It’s because the USA power standards are not suitable for kettle life. The 110 voltage on their power means it takes ages to come to the boil. The idea of putting a few cups of water into a kettle, pushing a button and having boiling water inside a minute does not exist.
That’s why these tabletop things are useful: yes they take ages to initially boil, then they maintain that temperature. 110 volts is fine for that task.
There are 240v outlets in the USA, but they’re usually only used for things with heavy power draw (clothes dryers, EV chargers, electric hot water heaters, etc). Some areas have 208v instead of 240v though.
But yeah, boiling water is slow in the USA and a lot of people do it in the microwave (whereas I never saw anyone ever do that in Australia). We’ve got a Breville espresso machine that has instant hot water, which is useful for some of the use cases we’d use a kettle for.
This is kinda true and kinda not. Even on 110, an electric kettle is faster than a kettle on a gas stove. The real answer is that Americans just don’t drink much tea. My family is unusual in that regard.
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This is kinda true and kinda not
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This video also proves my point. And he knows it. Nearly 5 minutes to boil a litre of water? That’s hilarious!
I just replicated his experiment, with an identical bottle of water in my kettle, and was surprised that it took 2:47 to boil. I honestly would have thought it quicker than that.
This isn’t about tea, either. In fact, I boil the kettle for coffee far more frequently than for tea. I would also boil a kettle to quickly get 2L of water for cooking pasta. But since I’ve just boiled it and it’s 10:30pm, I make peppermint tea. Ahhh.
Did you miss the part about how it’s still the fastest way to boil water? Yes yes, it’s slower than yours, we’re all jealous. Even still, we would all have electric kettles if we needed to boil water all that often because it’s faster than anything else we have. But:
- People don’t make pasta or rice every day, and even when you do you usually have plenty of time for it to come to a boil while you’re chopping or stirring or whatever. People who do make rice that often typically use a rice cooker.
- You can’t really boil enough water in a kettle to cook potatoes or vegetables or anything else.
- Coffee makers of most types typically boil their own water (yes there are pourovers and chemexes, but they aren’t that common and people who use them do buy kettles).
Nobody would buy a kettle for just cooking even if we did have more power delivery, simply because you don’t cook anything by boiling all that often. Case in point: my family drinks tea, and so we own a kettle, but tea is really the only time we boil water (in the kettle or otherwise) for anything on a daily basis.
