Scope. This page provides a controlled reader-run protocol and does not claim site-run measurements. For cooking, cooling, storage and reheating, follow the current official guidance linked on the page.
"Medium-low" is probably the most frequently issued instruction in domestic cooking, and it carries almost no information. It is a position on a dial that the recipe writer owns and you do not. Their dial has a different number of settings from yours, drives a different heat source, and sits under a different pan. The word survives the transfer between kitchens. The heat does not.
This is not a small annoyance. It is the reason a recipe that works for the person who wrote it produces a curdled sauce, a burnt aromatic base or a stubbornly raw centre for a competent cook following it exactly. The instruction was never a specification. It was a memory.
The method is to measure it: one pan, one probe, one target, every dial setting, on each hob available to you.
The problem with an instruction that is not a number
A dial setting is an input. Pan temperature is an output. Between them sit at least six variables that the recipe cannot know about.
- Heat source type. Gas heats the pan base by flame contact and radiation across a ring. Induction generates heat inside the ferrous base of the pan itself. Electric radiant heats an element that then heats the pan by conduction and radiation, with a large lag in both directions.
- Burner or zone size relative to pan size. A wide pan on a small ring has a hot centre and cool edges. The same pan on a wide ring behaves like a different pan.
- Pan material and thickness. Thermal mass and conductivity change both the temperature the pan settles at and how violently it swings.
- Number of dial positions. Some hobs offer a handful of detents. Some offer a continuous sweep. "Medium-low" on a nine-position dial is not "medium-low" on a five-position one.
- Ambient conditions. Kitchen temperature, draughts, and whether the extractor is running all change the equilibrium.
- Contents. An empty pan, a pan with oil, and a pan with cold food in it are three separate thermal systems.
None of that makes the instruction useless. It makes it a rough steer that a cook translates using experience. The purpose of this article is to shorten the apprenticeship by showing you how to make the translation yourself.
What to measure, and how
The method is fixed before any result is recorded. It is published here in full and in more detail on how we test, so that anyone can repeat it, disagree with it, or point out where it is wrong.
The pan. One pan for all runs, so the pan is a constant rather than a variable. Material, base thickness and diameter are recorded in the log.
The probe. A calibrated probe with the ice-point and boiling-point checks run immediately before and immediately after each session, with both offsets recorded. If the probe drifts during a session, the session is discarded rather than corrected. Surface temperature and liquid temperature are measured with the appropriate instrument for each, and the instrument is named per reading.
Probe placement. Fixed and recorded. Surface readings are taken at the pan base centre and at a stated radius toward the edge, because the difference between those two points is one of the results, not an inconvenience. Liquid readings are taken at a stated depth away from the pan wall.
Contents. Two conditions per setting: the dry pan, and the pan holding a stated volume of water. The dry pan tells you what the hob can do. The water tells you what the hob does when a real thermal load is attached to it, which is the situation you are actually in.
Ambient. Kitchen temperature and, where relevant, extractor state recorded per session.
Settling time. Each setting is held for a fixed dwell before the reading is taken, and a second reading is taken at the end of a longer hold, because the number at two minutes and the number at twenty minutes are frequently not the same. That gap is one of the more useful things the test shows.
Replicates. Every setting is run more than once, on separate sessions, and the spread between runs is recorded alongside the mean rather than smoothed away. Replicate count is recorded in the log.
Failures stay in. If a run goes wrong, record it in the log with the reason.
Reader worksheet
Use the table below as a worksheet for your own hob. Enter only readings taken with a calibrated instrument, and record the date, pan, heat source, and ambient conditions beside them. No cell is filled in, because we have not taken the measurement; every value in it should be one you took yourself.
| Dial position | Gas: dry pan base, °C | Gas: with water, °C | Induction: dry pan base, °C | Induction: with water, °C | Electric: dry pan base, °C | Electric: with water, °C |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lowest setting | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Next position up | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Next position up again | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| Continue: one row for every remaining position on your dial | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| First setting showing occasional bubbles at the surface | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| First setting at a full rolling boil | — | — | — | — | — | — |
| The setting you would call "medium-low" | — | — | — | — | — | — |
Most hobs are one heat source, not three, so you will fill one pair of columns and leave the rest empty. That is the point: the empty columns are the reason a recipe written on somebody else's hob did not transfer. Fill a fresh copy of the worksheet for each session rather than overwriting the last one, and keep the discarded sessions.
Record every figure in Celsius, with the Fahrenheit conversion alongside if you want it.
Gas: dial position versus measured pan surface
Gas is the most intuitive of the three because the output is visible. A flame you can see is heat you can estimate, which is why cooks who move from gas to anything else describe feeling blind for a fortnight.
