| Asin | B01FLR0ET8 |
|---|---|
| Dimensions | 11.4"D x 14"W x 2.5"H |
| Weight | 6.2 Pounds |
| Manufacturer | Duxtop |
Countertop Burners
Duxtop Portable Induction Cooktop Burner, Induction Hot Plate with LCD Sensor Touch 1800 Watts, Silver 9600LS/BT-200DZ
$4.50
Jordan –
SEE UPDATE BELOW:
I got this despite that it has the fewest reviews on Amazon, and it looks like most of them are fake/paid for reviews anyways. I picked it though because the duxtop brand has good reviews and this model has the most temperature settings among the cheaper options, and it has a lower temp range too. I read a few people saying with other ones the lowest setting was still too hot. I figured if I was truly going to replace my stove top I wanted the one with the most flexibility and was willing to pay $30 more for it. It moves up in 20 degree increments or .5 power levels. I’ve only used it a handful of times, and I’m still just getting used to induction cooking in general. The negatives I’ve had with it apply to all induction burners in general. The cycling heat on and off to maintain temp really threw me off so I tried to compensate by adjusting temps, which I learned I shouldn’t do, just let it do it’s thing. And when on full power pretty much all of my pans emit this high pitched ringing noise that really sucks. It seems to only be really bad at full power and acceptable at even some of the higher powers just under full.
But boy howdy does that thing heat! Water boils so fast you can’t believe it. And you do have really quick control of temperatures. I think I’m going to love it once I figure it out. It’d have to be truly terrible for me to use the electric range though. I recommend giving it a shot. This model has the cleanest interface, no special buttons for sauteing or grilling or whatever they say it’s for. That stuff would change from pan to pan and dish to dish, anyways and wouldn’t be accurate. The 9600 has a boil button which is always accurate, and a keep warm button which will probably work in most situations. At $100 it was worth it to me, but units at half that price have about 95% of the functionality that you could probably get away with and still be good to go, so it’s really up to you. It has the same 6.75" diameter coil set underneath the glass, I checked using a high powered flashlight pointed at it with the lights turned off.
I did a test of the lowest temperature of 100 degrees, as that is one feature that sets it apart from others. I put 1 cup of water into a 6 inch cast iron enameled pot at 74.6F and set it on 100 degrees. About 15 minutes later the water was at 77.3F. At a half hour in the water dropped to 76.8F. At 45 minutes I concluded the testing and it came in at 75.7F. I then turned the burner off and just let it sit for 15 more minutes, which brought it to 75.3 degrees. To me, this is a mostly good result in that while not accurate, the unit does have the ability to go to an ultra low temperature and keep it some what consistent to a few degrees, although I did not like the trending downward temps. But since this was the lowest setting, I believe higher powers/temps might achieve a more consistent level. My main concern was to find out if the lowest level was going to be too hot, which it most certainly is not! So I think it could be good for those looking to melt chocolate. (See below edit, I was wrong, not good for chocolate!)
In conclusion, if I were just rating this unit compared to others in it’s price range, I think I’d give it 5 stars. It’s more expensive, but I like the user interface more than other options and the low temp abilities sets it apart. But since I’m rating the unit not only against it’s peers but also in it’s own right just as an induction burner, it gets 4 stars as I have yet to determine if I can live with the high pitch painful noise at the highest setting, and the temperature regulation of constantly turning on and off and on and off is annoying so far. I hope I will learn to love it though. I’ll update in a few months when I really get a chance to delve into it.
Oh, and the other guy who rated it 1 star and said you have to mess with the lock button to start it is smoking crack. You hold your finger on the power button (wet or dry, I intentionally tested that) for 3 seconds, the blue screen turns on and then you press the menu button. The unit automatically starts at power level 5. You just have to match sure the pan is on the burner before you start it.
UPDATE: I figured out that reading the instructions is a good thing! The temperature mode and the power setting mode do function differently. I was thinking it was just two ways to look at the same heat level, but not true. The temperature mode tries to keep the pan at the temp setting you chose (keep in mind the pan temp will be different than the food temp in the pan!). It sucks at this. This is why I was having so many issues with the power cycling. I redid my before water test, this time at 120F degree setting, and the water immediately spiked to 150F and then throughout the course of 30 minutes would drop to a low of 105F. If you took an average of it’s temp over that time it actually might have been pretty dang close to 120F or maybe 130F, but with those highs and lows it would be terrible for any chocolate work or anything you needed even temps for.
