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(More customer reviews)You know, flying cars, a monorail to whisk us to work, home fusion reactors to generate unlimited electricity, and dinner cooked over something they called "cold heat"?
Well, one of those miracles actually made it home.
Induction cooking might seem futuristic but the technology has been around since the previous century. It's finally emerging in two affordable forms: built-in and portable. Portable induction cooktops might not equal the speed of their stationary big brothers but they do come in mighty handy when you're in the mood for a hot meal but the weather isn't.
Like all induction cooktops, this Sunpentown Mr. Induction unit uses computer-controlled electromagnetic waves that induce metal cookware to create its own heat. The glass surface doesn't emit heat but instead absorbs some heat from the cookware, thus the warning printed right on the glass. Unlike a gas burner or electric surface unit, nearly all the heat cooks the food. Only the tiniest fraction escapes into the room. I don't have to tell anyone reading this that the same isn't true for even the most high-tech electric smoothtop ranges.
If there's a disadvantage to induction cooking, it would affect those with big collections of incompatible cookware, that is, non-ferrous pots and pans. Three simple tests will reveal what will or what won't work:
1. The pot or pan has to be at least 4 1/2 inches in diameter.
2. The bottom must be perfectly flat. It's OK if the bottom has a small indented or stamped trademark at the very center.
3. The bottom must contain enough ferrous metal to make a small magnet cling.
Happily, the qualities of good induction cookware are also those of good conventional heat cookware, so you probably won't have to replace everything in your cabinets. Test what you already have and add only the pieces you might need. Grandma's cast iron skillet and Aunt Sophie's enamelware Dutch oven were induction-ready ahead of their time.
Where you intend to use your induction cooktop is just as important. Stainless steel and other metal work surfaces can weaken the electromagnetic field, and may even heat up like cookware. Stake out a Formica, marble, granite or wood surface near an electrical outlet instead.
This 1300 watt cooker can't rival the speed of a 240 volt 3000 watter but with power equivalent to a 9,341 BTU gas burner, it has plenty of oomph to bring a pressure cooker up to steam and boil a stockpot of water for pasta. The front panel lets you step up and down through 20 power settings. Three touchpads are labeled MIN, MED and MAX. They jump directly to power settings 1, 10 and 20 but those settings are closer to KEEP-WARM, MIN and MAX. I used the MAX setting to bring my pressure cooker to pressure but when I switched to MED, the pressure dropped. I recovered the pressure on the MAX setting and then backed off to 12 to keep the pressure cooker hissing. The TEMP touchpad cycles through three keep-warm temperatures of 140, 167 and 194 degrees Fahrenheit. A built-in timer can be set for up to 9 hours and 50 minutes of cooking or keep warm time, overriding the unit's 2-hour automatic shutoff. I don't know how heat-resistant the plastic case is, so it's always best to lift hot cookware off the surface and never slide it off. The glass panel wipes clean once it has cooled down, which takes as little as a half-minute.
A note to the noise-conscious: All induction cooktops have fans to cool the electromagnetic coils. A portable unit isn't sunk into the counter so the sound is more obvious but much lower than the noise produced by a microwave oven or a range hood exhaust fan.
Since it's portable, it lets you cook anywhere there's an electrical outlet on a circuit that's not in use by another power-hungry appliance. As long as no one's using the microwave oven in the break room, you can wow everyone at the office with one of your home-cooked specialties. At home, you can adapt your cooking to the season. In winter, an induction cooktop is a handy keep-warm burner while the wasted heat from conventional cooking warms up the kitchen (but NEVER use the stove or oven solely for heating the room). Come the lazy, hazy, crazy days of summer, use your Mr. Induction to satisfy that craving for spaghetti and meatballs without sweltering at the stove. And don't be afraid to crank up the A/C and turn the ceiling fan on High. There's no flame to blow out, so there's no danger of gassing up the kitchen. At any time of year, induction is the method of choice for sustained low-heat cooking that would normally require a double boiler.
For about the price of a top-o'-the-line countertop convection oven, you can take your first steps into the futuristic world of induction cooking. But be careful. You may never, ever want to come back.
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Sunpentown SR-1891B 1300-Watt Countertop Induction Cooktop, Black
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