Barilla passive cooker | Hacker News Reader

Barilla passive cooker

barilla.com

563 pointscunidev509 comments

The claim: reduces CO₂e emissions by up to 80%*

The asterisk: water boiling phase excluded

When I boil pasta, I use full heat to get the water boiling, drop in the pasta, then let it come back up to a boil, then drop the temperature as low as possible to keep a slow boil going--about medium-low.

Guesstimating that the boil takes about as long as the time to cook the pasta, I'd say that the pasta cooking portion only takes up about 1/3 of the energy of the total (cold pot to cooked pasta).

The 80% savings only covers the pasta cooking phase, so overall, it's only saving 4/15 or 27% (roughly). If you use a lot more water, then that initial boil time further reduces your savings.

Guesstimating that the boil takes about as long as the time to cook the pasta,

You need an new stove. Edit: or a new pot

Bringing 5+ quarts of water to a boil takes a lot of energy. Hell, it takes my jetboil 90s-120s to boil low-temp water in like...1 quart quantities. It doesn't seem unreasonable to me that a large pot of water takes 8-10 minutes to bring to a rolling boil.

You don't need to cook pasta in a lot of water. Just enough to cover the pasta is fine.

Right. And in fact, it's better that way. There's more starch in the water, which makes it more useful when you add some to the sauce in your sauce pan.

What, you don't finish your pasta by heating it with the sauce??? Hang your head in shame.

Or just cook your pasta in the sauce.

no. they shamelessly pan fry pasta. (and rinse them briefly with fresh water to get rid of the starch and stop the cooking for bite. also works just perfect with a low amount of water)

More than a gallon? That's a big batch of spaghetti - it stands to reason that if you're feeding a great multitude, there's going to be a cost in cooking fuel.

Or he is stuck with an electric coil stove that he can't replace. Those suck.

A better way to save energy is to use an electric kettle to get the water up to boiling.

This is about three times as energy-efficient as a gas hob. Combined with passive cooking it could save real money…

Technology Connections on YouTube has a good video about how electric kettles are the superior way to boil water: https://youtu.be/_yMMTVVJI4c

This is not just efficient but also saves a lot of time. I do this with rice/pasta or anything that requires boiling. Also, using a pressure cooker can save a lot of time/energy with foods like legumes/meats etc.

+1 for pressure cooker. I use mine twice a week or so. For just about anything since there are so many recipes online. And less clean up!

Alec, of the Technology Connections YouTube channel, shows it's not just energy saving, but faster and cleaner. Even with US outlet power limits a kettle will boil a volume of water much more quickly than a gas stovetop, and my indoor CO2 sensor won't spike by hundreds to a thousand PPM of CO2.

While the time savings is modest, if you have an electric kettle it's a no brainer to prefer that over gas.

Though induction stovetops can be faster yet, and just as clean.

Your gas stove will likely dramatically outperform an 1800W electric heater if you use a proper pot:

https://turbopot.com/

I would still rather use a nice induction range, but it is possible to get decent efficiency out of gas.

Buying cookware that works better on gas but is specifically incompatible with induction cooking seems a bit like rigging your Ram to roll coal, at this point in time.

How's that? Most people who have serviceable gas ranges are not going to rip them out and replace them with induction any time soon.

Someone who wants to go electric badly enough to spend thousands of dollars installing a high-current power outlet is not likely to balk at the cost of new pans.

There's still a huge amount of energy that gets dumped out into the kitchen by any non-induction cooktop, no matter what pot you use.

I always wanted some kind of "collar" that I could put around a burner to try to direct that excess heat back into the pan/pot.

The problem is you need airflow or you generate carbon monoxide instead of carbon dioxide. So simple solutions can get more heat but also kill you.

minor side effect

Death only increases the amount of carbon emissions this method saves.

Product idea: a broken CO detector that saves up to 100% of person’s future emissions. Saves money in the future too.

Lower carbon emissions with this one weird trick!

But your decomposing family will release CO2!

It's offset against the future CO2 emissions of the family and their descendants.

(Gee, this thread got dark. Like carbon-black dark)

There used to be (still is?) a sort of vertical chute/collar available to put around camp pots. Think mountaineering applications. The idea was that they would capture heat energy escaping off the bottom of the pot that would rise/disperse into the environment, and channel it close to the side of the pot where it would heat the vessel as it rose. Think of wrapping a section of corrugated cardboard around the outside wall of a pot. Now a birds-eye view down the cardboard should reveal the energy capturing channels that will allow the sides of your pot to heat the pot contents. Adjust your material and tune the sizing and you’ve got a camping gadget.

Typically, those collars are used as a wind screen.

https://www.rei.com/product/139472/toaks-titanium-windscreen

No - found a reference:

https://www.msrgear.com/stoves/stove-accessories/heat-exchan...

This is maybe useful for boiling water but not so great for cooking. You want your pot to have a relatively uniform temperature, and gas burns very hot. This means that, especially if the walls of the pan are thin, any part of the wall that has good thermal contact with combustion products and poor contact with food will get extremely hot, with various unfortunate consequences. Also the handles will get hot.

Well it takes absolutely forever to boil water on a camp stove, so I"ll take it.

Look into jetboil campstove/pot. It's got a heat exchanger fin stack on the bottom of the pot to improve boil time.

Old cast iron skillets had a collar under them to better fit on the pot belly stovetop.

Crazy. Like a Jetboil for your home stove.

What efficiency (in terms of energy transfer to the intended material vs to the environment) is observed with gas? IIRC, gas achieves maybe 35-50% efficiency (depending on the surface area and material of the pan) compared with ~80% for electric resistance heating and >90% for induction.

Adam Ragusea did a water boiling comparison and the gas stove was dumping so much energy into the air around the pot that his thermometer melted [0]. I just don't see how any pan geometry could extract much of the energy from the quickly rising hot gas produced by combustion.

[0] https://youtu.be/Xn1LUo5ra_A?t=249

The claim on the site is that the heat exchanger base boosts efficiency up to 60%.

You still of course do have the problem that home rangehoods usually aren't powerful enough to create enough air-flow to properly deal with the NOx and SOx produced by burning gas, which turns out to be a big health risk...

Most home range hoods are too powerful. Go to any site that calculates commercial range hood requirements, enter in your parameters, and then try to find a nice range hood that matches. Those 700 cfm or 1000 cfm beasts the appliance stores sell are entirely inappropriate.

There may well be a problem with a poorly designed range hood and exhaust that inevitably isn’t captured. And people might not like using the hoods all the time.

Comparing gas with electrical efficiency is not representing realistic end-to-end efficiencies wrt. co2 as long as the vas majority of electricity is generated from primary energy. Power plants tend to have efficiencies lower 50%.

The gas end-to-end "efficiency" will not improve drastically ever, while for an electrical stove it is tied to energy production. Arguing with end-to-end efficiencies and power plants is misleading, as I can power my induction stove from my solar panels

That's true, but I power mine from the municipal grid that burns stuff to make steam and then electricity

Might still be better as efficiency goes up with temperature and industrial generators can achieve much higher temperatures that what you can at home, and also include some clean sources of energy into the mix.

I have a gas stove in my studio apartment. I still use an electric kettle to get water boiling before dumping it into a preheated pan to cook noodles/whatever. Highly recommend this approach if you are stuck with gas.

> Highly recommend this approach if you are stuck with gas.

My partner, who cooks more, bemoans that our new apartment has electric. Grew up using gas and claims that it’s better for cooking. I prefer not to intentionally dump gas into our house and welcome the minor benefit of energy efficiency.

Funny how different people see the world (and technology).

Get a (high power) portable induction hob. If you have an outlet that can supply a 1.8-3kW one, it's better than gas unless you're using a wok or simar.

Watch this video about how the idea that gas was better for cooking was a marketing ploy with no basis in reality and how they used lobbyist to force has connections into building codes

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hX2aZUav-54

"no basis in reality". Do you cook? Gas is functionally superior than traditional electric resistance cooking. That's not some evil lobby, that's practical experience. You can instantly control the temperature without juggling multiple burners at different heats. That makes it better. I'd take gas over electric (resistive or halogen) all the time - and I've lived with both.

Induction is on par with gas in controllability - and although there are some downsides, the upsides (so easy to clean!) Make it worth it (imo). I'm not saying that because big induction paid me to either.

Every gas range( Wolf, Viking, GE, Bosch, Maytag ) I've used seems to vary dramatically with temps at different settings.

The lowest setting on some ranges might be a High setting on others.

I used to be a cook in a a few michelin starred restaurants, so you can trust my opinion here.

Gas is far superior to electric heating elements because of the speed at which it can change temperature, and makes flambeing a cinch.

That being said Induction ranges are several orders of magnitude superior to gas. As are ovens with humidity and air flow control.

This is the case for every range, gas or electric. Every time I've moved I'd had to "recalibrate" my expectations and use of the stove to account for different temperatures and quirks.

My preference for gas has a lot to do with the fact that my pans, unless they're exceptionally heavy, never sit stably on the conventional coil-type electric stove burners. So the pan isn't level and doesn't heat evenly. Gas range grates don't tend to have that problem.

I've never owned an induction cooktop but I'd imagine the flat surface wouldn't have that problem (assuming the pans aren't warped).

Gas burners put out 3x-4x the power of an electric burner and have much lower thermal mass, so the acceleration in thermal power is much higher and the absolute thermal power is higher.

A large electric burner is 2400-3600 watts, a large gas burner can be 8-16 kw. I think induction could get better power delivery than gas with time.

You can get skillful with electric, you just have to see 30 seconds into the future and anticipate the thermal lag and overshoot when adjusting burner power.

Gas burners may be higher total power, but the heat transfer is surely pretty poor. Induction delivers something like 90% of the power into the pan. Boiling water (which is just an exercise in energy transfer) is much quicker on induction than gas.

In my experience living with an AEG induction stove with a peak single burner power output of 3.7kW - apart from I never did any cooking (apart from boiling water) which needed that level of power for more than a few tens of seconds. The gas stove in my current house felt underpowered in comparison.

No disagreement here, induction has way better power transfer to the food than electric resistance heating. I was only comparing resistance heating with gas.

I cook, and while I acknowledge there are benefits to gas, I can escape the feeling that what a lot of people end up comparing are crappy electric stoves from when they lived in cheap apartments vs higher end gas stoves that they/another homeowner bought for themselves.

> claims that it’s better for cooking

It's not really "better" it's simply easier keep a constant heat. Most electrical cooking stuff works on intermittent on-and-off cycles. An electric oven power up, then start cycling it's internal resistences let's say 10" powerd 5" off, then again 10" powerd etc. Some users here show me in a video an induction plate who use "mini-coils" who seems rotating constantly nearly nullifying such cycle effects on food cooking, but most other electric gears choose a "simpler" approach for their OEM.

Personally I'm all electric since around 8/10 years or so, I've made a habit and not a professional cook (while remaining a professional eater) but I understand those who dislike the initial impact...

Beside that: most actual tech is developed in crappy ways, most product explicitly made not to last and not to ensure evolution with plugged-in recycling but simply ensure a constant buy of new gears who are just crappy like the ones they substitute. Now most people might not realize that as well as a techie but anyone feel that. So...

Induction is much better than gas about 90% of the time. Because the heat can be set much lower than a flame’s temperature, and because heat transfer happens through the whole bottom surface of the pan, it’s much better to keep a low-ish temperature for any length of time, which opens a lot of possibilities. For high heat, the larger contact area makes it much quicker to heat up evenly the whole pan. It pairs very nicely with a cast iron pan as well.

And that’s just from a practical, cooking point of view, without mentioning all the health benefits.

It was not our choice when we got an induction cooktop the first time, but now it would be.

If you can afford it, a high end induction stove might be an upgrade you both enjoy without needing gas. Higher end ones have more precision and consistency and easier controls.

I cook a lot. I enjoy cooking with gas and I appreciate it’s benefits, but I avoid/minimize it because it is so plainly inefficient and frankly more hazardous than a modern electric or induction burner.

I generally heat half the water in the pot, and half in the electric kettle (adjust proportions depending on the relative power of your appliances) Quickest way to heat up the required amount of water

Assuming you have a four-burner stove, you could split your water five-way, and use four pots and your electric tea kettle.

If you want to push, you could improve the efficiency even more. That would require a capital investment into additional stoves and/or electric kettles. You'd probably need something like kubernetes for orchestration as well.

Since I don't have a dishwasher, using more pots actually has time cost, so that approach doesn't work

Interestingly, I feel compelled to wash a pot even if I only used it to boil water, while that's not the case for the kettle. Force of habit I guess

>Though induction stovetops can be faster yet, and just as clean.

You have the mother of all hotspots on the pan (less relevant for boiling) where the induction ring itself is and getting simmer right is harder. Induction as implemented right now is on/off with full blast for the duration and just increased downtime. It is not the same as low constant output.

> You have the mother of all hotspots on the pan (less relevant for boiling) where the induction ring itself is and getting simmer right is harder.

Not at all. There is no significant hot spot as heat is actually produced by the bottom of the pan and not the coils themselves.