Now, since I am using the power mode things are waaaay better with the power cycling. It just doesn’t do it. I did the water test again, this time with 2 cups of water and I used the ".5" power setting which is the lowest. Over the course of 45 minutes the water ranged from 134F to 138F with fluctuations in between throughout. The first half hour it was usually closest to 135F, but near the end was reading consistently 137F.
For this pot that I was using, this means the lowest effective and reliable temperature this cooktop can do is about 135F Degrees. This might still be better than other units out there, but I was hoping for less. But I am fairly happy now that I know the power cycling is mostly an issue with the temp settings and not the power settings. I’m almost certainly only going to be using the power settings from here on out, unless I’m doing a long simmering chili or something with a lot of mass in it to help even the fluctuations.
J. Loomis –
The cooktop does exactly what it needs but overall feels like they cut corners on so much. After buying this, unless the look was important to you, I would get the very cheapest version of it. The extra money doesn’t really offer much
Pros
1. Relatively cheap, but in hindsight I would have gone with the cheapest version duxtop
2. Looks ok but IMO not much better than the cheaper one
3. Boil and keep warm buttons are ok but essentially worthless. Just shortcuts to turning the power level to 10 or 1
4. Heat control seems really nice and honestly I don’t have any problems with it. If you are currently using a traditional electric burner this will be a vast improvement(maybe not so much if your using gas). I do not use the temp setting, I only use the 1-10 power levels which increase in .5 increments. I would never expect a stovetop burner to keep my pan at a set temp(seems pointless to me).
5. Boil times are amazing, better than traditional electric burners and way better than gas.
6. The surface of the burner stays relatively cool. I wouldn’t recommend touching right after cooking but it doesn’t not hold heat.
Cons
1. You have a 5″ coil and a small bare spot in the middle. This does not give you even heating at all for a large pan. Cast Iron, Carbon Steel, and Stainless do not heat up evenly at all. If you use something with a copper/aluminum core(paired with a compatible metal) you will get fairly even heating but no thanks to the burner. Slowly heating larger pans helps but heat distribution will never even out. To be fair, cheap gas stoves don’t heat anymore evenly, but I do think traditional electric glass top stoves heat the most evenly(it just depends on the size of the coil is comparison to the pan).
2. The fan is way louder than it needs to be. I don’t hate the fan and you get used to it. But I have worked with electronic long enough to know that you can great decent airflow without this much noise. I assume they just used a cheap fan to reduce costs.
3. Coil Whine – I am assuming the high pitched ringing you hear when you first turn this thing on is coil whine. I could be wrong though. It reminds me of a graphics card under a heavy load, but louder. The whine varies drastically with the type of pan used. Thick cast iron seems to generate very little whine, thinner stainless generates a bit more. But the clad pans I use which have copper/stainless combo generate the most whine. I might have a defective unit because I know coil whine varies on graphics cards, but I am not sure. The whine is very loud as the pan heats up but dissipates fairly quickly. With most of the pans the whine goes away or becomes unnoticeable once the pan is warmed up. The clad pans never stop making the noise but does become much quieter once the pan has heated up.
Reba Alice –
We got this induction burner to try out induction cooking and see if it could be a viable replacement for our propane gas stovetop. We had been seeing a lot of news articles about propane and natural gas leaking cancer-causing chemicals into the house, and we wanted to transition away from using propane anyway because our tank needed to be replaced. The burner is very easy to use, and the instructions were excellent at helping us learn how to cook with induction. My favorite aspect is that the heat level can be selected using specific numbers. When we later looked for built-in induction cooktops, we found that many of them lacked this wonderful feature, so we decided to just continue using this portable cooktop instead of installing one, and bought a second portable induction cooktop from this same brand, which we also love.
There are a few downsides which were not enough of a big deal to us to outweigh the benefits:
As other reviews mention, there is a high-pitched humming noise when the unit is heating up. Some of our family members, particularly children, were greatly bothered by this in the beginning, while adults who don’t hear as well noticed it but weren’t bothered by it much. The noise pitch and volume seems to vary depending on the type of cookware used–generally, more ferrous materials such as cast iron seem to make less noise, and nonstick pans that just have a layer of metallic surface on the bottom made the most noise.
