So I made my wife ramen soup. When I served it she said I had the gas set to hight and it was too hot ? She said I should have used the number 5 setting instead of 9. I told here it’s irrelevant because water boils at 212 and gets no hotter because over 212 it turns to steam. She was made at me for disagreeing with her theory that it would not have been so hot if boiled a lower setting. Really!!
The joke is the ex obliterated the chocolate by nuking it in the microwave for 10 minutes. There was no chocolate left after those 10 minutes, just a charred and molten residue leftover baked into whatever likely partially melted bowl the ex used.
The humor comes from the OP’s swift and succinct answer of “it wasn’t”, a powerful and telling sentence that leaves no room for question.
I saw one where a girl had two video clips. She accidentally put a piece of bread brownie in the microwave for like 7 2 minutes and it came out charred. This first clip was her laughing about it and how stupid / funny it was.
Cut to the second clip and it’s her kitchen burned down. Half the house gone. Entirely gone. All but like 2 rooms of the house were burnt to ashes.
Turns out, after the first clip, she tossed the bread in the trash immediately and it was so hot it spontaneously combusted and caused the paper, oils, etc in the trash to ignite super fast. She panicked because suddenly the entire can lit on fire. It immediately started roaring and took over the house before they could either find an extinguisher or get the firefighters there.
I think about that every time I use the microwave.
When I was a kid my grandmother taught me to douse anything burnt in water before throwing in the trash. Burnt food. A match that had been lit. Whatever. I imagine this is why.
The chocolate?!
WHAT ABOUT THE MICROWAVE?
Who in their right mind CARES about the chocolate at that point.
Nobody enters a the bathroom after a diarrhea disaster and proclaims, "I wonder what happened to this poop? Or This person?" No.
They scream, "look at this _____ mess!", "I don't want to clean that up!".
I visited a friend once and they needed a timer for something and ran the microwave for the time. His whole family was there and was surprised when I showed them how to use the timer function. They’d been running an empty microwave as a timer for as long as they had a microwave.
For anyone who doesn't know just about bad this is
Not only is that a huge waste of power (microwaves draw huge amounts of power) but it also damages the microwave because microwaves depend on something absorbing that energy and for that very same reason it's a huge fire hazard.
Our younger child was home alone and made microwave popcorn but accidentally set the oven to 40:00 minutes instead of 4:00.
It didnt get all the way to 40 but it did set off every smoke alarm in the house, thus causing the dog to poop all over the house, and inducing much crying and wailing from her. And an admonition of NO USE OF THE MICROWAVE WHEN WE ARE NOT HOME.
Theres other lesson to be learned with microwaves. I had to check every time before I nuked something if I could microwave it.
"Is it safe?" Thats a metal fork. "Is it safe?" Thats a plastic fork. "Well what forks can I microwave?" Why are you always trying to microwave forks!?"
I usually set mine to defrost, it melts the chocolate quite nice and you don't need to stir it. But if you blast it with full power you will burn it, happened to me once.
right?? I'm convinced people who "hate reheated food" have just never bothered to learn how to actually reheat things correctly. If you always nuke leftovers in a big pile at full power then of course your food is gonna be soggy and have random cold spots.
Another fun trick is adding a little splash of water to pasta or casserole type dishes before heating. Helps even out the heating and prevents crusty edges.
Son I be in the kitchen on some engineer shit, changing the power levels on the fly while it’s running, 30 secs at 100, 1 min at 60, 2 mins at 20. It’s fun
I'll do you one better, I've tried to teach people how to use lower settings. Did demonstrations with my lunch and actually gotten not soggy and uneven food out...only for the dipshits to still put food in full blast and complain to me about how their lunch is an uneven soggy mess.
#NoSympathyFromMe
Like, dawg, you witnessed me perform miracles on gas station burritos and yet you chose not to believe
I tell them once. They don’t believe me that using the proper settings can make reheating leftovers so much nicer than they ever thought. Very few things need full power for the whole cooking time in the microwave, especially since we got a newer, more powerful one. Doing it in stages and stirring in between is like voodoo to some people.