> Induction as implemented right now is on/off with full blast for the duration and just increased downtime. It is not the same as low constant output.

Again, not at all. All the devices I have used were perfectly fine generating a low, constant heat. what you describe may be the case for bargain basement ones, and it was the case for most resistive cooktops, but is definitely not the case for inductions ones.

I guess you could have a hot spot on the pan if the coils are ill-designed or you’re putting a large pan on a small burner?

The pan will only heat up near the coil, so if the coil covers only the center third of the pan, only that will heat up (though some pans have a heat-spreading layer to mitigate this, and sometimes to add some more inertia depending on the pan’s purpose).

> I guess you could have a hot spot on the pan if the coils are ill-designed or you’re putting a large pan on a small burner?

Yes, but then it’s hardly a problem with the technology if you put a large pan on a small burner.

As for the rest, in all cookers I have seen, the coils cover the whole surface, except for a small spot in the centre. Besides, induced current does not happen only where the cookware is closest to the coil. The magnetic field is more spread out than that and the heating surface is larger than just the surface of “contact” (there is no real contact, but anyway).

I assume there could be an exceptionally badly designed induction cooktop with hot spots (it’d have to have a very weird geometry, though), but that would take some effort.

With most cookware it's pretty obvious where the coils are when trying to simmer. With thinner stuff like carbon steel the hot spots can be pretty nasty: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pifD__DIxGU

> All the devices I have used were perfectly fine generating a low, constant heat

I have never seen an induction cooktop that could generate low, constant heat. Even pretty pricy ones (eg. a 3000€ Bora hob with integrated extraction) showed a clear on/off cycle at the lowest heat settings. But maybe tech has improved in recent years, and there are hobs now that have constant low power output?

Maybe the effect also just depends on your cookware? On pots with a heavy bottom with aluminium or copper core you probably won't see the coil patterns and the on/off effect will be less pronounced. If you have a pot with a thin stainless steel bottom, you will definitely see uneven heat, the power from an induction coil is not completely homogenous.

All of the cheap tabletop cooktop I have seen have terrible cycling at lower powers, there seems to be two power levels and when you need something below the lower one, it cycles power at ~10s frequency. In contrast a Bosch integrated cooktop from a couple of years ago also does cycling, but seems to have more power levels available and the cycling is faster, around 1Hz or so. At least for me that is good enough.

My issues with it are more about inaccurate placement causing hot and cold spots and if you move a pot it can triggers cookware detection, which then clicks different coils on and off for 5-10s before it is satisfied with the new configuration. Both of those issues are probably exacerbated by the "FlexInduction" system that promises one large automatic cook area.

I'm hoping that power electronics development for electric cars creates some innovation in this area, but it's really hard to tell because there are no useful review sites and there aren't any places that let you take a cooktop for a testdrive.

> there are no useful review sites

Right! The only thing there is are occasional reviews on shopping websites, but people can usually only compare it to their previous one, so there really are no useful reviews (spoiler: most induction hobs are faster than whatever people had before, and people seem to hate touch controls)

Especially once you get to the fancy features (eg. internal and external temperature sensors) there are almost no reviews at all and all you have is the manufacturers marketing.

> While the time savings is modest, if you have an electric kettle it's a no brainer to prefer that over gas.

Not quite. Water is heavy and boiling water is dangerous; if you're boiling your water in a teakettle you then have to transfer it to a pot on the stove without scalding yourself.

(This isn't the exact problem I'd experience if I adopted your advice. I have an electric teakettle, but it is low volume and is also sharply limited in the rate at which you can pour out water from it. That's fine if you want to prepare individual servings of tea. It's unworkable if you want to prepare a bunch of boiling water to boil stuff in. But fixing that problem will immediately cause the "boiling water is dangerous" problem.)

Presumably you mean you have a gooseneck kettle, which I agree is not well suited to this task (though if it takes 30s to pour out the kettle, it's not really a big deal). Regardless, pouring boiling water out of a kettle is far less dangerous than pouring the cooked pasta + boiling water out of the pot and into a strainer.

If I'm looking to boil say 2 litres of water, I'll put 1.5 l in the electric kettle, 0.5l in the pot on the gas stove with a lid on. Generally the kettle boils first.

> Regardless, pouring boiling water out of a kettle is far less dangerous than pouring the cooked pasta + boiling water out of the pot and into a strainer.

I don't think this is true. The mechanics are essentially the same. But the colander receiving the pasta + boiling water is situated inside the sink, which will catch the water that is in that case intended to spill out.

The pot is situated on the stove, which is a raised platform that can't catch water at all. Any spill there will splash all over.

Well, with my sample size of one, I've splashed boiling water on the floor when trying to drain pasta or potatoes, but never while pouring out a kettle. Perhaps related, a kettle has a cold base in addition to a cold handle oriented more appropriately for pouring.

For some reasons I thought most of the people switched to electric induction cooktops.

There are a lot of resistive electric ranges, and around 40% of Americans still use gas stoves.

After installing an induction stove, I did a side-by-side test on boiling water on it vs kettle. The kettle won, both on power consumption and time. This is for a ~2000W kettle.

Americans don't really do electric kettles, largely on account of using 110V mains, which limits power to around 1100W, making it a lot slower than ~2000W electric kettles in the 200+V world.

I'd be very surprised to see a standard US gas range capable of boiling water faster than an electric kettle.

Yeah, even for a 1200W kettle heating a liter of water can be faster in the kettle than an average gas stove and pot.

Yeah it's just not. I have one of those ridiculous bazillion-BTU gas burners and I still prefer to boil water using a combination of a 120V tea kettle (1L) and an 120V portable induction cooker. An installed 240V range is even faster, but I don't have one of those.

Americans largely don't use electric kettles because Americans largely don't drink tea at home and thus don't use kettles as often as the rest of the world.

Most households I know don't even own a kettle. Not a stovetop one, not an electric one.

If you were to ask most Americans why they don't have an electric kettle at home they won't say "because I only have 120V outlets in the kitchen." They'll say it is because they don't need a kettle.

I own a stove top kettle. Only used for hot chocolate or aeropress coffee (but I usually use drip maker)

You sure? Germany is a (shit) coffee country and everybody has had electric kettles since the 90s.

What do they use the kettles for? For most non tea drinking households in the US there is no essential use for a kettle.

They do sell them here, people buy them, they are usually tea drinkers.

To perhaps state the obvious, I use mine mainly for coffee. And the occasional tea cup.

Honestly it seems more likely for an American household to have a Keurig machine (or hell, even multiple Keurigs) than to have any kind of kettle.

You're on target here. I have become the dumping ground for misbehaving keurigs from family and have managed to make most of them work or frankenstein parts between them. I hate the machines and wish this never happened. I was happy with a french press. Curse my urge to not waste things.

Last sentence is ironic because keurigs waste so much plastic if you use them daily.

It feels like much plastic since you touch each one, but it's a very tiny amount if you weigh your monthly usage.

> I was happy with a french press. Curse my urge to not waste things.

I don't understand this sentence, I would much rather waste some ground coffee beans and water than plastic.

With a French Press, you don't have to buy and throw away a constant stream of paper filters.

A Keurig machine is just an electric kettle with an electric pump inside of it.

Can it be used like a kettle - ie can it rapidly heat up a quart of water without a coffee residue taste? No, it cannot.

Just because they both heat water doesn’t make them similar.

Pretty much. I used my keurig this way for a few years until i realized I'm really not using pods and am only using it for hot water to make tea (via normal steeping). If you brew coffee and then use it for something right after I don't recall there being much coffee taste, but you could probably run a small cup setting to flush things in the pod area a bit if needed.

I've since switched to a Zojirushi water boiler which I adore, especially after learning my keurig wasn't getting hot enough to really brew the tea well.

I used to use my Senseo to make ramen so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I strongly disagree. With a kettle, the whole volume of water is being heated at once and is a uniform temperature. A Keurig or drip coffee maker is only heating a small volume of water at a time. By the time you process a whole liter of water the first bit will have already cooled off a lot. It's a very different process and potentially a very different outcome.

If you're making a single cup (~250mL) why do you need to heat 1000mL of water?

Ok exactly - in addition to keurigs /nespressos etc mentioned (which I will refuse to buy) - for years the predominant coffee making apparatus in the US has been the automatic drip coffee maker.

French press, pour over, chemx are all niche.

German in Canada here. I used mine to cook water for pasta as it's usually faster and more efficient than my electric cooktop. Bought one in Canada and it's close to useless for that purpose. My German kettle would bring 1.7L of tap water to a rolling boil in about 4 minutes. My Canadian one needs about 10 minutes to achieve the same.

> there is no essential use for a kettle

electric kettle

french press for coffee

tea kettle for tea

Tea.

French press coffee.

Instant coffee, hot cider, hot chocolate, etc.

Heating water for instant soups, etc.

It was weird how before that they only ever had wall mounted Wasserkocher (water boiler) and then en-masse discovered kettles.

Lots of Americans drink kind of shit coffee as well, they just largely drink it from drip coffee makers. Alternative brewing methods like french press, aero press, pour over, etc. is starting to become more popular but is definitely still not a predominant way of doing it. And even then, the really bougie people will just have an instant boiler tap in their kitchen instead of taking up counter space with something that takes longer to get hot water.

In my experience drip coffee in a halfway decent machine from halfway decent beans is miles better than most/all instant. Just because drip coffee is convenient doesn't necessarily mean it's bad.

The beans you use are more important than the brewing method - if you use a giant tub of stale Folgers it probably won't be great. But grind you own decent beans and a drip machine can be fantastic.

Recommend any particular beans?

I doubt we live in the same place so I won't recommend anything specific. But I would find local roasters and try to buy beans that were roasted in the last couple of days. Freshness makes a pretty big difference. Finding specific ones you really like will take a bit of trial and error. Single origin if you want interesting/specific flavours, blends if you want something a bit more consistent.

Drip coffee is pretty good, good taste and caffeine content while being pretty simple to brew, a decent machine is cheap as well. It's just a method, the beans you use are what actually count.

The worst part of a standard American drip coffee machine is cleaning it. Too many different nooks and crannies to get gross.

I find pour over to be one of the easiest methods in amortized time. It takes three minutes to make a cup but the clean up time is only another 30 seconds—-throw away the paper filter and rinse the dripper.

Those suck, I use a Moccamaster that's been beating around for at least some 30 years. Bought it second hand and never had an issue in the past 15 years, reliable, easy to clean. It's a delight of design based in functionality for me.

Recommend any particular beans?

The time since roast matters a lot. Find a local roaster, you can get fresh roasted and it’s unlikely someone that went through the effort of setting up a local roaster is going to buy crap beans. Also, I’d recommend light roast.

And pour-over is just you manually doing what the drip coffee machine does for you.

I don't drink the bean juice personally, so I've got no skin in the game. To me it definitely seems like a drip coffee maker could make a cup of Joe just about as good as most other methods. I do think it's a combination of the burner burning the coffee after and also a coolness factor (that's how my parents did it, gross!) that drives a lot of the hipness of alternative brewing methods in the US.

But as mentioned I don't really have a horse in this race to begin with. Drink what makes you happy however you brew it. :)

I'm not going to judge which one is better (though I personally prefer espresso, it's a matter of preference), but coffee brewed with different methods definitely tastes differently. Coffee brewed at higher pressure (3~4 bar for moka pot, >9bar for espresso) tend to taste way stronger and more flavorful (which is why they're drank in lower quantities)

Hard Disagree.

Espresso and similar pressure based brewing (Moka Pot) is far superior with equal beans. Tastes way better, more flexibility in creating different drinks, very fast to brew, etc . If it’s too concentrated or hard to drink an espresso shot then you dilute it (for all you black-coffee drinkers, it’s ok to use milk, it’s still coffee).

Different methods of brewing give you different results. If you like (or just want) a stronger flavour, use a pressurised method (espresso, moka pot, etc.), more flavour but the caffeine content is going to be lower than a longer brewing method.

I drink coffee in different ways in different days. If I want a large amount in the morning I go for a drip coffee or french press, the taste is smoother and caffeine content higher. If I want to taste the fullness of the beans I use a moka at home.

I don't see other methods of brewing as objectively better or worse, it depends on the result you expect or want, some days I want an espresso in the morning, some days I want a lot more caffeine, etc.

Also, I just drink coffee, I don't make drinks or turned coffee into a hobby.

> an instant boiler tap in their kitchen instead of taking up counter space with something that takes longer to get hot water.

These things usually serve "near-boiling" water, somewhere around 95 C. This is fine for some cases - e.g. making ramen - but not appropriate for many kinds of tea.

I have such a tap, and I also have an electric kettle. The tap is mostly used to prefill pots with near-boiling water for cooking, so as to not wait for so long for the stove to do it. The kettle is used for tea and coffee.

I know it's heresy to the British, but you can heat water for tea in the microwave just fine. And at least in my European imagination, every American has a microwave in their home.

>every American has a microwave in their home

Of course we do! Europeans don't all have microwave ovens? How do you warm up leftovers?

