An American scientist has sparked a trans-Atlantic tempest in a teapot by offering Britain advice on its favorite hot beverage.
Bryn Mawr College chemistry professor Michelle Francl says one of the keys to a perfect cup of tea is a pinch of salt. The tip is included in Francl’s book “Steeped: The Chemistry of Tea,” published Wednesday by the Royal Society of Chemistry.
Not since the Boston Tea Party has mixing tea with salt water roiled the Anglo-American relationship so much.
The salt suggestion drew howls of outrage from tea-lovers in Britain, where popular stereotype sees Americans as coffee-swilling boors who make tea, if at all, in the microwave.
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The U.S. Embassy in London intervened in the brewing storm with a social media post reassuring “the good people of the U.K. that the unthinkable notion of adding salt to Britain’s national drink is not official United States policy.”
What’s wrong with the microwave? Heat is heat (except the 1995 movie which has little to do with heat or thermodynamics at all).
You could easily over steep it if you microwave it with the bag in it, but if you’re just boiling water it shouldn’t make a difference, other than being inefficient vs a kettle.
I don’t think I would steep it in the microwave, but I could see myself boiling or reheating tea in it.
Reheating tea? U wot?
Don’t knock it til you try it. Cold water and bag goes in a mug in microwave. 1-2 mins later tea comes out. No forgetting about hot water or letting things cool and forgetting about it. I dont care if it’s correct. It tastes good to me.
Isn’t microwaving the bag bad? Wouldn’t it add microplastics and such?
I had no idea but a quick search shows most teabags have plastics.
Not sure if there’s a difference between microwaving a bag in water or letting a bag sit in hot water
Barbarian!
This is probably a US vs UK thing on power supply. Microwave is way faster to heat water than a kettle because the max voltage is lower in the US
My electric kettle heats water super fast. I don’t know where the idea that 120v electric kettles are slow came from. Maybe kettle tech used to be worse but I have zero complaints about my kettle speed and I have used European kettles too.
Its possible to make your house 220v here, but we dont because everything sold here is shitty ass 115v
I’ve never tried it but considering there’s 3 different boil levels for steeping tea called inventively first, second and third boil.
Also the levels of oxygen in the water can affect the taste of the tea I would hazard a guess that microwaving water will create a fucking cupped abortion.
A microwave - no matter how clean - will probably imbue the water with ‘extras’. Tea is extremely delicate. I swore I hated tea until one day aged 21yo a friend made me a cup and it turns out I’d been drinking tea wrong the previous 21yrs. It took another 5-6yrs for me to find my preferred tea making method. Everything from the cup to teapot and water hardness level. Whether it has additives in the water and how much. How long to steep for. Each tea can require different steeping times to get the right colour and taste.
Making GOOD tea right isn’t as easy as people think.
It overheats it.
The water in a microwave when boiled forms small pockets of gaseous water whose temperature is more than 100 deg C, so it basically cooks the guts out of the tea.
You boil the water in the microwave. Then pour it. Not with the leaves or the pouch in.
Nothing. My two cents is just the microwave to heat up you water and add your tea of choice to steep afterwards.