I enjoy cooking a lot and I cooked on gas stoves, electric ones (the ones that have those red hot spiral things under a glass) and top-of-the-line induction ones. In my opinion (and probably many restaurants' opinions from what I can see through their reactions on bans for gas appliances in new buildings), a gas stove is just unmatched in how much easier and better it makes cooking.
I totally get the desire to switch to electric appliances for many reasons, but I am yet to meet an electric stove of any kind that I remotely enjoyed cooking on. Is this everyone's experience? Did I just not meet the right induction stove yet? Is there some sort of new technology on the horizon that will make electric stoves infinitely better?
I'm the same. I was a huge proponent for gas stoves, until I got a good induction one and wow. It's just as good when it comes to heat, with extra advantages like not throwing extra heat into my kitchen, things never burning onto the actual plate and it just generally being a much neater solution. But yeah the heat can easily match gas, it's great.
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.
Tactile feedback? Knobs? What do you think this is, the 1950s? No no. Your next stove should have a touchscreen, maybe not even a screen at all - control everything via your phone using a cloud based platform that connects to your stove./s
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!
This is obviously how the stove generates the heat. The CPU is doing bitcoin mining for Samsung. Each plate has it's own set of CPU's depending on size.
I don't know how anyone can cook with these things for exactly the reasons you mention. Cooking can be chaotic with many things to keep track at once. Fingers are wet, or greasy so buttons don't work. Something overflows with just a few tiny drops the thing switches off leading to a problem with something else on the stove that requires constant stirring because now you're forced to clean your hands, dry to spillage from the stove before you can continue. Lift a heavy pot from the stove and put it back down (because it was a wee bit too hot to handle) - BAM! the fucking glass is broken. (I broke already 1 induction stove from my brother and my own Ceran this way).
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.
Apparently you can use propane tanks. That's what a family told us that wanted to move into our last apartment. They swore by their cherished old gas stove, and said one of those tanks lasts them... well, I don't remember exactly, but it must have been half a year or something. In any case, much less of a hassle as I would have thought.
This is so true, my parents have an induction stove with touch controls. It takes ONE drop of water on the 10x40cm touch control square to make the whole stove top shut down with a beeping alarm sound. If you have buttery fingers it won't recognize any touches (major annoyance when making butter heavy sauces).
On top of that it also relies on long-presses, you have to hold your finger on the "button zones" for 2 seconds, then you can alter the heat, one touch at a time on a 1-10 scale. Takes about 10-20 seconds to adjust the heat.
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!
stove/oven UX has been shit ever since they were first digitized. my first home had an analog-controlled electric oven: turn the dial to the temperature you want. every oven i’ve owned since uses up/down touch buttons to adjust the temperature in 5-degree increments. it turns the half-second process of swinging a knob to the right place into a 5-second process of holding a button until it hits the right temperature.
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.
We searched high and low for a stove with an induction top that used knobs and finally settled on a stove from Bertazzoni. Expensive but worth it for us.
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.
We bought one from a restaurant on ebay. The "professional" models for restaurants don't have touch controls or fancy electronics. Just knobs. 100% recommend.
Mind naming the brand?
We got a single pot model (59500P) by Vollrath to test out induction. We love it and wish all hobs had controls by single digit percentage.
We cannot seem to find a cooktop equivalent.
Edit: I read further and realized you got single plates too. The search continues....
Did you ever have any issues with your 59500P? I have the same and never run it above 70 or so, for fear of killing it. I heard they don't do domestic use warranties.
I hate those too. There are a few models left, that have knobs, but they are getting fewer and fewer. No idea why.
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.
Yeah, lifting the pan is what I resort to, too. Like cooking on medieval fire. It‘s kinda ridiculous, given the granularity, precision and immediacy that electric heating, and especially induction, would allow for were it not for those dumb touch controls.
- 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.
It's a different tool, it works differently. Induction boils water in less than half the time, and it also has very precise heat control which can go very low, down to 100 degrees, where a gas stove's lowest setting is fast high heat by comparison.
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.
My gas stove gets super super low too. Not sure how to compare it to 100 degrees; but it’s very very little BTUs. It’s a double burner with a normal one and a inner smaller one.