We found it’s much more usable with a silicone mat–otherwise the pan can easily slide around on the cooktop, particularly when you’re boiling water and it splashes over the sides.
There is a slight learning curve to cooking with induction, but as a pretty functional family “cook” who makes just simple dishes, I found it very intuitive. Much of the challenge was that I decided to also learn how to cook with cast iron at the same time, and that also has its own learning curve, which I found to be steeper than cooking with induction.
Many people we’ve shared our positive induction experience with are incredulous that we were okay with buying all new cookware, but we used this as an opportunity to clear out a lot of the cookware clutter from our kitchen. We found we really only ever used a few pans anyway, and we were happy to have an excuse to replace our cookware that had scratches in the nonstick coating, which likely wasn’t good for us to keep using anyway.
I would highly recommend this induction burner to anyone looking to try out cooking with induction, relatively inexpensively. We’ve had it for a year, using it several times a week usually, and it has always performed consistently well.
Mountain Voyageur –
I chose Duxtop because online reviews are nearly unanimous in ranking that #1 unless going to a much more expensive unit. I also like that it has 20 power levels — in my experience, the 10 levels that most of its competitors have are just not enough (the main problem is not having enough fine-grained control at the low end).
I tried a few things when I first got it and found that any issues don’t really matter to me in practice. The coil diameter is smaller than on the much more expensive units, but my pots spread the heat well enough that I do not notice it when actually cooking. (The only exception was an 11″ 12-quart All-Clad stockpot, but that’s awfully big for a countertop unit.) Another thing I noticed is that the coil pulsing is more pronounced than on a much more expensive Vollrath unit. Again, in practice, I never notice that when actually cooking.
One thing that I was pleased to confirm is power. The power of a countertop unit is limited by the home’s circuit breaker so the Duxtop is as powerful as a more expensive unit, albeit delivered through a smaller coil. The result is that the Duxtop can boil water (or do any other cooking) as quickly as a more expensive unit.
Another thing I like, and take to be a sign of good quality, is that its power cord is quite heavy and its plug is well-designed for gripping. There is no reason to pull on the cord when unplugging. That is good because my one minor quibble is that, while there is an on/off control, it has a very bright LED even when off. Duxtop says to unplug it between uses. A minor quibble, but not really a problem for me.
The one thing I cannot comment on is its temperature control. My cooking has not involved that, so I cannot say how well it holds a temperature. Based on the reviews I read, I have no reason to question that aspect — it’s just that I have no personal experience to report.
Other than that it is well-designed, attractive, easy to understand, works well, and I use it a lot — several times most days. I am glad I chose the Duxtop.
Amy CC –
Absolutely wonderful. Just amazing how quickly the pan heats up. You can boil water more quickly, and perfectly even heating. It is rather funny that it beeps if you pick the pan up while it’s on. I get that the pan has to be in contact with the surface for it to heat up, but sometimes you have to pick the pan up to get the butter/oil to evenly coat the pan. I need to look to see if there’s a way to turn that beeping feature off. It’s mildly annoying.
Seattlite –
I gave this a 4 even though it didn’t work for my application and it did not have features that I saw as important. But on a price vs performance basis it’s a 4.
I wanted to try induction cooking so I bought this plus a new induction capable pan and an infrared thermometer. I also have a plug that lets me measure the current the device is drawing.
1) the docs say it delivers 1880 watts. But it draws just under 12 amps at full power. 12 amps times 120 volts is 1440 watts. Unless the laws of physics are different when it is used it cannot deliver more power than it draws. And that doesn’t even account for normal inefficiencies and losses.
2) Despite that, it heats fast. I filled the pot with 2 cups of water and brought it to a boil. 4.5 mins. I refilled the pot and brought it to a boil, 4.4 minutes. essentially the same. Very satisfactory.
3) I tried heating the new pan to see how evenly it heated and weather or not it overshot the target temperature. I set the target to 260 degrees and it overshot to 320. But the IR thermometer showed that there was only +/- 20 degree temp difference over the surface of the pot.
