I think anyone who drinks tea knows the English have scorn for the way Americans make tea.
“BOILING,” they grumble. “The water must be BOILING!”
And I do boil the water. Up until this week I have dutifully used a pot and boiled the water to a rolling boil which I pour directly over the (borderline acceptable) tea bag, and then I wait 4 minutes for it to steep.
This makes pretty good tea. It’s strong enough I can add milk and a ridiculous amount of sweetener and I still taste the tea.
However, I have a new way to boil water now, thanks be to the drain flies. Gary heard the suggestion to pour boiling water down the sink, so to ensure the flies would be extra dead he paid extra money for extra-boiling water. He bought a fancy gooseneck self-heating induction kettle that gets the water up to a documented 270 degrees, when water boils at 212.
He used it once and declared all drain flies dead.
I’ve been the only one who notices the stray orphaned flies so it’s been up to me to remain vigilant. I feel we got the best results killing the drain flies with the Green Gobbler fluid so I’ve been using that instead. That’s fine.
I knew from the start the tea kettle would be used once and abandoned by Gary, but then I thought I could use it for … tea. But really, how different could the tea be? I decided to try it.
The water took two minutes or so to hit max 270 ultra-boiling, and when that water hit the tea bag I immediately had full-on brewed tea. No time at all spent steeping it. And it tasted quite good.
So, all tea shall be made properly in the future with the special kettle. I can’t even imagine what would happen if I poured it over loose-leaf tea.
4 responses to “TWIL: How to make tea”
My goodness, how do you Americans not have electric jugs as standard kitchen equipment? SO primitive, using a POT for goodness sake! Glad you’ve seen the light.
Big Dot – It seems so odd to me that you would have an appliance that does nothing but boil water. Do you use it for anything else? The booklet says I can make pour-over coffee with it.
So we spent a school year in the UK and our flat had an electric kettle but no microwave and while it would be easier for me to reverse that particular order of things if solely for the “reheating leftovers” aspect:
1. the kettle is so fast. SO fast. I boiled pasta water in it then added the boiling water to a pot with just a teeny bit of water I’d been preheating at the same time on the stove: faster time to cooked pasta.
2. if you consider how often tea is made by Some Other Cultures, it starts to make more sense; for one thing, the kettle is a self-contained unit on the countertop and there is no taking it out and putting it back, and it’s harder to burn yourself with it vs. a still-hot stove burner. We have a toaster, when we could use the oven to make toast instead, and we don’t even make toast every day (I do think having just a regular kettle on the stove to boil water is less of an effort than making toast without a toaster [and without a toaster oven], but still).
3. they’re also great for cup noodles; for baking recipes where you add a pan of boiling water to the lower shelf in the oven; for accelerating soup-making just like accelerating pasta-making; and yes, for french press or similar coffee-making.
4. It brings water up to the boil, then stops; there is no boiling dry (unless you have a defective model). Tea! All the time! With no boiling-kettle-dry accident possibilities!
Anyway. I do not drink enough hot tea to currently have prioritized having one [also, technically we *have* one but its safety mechanism is broken so it will boil itself dry if you let it, and I can’t get rid of it because it’s unsafe but it still *works* for boiling water…] but I remain enthusiastic about the electric kettles. A friend also in the US drinks 3+ cups of tea per day and has one in her tiny kitchen and for her it is 100% worth it.
Not sure about the superheated water, though, tbh. That is… weird. And might melt some things that boiling water doesn’t, which you might not want melted?
KC – I don’t think the extra few degrees are going to melt anything. I think most people have encountered superheated things in the microwave. They say the superheated microwave phenomenon happens when there are no imperfections in the container. I hope the makers of this device put in some imperfections.