I don’t usually do shootout comparisons and reports but Ananke and Fortuna had other plans for me. I’ll put the whole sordid story either at the end of this article or make a separate fml post.

(I hate recipes that are preceded by six A4 pages of how “Auntie Mabel always made it for Uncle Taff – until her husband caught them at it and she stopped cooking and Taff’s appetite just – died away ” so – I’ll put the schmaltz stories after the useful section.)

Sorry! For some reason I lost the proper final draft of this article and an older one was published. I couldn’f find the latest draft so I’ve just had to correct and re-save on the fly.

So anyhow – I got the chance to test a few induction cookers, those gadgets that are showing up everywhere – and I think the best way is going to be to say a few words on what they are and how they work (the sort of crap you can read anywhere) and adding the little “gotchas” I found out the hard way or else was lucky enough to figure out before they “gotcha’ed” me, and also, I’ve used all the ones I’ve come across and have gathered together some knowledge, skills, and techniques.

Also, when I say I “got the chance to” do these things I actually mean “fml…”

Right – Terminology:

We’ve cooked on old wood-fired ranges, gas-fired ranges, electric ranges. All of those “ranges” are the larger cooking appliances where we could place multiple pots on their individual heat spots also known collectively as “hobs.” We had smaller versions of those that effectively had just one hob spot – campfires, pot belly stoves, camping gas cookers, benchtop electric cookers. Then, just to complicate things, the single hob devices became two hobs, like half a range. This is getting too long already.

I can’t get my hands on one of those proper multi-hob glass/ceramic beauties that have begun replacing old gas and electric stoves and cooktops. (If anyone wanted to donate one or find me a sponsor that would provide one for me to gift to the landlord, I know he’d install it for me so – drop my name people, drop my name…) So the induction cookers I’ve managed to gain experience with are the benchtop/tabletop units referred to earlier.

The “hobs” of induction cookers are flat coils (technically we call them “pancake coils”) that transfer the electric power by induction. (Hence “induction” cookers.) Induction works best on ferrous metals hence only cookware made of ferrous materials will work on an induction hob. Basically, if a magnet sticks to the base of the cookware, it’ll work. Thaty’s enough of the terminology and stuff over. On with the show’n’tell.

Cast In Order of Appearance:

1: Dark Horse: The Meng Qi ZY-H

Specs: 1800W, coil dia: 16cm, area: 200cm sq, pwr density: 3w/cm sq, controls: basic 3 way

History: A few years ago I’d heard and read a fair bit about induction cooking but the price was keeping me from buying. I’m a pensioner dammit. So many things I’d like to test and report and – anyway – I think Fortuna intervened and led me to an opp shop (thrift shop) that we rarely go to because it’s a fair distance for our budget. And there was what I presumed was an electric resistance single-hob with a ceramic top, it was ten dollars, a decision was made on the spot, what the heck. I bought it.

Turned out to be a great little unit to learn on and I’d still be using it but for one assassination.

Performance: This unit used it’s 1800W power wisely and produced even heat across a wide diameter. (That’s going to be important later. Keep it at the back of your mind…)

The Meng Qi is #1 in the photo below.

2: The KMart ANKO FYM20-55(AT)

Specs: 2000W, coil dia: 12 cm, area: 170 cm sq, pwr density: 12W/cm sq, controls: basic 3way

History: Long story, had to use more than one induction cooker, found this unit on the catalogue, bought it, wasn’t too bad. Until it blew up, apparently a very common fault with these units. And assassinated my lovely old Meng Qi . . . The spike it created took out everything that was powered on that breaker, which included Old Faithful . . .

Performance: It had 200W more than the Meng Qi and a similar sized coil, and it worked really well aside from, after a few weeks, spreading pretty sparks and white smoke and death…

UPDATE:

KMart finally refunded the $55 cost of their faulty device after we moved heaven and earth to find some semblance of a transaction number, after which they A) admitted that they could have sent us a copy of the store receipt from their online ordering facility at any time and B) semi-admitted that the units have a reputation – by suddenly out of the blue asking if we’d used it on an extension cord of any kind. Methinks that the rumours I’d been hearing about them blowing up would have come mostly from the camping community, who’d mostly have been using them with an extension cord or dodgy inverter, perhaps? Anyway keep this in mind – extension cords and power boards are a no-no for inductive hobs unless they’re low power, say under 2000W. The Meng Qi was no doubt built to the lower power because many rural areas would have dodgy power.

