No, it's not sexy. It's sleek, or simple, or innovative, but I really hope no one wants to fuck it. </petpeeve>
And please, please, please stop saying "culinary enthusiast." In my humble opinion, if "[o]ne of the key consumer cues for induction is cleanability," that's less an enthusiast and more a lazy person with 5 grand to throw at a stovetop. I know a few people who actually work as chefs - the most enthusiastic of culinary practitioners, I presume - and I haven't heard any of them ever complain about the "cleanability" of, well, anything.
[Edit] Not to mention, the UI on that touch panel is totally uggs. Look at those pseudo-3D buttons!
My concern is not that you'd burn your hand off (I have an induction burner). My concern is that people who cook a lot like to be able to adjust temps by feel and (as someone else pointed out) muscle memory. If you listen to Dave Arnold's "Cooking Issues" podcast (you should! it's really awesome!), you'll learn that pro kitchen chefs have this problem in a lot of places --- high end equipment with digital variable controls, when they just want simple dials and paddle switches.
No, chefs clean their cooktops continually during service. The thing to know about most pro kitchens: they're incredibly small. There's no way most of them could even fit the person who'd clean up around a cook. And in small kitchens, if you're not working clean, you're going to look like the Swedish Chef.
You know - I unfortunately never was to 'pro' kitchen, so I don't know how these work, but if it is similar to how I cook - sure, they're cleaning them up as they go (that's the only sane way to do it.), but I'm not sure whether such stove doesn't require throughout cleaning after whole day/night of use - and that's something I imagine being done by someone else than chef - and that's when the 'cleanability' part comes in play.
If we're talking about a cooktop, my thought about the word "cleanability" is, does it attract grit and grime, can you quickly wipe it down with a side towel, does it have lots of fiddly grooves where things get trapped, do the burners get clogged easily.
You know, while you're probably right overall, people can get very particular about the tools they use. I'm quite attached to my development environment and am snarlingly possessive about it; I wonder if there are any chefs out there who feel the same way about their stoves?
A good stove really does help by producing a greater range and diameter of heat more consistently. I think people do get attached to good stoves. At the end of the day, though, people are most possessive of chef's knives.
Not in my experience. When I worked in fine dining the chefs were fanatical about their knives. Later in life I've become friends with some professional chefs who also are particular about their knives.
Now, they don't go around announcing to all their friends about what kind of knife they use (like many home cooks), but they do care about their tools.
Personally I just want knives that are sharp. I view them a lot like wine. There is a big jump from the $2 bottle to the $8-$20 bottle and then not so much from there. Buying the middle ground makes sense.
Keep in mind I didn't mention anything about the price, just that they had tools that they liked much like I am about my computers. They each had what they liked and that's what they used. The thing is, unlike home chefs, the pros didn't care what anyone else used or felt the need to talk about their knife being better than some other knife. They just found a knife or set that had a good weight and fit their hand well.
When I worked fine dining it was at the Mills House [1] over 10 years ago. Sometimes I miss the days where my job ended as soon as I left work with a wad of cash :)
I knew a left-handed cook who was very particular about his knives - but yeah, most professional cooks just use whatever is supplied by the restaurant.
... don't know that that's true either... I think cooks do carry their own knives! I was just under the impression that most of them used (pricingwise) mid-range knives. I know one who uses Victorinox stamped knives, for instance.
I share your peev. Stoves, cars, phones, algorithms, archeological discoveries, and economic theories are not sexy. A person who arouses sexual desire is sexy.
Please, people. Find other adjectives for inanimate objects and abstractions.
Interesting; I love the "cooks anywhere" aspect and the touch screen that kinda showed where things were.
On thing I noticed about the video was the horrific parallax; it looked like the demonstrator was hitting the touch screen a good 1/2" away from what was being selected.
Cool design. Unfortunately, the "put the pots anywhere you want" concept requires induction to work. You'll have to pry my gas stove "from my cold dead hands" :P
Why? Induction is nothing like an electric cooktop. It's very responsive and very very fast.
They're also pretty cheap; a single burner cooktop from a good brand costs under $70.
My understanding is, gas is the gold standard in the US mostly because gas (cooking fuel) is so incredibly cheap here; induction is more common in Europe.
I'm actually from Europe (The Netherlands), but it is not the price of gas that appeals to me, but the flexibility of a gas stove.
I do a lot of stir-fry cooking with a wok and the only way those things work well is if there is a blazing inferno below them. I also like to use cast-iron pans for grilling, because they hold heat well and don't cool off as quickly as aluminium cookware, which helps a lot with big pieces of meat and fish.
I must admit that the cleanliness and beauty of induction stoves does appeal to me. A combination stove where half of it is induction (for boiling water, cooking pasta etc.) and half is gas for more heavy-duty work would be perfect.