And yes, I drink tea daily with microwaved water.

I'm American, and I often heat up leftovers with a toaster oven or on the stove. For some foods it gets better results.

There's also steamers. They are especially popular in Asia.

Isn’t it problematic to heat water in a microwave?

Only if you overheat it. Drives all the gas out and makes the water off/flat.

Its possible to superheat water in a microwave so that it will explosively boil when disturbed, but it is fairly easy to safeguard against, as well.

My microwave has a picture of a cup with a spoon in it, this stops superheating.

How?

It provides a non-smooth surface to induce steam bubbles to form.

I know in chem labs we used to use little chunks of ceramic for test tubes, but those aren't desirable in your tea.

>My microwave has a picture of a cup with a spoon in it, this stops superheating.

This appears to be a microwave setting. I don't see how that would provide a non smooth surface

“My microwave has a picture on it” is what was said; graphic instructions are common.

Ah ok I see now!

Sorry if I was unclear. It's basically this: https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/234042/should-i-...

I don't heat up leftovers, I just eat them cold. But we do have a microwave (we bought it at the beginning of the pandemic so we could heat up frozen meals--we didn't have one before). I had cold leftover pasta for lunch today. My wife turns up her nose at cold leftovers but I'm not picky.

Anecdote of one: I am an American that does not own a microwave and does own an electric kettle. We are legion.

You can end up superheating the water that way and scalding yourself. I also prefer to control the temperature of my water which you cannot do in a microwave.

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/boil-on-troubled-waters/

It's something to be aware of, but in practice it's very difficult to superheat water at home.

For superheating to occur, you need very pure water in a smooth container with no imperfections. Tap water in most places cannot be superheated because it contains too many minerals, and most ceramic cups aren't smooth enough to prevent boiling.

If you're making tea, an easy way to prevent superheating is to drop the bag in the water before you heat it. Another way is to put a wooden stirrer in the cup.

There's a mythbuster video here where they show water being superheated: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_OXM4mr_i0, but note that they use distilled water (which nobody drinks) in a Pyrex container (which nobody uses). And they actually use a mug of tap water as a control.

that's not really true. i've superheated tap water at least a dozen times. never had a negative consequence from it, besides having to clean up some water, so it's also not something that really bothers me. from my experience the superheated state can be surprisingly stable, a couple times only explosively boiling over while being poured, instead of the moment I grab the container.

edit: as far as 'nobody' using Pyrex, my preferred container for heating water is a big Pyrex measuring cup.

My microwave has a picture of a cup with a spoon in it to warn you to only boil water with something in it. Despite being warned for years not to put anything metal in a microwave it's actually fine to leave a metal spoon in water to stop it from superheating.

> It's something to be aware of, but in practice it's very difficult to superheat water at home.

Eh, I've had it happen many times at home. A coffee mug of water comes out of the microwave with just a hint of bubbles. Add sugar/tea/instant coffee and the whole thing instantly bubbles up and spills.

It's really easy to control the temperature of the water; boil it, ten wait for it to cool to the correct temperature.

For a fixed amount of water, you can learn the time and not have to pull out your instant-read thermometer.

You can burn yourself with an oven or a hob. In fact a kitchen is full of ways to maim yourself. So why single out the microwave? A microwave is a tool, tools can be unsafe if used improperly.

But that's partially because 1100W kettles are less _useful_.

I'm mostly a coffee drinker, and use a bean to cup machine for that. But I still use my kettle a good bit, because it's quicker to boil the kettle and then pour into the pan and bring back to the boil than bringing cold water to the boil in the pan. I've got a 3kW kettle, though, if I had a 1100W one I wouldn't do that because it _wouldn't_ be quicker.

Unless you have some sort of thunder-wok burner the 110V kettle is still way faster than the stove.

Source: have a 110V kettle and a gas cooktop with very large burners, still use the aforementioned trick.

I timed mine (1kW kettle vs glass topped electric stove, not induction) and the kettle was only a bit faster: https://www.jefftk.com/p/electric-kettle-vs-stove

Hi end gas ranges will beat a good electric kettle in the USA. (kettle 7min, range <6 min). My wife picked up a used thermidor this last summer and it beats any kettle we’ve had in the USA so far by at least a minute. That said, the kettle is more convenient overall (auto shutoff, auto start, pour from same container), so we end up using it.

In the other hand the US kettle beat the crap out of our old gas range, and even the good range is not nearly as fast as a crappy electric kettle in germany, which clocks in at 4 min.

did you try french press?

Once introduced, it's hard to downplay the usefulness of an electric kettle.

I'm American and learned about electric kettles during trips to Asia. They are definitely handy, even at 110V. We make our daily coffee in a French press, so the electric kettle is a no-brainer.

> We make our daily coffee in a French press

Moka pots are much better. Your French press will start letting the coffee powder through at some point. I use these: https://www.rommelsbacher.de/en/coffee-tea-co/espresso-maker....

I don’t like to force things on people, but I usually buy people Moka pots. Moka pots ARE better but they make a different coffee. Moka pots are an espresso machine substitute more than a French press substitute.

I do recommend it though. Lots more options for coffee drinks.

You can't compare a moka pot with a french press, they are fundamentally different things that make different styles of coffee. Espresso and coffee are not identical.

Personally I find french press too grainy, so at home I use aeropress, but when out prefer a properly done pour over filtered coffee. Black of course.

Agreed. Someone gave us ours as a wedding gift. I thought, “Great. More clutter I don’t need.”

I use it daily for tea and coffee (Aeropress). And now, thanks to this thread, I may use it to speed up my pasta water boiling.

While traveling through Europe, most AirBnBs had electric kettles and they all had gross scale deposits in them so I ended up boiling water in a pot.

It's calcium. It won't hurt you, and you can't taste it.

Will it also make my bones stronger? Where does it come from? Was it in the water to begin with?

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_water

Yes it was in the water to begin with, that’s what hard water is.

Ahh right, hard water, thanks.

Don’t know about your bones but all tap water has some minerals in it.

Good thing too, because if you drink demineralised water it pulls electrolytes out of your cells (I think by osmosis) and eventually you also end up with decreasing bone density.

Most tap water is far from being demineralised. It's a problem if you have a reverse osmosis filtration system though.

You can definitely taste it.

If you care about energy efficiency, you should descale your kettles every so often.

It's not even hard, just boil a solution of 1/2 white vinegar + 1/2 water, and the CaCO3 (+ 2H(+) from the vinegar) changes back to Ca(2+) + CO2 + H2O You can even see the bubbles from the CO2

It's pretty inconvenient when you are in an unknown location on a hotel. But yes, some areas of Europe has very hard water.

For making coffee or tea, soft water is preferable.

For drinking straight up, hard water tastes better. At least to me. Perhaps because that's what I grew up with in central Europe.

Btw, the Romans also built their towns preferably in places with hard water.

I come from a soft water area and I prefer the soft water for drinking. Our water cooker never needs vinegar, it's just not getting the residue :-)

I'd recommend using citric acid instead, they sell it here as "lemon salt" so it comes in an easy to use salt shaker. I usually put it in the minimum amount of water required to safely boil it and a small amount depending on how heavy the deposits are (usually up to a spoon is enough for me), though you could also just pour it in and wait.

It works really well and doesn't leave the same smell. When I'd previously used vinegar I'd had to boil another round of water and throw it away just to clean the kettle from the vinegar itself, but with citric acid there's no need (just don't drink the citric acid, it tastes like acid :)).

Do you recommend citric acid over vinegar just because of the smell?

I use vinegar all the time, put in something like 50 ml to the remaining hot water just after making a tea. After a few minutes you can just rinse it and let it evaporate, 5 more mins and the smell is totally gone.

> You can definitely taste it.

If it gets deposited, it means that it’s not in the water any longer, or at least the concentration in the water has lowered. What you can taste is already in the water before you boil it and does not come from the kettle (well, in kettles that have been used normally with normal water).

If it bothers you, just boiling a bit of slightly diluted vinegar will get rid of it.

> If you care about energy efficiency, you should descale your kettles every so often.

Yes, these are terrible at conducting heat.

Adding a little vinegar and water and boiling it will often remove most of the scale. Maybe hard when you're travelling, but at home it works fine.

Citric acid is commonly used in Germany.

With the added bonus it (imo) smells better. In the US, you can usually find it with pickling supplies or in the cleaning section as coffee pot cleaner

You clean that by boiling vinegar and water, takes 3 minutes.

I'd gladly take an electric kettle over what I had to use the last time I was in an American hotel room to heat water, which was the bedside drip coffee maker. Water heated through that still tasted like bad coffee.

Throw some white vinegar. Boil. Rince. Clean.

It’s part of my bug out bag. You can cook with that thing and one bowl.

I have a pretty nice electric kettle. You can set it to a number of common tea temperatures and it'll hold that temp for up to a half hour. I got it as a wedding gift. I use it about weekly.

If it broke tonight I don't know that I'd bother replacing it tomorrow. I'd probably go a while before I got another kettle. It might even take someone gifting me one before I bother getting one.

Sure, it's marginally faster boiling water than my stove. It's about as fast as my microwave (which is insane at 1650W). It's definitely more efficient, but the break even on that is measured in years probably for even a cheap kettle and decades for this fancy one I have.

I just don't really drink many hot drinks and my microwave does just about as good of a job for getting things hot.

https://www.cuisinart.com/shopping/appliances/tea_kettles/cp...

Strange.. every household and even hotel room I've ever been in North America had a kettle.

I only went to an Airbnb once that didn't have a kettle, so I Amazon'd one and just left it there.

In the hotels, that’s not a kettle. It’s a coffee maker. If you choose to not put coffee in it, that’s up to you.

(Us Americans tend to optimize for coffee over tea. If something also works for tea, that’s a happy coincidence, but not intentional.)

If you did it must not have been in the United States, or you got lucky.

I've been in over a hundred different hotels in the United States. East coast, West coast, Midwest, Rockies, deep South, South Atlantic coast, pretty much every region. I've probably only had a kettle a handful of times. Nearly universally a drip coffee maker, but practically never a kettle.

Note I'm not talking about the machine with the glass carafe on a small burner with a basket above it. That's a coffee maker in US terms, not an electric kettle.

Oh yea ok I think you're right about the hotels.

It's a pretty universal item in any Canadian home and possibly even dorm room.

My wife drinks tea, I drink coffee. Both of us grudge the time needed to heat water in our 120V American electric kettle compared to European 240V kettles. I^2 makes a big difference.

We use a hot water pot at home, a Zojirushi. Never have to bother with hot water, it's always available and the thing uses a negligible amount of electricity (we're almost entirely on solar anyway, so it's a moot point for our family) comparable to all of our other appliances.

European here that doesn't drink tea yet still has a kettle.

> they won't say "because I only have 120V outlets in the kitchen." They'll say it is because they don't need a kettle.

Well no they wouldn't say that, unless they have experience of 240v perhaps.

They might reasonably say that it's too slow. Or maybe they're aware that kettles are 'just slow' and so arrange their lives so that they don't need a kettle, in which case they would say "I don't need a kettle".

Technology Experiments tried it.

https://youtu.be/_yMMTVVJI4c?t=232

It’s not that slow. 1. They sell plenty of kettles in the US (touch grass and go to Target sometime or something) - a large portion of those sales are probably to Asian households. It is simply that if you have a drip coffee maker and don’t drink much tea why do you need a kettle.

No idea where this dumb myth comes from - kettles are not hard to find in the US, they work fine - there is a ton of demand it is just relatively miniscule.

They're found in most college dorm rooms.

No idea where this dumb myth comes from

I think it’s a hangover from when it was true - fairly recently in a human-lifespan timescale. I moved to the SF Bay Area from the UK 20 years ago, and had to buy a weird kettle from Amazon. None of the nearby stores had a decent one. That’s definitely not true now though.

I had an electric kettle growing up, but nobody else I knew/know has one. I don't know why, they're extremely practical, don't take up much space, and don't cost much money unless you get a fancy temperature-controlled one.

I wonder how I’m making my Chemex every morning…

Japan is on 100V mains, and electric kettles are everywhere.

Good point. What's the typical kitchen set-up in a Japanese apartment?

FWIW in my American experience most everyone I know has one and uses it, so your mileage may vary.

I don't have a kettle because I have a hot water tap that gives me water at more than 200F. If I need it boiling, it takes a very short period of time on the range to get it there. Those are relatively common, almost every one of my friends and family have one too.

which limits power to around 1100W

All those 1800+ watt hair dryers that are used very commonly in the U.S. are wondering where you got your wattage limit from.

https://news.energysage.com/how-many-watts-does-a-hair-dryer...

Continuous vs noncontinuous overcurrent rating.[1] Depending how you get your appliance approved, you can draw more. The actual requirement is 3 hours, but like all regulations you have to look at intended usage:

[1] https://www.csemag.com/articles/understanding-overcurrent-pr...

The comment I replied to said the U.S. was limited to around 1100W which is why The U.S. doesn't use tea kettles.

I reply with a very commonly used device that uses over 63% more power than 1100W showing that obviously isn't the reason the U.S. doesn't use tea kettles.

