New Toy: Breville/Polyscience Control Freak!

[horseflesh]

ChefSteps support is good, maybe they can help.

 

https://support.chefsteps.com/hc/en-us/requests/new

 

[adrianvm]

Do you think they are support for the Control Freak or support for the web site for their subscription and such?  The product is sold by Breville and their support sucks.  I've been trying to get answers from them for a couple weeks at this point about recommended pans and allowable pan concavity as I grow increasingly suspicious that there is no such thing as a flat pan. 

[horseflesh]

ChefSteps flogged the heck out of the new CF before it went on sale and their staff was participating in forum chats about it. I doubt ChefSteps would help with a warranty claim but IMHO there is a good chance that they can answer questions. 

 

ChefSteps has countless videos featuring the CF as the cooktop too, and they may be able to help with questions about cookware. 

 

It's a contact form. Try it out. If you are not satisfied I apologize in advance for wasting your time with the link. 

 

 

[adrianvm]

Fair enough. 

 

Is there something wrong with the boiling water test used in that video?  I tried it on a couple pans.  On the Heston nonstick I got a totally even bubbling surface of water.  On the Falk I got a ring of bubbles, which the video would argue is inferior. 

[Laurentius]

6 hours ago, Johntodd said:

C'mon now, spill it.

 

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...

 

 

[adrianvm]

I tried Demeyere proline with the boiling water test and also got a small ring.  I don't understand why I don't at least get two rings given the double ring design of the Control Freak. 

 

Does the induced field really fall off as 1/sqrt(r)?  That's much slower fall-off than I was expecting. 

 

[Laurentius]

1 hour ago, adrianvm said:

I tried Demeyere proline with the boiling water test and also got a small ring.  I don't understand why I don't at least get two rings given the double ring design of the Control Freak. 

 

Does the induced field really fall off as 1/sqrt(r)?  That's much slower fall-off than I was expecting. 

 

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

 

Yes.

[adrianvm]

So it's actually possible that I put a 12.5" skillet on the cook top and it only energizes the inner ring?  That seems like a pretty bad idiosyncracy. 

 

Tried a Demeyere Atlantis dutch oven that is 9.5" diameter and it also seems like visible boiling is confined to a 6" ring.   I mean, could something be wrong with my unit?   Is there any way I can tell if the outer ring is energized? 

 

[Laurentius]

3 hours ago, adrianvm said:

That seems like a pretty bad idiosyncracy. 

 

 

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.

[adrianvm]

I'm not sure what you mean by "these are hot plates after all".  Like therefore they cut corners? 

 

I measured power while heating at it was around 1680W.  Once I got to a boil and turned the temperature down to 225 it bounced between 1300W and 1500W. 

 

It crossed my mind that if the coils were given equal power then the outer coil, which covers a larger area, would be delivering less power per area to the pan than the smaller inner coil. 

 

You didn't answer the question of whether there's any reasonable test that could reveal if the outer coil is energized. 

[Laurentius]

3 hours ago, adrianvm said:

I'm not sure what you mean by "these are hot plates after all".  Like therefore they cut corners? 

 

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.

 

3 hours ago, adrianvm said:

You didn't answer the question of whether there's any reasonable test that could reveal if the outer coil is energized. 

 

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.

[Laurentius]

On 5/15/2024 at 11:57 AM, adrianvm said:

I also wonder why there is a gap in between the two rings. 

 

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.

 

 

[severoon1]

I have the exact same setup, a Control Freak and a Bellman 55ss I bought to accompany my Flair 58+ hand pull espresso machine.

 

I bought my steamer before the Control Freak and found it very difficult to use on my range. For one thing, the grate over my burners isn't that great for balancing the steamer, and too much heat sneaks around the sides. I've already had to replace the handle once because it got overheated and the thinnest part of the Bakelite handle where it meets the unit cracked and came apart.

