As part of efforts to battle continuing climate change, experts from around the world have called for a generation-defining shift from fossil fuels.
One of the goals is to increase dependence on electricity, rather than fossil fuels for heating homes, powering cars, and cooking.
Dozens of cities in the US, including Berkeley and San Francisco, have already put strict new regulations in place banning natural gas service in most new building construction.
In professional kitchens there is a lot of room for climate improvement. While safety and energy use concerns with gas cooking are an obvious target, there are also issues with traditional electric stoves, which are slow to heat up and cool down, wasting large amounts of energy in the process, while also posing the threat of burns since heating coils stay hot even after they are shut off.
Hello Induction
For more and more professional kitchens looking to reduce their carbon footprint, cooking with induction technology is quickly coming to the fore.
Though the technology is actually nothing new – it was even featured at the 1933 Chicago World’s Fair – the technology is still dwarfed by the use of traditional cooking methods.
While induction cooking is popular in Asia, and in Europe, it still hasn’t caught on as big in the U.S. According to a report by the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers, in 2019 only one percent of stoves in the US have induction cooktops.
The report adds that the number climbs to 15 percent among built-in cooktops, but that’s still a small share of all major cooking appliances in the country.
While induction cooktops also use electricity as well, they cook food in a completely different way with the use of copper coils below the surface that create a magnetic current. Rather than passing heat along to the pot or pan to food, induction cooktops heat the food directly which results in more evenly heated much less heat energy loss.
According to research from Frontier Energy, “Induction technology, however, has revolutionized electric cooktop cooking by changing the way heat is transferred to cookware.”
According to the report induction cooktops are capable of delivering as much as 90% of the electromagnetic energy generated to the food in the pan. That is compared to as little as 38% of the energy generated with gas ranges.
Considering all the benefits available with induction cooking appliances, why haven’t you made the switch?
Read more at: New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, and CNET.
