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Hilarious!
I love the analog controls for most of the innovations, and the weather station was a total got to have! You could kind of tell the narration was written by the marketing department...
(Sorry, had to walk away and throw another log on the fire...)
Makes one wonder how long all those electrical miracles would last before they had to be replaced, at great expense.
Think I'll keep my wood stove for the next 40-50 years, and save a bunch of money...
No, I've definitely used induction. The main problem I had with it is it's extremely unintuitive to use. The power levels went from 1-9 and I'd have to click on +/- buttons to adjust. Very confusing, very inefficient. This wasn't a high end cooktop and that's why I stand by my assertion that in order to get induction as close to gas as possible, you need to buy an expensive, high end one which ends up being quite costly. The Thermador full surface 36" induction cooktop lets you place cookware anywhere on the surface and you can buy a magnetic knob accessory to rotate the power settings much like in gas.
The problem is... most kitchens don't have a cooktop + wall oven setup, and even if they do, it's not always the right cutout size. So, anyone who wants to get good performing induction NEEDS a kitchen remodel. The sleekness of induction cooktops also pairs best with a contemporary/minimalist aesthetic which isn't everyone's cup of tea.
While what you say about ease of cleaning is true, I also see a disadvantage to that. I feel the glass surface of induction is extremely fragile. I'll always have OCD with putting any heavy pot or even spilling a few grains of salt on it because it might scratch or break. With gas, durability is never a problem and the last thing I need to worry about when I'm making a 4 course meal for guests is obsessing over scratching my $4K induction cooktop
I think that unintuitiveness can come with lack of experience and familiarity. While you understand power level goes up just as someone might understand a larger flame on a gas stove is going to be hotter, it may take some time to adjust to understanding just how hot it gets and how quickly it does so. I know for a fact that I've had people visiting and staying over in places where there was a gas stove and they're unfamiliar with home cooking on a gas stove. Sure, they understand that the higher setting with the larger flame is hotter, but good cooking means also understanding how hot the different settings get and how quickly. With just a bit of experience though, it gets pretty easy. I don't think your assertion that expensive, high end ones are the only way to go here, because I've definitely had times where the induction cooker I used wasn't a high end one. Just as there are pretty usable gas stoves that are cheap, there are also induction stoves that are plenty usable and cheap. You don't need to spend $4K to get a good induction range and you'd have a really hard time spending that much for just a cooktop alone.
In terms of fragility, there are some that scratch more easily than others, but any significant damage is rare and I've never seen it happen in person. You'd have to be really slamming large cast ovens in order to actually be damaging it. If you're really OCD about it, then I have seen people put mats or even paper towels between the surface and the burner which looks pretty crazy--remember, induction works via an oscillating magnetic field inducing an eddy current in the cookware itself so things that don't conduct like silicone mats or paper towels don't actually interfere with that induction. I remember seeing cooking demonstrations as a really young child at a then nearby mall where there was a whole schtick with the day's newspapers being placed under it while stir-frying to show how safe and easy to clean induction is.
Quote:
Originally Posted by BugsyPal
Guys, there are still electric coil burners on ranges or stand alone units. Just because city forces builders to ditch gas, it does not follow everyone will be getting induction.
Things likely will vary due to several factors including sale or rental price point. Lower down on scale will see coil, with maybe higher end going with induction.
Yea, absolutely that exists. Induction cooktops haven't been that common in the US so older electric ranges using resistance heating is probably the more likely encounter in older buildings. This is for new buildings. I understand it does not follow that everyone will get induction and it may be that cheaper new construction may get lesser kitchen appliances--which is pretty much how real estate in the city works anyhow. If you put in exposed coil, well, damn, guess the landlord doesn't want to rent it for much and/or are renting to people who don't really care much about the kitchen appliances because coils are pretty obvious to notice and they suck. I don't think higher end will be the exclusive domain of induction though because it's not really that large of an expense to get a decent range with induction and those are at prices that are nominal compared to the cost (and profit) of renting. Then again, I've known people who essentially use their ovens as storage, so I guess there might be people who could not give a **** that their range uses electric coil resistance though I myself am not in that camp.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Hazel Greener
And you will probably never hear anyone say, "Try this salmon I smoked on my induction range!" LOL
I've probably seen a dozen induction cooktops that were cracked or broken, due to having pans banged on them too many times. Some were the cheap mobile $400 type, but a couple were the $12-15K commercial setups.
