The hottest trend in the kitchen: the induction cooktop

Tag: china cupboard

When you cook with gas, an open flame heats the pan and the food inside it. When you cook on an electric coil or radiant cooktop, electric resistance creates heat, which is transferred to the pan and the food.

You lose a lot of that heat, whether gas or electric. It warms up your kitchen and it makes the cooktop hot.

1 In induction cooking, electricity passes through a coil of copper with magnets on its back side.

2 That creates an electromagnetic field of energy. (Electromagnetic energy is involved in radios, cell phones, hair dryers, microwaves, lightbulbs and many other things we use every day.)

3 When a pan is placed in this magnetic field (i.e., on the cooktop), its iron molecules react and begin to move very quickly — 20,000 to 50,000 times per second! — and create friction. The copper coil itself doesn't get hot. The pan becomes the source of heat that cooks the food. Only the part of the cooktop covered by the pan gets warm. No pan, no warmth.

The cooktop never glows bright red, as an electric cooktop would. It gets a little warm, the way a mug warms up when you pour in hot coffee. The cooktop starts to cool down as soon as the pan is removed from the magnetic field or when you turn it off. No heat escapes into the room.