this video has been a journey I've been wanting to tackle induction cooking for a long time and a few months ago I finally got down to it and here's my Take cooking with induction has been both incredibly frustrating and incredibly awesome all because of the weird way induction works this is minute food I grew up cooking on a gas stove in the era of those Really cringey Cooking with gas commercials I have always been a DieHard gas or nothing kind of girl and as you've all seen and commented on I
still use a gas stove I know Recent research is pretty clear that cooking with gas has some serious drawbacks but I also know that my family isn't currently in the position to Shell out for a new range that day will come though at least I hope it will and I feel like I at least need to consider induction so several months ago I bought this portable induction burner the one that America's Test Kitchen rates is the best or at least the best for anyone without 1,500 bucks to spend on a single burn
er and I started cooking and in between meals I dug into the nuts and bolts of what actually goes on in one of these things in some ways cooking with induction is no different than cooking with gas or old school electric burners you turn on the burner and the pan gets hot and Cooks your food nothing new there but there is a super weird thing about induction cooking and that's how the pan gets hot when you cook with gas or standard electric burners the burners themselves produce heat and through
conduction convection and some radiation that heat gets transferred to the pan but with induction cooking the heat gets created inside the pan bypassing that transfer step entirely this works because of electromagnetism which is complicated but all you really need to understand to get induction cooking is that electricity and magnetism are basically two sides of the same coin you can use electricity to create a magnetic field and a magnetic field to create electricity straightforward right so le
t's Peak inside this little induction burner inside is a coil of wire and when you turn on the unit electricity runs through that coil which remember electromagnetism creates a magnetic field around the coil the current coming through the coil however is constantly alternating directions which makes the resulting magnetic field constantly flip back and forth if nothing magnetic is that close to this coil nothing happens you get no heat but if say a magnetic pan like carbon steel is sitting on th
e glass top of the burner the magnetic field will interact with the metal in the pan as the field flips back and forth it generates electrical currents ins inside the pan and as those currents flow through the metal in the pan they generate heat now you have a hot pan to cook your food just like you would with a gas or standard electric burner but the weird way induction heats the pan specifically the fact that it skips that intermediate step of transferring heat to the pan makes cooking with in
duction remarkably different than what I'm used to first because and I didn't actually expect this that heat transfer step provides a ton of visual information I rely on that little blue flame or to a lesser extent the glow of an electric burner to determine the right heat level and to know exactly how a pan and the food inside it is going to behave with induction those visual cues are missing so instead of being able to anticipate what I needed to do I constantly felt like I was behind the ball
and I must not be alone because some high-end induction burners now come with LED lights that mimic a gas flame in order to provide that visual feedback I don't actually think that's necessary I did eventually hit my stride but it's interesting evidence that induction cooking does come with a fairly significant learning curve my learning curve was Amplified by the fact that my burner would get to a certain temperature and then just refuse to stay hot I couldn't cook anything consistently and I
was actually about to give up on induction but the more I thought about it the more I wondered whether the burner wasn't working right see in order to maintain a certain temperature in most induction burners the coils Cycles between being on generating heat and off not generating Heat maybe for whatever reason the burner I bought wasn't cycling properly no answer from the company so I bought another burner this one was a different model Sirius eats favorite induction burner and it could actually
hold the temperature I asked for with a well functioning burner and enough experience under my belt I started being able to appreciate the weird way induction heats up a pan because eliminating that initial heat transfer step actually creates all sorts of benefits like the fact that there is no hot burner to deal with sure some heat conducts from the hot pan back to the surface of the cook top that's what this disclaimer is all about but it never gets really hot so I don't have to worry about k
ids or curious cats burning themselves a boiled over Gunk getting cooked onto the surface or a hot burner igniting some stray oil plus I can do this super nerdy party trick without setting my house on fire another Quirk induction cooking is freaky fast since you don't need to wait for the burner to heat up then for the heat to make its way from the burner to the pan water boils in a fraction of the time it takes a gas or traditional electric burner and turning the heat up or down has an almost i
mmediate effect it is a really remarkable difference and there's one more benefit of that missing heat transfer step induction is way more efficient than gas or standard electric burners with those old school methods as the burner heats up and transfers heat to the pan some heat is lost to the surroundings estimates are kind of all over the place here but when you cook on a standard electric burner at best only around 70% of the heat makes it from the burner the pan with gas it's at most somewhe
re around 50% with induction though because you've cut out that heat transfer step Almost 100% of the energy goes toward actually cooking your food so the Energy savings can be pretty substantial especially if you're going from gas to induction just keep in mind that switching from gas to induction doesn't necessarily mean you'll save money that depends on the actual cost of energy in your area induction isn't perfect the noise emitted by the burner bugs some people you have to be a bit careful
of heating a pan too too fast and warping it you're limited by the size of the coil which the amazing Helen renie does a great job of explaining in two of her videos and a good quality induction range is expensive which we are working on an entire video about but based on my induction experience so far my take and remember I am a gas burner devote is that induction is the future of cooking it is amazing what this weird way of heating up a pan can achieve and maybe if enough of you subscribe like
this video and share it with your friends one day I'll be able to embrace the future and you won't have to keep chiding me for cooking with gas no clever segue here just check this out to celebrate the upcoming total eclipse some of our amazing teammates at minute Earth created this gorgeous shirt that imagines based on a fair bit of awesome science what eclipses look like from other planets it is the perfect thing to wear while you're watching the upcoming eclipse in North America or while you
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