Induction cooking - but what about woks?
Have you heard about induction cooktops? I sure have, but every time I mention them and how cool they are, there’s always somebody getting up in my bus- oh crap, the power went out. Well, I guess my family’s just gonna starve tonight since I don’t have that gas stove anymore. Hold on, let me go grab the candles. [match strikes] Oh? What’s this? Hold on, I need more light. Ohhh, it’s my old camping stove! I wonder if it still works.
[thud] Here goes nothing! [gasp] It does! That’s cool. Well, too bad we’re not camping otherwise this could really come in handy right now. Please tell me you understand the point of that joke. I have to tell you that using a camping stove indoors is dangerous and that you should follow all manufacturer warnings and instructions. Uh, but aside from power outages, there’s another little “gotcha” that comes up with surprising frequency any time I talk about how cool it is to cook with the power of magnets. But what about woks? You’re not thinking about cultures that use woks! And proper woks don’t work with induction cooktops, so whaddya say to that? I say… check your assumptions.
Because look at what I’ve got here. This is an induction wok! It would appear that induction woks actually exist. This one’s carbon steel and has a round bottom and everything! And this isn’t very fancy - it plugs into a standard wall outlet and it cost about $200. That’s not a cheap kitchen gadget, to be sure, but it’s also pretty reasonable for what this is. Now, real quick and very important caveat, this video should absolutely not be seen as an endorsement of this particular product. For one, I have never cooked with a wok.
Well, a good one anyway and I definitely do not have any decent wok skills. So I cannot really vouch for how well this wok handles all your wok needs. I also already have several complaints about this thing - it seems to be trying too hard and some features are confusing and don’t seem that necessary but the bottom line is… it exists and is a product you can buy today. The technology has arrived. And I would argue, based on what I've gathered about the important factors in this style of cooking, it’s actually pretty great to wok this way. [sudden Aerosmith riff] For those who aren’t familiar with induction cooking already, I’ll explain how it works in a moment but first I want to pose a simple question: what are we asking our cooktops to do? Regardless of the technology, be it an open flame, a cast-iron wood stove, or an electric heating element, we’re just trying to heat up pieces of cookware so that we can… cook in them.
That’s it. It’s not really any more complicated than that. We just need to get a pan or pot or skillet or griddle or dutch oven or, yes, wok hot. People have strong opinions on which method for getting cookware hot is the best, but in the end all of them are simply producing a lot of heat right below the cookware, then that heat is transferred into the cookware and eventually into the food you’re trying to cook. Induction cooking is completely different, though.
Power electronics send a high-frequency alternating current through coils of wire below the cooking surface, and thanks to electromagnetic induction, that induces electrical currents inside of the cookware placed atop those coils. Those currents, as they travel through the metal of he cookware, end up producing heat through a process called joule heating. And that means the cookware itself becomes a heating element. No heat transfer from hot thing to cold cookware occurs, instead the cookware itself is the thing which gets hot.
It’s similar to how wireless phone charging works, but at much, MUCH higher power levels. There are tons of benefits to this approach. For one, it offers the same instant heat output that gas does. You don’t have to wait for the heating element to warm up because your cookware is the heating element.
Similarly, when you turn the heat down, there’s no lag like in a traditional electric stove. Stop inducing currents in the cookware and the cookware instantly stops producing heat, just the same as shutting off a gas flame. So you get all the control of a gas stove but you also get none of its downsides such as the wild amounts of excess heat they produce in the kitchen as a large majority of heat emitted from the gas burners goes around the cookware. Start noticing that and you may become a bit annoyed by your gas stove, especially in the summer.
That just doesn’t happen with an induction stove since nearly all of the heat produced is coming from the cookware itself. That also means the surface of the cooktop never gets that hot. It’s only as hot as the bottom of the cookware, making cleanup a breeze and making the stove safer for the childrens. If you’ve never had the chance to play with an induction cooktop before and you’re induction-curious, there are plenty of inexpensive options these days which let you take it for a test drive.
Note, however, that most of these plug-in units are… not the best. They’re built to cost - this unit from Ikea currently retails for $60 US dollars - and some nicer features you might find in a proper cooktop are omitted. The most frustrating thing with these is their kind of clunky touch controls, limited power output selections (just 9 in this case) and they tend to produce more noise than a true induction cooktop or range will, both fan noise as it cools the electronics inside of here and high-frequency ringing sounds caused by tiny vibrations in the cookware. Still, they’re very impressive for what they are and this one lives next to my conventional electric stove to supplement it. To check if your cookware is compatible with an induction cooktop (which is their major downside), see if a magnet will stick to the bottom.
If it will, you should be good to go. But if it doesn’t, sadly that piece of cookware won’t work with an induction cooktop. But then, there’s woks. Traditionally, woks have a round bottom.