On a gas hob, test for a hot annulus rather than assuming a uniformly hot disc: map the pan base where the flame ring meets it, at the centre, and at the rim. On a pan wider than the ring, measure the edge-to-centre spread on your own setup before drawing a conclusion.
The other gas-specific behaviour is that the lowest usable setting is bounded by flame stability rather than by the dial. Below a certain gas flow the flame becomes unreliable, so the true floor is a physical limit, not a design choice.
Induction: dial position, and the cycling problem
Induction is where the word "low" quietly changes meaning, and it is the single most important thing this test exists to show.
At high settings, an induction hob modulates power continuously. At low settings, many hobs cannot deliver a genuinely low continuous power, so instead they deliver full power for a short period, then no power, then full power again. The cycle repeats. Averaged over a minute, the power is low. Instantaneously, it alternates between a lot and none.
For a pot of water, this barely matters, because water is a large thermal buffer that smooths the cycle out. For a thin pan holding a delicate sauce, it matters a great deal, because the pan base tracks the cycle far more closely than the food does, and the contents nearest the base experience the peaks rather than the average.
This is why an induction user following an instruction like "hold at a bare simmer" can find the pan simultaneously too hot at the base and not hot enough overall. The dial is not lying. It is describing an average of a square wave.
Record the cycle period at each low setting, the peak-to-trough swing in pan-base temperature, and how much a heavier pan or water buffer damps it.
Electric radiant: the number keeps moving
Electric radiant hobs have the largest lag in both directions. The element takes time to come up, and, more importantly, it keeps radiating after you turn the dial down. A cook who reduces the setting at the moment a sauce starts to catch has not reduced the heat yet. They have reduced it in about a minute's time.
Many electric hobs also cycle, for the same reason induction does, but with a much longer period and much more thermal mass in the element smoothing it. The practical consequence is different: rather than a fast square wave, you get a slow drift up and down around the set point.
Two numbers matter here and both are your observations: the time from a dial change to a stable new pan temperature, and the size of the overshoot when you increase or decrease.
This is a sample, not a standard
We need to be blunt about what this test can and cannot claim.
You are measuring individual appliances, not classes of appliance. Two induction hobs from different manufacturers, or from the same manufacturer in different years, can differ substantially at the bottom of their range. Burner geometry varies. Element wattage varies. Control algorithms vary and are not published.
So a filled-in table is a worked example of the translation problem, not a conversion chart. If you take someone else's medium-low figure and apply it to your own hob without checking, you have replaced one person's memory with another person's memory and gained only the illusion of precision. The point of the table is to show how large the differences are, and to give you a protocol you can run yourself.
That protocol is next, and it is genuinely quick.
How to make your own version of this table
You need a probe you trust and about ten minutes. Do it once and you never have to interpret a hob instruction again.
- Check your probe first. An unverified instrument makes the whole exercise decorative.
- Use the pan you actually cook in most. Not your best pan. Your default one.
- Put a measured, modest depth of water in it so you have a real thermal load. Note the depth so you can repeat the test later.
- Start at the lowest setting. Leave it for a good few minutes without touching it. Probe the water in the middle, away from the base and the wall. Write the number down next to the dial position.
- Step up one position at a time, waiting the same fixed time at each, and record. Do not skip settings; the interesting non-linearity is usually near the bottom.
- Note where the surface behaviour changes. The setting at which the surface first shows occasional bubbles, and the setting at which it breaks into a full roll, are the two visual landmarks worth marking.
- Repeat the whole sweep on a different day. If your numbers move, you have learned something about your kitchen, your pan or your patience, and all three are worth knowing.
- Write the results on a card and put it where you cook. The fridge door works.
Once you have that card, "medium-low" becomes a translation problem you can solve in one glance rather than a guess you make and then regret.
If you want to know how the three hob types compare against one another rather than against their own dials, that is a separate test with a separate protocol: how the three hob types compare at low heat covers the floor, the stability and the responsiveness of each.
In Plain English
A dial setting is not a temperature. It is a request, and every hob answers it differently, so any recipe that says "medium-low" is describing a result the author got in their own kitchen with their own pan.
This matters most to anyone who has followed a recipe carefully and still got a different outcome, and to anyone who has recently changed hob type and suddenly cannot cook the things they used to cook well. Use it before you start a dish that has a narrow window: sauces, custards, aromatics, anything gentle.
What to do next is the ten-minute sweep above. Measure your own hob once, write the settings on a card, and from then on you are translating recipes rather than guessing at them. Your own card is what closes the translation gap; this page makes no claim for equipment it has not measured.
Where to go from here
The free fridge-door temperature card is designed for exactly this. One side carries the four temperature bands and the jobs each is for; the other side is blank, ruled for your own dial positions, so the card ends up specific to your kitchen rather than to anyone else's. It is ungated and always will be.
If you would like to see the calibration routine and log format behind any measured number on this site, they are on how we test.