That doesn't happen with a cast iron gas range top...
I'm not sure if I follow where you're going with this. Smoking salmon or smoking anything whether hot or cold smoked is not about direct exposure to flames. At least not in any way I've done smoking, and I have a whole damn ecosystem of departed plants and animals waiting for me in the afterlife that I've smoked. Smoking is generally methods of using indirect heat and there's nothing about a natural gas range versus an electric range where smoking is more difficult or harder. I'd actually argue it's easier because temperature control is usually better with electric.
Your pricing for commercial setups might be possible if it's a pretty expansive commercial operation with multiple cooktops and stations, but $400 on a "cheap"portableone is outrageous and someone's been fleeced in that case.
Last edited by OyCrumbler; 01-25-2022 at 03:46 PM..
<I'm not sure if I follow where you're going with this. Smoking salmon or smoking anything whether hot or cold smoked is not about direct exposure to flames. At least not in any way I've done smoking, and I have a whole damn ecosystem of departed plants and animals waiting for me in the afterlife that I've smoked. Smoking is generally methods of using indirect heat and there's nothing about a natural gas range versus an electric range where smoking is more difficult or harder. I'd actually argue it's easier because temperature control is usually better with electric.>
I get the smoke of an indirect flame also when using gas (or often wood fire) versus induction heat. As I have a lot of available wood types/sizes in the back yard it is somewhat different than a city home situation. (I also have too many pans that don't work with the "magnet heat" of an induction type electric range... I'm old...)
Different situations and tools for where I am, compared to a more urban area...
What I use works well for me, and I've also smoked about anything that walks, flies, or swims. Well, not possum or raccoon - those get parboiled and then slow cooked with BBQ sauce... (I forgot a couple of others too - Gar and dogfish just get thrown in the fields as fertilizer, as they turn mushy before you can even smoke them on a stick beside the water where you catch them - nasty!)
I don't think I've ever used any of our home electric ranges for smoking, though I used an electric hotel flat top range for some trout about 40 years ago. That was not very controllable due to the thickness of the metal, and how slow it was to heat or cool if adjusted. Those were so slow to heat up that you could put 20 pounds of mirpoix in the pan when it was turned on and it would sweat/extract the flavors over the course of a 30-45 minutes, until it was hot enough to start adding flour for making roux. But they could pull you about 800 degrees for searing if you wanted to wait that long, and could take standing by a 6 foot by 3 foot slab of hellfire... LOL
I don't use the home electric range for smoking at all, because I have an outdoor wood burning smoker unit and a firepit in the back yard, and the wife would kick my butt for putting smoke in the house...
<Your pricing for commercial setups might be possible if it's a pretty expansive commercial operation with multiple cooktops and stations, but $400 on a "cheap" portable one is outrageous and someone's been fleeced in that case.>
The commercial ones I am talking about using were four burner 220V units with a built in downdraft air filter so that the unit can be moved wherever you have a 220 outlet and not require an exhaust fan. Banquet rooms, remote dining rooms, that kind of thing. The last quote I got about 6 years ago for one of those units was in the 35K range, with probably half of that for the downdraft filter system and portable sink with refillable water bladder.
As for the commercial induction portables, we used to get decent ones for $45 about ten years ago, through a supplier of waffle irons (when purchasing their malted flour products = big discount). But the last time I checked, the quote was a little over $300 each and they had to be used in a minimum of a 30A circuit, which we never had enough of. We had to have units that could handle running hard 3-5 hours straight, so it's not like a home unit. And they were always a tempered glass top surface, which doesn't take to being whacked with saute pans when cooking omelets (and especially crepes) for hours a day. We burned and smashed them up pretty fast...
Different kind of animal used in those commercial kitchens due to the high volume...
I don't think your assertion that expensive, high end ones are the only way to go here, because I've definitely had times where the induction cooker I used wasn't a high end one. Just as there are pretty usable gas stoves that are cheap, there are also induction stoves that are plenty usable and cheap. You don't need to spend $4K to get a good induction range and you'd have a really hard time spending that much for just a cooktop alone.
