Food and Cooking

Induction is where it's at if you want electric. It works similar to how a transformer works. The stove makes a magnetic field that your cookware reacts to. The downside is that all your pots and pans need to be magnetic. Fortunately this is easy to test with any magnet (like a fridge magnet even).

You can get single stand alone induction burners for less than $100 if you want to try it out. Some are more powerful than others.

I've been wanting to replace my stove for a while and I still keep going back and forth between gas an induction. I still kind of prefer cooking on gas but there's some controversy about air quality and gas stoves. But I can tell you, if I don't get a gas stove... I'm gonna get an induction one.

Induction is where it's at for temperature control. Gas is good, but a lot of the heat is lost to the sides of the pot/pan, and to the air around.

Traditional electric radiant cooktops use resistive heating elements that work much like the old coil electric burners that have been around for 70+ years.

Induction works by putting out a strong switching magnetic field that heats the metal molecules of the pan. Handles stay cool because there is no excess heat blasting the sides of the pan like with gas and radiant electric. It does cycle on and off, but it does that quickly. It heats the pan much more quickly than gas (water boils in a quarter of the time vs gas), and you can drop the heat more quickly too. And the cooktop as a whole stays much cooler than other types. Simmer and melt settings let you maintain very low temperatures as well.

If there is a down-side it's that you must use pans that heat up in the magnetic field. So aluminum and glass/ceramic are out. You need induction-ready cookware. If a magnet sticks to a pan it will work.

easiest way to think of inductive stovetops is if you have cookware with iron or steel, the pan becomes the heating element, cutting out a wasteful middleman of heat transfer. You get energy efficiency gains, faster pre-heat times, and higher temps achievable. They're just expensive and dont work with all cookware.