4) I then tried my trusty, ancient cast iron frying pan. It overshot by 200 degrees!!! the pan was smoking. plus it didn’t heat evenly. The temp differences were over 100F across the pot.
I finally figured out why.
The shiny new stainless steel pan has a much higher effective radiance than my crusty, well worn, well covered iron pan and the unit has no way of adjusting for effective radiance. According to the manual of my thermometer my iron pan has about 1/5 the radiance of that shiny new pan, so the sensor of the unit could not accurately measure the temperature, not even close to accurate.
+++ a necessary feature for my use would be a way to allow the unit to compensate for the reduced radiance. Maybe higher priced units have this???
5 – Another feature I would need is the ability to adjust the power at the same time I set a target temperature. This unit lets you set the power or set the target temperature. But if you set the target temperature it uses maximum power until it detects that the target has been reached. I would like to be able to set a target temperature and still control how fast it heats, i.e. set both the target temp and the power.
6 – Lastly there is no way to remember a setting. If you change between power and target temperature it always goes back to the defaults. If this cooktop had the features I mentioned above I would want to be able to store settings and recall them. It would take a while to figure out what a correct setting was for any pot or recipe and I wouldn’t want to have to figure it out over and over again.
7 – the last thing is the uneven heating of the cast iron pot. I believe this was caused by the unevenness of the pan itself. It’s not perfectly flat so it does not have the same contact across the pot, resulting in a different distance between the pot and the source of the energy. I strongly suspect this is why it didn’t heat evenly.
8 – and the last, last thing. Induction cooktops don’t heat the sides of the pan. Not important in many recipes but sometimes you need to have the side of the pan at the same temperature as the bottom. Easy to do on a gas stove, impossible on an induction stove. Not fault to the unit though, physics is physics.
Still, problems aside, I think this is a good unit for the money. It does heat fast. It uses less energy than either a gas or a radiant electric stove. It’s just not right for me.
D. Booth –
I’ll admit I’m a sucker for kitchen gadgets and small appliances. But it must have been a well-placed ad that got to me late one evening, when, within the space of half an hour, I went from never having heard of a standalone induction hub to having one in my cart to be delivered the next morning.
That order went in a week ago today. In that time, I have used my gas cook top only for conducting comparison tests to see how much time, if any, the induction would save me over the gas. My kitchen is not a certified laboratory, but the results were pretty much as expected, with one surprise.
I used 5 different pans for testing. All All-Clad and Tramontina vessels are tri-ply. For the first test I boiled 2 cups of water in the following pans with these results:
5” All-Clad saucepan: Induction (I): 3 minutes; Gas (G): 6.75 minutes
NOTE: Part of the difference is no doubt due to having to use the smallest burner on the gas stove for this small pan.
All-Clad saucepan: I: 3 minutes; G: 5.25 minutes
All-Clad Dutch oven size: I: 3 minutes; G: 4 minutes
Le Creuset 2-1/4 quart saucier pan: I: 3.2 minutes; G 4.5 minutes
For the second test, I boiled 5 quarts of water in one pot:
Tramontina pasta pot: I: 22 minutes; G: 22.5 minutes
WHOA. That last one was a surprise and disappointing one at that. I repeated it somewhat in the All-Clad Dutch oven with 4 quarts of water, and the results were similarly similar. Is the hob working right? Has anybody else had the same results? Still, if it is working right, it’s not a deal killer. I’m used to planning for water to take this long to boil, and I’d much rather be doing it on a heating source that is not polluting my household with deadly gasses for that much time.
In addition to the boiling-water tests, I cooked vegetarian chili in the Dutch oven (see photo), made oat-milk chocolate pudding in the Le Creuset, fried eggs in a black steel /carbon steel frying pan, warmed up left overs, heated soup for lunches; and I was happy with all results.
As to usability, I was concerned that the interface might be tricky, but I picked it up quickly. Not bad for a seriously senior senior citizen.
The pan does have a tendency to slide if you’re stirring vigorously. My handles and lids did not get hot; however, so can can quickly keep a pot from getting too far away without burning myself to stop it.
I like its look and the design with a controls at a slant. As a shorty, every little detail like that is helpful. It is lightweight, but a bit bulky. I definitely read the size specs before buying it but was probably hoping it wouldn’t really be that big.
