Cooks moving to induction usually report that everything happens faster and that familiar recipes overshoot. The hob is not simply more powerful; it delivers heat by a different route.
The pan is the heating element
An induction hob generates a rapidly alternating magnetic field, which induces electrical currents inside any ferrous pan placed on it. Those currents heat the metal directly.
The glass surface stays comparatively cool and warms only by contact with the pan above it. There is no flame and no glowing coil.
Because nothing between the control and the food has to heat up first, the energy reaching the food arrives with almost no delay.
Response time removes the usual safety margin
A gas flame or an electric coil carries stored heat, so turning it down lowers the output gradually and gives a cook time to react.
Induction stops almost immediately, which is welcome, but the reverse is also true: turning it up raises pan temperature faster than most people expect.
Oil that would have taken a minute to reach smoking point on a coil can get there in seconds, which is the single most common cause of ruined first attempts.
Pan material and flatness now matter
Only magnetic materials couple with the field, so aluminium and copper pans work only if a steel plate has been bonded into the base.
Contact between the base and the glass determines how efficiently the field reaches the metal, so a warped pan heats unevenly or barely at all.
Round-bottomed woks lose most of their contact area, which is why induction wok cooking requires a recessed hob rather than a flat one.
Losing the flame changes technique
Gas heats the sides of a pan as well as the base, and that spill of radiant heat is what keeps the upper walls of a wok hot during tossing.
Induction heats only the area over the coil, so food pushed up the sides of a pan stops cooking. Anything charred directly over a flame has no equivalent at all.
Kitchens also lose the ambient heat a gas range throws out, which changes ventilation needs and makes an induction kitchen noticeably cooler to work in.
Low settings behave strangely
Many hobs cannot generate a genuinely low continuous output, so they pulse full power on and off to average out at the setting shown.
A pan on a low number is therefore alternating between heating hard and not heating at all, which shows up as a simmer that surges and stalls.
Heavy pans mask this by evening the pulses out, which is one reason thick bases matter more on induction than they did on gas.