I’ll confess; this is how I make tea. I fill up my mug with water from the sink and then I heat it in the microwave for a couple of minutes. Then I put a tea bag in the hot water.
This seems like the most convenient way. (Other than buying pre-made tea and reheating it, I suppose.) But it seems to upset purists who feel you need to heat the water in a kettle on the stove.
Is there any reason why water heated in a stove-top kettle is better than water heating in a microwave? Or is this (as I suspect) a case of “that’s the way my grandmother did it so it’s the only right way to do it”?
A microwave oven is literally a device for boiling water (or the water inside a piece of food), so no, there is nothing ‘wrong’ with your method aside from how much energy is wasted compared to heating with a thermoelectric filament. The tea leaves do not care one whit about how the water is heated.
However, using unfiltered water from the sink…well, I don’t like to be a snob but if the water doesn’t go through at least a three stage reverse osmosis process or bottled by small children on a remote island I have never visited it does not touch my delicate, lightly massaged, manicured lips.
Normally if I want to achieve that goal I say something unkind about one of their inbred German masters and they get into a big tizzy about the Magna Carta and the Parliament and how great the British Empire used to be before everybody got all ‘woke’ after WWII. If I really want to gig them, I’ll then ask how many times the Norton Motorcycle Company has been bankrupted, or say something about Lucas Automotive, or list all of the sitcoms that American producers stole and did better (although not The Office because Ricky Gervais is the true national treasure of the Britain). The tea thing is an escalatory step that I just skip entirely because…I guess just don’t care enough about tea, really.
The concern might be placing a tea bag in water, microwaving it until the water is hot, then removing the tea bag. The water doesn’t get hot enough and the steeping is too short.
Reheating tea in the microwave also produces a different flavor. I know this because I do it all the time.
Finally, the Brits do have a sense of humor, so I trust most anger regarding proper tea preparation is performative.
Poking around the internet, I see that the microwave is suppose to in practice produce temperatures too far from the perfect 97 degrees C that produces good tea. This article claims that the problem involves insufficient uniformity of temperature:
It is not well known among the general public but it is actually a scientific fact water is a liquid at that temperature, and so you can just give it a quick stir with a spoon in order to homogenize any temperature irregularities.
The first one has validity , the other two do not.
Yes, Microwaved water can get super heated. Just let is sit for a minute, and you are fine however.
Then there is this-
As mentioned above, heating water in a microwave, for any purpose, is considered acceptable and common in the US. To do so to make tea is considered uncommon and borderline heretical in the UK. The reasons for this are difficult to pin down. Some argue that the microwave doesn’t allow proper control over the water temperature (which is considered vital for proper tea-making), but this position is questionable at best. Others raise the danger of superheating water which might boil over when the tea bag is added, but this is likely a highly overblown concern. Some people even argue that microwaving changes the quality or composition of the water in some way, but there’s very little science to back that up.
Wait water is liquid? Really? I thought it was plasma. I’ve heard water is wet as well, but that awaits confirmation.
The perfect temperature for tea varies: for black it’s just under boiling, the amount the temperature drops at kettle goes from stove to tea pot. But for mate it’s 150-160 degrees F. Green tea is 175. You can’t get that precision with a microwave: you need an electric kettle.
Except for black tea. I suspect that super heating the water to a small extent, then stirring it to remove energy by boiling and heat transfer to the spoon, might produce the perfect temperature. Sounds risky though. Better to stick with the extremely precise electric kettle: I know the temperatures are accurate because they are printed on the buttons.
While he used a measure of sarcasm, Stranger was making a valid point.
The article you linked to said that a microwave was the wrong way to heat water for tea because the water would be heated unevenly. Even accepting this is correct, it’s a problem that’s easily addressed by stirring the water.
(b) I may be British but I can count the number of cups of tea I have drunk in the past several decades on the fingers of one hand. And they were all under duress.
(c) And everyone knows that microwaves are for converting toast, onions, tomato puree, garlic paste, cheese and capers* into pizza.
I think it’s pretty much as simple as we (the British) can’t get over our bemusement about the scarcity of electric kettles in American kitchens. It just seems like you’re fumbling around with
and complicating something that is simple. Just to be clear: I’m not saying that’s what it is, merely that’s how it seems.
It’s not helped by weird cases where people are seen putting the teabag into the mug of cold water and putting that in the microwave, or putting the milk in immediately after the teabag, or whatever.
Same thing with recipes that call for ‘3/8 cup butter’ or something. It just lands as absurd from our viewpoint.
This is the problem. You need to pour the water over the teabag, to help it diffuse out. Just dunking it in hot water is highly inferior. Also the water probably won’t get hot enough in the microwave; heating a mug until the water boils sounds dangerous.
Every house in Britain is equipped with an electric kettle. Even back when I didn’t drink tea it would have been unthinkable not to have one. I have seen a stovetop kettle, but only a few times in my life.
Yep, I would say it’s the one appliance that people have if they only have one appliance. Students in halls of residence have a kettle. If they have two appliances, the other one is probably a toaster.
The kettle is the first thing you unpack after moving house. If the kettle breaks or malfunctions, the plans for the current day are reorganised around the priority of procurement of a replacement kettle. In the interim, water may be boiled in a saucepan, but we will wear a facial expression that looks like we are sucking lemons the whole time it is happening.
Hey the Mashable article linked to a finding in a peer reviewed journal so we know it’s accurate though highly misleading.
More than you want to know
That was banter. The originating article was in AIP Advances. The microwave tea shtick was a hook for another paper, a legitimate one, about the extent that microwaves heat unevenly and ways to design around the problem. That paper did not emphasize tea. It does have some nice heat maps:
(a) Electric field profile of microwave-heated alcohol (V/m), (b) temperature profile of microwave-heated alcohol (°C), (c) electric field profile of microwave reheated rice (V/m), and (d) temperature profile of microwave reheated rice (°C).
Note the differing temperature profiles between heated alcohol and reheated rice.
I’ll say it: Microwaving the mug is actually the superior method. If you heat the water by some other method and then pour it into the mug, the room-temperature mug cools off the added water to below optimum tea temperatures. If you heat the water while it’s already in the mug, then the mug heats up with the water, and the water remains hot.