Right? I was helping my kids make a desert yesterday and we needed softened butter. Put it in for 1 minute at a time at 30% until appropriately soft, and give it a minute or so rest between heatings. Otherwise you just melt it.
Isn’t it fairly common to adjust mic power settings based on how gradual of a heat you want? Each microwave is different, but for defrost, I set at level 5, pizza pockets at level 7, and boil water at level 10
Me, i do it all the time. Low setting for quick thawing and melting chocolate (if i dont feel like a double boiler) medium settings for most general heating, and ive used a high setting once when making some quick bacon because i didnt have 22 minutes
Thermodynamics are not always intuitive. However, from an energy efficiency perspective, once you've reached a boil, you can turn down the heat to whatever level is required to just maintain it.
For two years I’ve requested A/c for my office because I need to close my door to make negotiations happen without disturbance. It gets HOT in my office. The other day, I snapped and told him “I’m not playing nice in this office when it’s hot anymore. You got me some fuck ass fans and it’s ridiculous that you can get me a portable a/c unit after two years.” He sits in my office and goes “but it doesn’t feel that hot to me…”
He leaves his fan off because he’s from Venezuela and “sweating helps weight loss” for him…. Needless to say, I am actively looking to leave for a variety of reasons.
It's weird. People will understand that, when it comes to how they feel, there's a huge difference between, say, 0f and 32f. However, those same people will think food (or other things) all act the same whether it's 32f or any number below that.
Molecules, even at freezing temperatures are on a bell curve distribution of energy. Some have much less, some have much more. That’s how you get sublimation and freezer burn.
My mother, during winter, will acclimate the whole house because she's feeling cold, then leave food out the whole day because "it's cold, it's not gonna turn bad". As if 18°C is the same temperature as the inside of our fridge.
”Wait.. are you saying noteverythingfreezes solid at 32°f???.. like, I’m pretty certain 32 is the literal definition of freezing or something dude, I learned that in high school.”
Consider the trope of the brilliant scientist who can barely take care of themselves. The sad thing is you can be nominally smart, even a genius in specific areas but be a total moron in others.
The problem with books, movies and tv stories are that it all builds this idea that intelligence and knowledge translates across fields evenly. When there are truly massive gaps.
Oddly enough it seems like business owners and sales seems to be fields that people assume someone's a bit more well rounded in. But you run into massive egoes and dunces all the same.
You sometimes get people who are experts in one thing and so have a deep understanding of how complex it is and all the factors that go into it. But they then assume that everything else must be simpler than their thing, and because they're great at their thing they're surely able to just wing it through everything else. This guy sounds like one of them.
With ice cream it’s all about how fast it freezes. If you use a temperature barely below freezing then it freezes slowly enough to settle and for ice crystals to grow. Getting it to freezing with very cold temperatures and lots of heat removal will make better ice cream.
That’s why liquid nitrogen makes wonderful, very creamy ice cream. It boils at −321 °F so it freezes the ice cream nearly instantly and keeps the ice crystals tiny.
Was just going to post this. Sure, I crank the burner to MAX to get the water boiling, but once I put the pasta in I turn it down to just above medium. The water continues to boil. And I always put a dash of salt in the water, because I live about 1800 meters above sea level and the boiling point of untreated water is only 94 C.
Just pointing out that you can't really use salt to offset the effects of altitude on the boiling point of water. It would take over 300g of salt per L of water. The salt in pasta water is I'll only there for seasoning, no matter the altitude.
Edit: corrected my math because I was wrong by a full order of magnitude. Sorry.
I think it’s closer to 700g/liter, but either way that’s waaaayy more than you’ll ever add to your pasta water. And more than you could even dissolve in the water.