As a compulsive wiper-upper I found myself accidentally changing settings whenever I automatically swiped whatever I had managed to splatter on it. At least things it cleans up easily, unlike that gas monster.
My biggest concern is that when I plug it in, the electricity arcs. What does that mean? Something wrong with my wiring, the unit, nothing to worry about it?
I’d like to store it on its side but haven’t found any documentation about that yet.
And, finally, regarding the noise it makes. The fan seems a bit loud for such a small device, but it is waaaay less noisy than the exhaust fan above my cooktop that seems to just send the stinky gas fumes to a vent above the microwave and shoot it back into the room. I have only heard the other noise, kind of a hissing noise, a few times. It hasn’t been very loud. If I move the pan a little bit, sometimes it goes away. I consider myself pretty sensitive to sounds, and it hasn’t bothered me. Fortunately, my floor plan is pretty open. If I was in a closed off kitchen where noise had no place to go, it might be more of a problem.
I have a modest-sized kitchen that has no vacant countertop space begging to be filled. If I add something, it most likely means, something else has got to be relocated. For that to happen I have must have a great need or desire for the new product. This is undoubtedly worth it. It saves time in most cases, doesn’t harm the atmosphere, and it takes the pressure off replacing the old gas beast and paying for new wiring to get a new stove. If I had a tad-bit more space, I’d probably get the double-burner version. As it is, I’ll keep using this and add another single burner if I want to later.
Richard H. –
I have a gas stove which I like but still want to minimize — especially in the Summer since I don’t have air conditioning. The cooktop works very very well and is easy to use. The settings are easy to use and the cooktop responds quickly to changes. It is very portable so I often use it outside to eliminate heat and also it helps reduce the smell of frying onions and garlic in the house. Very satisfied. Easy to clean.
Creig –
I owned a Tramontina induction hot plate for several years before it recently stopped working. It was excellent for searing meat especially steaks, and good for only a few other tasks because the temperature control was crude. This DUX unit, by comparison, is fantastic. What a great improvement! It seems all these less expensive induction hot plates, including this one, control cooking temperature by cycling the power on and off as opposed to controlling the induction coil current. Most of them offer a pan surface that alternates between too hot and too cold . This DUX unit has somehow overcome this problem by using much finer control of the duty cycle. The result is vastly improved temperature control and an induction hot plate that is useful for more than just boiling water or searing meat. The Dux is well designed and very nice looking. This is without any question a best buy. I got a “used” one in a box that had been opened at a nice discount. Could not tell it from a brand new one. Unless you need a 220V unit for use with much larger pots and pans, get this one. Remarkably it will control well all the way from blazing hot to warm at approx. 125 deg F. It has a useful timer that goes up to 10 hours and shuts the unit off when the time is up. This DUX unit is far more useful than competing induction hot plates because of its good temperature control, very wide range of settings and timer. It could be the heat source for a fine crockpot substitute. Of course, as with all of these less expensive induction hot plates, you will want to learn to control the temperature indirectly using the numeric settings that control the duty cycle. This one goes from 0.5 to 10 in 0.5 increments giving you a total of twenty settings. The Dux can be made to read out temperature directly but the reading will only be approximate, and may be quite inaccurate in some situations. This in no way affects the usefulness of the Dux however. If temperature is critical, use an “instant” read thermometer. One of the big surprises is that you can make Hollandaise sauce directly without a double boiler if you have the right utensil.. For example, the 12 cm Barazzoni belly shaped milk pot with heavy wire handle is perfect for this purpose. Its base is only 9 cm which is wide enough to let the DUX top know there is a pot on it, so it won’t shut itself off, but small enough to fit mostly within the central circle of the Dux. To make a one egg yolk Hollandaise, for example — something not easy to do directly on a gas or electric range without using a double boiler– put one cold egg yolk and 4-5 Tbs of cold butter in chunks into the pot all at the same time! The butter can even be frozen! Put the pot dead center on the Duxtop and set it to a low setting “1”. You can tinker with the heat a little by moving the pot slightly off center and then back to center as needed, or lifting it, something you can’t do with most competing units without having to reset the controls. Whisk until the butter is incorporated and then season the sauce in the usual way. This goes very fast, about a minute or two. This is the easiest anyone is ever going to make a perfect hollandaise sauce.
