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Recipes, cooking lessons, tips, tricks, food blog, and more.
Recipes, cooking lessons, tips, tricks, food blog, and more.
20 November 2009
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Loading ...It seems like such a simple task - boiling water. But for someone who has not cooked very much, there are potholes easy to trip on. Sometimes, the simplest tasks aren't so simple after all. Let's explore this seemingly simple task!
In cooking, we often use different terms refering to varying degrees of hot water. It is useful to understand them.
Boiling is when a liquid turns into a gas. Well, it's a bit more complicated than that, but that's really the bottom line :) It happens when the pressure on the liquid reduces enough for the gas to form. For this to happen, usualy we need to add some form of energy, such as heat.
All liquids can be boiled. Solids can't be boiled. That means that technically, you don't make "boiled potatoes"; you cook potatoes in boiling water. But that will be the topic of another post :)
When you have water being heated and you see bubbles coming from the bottom of the pot and raising to the surface, you have boiling water.
Everyone knows that water boils at 100°C (212°F), right? Hmm, yeah, kinda sorta. The boiling point of pure water at sea level is 100°C. To make our lives easier, we tend to say water boils at 100°C (212°F), however there are two main factors that can influence that.
Notice that I stated earlier "The boiling point of pure water at sea level is 100°C". There are two important qualifiers there: "pure", and "sea level".
If there are other elements in the water, the boiling point will vary. For example, if you add salt to the water, it will boil faster. That is to say, the temperature at which the boiling point is reached is lower. The more salt you put in, the lower the required temperature will be. If you add 1 teaspoon of salt to 1 liter of water, you reduce the boiling point by about 0.5°C to 1°C (1°F to 2°F). Some recipes call for cooking in a mixture of stock and wine, which are not "pure water".
You would have to cook ingredients a bit longer in salted water or in stock or wine than you would in plain & pure water. Not significantly longer. In fact, in most cases you can't really tell the difference, and there are other factors determining cooking time (size of the ingredient, for example).
As it is pressure that is keeping a liquid in liquid form, when there is less pressure, the liquid boils faster. Sea level is where there is the most atmospheric pressure (for most cooks). The higher you go, the less pressure there is, hence the temperature required for boiling drops. At the summit of Mt. Everest, the boiling temperature of water is ~69°C (156°F).
A narrow and tall pot of water will take longer to boil than a wide shallow pot of water, because the water creates more pressure. Stormy weather can make water boil faster, because the atmospheric pressure is not as strong.
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There is nothing better on a cold wintry day than a properly made pot pie. Craig Claiborne