Cooking

[fluffy]

The electric kettle is only 1100W at 120V, while the induction stove is able to dump a lot more power into it (being 240V on a 30A circuit). Also with induction, the cooking vessel itself becomes the heating element. It’s incredibly efficient.

[jb]

Wow, the cooktop is pretty loud eh? I had heard that about induction, might actually scare me away from it.

[fluffy]

It's actually a lot less quiet to my ears than how it came out on the video. I suspect that the EM field got picked up by my camera's microphone. Aside from hearing the coil click in (which is the same as on conventional electric) the only sound I heard in person was the kettle immediately starting to sizzle.

My portable Max Burton cooktop is pretty loud, though, as was the induction stove I had in San Francisco, so it does definitely depend on the stove.

I have a friend with a finger magnet. Maybe I should have them come over and see how much their hand freaks out when the stove is running. (I learned of their finger magnet when they tried out my dry herb vaporizer and they were surprised by just how much they felt it.)

[fluffy]

Okay I guess that there is a very slight audible hum but it’s still pretty quiet. I think it’s just from the pan vibrating a little bit, as what happens when a big magnet is resonating with it.

It’s still quieter than the sound of a typical gas stove and it gets drowned out by the actual cooking very quickly.

[crumpart]

I really wanted an induction stove until I tried one in an Airbnb one time and realised just how often I pick up pans while cooking.

[fluffy]

What was the problem with picking pans up? On every induction stove I've used it only shuts off the coil while the pan is off the surface, when the burner wouldn't be heating it anyway. I guess the beep can be slightly annoying but you get used to it

[fluffy]

It is so nice having a functioning kitchen again.

Omelet with onions and bell peppers

IMG_1473.jpeg (1.85 MiB) Viewed 1586 times

[fluffy]

Actually I take it back, the cooktop DOES get that loud in power boost mode. However you only rarely use that, like when making tea. Most of the time it’ll be at a much lower power level and then it’s pretty quiet.

[Caravan Ray]

Actually I take it back, the cooktop DOES get that loud in power boost mode. However you only rarely use that, like when making tea. Most of the time it’ll be at a much lower power level and then it’s pretty quiet.

Why are you making tea on a stove top? It that some weird leftover from your pre-revolution slave-owning days? Are electric kettles un-American?

Serious question actually - American hotels never have a kettle. WTF!?!? Howard Johnson’s Anaheim are the only exception. They had kettles under the counter for aus/nz/uk tourists. Great job. 5 stars.

I asked the Hilton in San Francisco for a kettle. They told me to go to Starbucks. I visibly and audibly hurummphed.

[vowlvom]

It's something to do with the lower voltage in the US isn't it? Their strange power grid struggles to drive the humble electric kettle.

[Caravan Ray]

It's something to do with the lower voltage in the US isn't it? Their strange power grid struggles to drive the humble electric kettle.

I bet that Washington bloke feels like a complete dick now!! “Let’s be revolting”...”nah...we can’t have a cup of tea anymore...unless Mr Jefferson’s slaves boil it on the cooktop for us”. Trump is too good for these people.

[owl]

I have an electric kettle in the kitchen, next to the gun rack. Tea is un-American, though, so in the spirit of our great Founding Fathers, I only ever use it to heat up my afternoon mug of Mountain Dew Code Red.

[fluffy]

I mean in the video I posted above, I literally show my electric kettle, and how much slower it is than my stove, because kettles are 120V and stoves are 240V.

Plus, Americans are more into coffee, so we tend to have drip coffee pots instead. (I do not have one of those. I love coffee but I use kettle-based brewing approaches.)

