“The downside is that the mug is also 180°C now.”
Nah see they’ve got one of those fancy dual air dryers in the picture. One side is clearly for food and the other for beverages.
Yeah but you’re not supposed to put the cup in with it. You pull the tray out and pour it into one.
Somebody had been considering what could be worse than microwave tea.
There’s nothing wrong with microwaving water. It’s all just getting water molecules to move faster.
Thats how I make my teas. Boil it in a glass measuring cup, then pour it into a mug with the tea.
TechnologyConnections made a video about it.
As someone in a Commonwealth country, it is so weird to me that people would microwave a jug of water to make a cup of tea instead of buying a $5 kettle.
I’ve seen microwave tea as putting the tea bag in the cup and then microwaving it, which is slightly not ideal imo, but to each their own
That is probably for safety. If you microwave water without anything for it to nucleate on, then it can be liquid above the boiling point. If you then put a tea bag in, it will explode into steam in your face.
Americans will do anything other than buy an electric kettle.
Americans who drink hot tea have them (source: have had one for like 20 years).
Americans in general are just more hot coffee cold tea people. Exceptions abound of course, but in generalities.
There is literally a kettle on the left lower side of the image (likely deliberately as it seems awkward having it in front of the air fryer like that)
in my experience, it is quite hard to find a place for a kettle that isn’t at least a little awkward
OOP uses centigrade and spells color as “colour”; they’re probably not American.
I’ve heard electric kettles are slower here because of the limits of our electrical system. I do have a kettle for the stove, though. I also rarely drink tea.
Standard outlets in the USA are 120v at 15A (1800W max peak, 1440W max continuous). In comparison, standard UK outlets are 230v at 13A (2990W peak)
This also affects other things. For example, standard electric heaters (resistive heat) can’t get as hot in the USA.
Edit: Also, dryers in countries like UK and Australia don’t need a special type of outlet.
Due to a quirk of unifying 2 standards, Europe and the UK, the range is 216.2 volts to 253.0 volts.
That encompasses infrastructure built to a tighter tolerance around 220V in Europe and infrastructure built to a tighter tolerance around 240V in the UK (and Australia).
We expect 3150W out of a kettle most of the time. Our heaters will say 3kW.
Usually you’ll find a few volts over 240 out of our outlets and that’s to design spec.
My friends just put a euro style 220 outlet on their counter and ordered a kettle online. Since they were building the house new it was basically no different than buying a 110v kettle.
That’s true, because you use a 110V based system you have less power available to the kettle. It’s still a lot faster than an electric stove though. Not faster than an induction stove, probably.
We have a 2 phase, 120v or 240v. Standard wall outlets only have 1 phase at 120v and a 15amp limit.
We have an electric kettle, husband uses it for instant coffee; before we got together he used the microwave to boil water. The kids use it for tea. I use it for hot water for Moka pot, boiling water for grits, whatever needs hot water.
Electric kettle, microwave, and coffee grinder are the only appliances that live on the kitchen counter, all the other things are in the pantry.
I am an American and i own an electric kettle and use it frequently. I switched to an electric kettle after accidentally turning my microwave into a smoke bomb when I put instant ramen in there and forgot to add the water. Now I only make instant ramen with hot water from a kettle or on the stove.
Okay this is a shitpost, but ffs don’t try this. That’s a small electric fan-forced oven. There’s a nonzero chance the airflow will splash water all over the inside, which is absolutely not liquid proof. Water + electricity == bad.
I see your point. But how the hell is the mug not going to be hot either and you are able to just lift it out?
Got an air fryer here with a steamer mode, so that definitely doesn’t have moisture-sensitive electronics inside the cooking part!
Probably depends on how fancy the air fryer is.
I’ve got a small, cheap air dryer. I think it was maybe $25 when I got it? It’s just got two settings - a knob to set the temperature and another knob to set a timer (analog timer that makes a ding noise when it’s done)
Inside it’s just a heating element like the ones you’d see on an old-school stove top, and a big fan to blow the hot air downwards. I doubt there’s any electronics in it - it’s probably just basic electrics. I don’t think the heating element would like being splashed with a liquid.
Really though, so many Americans would have their cooking lives enriched by an electric kettle.
My parents told me, “be careful the heating elements catch fire, there’s little to no safety mechanism, you can’t leave them alone!”
It’s a kettle…
People either don’t know they exist or have some weird thing with them. Gives me the same vibes as cultures that don’t sleep with the fans on lol.
Not sleeping with the fan on is a way to save face, at least in Asian cultures. In which it’s basically the families out to admit their loved one committed suicide.
They say if you have a fan on in the night and the door closes, it creates a vortex and somehow sucks out all the oxygen.
I think most electric kettles are a bit slower there due to normal outlets only being 110V, but not all kitchens have 20A outlets(probably most do nowadays?), so the kettles made for the USA market tend to be 1.6KW so they can run off a 15A outlet if needed, whereas ones made for 240V countries tend to be 2KW.
Should still be way faster to use a kettle than an air fryer though as I’d assume the air frier would likely be limited to 1.6KW too?
The air fryer either superheats or melts the mug, depending on its material. You either scald your hands picking it up like you would grab it from the microwave, or you burn your house down.
or you burn your house down.
Probably only if your mugs are made of wood 😂
Not Usonian but I’ve never understood the electrical kettle, I just use the microwave for infusions and the like. And for everything else cooking related the stove.
Am I missing something?
Yes, kettles are more efficient at boiling water vs a microwave. On top of that, you don’t need to guess the time it’s going to take, it just goes until the internal temperature sensor reads 100degs and it shuts itself off with a little ‘clunk’.
Thanks for the enlightening, now I understand.
Still microwave for me since while I do enjoy infusions I don’t make them that much to justify the expense and the extra stuff laying around.
Interjecting with some slight pedantry, but only because I think it’s interesting.
There may be some kettles that just switch off at 100C, but those would be pretty terrible kettles, as they could only boil water at sea level. Go up to 10,000 ft. of elevation, or put something in them that boils at a lower temp than water, and that kettle would just keep running until all the liquid is evaporated.
Most kettles (I think, this is totally based purely on anecdotal evidence, I haven’t actually gone out and examined most kettles) detect the presence of boiling in general, rather than a particular temperature. This allows them to work on a variety of liquids at a variety of pressures (or elevations). They do this with some clever piping and a bi-metallic strip. Basically some of the vapor of whatever liquid you’re boiling is directed through some piping down to the bottom of the kettle, where it passes over a bi-metallic strip and heats it up. Once the strip heats up enough (to a temp much less than the boiling point of water or most other household liquids you find yourself in need of boiling), it buckles, and does electrical circuitry things that end up turning off the heating element.
There’s a Steve Mould video on the topic with a much better explanation that’s super interesting, for those of you into nerdy sciency type stuff: https://youtu.be/VzqN4Cn8r3U
I prefer kettle as a microwave is slower, and turns ceramic cups into lava.
