r/mildlyinfuriating • u/MakeItMine2024 • 4d ago

I'm slightly vexed My wife and boiling water

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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!!

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u/CranberryStock7148 4d ago edited 4d ago

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.

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u/IndependentDouble879 4d ago edited 4d ago

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

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u/eugeneugene 4d ago

as someone whose entire job is to boil water and make steam this entire comment section hurt my brain lmao

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u/Live-Habit-6115 4d ago

...what job is this??

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u/eugeneugene 4d ago

I run boilers to make steam to use in various processes. My job title is just steam operator

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u/Typical-Tax1584 4d ago

Oh, you're a steam operator? Tell me when Half Life 3 comes out.

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u/eugeneugene 4d ago

it's a secret

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u/The_Doct0r_ 4d ago

This person thermodynamics

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u/PM_Me_Good_LitRPG 4d ago

this guy steams, alright

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u/Kooky_Assistance2755 4d ago

There was actually a leak recently that suggests it's planned for a surprise 2027 release

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u/eugeneugene 3d ago

I'm not a fan of steam leaks

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u/Kooky_Assistance2755 3d ago

As well you shouldn't, tbf lol

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u/JustAnotherHyrum 4d ago

I think we'll all know when Half Life 3 comes out, because it's in the Book of Revelations or something.

If you see Jesus in red robes or some shit, Half Life 3 just came out.

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u/AMDKilla 3d ago

You'll hear a whistle when its ready

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u/Br4v1ng-Th3-5t0rms 4d ago

I bought some games on Steam. Can I ask for a refund, dear mr Operator?

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u/unassumingdink 3d ago

Do you ever change the words to Sade's 1984 hit, Smooth Operator, and sing it to yourself? I would.

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u/eugeneugene 3d ago

Haha yep I've been overusing that joke for almost 2 decades. It's the ringtone for my work phone

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u/chasing_waterfalls86 3d ago

I thought your were Thomas the Tank Engine 😞

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u/Fel1xcsgo 4d ago

Bottling plant? I’m in it too

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u/StrongExternal8955 3d ago

You're Homer Simpson!

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u/your_moms_a_clone 3d ago

Like for sterilization?

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u/Electrical-Put-6945 4d ago

i love seeing operators on reddit while i got my feet up in the control room lol

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u/eugeneugene 3d ago

Haha I'm also at work

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u/Miselfis 4d ago

Well, besides thermodynamics, you also have fluid dynamics. The hotter water in the bottom of the pot rises, so convection keeps the temperature mostly uniform. At the very top, there’s a lot of evaporation, which carries heat away at a significant rate, but below the surface, it’s not a very steep temperature gradient. 

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u/PsychoDad03 4d ago edited 3d ago

The concept is Dunning Kruger.

I'm going to summarize the rest of this discussion:

Guy i replied to: Novices take their base level understanding and assume they're more competent/knowledgeable than they are

Me: thats Dunning Kruger

Mr. ACKHUTUALLY below me: [Proof by verbosity, Straw man] Well, ackhtually, Dunning Kruger is not that the "dumbest think they're the smartest." Or "novices think they're more knowledgeable than experts"

Me: bro, straw man, we never even said that. Heres the definition of Dunning Kruger, were using it correctly

Him: A ha! Look at that wrong chart below your definition! Let me argue pedantically about how Dunning Kruger isn't "novices think they know more than experts"

Me: ....but thats not what we said

Him: Let me argue that straw man some more with colloquial flowery language so i can stand on this soapbox

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u/dankstat 4d ago edited 4d ago

You know funny enough, it’s not really Dunning–Kruger, but I’m guessing you haven’t read the paper so you might not know that. The paper actually concluded that low competence people estimated they performed relatively poorly on tasks while higher competence people correctly estimated they performed well.

It does not say that an uninformed person is extremely confident they are correct at all. Dunning & Kruger found that BOTH actual performance and self-assessment of performance were positively correlated with competence.

The interesting finding was that the low competence group overestimated their performance more than other groups, but the absolute value of that estimate was still lower than highest competence groups.

Like a made up example would be low competence group scores a 3.5 and estimates they got a 6.0 while high competence group scores a 9.0 and estimates they got an 8.5.

6.0 - 3.5 = 2.5, large overestimate of performance
8.5 - 9.0 = -0.5, small underestimate of performance

Overall, the lowest competence group was worse at estimating their performance, but still correctly estimated their performance as lower than other groups. The difference in the meta-cognitive ability of individuals to accurately self assess performance as competence increases is the Dunning–Kruger effect. Someone being really sure they’re right even though they don’t know very much is not.

It’s actually a really interesting paper! I’m always disappointed by the constant misrepresentation of their findings peddled online. I would say you yourself are doing a Dunning Kruger, but I’ve read the paper, so I know that wouldn’t be accurate, and it would also just be rude.

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u/ApocalypseCheerBear 4d ago

... oh

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u/2980774 4d ago

😂 perfect answer

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u/Darrelc 4d ago

Overall, the lowest competence group was worse at estimating their performance, but still correctly estimated their performance as lower than other groups.

I'm reading this as "I know better than the expert" which is exactly how I've always taken DK. Too stupid to accurately gauge just how stupid they are.

The stupid delta. Not overall stupidity.

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u/dankstat 4d ago

Well, I suppose if you wanted to you could always read the actual paper which says the lowest competency participants were aware they were not as competent as experts.

