How To Keep Water From Boiling Over

Cooking is all game and fun until the water in your pot boils and your stove becomes a sticky mess. Unsurprisingly, this leaves many home cooks like you and me wondering if there’s some secret way to keep the water in our pots from boiling over. to keep the water from boiling), until I stumbled upon a trick that seemed so simple and effective that I found it hard to believe. Read: how to keep water from boiling. can confirm with you that it actually works. And I’ve been using it ever since. In this post, I will tell you all about it.To keep the water in the pot from boiling, place a wooden spoon across it. Since the spoon is not submerged in water and wood is a poor conductor of heat, the spoon will be drier and cooler than the pot. When the bubbles come into contact with the spatula, they break off because the surface is dry, cool, and rough.This trick mainly works when boiling starchy foods. Here’s the scientific reason why.

Why does a wooden spoon keep water from boiling?

Contents

Starch is a carbohydrate that occurs naturally in vegetables, such as potatoes, beans, lentils, peas, chickpeas, and corn, as well as in grains and flour products, such as rice and pasta. . heat. When you put starchy foods in a pot of boiling water, the water will remove some of the starch particles on the surface of the food. These starch granules dissolve and swell, creating bubbles, the air bubbles formed by the starch granules absorbing increasing amounts of water until they break apart, bringing the starch molecules into the water. form white foam. The water turns white when you make the pasta. There’s one last piece of the puzzle that I need to show you before you understand why a wooden spoon keeps water from boiling. boils, water boils in a continuous cycle known as convection currents Here is an illustration of how these convective currents look like: In physics, density is a unit of measurement for the mass of an object on a volume unit. Submerged in water, less dense objects will float and denser objects will sink. As the temperature of water increases, its density decreases. That’s why the water molecules closest to the bottom of your pot will heat up and become less dense. As the molecules at the bottom heat up and lose density, they rise to the surface and are replaced by cooler, denser ones. water molecule. This happens over and over again – until you take the pot out of the heat. It doesn’t matter if you knew this before coming to this post, you probably already noticed it because bubbles in a pot of boiling water will form periodically. When too many bubbles grow too quickly and clump together too much, the water boils. The starch bubbles heat up, swell, and burst, heating the other starch granules and turning them into bubbles in the process. The bubbles become structurally stronger and produce multiple layers of foam. As the cooking water becomes thicker and denser, the bubbles on the surface prevent steam from escaping from the bottom of the pot, causing the liquid and foam in the pot to rise. turning on the lid won’t help. If you do, the water will only boil faster because it will be harder for the steam to escape.Placing a wooden spoon on top of the pot will work because the foam will eventually meet the spoon as the foam rises. The spoon draws heat from the bubbles so they don’t grow too large, clump too much together, or grow stronger structurally.Read more: how to remove dry play doh from carpet “That creates a lot of opportunity for bubbles to start seeping and clinging to the wood. This inflates the bubble,” Scott Beaver, PhD in Chemical Engineering and creator of Learn Science with Dr. Scott, told North Carolina broadcaster WRAL. The tension to pull the bubble out will be greater than the surface tension to hold the bubble together. So the bubble collapsed.” When this happens again and again, the foam will decrease. Try this tip for yourself and let me know how it worked for you.

Don’t cook all your food in the boiling pot

When you set the heat on the stovetop to high and place a pot of water over the burner, the water will eventually reach a rolling boil. A rolling boil is when the water in your pot reaches a temperature of 212°F (100°C), also known as the boiling point of water, and bubbles begin to form and burst as a result. . That’s also when starchy water can boil most easily because the water’s internal temperature and convection currents create the perfect conditions for it to happen. Depending on what some people think, you don’t really need to cook most of your soups and stews on high (or even medium-high). Bring the water to a boil, then reduce the heat to medium or medium-high. By doing so, you will reduce the risk of water boiling. You should only cook pasta in a hard-boiled manner. Because pasta is rehydrating and cooks quickly — and adding cold or room-temperature ingredients to the pot of water will cause it to cool down — you want your pot to recover quickly. This makes time easier.

Does adding salt keep the water from boiling?

Adding salt to a pot of boiling water will not keep the water from boiling. when cooking isn’t big enough to make much of a difference.

Inference

Now you know why placing a wooden spoon over a pot of starchy water keeps it from boiling over. Just remember, sooner or later, you should lower the heat to ????. Next time you cook pasta or lentil soup, try placing a wooden spoon on top of the pot and share how it works with you in the comments below.Read more: how to ask a professor about high marks