And you reply with essentially, "Oh, but that's because the hair dryer isn't used continuously for 3 hours". Did you think a tea kettle is used for 3 hours continuously?

Please actually read what I said: there are differences in the appliance approval process which determines how much continuous power you can draw from an electrical circuit.

Why would a manufacturer bother trying to prove discontinuous draw when they can just current limit, use the same element they do everywhere else with the same resistance, and not worry about it?

I read what you wrote but still fail to see what it has to do with a claim that 1100W is the limit on US circuits and that is the reason Americans don’t use electric kettles.

Because that is what was being discussed.

In my experience, electric kettles are reasonably common in America.

> Americans don't really do electric kettles, largely on account of using 110V mains, which limits power to around 1100W

Most sources I can find indicate the usual (but not maximum) draw of US electric kettles 1500W, and checking a few popular models confirms that 1500W is common.

Most kettles I've had in the US are 1500W, similar to a space heater.

It does take longer to boil, but it's like 2 min compared to 1 min.

I survive.

I'm a European who finds kettles stupid. I own one because someone didn't appreciate my house's lack of kettle and got one despite my protestations. I own (1) a induction stovetop, (2) a microwave… both will perfectly boil water just as fast. Why do I want to waste counter space on a kettle. My kitchen is tiny.

I have the same complaint about a ricecooker. It's perfectly easy to cook rice in a pot. Sure it's convenient to use the automated device, but it's wasteful.

I've never owned a rice cooker but I'm led to believe the rice they make is superior to anything you can reasonably achieve in a simple pot.

It's far easier to achieve consistent results, for sure. We have a small one and it's the best rice we can make at home without significant effort.

Cooking perfect rice in a pot takes technique, for sure. But it's not that hard, and if you do it right it comes out perfect just like a rice cooker.

Wash your rice. Throw in cold pot with 1:1 ratio of rice to water, + a bit extra to account for evaporation[1]. Bring to a full boil. As soon as it's boiling, drop the heat to the lowest setting and cover your pot as tight as you can and let it steam itself until ready. When ready, fluff it immediately.

[1]: the precise amount extra depends on your setup, tbh… how tight your lid seal is, how much surface area your saucepan exposes, etc. but usually an extra 25% will be about right

Dedicated appliance worth to have if it used frequently. As a Japanese who uses ricecooker and kettle, it must have.

No it's not.

The most efficient (and fastest) way is an induction hob with copper disc pan. Something that Technology Connections didn't include in his video.

See some test here: https://youtu.be/EBlyuahlplI

Where's the energy loss from the kettle that's not present in your proposed method? Legit asking, I don't see it. Just heat radiating from the body of the kettle for longer cuz of longer time to make it boil?

The claim seems dubious in Europe, but in North America the stove has access to twice the voltage potential as the kettle, so can heat faster. Then with equal losses the stove wins.

Europeans use 220V for everything.

Well, Germans like to use three-phase power for their electric ovens.

(Still nominally at 230 Volt, but it's not quite the same as two-phase power.)

So in Europe the phenomenon of a stove heating faster than a kettle would not be observed. Isn't that what I said?

230V/3kW induction stove boils a cup of water faster than you can get the cup from the cupboard.

> Where's the energy loss from the kettle that's not present in your proposed method?

You're not heating the water directly, you're heating it through a piece of metal. The wasted energy is heating that piece of metal up to more than 100 deg C. A surprising amount of energy lost there.

If you use the induction hob you're only heating the metal that you actually need to heat to do the cooking.

For us in northern climates, none of this energy is really wasted during winter. But many of us now have heat pumps, which are more efficient than resistive heating.

I have a modern induction stove. I think it's great. But not for bringing water to boil. It's about as fast as a kettle for 500-750 ml. But over a liter and it'll be much slower than a kettle (yes, boost function). I do not use it for bringing pasta water to boil.

> This is about three times as energy-efficient as a gas hob.

I sincerely doubt this figure in cases where electricity is generated from fossil fuels in the first place.

For example, I lived in the Netherlands where 80% of electricity is still produced by fossil fuels, mostly in gas-fired power plants. As I understand it, generating electricity from gas has an efficiency of only about 50%. That means you lose a lot of energy before it even arrives in your home.

An electric kettle has an efficiency of about 80%, with gas stove around 40%. Assuming the cost of transportation is approximately equal for gas and electricity, that means using the gas stove is about as efficient as using the electric kettle, if you assume (most of) the electricity comes from a gas-fired plant.

In the winter, the gas stove will be more efficient since all the heat that doesn't go into your food, heats up the room (heating is typically also based on gas in the Netherlands, so this is basically free energy).

> Combined with passive cooking it could save real money

Again, I don't think this is true. Currently the energy market is fucked up because of the Ukraine war, but up to recently a cubic meter of gas cost around 1 euro, which produces roughly 10 kWh of energy, versus a kWh of electricity cost around 40 cents. That means that on a per-kWh basis, gas costs only a quarter of electricity. So even if the electric kettle is twice as efficient as the gas stove, it is still twice as expensive.

In countries where most electricity is generated by burning coal (like Poland, for example) there is also an environmental cost, since coal-fired plants emit more CO2 per joule than gas-fired plants.

YMMV based on local energy prices obviously, but I don't think it's straightforwardly true that electric kettles are always more efficient or more environmentally friendly than gas stoves, if you look at it holistically.

https://www.vox.com/energy-and-environment/2020/5/7/21247602...

I imagine part of the efficiency of electric kettles is due to the heating element actually being submerged in the water, or at least directly adjacent to it.

Compare to a stovetop where there's a big heavy pot between the element and the water, and it's not in complete contact with it. Also often the heating element is underneath a piece of glass.

With an induction cooktop the pot is the heating element.

> Compare to a stovetop where there's a big heavy pot between the element and the water, and it's not in complete contact with it.

You’re describing resistive stovetops, not induction ones where the heating element is the bottom of the pot itself.

> Also often the heating element is underneath a piece of glass.

These things under the glass do not heat anything. They are there to induce some electric current in the bottom of the pan you put on top, which actually does the heating.

> These things under the glass do not heat anything

Glass infrared cookers also exist, my parents had one back in the 90's before induction was much of a thing. It was touted as easy to clean (and looks cool)

Yes, you’re right, I forgot about those!

They are mostly historical curiosities now, right? Not as cheap as simple resistive cookers, and worse in about all respects than induction ones.

Probably depends on your location. They are still sold here in Sweden for instance, but otoh almost nobody has a gas stove since electricity used to be dirt cheap here.

I have one! I think they're still pretty common in New Zealand too.

They're awful though, I've only got one because I'm renting. The old school exposed spiral element ones are the best non induction electric stoves imo.

> In the winter, the gas stove will be more efficient since all the heat that doesn't go into your food, heats up the room (heating is typically also based on gas in the Netherlands, so this is basically free energy).

The efficiency loss of the electric kettle also gets converted into heat that heats up your home, energy doesn't just disappear.

Not the waste heat from the power plant.

As with everything in this discussion, this also depends on where you live as district heating is a thing

Well the heating with gas is cheaper than with electrics in most places.

So it is "heat your house by X at price of the gas heating" vs "heat your house by X at price of electric heating". And the price of old school resistive heating, not the more efficient heat pump.

An electric kettle is ~90% efficient, the rest is lost to the surroundings but the electricity generation (assuming gas) is ~60% so the entire process, gas to hot water is ~60% and most of the waste you don't get the benefit of.

And gas stove kettle is ~40% efficient but you get the other 60% back as heat in the surroundings, so the entire process is ~100% efficient.

Assuming you need that waste heat of course. In the summer that 60% inefficiency really is an inefficiency.

Damn, 40 per kWh electricity.

My last energy bill (including taxes and fees) is showing $0.124 per kWh electricity, and $0.62 per cubic meter of gas.

With those prices, gas is still twice as expensive as electricity, so even if the gas stove is half as efficient, you still break even.

And yes, electricity prices in Europe are crazy right now. You can see some graphs here that show how enormous the spikes are compared to years of relative stability (no need to read the text; the graphs speak for themselves, and the y-axis starts at 0!)

Electricity: https://www.overstappen.nl/energie/stroomprijs/

Gas: https://www.overstappen.nl/energie/gasprijzen/

So apparently I slightly misremembered the prices; those graphs show that in 2020 the average gas price was about 84 cents per m3 (or about 8.4 cents per kWh assuming 10 kWh per m3), or 23 cents per kWh of electricity. That's closer to 1:3 than 1:4 on a per-kWh basis, but the general argument still holds that it seems like cooking on gas is cheaper than cooking on electricity.

The kettle might come out around the same for particularly dirty grids, but my understanding is that induction stoves are efficient enough (and gas stoves so poor efficiency) that it's basically always better CO₂-wise to use the induction hob.

Your assumption that "the cost of transportation is approximately equal for gas and electricity" is probably not accurate, given that while the infrastructure costs are probably similar, the cost of the energy used in the compressors to pipe the gas around is likely quite a bit higher than transmission losses (around me at least, the service fees on the bill if you have gas were at least 50% higher than electricity last I heard).

You really don't want to be getting much of your heating from a gas stove (or unflued gas heater) not just because of the possibility of carbon monoxide formation, but because NOx and SOx produced by burning gas is actually a health risk (primarily asthma for kids, cardiovascular for adults).

And the gas pipes looses gas in transmission which does a lot more damage to the environment than lost electricity.

> A better way to save energy is to use an electric kettle to get the water up to boiling.

An even better way (and one that also saves cleanup) is to use an electric pressure cooker like an InstantPot to cook the pasta

or an induction stove. I had an induction cooktop, moved and ended up with a gas cooktop again - I was astonished at how much slower and overall worse it was than induction. I quickly replaced the gas with induction and am now enjoying it once again. The only downside for induction is you have to have induction ready cookware - but really it's not that hard these days. Cookware and more has all-clad seconds and if you sign up for their email newsletter they run a sale - buy one, get a second 50% off - it's how I built my collection. Made In is a medium quality alternative - made in Italy. For affordability, Tramontina is surprisingly good. You can find it at Walmart, Costco and other places. It's not quite as dense as Made In or All Clad but any clad cookware is way better than anything with a damn disk in it.

Unless the electricity came from gas or coal. Then it's a wash.

Induction hobs are about as good as a kettle (and you lose less energy because you're not heating up the glass/plastic/metal of the kettle).

Isn't this a thing? This is how I have been cooking for a long time - bring water to boil in kettle and use it to cook.

Speaking about electrical kettle: why aren't there insulated kettles that would help me save energy when I re-boil water after 20 minutes?

EDIT: Ah, there are some: https://www.amazon.com/DASH-Insulated-Electric-Kettle-Cordle...

If you're reboiling water aren't you already doing it wrong.

Ideally you should only be boiling the water you need.

I don't have reverse-osmoze filters, so I get pretty much residue (lime) which I rather leave in the kettle.

Moreover I sometimes want to add extra hot water to my 0,5L cup of tea. When boiling water, I already add the extra water I'll need so I get it just-in-time (except it has already lost much heat thus why I'll try to get insulated kettle). My wife may or may not want to drink tea, but I get ready water anyways (yeah, this could be organized better)

I just have a thermos flask next to the kettle. The excess ALWAYS gets put to good use: extra cups of tea (without reboiling), cooking, dishes in the sink, or even the kids' bath.

Throw a kitchen towel over the kettle after you pour off your first drink.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tea_cosy

Unless it's winter where you're heating your house anyway, in which case the gas hob is more efficient.

But gas is a lot cheaper than electric anyway so I wouldn't expect a kettle to be much cheaper.

My housemate makes pasta nearly every night, so we decided to optimize the process. We found that bringing the water to boil in a borosilicate flask in the microwave, adding the pasta and then returning it to the microwave with a pyrex bowl of the sauce and meatballs was the fastest and most economical method. I think from start to finish it takes 9 minutes total, 7 to bring the water to a boil and another 2 to reheat the sauce and cook the pasta. Something like 150 watts of power usage in a 1kW microwave.

Doesn't this seem crazy counter-intuitive. Turn gas into heat, water to steam energy to electricity, then transmit the electricity, then turn the electricity back into heat. Versus turn gas into heat, water to steam?

The claim is weird, though. If they said “just add to boiling water and turn off immediately” then they would claim it’s 100% more efficient*.

If you turn off your water right before it’s boiling and cook your pasta, then Barilla is an energy generator*.

Actually reverse cycle air conditioners are said to have a heating efficiency of over 100%, but what they really do is to move the heat from one point to another. It's all about definitions; if you define the system as your room, it will be more than 100% efficient. If your system is the universe, then it's always 100%.

By the same logic, yes, your hypothetical statement can be rephrased as "if you already have boiling water, cooking pasta doesn't require any energy".

But the whole point is that Barilla's definition is ludicrous. The only definition that really makes sense is how much energy did it take to get the pasta from the box to my plate, and Barilla is excluding the vast majority of that energy in their 80% number for the sole purpose of inflating it to make it look better.

