Does anyone here have experience/opinions on induction hotplates?
I live in what is basically a studio apartment in someone's basement with a little cobbled-together kitchen in a small room attached to my bed/sitting area. My cooking is done in a largish Cosori convection toaster oven (mine) with a double-hob induction hotplate (kindly provided by landlord) sat on top. The hotplate is from Nutrisystem (not sure of model exactly) and it's definitely a step up from the electric one I brought from my old place (My kitchen was the laundry room there!), but over the last few years there's been a few things about it I don't like so I'm considering buying a new one.
The main problem I have with it is the lack of specificity in the temperature settings: it goes 140°, 210°, 260°, 300°, 350°, 400°, and above that I never really use, but I often have trouble with something cooking too fast at, say, 300° but too slow at 260°. I'd like a device that lets me make smaller, (like maybe 5-10 degree) adjustments at the very least. Also there is the issue that if you go above a certain temp on one hob, it will dial down the other automatically to keep from going over max watts, but it also means I can't boil water on one while searing a steak on the other. Not sure if there's a way around that what with the limitations of current portable cooktop technology and American house wiring codes. As you may have gathered from my living arrangements, I need to keep the cost down to a reasonable <$300, preferably <$200.
Because it needs to sit on top of my toaster oven, I need a side-by-side arrangement. I was gifted Amazon cards for Xmas so I'm hoping to find something on there to defray the cost, but if anyone can point me to the perfect solution somewhere else, I'm interested. Everything I've looked at there so far has preset temp settings and I can't tell if they are fine enough to be any improvement.
Bonus points if anyone knows of an induction-compatible stovetop griddle that heats evenly and isn't heavy-ass cast iron.
Thanks in advance for any advice!
I can't answer most of your questions, but for this
I think that you will need something big and heavy to evenly heat on induction just by virtue of how induction heating works.
Can you explain more? I was going to recommend a carbon steel skillet, which offers many of the same benefits of cast iron (including working with induction) but are much lighter. I don’t use induction currently though so maybe I’m missing something.
Serious Eats has some recommendations for induction cookware here that look decent. A stainless steel skillet could be a good option too. https://www.seriouseats.com/best-induction-cookware-5216877
Definitely not true that you need something heavy. In Sweden induction stovetops is very common, I've used it for past 10-15 years. Nearly everything I've used from lighter non-stick and steel pots/pans to heavy cast iron has heated evenly.
When I hear "even heating" I assume it to mean that everywhere from the center of the pan, to the part directly above the "burner", to the edge of the pan should be roughly the same heat. Thin pans will never do that, the hot spots are going to be more obvious. The thicker the pan, the less of a concern this is (at least after the pan comes to temp.)
That isn't to say that you can't cook with thin pans on induction, you absolutely can, as demonstrated by wide swaths of populations.
Yes, I want something I can place across both burners that will get as hot in the space between the burners as over them. I have a friend who visits on the weekends and he eats like he's about to go into hibernation and I'm tired of having to cook things like pork chops or pancakes in shifts in a skillet (to be fair, I also usually cook an extra piece or 2 for myself to eat later in the week to cut down on washing). But I have joint issues that make controlling heavy objects with just wrist/arm strength a literal pain so I'm trying to avoid getting a griddle that will be overly difficult to hand wash. Plus I don't have an oven big enough to season a griddle or even full size skillet. I suppose I could oil it and then leave it on the stove for a while but idk if that's going to get the oil baked in properly.
It sounds like you either need a stainless steel pan or a carbon steel pan.
Stainless (with an aluminium core) will conduct heat really well which will mitigate the hot spot problem. But they are not very non-stick (which can be a good thing if you're cooking meats).
Carbon steel will let you build up a non stick surface and will conduct heat better than a cast iron, but not as well as a stainless steel pan.
Both will be much lighter than cast iron.
Relevant YouTube video: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yX4hXnyfozo
It’s much less the size and weight of the cookware and more so the size of the coil in the cooktop. One of the reasons why America’s Test Kitchen keeps recommending the $1500 Breville Polyscience cooktop is because it has a very big coil which means more area gets heated.
The best cookware will be something that conducts heat very well, and multi-material stuff like All-Clad is probably going to be the best. I don’t think I have seen a griddle like this though.
