that consumption anything close to affordable.

> so it's very unlikely that synthetic Methane will cost more than a few dozen cents per kWh

No, it’ll cost much more than that. You’re ignoring the factored in cost of storing and distributing gas. This is something that’s only affordable because of economies of scale (and government support) because it was the only practical option for heating and hot water for a while. As electricity gets cheaper and people switch over to heat pumps and electric hot water heaters, the cost of that distribution network is going to fall on fewer people, driving up their cost.

I wouldn’t be surprised if that the gas bill for synthetic methane just for cooking was as high as your current gas bill for heating and cooking. Once economies of scale go away, things get costly fast.

> So you can run a stove for an hour a day for one or two bucks or so. I guess that's several times more than you pay for natural gas, but a lot cheaper than going to a restaurant.

Sure. But the competitor to a natural gas stove isn’t eating out, it’s electricity. Especially as gas gets more expensive and induction ranges become the norm.

Not sure where you live, but in my country the plan is to get everyone off gas by 2050. At that time the national gas network should be shut down.

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.

A wok has 2 important features: it has a round bottom and it’s thin. The thin sheet steel allows it to heat up and cool down quickly. Maybe you can make a thick-bottomed pan that has a rounded bottom on the inside. And maybe you can pump enough energy in it to make it heat up quickly, but you can’t suck the energy back out. If it’s that massive it will not cool down quickly.

This is pretty much the case for all good induction kitchen-ware, since this is one of the main ways of cooking that induction allows that no other kitchen powersupply has.

A wok with a flat bottom outside and curved surface inside would also be heavy.

Yeah, it is heavy. You cant really toss things in it like you would a carbon steel wok.

If it’s heavy cast iron, it’s not a wok but a wadjan. Does it have 2 handles as well ? A wadjan is an Indonesian wok-like pan, but unlike a wok a wadjan retains heat due to it being heavy cast iron. A wok should be thin sheet steel so it heats up and cools down very quickly.

Wadjans are very good for things that have to stew/simmer, which is common in Indonesian cuisine. It has different uses than a Chinese wok.

Here is a link that might be more useful

https://i.imgur.com/NKXQpXZ.jpeg

https://i.imgur.com/4MlLayk.jpeg

Yeah, it isnt quite like a carbon steel wok but most people in North America wont have a a wok burner to hold the round bottom so they need the flat part.

You also definitely cant cook in them quite like a wok since as you say the cast iron holds so much heat. I usually just get it real hot on the burner for 5 or 6 minutes and then stir fry something. You have to take the food out when it is ready though because moving so much iron off the burner doesn't cool it down as quick.

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.

Not that recent, at least not here in Europe. I know the difference, they had a resistive cooktop maybe 15 years ago or so, that was even worse, took forever to respond.

There are several problems with induction. While not inherent to induction, the controls tend to be crap. For some reason most induction cooktops have touch controls, which are an absolute disaster. At my parents previous place they had one where you had to first select the burner, and then use +/- touch buttons to change the temperature. You couldn’t quickly change anything. And of course the touch controls never worked if you had wet hands (and why would you have wet hands when cooking, right ?) Although indiction plates with knobs apparently do exist, I haven’t seen any yet.

A problem that is inherent is the complete lack of feedback: you can’t see a flame, you can’t hear it, meaning you can’t adjust the temperature by feel. Another inherent problem is that it limits the type of cookware you can use on it, only flat bottomed steel pans.

Basically, they are very impractical devices and not fit for purpose in any way.

https://eurokera.com/blog/professional-chefs-love-induction-...

https://www.vice.com/amp/en/article/78mvqa/why-londons-top-c...

https://www.treehugger.com/professional-chefs-are-dumping-ga...

It's one thing to have a preference, and another thing altogether to lie about the things you don't like to bolster your preference.

step back for a moment and realize that you're calling another human a bullshitter and a liar about their preference in cooking equipment. They're explaining their anecdotal position on the matter -- not teaching a college course.

I'm a big cook, i'm always in any cooking related thread on HN -- I never see the crowd rile up as much as when induction hobs are ever mentioned. It's strange to me that induction hobs create so much conflict and illicit so much passion from both sides of the aisle..

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).

Propane requires a slight modification to a gas hob (basically, different sized nozzles) but those came with my hob and it’s trivial to replace them.

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

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8a/Iron_car...

I thought this was true (it makes some sense), but the data seems to show the opposite. This source has cast iron at 52 W/m-K, and 1% carbon steel at 43 W/m-K (0.5% carbon steel is at 54 W/m-K). Now, this obviously depends a lot on the processing and heat treatment of each material. But at the very least, the difference is not massive.

https://www.engineeringtoolbox.com/thermal-conductivity-meta...

I guess most of the reputation of cast iron comes from the chunky shapes of the pans, and that the higher end stainless cookware is often cladding around copper core

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.

The only real solutions to this issue I could find are smaller and thicker pans, and the use of things like ovens and barbecues.

in a spherical cow sense, yeah, heat is heat. but the distribution of that heat is going to depend a lot on the implementation, and can make a big difference for searing meats or making delicate sauces.

radiant glasstops are really good at even heating, but only if the bottom of your pan is exactly the same size as the burner. the edge of the bottom ends up a little cooler, because energy is radiated out from the unheated sides, but not dramatically so.

I've found gas ranges to be pretty terrible for even heating. you get a hot ring where the most intense part of each flame touches the bottom, but a significantly cooler center. only the most expensive gas ranges come close to the evenness of a pedestrian glasstop. main benefit of these is you can effectively change the size of the burner, so nice if you have a lot of odd-sized pans.

I haven't had a chance to try an induction range myself, but I've read a lot of ymmv type posts on the internet. the gist seems to be that the tech itself is very good, but the outcome depends on the (electical) conductivity of the pan itself. which makes sense to me, at least in a handwavy sort of way. I wouldn't expect every pan to heat itself perfectly evenly in response to a uniform magnetic field.

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.

Alternatively maybe it’s just relying on inducting directly to the Wok bottom but the surface area touching the glass plate is very small so I can’t see it working well.

The ring does three things (probably). Keeps the wok supported, transfers heat to the pan, and tricks the sensors in the stove into thinking there's a flat pan on it.

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...

I think the article is precisely about studying more closely something that was thought to be safe (by the author at least), keeping an open mind never hurts :)

It's not like I would switch back to gas even if induction radiation was found to be causing some kind of health issue anyway, just like I'm still using my phone, because it's convenient (or going at the beach even if it's sunny because I like it ^^)