There are woks with flat-bottoms to allow them to work on traditional electric or induction cooktops, but many people would say those aren’t even woks. A round bottom is much better for certain styles of cooking, particularly stir-frying. Woks used over a gas burner can be supported by a simple ring surrounding it, but on the flat-surface of an induction cooktop… uhh that doesn’t really work. Even if you got a round-bottom wok to sit correctly somehow, induction relies on the cookware being close to the induction coils. So a typical induction cooktop will work very poorly if at all with a round-bottom wok.
But who’s to say we’re limited by the typical? Certainly not this company because they’ve made this thing. It’s actually not far off at all from this Ikea unit, but the induction coil is formed into a bowl-shape just like the matching wok. That means you can put the wok in it. And now you have an induction wok! Look at that! What was previously an impossibility is now a reality. And since this is powered by induction, the wok gets hot incredibly quickly.
Look, right now the wok is stone cold. Now I’ll turn this unit on. After only 10 seconds of heating, watch how it reacts to water. Who says you need a gas flame for a hot wok right now? When I first got this and followed the instructions to season it, the oil started smoking quite intensely after only about 30 seconds.
It’s pretty dang hot pretty dang quick. Now again, I am not a good judge of a wok. This could very well be a pretty terrible wok, but I’m not really interested at all in singing the praises of this product. I just want to make you aware that it exists. There are a number of things that could be improved upon here, and a proper cooktop freed from the limitations of a North American power outlet would be even better than this. My only point today is that woks are not an induction gotcha, and I think I’ve proven that well-enough.
But I do want to give some useful information on how this product you can actually buy actually performs, so let’s dig out the thermal camera and do some testing. First, let’s just look at where the heat ends up getting produced. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s mostly generated in the center of the wok.
From what I can tell this is usually what you want - however it’s more ring-shaped than you might expect. The direct center of the wok remains a little cooler than the areas surrounding it, though of course heat conduction means it still gets plenty hot. Since this is a round-bottom wok, you can move the wok to change which areas are getting heat, which can help replicate some traditional wok techniques. One thing that can only kind of be replicated, though, is tossing food. Obviously there’s nothing stopping you from removing the wok from the base and doing that goodness (you can tell I’m really good at it) except… uh, well when you lift the wok away from the induction coils, it stops heating. That’s not all that different from picking it up over a gas burner, but the induction unit complains when you do that.
Most induction cooktops enter some sort of angry state when you remove the cookware from them, but it’s rather annoying when a wok does that since tossing is a commonly-used technique. In fairness this unit gives you a decent amount of time before entering a safety shut-off mode (10 seconds by my count), but it does enter an error state after that and requires resetting. I think that needs to be more generous.
We’ll add that to the “needs improvement” pile. What doesn’t need improvement, I think, is heat output. Pay attention to those numbers in the thermal camera. This thing heats up extremely quickly. We’re approaching 500 degrees after only 30 seconds.
Of course, heating the wok is only one part of the equation - cold food you put in here to cook will absorb a lot of that heat. I mean, that’s the point of cooking. And this fella is limited to a weedy little plug! It only pulls 1,500 watts from the wall, which is about 5,000 BTU/hr. That’s no match for fire, is it? Well, no, but to rehash an argument I once had online (the very fuel of many of these videos) induction technology means you cannot compare things quite so easily. Some people may scoff at the 5,000 BTU/hr this can put out - some proper wok burners will do 30,000 BTUs. But remember that essentially every watt of heat this pulls from the wall is becoming heat directly in the wok.
While I’m sure those 30,000 BTU rocket burners can get a wok hotter than this thing can, since well over half of their heat energy ends up just going around the wok, the actual difference in cooking power is likely much smaller than those numbers suggest. Oh but right, I said not to focus too much on this particular unit so... don’t focus too much on this particular unit! If built-in to a proper cooktop or range, this wouldn’t be limited to an ordinary plug and could be much more powerful.
This whole video is simply - look at this! It’s an induction wok! So… look at this! It’s an induction wok! I’m wokin’ here! However, now I will get annoyed at this particular unit because it annoys me in several particular ways. Firstly, the controls. I may be a simple person, and I may not know my way around a wok, but I really don’t know what on Earth is going on here. The simple unit from Ikea may arguably be too simple, but it at least offers 9 power levels. This only offers three: 600, 900, and 1,500 watts.
But also … you set the temperature. Uh, since the cookware is the heating element in an induction cooktop, we can use temperature sensors to see how hot the cookware is getting. And this has one. But it’s not using it merely as a safety device, it’s using it as a thermostat so it will react to the temperature of the wok and keep it fairly constant. I think this could be a useful feature depending on what you're trying to do, but you have to choose a temperature.
You cannot simply say “go” and change the power levels based on how the food’s cookin'. I suppose you could get used to this, and maybe that offers a layer of repeatability which might jibe with some brains, but I feel like that’s introducing a variable which is more confusing than it is helpful. I’d rather this just have a bunch of power levels - preferably changed with a knob for extra fine control and just let me do the thinking. The other incredibly irritating thing this does is set a timer by default.
