inductioncooking
Latest
The Tasty OneTop smart cooker ruined my dinner party
It's been quite a drama for me in the kitchen lately: Due to a leak in my building, my cooking gas was shut off for 11 months. It's back now, but for most of last year I had to get by with takeout, microwaveables and oh-so-many salads. Tasty's OneTop seems tailor-made for these type of situations. It's an induction cooktop, which means it goes anywhere you can plug it in. And Tasty's step-by-step instructions make the whole cooking process manageable. It's the kind of thing you'd happily play with in a college dorm. Or, in my case, a small New York City apartment with no working stove. Every year I always have a few people over to watch the Oscars, so that seemed like a good opportunity to give the OneTop a spin. Home-cooked food and a new gadget to play with! Perfect pre-show entertainment!
Panasonic makes the first countertop induction oven
Induction cooking is great for budding chefs: it rarely needs preheating, it's energy-efficient and it's safer than conventional burners. Getting it has usually meant going for a full-size oven or a cooktop, however, which isn't always practical if you're in an apartment or otherwise can't justify tearing out your existing appliances. That's where Panasonic thinks it can help. It just introduced the first-ever countertop induction oven, giving you all the benefits of the technology in a relatively tiny, enclosed space. If you want to grill a barbecue-grade steak, you can do it with a device that's roughly the size of your microwave.
GE's touch-savvy induction cooktops double as griddles and sous vides
If you want to get elaborate with your cooking and try a griddle or a sous vide, you normally need either a dedicated machine or a bulky add-on to get things right. You won't have that hassle with GE's 2015 Cafe, Monogram and Profile cooktops, though. They're already pretty high-tech between their safer induction cooking pads and touch-sensitive controls, but the real stars of the show are their abilities to switch to other cooking methods with little effort. The Cafe and Monogram models have an integrated griddle (the first for induction), and all three can use a $150 smartphone-controlled sous vide accessory (also a first) that lets you get just the right water temperature without having to watch like a hawk. Just be prepared to pony up if you're hoping for the latest in culinary tech. GE's cooktops will start at $1,500 for a 30-inch Profile, and they scale all the way to $3,100 for the 36-inch Monogram.