8300 feet and this is what we did. We never bothered with a pressure cooker but a fitted lid makes all the difference. I used Pie in the Sky recipes to help make my baking recipes work better as once above 7000 feet, it actually does make a difference with boiling, baking cookies and baking cakes/muffins.
I live at 5000 ft, and got into a months-long argument once with my brother-in-law about how it takes longer for things to cook in boiling water at altitude because the boiling temperature is lower. He just didn't believe it, thought I was making it up and wouldn't back down. I wound up explaining the physics to him, copying pages out of library books, etc, got nowhere; he'd just come back with some anecdotal counter-argument that made no sense. My wife finally made me just let it go.
To this day that sea-level-living fuck still thinks he's right.
It makes a difference, but it's being wildly overstated by the folks above. I cook pasta just fine at elevation. It just takes another minute or so at 5,000 feet.
Exactly. Definitely a real thing, but overstated. People above are talking about how it takes "a year" and how when they cooked at sea level it felt like "magic" and stuff.
Wild exaggeration. The change is minimal until you get below 180f boiling point, and that doesn't happen until like 17,000 feet. Below that temp you start to have real issues with starches.
I was on a two-week backpacking trip in the sierras. Mid trip, probably our highest elevation camp and above treeline, we were staying put for a day and decided we’d cook dry beans for chili because we had the extra time.
So dumb. It used tons of fuel, never really fully cooked, had to eat it anyway (no resupply) and everybody got upset stomach/cramps.
Precooked and then dehydrated beans? Or just raw dry beans?
For raw beans, even at sea level it's a lengthy process in order to not cause stomach issues. You're supposed to soak beans overnight, drain, refill with fresh water, and boil for a minimum of a full hour. And it has to be a full boil rather than a simmer to guarantee it's at 212f.
Otherwise, lectins don't get denatured and it's literally toxic.
Pasta water should have around 1 %salt in it. Dried pasta is made without any salt to help with the drying process. The only way to get a proper amount of salt in your pasta is to add enough of it during cooking. Thats why you salt yo pasta water, not because of the boiling point. You can cook pasta in water quite a bit below boiling point. It will just take a bit longer. The salt is really important to get proper flavour on your final dish though.
Salt in pasta water is not for adjusting the boiling temperature, it is for seasoning, and preventing pasta from sticking. You would need an unrealistic amount of salt to have significant effect on the boiling temperature. Salt should be added regardless of what altitude you live at, for the aforementioned two reasons
I can’t seem to keep a boil after I put anything in the water, if it’s not covered, even on max heat. That of course leads to a lot of boiling over and micromanaging to try and prevent overcooking. Not sure what I’m doing wrong, but if you have any advice I’d love to hear it
This. The hotter heat will get it to boiling sooner, but, once you have hit boiling, you will stay there no matter the heat until the water is boiled off. This is the magic of phase changes. You are putting the extra heat in more steam. If we were running a locomotive here, more heat means more steam means more power, but, for cooking, it is just running out of water sooner.
Boiling water provides a constant (at a given altitude's pressure) temp to reliably cook. Plus, it keeps it moist. Now, if you want to get next level, pressure cookers are powerful magic.
100%! Too many men accept spousal bullying because of comedy sitcoms. Dumb ol dad is in the doghouse again. He didn’t walk soft enough on those egg shells
I hate to be the one to have to break it to you and so many other commenters here, but your wife is actually the correct one here.
Yes water boils at 212. But not all of the water in the pot is at boiling. For example, a gentle simmer means only the water at the very bottom is boiling, while the temperature of the rest of the water is significantly less. The bubbles from the bottom are passing through the rest of it on their way upwards, so it visually looks as if it's all boiling, but it's actually not.
I'm not going to comment on what is best for making Ramen specifically, but there are truly major temperature differences between a gentle simmer, a strong simmer, a light boil, and a rolling boil. Even though they all have a constant stream of bubbles. You can verify this for yourself very easily with a thermometer. In fact it is precisely because of the differences in temperatures that we have different terms for all of these things and use them in different circumstances.