Yea, absolutely that exists. Induction cooktops haven't been that common in the US so older electric ranges using resistance heating is probably the more likely encounter in older buildings. This is for new buildings. I understand it does not follow that everyone will get induction and it may be that cheaper new construction may get lesser kitchen appliances--which is pretty much how real estate in the city works anyhow. If you put in exposed coil, well, damn, guess the landlord doesn't want to rent it for much and/or are renting to people who don't really care much about the kitchen appliances because coils are pretty obvious to notice and they suck. I don't think higher end will be the exclusive domain of induction though because it's not really that large of an expense to get a decent range with induction and those are at prices that are nominal compared to the cost (and profit) of renting. Then again, I've known people who essentially use their ovens as storage, so I guess there might be people who could not give a **** that their range uses electric coil resistance though I myself am not in that camp.
.
Meh, not really. The thing is, the more technology something has in it, the more you need it to be very refined and the more easily it will break. Induction cooktops by nature are full of electronics and all that stuff, whereas gas is a straightforward analog system. Those "affordable" induction cooktops you speak of will almost universally start behaving strangely after 7-10 years and/or have major electronic problems. Less likely with high end brands (which to me, are the ONLY option for induction), but even those will last less than a durable, high quality gas range.
Speaking of gas ranges, there is simply no electric replacement for them. As an appliance nerd, I can't tell you what a joy it is to look at a 60" dual-fuel Wolf Range or dream of one day ordering a custom built LaCanche range from France - they max out at 80" and some of them cost more than a Rolls Royce! They have several cooktop arrangement options but they always, ALWAYS feature some kind of gas element. At the end of the day, people will always, always prefer cooking over a live flame whether it is gas or simple wood fire, because that's the way we've evolved to do it for millennia. At this point using fire to cook is in our DNA.
Heat pumps now have a COPs of up to 4-6 in cool weather in practice and still 2 and above down to the -10Fs and reach parity of ~1 when you're in the -20Fs. You live in New York City, probably have all your life, and you should probably well know that we don't get -30Fs bulb temperatures, we have never gotten -30Fs or below as far as records show. Let's be generous and say natural gas heaters here gets that theoretical COP of 1.
What a complete load of nonsensical misinformation. Reality in NYC:Endless reality based Ice up-defrost cycles (very energy expensive) defeat any seller generated fake "lab results" showing stellar performance.
For NYC and its humid environs, air-dependent heat pumps are a bust. If you have a LAKE from which to extract your heat, we might have a sensible conversation.
Yes, air to air heat transfer works nicely in COOL temperatures but not in COLD, HUMID conditions, like NYC today.
Yes, I am a Chem engineer, who has lived with, and jimmy rigged, a heat pump for several decades. Great for temps above 40 degrees, but that is not OUR weather pattern for Winter.
Sell these heat pumps to people in California or Arizona, not New Yorkers.
Last edited by Kefir King; 01-31-2022 at 08:52 AM..
Meh, not really. The thing is, the more technology something has in it, the more you need it to be very refined and the more easily it will break. Induction cooktops by nature are full of electronics and all that stuff, whereas gas is a straightforward analog system. Those "affordable" induction cooktops you speak of will almost universally start behaving strangely after 7-10 years and/or have major electronic problems. Less likely with high end brands (which to me, are the ONLY option for induction), but even those will last less than a durable, high quality gas range.
Speaking of gas ranges, there is simply no electric replacement for them. As an appliance nerd, I can't tell you what a joy it is to look at a 60" dual-fuel Wolf Range or dream of one day ordering a custom built LaCanche range from France - they max out at 80" and some of them cost more than a Rolls Royce! They have several cooktop arrangement options but they always, ALWAYS feature some kind of gas element. At the end of the day, people will always, always prefer cooking over a live flame whether it is gas or simple wood fire, because that's the way we've evolved to do it for millennia. At this point using fire to cook is in our DNA.
I agree with your first sentence and how it applies to kitchenware. There's a lot of additional, "luxury" or new features being added especially on the higher-end of things that I think are novel but not necessarily useful or durable. I don't think the general category of induction cooktops is really that. For example, there's a family home of sorts in Taiwan that has an induction cooktop installed decades ago that was not high end (as budgets back then were pretty limited). It heats things up faster than any home gas stove I've had here.
