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Barilla passive cooker

barilla.com

161–170 of 528 posts

Re: Barilla passive cooker

#161
post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alec, of the Technology Connections YouTube channel, shows it's not just energy saving, but faster and cleaner. Even with US outlet power limits a kettle will boil a volume of water much more quickly than a gas stovetop, and my indoor CO2 sensor won't spike by hundreds to a thousand PPM of CO2. While the time savings is modest, if you have an electric kettle it's a no brainer to prefer that over gas. Though induction…

Your gas stove will likely dramatically outperform an 1800W electric heater if you use a proper pot: https://turbopot.com/ I would still rather use a nice induction range, but it is possible to get decent efficiency out of gas.

Buying cookware that works better on gas but is specifically incompatible with induction cooking seems a bit like rigging your Ram to roll coal, at this point in time.

Re: Barilla passive cooker

#162
Could someone with more graphic design skill than I try to squeeze their "full table" down to 1 page that looks good coming from a B&W laser printer?

https://www.barilla.com//-/media/images/shared/passive-cooki...

Here's my first attempt, but I don't have any stylish art https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1OV0yfGyWSfzKrwKYGg91...

Re: Barilla passive cooker

#163

I feel like we perhaps still have some bigger levers we can pull to reduce emissions before we meddle with our linguine.

Yes.. I certainly appreciate that the largest pasta company in the world which is owned by a small family of billionaires bringing in billions in revenue every year gained by monopolizing markets and buying out small competitors expects me to carry it's environmental water for them.

Re: Barilla passive cooker

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Americans don't really do electric kettles, largely on account of using 110V mains, which limits power to around 1100W, making it a lot slower than ~2000W electric kettles in the 200+V world.

Americans largely don't use electric kettles because Americans largely don't drink tea at home and thus don't use kettles as often as the rest of the world. Most households I know don't even own a kettle. Not a stovetop one, not an electric one. If you were to ask most Americans why they don't have an electric kettle at home they won't say "because I only have 120V outlets in the kitchen." They'll say it is because t…

But that's partially because 1100W kettles are less _useful_.

I'm mostly a coffee drinker, and use a bean to cup machine for that. But I still use my kettle a good bit, because it's quicker to boil the kettle and then pour into the pan and bring back to the boil than bringing cold water to the boil in the pan. I've got a 3kW kettle, though, if I had a 1100W one I wouldn't do that because it _wouldn't_ be quicker.

Re: Barilla passive cooker

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You sure? Germany is a (shit) coffee country and everybody has had electric kettles since the 90s.

What do they use the kettles for? For most non tea drinking households in the US there is no essential use for a kettle. They do sell them here, people buy them, they are usually tea drinkers.

German in Canada here. I used mine to cook water for pasta as it's usually faster and more efficient than my electric cooktop. Bought one in Canada and it's close to useless for that purpose. My German kettle would bring 1.7L of tap water to a rolling boil in about 4 minutes. My Canadian one needs about 10 minutes to achieve the same.

Re: Barilla passive cooker

#168

The claim: reduces CO₂e emissions by up to 80%* The asterisk: water boiling phase excluded When I boil pasta, I use full heat to get the water boiling, drop in the pasta, then let it come back up to a boil, then drop the temperature as low as possible to keep a slow boil going--about medium-low. Guesstimating that the boil takes about as long as the time to cook the pasta, I'd say that the pasta cooking portion only…

This is a bizarre thing to put in the fine print. They're literally just excluding most of the cooking process from their calculation and I can't see any reason why other than to artificially inflate the efficiency stat.

Re: Barilla passive cooker

#169
post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A better way to save energy is to use an electric kettle to get the water up to boiling. This is about three times as energy-efficient as a gas hob. Combined with passive cooking it could save real money… Technology Connections on YouTube has a good video about how electric kettles are the superior way to boil water: https://youtu.be/_yMMTVVJI4c

> This is about three times as energy-efficient as a gas hob. I sincerely doubt this figure in cases where electricity is generated from fossil fuels in the first place. For example, I lived in the Netherlands where 80% of electricity is still produced by fossil fuels, mostly in gas-fired power plants. As I understand it, generating electricity from gas has an efficiency of only about 50%. That means you lose a lot o…

I imagine part of the efficiency of electric kettles is due to the heating element actually being submerged in the water, or at least directly adjacent to it.

Compare to a stovetop where there's a big heavy pot between the element and the water, and it's not in complete contact with it. Also often the heating element is underneath a piece of glass.

Re: Barilla passive cooker

#170
I've been cooking like this for about 15 yrs or so when I discovered stainless steel and I couldn't recommend them more, if you don't have any please buy some now, they also last for a lifetime. Get some good stuff, the kind of thing that feels heavy on your hand.

Stainless steel takes ages to cool down, so I usually cook vegetables in a similar fashion to this "passive cooking" technique, the taste is much better and even the colors pop up much more. Actually everything just tastes better because Aluminum does change the flavor of food for the worse, it makes it taste more "acidic", idk, when you switch to stainless you will notice the difference immediately.

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