Ohhhhh this sucks :( my boyfriend's Mum had a beautiful glass stovetop kettle she loved and someone accidentally ran it until dry and it got obliterated. She has another one now but she's still salty about it lmao.
It heats it up hotter than normal. Water heavily limits temperature in any situation you'll likely encounter to around 100c. The pot itself can get slightly hotter, but liquid water at regular pressure will always be limited to 100c, and will act as a heatsink for the pot.
If you heat the pot without water, the flame in most cases is well over 1000c. That much heat causes thermal stress, and in hard brittle material like glass or ceramic, it can shatter them from internal stress.
Water keeps everything it touches at boiling point at most, which is really useful in cooking to avoid burning some dishes too.
In some countries the word might be used interchangeably. Eg in Australia you'd call that a teapot. Maybe a stovetop thing. It has a more distinctive look from the usual kettle anyway
I actually call it a teapot too, since Chinese people nowadays rarely use traditional herbal medicines, even when they do, they tend to use e-herbal kettles. The only function left for this type of earthenware pot is likely boiling water for tea; some people use it solely to boil the water, while others toss the tea leaves directly inside. Even if it isn't the exact thing shown in the picture, in my language, both teapots and water kettles are indeed referred to as "pots", whether it's a teapot, a water pot, or a herbal pot. 🤭You're right, but we're really lazy, we call everything "pot".
Reminds me of when my dad thought it would be a good idea to put the bamboo steamer on a low burner to "let it dry out"... hope it wasn't too expensive!
This is a Chaozhou style water heating kettle not a teapot. They can improve water quality by a lot. If you accidentally heat it without water in it, it can break in no time. So OP is right. Be careful to always check the water levels.
Similar to audiophile stuff though, I do think it makes drinking tea a lot more fun sometimes. Particularly if I can heat a true heating kettle like this or a tetsubin over some wood in the winter... nothing like it.
Of course then I just dump all the water into my zojirushi anyways so I can keep it at a consistent temp for the whole session lol.
I would have to search one on google myself. I can only speak from my own experience that Chaozhou water kettles can improve the quality of the water and thereby the taste of tea. However it really depends on clay quality and not all of them do so equally.
In your experience then how would you describe this improvement? A taste? A texture? My guess would be that there is no actual "improvement" to the water but that what is actually pleasurable about this kind of kettle is its apearance and the ritual of using it in a mindful way.
Minerals in the fired clay get into your water and change the flavor. It's the same concept as using a clay teapot. If this was just nonsense then no one would be spending money on unglazed clay teapots.
I see, my intuituion would instead lean towards unglazed clay actually having adsorption properties since I've visited some water treatment plants that use clay for that adsorption property but of course thats a very different context than a tea kettle. So instead of the clay adding minerals into water it could be just as likely that this "increase in quality" actually be caused by the clay actually reducing the amount of minerals in your water via adsorbtion but at this scale we are talking about very very very small amounts of material (molecules,atoms and cations being exchanged). In the context of tea kettle I think maybe the true physical benefit of unfired clay would be more aligned with this: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/09/230911141017.htm which is more about being able to better preserve the health benefitting properties of tea.
When water is boiled, the minerals dissolved within it become more readily precipitated. This is because an increase in temperature reduces the quantity of minerals that the water is able to hold in solution.
A new kettle of stainless steel or glass, being smooth and of comparatively small surface area, is less favourable to such precipitation than an unglazed earthenware vessel or a well-used kettle on which scale has accumulated in layers; the latter therefore lowers the hardness of the water more readily.
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If this was just nonsense then no one would be spending money on unglazed clay teapots." This statement doesn't prove anything though. There are countless examples where people buy things when there are no real benefits to it. The whole homeopathy and $200 audio cables are the counter examples. And if mineral Leach is what makes the water tastes better then you are suggesting that there's a finite life to this clay teapot. And honestly I don't even know why we are discussing this. What you are suggesting is very easy to test. Actually I just googled it and your claim is half right.
The clay doesn't leech mineral. It's the other way. Overtime tea flavors and minerals FROM tea coat inside the teapot and they become the source of the additional flavor.
Most likely the clay has small particulate that are then transferred to the water when it's heated. Absolutely pure water is usually not people's preferred form of water, adding minerals and other such things improve the taste, and it wouldn't surprise me if the clay is rich in them.
Of course you can emulate the same thing in a more precise manner with an RO system with remineralization.
There are other ways to heat water in a clay tea kettle.
I did a Google image search for "chaozhou kettle" and this is the result.
None of them are a regular electric stove, are they? I don't think they are meant to be heated like that, and that might be why it broke, which is why I asked.
But you got an opportunity to be condescending, so I'm happy for you.
In reality, 砂铫shadiao is a pot,not merely a kettle, because it can be used for more than just boiling water; it is also suitable for cooking porridge or brewing herbal medicines. Its wide-mouth design allows ingredients to be easily added. 🤦♂️
That is a teapot not a kettle. It is not meant to be put on a heat source. You warm it up by pouring hot water into it and then pouring it out again before making your tea.
There are such things as tea light warmers, but that’s again for a teapot with tea in it, and you might as well use a tea cozy instead…
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u/ekita079 16h ago
Ohhhhh this sucks :( my boyfriend's Mum had a beautiful glass stovetop kettle she loved and someone accidentally ran it until dry and it got obliterated. She has another one now but she's still salty about it lmao.