Since reviewing this duxtop, I had a chance to use the beautifully sleek induction cooktop sold by IKEA. The IKEA unit is about half the price, however it lacks fine control of cooking temperature (10 settings versus 20 available on the Duxtop Model 96xx) resulting in significantly more coarse temperature control and a very noticeable cycling between on and off. Furthermore the IKEA unit, as do most other brands, shuts of quickly if the cooking utensil is lifted from the surface and stays off until manually reset, whereas the Duxtop, while it also shuts off to protect the unit, will restart without changing its settings when the cookware is placed back in contact with the surface within a minute or less. Quite often one needs to lift a pan to flip its contents, or for even finer heat control. Having used this Duxtop for a while now, I can’t say enough good things about it, it is truly a remarkably well designed and extremely functional induction hot plate for home use..
I noticed another review mentioned that they like another brand of induction hotplate better because it boiled water, by their test, 20 seconds faster than the Duxtop. I need not point out how absurd this is. Twenty seconds difference over 4 minutes will result from small differences in the amount of water or the precise positioning of the pan. There is no statistical difference between the time to boil water between these two hot plates. You’d have to repeat this test many times under careful control to have any chance of detecting any real difference in the time to boil water. Incidentally, none of these 1800 watt induction hot plates will boil substantial amounts of water significantly faster than many conventional, natural gas stoves. That’s not where an induction cooktop has an edge over a good gas range. The Duxtop is better at controlling both time and temperature than a gas stove and it both heats and cools the surface of a pan far more rapidly. All induction cooktops, even the lousy ones, will get a pan surface blazing hot very fast on their top setting and are superior for searing meat, but do this outdoors unless you have efficient kitchen stove ventilation, because there is going to be smoke, and lots of it. The only place where the top setting should ever be needed is in bringing water to a boil quickly. The high heat of vaporization of water gives some protection to the cooking unit. If you want to shorten the life of the induction hotplate, use it at the top setting (10) on a dry pan for extended periods! In searing meat a setting above 8 is not needed. This is undoubtedly why when one selects the boil function on the Duxtop it automatically sets the power level to 10 and automatically sets the timer to 10 minutes; yet another wise protective feature of the Duxtop that competing units do not have.
Another big advantage induction cooktops have over any range with an open flame is that a paper towel can safely substitute as a pan lid to trap splatters of moisture and fat while letting steam escape. This arrangement can be used in combination with a lid, which will trap both splatters and steam. Many meats nowadays come pumped full of salt solutions,e.g., most bacon brands. These meats, when fried in an open pan, will create a mess of fat spatters. If a lid is used, steamed rather than browned meat results. Induction cooking solves these problems. Bacon, for example, is as easily prepared, and without creating a mess, on the Duxtop as it is in a microwave by substituting a paper towel for a pan lid. Nothing browns meat faster or more conveniently than an induction cooktop, and there is no mess to clean up!.
All in all this is a remarkably good induction hot plate, and is perhaps the first inexpensive induction hot plate for home use to give highly satisfactory temperature control over a very wide range. It brings an inexpensive, portable home unit very close to the control one previously had to pay far more to achieve. In this sense, this appears to be an appliance that breaks new ground that all other home-use induction hotplates will be forced to emulate. We can think of the Duxtop as bringing to the serious home cook what was previously available only in professional or high-end home kitchens. Like the iconic Kitchenaid Mixer that brought professional orbital mixing action to home cooks, this 96xx series of Duxtops appears to me to be the first inexpensive induction cooktop to give professional quality induction temperature control. The only difference you are likely to experience between this unit and one costing far more is the size of the pans and the volume of liquids that it can handle. In most cases this duxtop unit will be sufficient for cooking four to six servings using most standard sized pots and pans. You can successfully use somewhat larger pans up to the width of the unit if you use a lower power setting and allow more time for conduction to even out the pan surface temperature. The only possible improvement I would like to see would be one still lower power setting of say 0.25. That could be even more useful for fermentations such as making of creme fraiche in a bain marie. The present model goes down to a still amazing and very useful 0.5. Yes, you can melt chocolate at the 0.5 lowest setting, but keep your eye on it and stir. After using this thing daily for a few months, I am still amazed at what it can do and how well it does it!