I have not used your device, and have only experienced induction stoves at friend's houses, but this makes no sense to me. What degrees is this possibly measuring without a thermal sensor either directly measuring the pan (unlikely IMO) or inside the pan/pot (even more unlikely). All ranges I have ever used don't have temperatures (though that might be nice) they just have low/medium/high knobs. The precise temperature of the pan doesn't matter so much to me as how fast heat is being pumped into the pan, and how fast the pan is transferring that heat into the food.
How fast heat transfers into the food is controlled by a number of factors. Primarily it is how much energy the burner can put out, and how fast (conductive) the pan is. Turning the energy of the burner up/down controls how much energy goes into the pan. The pan's mass and composition controls how fast it can pass that heat into the food.
Again, I don't have extensive experience with induction, but my instinct says regardless of induction/gas/electric the cast iron is always going to heat more evenly. If not cast iron, then a heavier thicker pan. How evenly the pan heats is a function of it's composition and mass. A heavier bottomed pan has more material that will distribute heat more widely across it's surface before it reaches the food. A thinner material like carbon steel has much less mass, and the heat will pass through the pan to the food more quickly. That's why it's valued as a wok material, the heat can be quickly adjusted and controlled by moving the pan around/away from the intense flame.
FWIW, this is the induction cooktop that Consumer Reports has listed as "Best Burner" - https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01FLR0ET8
There's a fair amount of folklore around this, but my understanding is that:
Well, not if you're using an induction cooktop. Aluminum doesn't work with induction afaik (and I don't know whether stainless clad aluminum alleviates this fully, not an expert on induction stoves lol)
I currently only have an ordinary glass-topped electric stove instead of an induction one myself, so it unfortunately hasn't come up for me. The only aluminum cookware I have is a moka pot -- and the only reason I heard about the aluminum thing with induction in the first place was when shopping for one, since stainless steel is less common (but still easy enough to buy) for those.
I don't think I've ever tried Ikea cookware tbh, though I've been satisfied with their dishes. Most of my cooking happens in my carbon steel wok or my enameled cast iron dutch oven. In the end I think the slow-heating electric stove burners are probably the weak link in the chain for me personally lol
(adding to @douchebag’s response!)
Common induction hobs only work with steels and irons, yeah, but there’s no technical reason why they can’t work anything conductive — see this Panasonic hob which works with copper and aluminum. There are even industrial induction furnaces which are used for melting aluminum (and whatnot) for use in other processes!
Wikipedia’s a great resource for researching the underlying science of cooking stuff, since a lot of cooking sites are focused on teaching techniques, not being science educators (America’s Test Kitchen is also unfortunately prone to this :/).
That Panasonic model must really pack a punch at 3500w!
I went looking for the efficiency for various materials, and found the following:
The following summarizes conversion efficiencies for common base metals heated with induction heating:
https://www.fabtechexpo.com/blog/2019/01/03/brazing-101-induction-heating
It was a quick skim so I might have missed something, but it looks like while you can get metals like copper to work, the process isn't as efficient and I would suspect could impact the performance of the unit.
Yeah 3500w is nuts — that’ll boil a pot of water real quick!
Re. Efficiency on copper/aluminum, this review I ran into suggests that it can only dump about 2400w of power into non-ferromagnetic pans? Although I’m not sure how power is being measured in this case.
I like weird physics digressions!
I don't know that I would define evenness that way for cooking, though I understand the appeal. Personally I would choose evenness such that any random sampling of points in the cook space would conform to a small range around the desired temperature. The smaller the range the more even the heat.
Other factors, such as how long it takes to achieve evenness when heating a pan from room temperature, would personally be secondary to the ability to achieve evenness.
When heating you usually have a temperature gradient from the points of contact with your heat source radiating out. So the heat source might influence the evenness of some materials.
To achieve that, I suspect pans with a high thermal mass would protect against temperature fluctuations as food comes into contact with the surface. You would of course need good conductivity as well so that fluctuations in regions of the pan are quickly dispersed.
Which I think gets us back to good old cast iron being a strong contender. Although one limitation there is how long you need to preheat it to achieve a stable even temperature.
Have a great day!
Aah, makes sense — I think professional kitchens tend to rely on their burners’ high output and granular control to avoid needing much thermal mass in their pans, hence the drive for home cooks to use cast iron.
