Higher ratedRanked #2 in Best Compact Induction Cooktops
Duxtop 9100MC Portable Induction Cooktop4.4
3 sourcesall derived$84.99The 9100MC is the plainest cooktop in Duxtop's own lineup and, in the most thorough test available, the best one. Serious Eats ran 17 portable induction burners through boiling, frying, searing and simmering and this model won outright: it boiled a gallon of water fastest at 16 minutes and drifted less than five degrees across an hour of simmering. Its advantage is restraint — physical buttons, no presets to fight, no auto-timers that cut the heat early. The ceiling shows up in deep-frying, where it could hold 375°F oil only by running flat out.
Strengths
- — Fastest boil of the 17 cooktops Serious Eats tested — a full gallon of room-temperature water in a 4.5-quart Dutch oven reached a boil in 16 minutes
- — Held an hour-long simmer with less than five degrees of fluctuation, the steadiest low-heat behavior in that test group
- — Physical push-buttons instead of a touch panel, so you can wipe up oil splatter mid-cook without changing a setting
Watch-outs
- — Ran out of headroom deep-frying: Serious Eats had to hold it at maximum power for the entire onion-ring test just to keep the oil at 375°F, and it would not push past that
- — No boil or keep-warm shortcut buttons, so routine heat changes take more presses than on cooktops that have them
- — The control icons are printed onto the buttons rather than moulded, and Serious Eats flagged that they could wear off over time