The gas burners designed for woks also supply heat all around the wok, not just from the bottom-up; woks are supposedly notoriously poor performers on conventional cooktops.
Gas cooktops are great! For me, based on my limited experience and knowledge, it's (Tied for 1st) [Gas, Induction], then the 2-slice toaster, then the microwave oven, then electric.
Induction is as responsive as gas, faster to boil water (no wasted heat, or need to heat the pot before heating the contents) and more energy efficient.
It's marginally slower to boil water than a good gas burner (my tests, but also Cooks Illustrated's, and they're not usually wrong about stuff like this), but they the two are so close that it's not worth comparing.
Also, not sure how energy efficient. It may depend on the specific cook top. At max power, the things drain a lot of power. It's possible that they consume less "energy" than gas but are still more expensive, right? Gas is very cheap.
It's very trippy to sear meat or boil water on a burner, lift the pan off, and have the cooktop surface be cool to the touch.
Gas may be very cheap, but we pull it from the ground.
We may pull a lot of our electricity from the ground at the moment too, but there are options for renewable sources of electricity.
GE rates their induction cooktops are being able to boil water about 25% faster than their gas cooktops with similar gas output. But I have seen other scores that show that induction is only slightly faster at boiling water.
I think I agree with all this; I'm just making (or actually regurgitating) an argument for why induction isn't as popular here as it is in Europe. Again: induction is awesome.
But I've done my own tests and so has Cooks Illustrated and it doesn't look like the typical induction unit boils water faster than gas. On the other hand: who cares?
Induction is hardly new, and the touch screen interface is probably just going to piss you off massively. For an interface like this, you need input feedback and should be able to utilize muscle memory.
Exactly, the best interface for kitchen-ware is physical knobs. I hate all those touch-surface buttons that usually come integrated on stoves like this. They have no feedback and they fail to react more often than they do.
Seconded. Cooking and touch screens should be as far apart as possible. The kitchen is an environment full of potential disasters for such an interface: food everywhere to gunk up the device, heavy / hot / wet objects to destroy it, wet / dirty / sticky fingers (okay, okay, let's [try to] be grown-ups) to prevent proper touch detection, and so on. I love the idea of an iPad in the kitchen, for example, but only as a screen (preferably interacted with via voice) and not as a functional device.
If you cook all day, or cook lots of things at once, being able to reliably adjust power levels without looking at the controls is a huge win. That's just a fundamental problem with touch interfaces.
I mostly agree with you, but that is what people used to say about Smartphones so maybe the flexibility given by touch screen will over rule is lack of muscle memory
One problem with induction cooking is that you have to use cookware made of ferromagnetic metal. For other pots an interface ferromagnetic disk is required.
"Interface ferromagnetic disk" meaning "round piece of any metal efficiently heated by induction".
I think this downside of induction is wildly overstated; I have very few pieces of cookware that aren't "induction compatible", and I certainly didn't shop for them with that as a criteria. Any All-Clad pan works; my cheap-o omelette pan works; my enameled dutch oven works; obviously, my cast iron skillet works.
So much normal, good cookware works on an induction cooktop that it might make more sense to think about "induction incompatibility" as a liability of exotic (or particularly cheap) cookware, instead of a liability of induction.
I'm curious why they don't work together. I looked it up on Wikipedia and it seems to say cast iron should work fine. I have no personal experience with an induction range.
I'm assuming he's saying that because cast iron pans are extremely heavy, and because on a conventional cooktop you can be rough with them (you kind of have to be in order to, for instance, saute on one). Induction burners will shatter if you slam a cast iron pan onto one.
Tempered glass is something I've dealt with extensively.
Harsh temperature changes can break it, but slamming cookware against it won't break tempered glass. All the edges and corners should be hidden, so it's not like you're going to be able to whack the corner where it's weak. A tempered piece of glass is under stress, which concentrates along the edges and at the corners. That makes them into weak points. The flat side? You can hit that all day with a shovel.
That said, things like scratches can weaken it. So I wouldn't be surprised if some combination of scuffing up the surface & big temperature changes were enough to blow one up. And yes, tempered glass blows up, it doesn't just crumble. Like I said, it's under stress, so it goes flying, just like the pieces of a balloon do when it's popped.
And please, please, please stop saying "culinary enthusiast." In my humble opinion, if "[o]ne of the key consumer cues for induction is cleanability," that's less an enthusiast and more a lazy person with 5 grand to throw at a stovetop. I know a few people who actually work as chefs - the most enthusiastic of culinary practitioners, I presume - and I haven't heard any of them ever complain about the "cleanability" of, well, anything.
[Edit] Not to mention, the UI on that touch panel is totally uggs. Look at those pseudo-3D buttons!