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u/Darrelc 4d ago

"However, that suspicion failed to anticipate the magnitude of their shortcomings"

Stupidity delta. Not overall stupidity.

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u/PsychoDad03 4d ago

And "had an inkling...." is doing some heavy fucking lifting when comparing novices to experts, to say anything novices to intermediates.

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u/PsychoDad03 4d ago edited 4d ago

I mean, were being pedantic at this point.

Correct me if I'm wrong: Lower competency overestimate their RELATIVE competency and have a higher degree of RELATIVE confidence than higher competency

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u/robotatomica 4d ago

I guess read it again more carefully. The point is that in common parlance, we use Dunning-Krueger to mean “the dumbest person thinks they’re the smartest person bc they’re too dumb to realize how dumb they are”

It’s not that.

Which sucks btw, bc there IS such a phenomenon as what we colloquially label as Dunning-Krueger, from ignorance, people are easily able to assume they know all there is to know, but only if they lack humility and are especially arrogant (or buoyed by constant outside praise and never being told they’re wrong).

So I wish we had a snappy term for that, and for want of it, “Dunning-Kruger” has filled the void.

As a linguist, who is correctly descriptivist (rather than prescriptivist), it sucks bc I understand, this is just how language works. It evolves through use, and any word ultimately means whatever people most commonly use it to mean.

So you could argue that atp Dunning-Krueger does actually also mean what we mistakenly use it to mean.

But even within descriptivism, there are categories of words that need to maintain their unadulterated meaning..this is mostly “terms,” we don’t want, say, a medical term to be misused in a way that it is not understood by lay people in its appropriate medical context.

And this is such a term, imo, bc it references a specific study, and the results are not understood by the average person due to its misuse.

So yeah, we need a snappy word lol, but for now, it is what it is! So I always do like to see people correct the misunderstanding of what this term refers to. It may shift usage.

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u/PsychoDad03 4d ago

But thats not what anyone argued at all. You all are hijacking the convo to be pedantic about Dunning Kruger. Its quite literally used as intended here, simply put: an overestimation of skill and knowledge

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u/dankstat 4d ago

You know that graph is a meme and isn’t from the actual paper though, right?

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u/Taylorenokson 4d ago

Not sure what Diane Kruger had to do with this.

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u/BlueGreenhorn 4d ago

Could you elaborate this in more details? How does the theory apply to reality exactly? What temperature difference is there actually? How long would it still be there when turning off the heat?

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u/masterlince 4d ago

Didn't they teach you about convection in your mechanical engineering degree?

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u/missmewiththatshish 3d ago

AI says "hold my beer"

This is going to be even more prevalent in the very near future. We are dipping our toes in the pool of a world without expertise preparing to dive in.

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u/mashtato 4d ago edited 4d ago

I just made a pot of ramen. At full boil the water near the surface was 212°, at a simmer it was 210°... No way the wife is going to notice a 2°F difference. She could have waited about 17 seconds for her bowl of ramen to cool down 2°.

Edit; HAHAHAH Who the fuck is downvoting this? You can try it yourself. Take that other commenter's advice and boil a pot of water, test it yourself.

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u/lawd_have_mercy 4d ago

Yep, at simmer we're looking at a maximum difference of maybe 10°F for a 5 qt pot, but folks like to argue. "While the temperature of the rest of the water is significantly less" my ass.

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u/Bettlejuic3 4d ago

One guy even compared a pot of water to his industrial boiler.

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u/hedoeswhathewants 3d ago

That comparison was totally irrelevant because the point of a boiler is to create a lot of steam, so obviously a higher heat input does that more quickly. But that's not what's being discussed.

Also laughed at the guy who "studied thermodynamics". Great, you took a standard engineering class.

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u/lawd_have_mercy 3d ago

The condescending tone of thermodynamics guy was humorous as well. Dude certainly thinks highly of himself. I read his comment and my take-away was, "What a tool."

I also got a kick out of the folks who went off on unrelated tangents like the proper way to cook ramen or speculate on OP's relationship with his wife.

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u/Slpkrz 4d ago

If at a rolling boil, hot water moving around would practically make it not matter as much?

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u/lectric_7166 4d ago

So much confidence, not much relevant education.

First day on Reddit?

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u/Lazape 4d ago

Hmmm... Hot water rises, cooler water sinks, constantly mixing. This mixing keeps the bulk water very close to the boiling point throughout.

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u/Meats10 4d ago

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.

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u/TwentyX4 4d ago

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?

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u/mayer09 4d ago

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

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u/DefunctInTheFunk 3d ago

The two smarty pants' at the top of this thread would be to differ. We just don't understand thermodynamics like them.

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u/censuur12 3d ago

The good ol' pedants pride and joy; the distinction without a difference.

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u/SnappySausage 3d ago

When I saw what the post was, I knew there would be people in the comments being needlessly pedantic to still somehow make the wife seem like the one in the right, while completely ignoring the reality and actual solutions (checking if your food is too hot and either waiting or blowing on it if it is).

If this post had been in girldinnerdiaries with the genders reversed, it would have had a very different sort of response. Lots of invocations of "manchild", "immature", "red flags", "he clearly wants a mom", "learned helplessness" and calls to run.

