Yeah, you’ve seen 'em, those “As Seen On TV” ads peddling Salad Spinners and In-The-Shell Egg Scramblers and Hair In a Can. Two things you can always count on with these is that they’re all going to be cheap, and none of them will quite work the way you’re led to believe they should.
So it goes I’m sure with the [. But I’m curious. Just what is the deal with this deceivingly simple device? The gimmick is apparently thus:
Add pasta (or whatever)
Add hot water.
Put strainer and “thermal lid” on.
“Special thermal conductivity” will cook the stuff “right before your eyes!”
*Special thermal conductivity?](http://www.taylorgifts.com/prodetail.asp?itemNo=24865Pasta Express[/URL) That sounds like insultingly bald-faced technical doubletalk to me – you’d think they were thumbing their nose at that whole thermodynamics thing. It just looks to me like you’re essentially soaking the stuff 'til it’s absorbed enough water to be considered “cooked” and the tube is really just made of thermally insulated stuff that keeps the hot water hot long enough to “cook.”
Is that all it is? A plastic tube with a lid? Could I make one out of a used Lays Stacks can?
Well, on the face of it, it’s not a terrible idea. Hot water isn’t going to get any hotter when it boils, so pasta must cook at around 212 degrees. So if you have hot enough water to start with and insulate the container and the pasta doesn’t cool the water down significantly when it’s added, well, sure it will cook.
As for “thermal conductivity” – I guess all that means is that convection currents in the water keep the temperature reasonably even.
Why stop with special thermal conductivity? That polycarbonate canister also has special electrical conductivity. And special magnetic permeability.
That’s what it looks like to me.
Probably not very effective for anything bigger than spaghetti (and that might be pushing it), but it’s the way Cup Noodles or instant couscous are prepared.
Sounds like it’ll work, but they’ve tried to jazz it up with marketing hype. If, for some reason I wanted to cook pasta in this way, I’d get water that is as close to boiling as possible (the hottest water the water heater will provide will probably be enough, though I’d have to wait longer) and put it all in a vacuum flask. Bingo! Nothing will cool down for as long as I have it jacketed by vacuum, even the near-vacuum of a commerically-available Thermos. I bet that’s all it is–a specially designed Thermos.
Pasta normally cooks in minutes so its not like thats impressive. All it is is a plastic container with a strainer top. Handy if you have pitchers of boiling hot water sitting around. Less so if you have to use the stove.
I’ve never seen this device, and it looks like a bad idea (how do you tell if the pasta is done?), but cooking without heat is popular in Asia. They have “thermal cookers” or “stay-warm pots”, which are basically a bit pot which sits in a thermos. You bring a soup or stew to a boil, seal it up, and open it up 6 hours later, and it is fully cooked and still piping hot. I have a pot myself, and it works great.
Well, Cup-o-Noodles uses noodles that don’t even need hot water – leave it in any temerature water and they’ll be soft in minutes. Pasta can do the same – if you leave it in cold water for a day or two. It really needs the heat to expand the stuff so that it can absorb water.
I figured it would probably work, but that there’s no real trick to it; you could probably accomplish the same thing in a thermos, if you had a thermos big enough.
My husband saw this advertised on TV and thought it looked great. I thought ‘so what if it cooks pasta in 8 minutes? I cook it for seven in boiling water’. I put the pot of water on to boil while I cook the sauce, or whatever, so it’s not like I’m impatiently waiting around for the pot to boil.
I won’t be buying one any time soon. I can strain my pasta/water by hand. I’m just old-fashioned that way.
Yeah, it’s just a thermos - the 8M video they have says almost exactly that. It also manages to be pretty funny. There’s the obligatory shots of the poor housewife struggling to do things the “old fashioned way” and bungling a perfectly straightforward straining job, the host shows how “easy” this gadget it is, but when she tries to drain the spaghetti, it cloggs the holes and she has to shake it quite hard, and then “Nothing sticks!” except the ‘Orzo’ (type of pasta?) they quickly cut away from.