 

It never occurred to me to try the Control Freak until I saw this post, but I spent the afternoon experimenting. I discovered that you don't need an induction plate at all. All you have to do is position the Bellman so that the center nut in the bottom is sitting right on top of the temperature sensor of the Control Freak. If you slide it around, you'll feel when it's on the temperature sensor. To test things out, just put some water in the Bellman and leave the top completely open and put it on your Control Freak set to 100°C. You'll get a message prompting you to make sure the cooking vessel is positioned covering the sensor, and just hit Resume. It just works!

 

My next task was to figure out how to go about getting the right pressure. The trick is to heat the water in the steamer to the correct temperature for ~2 bars of pressure, and you want to make sure that you don't trip the pressure release on the Bellman. That's there as a failsafe, but you're not supposed to depend on it—just imagine the consequences if that pressure release were to fail for some reason, which is one of the reasons I never liked the idea of using it on my gas range either.

 

According to my water vapor pressure calculations (example), 120°C is the required 2 bars of pressure. The optimal amount of water in the Bellman is 250 g, so add that to the vessel and screw the top on to be reasonably tight with the steam wand closed. Set the temperature to 100°C at Fast intensity (it will overshoot by ~15°C or so). Once it reaches temp and beeps, set the intensity to Slow and then put the temp to 120°C. You can go as high as 125°C, I was able to get it to 128°C before the pressure release triggered (which is just around 2½ bars, as advertised).

 

Once it's at 120‒125°C, remove the steamer to a silicon / cork / whatever trivet or hot pad, something stable, and you can go to work. Even off the heat, there will be more than enough pressure to steam a good quantity of milk. I would not try to steam right on the Control Freak because the upward pressure of the temperature sensor makes it easier than I like for something to go wrong.

 

Keep in mind that even on the lowest intensity setting, the Control Freak heats pretty quickly. Make sure to have a trivet next to the unit and make sure you're standing there so you can quickly remove it if the pressure release triggers. I'm certain the Control Freak is easily powerful enough to produce more steam than the pressure release can vent, and it wouldn't take long to turn into a bomb if left unattended.

[weinoo]

In this video, from the Bellman website, he states that the Bellman is induction compatible:

 

 

[severoon1]

Quote

In this video, from the Bellman website, he states that the Bellman is induction compatible

 

That's true, but the Bellman 50SS is not technically compatible with the Breville Control Freak. If you look at the Control Freak, you'll see that there's a spring-loaded temperature sensor right in the middle of the induction coil, and that is depressed when a pan is placed on it. There's a small ring around that center bit which is supposed to be completely covered with the flat bottom of a pan, and this particular induction hob can sense if it's not.

 

If you look at the bottom of the Bellman 50SS, it unfortunately does not have a flat bottom (you can see briefly in this video if you pause it at 3:57):

 

 

Initially when I tried using my Bellman on my CF, it didn't work at all. The unit just complains that you need to have something on the temperature sensor if you don't have it perfectly centered. I found that if you do make sure it's centered so the nut and thread pushes down the sensor, the CF will give you a warning, but you can click through the warning and it works great.

[Laurentius]

On 5/23/2024 at 6:56 PM, adrianvm said:

When you say there is only one coil you mean the entire coil---both parts on both sides of the gap---just always fires up? 

 

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...

[JoNorvelleWalker]

7 hours ago, Laurentius said:

 

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...

 

Why should the sidewall temperature matter for a pressure cooker?

 

[palo]

2 hours ago, JoNorvelleWalker said:

 

Why should the sidewall temperature matter for a pressure cooker?

 

Just as in an automobile tire, the sidewall is the weakest point. If the temperature varies there, then possibly that could affect the measurement criteria

 

p

[Laurentius]

23 hours ago, JoNorvelleWalker said:

Why should the sidewall temperature matter for a pressure cooker?

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.

[adrianvm]

If you aren't using a control freak then thermal equilibrium may not exist, or may not be a reasonable place to be, for an empty pan.  I noticed that the control freak has "low" marked at 130 F.  I tried setting a pan on my gas stove on low and monitored the temperature, which continued to rise until I discontinued the test, at which point the pan was I think somewhere between 200 F and 300 F.  Not equilibrium yet.   This makes me wonder if I can get a pan in equilibrium on the gas stove.   If I recall correctly on centurylife he tests by heating the pan until the center reaches a target temperature.  It seems like this might favor thicker pans that get more time and clearly it's not an equilibrium measurement.   I don't know what affects how much heat the pan loses to the environment, which would determine where the equilibrium is in an open loop system where you are setting the input power. 