I think I’ll stick to my stainless, triple ply skillet, though, since it feels like a cheat mode for cooking :D
I think that's a fair point; professional kitchens can throw more BTUs at the problem! I'll take a look at triple ply skillets as I don't think I have any. I do have some of the Carote granite pans which are great, as well as good old cast iron and steel.
Have a great day!
I found one tri-ply griddle (with ceramic coating, which, eh) on Amazon. It would fit almost exactly over both burners with nothing outside the elements except the space between them. Which would certainly help keep things even, at the expense of maybe not being able to fit quite as much food on it as I'd like. I'm more concerned about their "convenient" offset handles; I don't see how that wouldn't cause balance issues but I also don't plan on carrying it loaded with food. There are also some complaints in the reviews about the griddle not being completely flat which is a pretty big issue for induction (and for cooking pancakes), and at $250 it would need to be functionally perfect for me to justify the cost.
I've been using this one for the past six months:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/B07KSNTSVR
I got it so I could minimize the use of my gas range and it lives on my counter next to the stove. I like it fairly well. It has a temperature and power level set of controls and you can set temp in 20 degree f intervals from 100 to 460, and the 20 power intervals from 100w to 1800w.
It has a timer and a keep warm mode, and it's great for gently melting butter, pancakes, etc. I use it with cast iron and steel pots and skillets.
Two things I will mention is that it has a slight whine and low fan noise when running, and I wish it could get just a tad hotter. When I am stir frying or making candy, it takes a little longer than a gas range on high. That said, it has been extremely useful to me in ways that a basic range isn't. The ability to set discrete power and temp levels let's you dial in your recipes, and the timed modes are handy. It also boils water fairly quickly.
Happy to answer any questions you might have.
I was looking at the Duxtop 2-hob models, but I wasn't sure about their temp settings (They don't say the actual temps. You say 20 degree difference, which is less fine than what I'd like but better than my current cooker's 40-60 degree jumps) and I'm worried that the right hob being capped at 1000w is going to cramp my style since I sear a lot and prefer to use the right side because it's closer to what little counter space I have.
What amp are the circuits in your breaker? I suspect if you bought two single burner models and ran each on the same circuit at 1800w you would trip your breaker.
1800w/120v = 15amp. So any two burner unit that let's you pull more than 1800w at 120v will trip a standard (US anyway) 15amp home breaker. I have seen some 20 and 30 amp breakers, but not in apartments unless you have shared panels. But if you have shared panels you might end up taking your neighbors outlets out with you. 😂
If you can confirm your breaker I can tell you the max draw, or if you can reach outlets that are on different breakers that would work to.
Finally, if you do have a power socket for something like an electric stove, then they make adapters that split the two hot poles into separate plugs giving you the ability to run multiple 15amp loads.
Best of luck!
Enter my pet peeve, as we electrify more of our home, of these damn 15 amp breakers.
This past Halloween, we managed to burn out some of our electrical wiring somewhere in the house with two electric heaters. Required an electrician to essentially jury rig new wiring to parts of the house because he couldn't locate the failure in the circuit.
With zero context, I would suspect that there was something wrong with your wiring to start with. For a 15A circuit the wiring is supposed to be able to handle 20A since going over a wire’s rating for too long could cause a fire. It also makes it so that if something goes wrong in that circuit, the failure points will be easily accessible like the breakers, fuses, fixtures, and receptacles. In any case, poorly or illogically wired houses is a painfully common thing. My house has a mystery switch that doesn’t appear to actually switch anything in spite of being right next to a lighting fixture.
I suspect you may be right. Though I wonder if it may also be the current electrician: he has a knack for missing fine details.
I have this one: https://www.ikea.com/ca/en/p/tillreda-portable-induction-cooktop-1-zone-white-10493520/
I've had it for two years, and it works great. I use it for boiling water or anything that involves boiling a liquid because it's 10x faster than my gas range to do so.
It does have some coil whine and a fan, but it's worked well for us.
I saw that in my own searches and it looks like a nice unit, unfortunately, I really need two burners and it looks like all their other options are multiple-burner units in the $1000+ range, which I have neither space nor $ for. I'm not sure cramming 2 of them on top of a toaster oven would be a good idea, I can just see a stray jostle knocking a pot of boiling water to the floor.
