It is, but… The two 120 volt circuits are not distributed through the home in a way that could be easily or safely exploited for this. From the electrical panel, wiring carries one 120-volt line or the other to normal receptacles.
Roughly half of all US kitchens will have a 240-volt circuit for the big cooking unit (range/cooktop/oven/cooker/etc.) but the plug is huge and behind the range. The half part is which ones were built as “all-electric” and which ones are cooking with gas.
Back to the spaghetti thing - Just what I always wanted! One more bulky single-purpose thing to consume space!
I don’t know anything about electricity, but I do know that any technical reasons for a lack of electric kettles in the US are a crock. Any Wal-Mart in the country sells a variety of electric kettles, the cheapest of which (around $10) will plug into any standard two-prong outlet and heat water faster (IME) than a microwave or a stovetop.
The reason more people don’t buy them? No clue.
even Sven has a big part of the answer, but not all of it. Europeans drink coffee, too, and although Brits make instant coffee far more than Americans do, they also make it in French presses, which use water from a kettle and make perfectly good coffee to my taste. (And for gourmet coffee, there’s those little stovetop espresso makers.)
So the real question may be why we make our coffee in drip machines or percolaters.
I’ve tried coffee from percolators, drip machines, french presses, single-cup sieves, and from instant. Of them all I preferred the taste from a drip machine. My least favourite was instant. Yecch.
As for electric kettles being faster than microwaves – I dunno abot that. I can nuke hot tap water for my tea in 90 seconds and have it plenty hot enough to stay that way for the next hour while I sit at my desk. Conversely, the kettle we also have at work takes a good 3-4 minutes or so to boil – and it’s a fairly new one.
Sure, 2-3 minutes doesn’t seem like much of a difference, but when you’re making tea on the tail end of your break it helps to be quick.
I’m skeptical, Mindfield. Are you really comparing apples to apples? Ninety seconds in a microwave might give you hot water, but will it boil it? For proper tea, the water really needs to be boiling. (Green tea excepted.) If you’re only heating the water in the microwave, but waiting for the kettle to boil, that’s not really an accurate comparison.
Also, kettles tend to have larger capacities than a cup you might put in a microwave. If you fill the kettle halfway even though you only need one cup, of course it will take longer. Try heating a quart of water in the microwave, though! My kettle never takes 3-4 minutes to reach boiling with only one cup of water in it, and like I said, it is the cheapest one on the market. Others I’ve had performed similarly. I’ve never timed it, but 90 seconds sounds about right, and that’s to get a full rapid boil.
Boiling water in a microwave actually is slightly risky, since it tends to superheat the water, rather than boil it
Well, I wasn’t comparing it to boiling a single cup of water in a kettle. But then I don’t heat my water to boiling anyway – I heat it until it’s plenty hot, but not too hot to drink or require blowing on. There’s not really much point in getting it any hotter; it doesn’t seem to make any difference to my tea, anyway.
I do have to cook longer if I’m making chai though. But then that’s half milk, which is cold to start with.
According to Slate, electric kettles boil water much faster than stovetop kettles. I don’t know how this compares to microwaving. If I only have one cup of water to heat, I’ll usually microwave it, but if I have 2 or more, I use the electric kettle nowadays.
I have one. Not really worth the money if you live in the typical american household of course. I bought it because I’m going to be living in a dorm with no stove. I got a Bodum electric kettle (the best) and it really is pretty easy.
1.You boil the water (takes only a few minutes in the Bodum and you use far less water than a big pot normally used for pasta)
2. You put the pasta and water in the tube and seal it up.
3. Wait until done (you taste one piece just as you would had you boiled it on the stove)
4. Drain, add sauce and reshake. It comes with a velcro oven mitt that wraps around.
The outcome? Well if you’re using that new enriched lentil flour spaghetti by Barilla, it will come out great. If you use semolina only spaghetti type noodles, they have a tendancy to stick. Elbows and other small, shaped pastas work out much better. Asian noodles come out great too. It might be better to stir them halfway to prevent sticking, I don’t know I haven’t tried yet.
So if you have a stove, a big pot and a collander, then you will not want this. If you live in a dorm and only have an outlet, an electric kettle and a sink, this is great.
Ok, in the interest of science, I did a little experiment.
Eight ounces bottled spring water (room temp.) heated in GE electric kettle, model 106832:
90 seconds to boil,
100 s to rapid boil,
appx 110 s to form a good head of steam such as would produce a loud whistle, if my kettle were the whistling kind.
Eight ounces bottled spring water (room temp.) heated in large rocks glass with plastic fork to prevent superheating in Samsung turntable 950 Watt microwave, model MU3050W:
161 s to form first visible bubbles
193 s to moderate boil
234 s to form vapor condensation on inside of microwave
(Fork slightly melted.)
How long does it take you to boil water in a microwave? I have no doubt that a newer 1200+ W oven would do a faster job than mine, but I can’t imagine it would beat 90 s (not by much, anyway.) And I can heat multiple cups at a time in my kettle; I can see when it’s boiling; and I don’t have to worry about superheated water splashing me in the face or foaming up when I add the tea.
For the record, it is possible to superheat water in a microwave, but only if the vessel is very clean. In the typical dorm room or office coffee cup, this isn’t likely to be significant.
I think the reason why most Americans don’t bother with electric kettles in the home is that it’s just one more thing to bother with. If you already have a stove, there’s not much advantage to an electric kettle over one you just set on the stove. But you also have to plug it in, and it only has a specific use. They’re also probably harder to clean, since you don’t want to soak the heating element and electronics.
Most of the stovetop kettles I’ve used have been absolutely impossible to clean! And why would you clean a kettle, anyway? As long as you empy it between uses, an occasional vinegar rinse is more than sufficient.
And I’m unsure of what it takes to superheat water in a microwave, but in my experiment, the bubbles in the water boiling in the microwave definitely stemmed from the fork. When I’ve boiled water in a microwave at work (with or without a fork), the water would bubble while being heated, but when I dropped in the teabag, it would briefly foam, seemingly responding to the sudden increase in nucleation sites. Is that indicative of superheating?