TALKING TECH

Duncan Bell cooks up a storm

While the hob itself was reasonably priced, replacing all my nice pans was not

Ilove cooking, not least because at the end of it, there is some yummy food for me to eat. Or at any rate, there’s some food. Then I shovel it into my gob, so I can later be told by my Japanese scales that I am ‘secretly obese’. I think they struggle with Western physiognomy, to be honest.

Later, I might go and flail about on an elliptical machine, until my watch assures me I’ve burned off all the calories from the yummy food. The display on the smart scales still says, ‘Get off me you fat, Western bastard’ afterwards. Isn’t it great to live in the technological age?

One part of that cycle of consumption and purging that’s never really involved tech till now is the actual cooking of yummy food.

Sure, I flirted in my youth with microwaves and sous vide waterbaths. If you really like food that looks raw but is actually more or less cooked, they are both great devices. Big thumbs up from me.

Cooking without cooking

Recently, however, I took the plunge and got an induction hob. A rather grand induction hob from AEG, in point of fact, with a ‘temperature probe’ that somehow requires neither batteries nor a wire, and a double-sized ‘zone’ for fish kettles, or cooking spaghetti horizontally or something.

It’s a cool and futuristic thing, but I should warn anyone going down this path that cooking with nothing but the white heat of science is not straightforward.

Actually, it’s deceptive to say ‘white heat’ because an induction hob actually radiates no heat. Instead, as you probably know, it uses magnets to swirl the atoms of your pans around, or something.

This, obviously, causes the pans to heat up, just as fridge magnets keep your fridge cool, I expect.

The problem is that, while the hob itself was reasonably priced, replacing all my nice pans was not. This is because, while they were very good at conducting heat, they weren’t magnetic, which they have to be, for induction to work its magnet-based witchcraft on them.

In exactly the same way that if you have clothes moths, they will without fail choose your most expensive jumpers to chow down on, the likelihood of an induction hob working with a saucepan is on an inverted sliding scale based on how expensive and posh they are.

Basic milk pan from Argos? No problem at all. Copper sautée pan from a French brand you can’t pronounce? Not a chance, mate.

Trying to buy new pans is hard as well because, despite what they tell you, nobody in cookware shops or in the business of writing product descriptions online seems to even know what induction is. ‘Can be used on all hobs including induction’ must be one of the most frequently inaccurate pronouncements ever, right up there with the number of calories my watch reckons I’ve burned. I even told a representative from a manufacturer of one pan, ‘I keep getting pans that don’t work on induction, even though they say they do,’ and they chortled and said, ‘That’s ridiculous, but I guarantee this one will work.’

It didn’t. When I told them, they seemed to imply I was lying.

The thing you soon learn when you locate a pan that does work on induction, is that it really works. Turn it up to warm up before you start cooking, and you may turn around 20 seconds later to find it is so red hot it has singed your ceiling, and the handle’s on fire.

Even so, I’d never go back to using boring old gas or ceramic again. Everyone gets excited by the speed with which induction makes things very hot, but its real genius is in how incredibly controllable it is. Turn it down to the lowest setting and you could leave a pan of soup on it for a week without it burning, and the middle settings let you cook food like a pro. Add lower energy bills thanks to induction’s efficiency and you truly have the hob of the future.

Too bad you have to bid adieu to the pans of the present, but progress always come at a cost.