By now you probably know about the problems with gas stoves. Carbon emissions from burning the gas are probably not the worst of these, since cooking is a smallish percentage of home energy usage; indoor air pollution and methane leaks are bigger issues. For new construction, going with induction instead is a no-brainer: it’s efficient, safe, professional-quality, and heats your food, not your kitchen.
But if you’re renting, replacing your stove isn’t really an option. And even for owners of existing homes with gas, converting to induction is a pain, something typically put off till the next big kitchen remodel. Not only are the ranges themselves expensive, but because they draw lots of current, you usually need electrical work and maybe a panel upgrade too.
This is certainly our situation: our breaker panel is already full, or very close to it, and our stove is a 36-inch Viking installed by the previous owner in a 2001 renovation. 36-inch stoves are much more expensive than 30-inch ones because they’re considered luxury products, and a new 36-inch induction range is typically $5K or more before you even talk to an electrician. But we didn’t want to wait till remodel time to start reducing our gas usage. So we explored options for doing better incrementally.
In summary:
You probably want to start with a freestanding plug-in induction burner. They’re cheap and the newest ones supposedly work well. We unluckily tried a bad one first: do not buy a Cuisinart Tasty One Top.
Instead of trying a different cheap induction burner, we went high-end and got a Vermicular Musui-Kamado. This is still much less expensive than a new range, and it is super awesome so we use it all the time.
If you regularly dry-roast or oven-fry small amounts of food, a countertop oven or convection microwave might also be worth trying.
Small burner, big difference
A typical gas stove, just like a typical car, is an appliance whose full capacity one uses very rarely. So adding a single induction burner can save you a lot of gas-cooking time, just as an e-bike can save you a lot of driving trips. All those one-pot meals, stir-fries, weeknight packaged pastas and so on can be done gas-free, and even for more complicated meals you can often cut gas usage in half.
But to realize that savings, you need to actually use the burner whenever possible. Ideally you want it to sit full-time on the stovetop on top of an appropriately covered burner, especially if you’ve got a range hood. So it’s worth prioritizing usability, because almost tautologically…
Usable things get used
We learned this the hard way when we bought a Tasty One Top. It seemed very futuristic and sleek, it looked cool, and it connected to a slick app that supposedly lets you do “precision cooking” with the help of a temperature probe. But it didn’t fit in well enough with our existing cooking practices to get frequent use.
Part of that was the form factor; the cool-looking shape fit awkwardly in our medium-sized kitchen and the footprint is much bigger than a typical range burner. The sleek minimal interface was too minimal to make it easy to set a heating level and check the cooking status— maybe things would have been easier with the app, but nobody actually wants to use a specialized app every time they cook, or at least we sure don’t. Adding insult to injury, you are supposed to be able to use most steel-clad pans with induction, but the One Top only ever worked with cast iron: our All-Clad and similar stuff didn’t register as ferrous enough, or something like that.
There are now much more practical-looking and even cheaper consumer induction burners on the market. I haven’t tried any of them, but if I were going to I would start with Wirecutter's recommendations. $100 or less for a basic burner, and maybe $30 for a Lodge cast iron pan, is an awfully cost-efficient way to save some gas. But we are fancy-gadget people, and there’s a very nice fancy-gadget alternative that we love.
Musui-Kamado FTW
Vermicular is a Japanese cookware company and the Musui-Kamado is their flagship product. It consists of a bowl-shaped induction cooker and a 4 liter enameled cast iron pot designed to fit in the bowl, with a matching cast iron lid machined to very snugly fit the top of the pot. It comes with a cookbook and guide, some of whose recipes are very nice, but we soon found ourselves mostly using it for freeform normal cooking.
The touchscreen interface is pleasant to navigate after a bit of initial learning. There are essentially five settings:
Medium, a heat level good for searing/sauteing or bringing water to the boil
Low, good for long braising or steady simmering
Very Low, good for “just barely bubbling” simmering
Warm, with adjustable temperatures between I think 70-200 F, for slow-cooker, sous vide, or keep-warm use
And a rice cooking mode with presets for different kinds, amounts, and styles of rice, because Japan.
“Musui” apparently means “steam roasting” and the idea is that because the lid fits so snugly you can cook things in their own moisture. If you’ve ever made a recipe that told you to put foil or a dishcloth between pot and lid to get a really good seal, this is similar, only the seal is even better. Between that and the very even heat provided by the purpose-built induction cooker, we find that it replaces not only much of our stovetop cooking but much of our oven use too— things like pot roasts or confit that need hours in an enclosed vessel in a slow oven are perfect for this.
So, yeah, we use it almost every day and it sits on top of a now-disused stove burner that we covered with a piece of steel you can buy on Etsy. It costs $730 which seems like an awful lot, since you could probably get at least 80% of the same functionality with a $75 Duxtop burner and a $60 Lodge double dutch oven. But it looks beautiful, the pot is an extremely high quality piece of kit (if Le Creuset were Japanese, these are the pots they would make) and it Just Works, and it’s still an order of magnitude less cost and hassle than a new induction range!
Ovens and half-baked ideas
That’s the stovetop solution: what about the oven solution? Seems pretty wasteful to heat up several cubic feet of airspace every time you want to serve your kid some chicken nuggets, no?
There’s no shortage of alternatives on the market: countertop ovens, air fryers, and combinations of the two are now legion. There are even “convection microwaves” which pair regular microwave functions with a resistance heating element. As with induction burners, even the expensive ones are much less expensive than a new range.
We looked into getting one of these briefly, but concluded we wouldn’t use it enough: our baking is mostly either “put a pot in a slow oven for hours” which the Vermicular can now replace, or “make a big sheet pan or two worth of cookies/roast potatoes/whatever” for which a countertop oven is too small. But that’s open to reevaluation. If you have a convection microwave which you like and often use to substitute for a regular oven, please let me know in the comments!
Personally, I've had electric-coil stoves my whole life. I gather induction is more efficient than electric-coil conditional on using suitable pots, but I don't have a good sense of how much and it's been hard to find induction cost-benefit analyses that don't assume you're starting from gas.
Those portable induction burners do look neat, though. I don't think I'll have room in my budget for it for a while, but I'll keep it in mind.
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I'd never heard of convection microwaves before, but I do love our countertop oven. It's great for baked potatoes, fish, reheating food that needs to crisp up (rather than getting soggy in the microwave), almond-cheddar biscuits, and of course toast (they don't call them toaster ovens for nothing). In theory I can bake a whole quiche in it, but I usually pair quiche with potatoes and there isn't room for both.
For "put a pot in a slow oven for hours", we use a crockpot. In the summer we put it in the non-climate-controlled back entryway; in the winter we put it indoors (on top of the stove), to recycle the waste heat towards heating the house.