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.
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.
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....
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.
I do recommend it though. Lots more options for coffee drinks.
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.
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...
If you care about energy efficiency, you should descale your kettles every so often.
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.
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 :)).
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.
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.
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 know in chem labs we used to use little chunks of ceramic for test tubes, but those aren't desirable in your tea.
This appears to be a microwave setting. I don't see how that would provide a non smooth surface
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.
edit: as far as 'nobody' using Pyrex, my preferred container for heating water is a big Pyrex measuring cup.
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.
For a fixed amount of water, you can learn the time and not have to pull out your instant-read thermometer.
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.
Source: have a 110V kettle and a gas cooktop with very large burners, still use the aforementioned trick.
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.
I only went to an Airbnb once that didn't have a kettle, so I Amazon'd one and just left it there.
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.
It's a pretty universal item in any Canadian home and possibly even dorm room.
(Us Americans tend to optimize for coffee over tea. If something also works for tea, that’s a happy coincidence, but not intentional.)
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.
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. :)
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).
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.
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.
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.
They do sell them here, people buy them, they are usually tea drinkers.
I don't understand this sentence, I would much rather waste some ground coffee beans and water than plastic.
Just because they both heat water doesn’t make them similar.
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.
French press, pour over, chemx are all niche.
French press coffee.
Instant coffee, hot cider, hot chocolate, etc.
Heating water for instant soups, etc.
electric kettle
french press for coffee
tea kettle for tea
> 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".
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.
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
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...
[1] https://www.csemag.com/articles/understanding-overcurrent-pr...
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?
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?
Because that is what was being discussed.
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.
It does take longer to boil, but it's like 2 min compared to 1 min.
I survive.
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.
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.