Barilla's definition is ludicrous, and I'm playing the Devil's advocate.

> The only definition that really makes sense is how much energy did it take to get the pasta from the box to my plate

Including the energy required (and the carbon footprint) to manufacture the pasta in the first place, yes? Or no?

no, because we're only comparing the energy required to cook the pasta; not the whole lifecycle.

If your definition of efficiency encompasses change within the entire universe, you could say that everything has an efficiency of 0% because matter and energy cannot be created or destroyed.

Back in reality, the purpose of a heat pump is to heat/cool an enclosed space. Its efficiency is rated by comparing it to a direct conversion from electricity to heat. So long as what occurs outside doesn't affect what occurs inside, it isn't relevant to the question of efficiency.

Except that would not cook the pasta.

I haven’t tried this technique yet, but one of the aims is to still cook the pasta effectively. I know from experience that your hypothetical won’t cook most dried pasta.

You "know" incorrectly. Pasta "cooking" is mostly rehydration, and that happens at temperatures well, well below boiling.

https://www.seriouseats.com/tips-for-better-easier-pasta

Getting the water to a boil is probably just a way for Barilla to make the instructions foolproof- after adding the pasta, the water will still be hot enough to rehydrate said pasta.

> instructions foolproof

and allows a leeway for a different pots, stoves, fried off power cables...

I use this technique when I don't want to bother running a second stove top and making a sauce or something for the pasta.

It takes more time, though.

This is a bizarre thing to put in the fine print. They're literally just excluding most of the cooking process from their calculation and I can't see any reason why other than to artificially inflate the efficiency stat.

Also probably assuming gas. Induction would take another 90% off.

Actually since they're using percentage, it doesn't matter

You can also use a lot less water than is standard: just enough to cover the noodles. Kenji Lopez-Alt has written about this a bunch [1]. Noodles cooked that way were indistinguishable in his testing. He's also discussed it on his cooking youtube channel, which I recommend to anyone. For example, a 3-ingredient macaroni and cheese [2] in which he discusses the noodles at 0:40-ish.

[1] https://www.seriouseats.com/how-to-cook-pasta-salt-water-boi...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWge-2jT9ZQ

Kenji's 3-ingredient mac and cheese is a masterpiece. It's become the go-to meal for my kids. It also has to be the peak in energy efficiency for pasta.

The idea is that by minimizing the water you can maximize the starchiness of the water, which creates a great emulsifier for the cheese sauce, along with evaporated milk. The combo is truly creamy mac and cheese, with no grittiness or separation of oils. It tastes great, it's faster than Kraft, it's energy efficient, it's easy to learn (literally 3 ingredients plus water).

It also has easy-to remember-units (6 oz pasta, 6 oz cheese, 6 fl oz evap milk). The evap milk amount perfectly divides the USA standard 12 fl oz evap milk can.

Kenji has tweaked the ergonomics of scratch mac and cheese light years ahead of where it was.

We use the recipe all the time too, but I can't understand it being given in 6oz proportions. None of the ingredients, except maybe some cheeses, come in 6oz sizes standard.

I do a 16oz box of pasta, 12 oz can of evaporated milk, and 16oz bag of shredded cheese. I put the milk and cheese in while there's a bit more water still in the pan, and have never missed the extra bit of evaporated milk.

And you even get pasta water way more concentrated in starch, which is useful if you're using it to make a sauce

The claim smelled bullshit from the get go. Boiling water takes much longer than cooking the pasta.

The asterisk always means bullshit.

> When I boil pasta, I use full heat to get the water boiling, drop in the pasta, then let it come back up to a boil, then drop the temperature as low as possible to keep a slow boil going--about medium-low.

Do you put a lid on the pot?

If not, you're running a reboiler. If you were to do that in a region of the earth and season of the year where you have to heat your place you'd probably be wasting double. Because the additional moisture from evaporation has to be removed from your place later through ventilation.

It always baffles me how many people don't care/know just how much less energy they could use to achieve the exact same result, just by putting a lid on.

You can actually really turn off the stove after the water starts boiling again. As long as you of course keep the lit on. That's how I have been doing it for a while, no dramatic difference in the end result (and yeah I am Italian, so I tend to complain about the details in food related matters).

According to Kenji, you don't even need boiling water to cook pasta:

https://www.seriouseats.com/how-to-cook-pasta-salt-water-boi...

https://www.seriouseats.com/tips-for-better-easier-pasta

"Want to get even more crazy efficient? Try soaking pasta in water as your prep your other ingredients. By the time your sauce is ready, you can just add the pasta (along with some of its soaking liquid) to the pan and, with a minute or so of cooking, your meal will be ready to go. One less pot to clean and a pretty satisfying magic trick to boot. Still skeptical? Here's the science to back it all up. The one exception here is fresh pasta—because it contains eggs, it needs to cook in boiling water to set properly."

I was gonna say, Serious Eats talked about this method (starting with a boil and then cutting the heat, mentioned in the article but not in the comment) so many years ago; only that they didn't call it "passive cooking". It comes with the nice benefit that you'll never have to worry about the pot boiling over except during the first minute, and, from what I've noticed, it seems to better align with the suggested cooking times on retail packaging.

I've argued with people about this and could never convince them to try it, mostly because of the "grandma did it this way" reason.

It's a pretty common technique for cooking rice noodles but it never occurred to me to try it with pasta. Thanks for posting this!

Harold McGee himself (author of the food geek bible On Food and Cooking) also presented this idea back in 2011: https://www.splendidtable.org/story/2011/01/15/you-can-cook-...

> I just did the experiment of cooking a pound of pasta in just enough water for it to absorb. I thought, "While I'm at it, why don't I play with the heating as well? I'll start them in cold water and see what happens."

> I found that starting in cold water means that the pasta doesn't stick to itself, which is great. Then it turns out that it heats up, it cooks just fine and you end up with pasta that is not at all sticky. The liquid is a little thick, but that's wonderful because you can make a sauce out of it.

just start the timer at 80°C and get the pasta below 80°C once Al dented, either by adding ingredients or by briefly rinsing with fresh water, e.g. to on fry the pasta afterwards.

I was first hurt that you conjugated "al dente", but in fact it's just how languages incorporate new elements and evolve, so that's fine, I guess.

> - how are you cooking your pasta? > - I'm aldenting them, of course :)

I still personally don't like it but since my opinion is not requested, I might as well get used to it in case it sticks.

Not as bad as calling a 'quiche' a 'quickie' ;)

uh oh what has happened here?

first I take full responsibility for "intelligent" auto correct on the phone in a rush in the morning, though. It's like "full self driving": at this time and age I, the driver, have full responsibility, not my "intelligent" "keyboard".

it also capitalized Al, Al dente as in Al Capone.

Now, with this creature out in the wild, I feel like Frank N Stein. Forgive me! ;-)

I always wondered if you could just put spaghetti in your Nalgene while backpacking and it would be ready by the end of your hike. People always look at me weird when I suggest it but I am down to drink starchy water all day and then eat spaghetti when I get there haha.

Should work fine. I only cold soak these days. Saves a lot of weight and is actually faster (my food is “cooking” while I hike, so it’s ready immediately after I stop for the day.

Other things you can use this on than pasta? Are there recipes for this kind of low-effort camping meals somewhere online?

There are many things you can do this way, the terminology “cold soak” used in the parent comment is a good starting point, there are lots of resources online with ideas and techniques for cold soak backpacking meals: https://sectionhiker.com/cold-soak-no-cook-backpacking-meals...

I am an avid backpacker and have heard a lot of folks talking positively about this, but haven’t given it a try myself just yet.

I typically take a mix of things, cold soaking is only one element. Couscous, instant oatmeal, ramen — stuff with flavor packets in general work well. I’ve also done bulk buy and added my own spices for a change - it just depends on how much prep time I have for the trip. I also eat salami, cheese, and a home-made trail mix with a lot of dried fruit and good amount of nuts and chocolate chips. A few bars for emergencies, backup water purification system plus a Sawyer Squeeze as my primary filter, and I’m good to go. The Talenti jars work great for me, and my kids enjoy having to “make” me a clean one every now and then.

I’ve backpacked with people who bring a lot of fresh food — avocados, eggs, bread even, plus the normal dehydrated food plus stove and fuel. I obviously swing all the way to the other extreme, eating like I do at home is not the point for me. Long days with lots of mileage and elevation gain make almost anything taste good, so why not save a few pounds, simplify your trip, and save a fair amount of money in the process. In general my backpacking systems are all moving in this direction as I get older and get more trips under my belt — with the one exception of a Garmin InReach, which has saved my ass a couple times now (with weather reports, not rescues needed).

Having had to rehydrate pasta while hiking to save on fuel as a beginner backpacker, I can confirm it does work.

Still, I now only bring semolina and polenta on multiple days hike. Both can be eaten fine after an hour of soaking in cold water.

I once had a pasta salad backpacker meal (forget which brand) that was pretty much this method exactly (except we rehydrated it in its original bag). Some of the freeze-dried veggies still had a little bit of crunch, but the pasta was good and it was quite enjoyable for camping food. I haven't seen it available since, though.

Huh, I guess Backpacker’s Pantry quit making it. I still have one on the shelf I should probably check the expiration date on.

This is a standard way of food preparation in the backcountry and is called cold soaking. Pasta, grains, beans can be prepared this way.

Yes, a significant part of the time needed to cook dry pasta is for rehydrating them. Fresh pasta only needs two minutes. So if you soak them long enough you can cook them quite fast.

You can just eat dry pasta like chips and save a lot more energy!

and finish with nice carton box for desert

Or you can get super crazy and cook your dry pasta straight on a pan with sauce, barely adding much water at all, spaghetti all'assassina: https://www.cnn.com/videos/travel/2022/10/13/spaghetti-allas...

That's a little too radical for my tastes.

On the vitro, I leave rice and noodles boiling for six minutes, other pasta ten, then turn it off and wait ten minutes for the water to be completely soaked.

The really useful trick is to measure the water (or broth) needed relative to the rice or pasta, so you can leave it unattended, just using a couple of alarms of the phone.

He definitely convinced me I was using far more water than necessary when boiling pasta. Cooking pasta in a shallow pan, with barely enough water to cover, was a revelation. Not just from the fact that you get a starchier water to help emulsify your sauce, but it just takes way less time to get bring to a boil.

I don't understand the presoaking. In the source of the linked article, it says it takes 1.5 hours of presoaking compared to only 10 minutes when cooking in boiling water. So it seems that when you split heating and rehydrating, cooking time changes drastically.

We used to hear this encouraged as an efficient method for cooking rice on government radio when we were kids. Cooking gas was precious and everyone wanted to save it. Basically this is how probably everyone used to cook before pressure cookers became a thing.

He soaked in hot water.

Backpackers have been using this technique to save fuel - I've got a cozy for my cookpot.

I also remember seeing this on one of the Victorian Farm shows - it was something like a pot roast brought to a boil in the morning, then put in a well insulated container to sit for the day.

Edit: Whoa, I just clicked through to "The Product" section, and it's an open source design using an Arduino. Super cool!

I have a thermos vacuum pot, and do stews and soups with it once a week where I just bring things to a boil and leave it in the insulated thing overnight.

Oxtail soup, pork spareribs, chili, biryani, hunter's stew, etc. Helps it with getting everything really nice and tender, and easier than a slowcooker.

It’s how pit barbecues work as well. You heat rocks on a fire and then bury the food (like a lamb) with the rocks under the ground, using the dirt as an insulator.

Or, cover the rocks and food (like lobster or oysters) with wet seaweed to steam the food.

Also yoghurts have been made using a jar in some insulated slow cool down method for centuries

I have a "Wonderbag," an insulated bag you put your pot in after bringing it to temperature. It does keep heat in for a very long time.

> a pot roast brought to a boil in the morning, then put in a well insulated container to sit for the day.

Don't you need to worry about some sort of danger zone with regards to bacteria in meat thriving between 100-140F? My friend always leaves meat out for several hours and never gets sick, but I've just assumed he's been lucky so far.

I’d assume if the lid was kept on then there’s little scope for new bacteria to enter the chamber

> it was something like a pot roast brought to a boil in the morning, then put in a well insulated container to sit for the day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haybox: “A haybox, straw box, fireless cooker, insulation cooker, wonder oven, self-cooking apparatus, norwegian cooker or retained-heat cooker is a cooker that utilizes the heat of the food being cooked to complete the cooking process. Food items to be cooked are heated to boiling point, and then insulated. Over a period of time, the food items cook by the heat captured in the insulated container. Generally, it takes three times the normal cooking time to cook food in a haybox.”

How you like to cook pasta aside. This is so dumb. No one is going to solve the climate crisis with not boiling the pasta while certain companies is reaponaible for basically all emissions.

What is the word for this? When you try socialise problems like this to try shift blame? I’m still surprised how many people don’t know thar “climate footprint “ is invented by one of the bigger oil companies in a similar campaign.

It’s not exactly what you are referring to but I like to call out conservation theater. Like when restaurants in California were forbidden from giving water to people unless they asked for it. As if drinking water was even a rounding error on California’s water issues.

