Digital accuracy and efficiency a big reason, along with safety, and a cooler kitchen,
An hour before dinner service begins at Ikoyi, a small two Michelin-starred restaurant at 180 Strand in central London, the open kitchen is a hive of activity. It’s also close to completely silent.
The zen-like atmosphere extends to the stove, a sleek, shining black slab at the center of the kitchen. No gas here — the restaurant uses a four-ring induction stove, installed two and a half years ago when Ikoyi moved to this site.
The switch to induction means the restaurant is cooler, the cooking process more exact, and nothing is at risk of accidentally catching alight on a gas burner, says Jeremy Chan, the restaurant’s head chef. Chan says he still loves the earthy, emotional experience of cooking with gas, but in the end he picked induction for its safety, efficiency and practicality.
Most importantly, it gives him confidence that his chefs can follow his recipes absolutely to the letter, meaning every dish coming out of the kitchen meets the high standard he expects. He now has an induction stove in his home, too. “As much as I love [gas], I’m never going back to it,” he says.
Chan is part of a quiet movement of chefs who are making the same transition. Gas stoves run on methane, which produces carbon dioxide when burned, contributing to carbon emissions. They are also linked to respiratory health problems, including asthma, and using a gas range at home contributes to some 40,000 premature deaths in the UK and European Union each year, according to research published in 2024.
That’s prompted efforts to phase gas stoves out in the US. In Europe, home retailer IKEA announced that it would stop selling gas stoves in the Netherlands, and in the UK commercial landlords including Lendlease and Grosvenor have said they plan to stop installing gas in kitchens at their developments by 2030 and to retrofit existing kitchens for electric cooking by 2040.
Figures on exactly how many chefs in professional kitchens use gas or electric stoves are hard to come by, but industry experts say that they are seeing an uptick in demand for induction, and not necessarily for environmental reasons.
“They are really interested in the performance benefits of electric over gas,” says John Cunningham, chief executive of the UK’s Foodservice Equipment Association, which represents manufacturers of stoves and ovens. In some cases, members now sell more electric than gas equipment, though across the industry gas is still the leader, Cunningham says.
The precise settings on the induction stove mean Chan’s recipes can be carried out to exact specifications by his staff, with no room for interpretation as there would be with instructions like “a low flame.” “There’s less human error,” he says. “You can be more precise in a more foolproof way. You can just say set it to, say, 3.5 — there’s nothing to interpret there.”
Good Housekeeping:
Induction stoves and cooktops heat faster than electric and gas counterparts. That’s because with induction, you don’t have to wait for the heating element to transfer to the pan. Instead, the pan heats up directly and super quickly — our tests have shown that induction cooktops can boil six quarts of water in under 15 minutes.
Induction stoves and cooktops offer precise temperature control.Electric cooktops take a lot of time to heat up and cool down, and it’s difficult to hit a precise temperature with gas ranges. But with induction, you’re afforded super precise temperature control which allows for more controlled cooking. When you turn the burner off, heat transfer stops immediately, so there’s less of a chance of foods boiling over or overcooking.
nduction stoves and cooktops are more energy efficient than electric or gas because heat isn’t lost in the transferring process. With gas and electric ranges, a lot of energy is lost to the air around the pots and pans. With induction, only the cookware heats, which ultimately translates to energy- and cost-savings (and, of course, faster cooking times).
I live in a large old building with gas to the kitchens and inadequate wiring to support everyone moving to induction range/electric oven. But I bought a single-‘burner’ induction hotplate and love it, and recently bought an electric toaster-oven/air fryer (it’s a countertop oven) and love it.
But specifically towards a goal of electrifying large, old, multifamily buildings – the DOE worked with startup Copper Channing to develop a suite of appliances that all include lithium-iron-phosphate batteries in them. https://copperhome.com/
Purpose of that is to allow replacing kitchen stoves, water heaters and other gas appliances without needing to upgrade the utility connection, the circuit breaker panel or run anything more than a standard 15-amp 120-volt plug. The battery charges steadily and the massive power draw for cooking dinner, or heating a lot of water, comes from the battery. They even have an app that can run the charger during lower-price electricity times.
The NYC public housing authority wants them to develop a non-fancy version of the oven to let them do upgrades in city apartments – they intend to have a first order of 10,000 and I think their overall was 50,000.
Their stove is the first item, and I want one but have an uphill battle to convince my condo association. The battery has two UL listings already and they’re working on getting one for the overall device. Maybe I buy one five years from now but I’m already doing most cooking electrically in my gas kitchen.
Several years ago I sent my foodie sister an induction cooktop (that you’d set on a counter, or like you’d have in a dorm), and told her that her Christmas gift to me that year was to send a video of her cooking something on it. Sure enough, she made dad’s chili while commenting on the differences. Since then, as my home nurse, she’s had a lot more practice cooking with induction chez moi. It helps that more of the online cooks are using induction cooking.
I think you need to be careful when you say precise temperature. I found the temperature varies between 5 to 10°. The units work like a microwave either full power or off and the precise temperature is determined by how long it’s on and off and so the actual temperature can vary 5 to 10°. I believe with the gas range you can set a precise temperature that doesn’t vary but difficult to exactly replicate for the next application.