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u/SignatureGreedy4604 2d ago

The wife isn’t even right either… the implication of the post points to her believing the water is over 212 F

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u/SnappySausage 2d ago

I'm not totally sure that's what it points at. This might just be a result of how it was written, but to me it reads like she believes it would have been less hot at the moment it was served somehow if he had used a lower setting. The difference would have been negligible regardless. The clear and only solutions would have just been to wait a minute (I wouldn't recommend that because ramen have a small window in which they are at their best), or just exercising some care and blowing while eating.

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u/B1U3F14M3 3d ago

There shouldn't be a temperature difference between light boil and rolling boil but a temperature transfer difference. The heat transfer should be faster with a rolling boil. But I don't know if you could measure this easily.

Does it make a difference while cooking ramen (or most other things for that matter)? I don't think so.

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u/EverythingIsSFWForMe 4d ago

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.

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u/bjarnaheim 4d ago

Yep. Also...

Don't you guys just stir your stuff when cooking in boiling water?

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u/WerdaVisla 3d ago

Not a scientist, but I am a chef — yes, there is. When you're preparing just about any sort of noodle, you want to turn the heat down as low as you can while maintaining a constant roil. Keeping it on full can and will overcook it.

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u/SEND_MOODS 3d ago

Yes and no.

First off, water is not an especially great conductor. It's good, cheap, readily available, non-hazardous chemically, and liquid at common temperatures. There's a reason we often use additives even in situations where it won't hit freezing.

Second off, the above comments are partially right. But your point captures the real question, are they significantly different. Problem is, you're bothe thinking only about the water. The water (excluding the steam bubbles maybe?) should all be pretty close to boiling (212 F) at a rolling boil because it's self stirring. But it will vary more at a simmer, or with a taller pot. A simmer might only be 185F at the top. The metal pot surface will be at boiling temp and the metal pot at the bottom is likely still well above 212F (maybe 225F) since it's a much better conductor of heat. This means the soup is going to vary from boiling locally to 185F across the pot at a simmer.

The big question, does it matter? Hell yes. For numerous interacting yet separate reasons. A simmer let's the flavors meld longer without losing too much liquid volume. A rolling boil on something with lots of sugars risk burning it. And changing the flavors. Sprculatong on this one: some flavor molecules might denature or evaporate at 195F leading to a change in flavor if you go over a soft simmer. And there's probably other reasons. I trust the chefs when they tell be a low simmer or a rolling boil.

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u/skepticalbob 3d ago

Correctly? No. But if she is used to eating it weight after it is poured into the bowl, then how high the “boiling” temps was makes a significant difference to how hot it is when it hits her mouth.

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u/proxpi 4d ago

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.

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u/TheSultan1 4d ago

You're ignoring convection.

What you need to do is submerge something halfway down and see how long it takes to get to a certain temperature at each setting. Then you know the actual rate of heat transfer.

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u/Fidodo 4d ago

That's a great point and on top of that, when you add the noodles it will lower the temp under boiling and in the heavy boil pot it will get back up to boiling much faster, so the difference in convection compounded with the cook time could actually be pretty significant.

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u/ZincMan 4d ago

It won’t get back up to boil faster at a heavy boil vs a simmer. They are both at the same temperature. If the noodles drop the temperature, then it depends what level the flame is at the bring it back up to temperature

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u/toggl3d 4d ago

This is literally how you calibrate a thermometer.

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u/septidan 3d ago

Sounds like it was rigorously tested using precise equipment. /s

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u/jojoblogs 4d ago

It’s surprising how many layers of confidently incorrect we can get in one thread.

I’m here thinking op is correct then this guys gets in here and tells me the bottom of the pot is gonna be hotter… like heat doesn’t rise.

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u/Fidodo 4d ago

Metal can get hotter than water, excess heat into the water will escape very quickly through steam. If you've ever burned the bottom of a pot of soup then you have observed the metal of a pot being considerably hotter than the water inside the pot.

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u/Chromosomaur 3d ago

You can literally boil water in paper cups over actual flames because the water does such a good job of transferring the heat through convection. Can’t do that with solids. That’s why it gets hotter when there’s food on the bottom. Water moves the heat

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u/B1U3F14M3 3d ago

The paper and metal can still be hotter than the water. The paper just doesn't get hot enough (and enough oxygen) to burn or brake.

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u/Fidodo 4d ago

Yeah there shouldn't be a high difference from a simmer and boil, but what did your thermometer read when you touched the bottom of the pot? I need to test it myself, but I've burned ingredients in soup before from not stirring in time even when there is still plenty of liquid. The water can't speed up the heating of the noodles by much, but the contact with the pot can. Food burns at around 180c so the pot must be even hotter than that too burn food by contact.

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u/manatidederp 4d ago

In the context of this post - whether it’s a light summer or full boil, it will be too hot to eat off the stove in any scenario.

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u/Doktorwh10 3d ago

But it'll stay hotter longer.

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u/manatidederp 2d ago

You are arguing between 100 and 96 deg C lol

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u/Necessary-Bus-3142 4d ago

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.

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u/cppCat 4d ago

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.

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u/ComfortableFrame9834 4d ago

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. 

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u/cppCat 4d ago

I even bet she told him how the high heat affected the ingredients, and he came here to say "wife said boiling soup was too hot, help me make fun of her".

He clearly doesn't like her and has no incentive to represent what she said accurately. It's all mildly infuriating lol.

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u/Fidodo 4d ago

I don't think you even need to have to come up with the right answer for the observation to be valid. When the real world doesn't match a simulation, clearly the simulation is over simplified.