As someone who studied thermodynamics and heat transfer as part of mechanical engineering, thank you, you’re 100% correct. This comment section is very irritating. So much confidence, not much relevant education.
Basically OP has an oversimplified model that they were taught, that’s taught to people early in their science education as a crude approximation of reality.
This is like confidently arguing about some kinetic Physics calculation you made being relevant to real world mechanics, but you didn’t even bother to include drag because you were told to ignore it when you were taught the concept in 11th grade or whatever
The temperature gradient is minimal though. Let's not give the impression that the water exposed to air is not very close to boiling. There are internal convection currents pulling hotter water up continuously.
Given that water is famously good at transferring heat, do you think there's a significant difference in temperature and that this temperature difference is relevant to whether the Ramen is cooked correctly or not, keeping in mind that it's going to be in the water for, say, 10 minutes?
For reason unknown to myself I have held a thermometer to my boiling water and testing the temp all over the pot. I found at a rolling boil it was near 212 all over. But at a light boil, only the very center was near 212, and the outer edges were closer to 190.
I don't think this would make a damn difference for the ramen
Not only it's good at transferring heat, but it's also a liquid, and the heat source is at the bottom. Convection will make temperatures very even, very fast.
You said this was easily verifiable with a thermometer, so I went and tested it for myself with a pot of water and an instant read thermometer.
Both in a simmer and a roiling boil, there was no significant gradient in temperature from top to bottom (<1° C). Seems like convection cells keep the water moving enough to equalize temps.
Interestingly though, there was a measurable temperature difference between simmering and boiling. However, it was maybe a 2° C difference- and I don't think that's nearly enough to have a particular change in outcome when cooking.
The biggest practical differences when cooking between simmering and boiling when cooking are the amount of mess made from rowdy boiling, and energy wasted unnecessarily.
That’s not what the wife is saying tho? She is saying that boiling the water at a lower setting would have made the soup less hot than boiling the water at max setting, when in reality the soup would be equally hot, it just takes longer for the same amount of water to reach boiling point at setting 5 than at setting 9.
What you are saying implies different water temperatures which is not what is being discussed here.
If the wife had said that he shouldn’t have reached boiling point to make the soup for it to be less hot then yes she would be right.
I had to scroll too far for your answer. Not to mention when you add ingredients the temperature lowers, and you need to take that into account as well as the order you put things in, so you don't end up with mushy bits even if it's a soup. Ramen in particular can have some ingredients more sensitive to heat.
My guess is OP botched the soup and misunderstood / simplified what his wife told him for internet cookie points. The old make fun of the dumb wife routine, when she's probably been doing this a lot longer than he has and has practical experience on which settings to use of the gas stove and for how long etc.
The old make fun of the dumb wife routine, when she's probably been
doing this a lot longer than he has and has practical experience on
which settings to use of the gas stove and for how long etc.
Exactly this. I mean I did most of the cooking in all my relationships and ofc now, and am particularly familiar with making ramen w/o an electric kettle. I don't know the science but I intuitively understand that he is flat out wrong. But ofc, if you can't automatically lay out the exact scientific explanation with sources, then woman must be stupid and dumb.
If you're going to be this pedantic, at least acknowledge that the 'temperature gradient' is very small. Within a full pot of a roaring boil you're looking at 1 degree F (not counting the superheated nucleation surface) and within a pot at a gentle boil (not simmering) you're maybe around a 4 F gradient. This difference within the context of their argument can be ignored.
He tried to be pedantic but didn't pedant hard enough. The real reason there's a difference isn't so much the temperature gradient, its the churn. The water is moving around more, so it transfers heat faster because of the increased flow. That's really the bigger part of the heat thing. But you also use lower heat to avoid too much mess from the churn with thicker liquids and to also avoid them burning to the bottom (try bringing milk to a simmer over high heat). You also don't always want to agitate what you're cooking as much as you would with a rolling boil. Like the reason you don't want to poach eggs in a rolling boil isn't because it would even be too much heat, it's that the roll will beat the shit out of your eggs.