The ANKO is #2 in the picture below.

The Westinghouse model WHICO1K

Specs: 2000W, coil dia: 12 cm estimated, area: 170 cm sq, pwr density: 20W, controls: “advanced”

History: The ANKO left me without a decent cooking method so I ordered the Westinghouse from Big W and it too didn’t let me down. Because by now I was expecting budget department store cookers to be crap.

Performance: It burned things a bit, which was annoying but I’d just started to work out how to get around those issues, and then it started making a noise like a small Harley Davidson was revving inside it. And it stopped actually working whenever that happened. At least Big W refunded me the cost of this one quite happily . . .

It’s #3 in the picture below and is just a screenshot I snagged off a website and pasted in.

The Tefal IH7208

Specs: 2100W, coil dia: 10-11 cm estimated, area: 80 cm sq, pwr density: 26W/ cm sq, controls: “advanced”

History: I was out of cooking hobs again . . . Getting to be a habit . . . Dammit. I went to the local (sorry, I’m going to mumble this because it’s . . . H#%v3.. #0rma& . . .) store to see what they had, and they had the same Westinghouse WHICO1K (but for about $30 more than Big W) and the Tefal at the same price as the Westinghouse Big W unit I bought.

Performance: It’s still going! It too has a too-small coil and way too much power but it’s not failed. Yet. (Also hold that thought about “too much power” it’ll all make sense shortly)

No image yet of the Tefal, but also it’s still working.

The ALDI Ambiano ICP23_11835

Specs: 2000W, coil dia: 11-12 cm estimated, area: 90 cm sq, pwr density: 22W / cm sq, controls: “advanced”

History: I’ve been looking for parts to repair the Dark Horse, the Meng Qi and I’ve tracked them down, but I’ve still been a hob down until I get those parts and – hopefully – fix the thing as my main daily driver.

So the other day we were ambling through ALDI and doing a spot of top-up shopping and there was a nondescript box among the seasonal stuff had the word “induction” on it. I was still looking for induction cookware and picked it up and it was ALDI’s entry into the budget induction hob market! $49 and so of course I bought it. The IGBT power transistors to fix Old Faithful will just have to wait a bit longer.

Performance: This unit nearly brought me to tears the first time I used it! (Which was the same night, why wait, I figured.) It cooked like the Meng Qi ! It wasn’t a nasty charcoalifier! It was quick heating but didn’t burn stuff unless I wanted to burn it a bit – and it has a pause button!That’s the ONE thing none of the others had and that I so often wished for!

(Why? Imagine needing to lift the pot for a few seconds to swirl things around. Without a pause button, you’d have to risk the cooker beeping and shutting itself off – or if you do it too often, maybe one of those times being the last straw that broke the camel’s back and blowing things up. But with that button, the game changes! Hit “pause” and you can swirl to your heart’s content, take the pot away to slide the next lot of ingredients in – whatever you need – and then put the pot back, unpause, and carry on cooking.)

No image yet of the Ambiano. Check the ALDI catalogs.

Controls – What I mean:

When I say Basic, I mean no programs, just the ability to select either a power level or a temperature, and optionally set a countdown timer. This is a most desirable arrangement – face it how many times do you use the “advanced frozen delicate fish defrost” setting of your microwave? – because you have all the control.

Then there are “advanced” controls’ What these all have in commons is several (stupid) programs you can’t alter any parameters of, one or two programs where you can change some parameters, and that’s about it. None of the advanced control panels seem to offer just simple “power” and “time” buttons, which are way more useful.

Also the “one or two programs that allow you to change parameters” aren’t generally obvious – on one of the cookers I tried, selecting the “fry” setting lets you change the power levels but not the temperature, another setting lets you change power levels and with a bit of fiddling, also temperatures. Only one allowed me to change the time as well as temperature or power. And you seem to have to work this out by trial and error, the manuals aren’t always overly clear on this.

The wide range of control panel button styles is also badly in need of standardisation.

To get used to your control panel, get a big pot of cold water, power the cooker, and with a combination of reading the manual provided and testing the functions to see which ones give you the best ranges of adjustment, you’ll pretty soon know what your favourite set of buttons will be.

