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electric kettles are the way and the light
This is how everyone does it right? Right?! The only people that I know who don’t use an electric kettle are in their 80s. Or is this some cultural thing where people in the US/UK/whatever don’t use electric kettles?
US still has residential power from the last century
US has 110 voltage that can’t run a kettle for shit
They’re fast and efficient, by putting the heating element right up against the water, and also safe thanks to shutting off automatically. Great shit!
Yep , I never realized how fast they are. 2 cups boils in under 2 minutes.
We have one for every bedroom, for teamergencies
Electric kettles are actually a scam. Look up any BIFL forum, they’ll all say that stove top kettle is the way to go.
Nobody wants to use a stovetop kettle when they can just push a button and forget about it.
Also an electric kettle costs 10-20€ and lasts ~10 years, it’s also much more energy efficient.
No need to “buy it for life”
Ur body is already made of like 70% water and also its already warm. Just eat the tea bag, thats what i do.
The best method (arguably not very energy efficient) is a Zojirushi water boiler that keeps the water hot (175F, 190F, 200F) and boils when a temperature change is detected.
It’s so nice to have if you drink a lot of tea, or as some Asian households prefer, hot vs room temp water.
Using cold water is the quickest, most energy-efficient and convenient way to make tea. Or coffee. Or hot chocolate.
Yeah British people don’t own microwaves I guess, but they expect us Americans to own kettles. Never mind that you can just boil water in the coffee maker if you MUST do it without a microwave.
1 coffee mug/tea cup of water in the microwave for 1 minute is perfect for a single serving bag of tea. it doesn’t have to be boiling, just hot. 1 min is also not long enough to dangerously superheat water. hot is water is hot water, it doesn’t matter if you do it kettle or microwave.
edit: lol
No. Just no. You get shit cups of tea from coffee houses because the espresso machine doesn’t dispense boiling water. The water needs to be boiling for black tea.
Also how do you microwave water? It takes ages to get water to boil in there and can explode. Use a stove if you must, buy a kettle if you can.
Also if you put a cup, teabag, and milk in the microwave at the same time I will find you, and I won’t just force you to make a good cup of tea I will force you to make a perfect cup of tea that will ressurect the Queen of bloody England!
The culinary arts of my home country may be shit. But you fuckers make it worse by fucking up the most simple recipies!
microwaves water for tea
this is why america is fucked
The microwave melts out the microplastics tho
How tiny are your mugs
doesn’t have to be boiling
Depends on the tea.
Black generally should. Green absolutely shouldn’t.
Europeans when they discover that no, most Americans really do not own a kettle rule.
Hmmm. Most of the Americans I know have electric kettles now. It’s probably my most used kitchen gadget. Great for making tea or coffee, or boiling water for oatmeal. I just used it tonight to get some warm water to soak my lizard (not a euphemism) and to thaw out a frozen mouse for a snake. Honestly it gets used probably 5 or 6 times a day most days.
to thaw out a frozen mouse for a snake
Was… Was that an euphemism?
They’re getting more common. I personally used a stovetop kettle as recently as six years ago. But electric kettles are a world of difference.
Minor problem for me is currently living in a very old house that we don’t own and using a proper electric kettle will pop a breaker. I recently bought a travel kettle that uses like 1/5 the wattage instead
So, I’m Greek and I also have never used a kettle. In fact, you won’t find one in most households. But all of us have a briki. It’s like a mini pot!
We use it to boil water/make cofee/tea/boil 1-2 eggs etc
I don’t get it either, I’ve always made tea with a small pot. It is just something to heat up water. It has a lid. The only time I started seeing a lot of kettles around was when pour over / V60 / Chemex became fashionable and every place started selling gooseneck kettles.
let alone an electric kettle
I can’t imagine life without an electric kettle…
I don’t know what happened. We used to be really into tea. Blame the Townshend Acts I guess?
We dumped that tea into the Boston Harbor because we didn’t want that crap.
