Laurentius

No, only the bottom ferritic layer of G5 is induced. I have a G5 piece. The line is a worthy try at advancing the state of the clad art. However, IMO there isn't really any improvement in evenness over existing constructions. What improvement there is relates more to weight (G5 is spooky light) and to some extent responsiveness. If you're considering buying G5, you should understand that the graphite core is very thin and not continuous--it's a perforated grid or lattice of round holes. I've not calculated the % of floor area that's actually graphite, but it's probably only 40-60%. The "open" holes are necessary for the pan to hold together.

Maybe because your data so far have been anomalous. It's been my experience with disc-base pans that they tend to trap/ accumulate heat that would otherwise flow outward and up the sidewalls. Some people think this is a good thing, but I don't. The phenomenon is the one big reason thick disc pans are not responsive the way other constructions can be, even of similar thickness.

Most of the time, it wouldn't matter if the pot is only being used as a PC. However, many cooks use their PC bottoms as stockers, and for many of those applications it can matter. My point wasn't directed at PCs in particular, but at disc-based pans in general. In skillets for example, a large temperature discontinuity where the disk ends can preclude some things.

I believe this to be the case. We obviously can't directly see the field created by the coil. What we see is the manifestation of the heat created by the field through the pan--technical or practical thermography. So it's fraught to look at a photo of an exposed coil, and conclude the diameter of effective heating. Doing so is similar to judging that diameter by the circle(s) painted on the glass. Better just to decide/measure whether a given coil heats a given pan evenly enough for what you're cooking. Measure your Fissler an inch up the sidewall and see what you get...

The mom of one of my best childhood friends had (and was very proud of) a Flair. They had a small rambler kitchen, and I recall being amazed how much room it made when stowed away.

Hey, here's a challenge for anyone whose PIC has a fan that can run even after the heat is turned off: Run a largish pot of oil up to 360F and put it atop the plugged-in PIC without turning it on. Will the fan come on?

The fans may move air across heat sinks, but they're intended to vent air heated by the glass and hysteresis loss. How hot do you think those diodes get?

They used to say the same thing about the VMP. Have you charted the temperature settings to gauge their accuracy? Have you measured the wattage drawn to check whether it cycles? This is a distinction without a difference, since everything sits confined within a few inches of the hot Ceran. This is by far the biggest source of heat in the case, although there would be some from hysteresis losses in the coil itself. If your point is that the glass itself needn't be cooled, fine, but the fans exist to vent air heated by the glass.

I have a Vollrath Mirage Pro. You are right that the 100-step increments work well for as low as you want to go, including yeast rehydration. I'm generally very happy with it HOWEVER, (1) The unit does cycle in both % and temperature modes. I've wasted a lot of time trying to map the cycles using a Kill-A-Watt, and while the wattage output levels (and their swings) vary by setting intensity, they definitely do cycle. (2) I find the temperature settings completely worthless. They're wildly inaccurate in general and they never agree between different pans. (3) The case exhaust fans stop when heat is is turned off. This is a bad feature, considering the Ceran can get nearly as hot as any pan--many commercial countertop units include fans that will run until the case interior is cool.

Probably for cooling and non-interference purposes. Also the field is a torus, so there may not be a need to have further intensity at the gap. After thinking about this and seeing multiple photos, I think there is only 1, 1800W coil.

Well, yeah. They're small and portable. The cases aren't particularly robust, or the ventilation all that powerful. And the power output is the same as a hair dryer or toaster. You mean reasonable in the sense of not cracking the case and employing test equipment? You saw in that video where an outer ring was causing simmering--you could try to duplicate that. I'd run a progression of increasingly larger-floored pans (meaning ferromagnetic bottoms) and see if there's a point were the bubble pattern changes. You could also--carefully--try to spoof the sensors by moving pans off-center, or even placing magnetic items barely outside a pan's periphery. If you do all these kinds of things while monitoring power through a Kill-a-Watt, even better. This might tell you something, but it might not. The safety features on these appliances make them quite inscrutable.

The world of induction is full of them. An early shocking case was that Viking appliances wouldn't work with Le Creuset cast iron. There's a head-scratcher. There may be a feature on C.F. that only allows 1, 1800W coil to power up at a time, and how which one's determined is a sensor/software cluster. Speculation on my part. The power rating is for the total, so for sure you don't get to have 3600W from a 110VAC circuit. You think two rings share 900W? I know this is heresy, but these are hotplates after all.

The detector loop can have idiosychnrasies. Unless Breville designed with X pan in mind and testing, you just don't know. Yes.

