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Comment by nemo44x | Hacker News Reader

Heating up water quickly is almost never a use case. It is not on the critical path for optimizations either. Unless you subsist on boiling noodles when you’re late for a meeting.

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Making spaghetti/tortellini/noodles, coffee, malt-o-meal, oatmeal, etc seems common enough for most to not be a "almost never use case". At least on stoves I've seen.

> Heating up water quickly is almost never a use case.

It'd be helpful for my household for hot water for coffee and tea, and it'd also help us for heating up some extra water for grits or risotto when they need more.

Also, isn't boiling water just the measurable outcome of the test but what matters is that the pot is coming to temp sooner? Pots and pans heating up more quickly is helpful all the time.

Electric kettles are great for heating water quickly.

Pans coming to temp sooner would be useful if the gap was measured in large units of time but it isn’t. I care more about the properties of the pan and fire more. For instance cast iron pan is used to hold a lot of heat but isn’t very reactive. A copper pan can heat up quickly but more importantly it can change temps quickly. This is known as reactivity.

For instance maybe I want to sear a pork chop on high heat and then drop the burner and toss in butter and herbs. I need reaction (in this case the pan cooling quickly) for this basic technique or else I have burned my butter.

Its like having a car with outrageous acceleration. In the case of a car you are wildly careening all over the road doing cruisin usa wheelies backflips barrelrolls and all. In a pan it means scorched butter and half cooked bacon compared to burnt bacon on the same pan.

Main thing induction seems actually worse for is being able to lift the pan above cooking surface and differentially heat different parts of the pan, particularly useful for Chinese/wok cooking.

I like this for making eggs too. And lots of things.

Seems to be a function available in high quality cooktops? Here, called ProfessionalMode: https://www.vzug.com/ch/en/products/kitchen/cooktops/inducti...

But the main function of any stove is to heat things up. Induction can simply do that faster. Boiling water is just an easy way to measure it

I guess you don’t cook? The main function of a stove is to work with your pans/etc to create the heat you desire. Different applications have different requirements. I may use a cast iron pan to store a lot of heat and release it over some time. I may have another where I want to change temperatures in the pan quickly, which is far more common for me.

For example I may use high heat to sear meat and then drop the heat to add butter and herbs and then use the pan drippings to make a sauce which requires intense heating to deglaze and flambé to enhance flavor and then reduce heat quickly to mount the sauce. Copper is the best material for this and it doesn’t work with induction. High quality steel just doesn’t perform.

To me, this sounds like an argument largely built around the idea that you don't want to learn how to use a new product. Many people have convinced themselves they can't adapt, and I think this follows from the marketing ploys described in the article.

You're downvoted because people who aren't enthusiasts just don't have the experience to understand.

It's like the EU ban[0] on lead paint. Fine artists said "wait but what about Flake white? It's a critical paint! Nothing else compares! We know how to use it safely!" And the response was "Just substitute Titanium white. It's brighter anyway!" But Ti is absolutely not a substitute. It's like telling sculptors to substitute plaster for marble.

[0]I can't recall if the ban was lifted. I live in the US.

EDIT: Don't take my word for it. Here's Michael Harding on the subject, he makes paints that are among the very very best available:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=G1pXT06HXX0

https://www.lucillesmithson.com/single-post/2016/05/06/in-co...

This point is making the opposite case that you think it is though: the artists are basically a tiny population that benefits from keeping lead paint legal while the larger population suffers.

Exactly. Talking how fast to boil water is pretty much useless. Tell me how to actually cook on induction like I do with gas.

The same, only without giving money to Russia.

When it heats it faster, there is less loss into the environment before all of it gets up to the required temperature. Efficiency gains is _always_ the desired optimization when you look at what new energy policies are trying to do.

Electric kettles are even quicker at heating up water and use less power to do so. They are also cheap and can last for decades if taken care of reasonably well.

I use an electric kettle for this.

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