For one thing it’s safer. You can google “Super heating water in microwave” if you want the science… the tldr though is that people get nasty burns from water boiled in microwave when removing it from microwave because of the super heating phenomenon . When you remove the water a speck of dust can cause superheated water to suddenly boil and spill over and give you nasty burns on your hands.
A kettle also boils water more evenly. Microwaved water does not heat evenly… And you can taste this too. Take it from an Englishman… Microwaved tea tastes disgusting. The uneven heating makes.the tea taste weird.
Kettles also tend to boil water faster than a microwave. But if you’re not worried about speed… Please boil water in a pan on the stove instead of the microwave so you stay safe. If you boil water often though… Get a kettle.
@haydesigner Yes. It’s easy, it’s tidy, it’s pourable. You can make your tea and your ramen with one prep device. And it’s not going to add a bunch of heat to your home.
I use my electric kettle almost daily.
I use my microwave about once a week, and usually end up angry at it.
@haydesigner Yes the superheating is a valid microwave hazard. Uneven heating of the water? water mixes fast by convection when heated, even in a microwave. The outer maybe 1/4 inch is what is heated by the microwave, and convection takes over.
More likely it’s that the water is too hot when added to the tea.
Avoiding superheating and just automated speed to heat an amount of water up to a full kettle are the advantages of a kettle.
I bought one of these things with the Sur La Table imprint at Costco a year and a half ago and I use the h*** out of it. It’s well built, it boils water at five different temperatures and it’s very fast. If you drink tea or pour-over coffee, or make any sort of instant soup or ramen, this thing is indispensable (although it does dispense water very well indeed).
@ellett Thanks for the information that it’s got 5 preset temps and not a continuous range. (Hopefully @troy can chime in and correct the information if that’s actually not the case for this specific model.)
@phendrick I think the disconnect here is that yes, water flashes to steam if heated past 212F at STP (with a certain caveat about quiescent heating in a microwave), and therefore the formal “boiling point” of water is 212F/100C/373(ish)K. But water in a kettle makes boily noises long before the majority of the water approaches that final temp, and those lower levels are useful for many things. I suspect you knew that.
@ellett@phendrick I think “heat” is the better term. Some drinks want water at less than boiling, because the chemicals react differently. Green tea, matcha, certain other teas probably, or if you want to heat water for baking to a specific temperature. IDK if it’ll do just 100 F though, for dough or something.
@ellett@EvilSmoo@phendrick I make my morning cup of coffee with water heated in the microwave. After much experimentation, I found that 2m12s at power level 9 (~1100W) heats the (measured) 12 oz of water to the ideal temperature for use with my Aeropress. Rich flavor with little bitterness. Works for me.
@ellett@phendrick
Water’s boiling temperature changes under different pressures; it boils at a higher temperature when pressure increases and at a lower temperature when pressure decreases. This occurs because boiling happens when a liquid’s vapor pressure equals the surrounding environmental pressure.
@ellett It looks like some of y’all need some more engineering information. Yes, this kettle “boils” at all settings. That’s because the heating elements are two areas that wrap around the sides of the bottom. The water over the elements starts to boil almost immediately. The kettle knows how long to keep boiling to bring the overall temperature to the correct level because of that little knob you see toward one end. The vigorously boiling water over the elements agitates and thoroughly mixes the water in the rest of the kettle until the thermocouple in the knob detects that the overall temperature matches the preset level and then the kettle turns off.
And just to answer every reply, I’m within a couple of hundred feet of the Pacific, so my local boiling point is close enough to 212°F to make no practical difference.
@troy It looks like this kettle uses a pretty standard base, too. That could be handy; I’m a fan of not needing to have multiple bases in order to be able to make use of different kettles with specific features.
@babakool@dtranberg@troy the simple answer is yes. I came here looking for the same info, but since there was no response, I watched a few YouTube videos.