We, the extended family, had discussions about changing it out for newer, also induction, cooktops as part of a larger renovation when it just so happened that no one was going to be living there for several weeks. What ended up happening was that the older family members nixed a change of the cooktop (despite it being decades old and not high-end even for its time) because most of the fancy high end stuff was going for capacitive touch buttons or even touchscreens and they didn't want that. I ultimately sided with keeping the old one as well which is what won out because the induction cooktop was doing fine (surface still looked great, too, since cooking was usually with a kitchen rag on top and later "upgraded" to using a silicone mat), and most importantly, people were familiar with it and it was easy to use with a simple dial. The new ones had all kinds of interesting features like endless timers, settings, displays, feedback and sensors, but who was going to learn that especially among the older family members? A potentiometer dial was dead simple--knob to the far "left" counterclockwise and had a tactile "click" was off, to the far "right" clockwise was maximum output. You need something in-between, well, put the dial in between those two. Simple light indicators showed if current was going through. Dead simple to fix (which we never had to do as we've never had any issue with it), people were used to it, no bells or whistles, but dead simple to use and reliable. I feel like because induction cooktops are so "new" to most US consumers, a lot of the attention gets put on and also wrapped up in all kinds of new features that are more or less separate from the main feature, and why you want a cooktop in the first place, of being able to have heat to cook. I think this kind of capacitive button / touchscreeen / app connected feature set is pervading everything (like a lot of modern new vehicle controls), and while I'm far from being a technophobe, I think retaining a lot of the simple use of tactile dials, buttons, and switches is just better for me. I don't mind the new features, but I want to keep at least some of the things on dials, buttons, and switches because I think they have a kind of spatial and muscle memory to them that's really useful and pragmatic. Now I understand why with a lot of the new features they end up eschewing dials or buttons/switches that have different positionings for different modes. Once you start having that automated control settings and things you can program in, then you can have settings that kind of lose the one-to-one correspondence once it gets automated. For example, that dial I really like isn't by itself compatible with settings that do automatically timed and/or sensor driven programmed cooking, because if you started with the knob manually set at medium-high-ish, then automate it where it turns off or down after certain other conditions, then your dial is now in the "wrong" place after that. Now you can complicate and add cost and complexity by having a motor that actually moves the dial back for you in line with the automated settings, but that's a bit too much and so that's not, as far as I know, offered. So then what you get with these fancy automated/programmed features are then capacitive buttons and screens/displays where you button press for input. These things don't need to be packaged as part of an induction cooktop and aren't inherent to the primary use of them, but they show up anyhow and especially in the higher-end ones. I can live without these automated features and programming and I have been for decades, and though I don't mind having new features, I don't feel I need them though I understand some people want them; for me though, just give me some goddamn dials.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Kefir King
What a complete load of nonsensical misinformation. Reality in NYC:Endless reality based Ice up-defrost cycles (very energy expensive) defeat any seller generated fake "lab results" showing stellar performance.
For NYC and its humid environs, air-dependent heat pumps are a bust. If you have a LAKE from which to extract your heat, we might have a sensible conversation.
Yes, air to air heat transfer works nicely in COOL temperatures but not in COLD, HUMID conditions, like NYC today.
Yes, I am a Chem engineer, who has lived with, and jimmy rigged, a heat pump for several decades. Great for temps above 40 degrees, but that is not OUR weather pattern for Winter.
Sell these heat pumps to people in California or Arizona, not New Yorkers.
Reality in NYC is that the heat pumps mostly installed in earlier times were often those that weren't rated for colder weather, but people installed them anyways, and as you've stated, they were fine with warmer climates. You have a jimmy-rigged heat pump from several decades ago, and so that's pretty representative of that. Now that the Japanese, and increasingly Chinese and South Korean, manufacturers have released more affordable two-stage air-souurce heat pumps into the US market, these issues aren't really in play anymore unless you're specifically using heat pumps not meant for cold weather (which would be akin to and a subset of installing heating, of any type, into a home with undersized capacity which is not a good idea).
I posted links not to just lab-tested efficiencies, but to experiments using real world conditions. There's also the much, much larger real world experimental data of people actually using modern heat pumps in more northerly/colder parts of East Asia and Europe where heat pump adoption especially for the latter has grown tremendously over the last several years specifically because of the introduction of these newer, more cold-weather oriented heat pumps. These are great for above 40 degrees, and have been for the last several years fairly good for above -20F. It's when you go further beyond that where they lose their efficiency edge but can still work. I think your general statement about not for New Yorkers is still true though if you're including New Yorkers living in a fairly different climate of higher altitude and more northerly and away from the ocean in the Adirondacks. For New Yorkers in the Tri-State area though including the city of New York though? Modern air-source heat pumps are fine (and ground source heat pumps fine for the entire state).