Ah I missed that. Their other ones are designed to be installed permanently in a place.
European here. I have 4 pot induction cooker, it is powered via two phases in configuration 2 pots on each phase. Even with 240V and 16A breakers, I can't boil water and do steak on one phase, cooker distributes the power momentarily to each of the two hobs (if that is a name for the part where you put your pot on) to not exceed the power limit. I don't have precise wattage but I think that hobs are rated for something like 2-3.5kW (based on radius). In US on 120V, you won't be able to have two hob cooker where both hobs run at full power, that is certain.
About temperature - We don't have that here on induction. We have numbers from1 to 9 with some in the middle having also "." (decimal point) which means something between the two numbers. Water boil on number 6 usually with big pot (for cooking a lot of pasta) having to run at 8 (on the middle sized hob) to keep boiling. Sometimes I have a little bit of troubles to figure out the best setting... You won't chhange this with induction, it is digitally controlled, not with a standard knob on electrical or gas cooker where you can adjust to your liking.
About the plate - I think you mean adding a plate in between your cooker and your pot? We have aluminium plate encased in steel for that to be able to use ie. aluminium pans. It is aluminium inside because it transfers and distributes heat better and it is steel on outside because aluminium doesn't work on induction. So simply put - steel makes the heat and aluminium distributes it through the plate evenly. The plate is 28cm in diameter and around 5mm thick, it weights like... I dunno... 0.5kg? 1lb?
Your best hope is getting two one hob cookers and hooking each of them to different circuit (so they don't share a breaker). That way you can use both of them on higher setting. Forget temperature control altogether, it is just simplifying or marketing. Induction doesn't work like that/is not based on temperature (if it doesn't have temperature sensor, which I still have yet to see one).
Feel free to ask if you want to know some more.
I was also going to suggest 2 separate cookers.
One could have very fine "temp" / power steps and the other could either be the same or more powerful. I don't know what the user interface would be on some of these small step cookers but I would find it annoying to press a + or - button dozens of times every time I used it.
You probably have more models to choose from going single hob vs dual? (Is hob UK English?)
I'd also consider doing a fine control induction and an old school resistance heating cooker with an 'infinitely variable power knob'. These don't waste/lose very much energy like between a regular stove and the pan/pot. Induction heaters use some energy to drive the coils - there's a reason there's cooling fan. I'm assuming when searing/boiling at higher powers, even more is lost to overhead vs cooking.
If you're capped at 1800 watts, like 99% of that will be making cooking heat with a resistance heater. I'm going to guess 85-95% with induction? Maybe lower with marginal cookware?
Ditto with finding out if you have 2 separate outlets. Also, any chance there is an electric dryer outlet? That would be 240 V and higher amps. I saw some 240V induction 2 burner "wire in" units on amazon.
This is going further afield but I made a special extension cord that was dryer plug at one end and welder plug at the other. (Yeah, I used wire that was more than up to the current requirements.)
Induction loses energy in drivng the coild, for sure. The output temperature is just only warm enough on touch, I highly doubt it's more than 40 celsius. I suppose there will be like 5% loses in circuitry and coils.
Standard rrsistance heater must heat uo the metal enclosure which then stays hot after cooking for long time. Those are loses too and it will likely be more than induction. Just sayin', no problem with that.
Actually one induction and one resistive with analog knob maybe feasible if better temperature/power control is desired.
For controls of induction - ours work by holding the finger down. You hold it and in like 2 seconds you run at 9. There is also "P" setting which overdrives it for some time to make the water boil faster for example. This "P" has dedicated touch button for each hob, which means you just touch this and you go full power. When you have the cooker fornlonger time, you figure out the various settings for various pots and you don't have to fiddle with controls much and become effective :-)
This dual induction griddle-top or this electric one might be what you're seeking.
I have no idea if these particular dual-coil setups are reliable, but at least they're theoretically designed to heat the removable griddle top evenly across the two induction or electric coils.
I feel your pain on heavy cookware, but nearly every induction-compatible griddle pan I've seen had complaints about uneven heating and/or warping when used on two coils, regardless of the material.
I love our induction stove, but we usually make pancakes on a single burner in a round skillet in small batches, not on a griddle.