Cooking With Gas, Electric or Induction

One of the more vexing questions, when you’re choosing appliances, is deciding on what sort of cooktop you need. Gas & electric cooktops have been around for years and most of us would have cooked on either or both; Induction, however, is a fairly new player that has gained momentum over the past few years.

If you’re like me you may not know too much about induction cooktops or how they work.  When you’re deciding on your new cooktop, generally speaking, you’ll need to decide between one of four options or a combination of two, hopefully, this makes your choice a little easier:

• Electric induction cooktop– Induction cooktops work using an alternating current to induce heat in the right kinds of cookware, and are safe to the touch.
• Gas flame burners– These burn gas to apply heat directly to your cookware.
• Electric ceramic radiant cooktops– These consist of coiled metal elements or halogen lamps which radiate heat from below through a tempered ceramic glass surface.
• Electric coil or solid hotplate cooktops– These cooktops are normally cheaper, and operate by running electricity through a resistive coil element or solid hotplate to heat cookware directly.

Most cooktops will incorporate either two, four or six hotplates of various sizes using only one of these technologies, there are other cooktops that provide a combination of these technologies (e.g. radiant and induction, or induction and gas) are also available.

To appreciate why induction cooktops are considered ‘safer’ and why they’re becoming more popular, you need to understand how they create heat. Induction cooktops contain metallic elements under the cooktop surface. An alternating current is passed through these elements when the cooker is turned on, which oscillates back and forth through the elements.

This current doesn’t have any effect at all on most other kinds of materials – including human hands, but it does create an electromagnetic field at the cooking surface. If your pots or pans are made from the right kind of metal, this field ‘induces’ an electrical current in the base of the cookware you’re using. This electrical current in the cookware produces what’s known as ‘resistive heating’ – the pot or pan itself is heated, but the cooktop surface isn’t.

Some of the heat from the hot cookware you’re using will be transferred back into the cooktop surface, but this is normally made from a ceramic glass which is a pretty poor conductor of heat, so it shouldn’t stay too hot for too long.

What types of cookware work with induction cooktops?

To work with induction cooktops, your cookware needs to be ‘ferromagnetic’ – stainless steel or iron pots and pans work well, whereas aluminum doesn’t. An easy way to tell if your pots and pans will work on an induction cooktop is to see if they’ll stick to a magnet. If they do stick, they should work on your induction cooker.

If you already have a lot of non-ferrous cookware that won’t work on an induction cooktop, you still have options though. An induction disc (or ‘interface disc’ as it’s sometimes known) is a stainless steel disc that you can use on an induction cooktop to heat your incompatible cookware. These are normally quite inexpensive and come in a range of different sizes.