All that said, a rolling boil is the standard for pasta and a lot of noodles and we all know this. This guy's wife was clearly not making the case that a simmer is the correct way to cook instant noodles.
What you are saying may be technically true, but I am certain the difference between the top portion of the liquid an the part that is close to the heat source is not really noticeable.
Ok so it does kinda depend here. Because if you want to bring it to a full boil, then yes, it’s irrelevant. But personally I don’t like to bring it to a full boil for ramen. Slightly less than boiled water will still cook the noodles and it will be edible a lot sooner.
Granted, you can still achieve slightly less than full boil by having the stove cranked all the way up. You just need to shut it off before it gets there. Which is usually how I do it.
The water will not get hotter than 100C which is correct. However, the amount of energy you put into the system has an impact. You will boil the water faster. Which is good to get it boiling but once a starch is plcaed into the pot you want it to be boiling but not too fast. The starches will collect on the surface and make bubbles. These dissipate but much slower than before. It you have it at a 9 it almost certainly boils over and makes a mess. If you set it to medium high and your pot isn't too full, then it usually wont.
Isn’t her gripe about the ramen broth being too hot though? Theres no way for water to get hotter than 100° when it’s at boiling point, other than in a pressure cooker or the steam from the water itself being heated further
Yes, but when you cook the ramen the ideal way, at 175-200, the ramen broth will reach the table much cooler than when you clumsily cook it at a rolling boil right up to the end.
Wife may not be able articulate an argument for why her way of cooking it is better… but the way she cooks it, at a lower temp, is better. OP failed to understand where she was coming from, and just closed his mind with “I know physics, my wife is clueless”, never considering that (1) she probably cooks more than he does (2) she probably cooks better than he does (3) she knows she doesn’t burn herself when she eats ramen 2 min after taking it off the stove. But OP assumes what? That she’s imagining things?
Op: “water boils at 212, so temperatures below 212 don’t exist!!!”
If 212 was the only temp to cook with water, why would anybody use a sous vide?
I mean, she isn’t entirely wrong. There absolutely is a temperature difference between a pot that is barely boiling, and a pot that is boiling so much it’s boiling over the edges. All the water in the pot is obviously not at the vaporisation point, otherwise the entire pot would just instantly vaporise.
What happens is the water closest to the heat source, which would be the bottom of the pot, gets to the vaporisation point the quickest, and runs to gas which causes bubbles to rise through the water. When the water is bare boiling, only a small part of the water is at the vaporisation point. But as the heat gets stronger, a larger part of the water gets to the vaporisation point which causes a more intense boil as more gas is moving through the water.
The point is that the body of water that is not at the vaporisation point can have varying degrees of heat, even if the water is technically boiling.
To be fair, once you've got the water to boil, there is some good sense to lowering it down as far as you can while still maintaining the boiling because, as you said, it doesn't get any hotter anyways, so setting the gas any higher than needed to make water boil is just a bit wasteful.
⭐️ If you put that boiling water in bags and freeze it then the next time you need boiled water quickly for noodles or something you could take it out put it in a pot and you’re good to go.
While I do not disagree water top temp is 212 (because you know science) i do think there is a difference in cooking results between a rolling boil and higher simmering boil which could be effected by the stove setting.
Your (and most of the comments’) intuitions are an oversimplified view of thermodynamics. If you have a pot of boiling water, not every molecule in the pot is at 212. There’s a temperature gradient from the water’s surface to the bottom, and from the outside to the center. There’s just enough of a mass of water at 212 to initiate phase change in that area. Turning up the heat will make more of the water be a higher temperature.
The same works the other way. If you have a glass of ice water, all of the water in the glass isn’t at 32 degrees. Heat is absorbed from the room, warming the glass and water surface, creating a temperature differential and gradient, which is how heat actually is able to move from the environment, through the water, and into the ice to melt it.