So, That’s The Basics..

A few more things you need to know about induction cookers:

The Power Is “Lumpy.”

They usually have just two settings, OFF or ON. When you select the 400W power setting on a 2000w cooker, they just cycle the power on for 5 seconds and off for 20 or so. Only the part of the pot bottom directly over the coil gets all that energy. This is one reason larger pancake coils are better. I call it the power delivery density problem.

Basically, the coil is just activated at the full 2000W or whatever your unit is rated for, for x seconds, then turned off. All that energy doesn’t radiate sideways into the air as heat like it does from a gas flame or old resistance heating element, so it ALL goes into the only portion of the pot’s base directly over the coil.

It also doesn’t “conduct sideways” in the metal of the base because heat goes up, most metals are surprisingly bad at just conducting heat, and so just that central portion heats up. I mean, it will eventually spread along the whole bottom of the pot but this happens only slowly.

Several seem to try and deal with the issue by having two actual wattage settings, a slightly lower power range for lower settings and a full power range for the top end. This sort of helps a bit with the bursts of intense heat but it’s still a distinct OFF/ON/OFF cycle.

Pancakes Are Important

Everything has to do with the size of the pancake coil and the power rating of the unit. Actually, a great deal, so I might post a quick link to a video to get you up to speed. Helen Rennie covers it well so here goes:

Helen explains why the induction pancake coil (she calls it the “magnet”) is the elite of all the measurements you need to know about an induction cooker – it defines how much area of the bottom of the cooking pan will get hot. The wattage (generally 1400 – 2400 watts) defines how much heat the induction circuitry can push into that pancake coil.

Why The Size Is Important

Imagine a low power induction cooker with a large pancake coil: Say it’s a 1800W unit with a 16 cm coil. (Say! That’s the exact specs of the Meng Qi and demonstrates why it was so good!) At 16 cm diameter and 200 cm sq surface area, this demonstrates the “bigger is better” aspect of induction cooker pancake coils. Spreading the 1800W across the larger element gives it a steady even heat of 9W/cm sq. The power is spread out across the entire bottom of many of the pots I tend to use. This tends to provide the energy over a wider area where it’s both more effective and less likely to burn thing during the “ON” cycles.

Why The Vessel Is Important

If the vessel is less than half the diameter of the pancake coil, the cooker will tend to explode internally because half the coil will not have anywhere to radiate that power into and all of that will reflect back into the circuitry. That’s why they all beep and shut themselves down if you don’t have a pot on them.

If you have a pot more than twice the diameter of the coil, (or a coil smaller than half the vessel’s diameter) then the coil is only heating that small section in the middle. Either way the efficiency goes down drastically and you start wasting energy.

THAT in a nutshell is the PDD problem. A small coil in the middle of a large vessel bottom will burn whatever’s on that part of the bottom, but the heat won’t spread sideways like a gas flame would, and the cold food in the vessel will keep the outer edges cold while the middle burns. And a too-small vessel willseverely test the safety-limiting circuitry in the control electronics and may even burn it out.

Also – the magnet test, If the base of the pot isn’t magnetic, induction isn’t going to work with it. Induction is the process of imparting electromagnetic energy to the metal of the cooking vessel. You could place your hand on top of an induction hob and – assuming it stays switched on – you wouldn’t even feel a tingle, let alone heat. The electromagnetic field doesn’t affect anything non-magnetic. It has to be steel that a magnet can stick to. Stainless steel doesn’t work because stainless steel isn’t magnetic.

Which brings me to the one other thing about a good induction cooking vessel – a solid base that will hold the heat from one ON cycle to the next. If you imagine a thin sheet of tin over a gas flame, you’ll see that there will be red-hot spots where each little tongue of flame is. Throw a fish fillet on that to cook and it’ll have distinct char spots and be almost raw everywhere else. Put a similar fillet into a heavy-bottomed skillet and the heat evens out. Also, you’ll get a distinct “lag” between turning the gas up or down and the pan heating up or cooling down.

A good thick magnetic steel pan base will absorb the energy from the induction coil, turn it into heat, and slowly conduct it to the inner surface, then slowly lose a bit of heat until the next ON cycle. It “evens out” those fluctuations. And that actually also demonstrates what I said earlier – metals don’t actually conduct heat well. But the thick base uses that to advantage and helps to stop food burning when 2000W of energy is suddenly applied to it.

