Gas-stoves are easier to scale that is mostly the reason why most restaurants still use them. 15 fires on full throttle is much easier to achieve than on induction purely of how our current electricity network has been built.
But for a normal household? It really doesn't matter. My father had his own restaurant and at home he used induction because it was much faster for one family dishes.
They're superior for lots of things, but inferior in ways that are very important for many cooks. I cooked professionally so I've got a whole lot more experience than most using stoves— including induction stoves at work.
If a typical home cook was buying a stove for their house, I'd recommend induction without thinking twice, especially if they had kids. Same for anyone in a house without a stove hood. Even in a restaurant, I'd choose induction for pastry work— the precision and consistency are really great. It's also nice to not have all of the heat from 30 90k BTU burners all the time in a small room, too.
But for most uses, having a flame you can see, hear, and feel affords much more expressive heat control than digital displays and pan temperature alone. Most pan work is about feel rather than "heating something at x temperature for y time." Also, being able to pick the pan up a few inches to jostle the contents while still getting nearly the same heat transfer is really important for high heat sautées. It's also much much more expensive to get an induction burner that doesn't have a tiny hot spot in the middle of the pan— even with a relatively small burner, the gas flame still spreads out more, which is critical for things like searing large cuts of meat properly.
My dad is a retired mechanical engineer— he was the chief engineer at a fairly large company for years, and he knows a lot about heat transfer. He won't even entertain the idea that induction stoves are inferior to gas stoves in any way. He's probably also used a stove about two dozen times in his life and standing in front of one he vibes like someone learning to drive. It's the equivalent of his arguing I should use a compass, French curve and templates when figure drawing. Induction being more precise and efficient on paper doesn't make it better in all use cases, and some use cases are really important to some people.
I keep reading the same experience as you did but it's really difficult to imagine it being so without actually having access to an induction stove to try it out. What I care about most is the rapid adjustment from high heat to low heat and vice versa within seconds; this is really important for many Asian cuisines. What I care about next is the amount of heat output at its highest and lowest setting. Of course I can't verify these attributes by looking at induction stoves in a store.
Are they cost effective? I suppose in the long term you save money by paying for electricity instead of gas, which could offset price differences. I strongly prefer gas stoves over conductive electric ranges, but haven’t tried an induction stove yet.
Induction is better than electric but it isn’t as good as gas in my opinion. You can’t use copper cookware, you are very limited on how you apply heat, you can’t use techniques like flambé, you can’t hold food directly over a flame to singe like you can with gas, etc.
Induction is fine for some people but not for everyone. Not to mention in many places they are more expensive to buy and operate. Besides, venting your stove makes gas perfectly safe. The process of cooking creates more harmful gasses anyhow. Burning toast will freak any monitor out.
That all depends on what you're cooking. I have used just about all types of cooking contraptions there are ranging from an open fire through a pit fire, several types of "cultivated" fires (wood-fired stoves, BBQs etc), propane/butane/methane gas burners of various types, coil/cast_iron/ceramic/halogen electric and induction stoves. I normally cook on a wood-fired stove seeing how as I live on a farm in the Swedish countryside with plenty of forest on my doorstep which I also use to heat the house and whose branches I cut up for the stove. I do have one of those cast-iron resistance heated electric ranges next to the wood-fired stove but I only use it as a parking lot for pans etc. I also have a few single-hob induction plates around which I sometimes use outside when we're not supposed to light fires due to extreme drought etc. When I lived in the Netherlands I bought a "gas-free" house which meant I had to use electricity for cooking. Induction was supposed to be the bees knees so I built myself a range with an induction cooker on top and a hot-air oven underneath it. The thing worked fine for some types of cooking but it royally sucked for e.g. stir-fry cooking using a wok. Even the flat-bottom version I got did not come close to the real thing on a gas stove or wood fire.
Now, more than 20 years later I regularly use my mother's new induction stove when I visit her in the Netherlands. That thing still sucks for stir-frying, no matter which pan I use. There is just not enough power to be had on a residential induction cooker to reach the quick heat needed to make a good nasi goreng (i.e. Indonesian-Dutch fried rice). On the wood-fired stove here at home I use a Chinese wok which hangs directly in the fire and as such is close to perfect. The sad part of this is that my mother's previous range had a special wok burner which, while not as capable as the wood-fired stove, at least made it possible to quickly reach a good heat and keep it. Alas, she felt she needed to go with the flow and had that range swapped out for an anaemic induction cooker which is supposed to be able to run 2 plates at max power (~2 kW) at the same time but does not even seem to be capable of that without dropping one of them a notch down.
If you're comparing commercial induction cookers to gas stoves the comparison might hold. There are special induction plates for using a round-bottomed wok which may also lead to better results. Those are not what most people will get at home when they replace their "dangerous" gas range though.
Induction's pro's are its reaction speed, cleanliness, electrical efficiency and sometimes price (single-hob plates at e.g. IKEA are dirt-cheap) but that is about it. Its cons are the lack of power in most residential ranges, the lack of fine-grained control, the sensitivity of the ceramic top plate - it gets scratched easily when you have an 'active' cooking style as well is liable to break when confronted with heavy cast-iron skillets in the hands of inexperienced users, this is true for all ceramic cookers and not specific to induction - and the power electronics (I have repaired two induction cookers already, one of them (a commercial single-hob plate) had a blown out capacitor (literally - loads of black smoke blew out off the thing), the other (Siemens) suffered from a whole bank of broken power transistors (RJH60T4 IGBTs). Finally, confusingly in the light of my remark about single-hob plates being cheap, its often high price. Induction still seems to be priced as a "luxury" good while in reality it is fairly cheap to produce, the only relatively expensive part being the power electronics (where "expensive" means "a few tens of euro's for the requisite transistors and capacitors as well as the copper induction coils).