That's the perfect word for it!

On one hand small actions can lead to big change. On the other hand, no matter how many small actions are taken, this problem isn't going to be solved with government intervention.

Is that a typo? I feel that this problem isn't going to be solved _without_ government intervention. Large groups of people have an unbelievably high inertia.

But yeah, forbidding restaurants to distribute drinking water is probably not the right move.

Yup that's a typo hah.

On one hand small actions can lead to big change.

This is one of those things that we teach small children so they can feel like they are contributing but never go back and explain to teens that we were bs’ing about. These kids then grow up with a bad model of how the world works. This dynamic is pernicious.

No amount of at home composting or whatever the latest peacock thing is will make a real dent.

Gotta hand it to Barilla's marketing department. They found a way to seem climate conscious talking about cooking pasta

> while certain companies is reaponaible for basically all emissions.

those "certain companies" are exclusively energy companies. the energy they provide can be used for things like boiling water. it's good to hold companies responsible, but don't delude yourself into thinking individuals can't have an impact. the energy we use is a collection of a whole bunch of small things, added up (and a couple really big things, like driving cars and raising cattle)

Apart from that is Barilla one of those certain companies? I'm guessing no, so it's not like they gain much from helping their customers save energy. Except maybe if people want to save energy by not cooking noodles, and Barilla doesn't want to lose those customers.

Although honestly I wouldn't know what else to cook that uses less energy. Rice cooks for even longer, although less water is heated here.

A thousand small changes add up, however. Also, don't forget how those companies responsible for all those emissions make stuff that we eagerly buy up. The emissions are "their", but really on our behalf.

And I'm well aware of the hypocrisy in me typing this on a plastic keyboard in a plastic office chair wearing synthetic clothing. I could have carved keycaps out of wood and made a typing device with an Arduino, sourced sustainable wood for a chair and bought "green" cotton clothing. I didn't, because plastic is cheaper and more convenient. But I'm not blaming Logitech for making the products I'm happy to buy.

Changing people's habits because it's the "right thing to do" is not the way to solve climate change. The main reason why is that it's very hard to change people, especially so if the benefits are not immediate. What we do need is lots of innovative new technologies to solve the problem. Carbon capture is just scratching the surface.

I do think that the way certain people live can be improved, look at the carbon use of rich people in the USA compared to the average person in other countries. Larger houses, cars, more of everything, it all adds up.

Its fine to think that - and you're probably right. But again the solution will never be to ask people to change their consumption habits and their way of life. Its a non starter. The smarter thing to do is tweak incentives. A simple tax on electricity for example: now its more expensive to heat or cool a large house, leads to smaller homes, leads to more energy efficient units. That has a way way more impactful result than telling individuals what to do and how to do it.

There is no "the way to solve climate change" anyway. It's a challenge so huge that it will require us to change something about everything we do and the way we do it.

> A thousand small changes add up, however

You also start optimising your computer programs not by targeting the function that takes 90% of the time, but the utility method that takes 0.0001%, I see.

"Every little bit counts" thinking is one of the most destructive in society.

Nice straw man. Well done.

I'll gladly take an extra few minutes to make my pasta if it saves a lot of energy and emissions. But you do you, bud

It doesn't save a lot, while making you feel good for optimizing something very close to 100% useless, that's the whole point of my argument.

"Greenwashing" is probably the term you're looking for.

Also “victim blaming” and “crowd fucking”.

That’s when you ratio water to home and tell people they need to save a gallon on their shower but you literally ship millions of gallons of water to SA.

Do you think energy companies drill oil and burn it for fun??

They do it to provide consumers with energy and consumer goods. If consumers are more efficient or reduce their consumption then demand for these goods and services fall.

Shifting blame to companies to avoid personal responsibility certainly won't help solve the climate crisis.

Supply creates demand. If gas / electricity was 10x the price, you would suddenly see a lot more efficiency!

I'd like to add some context here: the whole cooking pasta with the stove off became a major talking point in Italian social media some months ago (I'm serious). It all started with a popular science educator posting a video on Youtube explaining the science behind it. Then some influencers decided to promote the idea because of reasons such as climate change and the energy crisis, which in turn started being ridiculed for the same reasons you are mentioning. Barilla just jumped on the occasion for some easy marketing both at home and on the international market.

Shifting all responsibility to producers is about as helpful as shifting it all to consumers. Clearly there is responsibility on both sides. Burning gas for cooking or heating is bad for emissions, so it is reasonable for people to avoid doing so for longer than necessary. Same goes for producers burning fossil fuels for electricity, etc.

Agreed. Saw similar tacticts during the bank crash in 2018 Blame was shifted to all the peasants byuing flat screen tvs.

Please dont participate in this co-dependent blame shift. Cook your pasta as you like and force media tp hold the real culprits accountable. Yesterday there was a thread on coal used to generate energy in various parts of the world. We could start by focusing attention to finance greener sources there.

Yeah I know, I sound like a hopeful hippie.

I think it's a form of greenwashing.

> Companies that intentionally take up greenwashing communication strategies often do so in order to distance themselves from the environmental lapses of themselves or their suppliers.

It was one fuel company who popularized the carbon footprint calculator, such that consumers don't focus on the massive harm the company caused.

A 145 year old pasta company just published open-source 3D printing models, Arduino circuit layouts & code and a bluetooth-enabled smartphone app on its website, that too with a decent sized marketing push. All so that you can build an overengineered kitchen timer from scratch in your bedroom. This is exactly the wild future I imagined as a tech enthusiast building cheap PCs two decades ago.

Yup. What a time to be alive.

That part is tongue in cheek. Cute and smart.

It wasn't Barillas idea. Looking at the quality and stuff used it was most likely thought up by a "Creative Technologist" in an ad agency with the sole purpose to win awards.(...and some PR but trust me it was done for the awards.)

I'm not exactly sure what point you're trying to make.

I think they're just clarifying that it was not the 145 year old pasta company that had the idea, did the engineering work, etc, which may not be lost on GP

I'm okay with a corporation outsourcing and financing these kind of projects

What does it mean for something to be a company's idea? The company isn't sentient, it's always a person or group that has the idea. If they have it while in the pay of the company, it's normal to say it was "the company" and would also be valid to credit the human inventor, but certainly a less relevant headline when discussing it in the context of a company's promotion

Barilla is a corporation. It's unable to do anything by itself since it's a legal construction and not sentient. Instead it bribes humans into doing its bidding for it.

I don't think it matters which humans are paid and how, does it? Only that it did actually pay for this stuff.

This is their ad agency I think: https://www.publicis.it/

I agree, it's just a marketing stunt, the hardware device is simply useless and probably its manifacturing alone is responsible for much more CO2 than you could save passive cooking your pasta for a long time.

Granted, this is if you use it with its "environmentally friendly AAA batteries"!

Agreed. This has instantly become one of my favorite examples of software eating the world.

Cyberpunk isn't (fully) here yet, but until then at least we can tide ourselves over with pastapunk.

How much of cooking protocol is to smooth over differences in heat flux? Recipes almost always seem to call for pre-heating an oven or bringing a pot to a boil before adding pasta/noodles. But temperature is temperature (when it comes to slow cooked foods, ignoring searing / maillard reactions). Are there any reasons not to just start cooking immediately while the oven/water is still coming up to temp, if I control for doneness? I cook almost exclusively by doneness anyways (internal temp and/or consistency), and it seems like for most foods, what matters most is area-under-the-curve (which is what the heat equation suggests).

Texture will be different depending on how long it stays in the water and at what temperature you cook it.

Going to the extreme could help: dumping the dry pasta in cold water and leaving it for a day would soften it while not cooking it much. The same process is happening at a way milder scale when you dump it before the boiling point.

I've tried a related experiment: Put the pasta in the water when cold, and bring it to a boil. The texture always comes out wrong.

Area under the curve is most certainly not the only thing that is important. Heat penetration over time can be completely different depending if you start the cook from a hot pan/oven or not. Searing a steak using a gas burner or sous vide are prime examples.

If you put something in a cold pan, it steams/boils itself on the outside and cooks unevenly while the pan or oven is heating up. This almost always results in bland flabby overcooked sad food. The lower the thermal conductivity of the food, the more this matters. The shorter the anticipated cooking time, the more this matters.

With certain vegetables it's OK to do this, like peppers and onions, because the lower heat "warmup" phase actually helps them soften up and break down, and they are also pretty thermally conductive (lots of water, not much hard fiber). But if you do it with mushrooms you'll just get spongy wet mushrooms, and if you do it with meat you'll get sad boiled stuff instead of something juicy inside and crispy outside.

In addition, some cooking techniques specifically rely on the rapid denaturing of proteins on the surface of the food, forming a kind of crust, to prevent it from fusing to the cooking surface. This is how pan-frying fish, meat, and eggs works.

You can certainly cook pasta starting in cold water, it just makes the timing more uncertain because you don't have a standard starting condition. It's nice because you can use just enough water to cover.

I am not a cook. I do have a physics degree. One time I pondered, "What's with the boiling water? And even caring about corrections for altitude?"

Water boils at a particular temperature. While boiling, at STP, it is at that temperature and stays there. Thus, when you immerse something in boiling water for a specific amount of time, you know this food item is experiencing a particular temperature for a given time. Boiling water allows for standardization on the temperature end, so you can assure yourself that, if you get the time right, well, you've standardized both of those things and your macaroni will be like someone else's macaroni, assuming they came from similar boxes.

The stability of the boiling water temperature takes away a lot of the guesswork.

And to remember measuring and controlling temperatures is pretty recent development. When cooking with wood there really wasn't a good way to get consistent temperatures. Neither on it, on stove or in oven. Thus water boiling always at nearly same temperature in same location was very handy.

Can't help with the physics, but in addition to more variable times and potentially different textures that have been mentioned, the other convenience of boiling water first is that it can be covered without causing trouble (potentially saving some energy), while lots of stuff (including pasta) can't unless you watch them.

Pressure cookers always start from cold, although the pressure and the tighter seal change some considerations.

Not related to the question but buckwheat is a good pasta alternative, quick cooking and goes great with pasta sauce; should be much lower total energy use, particularly with untoasted buckwheat.

Not really "passive" cooking as you're just not actively pumping heat into already boiling water and just cooking pasta in steadily cooling water.

You can actually soften pasta and many other similar foods by just leaving them in room temperature water for a much longer period. Some backpackers do this to reduce weight and it's been the only way I've ever prepared food while backpacking. Admittedly, cold noodles, oatmeal, rice, etc. is a lot more appetizing if you're many miles from the nearest civilization and have worked up a huge hunger from hiking.

i did once, with lentils; but nothing beats cooked food, no matter if it is pre-soaked or not...

Pasta needs to reach something like 80 degrees to "cook", if you just soak it at 35 it will not be the same result.

The method described here (which has been around for centuries) instead gets you the same result as cooking in constantly boiling water, saving a lot of gas/electricity.

I really doubt it’s a lot. I really don’t think it’s much at all, and that’s why they’ve got the asterisk on the number.

Water has really high specific heat capacity, and there’s a lot more water than noodles (by mass). You’re using a lot more energy to heat the water than the noodles. Most people switch to low heat (the water just has to stay boiling, how fast doesn’t much matter) at about the same time this would have you switch it off. So you’re saving a little bit of energy for the last maybe 25% of the process.

> I really doubt it’s a lot. I really don’t think it’s much at all, and that’s why they’ve got the asterisk on the number.

The asterisk is on the 80% claim, a more conservative estimation from a research published by the italian pasta makers association last summer was at 47%, which I think still qualifies as "a lot".

I think you are under-estimating the amount of power required to keep the water boiling, especially on gas stoves.

Couscous is pasta and “cooks” just fine for in a cold soak. Doesn’t even take that long.

True but unlike most pasta, store bought couscous is usually pre-steamed/cooked. That plus its small size (large surface area) makes it perfect for cold soak.

You don't need to cook Couscous and it is often pre-cooked in retail. In fact, that's how one prepares Taboulé. For Pasta it is absolutely not the same thing at all. Uncooked pasta isn't good for your stomach. If you don't want to cook pasta, then buy instant ramen, they are already cooked.

A cold-soaking only approach works well with instant noodles, dehydrated pasta and freeze dried pasta (all of which are pre-cooked).

However, a hybrid approach, meaning cold-soaking your meal an hour or so before dinner then heating, can help speed up the cooking process and thus save fuel (weight).

Having tried all of the above I can say that for me at least, many Korean ramens + peanut butter are a godsend that lend themselves really well to cold-soaking not just in ease of use but in taste too.

Wait, how long would you soak rice to make it edible? I’d imagine it’s longer than 24 hours.

Typically you'd use instant / minute rice when backpacking.

I'd imagine the pressure-cooked (ie: autoclaved) ready-to-eat products like Uncle Ben's Express (or whatever they renamed it) will take over a lot of this, at least for those not on a serious budget.

Backpackers typically use parcooked instant rice. Anywhere from like 30 minutes to all day will make it soft. A lot of folks put their cold soaking food in water at the start of the day so it gets jostled around and softened all day as they hike.

