Yes, there are induction hot plates. The one from IKEA gets good reviews and I think it can be ordered online.
Yes, there are induction hot plates. The one from IKEA gets good reviews and I think it can be ordered online.
we are running a heat pump in our sunroom. It’s just one room, but it’s had two years to run and it seems to be doing OK.
I am not a serious person.
After using my friend's induction hotplate for a couple of weeks to make coffee I bought my own. I love it for that but haven't started experimenting with it for other stuff. Part of my issue is that it's in our dining room because we've learned that half our house, including all of the kitchen and half the living room including the internet modem, is on one electric circuit.* Putting it in the dining room prevents us from dealing with blown circuit breakers, but makes it awkward if I want to cook with it.Originally Posted by Tradd
*I wish we'd been aware of this when we did the recent renovations but it didn't pop up as a problem until after everything was done and put back together. It would've been a minor detail to move stuff to different circuits when we had the walls opened up in the kitchen and downstairs bathroom. Now it would be a stupid expensive project that would add zero value to the house so we'll just live with it.
I've done what I could do, I cook mostly with a toaster oven and an induction hot plate. If something doesn't fit in the toaster oven (most things do) or I need multiple burners I'll use the gas stove that came with the apartment. Hot water is on gas.
I don't really think the objections to electric/induction are much of ones. The power demand, yes if the induction burner is on the very highest setting (the boil setting) at the same time as the toaster oven is on, it consistently flips a circuit breaker. Most (all?) of the kitchen seems on the same circuit breaker. But I know not to do that. And this place is probably running on the original electrical wiring from 60 years ago or something. Really, I think it is.
Yes induction has a learning curve but I have learned. As for being a foodie, I sometimes consider myself one, but I guess I'm an Alice Waters type foodie and it's all about the quality of ingredients with me and only very rarely about the particular burner one uses for cooking. Gas companies pay people on the food network etc. to hype gas, I'm not buying the hype of their paid promoters. Most pots/pans will work on induction but if you have to get all new pots/pans, that's a legit complaint.
I don't have control over everything as a renter, but dense apartments are probably overall better for the environment anyway despite the dream of owning allowing one to control everything and optimize it. This isn't exactly the most dense of apartments though, but it's not particularly large.
Trees don't grow on money
The only real objections to non-gas cooking I’ve seen is that they don’t work very well with woks.
That's an interesting observation. And not one I would've ever thought of. But it makes sense since the surface area of a wok on the burner is actually quite small. I actually did a stir fry shrimp and broccoli thing last week using the little induction burner hotplate we have and it worked really well. We don't have a wok so I used our biggest frying pan and basically accomplished the same goal of woks, higher heat in the middle, lower heat at the edges so that you can speed up/slow down cooking of various ingredients by moving them one direction or the other. It worked pretty well, but I'm not in any way a professional chef so I'm sure there was some compromise in quality that a true stir fry chef would have been aghast by.
I’ve actually seen articles that the no-gas cooking push discriminates against Asian people and their traditional cooking methods.
This got me curious. A quick search on amazon finds that people make standalone induction burners specifically for woks. I don't know enough about woks to know how practical this is. For instance whether woks are made out of steel that works with induction or if they are typically non-inductionable materials. I assume that good woks are seasoned like a good cast iron pan (and treated with the same reverence as grandma's past down cast iron pan is) so they'd probably work with induction assuming the wok and burner are the same size/shape? If they are a standard size then I imagine they would.
Interesting thread. I like that cast iron is okay to use on induction burners as that is what my huge wok is made of. Heavy as H@ll, but cooks great.
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Be nice whenever possible. It's always possible. HH Dalai Lama
In a world where you can be anything - be kind. Unknown
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