No we did, it was good tea. That’s what made the message clear, the value being sacrificed. The popular American predilection for tea up until after the Townshend Acts was well documented by de Tocqueville. It was only after that drinking tea was considered “unpatriotic”. Before then we would even eat boiled tea leaves with butter as a side dish. We were mad about the stuff, but as a colony we were only allowed to buy British tea. It was a whole thing.
Anyway I’ve had an electric kettle for ages. It’s more common in Asian-American households perhaps. We didn’t fit in that well in the states, so we went back to the UK. Now I only buy British tea again. Full circle.
ngl there’s a tea from Cornwall that is my absolute favorite black tea now
They do things right out in Cornwall. We were vacationing at lands end when storm Henk made landfall, it was memorable to say the least.
we asian muricans use those kettles for instant ramen lol
Cultural taste can change over time for various reasons. Tea has been inherently traditional to many countries, not as much to others.
we are shifting to boiling taps too now
Wait, do Americans not own kettles?
That’s like one of the first things I bought when I moved out.
In my country (and most of northern Europe I presume), induction stoves are becoming very common. I tossed my electric kettle 7 years ago when I got induction.
It’s faster than a kettle in most of my pots.
their shitty electrical grid means kettles take like double the time to boil.
I’ve actually timed my kettle. 15 ounces of water(I have larger mugs than ‘normal’) takes 2 minutes and 34 seconds to be a full rolling boil. I’m really not that concerned.
It’s still just a few minutes. Don’t heat up more water than you are going to use.
Great video on this from technology connections. tl;dr it takes more time, but not, like, that much more. We mostly just don’t have a huge tea-drinking culture here.
My family (American) did drink a lot of tea. Surprise surprise, we had a kettle. I did not die of old age from the cumulative weight of all that waiting.
I did not die of old age from the cumulative weight of all that waiting.
Not yet. Just you wait.
chronic exposure to time dramatically increases your chances of getting terminally old.
So why does Japan at 100V have electric kettles everywhere? It’s a cultural reason not the electrical grid.
good point! i don’t know much about their grid, only that it’s 50Hz in the west and 60Hz in the east.
I’ve never heard of anywhere in US using 50Hz and I’ve lived on the West Coast my whole life.
I love that you’ve come into a discussion about Japan’s electrical grid and still assumed that the conversation is about America.
I mean, the conversation started about America’s electric grid. It was ambiguous from context.
that may be because we were talking about japan!
Not that East and West, the East and West.
Pretty much every person I know in Canada has an electric kettle and every single office I’ve worked in has one, my kitchen has 15a outlets which is still 1800W. I have a simple gooseneck kettle that I usw mainly for coffee, it’s only 1kW and holds around 750ml, it’s not blisteringly fast but it’s boiled before I’ve ground my coffee.
The whole “120v is holding us back from having kettles” is way overblown (technology connections has a video on electric kettles).
Our grid uses the same voltages as Europe. Our houses even generally receive 240V from the line. It’s just that we went with 120V for most appliances and electronics for some reason.
I’d also argue a lot of Americans technically do have electric kettles, and they just don’t realize it because they’re advertised as coffee makers. It’s not ideal, but you can definitely use a drip coffee machine to boil water, and it’ll still be faster than a stove.
Unfortunately for every tea drinker in an American hotel, most coffee makers (at least the drip kind) will make any water boiled inside taste like coffee, unless they’ve been used exclusively for plain boiled water. Maybe a combo tea/coffee drinker wouldn’t mind, but I’ve always found it intolerable.
But it’s a good point about the grid - we have plenty of appliances for coffee that are principally glorified water boilers, and there’s no evidence that our appliance voltage has hampered their popularity at all.
it really doesn’t. european houses generally receive 400V from the line, split into 3 220V phases. you guys get two 120V phases that are fully phase-shifted, rather than 120° offset, and you bridge two phases to get 240 for heavy appliances.
It’s mostly for commercial installations, but you can get 3-phase 480V here if you want it.