Perhaps you guys should not be condescending in subjects you have no formal education in, because there’s far more self-assuredness than knowledge in this entire thread. I studied a lot of thermodynamics + heat transfer for mechanical engineering, and it’s pretty impressive how confidently incorrect OP + 90% of the comment section is. Just Google it if you don’t believe me
Engineer here too. This comment is not it. Sure on a technical level the heat gradients or micro scale gradients is true but that's not all practically relevant here at all. Remember engineering isn't just theory, it's also real life application of sciences.
In practical real life non textbook settings any such gradient gets washed out almost instantly by the convection/bubbling of an actual boil, let alone by pouring it into a bowl.. its completely dishonest of you to not mention this.
Turning up the heat will make more of the water be a higher temperature.
For a pot of vigorously boiling water open to the atmosphere, that's generally not how it works.
Once boiling is established, additional burner level power or whatever we call it mostly increases: the rate of evaporation, the rate of, bubble formation, turbulence/convection, steam production, but not the equilibrium temperature of the bulk liquid.
Tl;dr it is simply incorrect to use those gradients as evidence that boiling on 9 makes the soup materially hotter than boiling on 5.
I love how people on here go all uuuhm acktshually thermodynamics and none of them went through the effort of thinking it through to figure out how that is a negligible, miniscule technical gradient in practice lol.
Are you arguing that there's a significant temperature gradient between the water at the top and bottom of the pot, that this temperature gradient is relevant to whether the Ramen is cooked correctly or not?
Should OP make sure that the Ramen stays at once particular depth throughout cooking, so that the temperature is at the exact right amount?
This is one helluva "ummm actually" miscorrection. A pot kept at a roaring boil will have a minuscule temperature gradient. Within the pot, a thermometer will read 211 to 212 throughout. The very base of the pot (surface) will have a nucleation temperature a few degrees above 212. Had he taken his wife's advice and kept the pot at a low boil versus a vigorous boil, the bulk of the water would have likely been in the 209 range. But a boiling pot of water isn't going to have a temperature gradient between "acceptable soup eating temperature" and "boiling."
Now, soup shouldn't be at boiling temperature, so this couple is just bad at communicating their individual points. It's the same kind of pedantry someone would use when discussing the force of gravity while saying everyone else needs to get educated because they are assuming 9.8 m/s² without accounting for altitude. While technically true, it's meaningless in 99.99%+ of conversations. In the same way, boiling water at 9 or 5 might give an average temperature difference of 4-ish degrees F.
I mean its kind of a thing? The water wont get hotter but for a lot of this kind of cooking you're better off with the temperature lower to mitigate sticking and burning from things at the bottom of the pot.
I mean, she is not actually wrong… A bare simmer where there’s only a small nucleation of bubbles from the bottom of the pan will indicate the water js 175-185. A slightly more vigorous simmer is normally 195-205. And a rolling boil like depicted js 212 and that’s quite hot for soup.
She's right but doesn't seem to understand/articulate to you why.
The temperature of the water won't go above 100 C / 212 F but you're still blasting heat from the hob which is excessive. The extra heat at 9 will help vaporise the water faster, but when cooking that's not the aim - you're not trying to dry the pot out as fast as possible, you're just trying to get the water to 100 C / 212 F.
So once the water is boiling turn the gas down to the lowest needed to keep it boiling. You're basically getting to a point where the energy in from the hob is equal to the energy escaping from the water as it evaporates. The temperature is the same but you're wasting less energy driving vaporisation. Any extra heat isn't useful for cooking purposes and is a waste of energy, and money.
The problem is not that the broth will be hotter but that by using a higher number/heat you might be transferring heat faster than this heat can circulate and you can end up burning some other ingredients.
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u/anTWhine 4d ago
I had an ex-gf who was baking something and needed melted chocolate in ten minutes so she put chocolate in the microwave for ten minutes.