At the 3:01, you can clearly see that the inside of the lid is entirely plastic. In the QVC video with Carla Hall, she never opened the pot, so there was no way to tell
@dtranberg@msmay@troy Ah cha… thank you. I noticed the same thing in that QVC video but your YT sleuthing makes it clear. I have a large all stainless interior electric kettle that I use all the time. Thought a small one with temperature control might be useful but the plastic lid makes it a no go.
I spent a whole lot of years just using a kettle on the stove… but these are so easy, so convenient! If I didn’t already have one (that doesn’t do different temp settings, harrumph) I’d get this… but would I recognize the usefulness without the experience?
i have an electric kettle on the counter that i use at least once a day, usually a couple more (pour on ramen or sponges and swedish dishcloths…) and i wish i had a spare couple of sawbucks around so i could get this one with the temp settings.
@st_ellis@yakkoTDI back in the 1970s my grandmother called them ‘wettex’. I hadn’t thought of them in decades until I found a couple under a refrigerator I was moving out of her kitchen. Turns out they actually were a Swedish thing.
i find them to be very useful as a replacement for most jobs filled by a paper towel and I use it for washing dishes more often than my actual sponge.
They can also go in the washing machine a couple of times to extend their life. I have only one with print on it and I do not like it as much.
Can you override the auto shutoff so you boil your water for longer? I am struggling with mine as I need boiled water that has been fully boiled for 5 minutes to make sure it kills off everything and none of the electric kettles let me keep boiling.
@shirlema If it’s the same as the all-but-the colors twin from Costco, no. Once it hits the target temperature, it either turns off or switches to steep mode for a few min.
@shirlema The auto shutoff I actually saw a video about a while back, it actually happens when the water vapor is being produced fast enough, the pressure trips it and turns it off. This works regardless of elevation, because it doesn’t use temperature, otherwise somewhere like Denver, the water boils at 203F, and never gets to 212F.
This is also why you don’t want to heat water below the minimum mark, it may boil away and overheat the whole kettle without shutting off.
@algae1221@kevinrs@shirlema I have a ceramic pot one that did the same thing. I turned it on and went to another room. Came back a while later and it had shut off (luckily) but there was no water in it! It had all boiled-off and then must have hit some thermal limit for safety.
Totally unrelated trivia: CH is the international letter code for Switzerland. Being part-Swiss I will see the CH that way since I don’t know the cooking network personality. And no, this kettle is not from Switzerland.
I have a Costco version that only boils. I use it a lot, mostly for tea. I make different types of tea that require different temperatures. Nothing worse that green tea made with boiling water. I wonder how accurate the temps are? I bought a kettle on-line that was really far off, and worse the error was not consistent. For $20 I may have to give this a try. I’m thinking these are the colors that didn’t sell, but this is meh, right?
@Springbank My available temps on my Costco model are 212°F, 195°F, 185°F, 175°F and 160°F. I checked them my my IR thermometer and they seem pretty close to reality.
From the capacity lettering on the side, it look like this one may be calibrated in metric?
@ellett Costco didn’t have that one when I bought my present one. I’ve been using a ThermoPop thermometer and watching the temp. This one is smaller and will work better since as mentioned below, you should not reheat water for good quality tea. As for the colors, there is nothing in my house that matches either one. I went with green.
Kettle tip because a lot of people don’t know this…
Just put as much water (or slightly more) than you need in the kettle. Don’t completely fill it and just reboil every time you need boiling water.
Heating water removes oxygen. This impacts flavour in drinks like tea/coffee (chemistry… Oxygen in water reacts to the organics in tea/coffee). It’s best you boil just once for flavour.
@OnionSoup you might be right but don’t know the physics behind that if it is true. If water boils you’ll be “steaming” off water molecules which would have oxygen and hydrogen. So in the end, less oxygen, true, but less water total, so I would think the ratio/concentration would remain the same.