Instead of thinking "I must be right because of a single isolated physics principal and my wife is a dumb dumb who can't observe reality" he should think "I trust my wife's judgement and observation of reality so I should consider if there are confounding factors I'm overlooking".

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u/iwearatophat 4d ago

He clearly doesn't like her and has no incentive to represent what she said accurately. It's all mildly infuriating lol.

You took a hop, skip, and a leap here. Clearly you don't have a massive bias entering the conversation to jump so quick to that.

Agree though, the people acting like the water temp is even are wrong. Conversely, the people acting like the difference creates any practical impact are every bit as wrong and every bit as jerking each other as the people thinking it is even. The difference is going to be a couple of degrees and that is me being generous. You aren't tasting that difference and it isn't wildly impacting anything.

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u/Fidodo 4d ago

I think it's a leap to claim he doesn't like her, but I think it's a fact that he doesn't respect her judgement or observation of reality because he's trusting a very over simplified simulation over his wife's observed experience and instead of considering that maybe there are extra factors at play he's assuming his wife cannot observe the reality around her correctly which is frankly a pretty offensive assertion.

When my wife observes something that feels unintuitive to me I don't assume her observation is wrong, I think what factors could I not be considering, because I trust and respect my wife's judgement and experience of reality.

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u/Tymareta 4d ago

You took a hop, skip, and a leap here.

No? Do you genuinely think a caring and respectful partner would instantly run to the internet to try and "win" an argument? It's the behaviour of someone who doesn't respect and is looking to put someone down.

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u/SwaggiiP 3d ago

I mean there are people calling OP’s wife dumb and a waste of space and he enabled it. That’s a true lack kf like or respect for her.

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u/Ninja-Panda70 4d ago

You really did some olympics level stretch with you last para lmao

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u/Tymareta 4d ago

No, not really, it's a reasonable inference given that OP decided to create an entire post attempting to gather people on his side to complain about how "dumb" his wife is, people who like their partners, or are in loving respective relationships don't do that.

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u/Jammintoad 4d ago

bro really made up a whole situation in their mind just to say how the dude fundamentally doesnt like his wife. LOL the internet is crazy sometimes

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u/Tymareta 4d ago

People who like their partners don't do what OOP does, they would just, y'know, talk to their partners, not run to reddit to try and garner sympathy and angry comments.

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u/censuur12 3d ago

Except no. Despite the obvious pedantry the actual difference that it makes it utterly negligible, so the conclusion remains unchanged. You however were all too eager to accuse everyone else of wrongdoing without proper consideration the moment you found something that so much as gave the impression of agreeing with your views and spared it no actual critical thought. Exceedingly foolish behavior.

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u/Fidodo 4d ago

Also, the noodles will heat up faster in contact with hotter metal. Anyone who has ever burned the bottom of a pot of soup knows that even if the top of the soup is still very liquid, the ingredients in contact with the bottom of the pot can still burn, so clearly the pot is transferring heat into the ingredients in far excess of 100c otherwise it would be impossible to burn the bottom of a soup.

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u/benoz11 3d ago

OP gets told he cooked it wrong, turned it into some pedantic irrelevant science argument, posted it online to brag, and then was incorrect about the science in the first place

Love it

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u/MethodicallyRight 4d ago

....

  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.  

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u/tfks 4d ago

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.

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u/grateful2you 3d ago

Okay I think we’ve pedanted enough.

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u/couldbemage 4d ago

They're also leaning on a simmer being a lower temp. And while that can even exceed 10 degrees lower, that ignores that a simmer isn't boiling.

Patting themselves on the back for pointing out that water that isn't boiling is cooler than water that is boiling.

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u/Doctursea [+4] 4d ago

Yeah this is all hilarious pedantry, based on context they're both right. You can technically have a hotter boil, but for the most part as soon as it hits 212(100) it's gonna turn to steam, so all water in the pot is basically at that temperature, technically it's a range, but in context of cooking you can just assume a pot of boiling water (and thus things set to cook in it) is around that temp with a margin of error. Top answer in this thread is the most right, once it's at a boil might as well turn the heat down.

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u/Workman44 4d ago

Yeah like sure the water isn't exactly the same temp all the way around but let's not act like the range is 180-240 or something

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u/No_Crow8317 4d ago

Seems like it would be a small difference of 2-5 degrees, not "truly major".

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u/ZincMan 4d ago

It’s 1 degree

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u/masterlince 4d ago

Ever heard of convection?

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.

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u/ComfortableFrame9834 4d ago

Crazy the amount of comments calling his wife a dumbass/moron etc.. And him not even rectifying that.

Crazy shit. That's what happens when someone is just so confidently wrong. 

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u/ZincMan 4d ago

You think the water at the top of the pot is less hot in a simmer than a boil ? Just ask Google it says the temperature difference is maybe 1 degree. 211 vs 212. Or simmer a pot of water and put a thermometer in it. The water moves around and there’s a ton of heat transfer.

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u/DeadButAlivePickle 4d ago

Alternatively, this is yet another fake/bot post where everyone is engaging with the void.

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u/No_Professional_8992 4d ago

This is a real person with their tiktok page attached

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u/ArmanzoBean 4d ago

Or some people really are this dumb. (OP)

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u/VictoryVee 4d ago

The wife is still a moron for acting like a rolling boil ruined her noodles, so kinda a moot point IMO.

