Editor-in-chief

Marc Delauney.

I run Cooktop Hunter — single-handedly, from a converted loft in the Plateau-Mont-Royal with four cooktops bolted to a granite slab, a calibrated thermocouple rig, and an accidentally famous red All-Clad stockpot I've boiled enough water in to fill a small pond.

The short version

I am French, born in a village outside Lyon in 1977, the kind of place where the boulangerie closes for six weeks in August and nobody complains because they are already in Antibes. I went to Institut Paul Bocuse because my mother insisted it was the only school she would pay for, did my apprenticeship with a chef who threw pans at interns, and spent the next ten years on the line in Lyon and Paris — mostly at bistros, one stint in a two-star kitchen that was a very expensive mistake for both of us.

In 2008 I moved to Montréal with a Québécoise I had foolishly fallen in love with at Lyon Saint-Exupéry airport. The marriage did not last; my Canadian residency did. I cooked in Montréal kitchens for a decade more, then opened, closed, and reopened a small bistro on Rue Saint-Denis that finally closed for good when my landlord tripled the rent in 2020.

In 2021 I stopped cooking for strangers and started writing for them. Cooktop Hunter is that writing-down.

Why cooktops specifically

Because, for thirty years, the cooktop was the only piece of equipment in the kitchen I truly cared about. Ovens I trusted — the thermostat either worked or it didn't — but the cooktop is where the cook thinks. It's where you decide a risotto needs ten more seconds of stirring, where you back a sauce off the heat by sliding the pan an inch to the left, where you learn whether the knob you're turning is logarithmic or linear.

I owned — professionally or personally — every kind of cooktop there is. Open-flame gas, pro-style gas with an infrared broiler underneath, French-top cast iron, commercial electric coils, consumer ceramic, and eventually induction, which I dismissed for years and now refuse to give up.

Induction in particular interests me because it's the only cooktop technology where the physics is completely counter-intuitive to people used to gas. A 1,800W induction zone pushes 85% of its energy into the pan through electromagnetic induction in the pan's ferromagnetic base — no flame, no radiant element, no thermal mass losses. That is a remarkable piece of engineering, and most manufacturers are terrible at explaining it.

What I actually do here

I pick the subjects, buy or borrow the cooktops, run them through the test rig, cook real food on them, photograph the process, write the guides, and edit every word before publication. There is no editorial board. There is no ghost-writer. If you read a sentence on this site, I wrote it, usually late at night with too much espresso.

When an article crosses into territory I don't personally hold a licence for — the National Electrical Code, for example, or gas-line sizing in a specific province — I run the draft past a licensed tradesperson before publishing. Those reviewers get credited at the foot of the article. I do not accept press releases, I do not republish manufacturer copy, and I don't do sponsored reviews. If a cooktop is on this site, it's because I tested it myself or I'm explaining why I won't.

The test kitchen, briefly

Four induction zones (two portable, two installed in a granite counter) for comparative work. One 30-inch pro-style gas cooktop bolted to the wall with a dedicated 30,000 BTU output rail. A 30-inch radiant electric. A 15-amp countertop electric plate for the apartment-kitchen case. A calibrated Omega Type-T thermocouple rig logged to a laptop for simmer-precision tests, a Reed Instruments SPL meter for fan-noise measurement, and a 12-qt All-Clad stockpot that has personally boiled for this website an embarrassing number of times.

My editorial rules, in five lines

1. Measure, don't repeat. If a spec sheet says 18,000 BTU and my gauge says 15,200, the article says 15,200.
2. Update, don't abandon. Cooktop lineups change. Firmware ships. Guides are revisited when the underlying hardware is.
3. Name the uncertainty. If a burner is borderline, I say it's borderline.
4. No pay-for-positive. Not now, not ever. The site's small; the integrity is not for sale.
5. Respect the reader. Most people buying a cooktop are buying it once in a decade. That decision deserves a serious text.

The personal bit

I live in Montréal with a long-suffering partner, a black Labrador named Brigadier, and a Japanese cast-iron nabe I have been oiling for eleven years. I speak French at home, English at the desk, read too much about Japanese induction manufacturers (Panasonic and Hitachi build hardware that the North American market rarely sees and should), and I make pretty good soupe à l'oignon. You can write to me; I reply to everything eventually, though "eventually" sometimes stretches.