It's true that most induction cooktops/ranges aren't great for woks, but in principle the induction surface doesn't have to be flat -- it can be a concave shape to match the wok.
In fact these exist -- if you search for "induction wok burners" you can see some pictures. (I only recently became aware of this after watching this video of a chef who uses induction cooking in a small kitchen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooNzRrHA9VY)
Perhaps in the future there will be cooktops that include a wok depression on the surface, similar to how some gas stoves today include a built-in wok ring.
You’ll never really get wok hei with induction. It’s a mistake to think of a wok as just a differently shaped pan. Proper wok cooking is cooking is actually mechanically different. It’s mostly done with the hot air that rises up the side of the wok. Modernist cuisine has a great cutaway illustration on this.
The food is constantly flipped into the air above the wok where it is heated by the extremely hot air.
Of course very few homes in the western world have gas burners powerful enough for that anyway. I actually practice on a turkey fryer.
> It’s mostly done with the hot air that rises up the side of the wok.
I am not a cook, but I find it difficult to believe that the heat going by the sides of the pan is cooking the food, rather than the heat going through the pan and heating the air above the pan.
This is because where I've seen someone cooking on a wok, the food barely goes past the edge of the pan.
A sufficiently wok-shaped induction stove will induce the same heat as that going through the pan.
Afaik there is a motion of tossing food in a wok where you throw the food past the rim and catch it again. The moment the food passes the rim, a small flame ignites from the high heat and food oils, creating complex flavors. If you go to Asian restaurants with a wok station or to Southeast Asia/south China you can see this in action.
Wok Hei translates to “breath of the wok” for a reason. The food is constantly in the air, which allows it to dry out. The food spends most of its time not even touching the wok so no, you can’t do it on induction.
Here’s a good description from the Michelin guide:
> The food is constantly in the air, which allows it to dry out
Thank you for treating my ignorance!
Since in order to keep it in the air you have to constantly raise the pot from the cooker, and since induction can't work too far, it is clear why it doesn't work.
Correct! Watch someone who is doing it right and you’ll see the wok and food are in near constant motion. It just can’t be done with anything other than fire.
And there’s no way most of us in the west would know this. Not many people outside of the kitchen a Chinese restaurant would ever see someone do it right here. Most of us just treat a wok like a funny shaped pan.
I’ve been trying to learn the technique for a few years and I’m not great at it.
In a home context its irrelevant. You're not doing true wok cooking at home anyway, your piddly little small bore home gas feed won't be providing anywhere near the required intensity.
Yep. All of the “I want wok hei” complaints are nonsense because virtually no indoor burner ever gets that hot. If you cook in a wok often and want the restaurant taste then an outdoor propane burner does the trick for only a few hundred bucks.
Kenji Lopez-Alt, of Seriouseats and “The Food Lab” fame, is coming out with his new book, “The Wok”, here is his travel rig: https://www.instagram.com/p/CaxbNwdvOTR/. I’ve had a similar wok hob for years, and while fitting the wok to the curvature of the hob is essential, once you’ve got that figured out, it’s an absolute joy to use. Even, fast, powerful heat - nowhere near to a commercial gas hob, but neither is my gas range at home. My next home or kitchen reno will be induction, not even considering gas.
Isn't the reason why woks need gas also that the gas creates a smooth heat gradient up the sides of the wok? How far away from the surface of the stove can an induction element heat a pan?
You're correct, but times change, and the carbon steel wok over a giant burner isn't very suitable for apartment cooking anyway. There are now works designed for use on induction (with aluminium conduction to achieve a heat gradient), and they work pretty well. Also much healthier for the occupants, not as hot in the kitchen and cheaper to operate.
In countries with 240v/10A sockets a plug in electric wok is fine for home cooking. On 110v/15A it is still better than electric radiative cooking, but not as good as gas.
> There are now works designed for use on induction (with aluminium conduction to achieve a heat gradient), and they work pretty well.
This perspective drives me crazy. OK, so induction cooktops are good for the environment. But flat bottom woks are not woks, and you can’t do wok cooking on an induction cooktop. The only people who think that you can, are people who completely lack an understanding of wok cooking techniques.
Why do you think Alibaba (click the link!) has a thousand induction cookers, including ones with a spherical wok shape? You're saying the Chinese don't know how to stir fry?!
I have lived in various places around Asia for about 30 years, including almost my entire childhood. I have spent a tremendous amount of time and effort learning traditional cooking methods from the places I have lived, and I have never ever seen an induction wok cooker in the wild. Alibaba is filled with all sorts of completely useless inventions that never accomplish anything other than a small amount of buyers regret.
I know for a fact that you are arguing from a position of ignorance here, because it is physically impossible for an induction cooktop to replicate what gas provides a wok, which is hot air, something induction surfaces don’t produce. So I’d recommend that you do at least a small amount of research on the topic before you resort to such low effort (and hilariously inaccurate) ad-homs.
It sounds like the induction element cradles the wok. I don’t know about the thermal gradient thing (seems plausible) but in principle you could make a gradient in the field strength right?
I would have thought that a bigger drawback would be that you can’t get even heat input while tossing the wok, though I’m not sure how essential that is
The coils are light enough that you could have them under spring-pressure and lubricated against the wok, so medium tossing height won't affect heat transfer.