I've never done it by timer, but a quick search indicates about 90 minutes should be good. I'm always pressed for time and just let it soak while I set up camp, so its usually a little crunchy still when I'm done.

What are we calling 'edible'? I soak rice a minimum of 30m before cooking, I've definitely ended up leaving it longer than 90m on several occasions, I wouldn't just eat it without cooking as a result.

I don't think you'll ever get the same texture without heat due to lack of starch gelatinization.

It will get moldy before it ever gets cooked. Learn from my fail.

No mould will grow on soaking (i.e. submersed) rice.

Confidently dismissing someone else's firsthand experience, exactly the level of intelligent conversation this site is renown for.

Yes, much better to blindly believe an anecdote that contradicts known food science.

Mold can definitely grow on the surface of liquids. Have you never left a cup of coffee out on a counter for a few days?

It can grow on the surface, but won't be able to grow on submerged rice. Bacteria could still ferment the rice though.

No, while the visible majority of mold grows on the surface of things, it also sends out tendrils that penetrate through the medium. That's why you shouldn't cut mold off of bread or soft cheeses and eat the visibly "ok" part, you should treat the entire thing as contaminated. Hard cheeses that have only a little bit of mold can be scraped, but anything soft will get explored pretty thoroughly.

Why would you think that? It's water and starch. Everything a growing bacteria needs.

Their point is just that the mold will only grow on the surface, not the submerged rice. Mold needs air, too.

Mold is a fungus.

It doesn’t work very well with rice. It’s one of the worst thing to take while backpacking. It doesn’t soak well. It takes a long time to soften while cooking and it’s not very good when it’s slightly undercooked.

Not sure everyone agrees this is a good method

Quoting from https://www.finedininglovers.com/article/can-passive-pasta-r...

"The response was swift, and it came from starred chef Antonello Colonna. The Roman cook rejected Parisi's solution, claiming that with this procedure the pasta becomes "rubbery", and impossible to serve in a high-level restaurant. Colonna considers the method a failure and proposes cooking on an open-fire grill, with pots that have fed entire generations like a cauldron. The chef claims this traditional low-temperature technique lowers electricity costs in his restaurant."

Burning wood or charcoal lowers the electricity bill? Who would have thought!

Also, what is “low-temperature technique” supposed to mean? The open fire needs to maintain the water at 100C regardless. If low-temperature means lower water temp, then its the same as the passive method..

Not worthy of a high end restaurant seems like pretty faint condemnation.

I mean you can try and decide for yourself how much you like it.

Boiling water can't get hotter than 100C anyway, and water needs lots of energy to both heat and cool. If you cover it and turn off the heat the water inside realistically won't get much colder in ten minutes.

I always used the half technique: if it says 12 minutes I boil it for 6 and then turn off the stove. Never ever got it wrong.

Anyway I highly doubt the biggest pasta brand in the world would ever publicize a method that makes their product any less good.

For a product focused on reducing emissions, it would be nice if the environmental impact of the product was addressed in the FAQ or product page. What are the CO2 emissions of the source materials, production, and shipping the product to me? How many servings of pasta do I have to cook with it before I break even? 10? 100? 10000?

Probably the best way to save both water and energy when boiling pasta is to avoid using excess water altogether.

With a bit of practice it's pretty easy to make pasta in a similar way one makes rice - let almost all the water soak into it.

The trick is twofold: 1. One needs a pan that's not too shallow (i.e. the pasta needs to stack up on itself, not just barely cover the bottom of the pan)

2. The first minute or so some stirring is necessary to avoid the pasta clumping together.

Works best if the recipe calls for some sauce to be applied in the end (pesto, carbonara, etc.). In that case it's best to add the sauce when there's still some residual starchy water, using it as a thickening / binding agent for the sauce.

You can reduce the energy consumption drastically by boiling way less water than "a large pot" as every packet recommends. Just enough to cover the pasta + some evaporation margin is good enough.

That's why I tend to avoid spaghetti these days. A smaller pasta fits in the small pot better.

just rip it in half

(runs!)

Angel hair will soften pretty quickly. You can fold it in half once its steeped a short while from one end.

Just stick one end in, wait a few seconds, push, flip it over, repeat.

That said, since I discovered bucatini I don't think I have any desire ever to eat spaghetti again. (And also much more desire to eat 'long thin tubular pasta'.)

I always snap the bundle in half.

Is that something that even needs to be said?

Does any functioning adult actually cook pasta in such a way as to use way more water than necessary?

It's pretty common. Most pasta cooking directions say to use 4-6 quarts of water for a standard 1-lb pack of dry pasta. Many Italian grandmas (I'm making a guess off n=1 person with Italian heritage who learned it this way) do it like this. Because this technique is so ingrained, it's less obvious to reduce the amount of water.

easy to say if you are not italian

This is a mistake though from a cooking perspective. You use a lot of water because you want to have a very high ratio of thermal mass of water to thermal mass of noodles. You want the noodles to heat up as fast as possible so that the outside gets soft while the inside stays a little firm (al dente) and if you use less water, you’ll take longer to cook the noodles, allowing more even heat transfer because it’s a diffusion process. Basically what you’re going for is the opposite of sous vide/low temp cooking.

And with with more water, you’ll remove more of the starch from the pasta, making it less gummy.

A big pot is, of course, less energy efficient but the results are noticeable if you care about noodle quality.

I've tested this a bunch and you can reliably get nice al dente pasta using a low volume of water. If you boil a small amount and add the pasta, then bring it back to a boil the whole process is faster. Kenji has a good article about it, and I assure you that it always works for me.

Interesting, I’ll check it out. I guess returning to a boil really only has to do with the thermal mass of the pasta itself.

I’m also thinking in terms of spaghetti or noodles like that since that’s what I cook most and you couldn’t submerge them in a small pot.

You can do those long noodles in a pan, but honestly they sink down in a small pot by the time the water returns to a boil. At least for pappardelle it works.

You could probably do some quick math and experimentation to determine ratios of water volume and temp to weight of pasta and not even bring the water all the way to a boil and still get an al dents noodle.

Pasta are cooked in boiling water over a heat source. The water stays at the boiling point all along. There is no loss of temperature due to cooking the pasta. The thermal mass doesn’t matter only the surface covered so as long as all the pasta are covered you are fine.

The water does not stay at the boiling point when you put the pasta in if it’s a small amount of water. That’s why instructions always say to return to a boil.

All these reasons were disproven by Kenji on SeriousEats. Search the comments for the link.

I recommend doing your own blind test. There is no noticeable difference for me.

The 80% less CO2 number is BS, since the claimed savings are only after "water boiling phase excluded". Guessing this is more like 10% overall, assuming you turn your stove down to a low boil after the pasta is in.

My dirty little secret I've only dared to shared with my closest friends (fearing social ostracism) is that I cook by pasta by putting it in cold water and then turn the heat on.

Roughly when the water starts to boil I start periodically checking the doneness of the pasta.

Works just fine for me. Would never dare to it when cooking with friends however (only slightly /s).

However, it would be neat with a device similar to the one in TFA, but more sophisticated. Having some internal model of pasta doneness as a function of the time in the water, and the water temperature over time.

I see this in lots of 'how to boil an egg' guides, where cooking time matters.

When explaining it on the internet, the best way is to dump the egg into boiling water, and drain and cool with cold tap water after X minutes, because it removes other variables.

Buuuuut, if you learn your pot and water volumes and starting water temperatures and heating rate, you can cook your egg faster by starting with cold water, and maybe even knowing when to turn off the heat once the water is hot.

For eggs I've seen people use something like this [0], which I guess can be helpful if you switch pots a lot. Also trickier to test if a (boiled) egg really is boiled then with pasta.

[0]: https://www.amazon.com/Norpro-Egg-Perfect-Timer/dp/B00004UE7...

This assumes you’re trying to cook to an even heat internally (like a boiled egg) rather than an intentional gradient (like pasta noodles, a steak, etc.)

Starting with cold water, the cooked mass is heated more evenly, since the heat has more time to transfer to the core. For potatoes that's the recommended way, but if you want the eggs yellow to be soft, this might make it harder.

I only read this today, and I recommend anyone to just experiment and give new ideas some attempts.

The trick to fix that is to submerge the eggs into boiling water for a minute. Pull them out. Wait for another minute. Put them back into the water and complete cooking.

It is also the only way to cook an egg without an egg piercer.

I do something similar to boil eggs:

1) Put eggs in pot, cover with water.

2) Put pot with lid on stove on full heat.

3) Wait for the water to boil, then turn off the heat.

4) Wait 6 minutes (for eggs with slightly soft interior)

5) Cover eggs with cold water, wait one minute, peel.

Perfect eggs every time, and I am sure this saves a bunch of energy. They peel really well too.

You can save more energy probably if you only put a little bit of water, and then steam the eggs in the pot (no need for a steamer basket, just put the eggs in the shallow water). Also, apparently, peeling is easier when the eggs are placed in hot water vs cold. Look up Kenji's egg boiling experiment stuff.

I go back and forth between boiling the eggs the whole time, and bringing them to a boil and letting them sit. I can't determine which works better.

I think you can make it even faster by electric kettle to give a little assist. Maybe replace 1/2 or 1/3 with boiled water. That starts you off with half boiled water so it comes up to boil faster.

The most reduction in CO2 could be achieved if all the people that regularly overcook the pasta would just take it out after the amount of time written on the package. (only partially /s :-) )

You can tell from the comments in here that most people are overcooking their pasta and don’t know it, and in the general public I’m sure it is even worse.

Also works for eggs: But yeah, many wrong assumptions. Who blasts the water while it's cooking? Nobody, you boil it, add pasta, bring it back to boil, turn down the heat significantly. That's very far from 80% reduction, you only reach that without turning down the heat, in which case water splashes out of your pan constantly. Very misleading article.

I recommend steaming eggs. You only need to heat a little bit of water and the eggs cook more evenly

Not sure what's so special. I would assume everybody knows that most of the energy during cooking is wasted:

1. By the water evaporating

2. By the hot gasses escaping without actually heating up anything

3. With the water poured away after cooking

Which is why I:

1. Put a lid on the pot whenever I can. Once it boils it usually is enough to reduce the burner to absolute minimum to keep the simmer unless I am adding large amounts of ingredients.

2. I use induction whenever I can.

3. I try to avoid wasting water. I use minimum amount of water necessary to boil pasta (you really don't need as much as you think you do). I also steam rather than boil vegetables like potatoes or carrots -- you get away with half of a cup to a cup of water at the bottom. Steaming does take a bit more time but I think it is still more efficient than poring huge amount of water into the pot.

I am still waiting for a real Dewar pot that would have double sided sides and also double sided lid. Probably would require precision heating (possibly with integrated heating element in the base as well as integrated temperature sensor).

In the US, when it comes to Italian food, there's a lot of "you must prepare it this particular way or else Nonna will burst out of her grave and flog you with a pappardelle whip" discourse.

With that in mind, it's kind of fascinating comparing the en-US and en-GB Barilla websites. The GB site emphasizes sustainability ("100% Plastic Free", a page on sustainable basil farming, this Passive Cooking thing), while the US site emphasizes the quality and authenticity of the product ("Barilla al Bronzo", "Vero Gusto", "Chef's Corner"). No corporate responsibility promotions at all.

I hope the pasta in the US is plastic free too!

In the US, Barilla pasta boxes (and most other brands) have a small plastic window so you can see what the pasta looks like. The UK website is promoting the fact that they recently removed those windows from the UK packaging.

> I also steam rather than boil vegetables like potatoes or carrots -- you get away with half of a cup to a cup of water at the bottom. Steaming does take a bit more time but I think it is still more efficient than poring huge amount of water into the pot.

Pressure cooker my friend! Chemical reactions at 115C will by ~3-4 faster than at 100C.

In my opinion, electric grids should give away free instant pots as a part of their energy conservation strategies.

What? This much, really? TIL, thanks! I never use ours (too large), but will try to adapt using it.

It is truly amazing how fast an instant pot can cook things.

The idea of Passive cooking has always been interesting, but the device itself really feels like an April Fools bit.

It's basically just an alarm.. That needs to be paired with a smart phone. Really ?

The device seems absurd to me, too. Why would I need anything like that just to time some pasta?

I wonder how much pasta you have to passive-cook in order to offset the CO2 output of the device’s production and use.

I feel like we perhaps still have some bigger levers we can pull to reduce emissions before we meddle with our linguine.

Yes.. I certainly appreciate that the largest pasta company in the world which is owned by a small family of billionaires bringing in billions in revenue every year gained by monopolizing markets and buying out small competitors expects me to carry it's environmental water for them.

The concept is definitely not new. Another keyword to search for is Thermal Cooking. I have a Shuttle Chef Thermal Cooker / Thermo Pot for that. It's basically an insulated pot to retain the heat. You heat up your food for a short time on the stove, then you put the pot into the insulating pot and let it rest there for some time. But you have to get the timing right, otherwise everything just ends up being mushy.