It's them, not it. Where to start? There's the implication that cast iron is good on induction because a magnet sticks everywhere, with the negative implication that disk based skillets are bad because... wait for it, the sidewall isn't ferromagentic. In fact, cast iron cookware on induction is much worse than disk base and clad. Then there's the related silliness about the coil size. The magnetic field that excites heat within the pan falls off in intensity very, very fast, as in as a function of the inverse of the square root. This is why there's a hot ring IN THE PAN no matter what you do. The only thing you can do is thicken the pan with conductive material. Or stick with small pans and pretend there's not an issue. Then there's the guest star's induction stove. It obviously has two concentric coils, so it IS the stove not the pan. This producer made no mention of detector circuitry and sensors. Where there are concentric or multiple coils, there are sensors and circuits that limit which coils can energize. And disk base and skillets are the worst, not because of the pan, but because the sensor can't tell the difference between a skillet and a small saucepan. The praise for how well clad performs on induction is completely misplaced. With very rare exceptions, it's got much thinner conductive layers, and therefore hotspots more. And because it's so thin, there's not enough material to do a good job of moving heat laterally. Demeter Proline is the glaring counterexample. It goes on and on from there...

It's a terribly misleading video from a number of perspectives. I could go into detail, but there are many doozers told here.

Most do not heat that far out. You can't judge coil size by the painted circle.

Probably should be looking for a particularly melty cheese. Maybe even nuking your sandwich before the grilling. But what you really need is a copy of Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking, so you can refer to the different temperatures that caramelization and the Maillard reactions begin. You also likely already know that things like bacon will--eventually--brown at quite low temperature settings.

Yeah, maybe. Shake or sift or whatever. It's much the same as scattering flour for scorchprints--it doesn't need to be perfect to tell you what you want to know.

I believe it is. There are uneven gas hobs, too, but it's a nature of those beasts to flow hot gases up and out, not merely heat in a mostly discrete ring. Did you start your sugar/caramel tests from cold? Or did you wait for thermal equilibrium before dumping in the sugar? The RATE at which sugar melts (and what pattern it creates as it does) isn't necessarily a great measure of evenness. If you're interested, pick a temp on the CF that is on the cusp of scorching, and dump. Then see what any pattern of burnt sugar emerges on the pan floor. If you have a black ring, surrounded by caramel, surrounded by hot sugar, you may have a good measure of poor evenness.

These bases look a lot like the bases on Fisslers, named "Cookstar". The pattern serves several functions--or rather theories: to better hold the base together, to hold the base more rigid/predictable in its expansion, to break suction, and kinda/sorta direct gas flames outward. Another brand suggestion for taking the unevenness out of induction, if you can find them, is Silga Technika, which have a 7mm aluminum disk core. As long as quick response and cooking on the sidewalls aren't important, they're at least as good as Fissler, Paderno GG, and others of this type. I love Silga's heavy covers--I keep one around and ready for pretty much everything I cook.

Which Hestan is this? My understanding is that Thermoclad is 2mm of aluminum, and the Nanobond is a bit thinner. They allege the cores are pure aluminum for "up to 35%" better conductivity. I've had a Thermoclad, and I see no difference.

I am unsurprised. Nearly everyone who buys a CF does so believing it's absolutely correct, constant and precise. Good luck convincing them otherwise. The spring-loaded button thermocouple is good, but it's not that good, and the thermal contact isn't that great. Just for fun, you might try a dab of thermal grease on the button to improve contact, and compare. Also, the button is in the center, not above the coil. The field falls off rapidly with distance, too, so you have both less heat being applied dead center AND you have heat piling up there in an empty pan (Visualize the heat moving both inward and outward from the coil--this happens with gas and electric, too). Add in all the variables of pan construction, and it's... imprecise.

Unless someone cooks ONLY on a Control Freak (and never above about 300F), ControlInduc is a very practical feature. Fire and lung safety is but one advantage. The pan employs a magnetic alloy whose Cutie point is the cutoff temperature, but it is a gradual tailing off. God Knows what might happen if/when it stifles the Gf's button sensor.

They were ginning up a reason for another line, d5 (and the "Thomas Keller"). The underlying theory was Start-Stop-Start, i.e., that, by interweaving SS with aluminum in thin layers, heat was "forced" outward through the aluminum, allegedly resulting in more even heating. The theory makes no sense. A-C even offered a few pieces of d7 with even more pointless steel. They tried justifying that by claiming it made the pan just like cast iron (!!!), only lighter. Go figure.

Having sawn a few pans myself, and having worked in cookware development, I can tell you that many makers treat even their thickness specs like nuclear launch codes. They keep them from even their own sales and marketing people. They do so even when told a pan will just be destructively tested. After years of this tomfoolery, I've concluded they just are doing everything they can to minimize potentially unfavorable comparisons. It's assinine. The true secrets are in how the pan is put together, not how thick it is or (generally) what's in it.