You might never get used to seeing steam coming out of a cooking pot and streaming downwards, but you could surely get used to not having to clean a range hood.
Check out the X Pure, the latest cooktop from German manufacturer Bora. The sleek, minimal, flush-mounted induction cooking surface features four "burners" and a centrally-located air inlet containing a charcoal filter.
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The mounting depth required is under 200mm, so you can place drawers beneath it (assuming you've foregone an oven).
The grate for the air inlet, which is the part liable to become greasy over time, can be cleaned in a dishwasher.
The charcoal filter can be removed and replaced from the top, so you don't have to deal with the hassle of trying to get at it from underneath.
The only thing I don't like is that they went with touch-sensitive controls. To me, removing physical buttons and knobs is taking minimalism too far.
Bora was started by German inventor Willi Bruckbauer, who pioneered cooktop-based extractors back in 2005. By doing away with range hoods, Bruckbauer's invention opened up kitchen design possibilities. You can check out more of their offerings here.
I’m a lapsed industrial designer. I was born in NYC and figured I’d die there, but a few years ago I abandoned New York to live on a farm in the countryside with my wife. We have six dogs.
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The Bora X Pure Downward-Extracting Induction Cooktop
Speaking from experience, I tend to simply curse anything other than properly designed range hoods for the primary task of removing particulates and fumes from cooking. In short, it’s effectively impossible for cooktop or pop-up extractors to do a good job “because physics”. In this regard, cooktop extractor fans have a similar challenge as industrial dust collection systems. The intuition, however, is easy. Think about blowing vs. sucking air through a straw. It’s easy to blow through a straw and feel the stream of air at quite a distance away, as you’ve created a directed stream of air. But think how close do your hand needs to be to the end of the straw to feel air being sucked in. In the suction case, air is being pulled evenly in a (hemi-)spherical space. This is why the hood on a range hood extractor is important: as collection space for the hot, rising gases so the extractor fan “has time” to capture and remove them. Without a properly designed above-mounted range hood, it’s inevitable that a huge amount of the cooking fumes simply escape upward and away. Most recently, my experience with a nominally well-regarded pop-up extractor was that it was just a “slingshot” for greasy cooking fumes into the adjacent space. I think there’s a strong argument that this entire category of extractor is a particularly bad kind of “form over function”.
Downward extractions sounds great for cooking spicy foods. Get those spicy fumes away from my face before I cry and cough from all those habaneros and ghost peppers.
The Bora X Pure Downward Extracting Induction Cooktop is the best side of minimalism that I've seen thus far. Clean lines, uncluttered but simply not forgetting that it makes the kitchen look and feel futuristic whilst performing the necessary job that it needs to do. Viewing the physical aesthetics of the product I agree a hundred percent that minimalism is key but also removing the physical buttons or knobs for controllers removes that ease you have when automatically turning a key when opening the door or switching on the lights. I often cook in the kitchen early in the morning before going to work and sometimes the smell of the food I've just cooked lingers onto my clothing and having a downward extraction will decrease the smell and steam you're exposed to. I think one thing that minimalistic products fail to do sometimes is to add some warmth or emotions to a space. Maybe that can be resolved with a quirky feature (not to make look cluttered) but to make the product have a certain character and presence in the kitchen. This product has offered ease in the kitchen and will decrease the amount of frustration when a passionate chef is in the kitchen and makes an impossible mess. With normal stoves and extractors, it will be a mission to clean it well and to also get into all the slots food has sunk into.
I designed a range hood before. I would tend to say, maybe. It looks like the hole is large and with relatively little obstruction, so it's possible to get a large air flow without too much noise. Whether it works as well as shown, I'm not so sure.
I've seen these type of extractor pop up in a couple of new kitchens (friends getting new houses), and I'm surprised at how well they work! They seem to work just as well as over hanging fume extractors but without the overhead volume, making the kitchen a much more open space.