Solids vs iquids

Something solid or thick and goopy will burn at the spot where the coil is pushing energy into the vessel’s base and will need constant moving and stirring to prevent that. A large pot of thin liquid will start circulating around and carry the heat away, and let cooler liquid in to get heated.

If you want to cook pasta, use a bit more water / pasta ratio because you need it to keep circulating. Also with pasta potatoes and so forth, just like with conventional cooking, you need to stop the starch sticking things together (resulting in clumpy pasta) or sticking itself to the base. (Resulting in some pasta or potato stuck to the bottom and burning.) And with water broths as you add ingredients and they start to soften and thicken the broth, you also have to watch for that. And because of the “large base / small coil power delivery density issue” it’ll happen worse in that large pot right over the hotspot. The best way to deal with that, as I’ve said, is either have a coil that heats more than 75% of the vessel’s base, or keep going down in vessel size and transferring contents as they condense and thicken.

The best thing is to have that larger coil in the first place though. Do research. Ask the hard questions of the suppliers and manufacturers. Be prepared that a useable induction hob is almost never a cheap one.

Cleaning

I’ve been asked “isn’t it just a matter of a light wipe-down with a damp cloth?” and – no. Sure you’ll get the largest grossest clumps of dinner off the glass, but if you ever find anything that makes highly-glossy black ceramic glass look like anything other than a disgustingly streaked mess, hit me up. The closest I can get to that black mirror finish is with a conventional wipe-down, drying it, applying glass cleaner and then wiping it down with clean paper towels, and then never using it again… The matte finish white ceramic is the winner here. Why people think glossy glassy black mirror finishes look cool is beyond me…

Don’t EVER wash them in the sink under water – EVER – and when washing them use a damp cloth with mild detergent or glass cleaner. Don’t let any water drip in via the air vents either, make sure to keep them clear of dust and debris as the electronics need to have cooling.

Silicon Mats

You can buy silicon mats that you can use to prevent possible scratching of the ceramic glass, and to ward off the worst of the inevitable spatter – they’re not necessary, but they might be helpful. Be aware that if you put a frying pan on, it may hit temperatures of 220C and may give off fumes, I think they’re mainly meant for putting under boiling pots. You can also put a linen or cotton teatowel on the glass top, but they may end up damaged by heat.

I’ve tried them but find they don’t really help keep things clean anyway so – why complicate things?

The Tefal and the Ambiano aren’t pictured as they’re still alive and cooking. I may do a more detailed look at them in a future article seeing as they’re still available for me to develop / adapt recipes for.

DISCLAIMER: All the units I tested here were bought by me, none were donated or supplied for the purpose of securing a better review, and no incentives were offered nor solicited for. If the review of the product offends anyone at any of those companies, tough tits. Go and fix your product or your supply chain issues.

Now To The How To’s And Don’t Do’s

Helen is the lady to watch if you haven’t already. Using her methods is how I found out how pathetically small all the pancake coils on most induction hobs are. The Asian Meng Qi and the ANKO FYM20-55(AT) had the largest surface areas (as you’ll see in the specs above) and as expected, performed best at turning electric energy into heat transferred to the cooking vessel, the others had progressively smaller elements.

I’ll tell you that a relatively small cesve coffee maker (left) can be used on the relatively small coil of the cheaper cookers, but if I’d ever had the chance to try using the 8-9cm little pot on the 16cm coil of the Meng Qi it would probably have shut down on me as there’d be too little metal to radiate the energy into.

“The higher the power the better it will cook” is patent BS. “The larger the coil the better it will impart energy to the vessel” is better. But a picture is worth a thousand words:

That orange ring shows what an 11cm coil (orange circle) does to a 28cm frypan. The base of the pan is maybe 22-23cm diameter, and whatever you want to fry will only really fry inside that circle. I’d cooked a whole pack of sausages in the pan and the only way to get enough heat into it was to run the induction hob at about 1400-1600W initially until things start to sizzle then turn it back to 1000-1200W. The overall cooking rate will slow down but it’ll still always consist of “there you go human, there’s a full 2000W applied for 10 seconds in every 30, so I’ll just burn the crap out of those bangers thanks and leave those around the edges raw. Deal with me, human scum!”