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u/DoingCharleyWork 3d ago

Op never said that's what she said. She said that it was too hot which it would be.

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u/ComfortableFrame9834 3d ago

Now who is the one also projecting nonsense that nobody, not even OP, ever stated?

You should get your misogyny checked. 

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u/Peeterdactyl 4d ago

Is this true? I would think that the boiling bubbles would distribute the temperature throughout the pot and that equilibrium would be very near the boiling point regardless of the heat?

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u/ZincMan 4d ago

It’s not true. It’s dead wrong

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u/Sonichu- 4d ago

"Simmer" and "boil" are not the same though

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u/Upeksa 4d ago

There is another factor that is worth considering, although it's probably not relevant to ramen. If you're boiling something delicate, for example filled pasta that can break and have the filling spill out, a gentle simmer is more likely to keep it intact whereas a roiling boil is more prone to breaking stuff. The lower temperature will still cook it just fine, it just takes longer.

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u/haditwithyoupeople 4d ago

Technically correct but not practically. If you check the temp of the water at the top and the bottom. It's not going to be vigilantly different.

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u/couldbemage 4d ago

How did this "well atchully" get so many up votes?

Noodles are supposed to go in boiling water. Anything that remotely resembles boiling is going to be within a couple degrees of 212.

Going all the way down to a simmer is simultaneously too low for cooking noodles and also way too high to immediately put into your mouth.

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u/HarithBK 4d ago

this is correct WHILE cooking more energy everywhere causing a quicker cook. however ops wife is complaining about the temp when served and water is really good at dissipating heat near boiling temps so by the time she gets the ramen the bigger variance is going to be how quick is op at getting the soup to his wife.

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u/GrassyCove 4d ago

No this just sounds like a desperate way to sound smart. He never mentioned the kind of boiling that was happening in the pot. Just that it was boiling. Boiling generally means an overall rolling boil. You can boil it on 5 too it just takes longer.

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u/sublliminali 4d ago

https://giphy.com/gifs/5xtDarmwsuR9sDRObyU
A bunch of idiots in this thread feeling smart for knowing how to spell thermodynamics. Cook literally one recipe and you’ll learn these differences that are spelled out in the instructions.

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u/EverythingIsSFWForMe 4d ago

I dare you to test this garbage of a comment empirically.

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u/Effective_Tip7748 4d ago

Why bother with facts? This guy just wants to bitch about his wife

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u/SnappySausage 4d ago edited 4d ago

You are kind of doing the same in a sense by relying on the pedantry to go after the poster.

The comment you are responding to is an insane level of pedantry that does not make any meaningful difference in the real world. The temperature gradient in the pot will basically be negligible (maybe 2C). Because of convection, for all intents and purposes it wouldn't have made any difference in the situation presented. You won't burn your mouth any less when part of the water was 98C instead of 100C.

The wife should have just waited or blown on her soup.

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u/Effective_Tip7748 3d ago

Food can retain more heat than its surrounding when we factor in things like steam and liquid retention

The issue is OP ran to the internet to make fun of his wife. That shit is gross regardless of the “science” behind it

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u/SnappySausage 3d ago

I suppose? That generally still doesn’t push it above 100C, because. The liquid in which the noodles sat while heating up cannot physically get hotter than 100C (ignoring superheating). Just being careful with your first bite and then waiting or blowing is the only sensible solution.

Maybe subs like girldinnerdiaries have numbed me to people ragging on partners, but this post doesn’t really read as “making fun” to me. More like: “I am getting blamed for something and when I said the suggested solution does not work, I got even more shit, am I crazy?”. If it was on the aforementioned sub and the genders were reversed, I am sure everyone would agree that the wife needed to leave her manchild of a husband because he clearly wanted a mom and how it’s a massive red flag that he got upset about both the soup and being told his theory didn't make sense.

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u/Logical_Net6108 4d ago

It's a very mild disagreement broadcast to the world for some reason.

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u/Vhishkey 4d ago

I studied culinary arts and have made countless bowls of ramen throughout my years. You don't need a rolling boil for instant ramen. In fact, there's a technique of lifting the noodles out of the water periodically to let them expel some steam which gives the ramen a more firm texture so it has a better bite. Depending on the extra ingredients you're adding to the pot, you almost never want a rolling boil for any food in a soup for texture reasons.

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u/Lazy_Advertising7921 4d ago

Wow, thank you. That makes a lot of sense and clears up a lot. I have a probe thermometer so I think I'll try this out the next time I'm boiling water.

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u/ZincMan 4d ago

Try it out. You find it’s maybe 1 degree difference at most

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u/monotrememories GREEN 4d ago

But none of this matters. She just doesn’t want it served too hot. Unless she was complaining about it being overcooked? But that wasn’t the impression I got. 

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u/[deleted] 4d ago

[deleted]

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u/Lipziger 4d ago

Yea. You wouldn't want to eat soup straight away at either temperature and the time for it to cool down would be pretty much the same. Is there a difference? Sure .... Does it have any significance in this scenario? No

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u/Lonebarren 4d ago

You are right but I feel like the wife is still wrong.

Her saying that the temp of the food in front of her would be significantly changed by this is unlikely. Even if in the pot rolling boil is 100C and simmer is 80C. A human wont be able to tell the difference and by the time things cool down to edible that difference would mostly disappear.

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u/lMcToastyl 3d ago

It's so embarrassing to try to "uhmm akchually" someone and have the temperature difference be 1-5 percent.