Every time you switch this on, it will turn itself off after 20 minutes. Now, you can extend that time by turning this dial so it’s not like it’s a big deal, but as a default 20 minutes feels very short. And the dials are awful. Not, like, how they feel or anything but the arrangement is just overly complicated and confusing. You press this one to start it… but this one pauses it. And don’t press it again or it will shut off entirely.
I just… it’s bad. It didn’t take too long to get used to the one time I actually used this but it was irritating. And you’re right, I only used this one time because of my next annoyance: the wok itself. Look, if it’s not dishwasher safe I don’t have room for it in my life. That’s just how it is and I will not be taking any questions. Now, okay, I know that carbon steel woks which are properly seasoned are the bee’s meow according to some, but even if I were willing to embrace that lifestyle, seasoning this with the wok unit isn’t that easy.
You’ll be dealing with the hot spot in the middle and not getting much heat up the sides, and unfortunately this handle grip means you can’t use the oven to season it. Even setting that aside, this wok just feels kinda flimsy. Again, all of that is not a knock on the technology of induction or its appropriateness for wok-style cooking, just this particular wok. And if I found a better wok which was induction-capable and had the same general curvature as this one, it should work absolutely fine in this base.
And maybe I’ll do that! I used this to stir-fry some vegetables and I will admit they came out a lot better than they usually do in my big flat skillet. So I am pretty confident that if I spent time learning to use this thing, I could eventually wok the wok. I just… gosh I really just hate washing dishes by hand. I have a machine for that and I love it dearly.
Oh and by all means, please feel free to start a flame-war in the comments about non-stick coatings vs. cast iron vs. stainless steel vs. carbon steel. It boosts engagement. Oh there’s one last weird thing you can do with this: if you're so inclined, you can program in a series of steps so it will, say, be at 400 degrees for 5 minutes, then 350 for 10, then 450 for 7. I mean I don’t really know who wants that but it’s there. But now, let me remind you for the umpteenth time that the point of this video is not to say this is a good product or which style of cooking is best or anything like that - it’s just to let you know induction woks exist. Models on the market now are flawed in several ways that even this person has figured out so, there’s definitely room for improvement.
But I think the proof-of-concept is quite sound, and the technology is ready. It just needs a few tweaks and then I think it’ll be a real wok in the park. What I think is likely to happen before too long is that proper induction cooktops with normal controls and higher power levels will start offering one or two bowl-shaped burners just like this.
How common that will be in markets where woks aren’t typical is a giant open question, of course, but I feel like there’s enough demand in the US for at least one appliance manufacturer to offer such a thing. And if that doesn’t happen, plug-in units like this will undoubtedly get better. They may remain power-limited here in the US, but I’d bet dual-voltage units might appear which will put out 3 kilowatts if hooked up to a 240V supply. There are NEMA outlets for that, ya know. They’re just not common in today’s kitchens. To close this video out, I want to give my $0.02 on induction technology in general.
I appreciate that it exists quite a lot, but I’ve also realized that I find radiant electric stoves to be just fine. Personally, I don’t find it challenging to manage their quirks, so while I said this unit lives next to my stove - I don’t actually use it all that much. Mainly I use it when I want to bring water to a boil. My conventional stove is only faster than this at that task if I'm using a pot large enough to cover its largest burners. So for most general needs, this is faster.
And in fact it's replaced my electric kettle - I now use this stovetop kettle on this thing and it’s just as fast as a plug-in kettle, in fact it might be slightly faster since this will pull 1,800 watts from the wall. But generally I prefer cooking on the radiant stove. So that’s what I usually do. If you can’t stand electric stoves, though, and I realize many can’t, I think you’ll find induction to be a game-changer. It really is the best of both worlds, and if you haven’t already seen some of the wild demonstrations where 10kW of boost power brings a pot of water to a boil in seconds, well - look those up. They’re pretty impressive.
And since this technology can be tweaked to work with woks, I think it’s ready to become the new normal no matter where you live or what you’re cooking. And don’t forget - if cooking over fire is an absolute requirement for you… there are many different ways to make that happen. Don’t let the gas company convince you that they’re the only flame in town. ♫ deliciously smooth jazz ♫ I left out the other reason I keep this fella around: Power outages.
Yeah. My electric car lets me plug stuff into it, including this. And I tested its vehicle-to-load function over 24 hours and determined it could supply emergency power for my fridge, freezer, modem, laptop, some lights, and cooking needs for about a week if fully charged. Batteries, turns out, are pretty cool. It’s only as hot as the bottom of the pot making cleanup a braayze… what? I almost got through that. ...making cleanup a bray - I did it again! You all… buhfffh ...these days which le - beguhberklebub Was that enough wok puns? I guess you could say this video was a woky-talkie.
Oh that'll surely get inducted into the bad pun wok of shame. Get it, 'cuz induction? Or was it another wok pun? 为什么不是两者皆有呢？
2024-09-01 19:24
