Induction cooking is well established in other countries but has only recently gained traction in the United States, growing 30 percent year over year in 2020, according to the Wall Street Journal. Induction offers a completely different cooking technology: While traditional stoves rely on gas flames or electric coils to heat pans, induction burners and stoves work by generating heat directly in the pans themselves. Under sleek glass-ceramic surfaces, induction stoves and portable induction burners contain coils of copper wire. Electricity passes through these coils, which creates a magnetic field that induces (hence the name “induction”) an electric current in the metal of the pan, causing atomic-scale friction—which makes the pan hot. To be compatible with an induction burner, a pan must contain ferromagnetic metal, meaning that a magnet will stick to its bottom.
What You Need to Know
There are differences between induction cooktops and portable induction burners. Portable models are far less powerful than induction stoves
