This is why we should all leave the EU

[wraper]

One of the reasons for limiting power is to encourage people to only heat the water they need. The down side of high power kettles is that people waste a lot of energy heating far more water than they need.

I doubt that with lower power kettles will make people become any smarter. I even doubt that most of them understand that heating more water requires more energy and time.

[Kjelt]

I must admit that most people have no clue about physics.
What to think of the people that are cooking, they have a pan on the fire with already boiling water and vegetables and they actually think that raising the temperature will still decrease the cooking time.
Duh water boils at 100^oC the water will not get warmer then that (unless you add salt and increase its boiling temperature or use a pressure cooker).

[dannyf]

they actually think that raising the temperature will still decrease the cooking time.

I would say that they are right about that: that's exactly how pressure cooker works.

[Kjelt]

they actually think that raising the temperature will still decrease the cooking time.

I would say that they are right about that: that's exactly how pressure cooker works.

That is my second disclaimer comment UNLESS you use a pressure cooker 

[zapta]

It's that old thing of your freedom to swing your first ends where by nose begins.

You have a very long nose if it reaches my kettle at home.

[miguelvp]

I must admit that most people have no clue about physics.
What to think of the people that are cooking, they have a pan on the fire with already boiling water and vegetables and they actually think that raising the temperature will still decrease the cooking time.
Duh water boils at 100^oC the water will not get warmer then that (unless you add salt and increase its boiling temperature or use a pressure cooker).

I learned that from my grandmother and my mother before I even knew physics.

The concept was known since the 4th century but the term bain-marie was not used until one thousand years later.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_the_Jewess#Bain-marie

It's a common practice for old world cooks, maybe some didn't learn from their elders, that's too bad since cooking is an art that has been passed from generations and every home has their own alchemy behind it.

Made an awesome carbonara for my wife last night.

On cooking it's all about hitting the right chemistry of the food to get the right flavors, the methods are more based on smell memory than on actual measurements. And I don't use any chemistry or physics knowledge to cook. I rarely taste the food while cooking.

It's more like a dance between viscosity and smells that got memorized from when my grandmother and my mother cooked (the best two cooks I know in the planet, since they are the only ones that can hit the right tastes I'm used to).

I'm also partial to wines in the region I grew up (right between Rioja and Bourdeaux) which I often use to cook with in order to achieve those olfactory memories that define my family cooking heritage. While cooking I'm also partial to Atlantic seafood.

My point is, physics and chemistry be dammed, yes they are the reason why some food is just good and other excellent. And a few great cooks are chemists recently. Most of them I'm afraid comes from the tradition of their grandmothers

[Kjelt]

Well (can be argued) the most influential person on cooking of the last years is for me Harold McGee and what he did is exactly putting science in the kitchen and thus raising a new generation of cooks that do not need luck or recipees with infactual measurements and cooking times.
http://www.amazon.com/Harold-McGee/e/B000APD9MQ

Good for you if you cook on instinct and it succeeds. For me I switched after another tough dry piece of braise and stew that needed 24 hours at 70 degrees to sous vide cooking and now it succeeds each and every time. Cooking is just a function of heat and time, the ingredients, flavour combinations and the magic with the right wine is art 

[miguelvp]

That's the thing, I don't cook on instinct it's passed knowledge of many generations so in that way  you are right is more like a second nature thing that you don't have to think just do, more like driving than equations and formulas.

I do find sous-vide terribly boring in taste, It's good but monotonous at the same time but that's a personal preference since there is not a right way.

For example if you have the luck to stay in Tuscany on some old farm where the grand mother will cook something special, it will rival any top chef out there. Same in Spain in old towns that survived modernization.

Edit: you can't sou-vide a paella
I'm lucky that in Chicago I can find anything from anywhere in the planet as far as ingredients go, of course you can't find a real paella, they might compare to the ones found in restaurants in Spain, but those are not even close as the ones cooked in family households.

I've eaten in really good restaurants in my life but even the best are not as good as what my grandmother or my mother cooked.

[zapta]

Well (can be argued) the most influential person on cooking of the last years is for me Harold McGee and what he did is exactly putting science in the kitchen and thus raising a new generation of cooks that do not need luck or recipees with infactual measurements and cooking times.
http://www.amazon.com/Harold-McGee/e/B000APD9MQ

Hopefully the utopian busy bodies will not outlaw the other 'less efficient' cooking methods because they effect the limited resources of the collective.

