How To Stop Water From Boiling Over

Cooking is all fun and games until the water in your pot boils over and your cooktop becomes a sticky mess. Not surprisingly, this leaves many home cooks like you and me wondering if there was some secret manner to keep the h2o in our pots from humid over.

I was researching this topic on the Cyberspace and kept coming across the usual superstitions (like how adding salt to your pot keeps the h2o from boiling over), until I stumbled upon a trick that seemed and so uncomplicated and and then constructive, I found it difficult to believe.

After testing this trick out for a calendar week, I can confirm to you that it really works. And I've been using information technology e'er since.

In this mail service, I'yard going to tell yous all about it.

To proceed the water in your pot from boiling over, put a wooden spoon beyond it. As the spoon isn't submerged in the water and forest is a poor heat usher, the spoon volition stay drier and cooler than the pot. When water bubbles come up in contact with the spoon, they'll outburst because of its dry out, cool, and crude surface.

This play tricks works primarily when boiling starchy foods. Here's the scientific reason why.

Why a Wooden Spoon Keeps Water From Boiling Over

Starch is a sugar that'southward naturally present in vegetables, similar potatoes, beans, lentils, peas, chickpeas, and corn, besides equally in grains and flour products, like rice and pasta noodles.

Starch dissolves in water and swells upward in the presence of heat. When you add starchy foods to a pot of boiling h2o, the h2o strips away some of the starch granules on the nutrient's surface. These starch granules deliquesce and swell, causing the germination of bubbles.

The bubbling course considering the starch granules absorb increasing amounts of h2o until they finally burst, sending starch molecules into the water which results in white foam.

This is also the reason why your cooking water turns white when you brand pasta.

There's one last piece to the puzzle I need to show you before you sympathize why a wooden spoon keeps water from boiling over.

When you bring a pot of water to a boil, the h2o boils in continuous cycles called convection currents.

Hither's an analogy of how these convection currents expect like:

In physics, density is a measure of an object's mass per one unit of volume. Submerged in water, less dense objects will float and denser objects volition sink.

When the temperature of water rises, its density decreases. Which is why the h2o molecules that sit down the closest to the lesser of your pot will heat up and become less dense.

As the molecules on the lesser heat up and lose density, they volition rise upwardly to the surface and get replaced by denser and libation h2o molecules.

This happens over again, and over again, and again in cycles—until you remove the pot from the estrus.

No matter if you knew this earlier coming to this post or non, you've probably noticed it already considering the bubbling in a pot of boiling h2o volition form in cycles. When too many bubbles grow besides big too chop-chop and lump too much together, the water will eddy over.

Call back of it equally a self-reinforcing loop. Starch bubbles estrus upward, corking up, and flare-up, heating upward other starch granules and turning them into bubbling in the process. The bubbles become structurally stronger and create multiple layers of foam.

Equally the cooking water becomes starchier and thicker, the bubbles on the surface prevent steam from escaping from the bottom of the pot, causing the liquid and bubbling in the pot to rise.

Putting the lid on won't assistance. If y'all do it, the water will only boil over faster because the steam is going to accept a harder fourth dimension to escape.

Putting a wooden spoon over the pot works considering the foam will somewhen meet the spoon as the foam bubbles up. The spoon sucks up the thermal energy from the bubbles so that they don't grow too large, lump besides much together, or grow structurally stronger.

"That makes lots of opportunities for bubbling to get-go absorbing and wicking into the wood. This stretches the chimera," Scott Beaver, Dr. of Chemical Engineering science and creator of Learn Science with Dr. Scott, tells North Carolina Goggle box station WRAL.

"The stretching forcefulness to pull the chimera apart becomes greater than the force of surface tension to agree the chimera together. So the chimera collapses." When this happens over and over, the foam goes downwardly.

Try this fox out for yourselves and let me know how it worked out for you.

Don't Cook All of Your Nutrient in a Rolling Eddy

When you prepare the heat on your cooktop to loftier and place a pot of h2o on the burner, the water will eventually attain a rolling eddy.

A rolling boil is when the water in your pot reaches a temperature of 212°F (100°C), likewise known every bit the boiling point of water, and bubbles start forming and bursting vigorously as a result.

It's also when starchy water can eddy over the easiest because the internal temperature and convection currents of the water create the perfect conditions for it to happen.

Contrary to what some folks think, yous don't actually need to melt almost of your soups and stews on high (or even medium-high). Bring the water to a boil, then pass up the heat to medium or medium-high. Past doing so, yous reduce the run a risk of your cooking water boiling over.

You should only cook pasta in a rolling boil. Since pasta noodles rehydrate and cook fast—and adding cold or room-temperature ingredients to a pot of water causes it to driblet temperature—you want your pot to recover quickly. This makes timing easier.

Does Adding Table salt Keep the Water From Boiling Over?

Adding salt to a pot of humid water won't keep the h2o from humid over.

While it'southward true that salt dissolved in water raises its humid betoken to a temperature higher up 212°F (100°C), the quantity of salt that you apply when cooking isn't big enough to make much of a difference.

Conclusion

Now you know why putting a wooden spoon over a pot of starchy water will keep it from boiling over. Only remember that, sooner or afterward, it's a good idea to plow the heat down 🙂 .

The next fourth dimension you cook pasta noodles or make lentil soup, endeavour putting a wooden spoon over the pot and share how it worked out for you in the comments below.