@pmarin it’s not the oxygen in the H2O bond that youre losing its the oxygen (and other gasses) that are trapped as molecules in between the H2O molecules. (Water has lots of gas molecules trapped inside it… That’s how fish breathe) When the water boils it breaks the surface tension of the water and allows gasses trapped in the water to escape.
@lisagd22 most mornings i make a pot of tea using items picked from my garden - lemongrass, wild sage, etc. An infuser is p much necessary for this use, otherwise you have to fish out all the leaves once they’ve steeped enough to keep the tea from going bitter.
Mine came today. I tested it out and it does what it is supposed to do.
In addition to full boil, there are 7 temperature settings: 140, 150, 160, 170, 180, 190, 200.
When it hits the set temperature it will beep and shut off. If you click the Keep Warm button before you set the temp, it will hold temp for an hour and then shut off.
There are color lamps set into the base that make the water glow in 5 different colors to indicate the approximate current temp in the kettle, plus a numeric display of actual temp.
Don’t you dare laugh at the “stupid people trick”. But this morning, my half-asleep wife filled th glass kettle with water, put it down on the gas stove instead of its electric base, turned the burner on high and went off to feed the cat.
After a couple of minutes – in fact, the instant she heard the explosion – she returned to find the stove engulfed in flames, which she managed to extinguish, with the green plastic from the kettle melted all over the stovetop.
Several hours later, the entire house still smells like some forever chemical we shouldn’t be breathing.
But that’s not the worst part. The worst part is that we no longer have the electric kettle we’d both learned to love over the last ten days, though we still have its pristine green base, sitting forlornly next to the stove. Worse still, this 1.2 liter green kettle with temperature control doesn’t seem to exist for sale anywhere else on the internet. (Meh is totally sold out – I checked. And the red version would be really yuck in our kitchen.)
So I’m posting here on the 1% chance that someone who also bought this green kettle shows up just to complain about how horrible it is, and how much they wish they hadn’t bought it. If that’s you, let me know and I’ll take it off your hands.
Specs
Product: Carla Hall 1.2-Liter Mini Electric Kettle with Digital Temperature
Model: K89741116000, K89741D67000
Condition: New
What’s Included?
Warranty
90 days
Estimated Delivery
Monday, Dec 15 - Thursday, Dec 18
Is that color Tomato or Georgia Red?
@heartny tomato
Honest question… is this really any better than heating up water in the microwave?
@haydesigner yes. Yes. Yes.
For one thing it’s safer. You can google “Super heating water in microwave” if you want the science… the tldr though is that people get nasty burns from water boiled in microwave when removing it from microwave because of the super heating phenomenon . When you remove the water a speck of dust can cause superheated water to suddenly boil and spill over and give you nasty burns on your hands.
A kettle also boils water more evenly. Microwaved water does not heat evenly… And you can taste this too. Take it from an Englishman… Microwaved tea tastes disgusting. The uneven heating makes.the tea taste weird.
Kettles also tend to boil water faster than a microwave. But if you’re not worried about speed… Please boil water in a pan on the stove instead of the microwave so you stay safe. If you boil water often though… Get a kettle.
/showme an awesome honest question
@haydesigner Yes. It’s easy, it’s tidy, it’s pourable. You can make your tea and your ramen with one prep device. And it’s not going to add a bunch of heat to your home.
I use my electric kettle almost daily.
I use my microwave about once a week, and usually end up angry at it.
@haydesigner Yes the superheating is a valid microwave hazard. Uneven heating of the water? water mixes fast by convection when heated, even in a microwave. The outer maybe 1/4 inch is what is heated by the microwave, and convection takes over.
More likely it’s that the water is too hot when added to the tea.
Avoiding superheating and just automated speed to heat an amount of water up to a full kettle are the advantages of a kettle.
@haydesigner
I always heat water in my kettle. Also, I don’t have a microwave.
