Induction Cooking
Really a bliss. I only have cooked on gas a few times in my life, but from I what did, I can say that I prefer induction far beyond gas. Maybe I'm just sensitive, but couldn't stand the heat and moisture it produced when used for longer cook durations.
I have both used a 18-level (9 main levels, 8 half levels, 1 booster in each zone) and a 9/10 level (9 levels, half of the zones with an additional booster level) cooktop, the former being a mid-price BSH unit, the latter being a cheap IKEA Whirlpool unit.
Further I have cooked on several setting-less glas cermamic cooktops with those HiLight-unit things that glow red.
These normal heating units cycle on and of depending on temperature, even at max power and thus sometimes take ages to cook something. Sometimes, stuff just burns because you misjudged the setting due to the delayed response.
With induction, things are different and require some learning.
These units have usually 2 different ranges of power levels.
You'll usually quite clearly hear a sound emmited from the pot, not unlike a unltrasonic cleaner, the higher the power the louder usually.
On the lower levels (on the units I used, both do this until 2/3rds normal power), the power cycles on and off in a pattern in the second-range, changing depending on power level. You sometimes see when boiling water and then reduce the power to keep a steady low boil that the boil increases and subsides in that pattern.
From a certain level on, they usually start with continous power supply that then intensifies as you increase the power level, with the noise clearly changing.
The booster level (which yours dosen't appear to have) allows for basicly overdriving the plate for a limited amount of time. Perfect for boiling water and basicly nothing else as some units actually mention that that level with an empty pan could under bad circumstances melt your pan or overheat the electronics.
Now, one thing that changes is that you don't have heated mass in the cooktop to act as a heat buffer.
Second thing is that your pan isn't heated to a temperature, but is supplied with power, much like a microwave.
That actually describes that cooking feeling somewhat well: In a oven, you select a temp, and that is kept. In a microwave, you select a power level, that is supplied, idependent of temperature.
For cooking, that means you'll mostly use 3 levels:
1) Full power: Heating up quick. Carefull with pans and low-oil frying here, quick heatup here means a maximum of 1 minute to good frying, after 2 minutes you most likely are smoking up your kitchen.
2) Lowest continous power level: That is usually most handy for typical frying, both in deep and low fat situations. Sometimes, if food is cold, or a lot, yo might find yourself adjusting a little up temporarly. For deep fat frying, there is usually the need to up the setting when adding food to lift the temp, and once it starts raising again to lower it back down again. You can pretty accuratley adjust that there. This level is also usually perfect to keep a steady good boil.
3) A medium-low pulsing level: This is for everything that needs a simmer-like temperature like stuff with longer cooktimes, heating up stuff. That level is where with some pots, you get an intermittent boil as the element cycles, and with some, you get that just below bubbling temp.
I got that down to a science after a few weeks. And I think you will love it.
Over here, the technology has become pretty mainstream by now. A lower end but well warranted and for most people perfectly fine cooktop can be had for under 300€ at IKEA, a mid-range one with the better power level control is just 50 bucks more.
So, we are in the tiem of induction cooking, I think.
One thing though:
These beasts need proper ventilation beneath them!
This system relys on high power high frequency switching components which produce a lot of heat that needs to be removed from them to maintain a reasonable lifespan.
During normal operation you might hear a fan run at various speeds depending on what you are doing, which is perfectly fine.
If your cooktop randomly switches off without it being caused by spilling something on the touchpads (ours does this pretty happily) or it even displays a error code while cooking or it refuses to activate some zones, your most likely culprit is overheating.
Usually letting things cool is enough to clear that, but you have to keep in mind that the more heat you subject it to, the shorter it lifespan will be.
And, sadly, once something goes south, it usually means the end of the appliance.
Most of these have 2 huge and one small PCB in them, some and additional one for power input.
The 2 big onces are the inverter units that produce the high power high amperage low voltage AC need for the coils, one board running one big and one small zone. These are ALWAYS prohibitvley expensive and complicated to replace and sadly more often then not if one of these fails, the high current backfeeds into other parts and damages all other components as well. (On our Siemens combined unit - cooktop and oven with the cooktop controls on the front of the oven - one of the inverter boards failed in a pretty loud and violent fashion, takeing out not only the cooktop but even parts of the oven controls.)
The smaller board manges user input and other functions and can fail, especially if you place something hot on the interface.
So, best to keep your kitchen cool whenever possible and to not have power levels set higher the need as well as warranting proper ventilation below the unit.
