I've been experimenting with induction cooking. I bought one of those ubiquituous Duxtop 1800W units.
Some results:
1. The surface is glass and far too smooth. There's not a lot of friction - it is too easy for a hot skillet or pot to slide off. That's rather dangerous.
2. The sliding gets worse if there are drops of water on the glass surface. Those turn to steam and form a nice gas bearing so that the skillet or pot slides as if it were on glare ice, sometimes under its own power. This is *extremely* dangerous.
These faults could probably be cured by having some groves in the cooking surface so that steam under the pot can vent and some texture to the glass to give some frictional resistance to prevent things from moving so easily.
Oh, and I forgot to mention that the inductive cooktop caused a cast iron griddle to crack. This griddle has been used for years. It may be a coincidence that it cracked when used on the inductive cooktop, perhaps not.
It did make quite a noise, not unlike our Killer Cuisinart from a decade+ ago:
@karlauerbach Oh dear. Spot heating and so quickly that differential expansion cracked it?
@shuttersparks Well, the inductive surface has a "hot spot" that's maybe 6 to 8 inches in diameter - so it's not that much of a spot heat source - and its about the same diameter as the flame ring on our gas stove (which is a Wolf and can put out a lot of heat.) And it was only on about 3/4 power.
I was wondering whether inductive heating generates magnetic fields in the iron that could add their own stresses to the heat stress.
But cast iron does crack, so it could simply have been the griddle's time to go.
But that sliding of pots and skillets on the cooking surface - those are major problems.
I had a pot of boiling water to make some pasta. The boiling water splashed onto the surface and when I went to check on things the entire pot, filled with boiling water, kinda skadaddled around on the steam layer with the slightest of nudges. Fortunately it did not fall off.
@karlauerbach Thanks for your answers. Yeah, I hear you loud and clear on the sliding problem. That has to be addressed.
Induction certainly does generate magnetic forces inside the iron but I doubt it's much force.
The field over the burner should be nice and uniform. By spot heating I was wondering if certain parts of the iron were experiencing spot heating, perhaps due to variations in conductivity of the iron. Cast iron is a pretty poor heat conductor so the heating might not have been uniform across the surface of the griddle. I dunno. Would be interesting to know exactly how and why it happened.
Sounds like your gas stove isn't a good candidate for comparison. Hah. I was thinking something like my Magic Chef domestic stove with weak little burners that irritate me greatly. (You get spoiled cooking on commercial Vulcan stoves.) Hah.