I bought one of these things with the Sur La Table imprint at Costco a year and a half ago and I use the h*** out of it. It’s well built, it boils water at five different temperatures and it’s very fast. If you drink tea or pour-over coffee, or make any sort of instant soup or ramen, this thing is indispensable (although it does dispense water very well indeed).
@ellett i can only think of 3 trmperstures for water to boil at
(at standard pressure,)
100 C
373 K (rounded)
212 F
Help me out with 2 more?
@ellett @phendrick LOL!
OK, but a bit below boiling is ideal for tea: you want to steep, not scald.
And presumably if you’re doing something like canned soup, an even lower temp would get you to ideal.
I’m tempted, but whew. I have too many appliances.
@ellett @phendrick I gotcha, pal: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale_of_temperature
Rankine and Wedgwood are two.
Also, obligatory Finnemore sketch:
@ellett Thanks for the information that it’s got 5 preset temps and not a continuous range. (Hopefully @troy can chime in and correct the information if that’s actually not the case for this specific model.)
@phendrick I think the disconnect here is that yes, water flashes to steam if heated past 212F at STP (with a certain caveat about quiescent heating in a microwave), and therefore the formal “boiling point” of water is 212F/100C/373(ish)K. But water in a kettle makes boily noises long before the majority of the water approaches that final temp, and those lower levels are useful for many things. I suspect you knew that.
@ellett @phendrick I think “heat” is the better term. Some drinks want water at less than boiling, because the chemicals react differently. Green tea, matcha, certain other teas probably, or if you want to heat water for baking to a specific temperature. IDK if it’ll do just 100 F though, for dough or something.
@ellett @EvilSmoo @phendrick I make my morning cup of coffee with water heated in the microwave. After much experimentation, I found that 2m12s at power level 9 (~1100W) heats the (measured) 12 oz of water to the ideal temperature for use with my Aeropress. Rich flavor with little bitterness. Works for me.
@ellett @phendrick
Water’s boiling temperature changes under different pressures; it boils at a higher temperature when pressure increases and at a lower temperature when pressure decreases. This occurs because boiling happens when a liquid’s vapor pressure equals the surrounding environmental pressure.
@ellett It looks like some of y’all need some more engineering information. Yes, this kettle “boils” at all settings. That’s because the heating elements are two areas that wrap around the sides of the bottom. The water over the elements starts to boil almost immediately. The kettle knows how long to keep boiling to bring the overall temperature to the correct level because of that little knob you see toward one end. The vigorously boiling water over the elements agitates and thoroughly mixes the water in the rest of the kettle until the thermocouple in the knob detects that the overall temperature matches the preset level and then the kettle turns off.
And just to answer every reply, I’m within a couple of hundred feet of the Pacific, so my local boiling point is close enough to 212°F to make no practical difference.
What’s this made of?
@dtranberg glass for the vessel, stainless for the spout. A mix of plastic and stainless everywhere else
@troy It looks like this kettle uses a pretty standard base, too. That could be handy; I’m a fan of not needing to have multiple bases in order to be able to make use of different kettles with specific features.
@dtranberg @troy Any idea if the lid has plastic that is exposed inside and could come in contact with water or steam?
@babakool @dtranberg @troy the simple answer is yes. I came here looking for the same info, but since there was no response, I watched a few YouTube videos.
At the 3:01, you can clearly see that the inside of the lid is entirely plastic. In the QVC video with Carla Hall, she never opened the pot, so there was no way to tell
@dtranberg @msmay @troy Ah cha… thank you. I noticed the same thing in that QVC video but your YT sleuthing makes it clear. I have a large all stainless interior electric kettle that I use all the time. Thought a small one with temperature control might be useful but the plastic lid makes it a no go.
I spent a whole lot of years just using a kettle on the stove… but these are so easy, so convenient! If I didn’t already have one (that doesn’t do different temp settings, harrumph) I’d get this… but would I recognize the usefulness without the experience?
