It's nice to work in the finely tuned WIRED test kitchen, aka my kitchen. The knives are sharp, the coffee is good, the room-temperature butter is ready to spread.
And my induction stove is a marvel, boiling water in a heartbeat, heating sauces incredibly evenly and predictably. I like to say that its swift electromagnetic burners can turn a grandmother's cast-iron pan into a stovetop Ferrari.
While my stove is a joy to cook on, it is also the most annoying appliance in my kitchen, hands down.
Why? It has no knobs. This makes for a beautifully smooth surface that, compared to a gas stove with its grates, nooks, and crannies, is exponentially easier to clean. Designers love those clean lines, and manufacturers like them because it makes the thing cheaper to build.
Yet for something so smooth, it is covered with friction points. A surprising number of interactions are bungled because the touch-sensitive buttons that are used to control it don't work very well. There are also gobs of unintentional interactions when I set a pan or my hand on the surface, or when I clean it, all of which usually make it beep. There is so much beeping. Turning each burner on is a two-step operation where you hit an on-off button then poke the power-level slider. Both can be surprisingly difficult to make happen. It's never guaranteed that it will work right the first time and the odds go down about 30 percent if it's dirty, wet, has a slick of oil on it, or—pounds countertop—all three, because it's a stove.
I'd been talking with chef Chris Young recently about these "digitally controlled" or "capacitive touch" interfaces on induction stoves. Young has been a chef at London's Fat Duck, coauthored the book Modernist Cuisine, was a founder at ChefSteps, and recently started the thermometer manufacturer Combustion Inc. His dislike for induction interfaces rivals my own.
"Capacitive touch interfaces are pretty much a disaster for professional kitchens. They don't work when your hands are gloved, wet, or covered in goo—all pretty common occurrences," he says.
This is not a problem (or goo!) limited to one manufacturer's stoves, and while some of them work a bit better than others, it's mind blowing that this mistake-prone interface is the predominant control method for induction stoves.
"Most appliance manufacturers don't actually make the guts for their induction stoves," Young says. This is because they must use controls that are certified by safety agencies, meaning the manufacturer buys that part of the stove from one of a small number of capacitive touch manufacturers. Most of these suppliers use interfaces which tend to be what he calls "old versions of capacitive-touch technology."
My sister Gina, notorious for having no tolerance for BS in her kitchen gear, actively avoids using my stove when she visits because she can never get it to work. Doubtless thanks to this, when it came time for her to replace her gas stove recently, induction never crossed her mind.
Ya know what would fix this? What would make the problem go away and remove this needless barrier to entry for induction stoves with a twist of the wrist? Knobs.
Yes, the simple, old-fashioned knob. That thing you twist to turn on and adjust the temperature on a gas or electric burner. The thing that did not need reinventing. The thing that, without a doubt, works better than its modern, smooth-topped successor and would likely speed induction adoption. Those knobs. Let's "regress" back to knobs.
This idea crystallized at a recent cooking class I took in Oaxaca City, Mexico, where the stove we used was a four-burner, smooth—and thus knobless—induction cooktop. Over the next few hours, people had all of the "hard to turn on, hard to adjust" problems. A couple of times, I overheard someone say, "Hey, why'd it go to zero?" Someone also burned their finger trying to turn it down because the heat had spread from the nearest burner to the touch pad. Later, a pan slid over the main power button, turning everything off and bringing cooking to a standstill, something nobody realized for five minutes. Yet the moment that took the cake was when someone approached the stove, looked down at the instrument panel, and asked "How do I do this?" This was not ineptitude on their part; the person asking had been cooking for their whole life. This would never happen with knobs.
"I don't like this," said fellow cooking class student Pablo Scasso from Montevideo, Uruguay. Scasso studied product design before becoming a software engineer, and the difficulty controlling the stove reminded him of the way many car manufacturers have migrated away from dashboard knobs and buttons to the detriment of the driving experience (and potentially safety).
As he said this, he mimed driving while adjusting a knob on the dashboard with his right hand, all while looking straight ahead.
"I want to keep my eyes on the road. If I need to change the air conditioning with a touchscreen, I have to look at it. With a knob, I know right where it is."
This is not a nostalgic plea for the good old days. A knob is a direct, dedicated connection, an instant response to the twist of your wrist. It’s still the best technology out there. Once you're used to using it, you can turn it on blindfolded. The touchscreen always needs you to look at it.
Remember those years when the MacBook keyboards sucked so bad that Taika Waititi took time to make fun of them on the same night he won an Oscar? And how, after being repeatedly called out by tech journalists—Casey Johnston in particular went at the issue hard in a series of stories—Apple relented and reverted to the old keyboard style? Going back to knobs could be like that.
Yet change will likely be slow to come.
While I've read a few reviews that imply these "fully digital" induction-stove controls are something to get accustomed to, after close to a decade of use on my stove and other peoples’ stoves, I am fully accustomed to them and they do not work as well as knobs.
Casey? Taika? Are you out there? Can you save us?
This inspired me to write a three-line poem:
Call it a dial, call it a knob,
your life would be better
with one on your hob.
Induction-burner manufacturers may be getting the hint. A handful of them, like Samsung and Fisher & Paykel, now incorporate burners with knobs in their lineups. Impulse Labs has a promising-looking model slated to come out in late 2024. Breville makes an incredible, expensive standalone burner with buttons and knobs that make it easy to control.
The lack of knobs on induction stoves around the world isn't a problem in the grand scheme of things, though making them more common would make people's lives easier and speed adoption. There are certainly bigger fish to fry, but it would be nicer and easier to fry them on a stove with knobs.