A proper extractor fan mitigates the problem entirely.
For a lot of cooking, gas is simply superior in almost every way to induction or electric. Induction has a few advantages in certain situations, but not many - gas is more flexible.
Now there is something to be said about people using insufficient extraction or not maintaining their ventilation/extraction systems for sure, or grossly underspeccing them so that they aren’t worth a shit.
Resistive heating? Sure. Those things are nasty. But otherwise... nothing beats 7.2 kW of inductive energy transfer straight into the bottom of your pan.
Current place I rent has those awful resistive heating stovetop, previous place had induction. I miss gas - for some stuff I now have to either use a small camp stove type gas thing or a blowtorch, electric (resistive or induction) simply is no fucking good at all for some cooking tasks.
878654Tom|2 years ago
But for a normal household? It really doesn't matter. My father had his own restaurant and at home he used induction because it was much faster for one family dishes.
Jailbird|2 years ago
chefandy|2 years ago
If a typical home cook was buying a stove for their house, I'd recommend induction without thinking twice, especially if they had kids. Same for anyone in a house without a stove hood. Even in a restaurant, I'd choose induction for pastry work— the precision and consistency are really great. It's also nice to not have all of the heat from 30 90k BTU burners all the time in a small room, too.
But for most uses, having a flame you can see, hear, and feel affords much more expressive heat control than digital displays and pan temperature alone. Most pan work is about feel rather than "heating something at x temperature for y time." Also, being able to pick the pan up a few inches to jostle the contents while still getting nearly the same heat transfer is really important for high heat sautées. It's also much much more expensive to get an induction burner that doesn't have a tiny hot spot in the middle of the pan— even with a relatively small burner, the gas flame still spreads out more, which is critical for things like searing large cuts of meat properly.
My dad is a retired mechanical engineer— he was the chief engineer at a fairly large company for years, and he knows a lot about heat transfer. He won't even entertain the idea that induction stoves are inferior to gas stoves in any way. He's probably also used a stove about two dozen times in his life and standing in front of one he vibes like someone learning to drive. It's the equivalent of his arguing I should use a compass, French curve and templates when figure drawing. Induction being more precise and efficient on paper doesn't make it better in all use cases, and some use cases are really important to some people.
kccqzy|2 years ago
pinkmuffinere|2 years ago
nemo44x|2 years ago
Induction is fine for some people but not for everyone. Not to mention in many places they are more expensive to buy and operate. Besides, venting your stove makes gas perfectly safe. The process of cooking creates more harmful gasses anyhow. Burning toast will freak any monitor out.
the_third_wave|2 years ago
Now, more than 20 years later I regularly use my mother's new induction stove when I visit her in the Netherlands. That thing still sucks for stir-frying, no matter which pan I use. There is just not enough power to be had on a residential induction cooker to reach the quick heat needed to make a good nasi goreng (i.e. Indonesian-Dutch fried rice). On the wood-fired stove here at home I use a Chinese wok which hangs directly in the fire and as such is close to perfect. The sad part of this is that my mother's previous range had a special wok burner which, while not as capable as the wood-fired stove, at least made it possible to quickly reach a good heat and keep it. Alas, she felt she needed to go with the flow and had that range swapped out for an anaemic induction cooker which is supposed to be able to run 2 plates at max power (~2 kW) at the same time but does not even seem to be capable of that without dropping one of them a notch down.
If you're comparing commercial induction cookers to gas stoves the comparison might hold. There are special induction plates for using a round-bottomed wok which may also lead to better results. Those are not what most people will get at home when they replace their "dangerous" gas range though.
Induction's pro's are its reaction speed, cleanliness, electrical efficiency and sometimes price (single-hob plates at e.g. IKEA are dirt-cheap) but that is about it. Its cons are the lack of power in most residential ranges, the lack of fine-grained control, the sensitivity of the ceramic top plate - it gets scratched easily when you have an 'active' cooking style as well is liable to break when confronted with heavy cast-iron skillets in the hands of inexperienced users, this is true for all ceramic cookers and not specific to induction - and the power electronics (I have repaired two induction cookers already, one of them (a commercial single-hob plate) had a blown out capacitor (literally - loads of black smoke blew out off the thing), the other (Siemens) suffered from a whole bank of broken power transistors (RJH60T4 IGBTs). Finally, confusingly in the light of my remark about single-hob plates being cheap, its often high price. Induction still seems to be priced as a "luxury" good while in reality it is fairly cheap to produce, the only relatively expensive part being the power electronics (where "expensive" means "a few tens of euro's for the requisite transistors and capacitors as well as the copper induction coils).
haizhung|2 years ago
fullspectrumdev|2 years ago
For a lot of cooking, gas is simply superior in almost every way to induction or electric. Induction has a few advantages in certain situations, but not many - gas is more flexible.
Now there is something to be said about people using insufficient extraction or not maintaining their ventilation/extraction systems for sure, or grossly underspeccing them so that they aren’t worth a shit.
unknown|2 years ago
[deleted]
dfgfek|2 years ago
isoprophlex|2 years ago
unknown|2 years ago
[deleted]
bob1029|2 years ago
fullspectrumdev|2 years ago
vladmashk|2 years ago
0x1ceb00da|2 years ago