My background is in computer and electrical engineering, but I have a pretty broad STEMs base due to kind of interest and indecisiveness in high school and college and being sort of courted by various schools and departments into other fields like bioinformatics, physics and mathematics both applied and abstract so I ended up overloading on courses throughout to play the field and see what I was most interested in. I also have had to live abroad for various stretches of time in different parts of East Asia where these things like induction cooking and heat pumps made pretty rapid growth in market share and manufacturing so they were common. I mention this because credentials on the Internet seemed to be part of the persuasive argument here.
Last edited by OyCrumbler; 01-31-2022 at 10:55 AM..
I get the smoke of an indirect flame also when using gas (or often wood fire) versus induction heat. As I have a lot of available wood types/sizes in the back yard it is somewhat different than a city home situation. (I also have too many pans that don't work with the "magnet heat" of an induction type electric range... I'm old...)
Different situations and tools for where I am, compared to a more urban area...
What I use works well for me, and I've also smoked about anything that walks, flies, or swims. Well, not possum or raccoon - those get parboiled and then slow cooked with BBQ sauce... (I forgot a couple of others too - Gar and dogfish just get thrown in the fields as fertilizer, as they turn mushy before you can even smoke them on a stick beside the water where you catch them - nasty!)
I don't think I've ever used any of our home electric ranges for smoking, though I used an electric hotel flat top range for some trout about 40 years ago. That was not very controllable due to the thickness of the metal, and how slow it was to heat or cool if adjusted. Those were so slow to heat up that you could put 20 pounds of mirpoix in the pan when it was turned on and it would sweat/extract the flavors over the course of a 30-45 minutes, until it was hot enough to start adding flour for making roux. But they could pull you about 800 degrees for searing if you wanted to wait that long, and could take standing by a 6 foot by 3 foot slab of hellfire... LOL
I don't use the home electric range for smoking at all, because I have an outdoor wood burning smoker unit and a firepit in the back yard, and the wife would kick my butt for putting smoke in the house...
The commercial ones I am talking about using were four burner 220V units with a built in downdraft air filter so that the unit can be moved wherever you have a 220 outlet and not require an exhaust fan. Banquet rooms, remote dining rooms, that kind of thing. The last quote I got about 6 years ago for one of those units was in the 35K range, with probably half of that for the downdraft filter system and portable sink with refillable water bladder.
As for the commercial induction portables, we used to get decent ones for $45 about ten years ago, through a supplier of waffle irons (when purchasing their malted flour products = big discount). But the last time I checked, the quote was a little over $300 each and they had to be used in a minimum of a 30A circuit, which we never had enough of. We had to have units that could handle running hard 3-5 hours straight, so it's not like a home unit. And they were always a tempered glass top surface, which doesn't take to being whacked with saute pans when cooking omelets (and especially crepes) for hours a day. We burned and smashed them up pretty fast...
Different kind of animal used in those commercial kitchens due to the high volume...
I missed your post as I didn't realize you were replying to me.
I think the nuttiest, and it tasted very nutty, thing we've smoked has been hornet larvae in Taiwan. It's really good eats. Traditionally fried, but since we had a smoker set up (not common in Taiwan), then just about anything we can get our hands on went in. I honestly think we had a saleable product there, because it was delicious.
That slow heat up you're talking about with an electric range sounds like it's an electric resistance cooktop. That takes a while to heat up unless you've got a massive amounts of power you can put through it. Induction with pretty standard outlets heats up *really* fast, generally faster to getting cold water to boil than pretty much any home gas range. It's a lot of heat and it happens really quickly.
Yea, having a backyard smoker (or just an outdoor cooking thing) sounds great. Haven't had that in the city for years now though we leave here pretty often. We have smoked indoors before, but it's not ideal. It's not quite as bad as I had originally expected with the smoke as long as you're good about not constantly peaking.
I'd take another go at the pricing now that more induction cooktop makers have steadily entered the market. The selection here in recent years is a lot better than it was a decade ago, though it's actually still weirdly lesser than the selection I saw in Taiwan a decade age where the range of things available is extremely wide. Your price range once you're including multiple burners, filters, portable sink, etc, makes a lot more sense. This 30A one you're talking about is multiple burners right? 30A even at 120V strikes me as a crazy amount of power for a single element induction cooktop.
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We had to have units that could handle running hard 3-5 hours straight, so it's not like a home unit. And they were always a tempered glass top surface, which doesn't take to being whacked with saute pans when cooking omelets (and especially crepes) for hours a day. We burned and smashed them up pretty fast...