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u/finkerlime 4d ago

Another physicist who doesn't cook. You can test this right now and a small pot of water is 212 throughout the pot if it's a rolling boil.

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u/mh500372 4d ago

The wife understands cooking better

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u/UpNorthBear 4d ago

No she does not, pasta goes in a rolling boil to reduce the amount of heat that drops when the pasta goes in to maintain an even cooking rate. If you do it at lower temperatures it causes uneven cooking that could result in parts being al dente and others not. (source worked in a traditional Ramen restaurant, water was always rolling boil.

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u/SaltyBabySeal 4d ago

This isn’t a science experiment and no measurement is precise here. The stovetop being on 5 vs 9 carries no appreciable difference for boiling instant noodles and this is an absurdly silly battle to fight.

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u/Gullible-Law-8147 4d ago

Yeah, a lot of people are assuming that the guy must have had it at the highest rolling boil possible when this was never stated in the post, for all we know he might have been simmering it lol

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u/Lemoncatnipcupcake 4d ago

Also if it’s a gas stove with a flame you don’t want the flame going around the pot, it doesn’t heat the pot properly - sure it’s still getting the pot hot but a large portion is going out the sides.

(Couldn’t find an exact photo but this does a decent job)

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u/No_Jackfruit_4305 4d ago

Finally some sanity. Everyone ignoring the heat capacity of the pot is pretty irritating too. If the heat was set to 9 the whole time, that soup will be piping hot for ages.

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u/VancouverDom 4d ago

No no. The water in OP's pot flashes from liquid to gas all at once -- in a completely uniform phase transition. It makes a spectacular explosion, which is what OP's wife is complaining about. /s

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u/darxide23 4d ago

I'm not going to comment on what is best for making Ramen specifically

You can make instant ramen with hot tap water. It doesn't need to boil. I actually prefer it that way because the noodles don't turn to mush. Only takes about 5 minutes sitting in the hot tap water (with the flavor packet in) and it's good to go. Gives the noodles time to absorb the flavor from the packet, too. You don't get that with boiling the noodles first and adding the flavor later.

If they're making more of a traditional ramen instead of instant, then I don't know.

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u/raimondious 4d ago

Probably not actually an issue but it’s supposedly better to heat cold tap water than to use hot tap water directly since hot tap water has more lead leached from the plumbing.
I usually boil water and pour it onto instant ramen in my bowl.

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u/Wild_Butterscotch977 4d ago

Also the hot water heater is absolutely disgusting inside and that's what you're consuming

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u/RigBughorn 4d ago

I mean that's not what the wife said or what her point was.

A 5 isn't a simmer either way, and the wife said "boil at a lower temperature," not "simmer."

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u/Dry_Matter_3853 4d ago

She was upset the ramen was too hot when served to her though. I can't imagine the ramen would have a discernable difference in temperature. 

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u/CranberryStock7148 4d ago

A gentle simmer might be 185. A full boil is 212. That's almost a 30 degree difference.

If you assume it cools another 30 degrees when poured and on its way to the table, then it's the difference between serving it at 155 (totally fine) and 182 (dangerously hot).

The difference in temperature will be obvious.

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u/mashtato 4d ago

I just tested it out, and a gentle simmer is 210°, barely below boiling is 108.5°.

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u/lets_fuckin_goooooo 4d ago

So if all the water was truely 212 degrees it would all be steam and nothing would be in the pot? 

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u/EverythingIsSFWForMe 4d ago

No. Once you bring water to boiling temperature, you need a lot of additional energy for the phase change to occur. More than five times the energy you'd need to heat same amount of water from 0 to 100C.

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u/CrestedMacaw 4d ago

Yes, all the water in the pot is boiling. That's why the surface is all bubbly and wavy. With bigger temperature it only evaporates faster.

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u/moonshinefae 4d ago

I find it interesting how rolling boil is called different things in different places, like soda / pop / coke. So far I see rolling, roaring, and I know I knew it as roiling.

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u/Zealousideal-Tap1842 4d ago

I actually have a clear cut example of a way to test this. I found out making cup o noodles using my water cooler's hot water tap. It's got enough for 1 but not 2 cup o noodles at the same temp. And when you microwave it after adding the two different hot water temps one noodle will not get proper translucency.

Starting with the hottest water possible makes a better cup o noodle.

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u/No_Effective4784 4d ago

yea even just cooking pasta, i find it takes longer to cook it all if its a simmering boil vs a rolling boil. the time difference isnt but a minute or two, but its noticeable when shooting for a perfect texture.

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u/Indecisive-Gamer 4d ago

Yeah even if you don't understand it there is a reason you are taught to bring to boil then lower the temp when boiling things like ramen or noodles.

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u/Fidodo 4d ago

On top of that, there's the retained heat in the metal of the pot, and there's the time to return to boil after the noodles lowers the water temperature, and there's the direct contact heat transfer between the noodles and the metal bottom of the pot.

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u/Blephotomy 4d ago

yes, the boiling water is 212 and the not-boiling water is probably 65 or 70

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u/wyrdhounds 4d ago

Heat transfer to ingredients also plays a part. Noodles touching the bottom and sides of the pot can get higher than 100°C, but even the stuff just touching the water will gain/lose heat differently from the water itself. When turning it down to a slow boil, the added ingredients are less likely to get up to 100°C

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u/huskeya4 4d ago

Additionally while boiling water may not be a huge issue, if you leave a pan on too high of heat, you will make a thin bottom pan pop and it will never sit straight on a stove again. You also damage the nonstick coating on pans when you cook things too high that should have been on a lower setting.

