I am absolutely in love with my new induction cooktop.  It makes me realize how truly horrendous my 20-year-old traditional electric-coil cooktop was.  Have you heard the old saying, “A watched pot never boils!”  Well, induction cooking rewrites that.  I’ve put on a pot of water to boil and that puppy is roiling in less than a minute.  Even better – my small kitchen doesn’t get as hot.  Induction cooking makes your pan itself hot through the magic of an electromagnetic field.  So, it’s quite possible for me to cook something and have the cooktop itself feel only slightly warm while the pan is raging hot.  Awesome!

The drawback is that your cookware must be ferrous and able to be magnetized. In other words, you better have cast iron or stainless steel cookware because copper and aluminum will not work with an induction cooktop.  I was rather fortunate in the fact that all of my cookware save two pans are either cast iron or stainless steel.  I’ve collected All-Clad stainless steel pans with a copper core and Le Creuset enameled cast iron cookware for years.  I buy a piece whenever I find them for a good price at TJ Maxx or Home Goods.  However, the two pans which did not work were my only two non-stick pieces made of aluminum, and they were my beloved GreenPans.

I gave up teflon-coated non-stick cookware a few years ago.  I figure anything that can kill a bird from the off-gassing is probably not all that great for people, either.  Add to that the reports of one of the chemicals used in the manufacture of teflon (PFOA) is in the bloodstream of almost every person in America in some amount, and that was it for me.  I started a search for an alternative, and I came across GreenPans.  They work just as well as teflon-coated pans as long as you follow the directions with them and wipe the inside with a small amount of cooking oil before the first use.  After that, you don’t have to use oil and NOTHING sticks: not even potato-crusted sea bass.  It’s like seasoning a cast-iron skillet.  Actually, I think they are better than teflon pans; you can put them in the oven, and they are safe up to 800° F.  Teflon becomes unsafe around 500° F and isn’t recommended for high-heat applications.  GreenPans are made of plain old sand (Silica) and ceramics.  At any rate, I love my GreenPan but it was made of aluminum and didn’t work with my induction cooktop.  I had to find a replacement fast because life without frittatas isn’t worth living. 

I was so relieved to find that GreenPan now makes a stainless steel version designed to work with induction cooktops.  Whew!  Crisis averted:

GreenPan Stainless

I snapped up an 8″ and 10″ pan right away, and I’m once again enjoying frittatas and fish cooked in a safer non-stick vessel.  If you’re interested in acquiring these for yourself, the best place to get them is HSN.  Yep, that’s right – The Home Shopping Network – it’s the only place I’ve found them so far.

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