I don’t think this has much to do with the grid, though. It’s more that we started with 120V appliances, so that’s what we built our homes to support.
not true, that’s a myth
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I own one because I’m a coffee snob and enjoy pourovers. Before I went down that whole road, no. And neither did anyone I knew well enough to dig through their kitchen
Tea isn’t that popular here although I’d argue in recent years it has been gaining on what it once was. I think where other countries kettles are the norm, here “coffee makers” are the norm.
The majority of the more “popular” form of tea we’d have here is probably considered an abomination onto nuggin elsewhere: sweet tea. (Iced tea with about 628648lbs of sugar in it.)
I think this is the largest reason right here. People are naturally going to reserve their limited counter space for the stuff they use daily. For Americans, that’s more likely to be some kind of coffee maker than an electric kettle.
Growing up where I did, I knew a lot of families that regularly made iced tea. But they usually made a gallon at a time, once or twice a week, and still drank coffee every day - so they had counter top coffee makers, and stovetop kettles that could be stored away the rest of the week.
I had a dedicated saucepan to make iced tea to ensure my tea only tasted like tea.
I guess I’m surprised, I’m in Canada so expected we’d be very similar.
But you also have garbage disposals and I’ve never seen one here.
Are we talking about electric kettles or kettles in general?
An electric kettle is a counter appliance and therefore degeneracy. A stovetop kettle is functional decoration though.
a stovetop kettle is literally bigger takes up a hob takes more time to boil and costs more money
I don’t need the burner space most of the time, compared to the counter space. Plus, like I said, it looks better, so the aesthetics justify the cost. I agree the boil time is a problem, but it’s a small price to pay for clear counters. It’s starts with a kettle. Then you have a toaster, and an air fryer and a coffee grinder and a coffee machine and before you know it your house is 37% counter appliances by mass. The only option is to be an extremist.
lol no shit many Americans don’t own a kettle, they apparently rank 36th in tea consumption per capita. Breaking news lads, they aren’t as enamored with it as the next higher usage countries.
List of countries by tea consumption per capita
The UK is 3rd, behind Ireland and Turkey. Get your shit together, UK.
Facts.
BUT as an American southerner, our iced tea consumption is through the roof and it fuels our economies, sweet tea and fried chicken
Growing up, we’d make sun tea, and I feel like that’d send a lot of tea drinkers running. In the morning, you’d take a gallon jar of water, a dozen teabags, bunch of sugar, and let it sit in the sun during the day, and drink it that evening.
Fun fact, due to the power difference in the US, kettles are much slower here than some other places. You can run a 3kW kettle on the grid in the UK, and boil a single cup’s worth of tea water in about 45 seconds. In the US, most outlets won’t allow more than 1800W, or 1.8kW, so the best kettles will take almost twice as long.
That’s almost a minute and thirty one seconds! Daft.
I usually use my kettle to make coffee (handfiltered/pour-over).
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Now we need to get the South Asians and East Asians fighting about putting milk in tea.
I went to a Thai restaurant and they said, “Milk?” And I made a disgust face. A good Thai dude at another table said, “It’s not western milk.” And I tried it.
Wow.
Then he said, “Try it on toast.” And fuck me. Another wow!
This. It’s so sweet and good.
Ooo condensed milk is also great with coffee and is how you make Vietnamese coffee!
Alternatively, if you prefer tea, Hong Kong milk tea uses black tea and condensed milk too.
This one extended a little with a great literate addition 😂
wow, actual iambic pentameter, impressive.
the scenography is ass though.🤣🤣🤣 holy shit my sides
Long live King Pidoop.
That was something.
Honestly if you want to boil water quickly just use a pan. Takes like 30 seconds.
Are you boiling 50ml?
That sentence you constructed. I have some opinions about it.