I know the movie trivia reference! It’s Daniel Day-Lewis and his gal pal in The Phantom Thread.
@UncleVinny Nice, you got it! (I didn’t know this one till it told me.)
i have an electric kettle on the counter that i use at least once a day, usually a couple more (pour on ramen or sponges and swedish dishcloths…) and i wish i had a spare couple of sawbucks around so i could get this one with the temp settings.
@Noddy93 I’ve never encountered a reference to Swedish dishcloths before. Is this actually a thing or just a way of saying “these are from IKEA”?
@Noddy93 @st_ellis No. They are basically the same as dream cloths from Who Gives A Crap.
https://us.whogivesacrap.org/products/dream-cloths
@st_ellis @yakkoTDI back in the 1970s my grandmother called them ‘wettex’. I hadn’t thought of them in decades until I found a couple under a refrigerator I was moving out of her kitchen. Turns out they actually were a Swedish thing.
i find them to be very useful as a replacement for most jobs filled by a paper towel and I use it for washing dishes more often than my actual sponge.
They can also go in the washing machine a couple of times to extend their life. I have only one with print on it and I do not like it as much.
Can you override the auto shutoff so you boil your water for longer? I am struggling with mine as I need boiled water that has been fully boiled for 5 minutes to make sure it kills off everything and none of the electric kettles let me keep boiling.
@shirlema If it’s the same as the all-but-the colors twin from Costco, no. Once it hits the target temperature, it either turns off or switches to steep mode for a few min.
@shirlema The auto shutoff I actually saw a video about a while back, it actually happens when the water vapor is being produced fast enough, the pressure trips it and turns it off. This works regardless of elevation, because it doesn’t use temperature, otherwise somewhere like Denver, the water boils at 203F, and never gets to 212F.
This is also why you don’t want to heat water below the minimum mark, it may boil away and overheat the whole kettle without shutting off.
@kevinrs @shirlema So that means it won’t shut off if you don’t have the lid on it? I’ve got one that doesn’t, this must be why.
@algae1221 @kevinrs @shirlema I have a ceramic pot one that did the same thing. I turned it on and went to another room. Came back a while later and it had shut off (luckily) but there was no water in it! It had all boiled-off and then must have hit some thermal limit for safety.
@shirlema The way to get around this limitation is to run it with the lid not locked down. DO NOT LEAVE IT UNATTENDED when you do that.
“AI” Garbage.
@DrunkCat lol okay mr. “incorrect fact”. bot some more
@DrunkCat
Your effort to change opinions
About the usefulness of AI
With your creative writing skills
Really shows off your lack of talent
@yakkoTDI lol okay mr. “incorrect fact”. bot some more
What a coincidence, I’m watching Top Chef right now.
The QVC page for this has a video with Carla Hall demonstrating and it’s much more informative than what’s in the short little video here.
https://www.qvc.com/carla-hall-sweet-heritage-12-liter-mini-electric-kettle.product.K89741.html
@Kyeh Thanks for linking! We’re not allowed to use the QVC footage, but can’t stop our audience from sleuthing around
@Kyeh Most helpful, thank you for posting.
Q&A on the site includes details such as that it’s 7.75" tall and borosilicate glass.
Totally unrelated trivia: CH is the international letter code for Switzerland. Being part-Swiss I will see the CH that way since I don’t know the cooking network personality. And no, this kettle is not from Switzerland.
I have a Costco version that only boils. I use it a lot, mostly for tea. I make different types of tea that require different temperatures. Nothing worse that green tea made with boiling water. I wonder how accurate the temps are? I bought a kettle on-line that was really far off, and worse the error was not consistent. For $20 I may have to give this a try. I’m thinking these are the colors that didn’t sell, but this is meh, right?
@Springbank That tomato is…not my taste. But the green seems reasonably attractive.
I kinda color code my rooms on purpose, though.