Could someone with more graphic design skill than I try to squeeze their "full table" down to 1 page that looks good coming from a B&W laser printer?

https://www.barilla.com//-/media/images/shared/passive-cooki...

Here's my first attempt, but I don't have any stylish art https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1OV0yfGyWSfzKrwKYGg91...

> *water boiling phase excluded

Why is the part of the process that consumes the most energy arbitrarily excluded from this, am I missing something or are they just being dishonest so that they can include a bigger number in their marketing?

> am I missing something or are they just being dishonest so that they can include a bigger number in their marketing?

I assume that latter.

But, if I was being generous, I would say it's because the bringing to a boil is oftentimes handled by another process (e.g. electric kettle) so it's hard to compare.

Reduce CO2 by introducing a plastic smart device whose manufacturing costs a tree. I love these eco-friendly measures!

Low-energy prep of steel-cut oats for several breakfasts:

1. Boil water in an electric kettle — we have a gas stove-top but we buy wind power for electricity; it's a Texas-grid thing.

2. Pour boiling water into a pot, add oats, bring back to a boil on the gas range, then immediately turn off the gas.

(I use a ratio of 1 cup of steel-cut oats to 3 cups of water.)

3. Put a lid on the pot, put the pot on a trivet, cover with a dish towel (to keep heat in), tip the pot lid a bit to open it (to let steam out).

4. Come back in an hour or so — the oats are cooked and still hot; eat some, save the rest in a container to go into the refrigerator once cool.

I boil water in a kettle, then pour it over raw oats into a glass jar (e.g. peanut butter jar) enough to "wet" everything without covering the oats. Ten minutes later and the oats are perfect

I use an "overnight oats" method that I feel would probably be even more energy-efficient: place the required amount of rolled oats in a plastic container, pour in the required amount of milk/water, close the lid and store in the fridge overnight. In the morning, heat the mix for a couple of minutes in the microwave (you're just aiming to heat it up at this point).

I wouldn't stake my life that this method is more efficient, but it feels like it should be (microwaves are a pretty efficient method of heating a small volume). Takes a bit of forward planning, though.

It's wild that they have an accessibility sidebar with a gajillion accomodations, but the carousels, which are the main content on this page, break after the second item in Chrome for Android.

And here I was imagining that the Barilla passive cooker would be a thermal cooker -- a vacuum-insulated sleeve for a pot that can hold cooking temperature for hours. Several companies make these.

I've always done this because I don't like pasta boiling over into my electric elements. The emssivity of stainless steel and the enormous heat capacity of even the small amount of water I use and the fact that water cannot exceed boiling temperature means spegetti is done in 10 minutes even with no power at all after boiling has been achieved. Do not waste precious oil in the water. Just stir for a minute to prevent sticking.

There are a variety of no-boil pasta methods which use much less CO2. Haven't tested them yet but plan to next time I make pasta.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=259MXuK62gU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJHfXKvBHTA

And how much CO2 is going to be produced manufacturing and shipping the device they're selling you? Not to mention the batteries it needs.

I was thinking the same, probably much more than the CO2 saved with the whole passive cooking thing...

Not to mention some fine marketing bs like how it runs on 2 "environmentally friendly AAA batteries"!

I highly doubt that, even if everyone did this religiously, it would have any measurable impact on emissions, given how emissions from residential energy usage make up only a relatively small fraction of all emissions (and emissions from cooking only a small fraction of that). Am I wrong?

Save water and the planet

Perfect passive cooking works, years tested: 500g of pasta + 1-1.2 L of water cooked in a pressure cooker under high setting for 2 mins with natural release. (edit: setup is defunct Fagor + induction cooker)

It's just that simple and no water to discard except through GI tracts.

Interesting there are so many different names for these types of cookers. I've always heard this referred to as a haybox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haybox

Huh I have a thermal cooker at home that we frequently use: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_cooking

Seems like they are using the same concept.

Oh, thank you - that led me to episode 2 of Wartime Farm on the BBC that I was thinking of.

I've been cooking like this for about 15 yrs or so when I discovered stainless steel and I couldn't recommend them more, if you don't have any please buy some now, they also last for a lifetime. Get some good stuff, the kind of thing that feels heavy on your hand.

Stainless steel takes ages to cool down, so I usually cook vegetables in a similar fashion to this "passive cooking" technique, the taste is much better and even the colors pop up much more. Actually everything just tastes better because Aluminum does change the flavor of food for the worse, it makes it taste more "acidic", idk, when you switch to stainless you will notice the difference immediately.

> Stainless steel takes ages to cool down

This also means it takes ages to warm up. It’s fine as long as we’re honest about the fact that we still need to input the same amount of energy at the beginning.

Let’s save the planet…

…Here is one more single-purpose device! Filled with batteries and plastic, that does what? 2 minute timer and nothing else your generic kitchen thermometer can’t do. If you are nearby it’s obvious when things start boiling even without one.

I think it's a technique, not a product, u can do this on your standard electric or gas stove, turn it off earlier, let it sit a few minutes

I wasn't expecting this from an Italian pasta brand. It just feels wrong. Barilla has poor appeal among Italians for what it's worth. I prefer "La Molisana" pasta instead and I make sure I cook it the right way.

This device isn't really needed. When the water boils put in the pasta and turn off the heat, with the lid on. Wait the usual amount of time. This doesn't work well with pasta that has lots of starch (barilla hasn't much).

How about not pouring the hot water down the drain immediately, but leaving it in a pot with a lid on until it is cooled down? This way the erergy that you used to heat the water can contribute to heating your kitchen.

This works for rice and other grains too.

Another trick is that you don't need a giant pot of water, just enough to cover the pasta, especially for smaller pasta like penne/fusilli etc.

Better still, put it in while the water is cold. Start you timer when the water reaches 180°F/80°C or so, and — when it reaches the boiling point — turn it off & cover.

Put your pasta in with cold water in a skillet with just enough water to cover. By the time the water boils, the pasta is cooked. Save even more co2, cook faster.

I've cooked a lot of pasta in my life and most pasta will be fine in usually 1/3 to 1/4th the typical amount of water, though often better with frequent stirring to prevent the pasta from sticking together (which is the reason for the large amounts of water and boiling water in the first place).

If you're heating up 1.5 quarts (instead of a gallon) for pasta you're saving almost 3x the energy for the initial heating.

Surprised no one's mentioned "one-pot pasta" recipes yet, where you cook veggies / sauce, and just drop raw pasta into the pot while the water is cooking off.

The pasta comes out starchier since you're not throwing away the starch water, and it tastes great, but definitely "different" from a "real" Italian pasta dish. Still great though! Italians view this as sacrilege but it's great fwiw.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spaghetti_all%27assassina

One of the best Italian chefs in the world, known for his pasta, showing five ways to cook dried pasta:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DK3FC1cQPKg

The last method is the one described on Barilla's site. Use YT's CC feature to translate.

Better yet, use a large flat pan and just enough water to cover the noodles. You don’t even need to wait for the water to boil. It’s faster this way and uses less water. Kenji Lopez-Alt of The Food Lab has a few videos covering the topic. It’s a real win-win.

I might just be getting old and cranky, but I get the feeling we're re-inventing common sense, but replace sense with technology. Can I get an app that tells me to stop letting the water run while I brush my teeth as well?

Mhh, I don't know.

Yes, you could also do this without any technology.

On the other hand, I can cook rice in a normal pot yet all of Japan uses rice cookers. So why not?

We don't need to live our lives in low-power mode. There's another way.

I'm tired of cutting these weird corners to save energy. My wife won't even let us use the oven anymore. I don't think these things are gonna save the planet, or even save us that much money

Yes, run around anxiously in circles to make sure your carbon footprint is as low as possible so you don't have time to look at what the corporations pushing this bullcrap are doing.

It's the ideal cooker for me. I take shower only once per week and most of my gas cost went to cooking. It will save ~75% of by gas meter reading (but only ~15% on my gas bill though).

Don't cook on gas if you really care about that kind of stuff.

I have a gas stove because it just came with my apartment, but I went and got a $70AUD ikea portable induction stove and I'm very surprised, it's significantly nicer to cook with, the heating range is both lower and higher than what my gas stove can achieve. Boiling a pot of water on the induction is so much faster than on gas. For pasta its a no brainer.

Eventually I want to replace my gas stove with a full induction one but unfortunately it's quite expensive.

> When the water boils, pour in your pasta.

Why even wait for the water to boil? I always pour my pasta into the cold water right from the start, and it doesn't seem to make any difference.

Wouldn’t that increase the time it takes to get a boil going? Doesn’t that increase the thermal load (or whatever the appropriate term is)?

maybe not? if the water and pasta are at the same temp to start with. I'm assuming heating pasta also takes less energy that heating water.

The term you're looking for is heat capacity. Water has a much higher specific heat capacity (on a per unit of mass basis) than most other everyday materials, and it comprises most of the mass of a pot+water [+pasta] system being heated, so the time and energy required to boil won't be changed significantly by the presence or absence of the pasta.

Different stoves take different amount of time to boil water. Kinda hard to follow the timing directions on the box if you start with cold water.

Hint: There is a direct way to tell if pasta is almost done.

Oooh, maybe we can build a $400 IoT device that requires a $60/month subscription around this idea?

Oh... just tasting a piece of pasta? Never mind.

You could maybe call the device Pastero.

It would need to have several precisely calibrated pressure sensors to test the done-ness of pasta. With machine learning of course.

I suspect that makes it harder to get the timing right, because how long the water takes to heat up varies a lot more than how much it cools down in the first ~10 minutes after turning off the burner.

this might work for you barbarians, but for us italians this a big no-no ;)

Did you confirm with the Chinese?

you can save way more time and electricity by boiling in a electric pressure cooker . your pasta will be done before the time it takes to boil a cauldron of water on the stove

This is the epitome of what is - unfortunately - wrong with capitalism.

Lofty claims of CO2 saved, while the marketing and production of a single device alone emmitted X times of cooking pasta without it.

Makes me truly question if technology & capitalism, for all the massive good they have achieved so far are the solution or our doom.

I didn't realise that making my pasta cooking more efficient would stop China and India from polluting both the air and ocean like there's no tomorrow.

Scroll down a bit and you get white text on a bright yellow background.

Seems to be the modern take on animated rainbow-color backgrounds from the geocities days...

I put the pasta in the water immediately, not waiting for boil. I also don't time it. You can see and feel when pasta is cooked.

Why boil any water at all? You can just let the pasta soak in cold water overnight. It will be nice and soft in the morning.

Any benefits of passive cooking must be offset by encouraging folks to 3d print some (non) biodegradable junk piece of plastic.

You can do it without that bs gadget.

Hey, it specifically says it prints it with biodegradable junk plastic! Though I think the landfill at the end is the least problematic environmental issue here

That's a bizarre objection to 3D printing in the home. I don't do it for such reasons, but I assure you everything I've ever printed would have had a far worse environmental impact if I'd bought/had it made elsewhere. If I'd even been able to.

How? For all intents and purposes PLA is not biodegradable

1. I haven't thrown any away anyway;

2. Fixing things that might otherwise be destined for landfill;

3. Alternative solution (where it even exists) would be a similarly plastic part manufactured overseas.

OP probably wanted to share the arduino based passive cooker, but it can't be deeplinked. You need to scroll a bit.

I’m sorry, what does this device do? Is it really just an “internet of junk” kitchen timer claiming to save the planet?

How big a lens does one need to focus sunlight onto a cooking pan to boil water and cook pasta without emissions?

* by buying our device that wasted a bunch of CO2 to produce

* also it isn't actually 80% when you do the math correctly

Water is really a great thermal mass. I'm surprised it makes that much of a difference. 80% is significant.

Now the important question: Can China Coal and Saudi Aramco cook their pasta like this too?

https://www.activesustainability.com/climate-change/100-comp...

I sometimes make rolled oats in cold milk. Just give it some 30 minutes to an hour to get soft and fluffy.

Never heard it called this, but this is similar to the way my grandmother taught me to cook pasta.

Here's another simple way to reduce your pasta cooking CO2 emissions: cook with nuclear electricity

Passive cooking also works well for other boiled foods such as vegetables, eggs, and dumplings.

>environmentally friendly AAA batteries

oh come on

Laughable when one flight from $CELEBRITY nukes the efforts of thousands of people for a decade.

Why not put the pasta in from the beginning instead of waiting for it to boil?

I honestly can't tell whether that whole page is satirical or not.

This is definitely going to turn the climate problem on its head.

This is the best way to hard boil eggs as well.

Cooking*

Doesn’t look to me like this is selling a new cooking device.

what da... isn't this what everybody do? why there's a website full with huge eco banners dedicated for this? :/

That web page doesn’t render without JavaScript.

We are breaking the rules talking about this, but...

Am I the only one who can't see step 3 and 4? (On mobile)

The carrousel won't advance

Passive cooking; great idea Building electronics + app to help people measure some time? terrible solution

Hey, c'mon, this is advertising and must be removed

I got bad news for you about 95% of the content that gets shared on HN

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