I 100% run my vent while cooking. Curious how much of the bad gas I vent…
I see sources claiming that a gas stove on low can go as low as 137F, but I think that's a bit misleading because the heat is so uneven. If you've got a pot of water, maybe the water will be heated to 137F, but the temperature where the water meets the metal will be much higher; this is why double boilers exist.
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.)
I've had two induction stoves over the last two years, one newer and one a little older. I came from a lifetime of cooking with gas.
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.
My previous induction cooking top had a very nice system as far as touch controls go. Each of the four zones had a separate ~5cm strip from 0 to 10, and beeped when changed.
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.
My lg induction stove has normal knobs. It's awesome. I wouldn't go back to gas.
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.
You can def get induction ranges with knobs, I've been appliance shopping recently and saw plenty of them, but at the moment it may be a "luxury" feature that requires getting a model that is a few notches up from the cheapest model.
Of course it's silly that knobs would belong only to "premium" models.
> I love induction. The main annoyance, for me, are the touch controls.
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.
I happened to buy a used quality induction stove, that has knobs.
At the time I didn't think a lot about it, but to me it's the best stove I ever used.
I honestly don't know thw reasoning for using toch controls on induction stoves. They are a pain to use for most people.
I looked into this a few months ago and found a stove that came with magnetic knobs you put onto the control area. You turn adjust temperature by turning the knob
Induction plates vary a lot in quality and in the amount of energy they transfer. The more expensive ones can dump a lot of energy into a pan really quickly. Some go up to 3-4KW even. If you are trying to boil a large pan of water/soup/etc., a good induction plate gets the job done very quickly whereas you might have to wait a bit with a gas stove or a cheaper, lower capacity induction plate. Like wise, if you are searing a steak, you'd want a large wattage to get the pan really hot, really quickly.
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.
I do a lot of cooking and I prefer electric. I'm sure it's because I've cooked on electric ranges my entire life, the kind where the pan sits directly on the spiral heating element. I only ever cook with gas when I'm visiting a friend or relative.
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.
A proper induction range will boil water much faster than gas. Under two minutes to take a full pasta pot—8 quarts (7.5L) of water—from tap-cold (50F/10C) to a rolling boil. Do not confuse them with resistive coil electric stoves, which are inferior in every way! Unless you're dead set on aluminum cookware.
I like induction cooking as well, but it's not _that_ fast. Assuming a 3 kW (usually it's less powerful) induction stovetop, 7 kg of water, 4 J/(g.c) specific heat and 90 C temperature increase, that would take at the very least 14 minutes. Should take longer if you include heating the pan itself, phase change energy and heat losses. If you wanted to do it in two minutes, that would take twice as much power as a home Tesla charger. Heating water just takes a ton of energy.
I can confirm that our induction stove is very fast, much faster at boiling water than the (domestic) gas stoves I've had experience with.
A pot of water really does boil in under two minutes, so I wanted to question your math, but it seems correct :-). The problem here is the quantity, why are you (gp) boiling 7 liters of water?
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.
I've recently put in a jennair unit that will do 5kW into the main element.
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.
For sure - the first time I made popcorn on my induction stove I figured I'd put it on high heat for a bit to get it up to temperature like you would on a gas stove. Nearly ruined that pan.
Many gas ranges have a concentric simmer burner on at least one of the burners for this reason. It’s a low heat level that allows delicate cooking with all the intuitive feel of a flame.
My gas stove has an XLO mode, it actually will cycle on and off automatically. Makes a little clicking noise, but it's very effective for the lowest of simmers.
the stoves here have two rings with the inner ring being small enough that i can leave a dry pan on it for hours without it getting noticeable hotter than at the start. when cooking something i can leave it unattended for several minutes or longer.
In terms of fine control, induction is a game changer (me resisting moving from gas for a long time). I use lower, more precise cooking techniques more now. For high-temperature (e.g. searing a steak) stuff, there's something different about how it heats. I haven't worked out what it is yet, as induction gets the pan insanely hot really fast (on 'boost mode'); almost too hot, which should be excellent, but seems wierd, and sometimes seems to burn the pan. But for that kind of cooking I use the gas BBQ outside mostly.
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).
We bought a professional "manual" (no fancy electronics) from a restaurant (with knobs and no touch), for 100$ each. And built our own system with that.