It's just a ~1mm thick planar coil out of "Litz wire", covered by a glass plate in a normal stove top.
See https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Induktionskochfeld_S... for what's under the plate. The center silver thing is likely a thermostat/temperature sensor. The electronics may need to be a bit less ignorant to handle a flexible coil, but tracking the tank's resonance isn't even a difficult task; a Royer/Baxandall oscillator could probably be made to work.
No it’s actually because you cook with the extremely hot jet of air that rises up over the sides! You can get that from induction since it doesn’t heat the air.
I've never understood why we need 4 or 5 burner ranges, possibly with a slight size variations. I really only ever want one high power burner and one simmer burner. A dedicated wok burner sounds like a great addition. Another option would be to abandon the dedicated range entirely, and have a variety of countertop induction units that can be stored away when not in use. I don't think you could sell a home with a kitchen like that but it would be a big win for versatility, especially in small homes.
> I've never understood why we need 4 or 5 burner ranges, possibly with a slight size variations. I really only ever want one high power burner and one simmer burner.
I don't mean this to sound rude, though I know it will, but this is the literal definition of "argument from ignorance."
You don't use more than two burners, so you don't know why a stove needs more than two.
I personally frequently cook with three or all four burners. Further, there are meals where I might use the two small back burners, and meals where I might use the two large front ones.
I guess you could be describing a need for stoves that came with just two burners, for those who couldn't imagine using more. But, seriously, would you have bought a two-burner model if it had been available, knowing that you might have wished for more even one night a year?
IMO, this would be a major advantage of countertop units. Buy two or four or six or eight, store them away in the cabinet when they’re not in use and enjoy the extra counterspace, bring them out when you need them.
It’s not THAT much of an advantage, since the area of unused burners can be already used as extra counter space, since it flat and resilient. Actually that seems like a major advantage over a gas stove, that’s rarely mentioned.
I thought about doing this, but it didn't make any sense for me. The countertop units are inefficient in terms of space compared to regular stovetops. This isn't suprising, due to component sharing, the need for a case, etc. As soon as you regularly use two of them, you might as well have a stovetop.
There are also down considerations of power (wiring and maximum output) and noise (induction units have fans, which are less noticeable in stovetops), safety (accident risk from cables, tilting, etc) and convenience.
It might work if your everyday usage involves zero to one units. Which is certainly possible, if you don't cook much, but even if you are and you're using other heat sources like a rice cooker, oven, grill, microwave, etc.
Not a terrible idea to have one around when you're limited by your normal capacity, or when you want to simmer a stew at a buffet, or your stovetop breaks or you are redoing your kitchen.
Perhaps because you will want to cook 4-5 things at the same time?
Aor of Indian households when preparing a traditional lunch will have 5-6 items (in the south, particularly in a Brahmin household, you will have one sambhar, one rasam, three vegetable currys, rice, and a fried item usually appalam). This entire meal takes three hours or so to prepare from scratch on my stove (a three burner lpg stove).
Two more usable burners will cut this down to about 2 hours
I am pretty amateur at cooking, and I use three burners most of the time that I'm making a proper meal. I'm pretty surprised to hear that this wouldn't be very common for the average cook.
South India consists of fives states and one Union Territory, all with different languages, culture and culinary styles. A meal in a Brahmin household in Hyderabad will be very different to one in Chennai with probably only rice being the common feature. Curry is too generic to be a useful descriptor.
It's hard to make broad generalizations. But having been to all six divisions and having lived in three of them, I feel very confident in saying that a household that cooks three different curries, sambar and rasam for a single meal is very atypical. What GP described sounds closer to a restaurant set course meal and not something a household would cook on a day to day basis.
I helped prepare lunch in a Punjabi household this afternoon, and on the stove there was rice, two subjis, chai and a roti tawa all at the same time. I would consider this a typical (if not modest) lunch routine amongst the many Punjabi households in which I have had lunch.
> and on the stove there was rice, two subjis, chai and a roti tawa all at the same time.
So, they had 5 burners?
Anyways, my comment was more about the number of dishes. Two curries as in your example is fairly typical. Three curries, a sambar and a rasam like the GP said is definitely not. Chai at lunchtime does sound strange to me but then again, I'm not really familiar with Punjabi culinary preferences.
I think there's both a practical and aesthetic reason.
The practical reason is that people have different sized pots and pans. I don't want to put my small sauce pan on a large burner that will waste the majority of its heating surface. Similarly, I need a large surface to heat a big pan.
The aesthetic is that a lot of cooktops are combination stove/oven and thus have to be big enough for the oven bit. Once you already have that surface area, you might as well fill it up to make it seem more substantial. A stovetop with room for 4/5 burners will look like the manufacturer skimped out if it has only 2 burners.
One day I want a kitchen in which I can have every cool appliance -c steam toasters, waffle irons, cheese toast makers, microwave ovens, air fryers, fat fryers, gas hobs, induction hobs....
In fact these exist -- if you search for "induction wok burners" you can see some pictures. (I only recently became aware of this after watching this video of a chef who uses induction cooking in a small kitchen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ooNzRrHA9VY)
Perhaps in the future there will be cooktops that include a wok depression on the surface, similar to how some gas stoves today include a built-in wok ring.