Thursday, November 15, 2012

Induction cooking: starting out

Recently I went on to make my personal cooking arrangements. I decided to buy an induction cook-top. The important points for me were:
  1. portability, 
  2. size (space requirement)
  3. cleanliness, 
  4. price
  5. energy-price
  6. versatility
After getting the cook-top I went on to buy an ordinary "kadai", a plate to cover it and a ladle (all of stainless steel) as my only utensils. On my first trial I made some "khichdi" with potatoes and eggs in it. Not too bad. But there were several technical issues:

  1.  stainless steel works fine with induction although a magnet does not stick to it (which is a test everybody says you should do to check if a utensil is usable with induction).
  2. Stir frying is difficult with a pot with thin bottom as it gets too hot too quickly. Also, the "kadai" base heated up unevenly. It did not conduct well enough, causing the bottom to expand more than the sides - making the base warp.
  3. Boiling works better. But uneven heating and low conductance causes some parts to burn while others remain undercooked. You need to stir the contents to avoid that.
  4. With induction heating and cooling are very rapid (especially with a thin vessel of low heat capacity). For those used to cooking with some "inertia" of heating it will take some experience to adjust the timings and temperatures. 
Afterwards I found some information on utensils. I particularly liked this one:
http://www.cookingissues.com/2010/02/16/heavy-metal-the-science-of-cast-iron-cooking/#more-3385

And there is a website on induction cooking from where I got the above link:

http://theinductionsite.com/induction-cookware.shtml

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