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.
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.
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?
American kettles are a lot faster than anything else Americans have access to, except a microwave. That does a mug of water in one minute. As a trade off it seriously degrades the mug over time.
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 😂