[fluffy]

On the note of coffee, what's everyone's favorite brewing approach? My approaches, from most to least favored

• Cold brew concentrate, diluted with hot or cold water (this has the best flavor to me, but it tends to be way higher in caffeine so I have to do it sparingly)
• Espresso-based (when I'm at a coffee shop; I don't have an espresso maker at home)
• Aeropress with a Fellow Prismo attachment
• Pourover
• French press (okay in a pinch)
• Moka pot (tastes like crap, people keep telling me I'm just not doing it right but I think percolators are just bad?)
• Automatic drip coffee machine (waste of space and electricity and has no advantages over pourover except being able to make a lot more at once which is wasteful unless you're brewing it for a lot of people or just really into having stale, rancid coffee as a constant addiction-feeding caffeine drip throughout the day)

[owl]

• Automatic drip coffee machine (waste of space and electricity and has no advantages over pourover except being able to make a lot more at once which is wasteful unless you're brewing it for a lot of people or just really into having stale, rancid coffee as a constant addiction-feeding caffeine drip throughout the day)

It me

[owl]

I drink several cups of coffee a day, usually, and if I remember, I can put everything in the night before and set it on a timer so I can wake up to fresh coffee. I buy pre-ground coffee at the store too, or grind it there, instead of by batch at home. Roast me.

[vowlvom]

I mostly do pour-over if I'm making coffee at home, generally from freshly ground beans. We also have an aeropress and a nanopresso, but I'm lazy and there's less to wash up with pour-over so it generally wins for me. I've cut way back on coffee though because it generally makes me feel terrible if I drink too much, and as a result my lovely fresh beans are probably months old at this point.

I do like making cold brew in the summertime as well!

[fluffy]

I mostly do pour-over if I'm making coffee at home, generally from freshly ground beans. We also have an aeropress and a nanopresso, but I'm lazy and there's less to wash up with pour-over so it generally wins for me. I've cut way back on coffee though because it generally makes me feel terrible if I drink too much, and as a result my lovely fresh beans are probably months old at this point.

I do like making cold brew in the summertime as well!

I think I like using Aeropress for the same reason I like listening to vinyl - the coffee isn't significantly better and the process is so much more fiddly, but I enjoy the process and being involved in the moment and every step of the action. So Aeropress is actually the way I make coffee the most, even though it doesn't produce my favorite coffee.

Also cold brew is great for making hot coffee too! While my kitchen was being remodeled I only had very limited access to coffeemaking stuff and so I made a big pot of ultra-strong cold brew, and then each morning I mixed like 1-2 shots of that in with a cup of hot water. It was amazing and that's why that's now my favorite way of making coffee. It was both fully-extracted and lacked any of the bitter notes.

I drink several cups of coffee a day, usually, and if I remember, I can put everything in the night before and set it on a timer so I can wake up to fresh coffee. I buy pre-ground coffee at the store too, or grind it there, instead of by batch at home. Roast me.

I mean, at least it's being ground by a burr grinder?

[vowlvom]

Does the Fellow Prismo attachment thing make much of a difference? Haven't seen that before.

[fluffy]

It mostly makes the process less messy and error-prone. Coffee doesn't leak out the bottom while brewing or out the sides while extracting. It also has a reusable metal filter, which I use in tandem with the regular paper filters. It also increases the pressure very slightly which may or may not improve the extraction slightly but I don't think it actually makes any real difference at the pressures involved.

[crumpart]

We roast our own beans and have a very fancy grinder and manual espresso machine. Have paid for themselves several times over at this point.

[fluffy]

Nice. I used to have a popcorn air popper which I bought with the intention of experimenting with single-cup roasting, but I never got around to finding a source of green beans.

I have a few different grinders; the two I use the most are a shitty Krups electric burr grinder (which I found at the thrift store for $10) and a nice portable Hario hand grinder which is quite a workout to use. At some point I want to get a nicer electric burr grinder but the ones I'm interested in start at like $300 and that's a bit more than I can justify right now.

I also want to get a manual lever espresso machine, but those are also spendy and take up a lot of space.

Incidentally, I am an enthusiastic watcher of James Hoffmann. Being a Coffee Professional (he owns Square Mile roastery in the UK and has won the World Barista Championship and so on) he focuses mostly on the very high-end coffee-equivalent-of-audiophile stuff but I love his videos.