This $7,000 Induction Cooktop Gets Smoking Hot in Two Seconds. And I’m Rounding Up.

I initially evaluated the Impulse Cooktop as I would any other: I heated a stockpot full of water over maximum heat to see how quickly it would boil. I put a saucepan of marinara over medium heat to see how well it would hold a simmer. And I toasted flour in a 14-inch skillet to determine if the four elements provided heat evenly across their surfaces.

I also tested that battery-boost, and I can tell you one thing for sure: This baby does indeed get very hot, and very fast. On medium-high heat, a few tablespoons of oil in the bottom of a pan began smoking in two seconds.

And I'm rounding up.

In my previous tests of high-end induction cooktops, bringing 4 quarts of water to a full, roiling boil took eight to 10 minutes. On the Impulse Cooktop’s battery-powered boost setting, it took just under three minutes. That’s so astoundingly fast, I went around the office showing the timer to my colleagues.

Not only is this cooktop exceedingly powerful, but it’s also more precise than most: You can set an element’s target temperature down to the degree, and then sensors track and maintain the heat of the pan itself. I did this with my saucepan of marinara, with a pan of oil for frying, and with a pot of water I wanted to stay just barely warm, for which I set the element at 160 °F. A handful of cooktops try to achieve something similar, but none make it quite so easy or elegant.

In truth, what excites me even more is that this thing is legitimately intuitive to use, unlike the dozens of full-size induction cooktops I’ve evaluated over the years. Many other models have confusing digital control panels that stop working when splattered with whatever you’re cooking, or they have awkwardly placed and sized elements that make it hard to use two larger pans side by side — flaws that make me feel like induction cooktop design still hasn’t fully found its footing.

The Impulse Cooktop solves for that. Its huge central control panel is easy to read and creates a space between the heating elements, all of which can accommodate small or large pots. The elements are also raised, so it’s easier to find their center, which can be trickier on some fully flat, glass-ceramic induction cooktops.

The four knobs work as they do on traditional stoves, so there’s no learning curve. You can also press down to toggle between temperature (in degrees) and power level (in wattage). And the knobs are held on by magnets — which is super cool and still fairly rare — so you can take them off completely to clean the glass. Plus, an element shuts off automatically when you remove its knob, which gives you an easy hack to lower the heat immediately.

Bright, dim, solid, and dashed lights around the elements provide handy visual cues as to how hot they are, just as the size of a flame on a gas stove does.

To really put the Impulse Cooktop to the test, I asked Marilyn Ong, an editor on Wirecutter’s kitchen team and co-author of our guide to woks, to do some wok cooking on it. Using a wok is a high bar for any cooktop, as the best results usually require powerful gas elements that can maintain especially high sustained heat. In fact, many serious cooks wouldn’t even try wok cooking on a typical radiant-electric cooktop, which traditionally doesn’t produce enough heat and doesn’t have a flame that can create extra smokiness and char.

When Wirecutter researched and tested woks, we found that flat-bottomed woks were the more practical choice for the flat tops of modern stoves. They can still get nice and hot, but they don’t require rings or other accessories to remain stable.

But Impulse Labs lent us a prototype of a wok ring that claims to crack the code of the traditional, restaurant-style cooking experience, where a round-bottomed wok set directly over flames and crazy-high heat creates the caramelized deliciousness known as wok hei.

On most gas stoves, you can use a wok ring to hold a rounded wok so that the flames hit the base and sides. But rings aren’t really an option with flameless radiant-electric elements. Built to work with induction’s electromagnetic field, the Impulse Labs aluminium wok ring tries to channel an element’s power into a rounded pan without getting hot itself and thus replicate the experience of cooking on a powerful gas stove.

When Marilyn and I tried the wok ring, though, it was kind of a bust: Only the very center of the rounded wok got blazing hot. But we didn’t care. Cooking with a flat wok directly on the element was just fine with us. In that setup, the results were excellent, and we didn’t want to stop cooking. So Marilyn made fried rice twice. She deep-fried piles of puffy shrimp chips, which let us assess how the cooktop maintained a target temperature for the oil. She also charred garlic and pea shoots, without even trying.

On an electric stove, “it is not easy to char greens,” she said, “but this has done it.”

In fact, across the board, the cooktop let us quickly achieve dark, deep, delicious browning and even a true smoky flavor, which is time-consuming and challenging even with the actual flame of a gas stove.

The folks at Impulse Labs recommended that we keep the power level around medium-high during wok testing to avoid overheating the pan. But we couldn’t help but crank it up to maximum heat at least once — and we basically smoked our colleagues out of the kitchen as a result. (They came back, though, to sample more fried rice and those garlicky charred greens.)

At $7,000 for a 30-inch model (and $7,600 for the 36-inch version), the Impulse Cooktop costs as much as the most expensive luxury models available, which are made by far more established companies. (You can, of course, get a great cooking experience from induction cooktops that cost a lot less.)

But for now, the Impulse Cooktop is in a category of its own. Even if it weren’t lightning fast and extremely powerful, the intuitive design makes cooking over induction so pleasurable that it’s even fun, especially the ability to control the heat down to the degree. It’s akin to the temperature accuracy that’s achievable on some ovens, slow cookers, sous vide machines, or deep fryers — and to my mind, it’s a next-gen way to cook on a stovetop.

“This cooktop makes me excited about what’s possible with induction,” Marilyn said. “But I’m hoping that over time, not every cooktop that functions this well will cost $7,000.”

This article was edited by Rory Evans and Ingrid Skjong.