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.
Induction is very good, in different situations than gad. With induction, you have a reliable temperature control and can heat the whole pan uniformly, even at low temperatures. It’s very easy to let something simmer for hours or heat something just so it does not cool too much.
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.
I was able to get the most even heating with a high quality (but not insanely expensive) induction stove. Boiling water in about a minute, insane. And because the heating element is necessarily closed loop you don't have the regulation problems you do with an ohmic heater.
A gas stove is a lot more powerful (10-60kW vs 1-3kW) but a lot of that heat simply escapes upwards.
Its not about power or speed for me. Whenever i visit my parents i hate cooking anything because the electric stoves release heat in bursts then turn off for a bit then a huge burst. It’s impossible to cook anything the way you want . Normally i just go for overcooking everything. But in general i find cooking relaxing and that stove turns it into something that makes me mad every morning.
Maybe this is specific to the stove they have though. I have and will continue to use gas because of this.
That's not an inherent quality of electric stoves, just crappy ones.
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.
I hate to break it you but an old 50s era stove works exactly as the GP describes - there certainly wasn’t low cost high power solid state power conversion circuitry in those days - the mechanism is extremely simple, an adjustable bimetal thermostat that can turn the element full on and off with adjustable duty cycle - and that modulation frequency is over seconds. Any smoothing of this mechanism is inherent in the thermal capacity of the heating element.
And this is modulation of current - think of it as a very slow PWM.
If it's modulating as you describe, it's completely imperceptible, unlike any of the other ones I've had to live with in SF bay area apartments.
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.
As you will see in the schematic of chapter 4 the fixed temp switches vary two voltage combinations (that you get “for free” with split phase power) and two coils to get the limited power levels. But this requires multiple coils per burner as noted. If it’s a single nichrome element per burner then even with fixed detents it may likely use a bimetal switch.
> 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.
I don’t know why but when I visited Japan, every stove has this sensor which cuts off the gas almost completely when the pan gets to hot, I guess it’s to prevent oil fires. If you want to hate cooking, go to Japan and use one of those things.
My AEG induction stove has short enough pulse cycles it's not noticeable - a low setting just means low heat. In fact, it's the best stove I've ever used by far - it can go from gently melting chocolate to way too much heat in about 2s. Apart from boiling water I never use the most powerful settings because they'll burn stuff. The only thing it can't do better than gas is wok cooking - the curved sides don't get hot.
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.
Radiant electric replace the age old coil with elements below a ceramic or glass surface. They are uniformly abysmal to cook with.
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.
I haven't seen a coil hob for years, I think my grandma had one.
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...
I love cooking on gas. As you mentioned the convenience is unmatched and it is a pleasure compared to cooking using induction or hot plate. Induction certainly seemed more efficient with how fast it used to boil water, but when cooking food, gas always wins for me. Not to mention, lot of pans I have will not work on induction or hotplate.
a gas stove is just unmatched in how much easier and better it makes cooking.
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.
> I totally get the desire to switch to electric appliances for many reasons, but I am yet to meet an electric stove of any kind that I remotely enjoyed cooking on. Is this everyone's experience?
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.
What kind of cooking requires raising the temp of 50L of water by 60C? I'm open to the induction stove thing but I don't understand why its proponents are so focused on the speed of boiling large amounts of water. Is this the primary cooking activity of many ordinary families?
> What kind of cooking do you prefer doing on a gas stove over an induction stove?
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.
First they came for rough and tumble, then the cigarettes, then the lightbulbs, and now prometheus fire. Before you know it you're in a Darth Vader pod and you have no mouth but you must scream. Wealth inequality has gotten so dramatic that the state probably profits 10x more off people existing than the people do themselves, so the state cares 10x more about people living as long as possible than the people might themselves; as such, the state will show no hesitancy in making any tradeoffs that maximize long-term economic value extraction. https://youtu.be/tetwGGL997s?t=159
I totally get the desire to switch to electric appliances for many reasons, but I am yet to meet an electric stove of any kind that I remotely enjoyed cooking on. Is this everyone's experience? Did I just not meet the right induction stove yet? Is there some sort of new technology on the horizon that will make electric stoves infinitely better?