Oh, and apparently it’s dead boring waiting for your pot of water to boil, but this new thing is better 'cause overly cheery hosts always have a boiling kettle of water I guess they didn’t have to wait for. :rolleyes:
I don’t think the scripts for these As Seen On TV gadgets have changed since the 1980s. No one on the planet can properly put on a pair of socks, fumbling with those annyoing elastic cuffs and yanking at one side while the other stays put resulting in horribly skewed footwear, and then even when you get them on there’s that six inches of empty sock at the end that just flops around – but wait! Here’s Sockmeister to the rescue! Just fasten the patented Crocodile™ Clips to each side of the sock, sling the revolutionary Memory Polymer Hoist (elastic bands) over your shoulders, insert your feet into the sock openings, stand up, and presto! Your socks are instantly slipped quietly and comfortably on to your feet!
Orzo, incidentally, is indeed rice-shaped pasta bits. (Confusingly, you can buy actual grain rice called Orzo, too) Properly cooked real Orzo shouldn’t stick any more than Stellini (little stars) or Buccatini (little pasta sentence-enders). “Orzo” rice though is quite sticky.
Ok, I can see a couple of minor advantages to this, but they all depend on having an electric kettle (which I do). [Note to non-American Dopers: Electric kettles may be as common as toasters the rest of the world over (more so, probably), but they’re rarely seen in homes in the US.] If have an electric kettle, you can boil water in it much faster than on a stove or in a microwave, so it really is less waiting time than the “old fashioned” method. Plus, it looks like it uses less water per volume of pasta, which would reduce time to boil the water even more. In hot climates, the heat from a stovetop while cooking pasta (or anything else) can really be annoying in summer, but since the electric kettle and the pasta cooker are both sealed and insulated, they would release much less heat into the room. Since there’s no exposed element in an electric kettle, and no heavy, open, thermally conductive container of boiling water children could cook pasta with this device before they could handle cooking it on a stove. Finally, the kettle and pasta cooker take up slightly less space than a large pot, free up burners on the stove that may be needed for something else, and are often available where a stove is not (such as in an office).
I wouldn’t pay $20 for all that, but when they get to Walgreens discount aisle (as all tv infomercial products eventually do) I’ll probably buy one or two.
(Oh, and the cylindar is obviously insulated, so it’s not just a Pringles can. It’s, like, a Pringles can and a slightly larger Pringles can.)
In the 80’s when I lived in a college dorm, we would cook spaghetti by boiling water in a hot pot or two then put the spaghetti in whatever container we could find, then cover the container for 15 minutes. My friend said he got the idea from a “Hints from Heloise” column. I remember it working fairly well.
I remember reading a survivalist/self-sufficiency article about cooking in a thermos; I’m sure that’s all that is happening here (the article I read, though, was all about buying a big sack of barley from a feed store and slow-cooking it in the thermos with vegetables and small amounts of meat.
In the Modern Dormroom[sup]TM[/sup], I am happy to report that this still works just fine. Of course, I’ve been using an electric kettle to make Ramen noodles, but the principle is the same. I imagine that with an insulated container with a lid, we could make it work for real pasta as well.
This thing cracks me up. Now, instead of heating up water and putting the pasta into that pot to cook, you can heat up the water then dirty a whole NEW thing! But you get to turn your burner off several minutes earlier than you used to! YAY!
I don’t think the scripts for these As Seen On TV gadgets have changed since the 1980s. No one on the planet can properly put on a pair of socks, fumbling with those annyoing elastic cuffs and yanking at one side while the other stays put resulting in horribly skewed footwear, and then even when you get them on there’s that six inches of empty sock at the end that just flops around – but wait! Here’s Sockmeister to the rescue! Just fasten the patented Crocodile™ Clips to each side of the sock, sling the revolutionary Memory Polymer Hoist (elastic bands) over your shoulders, insert your feet into the sock openings, stand up, and presto! Your socks are instantly slipped quietly and comfortably on to your feet!