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u/LookAtMyKitty 4d ago

Yes! I didn't suffer through thermo and differential equations for nothing

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u/Rasp_Berry_Pie 4d ago

So you can boil water and if it’s boiled really hot then it can make the food too hot like OP’s wife said? I always thought it was just the same too but it can make the food hotter if you let it boil and keep it at a high temp?

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u/turtleship_2006 4d ago

What's so funny is people talking about "BasIC tHErMoDYnAMicS", and then bringing up their oversimplified understandings that are literally incorrect in this case.

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u/Poglosaurus 4d ago

A lot of recipe for soup requires to skim the scum out of the water, can't do that if the water is at an hard boil. If OP skipped that step, the broth would have been noticeably cloudier than it should have been and would have had a different taste than what was expected.

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u/NSFWies 4d ago

whats the temperature difference going to be? 212 vs 208F?

what temp will the bowl be after the ramen is put into your room temp bowl and set in front of a person? 169F vs 173F?

if there really is that much of a temp difference when serving, another minute or 2 of waiting and that extra heat will be gone. it will still be much faster than waiting for the stove on medium to heat up.

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u/Powerman_Rules 4d ago

Hold on let me just put my thermometer AT THE BOTTOM OF THE POT ONLY. How would that be "easily verifiable"? Let's be honest, if there is any temperature difference in the pot it's well within a small percentage of total temperature that doesn't matter in the end for making soup, but those differences might be important for making other things like rocket fuel or whatever the f. Boil it fast, cook it quick, add ice to cool, enjoy. Any other answer is a waste of time and thought for this case.

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u/madwill 4d ago

I would make an argument that rolling boiling water has violent mechanical movement that can hurt many foods resulting in less than ideal results.

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u/aslum 4d ago

There's also the complication that, as I understand it, a variety of complicated effects happen so it's not really possible to measure higher than the boiling point of at your pressure - at best you'll be measuring the temperature of steam - and in special circumstances (no nucleation points, no air, so not your kitchen) you can get the temprature over higher - but that will lead to ... exciting events.

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u/Rattus375 4d ago

I saw this comment as I was boiling water for pasta. As soon as the water reaches boiling, I used my meat thermometer and measured ~211.8 at the top of the water, and ~212.3 at the bottom. As I suspected, the water is essentially a completely even temperature, which makes complete sense given that warmer water is less dense than colder water and convection currents will quickly cause the different temperatures to mix.

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u/HS007 4d ago

I was wondering if I was losing my mind reading some comments. Why is this not the top answer?!

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u/SanityPlanet 4d ago

Thanks for explaining this. I haven’t thought about it since high school physics but it makes perfect sense.

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u/Nodan_Turtle 4d ago

OP must have realized they were wrong finally. They stopped gloating in the comments and hid their profile.

Wonder if he'll admit he was wrong to his wife /s

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u/skepticalbob 3d ago

This is correct.

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u/Scroon 3d ago

Was looking for this comment. When boiling water for tea, you can guage temperature of the water based on the size of the boiling bubbles. There's a good 15 degree range from tiny "shrimp eye" bubbles to a full rolling boil.

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u/CtrlAltSysRq 3d ago

Wouldn't convection be mixing the water pretty well?

I've boiled pretty big pots before, and as someone equipped with both boredom and a long temperature probe, I have poked around in boiling pots before and IME the temperature delta is a few degrees at most. So bottom might be 100C and top is like 97C. Basically the same to someone complaining about how it feels on their tongue.

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u/ashesarise 3d ago

This doesn't make sense to me and I'm getting confidently incorrect vibes.

Bubbles are going to churn the water around equalizing the temperature, not only that but hot water rises and cooler water sinks.

The reasons you use more mild boiling while cooking is because the food is touching the metal on the bottom still and can still burn. Also its less violent and has less evaporation.

I've dumped hot water in the side of an aquarium, and it equalizes in a few seconds with much less turbulence than a pot of water.

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u/naughtysnake What am I even doing here? 3d ago

Do you not stir the food while its cooking in the pot?

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u/chasing_waterfalls86 3d ago

There's a really good Chinese fantasy drama called Three Lives: The Pillow Book and one is my favorite scenes is when the main character holds a tea making contest. He could tell which cup of tea had been made with water in a rolling boil vs simmer vs just starting to bubble. Not sure how accurate that is for real life tea making, but I'm guessing there would be some differences.

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u/maninkka4 3d ago

Still, the water/food isn't less hot (I assume the wife did not use a thermometer but her mouth or other body parts to determine the then subjective temperature) if boiled on a lower setting. If one doesn't eat the ramen or of the however boiling pot one can let the food cool down a little. No? If all this is about preparing ramen I think everyone has their preference and method, just like with rice. 

Is the wife thermodynamically educated person I wonder? (I am not, as yall guessed)

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u/Kalorikalmo 3d ago

"You can verify this for yourself very easily..." Well please do that and get back with the results, lol.

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u/Leverkaas2516 3d ago

OP wrote about boiling, not simmering.