;-)

[gildasd]

On the subject of cooking:

We are getting a new 120cm stove for my new house:
http://www.agaliving.com/our-products/aga-range-cookers/aga-masterchef-xl/masterchef-xl-dual-fuel-%28gas-hob%29
Expensive? Yes but the same stuff made in somewhere else than Europe is only, at best, 400€ Euros cheaper.
The build quality is wonderful, I especially like the care taken in the small details the usual customer does not even see...
I use to work in kitchens (yes, that's how to study without getting into debt) , and this would totally work for a 30 diners per service restaurant.
That will do great for big family get together's (20 people).
It only needs a 16Amp line (but I'll put a 40 anyhow) for the 4 ovens at the same time!
That's 2500W going full blast...

Or what a Freedom Hairdrier needs to fluff a mullet.

[Kjelt]

Very nice! I only have a 120cm Viking gas oven and with its 6 3kW burners it totals around 35kW , i had to place a special thick gaspipe otherwise it would not work. 

[miguelvp]

Don't talk too loud or the next thing they regulate is ovens. Because like you mentioned earlier you can cook fine with less power over longer time.

[miguelvp]

Don't talk too loud or the next thing they regulate is ovens. Because like you mentioned earlier you can cook fine with less power over longer time.

The issue isn't power, it's efficiency. The Freedom Hairdryer is extremely wasteful and doesn't actually dry hair any quicker. If anything the extra power just damages hair. Ovens, on the other hand, make use of all that energy to heat a space to a certain temperature, at which point a thermostat kicks in and reduces power to maintenance levels. The energy is used and not wasted.

But as stated you can cook with less energy with a sous vide. Or if you want bake potatoes or just make roasted garlic using a big oven is a waste of energy. Slippery Slope!

[zapta]

On the subject of cooking:

We are getting a new 120cm stove for my new house:
http://www.agaliving.com/our-products/aga-range-cookers/aga-masterchef-xl/masterchef-xl-dual-fuel-%28gas-hob%29
Expensive? Yes but the same stuff made in somewhere else than Europe is only, at best, 400€ Euros cheaper.

That category of stoves should be banned. It's a waste of finite resources. For the same price we get get a good enough stove and save the lives of 10 children in Africa. Think of the common good.

;-)

[gildasd]

On the subject of cooking:

We are getting a new 120cm stove for my new house:
http://www.agaliving.com/our-products/aga-range-cookers/aga-masterchef-xl/masterchef-xl-dual-fuel-%28gas-hob%29
Expensive? Yes but the same stuff made in somewhere else than Europe is only, at best, 400€ Euros cheaper.

That category of stoves should be banned. It's a waste of finite resources. For the same price we get get a good enough stove and save the lives of 10 children in Africa. Think of the common good.

;-)

More like 40 at the going rate but also deprive the same amount of Englishmen of work in doing so.

It's a class A efficiency oven, I would not even consider an A-.

As a somewhat traditionalist as far as cooking goes, using a "sous vide" is akin to smearing food with dog poop.

[zapta]

As a somewhat traditionalist as far as cooking goes, using a "sous vide" is akin to smearing food with dog poop.

Well, when the busy body Utopians will limit the power of your oven, low temperature cooking will be your only choice. ;-)

[GK]

The "raw food diet" is all the craze down here right now, amongst the trendy set. Switch today and all of these seemingly intractable problems are solved. You'll also generate enough of your own environmentally friendly gas to run something like a Fiat Panda to boot.

[gildasd]

As a somewhat traditionalist as far as cooking goes, using a "sous vide" is akin to smearing food with dog poop.

Well, when the busy body Utopians will limit the power of your oven, low temperature cooking will be your only choice. ;-)

They already have, that's why it's on a 16A line where the last big oven I installed 10 years ago needed a 40A line.
The old and the new do the same thing, except one uses way less energy.

[gildasd]

The "raw food diet" is all the craze down here right now, amongst the trendy set. Switch today and all of these seemingly intractable problems are solved. You'll also generate enough of your own environmentally friendly gas to run something like a Fiat Panda to boot.

I mostly eat raw food, out of 21 meals I'd say 18 of them. But that's not due to any craze, it's just that I'm from the south of France and that's our traditional way of eating.
But my Belgian wife has a lot of problems switching over; she insists on having a "heavy meal" at least once a day where I'm happy with 2 to 3 a week...

[owiecc]

They already have, that's why it's on a 16A line where the last big oven I installed 10 years ago needed a 40A line.
The old and the new do the same thing, except one uses way less energy.