edit 2020: After daily use for 9 months haven’t changed my mind. A beautifully engineered product. Will be the standard against which all competitors must compete. And the price remains amazingly low for this kind of quality and function. One of the best products for the money I have ever purchased.
edit sept. 2020: Oh my goodness, is this thing ever great! Now I hardly ever use my otherwise great Bosch range’s gas cook top. For those in the Southern part of the U.S. that make gumbo regularly, this duxtop is a fantastic roux maker because of its great temperature control. It will make it possible for even an amateur chef to achieve an almost black roux without burning it. Look up Chef Paul Prudhomme’s method in his cookbook. Use an enameled, cast iron, dutch oven.
Edit: After 19 Months of daily use, still perfect in every way.
Edit: I continue to be impressed with the spectacular engineering that went into this product. I use it daily, seldom using my Bosch gas stove top. Beware of imposters that look similar but do not offer the all-important 20 levels of heat control, a 10-hour timer and also permit a pan to be lifted from the surface with the unit operating without having to reset the controls (very useful feature!). I have learned that the Duxtop has a number of circuit and heat protection features that are only evident after much use. What a great induction cooktop this is!
Edit Mar 2023: Approaching four years now of daily use. Still functions like brand new and looks almost brand new.
Mike Brennan –
I purchased this cooktop because it got the highest recommendation from New York Time’s Wirecutter, which has been testing induction cooktops for years, and because it seemed like a good way to dip my toe into the induction cooking pool for not a lot of money. It also provided a quick and easy way to reduce the use of my gas stove. Cooking with gas can have a detrimental effect on indoor air quality and indeed personal health, something most of us have not taken as seriously as we should.
And as the electricity grid becomes increasingly powered by renewables like wind and solar, phasing out all use of fossil fuels in favor of electric appliances will become increasingly desirable. Thus I wanted to get a glimpse of what my cooking future might look like a few years from now, given that I’ve long believed that gas provides the best cooking experience.
It’s interesting how admirable qualities in an appliance can be swamped by irritations — something every product designer should take seriously. For me the biggest irritation by far is that the unit beeps continuously whenever it’s turned on but without an appropriate (ie., ferrous) pot or skillet positioned on the cooktop. The beep is not loud, but it is insistent, and few things irritate me more than being nagged by my machines, especially when it’s so needless. (I turn off the sound on my microwave for this very reason. I’ll remove my food when I FEEL LIKE IT, thank you very much.) And having become sensitized, I have an increasingly negative reaction every time the beeping happens. That’s not the kind of relationship you want with your cooktop. Perhaps I should get some counseling.
The nagging happens every morning when I make my coffee. I heat my water kettle on the cooktop, and remove the kettle to slowly pour hot water over my ground coffee. The cooktop starts its hissy-fit the instant the kettle is removed. No pot! It beeps. And beeps. And beeps. Oh, the horror of not having a pot in place.
The idea for me is to pour some hot water over the grounds, then return the kettle to the cooktop while the coffee drips, then come back to pour some more water, and so forth. But during the pouring the cooktop is having its mini-nervous breakdown about the missing pot. There’s a palpably emotional insistence in both of us, the cooktop and me, to HURRY with the pouring and get that kettle pack onto the thing, to make the thing stop beeping.
This is all so unnecessary. Part of the rationale for beeping might be to remind the novice user of what kind of cookware will and will not work. Glass cookware, for example, won’t work. Non-magnetic stainless won’t work either. Cookware to which a magnet will stick does work. The cooktop detects whether induction-capable cookware is in position, and notifies the user when it is not. On the LCD display, for example, which flashes Pot! when one is missing.
The novice will soon learn what cookware is compatible with his unit. Even without the beeping, a good clue about incompatible cookware is that the cookware does not get hot. The blinking display is another reasonable clue. The incessant beeping is not.
Once the user has figured out what cookware does and doesn’t work, the beeping and even the flashing display serves no useful purpose, other than to tell the user what he can plainly see for himself by glancing at the cooktop and noticing the absence of a pot. No pot? I know, you idiot machine, I’m holding that pot RIGHT NOW while I make my coffee.