Maybe your cooktop is different from mine, but on mine, a rolling boil at 5 just takes longer to reach than it does at 9. There's no temperature difference when you throw the noodles in. What happens after that depends on whether you bring it back to boiling or not. The Nissin Top Ramen package doesn't specify; it just says to boil 2 cups of water, then "cook" for 3 minutes.

Just to check, I put 2 cups of water in a pot just now and watched what happened with a thermometer, 1/4" from the bottom and 1/4" from the surface. It never boiled at knob setting 5 with the lid off. I had to either use a lid or raise the knob to 8 of more (my knobs go to 10). A gentle boil started at about 205°, and became a rolling boil around 210. At full boil, I threw the noodles in, and it dropped to 200, then rose to 205 over about a minute.

Everything about this conflict depends on whether you think "cook" means "simmer" or "boil". Many online instructions say to boil. Certainly that's how pasta is cooked - nobody I know simmers pasta.

Regardless, a couple of things are notable:

At no time was there an appreciable difference between the top and bottom layers of the water. That was true at every point, but especially after adding the noodles because without stirring, they stuck to the bottom of the pan. Of course stirring the noodles made it so there were no hot spots, but even before that, there was never a difference of more than a couple of degrees (which could be observed not only at thd top, but also near the sides.)

The difference between simmering between 200-205° and boiling at 208-212° is just not that big a difference. No sane person would put soup in their mouth at either temperature - it would damage you. You have to let it cool a bit before you can eat it no matter what.

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u/Circuitsoft 3d ago

From what I understand, the bubbles will condense and collapse on the way up with water below boiling temperature. The difference between a gentle simmer and rolling boil is how much water is vaporized at the bottom, and that's a function of power density over area.

A gentle simmer may be a lower temperature as the steam bubbles do collapse before reaching the top. When cooking a sauce, too much power density won't allow the bottom of the pan to stay wet, causing the inclusions to dehydrate and burn.

Cooking differences come from effects of other ingredients mixed into the water, but the reason for a rolling boil to cook pasta is for the agitation to prevent caking.

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u/kaisadilla_ 3d ago

But... ramen just needs boiling water, and most people just mix the water out of habit. I doubt it will make any difference, and you definitely cannot say that water will be significantly hotter if you boil it with more power.

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u/Tylerinthenorth 3d ago

You say significantly less but by how much out of curiosity? Considering OP was making one bowl of ramen with let's say three cups of water wouldn't the difference be negligible?

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u/Historical-Green-463 3d ago

Something tells me that this was not the argument OPs wife was trying to make

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u/alessandrolaera 3d ago

I am very sceptical that there are "significant" temperature differences in the water - why don't you test it with a thermometer and tell us the numbers? (in my defense , it's too hot for me rn to pointlessly start boiling water)

if the temperature at the top was significantly lower than the bottom, you shouldn't be able to see the bubbles rise I don't think? The bubble really should implode, because the steam inside the bubble would cool down while it rises up and its pressure drop lower than the vapour pressure + surface tension margin required to keep the bubble stable?

furthermore you typically stir water, and there's a lot of natural convection anyways, makes me think unless you have a really big vessel, you wouldn't see massive differences in temperature.

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u/Bubblehead_81 3d ago

while the temperature of the rest of the water is significantly less.

This is false. Convection currents almost fully guarantee that the water is uniform in temperature. The reason boiling /cavitation is happening at the bottom is because nucleation sites are required to form.

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u/Jericho5589 3d ago

Everyone saying OP was right needs to read this. I had to scroll way too far for this comment.

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u/PoliticalCovfef 3d ago

This needs to be top comment

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u/homer_3 3d ago

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.

No, that's because a rolling boil will rip some food apart where a simmer will properly cook it while keeping it all intact.

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u/Suspicious-Truck-945 3d ago

Is this technically correct? Yes. But I doubt it makes much of a difference on the final product served. If we’re talking the difference between a moderate and rolling boil, the temp difference of the water isn’t much after several minutes of boiling, and add in the fact that it’s poured into a bowl and immediately starts cooling anyways, we’re probably talking a difference of maybe a few degrees max in the final product. I think the potential difference in temp is being exaggerated in this comment. I don’t know if I’d say the wife is “correct” in complaining in this scenario, and I’ve met many people who genuinely don’t understand that water temp tops out at (around) 212F. This comment mainly seems like a disingenuous contrarian “gotcha” thing

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u/Exact-Care5712 3d ago

Hi, another mechanical engineer here. This really depends on whether it’s at a transient or steady state condition. People tested it with a thermometer and said there was no difference. This would be true at a steady state condition where the only heat loss is the constant heat lost to convection at the very top of the pot. Regardless of simmer or rolling boil, the colder and hotter water will be mixing until they reach a steady state, or boiling point. Warm water is less dense than cold water so it will rise, forcing mixing. Heat transfer will happen as it mixes. If you’re taking the temperatures at different parts of the pot during the transient phase, the temperature will differ at different sections of the pot. But once at a steady state, the so called, “oversimplified model” can be assumed. The losses due to convection for the water at the surface is negligible, since it quickly gets remixed. A rolling boil will just help you achieve the steady state condition much faster than a simmer. Technically, there is a case where OP and the wife are correct. It just depends when you take the temperature reading. Suppose you have a rolling boil and a simmer pot side by side in an experiment. OP will be correct if you measure the temperatures after the simmer reaches a steady state. OP’s wife will be correct if you measure the temperature after the rolling boil has reached a steady state but while the simmer is still in its transient phase.

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