@Springbank My available temps on my Costco model are 212°F, 195°F, 185°F, 175°F and 160°F. I checked them my my IR thermometer and they seem pretty close to reality.
From the capacity lettering on the side, it look like this one may be calibrated in metric?
@ellett Costco didn’t have that one when I bought my present one. I’ve been using a ThermoPop thermometer and watching the temp. This one is smaller and will work better since as mentioned below, you should not reheat water for good quality tea. As for the colors, there is nothing in my house that matches either one. I went with green.
Kettle tip because a lot of people don’t know this…
Just put as much water (or slightly more) than you need in the kettle. Don’t completely fill it and just reboil every time you need boiling water.
Heating water removes oxygen. This impacts flavour in drinks like tea/coffee (chemistry… Oxygen in water reacts to the organics in tea/coffee). It’s best you boil just once for flavour.
@OnionSoup you might be right but don’t know the physics behind that if it is true. If water boils you’ll be “steaming” off water molecules which would have oxygen and hydrogen. So in the end, less oxygen, true, but less water total, so I would think the ratio/concentration would remain the same.
@pmarin it’s not the oxygen in the H2O bond that youre losing its the oxygen (and other gasses) that are trapped as molecules in between the H2O molecules. (Water has lots of gas molecules trapped inside it… That’s how fish breathe) When the water boils it breaks the surface tension of the water and allows gasses trapped in the water to escape.
@OnionSoup @pmarin Pretty interesting. Just learned something!
@OnionSoup Also boiling the same water repeatedly will mean more buildup of minerals if you have hard water or iron in your water.
@kevinrs @OnionSoup I typically iron on an ironing board
no tea infuser? pass.
@visioneer_one Why would you use a tea infuser in an electric kettle?
@lisagd22 most mornings i make a pot of tea using items picked from my garden - lemongrass, wild sage, etc. An infuser is p much necessary for this use, otherwise you have to fish out all the leaves once they’ve steeped enough to keep the tea from going bitter.
@visioneer_one I understand the use of an infuser. I’ve never seen one used in an electric kettle, only in a cup or teapot.
Nice! The only thing I’d add is a whistle. If I didn’t already own two perfectly good kettles I’d go for the sage.
Nowhere have I been able to find the 5 (?) preset temperatures this thing can be set for…???
Just noticed the video shows Wegmans tea! Seen a bit of their private label stuff in commercials and such.
That is all
Carry on
Mine came today. I tested it out and it does what it is supposed to do.
In addition to full boil, there are 7 temperature settings: 140, 150, 160, 170, 180, 190, 200.
When it hits the set temperature it will beep and shut off. If you click the Keep Warm button before you set the temp, it will hold temp for an hour and then shut off.
There are color lamps set into the base that make the water glow in 5 different colors to indicate the approximate current temp in the kettle, plus a numeric display of actual temp.
Don’t you dare laugh at the “stupid people trick”. But this morning, my half-asleep wife filled th glass kettle with water, put it down on the gas stove instead of its electric base, turned the burner on high and went off to feed the cat.
After a couple of minutes – in fact, the instant she heard the explosion – she returned to find the stove engulfed in flames, which she managed to extinguish, with the green plastic from the kettle melted all over the stovetop.
Several hours later, the entire house still smells like some forever chemical we shouldn’t be breathing.
But that’s not the worst part. The worst part is that we no longer have the electric kettle we’d both learned to love over the last ten days, though we still have its pristine green base, sitting forlornly next to the stove. Worse still, this 1.2 liter green kettle with temperature control doesn’t seem to exist for sale anywhere else on the internet. (Meh is totally sold out – I checked. And the red version would be really yuck in our kitchen.)
So I’m posting here on the 1% chance that someone who also bought this green kettle shows up just to complain about how horrible it is, and how much they wish they hadn’t bought it. If that’s you, let me know and I’ll take it off your hands.
@thumperchick