Smitten at the Stove: A Stranger Both Hot and Cool

By DEBORAH BALDWIN

Published: May 18, 2005

WHEN my husband, Irwin, and I fixed up our kitchen four years ago, we were finally able to buy our dream stove, a muscular, high-B.T.U. gas Thermador range, as hot as they came. Then the heat became a big issue, especially around this time of the year. Open a window and the flames bend in the wind, heating everything except the pot.

As a home cook with one eye trained on the horizon, watching for the next hot thing, I was primed when a cooktop for the home kitchen as suave and efficient as an Italian sports car came purring into showrooms this month.

Companies like Küppersbusch, Viking and Miele are using a seductive blend of sizzle, steam and showmanship to convince cooks that induction cooktops are ready for the home kitchen. For $1,400 on up, the home chef can tap electromagnetism to paradoxically control and intensify heat while reducing energy use. There is no wasted firepower; the heat moves only through the bottom of the pan.

There are a couple of hitches: your pans must be steel or cast iron (put away your Pyrex, copper and aluminum), and your kitchen must be wired for 220 volts, which is unlikely if you are using gas.

OUCH? NOPE.The heating unit on an induction stove never gets too hot to touch.

Induction cooking has been around for decades, but until now never made it past the swinging doors of restaurant kitchens. The units were too expensive and too fussy and the concept too weird to find a home audience.

"People call asking if it will kill their cat," said Wayne Smeeton, a sales manager for Küppersbusch, the German appliance company, citing fears that a magnetic field might be strong enough to make a metal pet collar glow red.

At Chelsea Fine Custom Kitchens, a shop that caters to the competitive New York cook, Mr. Smeeton demonstrated two Küppersbusch cooktops, one with a special wok unit.

"Ice, please," he said, sliding a steel wok into a bowl-shape indentation. He turned the power to high and allowed himself to smile when the ice started boiling before it was fully melted.

This looked to be the closest a home chef could get to the furnace-like power that Chinese restaurants put under their woks. Meanwhile a flat induction unit brought two quarts of water (uncovered) to a boil in 5 minutes 15 seconds - half the usual time.

Slow cooking has its place, but when you're hungry, fast is so much better. And here was a space-age force, just in time for pasta al pesto and corn on the cob. Induction uses magnetic coils under the cooktop's glass surface to jangle the molecules of iron in the pan, turning the pan into the heat source. Different models offer different amounts of speed and power, but in all cases heat doesn't dissipate into the air so the chef stays as cool as her cucumbers.

That's good news for New Yorkers with small kitchens, which can get so hot that many order in and use their stoves for storage. "With this thing you want to stay home," said Alex Beitler, who recently installed two Küppersbusch cooktops, including the $3,500 wok unit, in his West Village apartment.

"Watch this," Mr. Smeeton said with a magician's aplomb, whipping a dollar bill, unscathed, from between the wok and the heat zone.

Shut down the magnetic field and cooking stops instantly. Remove the pan and the glass surface is barely warm. Indeed, Mr. Smeeton said, spills do not bake on, leaving nothing to clean up beyond the fingerprints of disbelieving guests.

The new cooktops are sold with a lot of razzle-dazzle. But the true benefits are a little subtler: once you turn off the power you can leave the pan in place; there's no need to shove it aside or lift it off the stove. Induction also holds steady at low temperatures. While experimenting with one model I found it easy to achieve that elusive trickle of bubbles known as "just below a simmer."

Irwin and I dropped by Krup's Kitchen & Bath near Union Square, where a Viking distributor, Robert A. Luyckx, was on hand with a salesman's model that requires only 110 volts, half the usual power.

Irwin skeptically poured a bit of oil into a pan and added a half-pound of cold, moist stew meat. He turned the unit to high, and in seconds the oil was sizzling. In less than two minutes the meat was browned.

Viking, the company that did so much to popularize the semiprofessional gas range, now plans to introduce several induction cooktops. One cleverly combines two induction units and two that use regular radiant heat, the better to keep the cost below $2,000 and allow sentimental cooks to keep their copper pots.

For the super semipro, Electrolux recently introduced a $85,000 kitchen pod with sink, refrigerator drawers and two high-powered induction heating zones. Even at that price, of course, induction units won't make you a better cook.

Still, when we got home after our test drive at Krup's, I gazed at our oversize Thermador wistfully. I hadn't felt this guilty since I cheated on my hairdresser.