You can see in that picture above what it does. If I’d still had the Meng Qi to do that same batch of sausages, they’d have all cooked all the way across the bottom of the pan and no one spot would have burned as badly as those in the picture.

My suggestion with these small-coil hobs is to get a smaller frying pan that’s close to the same size as the coil, and that conducts heat outward – generally some form of sandwich construction. That pan in the picture was an ALDI aluminiumpan with multi layers including steel in the base. It’s a bit more forgiving than many but it still had trouble moving heat outwards. You can see the dark ring outside of the orange ring which is where heat convection moves the burnt material over the cooking edge. The diameter of the pan’s bottom was 19cm which was pretty well-matched to the 16cm.

I have a small cast-iron pan that works well on either of the two hobs I have left, it conducts heat outwards pretty well, but it does mean I need to cook in smaller batches, I also have some larger dutch oven style pots that I use on induction but they’re always just used for soups or for cooking carbs like pasta.

If I have a lot of stock (which I do use that larger dutch oven pot for) that I need to condense to make stock concentrate, I switch from the big pot to a smaller one as soon as I can, and then sometimes to an even smaller one for the final concentration. It’s the only way to avoid having stuff stuck to the bottom.

Forget the “cooking programs” – find the ones where you get to control the power and the timer.

USE THE TIMER!
Say I know that a stock broth needs to simmer for around half an hour before it reduces by half. Even if I’m standing right there stirring it and cooking something else in the electric frypan or whatever, I set the timer. If that stops the cooking process and I have to swear under my breath, set the same settings up again, and set another ten minutes on the timer, so what? I’ve had my attention diverted too many times by other small emergencies, and as I said the induction cooker only has two power settings OFF or ON so when things get down to critical consistency I’d rather not come back to a disk of burnt material in a pot.

BONUS MATERIAL

A Suggestion To Manufacturers:

IF manufacturers made a series of “pancake” and “doughnut” shaped coils and placed them concentrically, they could check each coil in the millisecond between pulses and work out how big a pot is sitting on top and only switch on as many coils as would be needed to achieve as close as possible to a 1:1 surface area match. Things would cook faster, more evenly, and with less waster power – but that’s pipe dream because each hob would have to have two or three hobs’ worth of coils and drivers. Ain’t no Bastard Corporation got time for dat.

If You’re Wondering About An Induction Cooktop Range

. . . or a benchtop induction cooker with multiple elements, remember that these will need to be installed and wired professionally as they’ll draw several times more than a general-purpose household outlet can supply. They do usually offer a larger range of coil size options for different cooking vessel sizes. The same protocols still apply to the individual “burners” on such cooktops, and often the same manufacturer sleight-of-hand about marking oversized “heating zones” that don’t actually match the true sizes of the coils under the ceramic top, and the usual warnings apply that you’ll either have to pay mega-top-dollar to get a decent cooktop, or else be lucky enough to find reviews with all that info in them before you buy. Check reviews online.

If You Want To Do The Math

I used this to calculate circle values https://www.calculator.net/circle-calculator.html it may help you figure out energy density etc if you want to work your particular setup. Also apparently you may be able to get a rough idea of the coil size while still in the store by using one of those metal-detecting carpenter’s “stud finder” gizmos but this will only be a rough guide. It’d be better if manufacturers stopped overcompensating with those oversize “heat zone” markings and just faced up to their inadequately-sized equipment . . .

Just How Powerful Can Induction Hobs Get?

Let me just say “BIG!” There are industrial induction hobs that are used to heat woks in restaurant kitchens, to heat very large stock pots etc, and they are industrial machines – they are bolted to the floor.wired into three phase power, and are built bulletproof. They are also more in cost than your whole kitchen reno.

There are also freestanding tabletop/benchtop induction cookers that are relatively powerful an 3600W so in theory they could be installed in your home but on a separate electrical circuit, and many multi-hob ranges you could have installed. I’m just using what I have because I rent and can’t afford to have a decent 4-hob range top installed.

I guess that brings me to the whole story of how I got to have to go through the crash course in this cooking method but I reckon that’ll be for another post. If you want to help me with the costs involved in this shoot-out, please do donate.

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