It’s important to understand that the absence of a pot poses no safety issues whatsoever. The cooktop itself does not get hot in any case, because induction only produces heat IN THE METAL STRUCTURE OF THE PAN, not on the surface of the cooktop. And anyway, the cooktop won’t energize the induction mechanism without an appropriate pot being in place, so literally nothing is going on in the absence of a pot. Everything is cool, literally and metaphorically. In that respect an induction stove is safer than either gas or conventional electric.
Did I mention that I very much dislike gratuitous beeping? But to be clear, a discreet for the purpose of auditory feedback during the operation of the controls, such as when adjusting the cooking level, is fine.
What else? Well, the actual active induction zone seems smaller than I thought it would be. It appears to be about 6 inches in diameter. You can readily see this by placing an inch or so of water in a large diameter skillet and bringing it to a boil. A tight circle of boiling water develops about 6 inches across in the center of the pan, with not much happening outside that circle. If all you’re doing is boiling a liquid, such as when I make my coffee, this is not a problem, because convective forces keep the liquid mixed and at a uniform temperature. But it might be a problem for other kinds of cooking.
The effect is interesting to observe. While I certainly didn’t expect uniform edge-to-edge heating on a 12-inch skillet, this smallish induction zone came as a bit of a surprise. And it demonstrates how tightly concentrated is the induced energy, so much so that it can somewhat overwhelm the ability of even a high quality skillet to evenly distribute the heat outside that induction zone. By contrast, a gas burner has a flame that spreads out over the entire bottom of the pan and can even go up the sides, which results in a larger area of uniformity for more even heat across the entire pan. For that reason the gas burner will almost certainly cook more evenly, even though the induction element is more energy efficient because all the energy used to produce heat is induced in the pan itself.
A couple of further comments on this. First, this is a PORTABLE cooktop. I have no experience with the capabilities of built-in induction cooktops. They might do a much better job of handling a variety of pan sizes. Something to investigate. And it might be argued that a portable cooktop is really only intended to be used with smaller pans anyway. All that said, it seems to me that a somewhat larger induction zone — say, 8 inches — would be a big improvement, and would be more suited to most of the cookware I use.
Another thing that surprised me a little is that energy output (ie, heat control) is produced by pulsing the induction element. One thing that’s said about induction stoves is that the temperature change is instantaneous, similar to gas. And it is. Maybe even more so, since with gas the heat must be conducted from outside the pan. But the heating output of this cooktop is controlled by in effect turning the induction element on and off over appropriate intervals to maintain the desired temperature or heat level. You can hear that happening when you’re boiling water at reduced power: The boiling sound starts and stops, starts and stops, starts and stops. I would have thought that the induction element would run continuously, with its power output continuously adjusted according to the desired cooking temperature. This isn’t necessarily a criticism. At least, I don’t think so.
And speaking of sound, this unit is somewhat noisy. That’s because it has an internal fan to cool its own electronics while it’s running, and presumably also to remove the small amount of heat that is conducted into the cooktop from the bottom of a hot pan. The NYT review warns of this, and also points out that the sound level from the cooktop is no louder than running a kitchen exhaust fan — which you really should be doing if you’re cooking with gas.
All this reads like a list of negatives, although I really didn’t set out to write a scathing critique. Better maybe to call this product a collection of mostly reasonable tradeoffs, except for the gratuitous beeping, which is an outright design flaw. The build quality certainly seems good. It’s really easy to wipe clean. The unit is compact enough to not take up an inordinate amount of counter space, and is easy enough to relocate or put away when it does. It makes it easy to augment your current cooking setup. It’s priced low enough to make for a low-risk purchase, and if you find you like the product you might view it as a bargain. It does draw a lot of power, which is a consideration given that it plugs into a standard wall outlet. That means there really oughtn’t be too much else on the same electrical circuit while the cooktop is operating. Otherwise you’ll find yourself blowing breakers. This unit will use all the capacity of a 15 amp circuit, and three fourths the capacity of a 20 amp circuit.
So, then. Do I wish a few things were different? Yeah. Would I buy it again? I think so. Would my rating be higher than 3 stars without the stupid beeping? Absolutely.