 

I agree that you can think of a clad pan as a large disk.  But you didn't explain how this helps us to understand pan heating.  On the Demeyere proline, the 5" point was only at 205, so heat is not all rushing out to the periphery of the disk. 

[Laurentius]

3 hours ago, adrianvm said:

If you aren't using a control freak then thermal equilibrium may not exist

Oh, it exists, in both the theoretical and practical senses.  And don't assume the C.F. attains some magical steady state where nothing else will.  Merely walking by the system will affect it

 

Practically, the equilibrium for our purposes is the point where the Delta Ts over the whole pan under constant heat are as small as they're going to get.  You don't need a C.F. for that, and some cycling or sine doesn't really matter.

 

Frankly, the heat output of regulated gas is probably more constant than that of any induction appliance.  

[adrianvm]

Yeah, in a theoretical sense, thermal equilibrium will exist---when the pan is at the temperature and distribution where its loss to the environment equals the input from the heat source.  But in a practical sense, if the equilibrium occurs at 700 F that's not a useful, practical equilibrium point. 

 

I'm not sure what you mean about the output of gas being "more constant".  More constant over time?  Over space?   It seems like heat output from gas is pretty concentrated in a ring.  The difference is that we have convection to distribute the heat.  But maybe you count that as part of the gas system's heat output. 

 

 

[Laurentius]

10 hours ago, adrianvm said:

10 hours ago, adrianvm said:

But in a practical sense, if the equilibrium occurs at 700 F that's not a useful, practical equilibrium point. 

 

This is word salad.  Pans can be in thermal equilibrium at any temperature.  When a temperature or setting is one useful for cooking, the minimum Delta T is a meaningful measure of evenness.  It merely means the pan is fully preheated.  That's the epitome of 'useful'.

 

10 hours ago, adrianvm said:

I'm not sure what you mean about the output of gas being "more constant".

 

Less variation over time. More steady.  You didn't understand That?

 

But you make a good point about exhaust gas flow enveloping pans, applying heat above the floor.  This is an advantage the C.F. and other induction hobs don't enjoy.  There are now induction rethermalizers in thermowell configurations that kinda emulate the gas effect, but they're incompatible with what most of us think of as cookware.

[adrianvm]

I definitely do not understand why gas as a heat source would be more uniform over time than induction.   The control freak obviously varies its output because it's running a control loop, but a normal induction system should be producing constant power output at a given setting.  What source of time variability exists?  Temperature dependence of electromagnetic properties of the cookware? 

[Laurentius]

3 hours ago, adrianvm said:

I definitely do not understand why gas as a heat source would be more uniform over time than induction.  

 

No, you don't.  The same volume of gas, and therefore the same Btus, will be output on an given analog hob at a given setting, no matter what.  This is not the case with induction, with its discrete digital settings, cycling, PID control and standby modes.

 

Let me give you an example.  Suppose you want to assess the evenness of Pan A, and compare how it performs on one induction versus one gas hob.   The easiest (and fairest) way to do this is to pick your discrete induction setting, and let the pan come to thermal equilibrium.  Take your readings.  Choose a sensible location, usually dead center.  What is the temp at that location?  Then fire the pan over the gas hob.  You dial the analog valve to the point where the same location comes to equilibrium at the same temperature.  Take your readings.  Compare.

 

If you try to do this the other way around, if you have a good thermocouple, you'll see a difference, because you may not be able to match the center temperatures with precision.

 

This also points up that the old-fashioned analog gas valve is infinitely variable within its range.  Not so with induction.  The practical difference here depends on the granularity of the available settings on the induction appliance--the finer the granularity, the closer to infinite variability.  Control Freak and the Vollrath 100-step units offers good granularity, but their chief virtue is repeatability.   

 

  

Edited May 29 by Laurentius
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