This is still baffling my grandmother. In the old ages you would check the temperature of your oven by touching its glass window. If it burnt your finger just a little bit it was too cold. You had to wait until it was really hot.

With the new oven I can still see her touching the glass window and complaining about the new crappy technology and oven not heating up properly.

[Kjelt]

For all the people that are still doing the same thing as their family has been doing for generations, don't stop if you don't want to,
but here is a nice tale i always will remember:

A man watched his wife cook a salmon in the kitchen. She took the entire salmon, cut off the head with a large extra portion of fishmeat beneath it,
cut of the tail with again a large portion of fishmeat above it, threw the head and tail with a lot of good fishmeat on it in the trash and baked the middle part.

The man saw this happen a few times and asked his wife why she did this.
She told him, "I don't know", "this is how my mother always did it, and that is how she taught me to do it".

On a family party the man asked his wifes mother why she would throw away all that good fishmeat and not cook the entire salmon?
The mother answered: "I don't know this is how my mother always did it and that is how she taught me."

The man went to his wifes grandmother and again asked the same question.
The old lady answered, oh well I had two large cats and they loved the head and tail of the salmon
but most importantly my fishpan was not big enough to cook an entire salmon, we had no fridges back then, so what else could I do,
I could not just throw it away?.

[gildasd]

My family went through WW2 on the continent and never forgot the hunger and cold that lasted years on end.
Wasting food and energy has always been frowned upon since I can remember. I could waste stuff, but I see no reason to do so.

Even the oven I'm getting will receive a once over with caulk, heat reflective coatings and isolation to boost it's efficiency to a level that a commercial company could not do at a reasonable price.

As for the new house, I'm planning for it to get Isolation of R=4 standard on top of the existing material (35€ per M2 max), a condensation boiler, replacing as many of the steel heating pipes with isolated PEX, triple glass windows and water heating panels on the roof (etc).
Our calculation is that this will pay for itself in 10 years over the existing single pane windows, air gap brick walls and traditional boiler.
I'll be doing most of the work because it costs about 66% less to do so.

Energy prices are not going to go down in Europe in the near or medium future (10 years).
So at the current rate of increase, it's financially suicidal not to make these changes now.

[miguelvp]

My family went through WW2 on the continent and never forgot the hunger and cold that lasted years on end.
Wasting food and energy has always been frowned upon since I can remember. I could waste stuff, but I see no reason to do so.

Mine went through the Spanish Civil War and when it was over, WW2 happened so the recovery time took longer even if Spain didn't participate in the war (not because Franco didn't offer his services to the Germans)

So I'm conditioned to eat everything that is in my plate and not to waste. But also I was taught that quality is better than cheap, it's better to eat less but quality food than more of cheap and less quality food.

The flavor fills you up more than the quantity anyways.

[G7PSK]

Within ten years you will need a new condensation boiler. I asked my boiler service man about new boilers as ours (an oil fired no gas here) is 16 years old he said that the expected service life of a new condensation boiler is under ten years and for the extra 2% or less increase in efficiency I might expect to see it would be better to stick with the boiler I have as it would last at least as long again. 

[gildasd]

Within ten years you will need a new condensation boiler. I asked my boiler service man about new boilers as ours (an oil fired no gas here) is 16 years old he said that the expected service life of a new condensation boiler is under ten years and for the extra 2% or less increase in efficiency I might expect to see it would be better to stick with the boiler I have as it would last at least as long again.

That's what I'll be doing. Isolation comes first.

Our present boiler was 80% efficient new, but being 20 years old, this has probably gone down to about 75%.
The best condensation boilers get 95/98%, so the jump is worth it in our case.
But, knowing much more about boilers than the average consumer (lots of boilers on commercial vessels) I'll probably have to drive to Germany to get models only sold there that are dual source.
AND have a 10 to 15 year warranty (not to mention that my gramp, two uncles and a cousin are/were in the heating business and can give me tips).
And only cost 10 to 15% more than your De Dietrich. But I'll have to Pay 21% VAT instead of 8%, mysteries of Belgian tax system.

As I side note, I used to build shops, and do the heating/air conditioning for those.
In a shop the heating system gets a WAY harder workload than a house system (wide doors that open and close all the time, big windows heat sinks), yet we were able to warranty these for 10 years of near nonstop usage.
So as a consumer, if you don't ask for the same, then you are getting shafted.