My kettle doesn’t even boil in 30s…
They might have an induction stove. The community housing project that owns the apartment I rent recently joined this pilot program to switch appliances from gas to electric to see how much it helped air quality and energy use in the home. It used to take me like 3 minutes to boil 2 cups of water on the stove, now that they replaced it with an induction stove it’s like 30 seconds. It’s amazing.
What is this lunacy… at least boil it in a pot 😭
what size microwave do you have that can fit a full pot?
💀
Use one of those mixing bowls that has a spout.
Cattle
Heating up a mug of water in the microwave is fine. I don’t get why people are so snobby about this. The water doesn’t care where the heat energy comes from.
Do you put a spoon in it though?
It definitely tastes different - flatter somehow. I don’t know why, but it does.
Tea will taste different depending on what temperature water it’s brewed in, but I can’t think of any reason the water itself would be different.
e: The material of the vessel would matter. Perhaps you like the taste imbued by your kettle, which would be lacking if you heated the water directly in a mug.
Something something typical US circuits can deliver less power than typical Euro circuits. Not a lot less though.
I used to own a $15 plastic electric kettle, but it died after a year or two. When I went to target to get a new (hopefully better) one, I realized I could instead buy a plug-in induction plate on sale for $50, and a plain stainless steel kettle that somehow cost only $1.50 (less than the shitty bread that I was also buying? how?). The induction plate was honestly one of the best purchases I’ve made in a long time. Sure, I have to wear earplugs to tolerate the high-pitched scream that the frequency driver makes, but it boils water just as well as an electric kettle and is also soooo much nicer to cook on than the resistive curlicue burners that came with my apartment.
Something something typical US circuits can deliver less power than typical Euro circuits. Not a lot less though.
It’s a lot less. Half of what an European delivers. So your electric kettle takes twice the time
https://www.electricaltechnology.org/2025/02/americans-gas-kettles-europe-electric-kettles.html
Hot plates aren’t exactly a new technology but can be useful. Just, you know, don’t put ceramic or glass directly on it. A pot of coffee you want to keep warm is fine though.
Technology Connections did a video on this rule.
regular US outlets are 120V. regular EU outlets are 240V. P=VI, so to produce the same amount of power as a 240V kettle, a 120V kettle needs to draw twice as much current.
the gauge of a wire determines how much current it can carry without setting insulation on fire. home outlets are typically wired for 15A, around the world. so in EU, 15A service can deliver twice as much power since that’s 15A of current at 240V = 3.6kW, while in the US at 120V = 1.8kW.
so EU kettles are twice as powerful, typically.
Every plug in my kitchen is 20A…USA chiming in.
The majority of my circuits are 20A. The breakers with the bars between them are 240V circuits. My house was built in 2002. 20A is becoming a lot more common.
At least here in Australia, 15A circuits are not very common. Only one of the places I’ve ever lived had a 15A outlet in a shed, which was likely installed by the previous owner for running a welder or plasma cutter, or some other high peak power tool like that. 3.6kW is massive overkill for general household use.
The standard circuit here is 10A, which gives you 2.4kW to play with. It’s been a while, but if I recall correctly that was part of the point Technology Connections was making - that the difference isn’t actually that great between 120 and 240V countries in practice. The change to boiling time from an electric kettle was pretty inconsequential between the two.
I believe he postulated that the real reason Americans don’t have electric kettles was that they didn’t have much need for them. They mostly don’t drink tea, and their coffee is largely prepared using drip coffee makers that heat their own water.
I didn’t bring my 3Kw UK kettle over because I heard it would probably blow the circuit. But my Australian colleague who moved back over here brought his UK toaster and it actually did blow the circuit.
Hmm for some reason the numbers 1600 and 2000 W were rattling around my head for US and Europe respectively. I know most US appliances don’t like to pull the full 15 A because that’s when the breaker trips, but that would scale roughly the same for Europe so the power ratio should still be as you describe. I guess I either was misremembering or got the EU number from an abnormally low-current circuit.
I forgot TC did a video on this. I’ll have to watch when I have the time.
do british people not have arizona iced tea?
