Becky Krystal on Boiling Water for Service Journalism

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Boiling water has been on my mind a lot lately. First, it came up because John and I were reviewing Joy’s soup chapter. Most of the recipes direct you to simmer or boil (or both), and we started thinking about the fairly subtle but very important difference between the two.

Then in our Ella Quittner episode, the subject came up again.

The very next recording, with guest Becky Krystal from the Washington Post, we once again got on the topic. Our cohost Shannon described arguing with her husband about what boiling actually means and what it looks like in the pan.

This isn’t some theoretical, only-matters-to-pedants distinction. When you need to boil something, like pasta or quick-cooking veggies, you need to actually boil it. Pasta that sits in hot water, for example, will cook eventually, but the noodles will likely stick together. On the other hand, when a recipe tells you to simmer, it is trying to keep you from overcooking ingredients. For instance, meat boiled instead of simmered for any length of time is bound to become stringy and dry.

But when you don’t have years of cooking experience, how are you supposed to know the difference between the two? And then you get into all kinds of language shenanigans with terms like “brisk simmer” and “low boil.” What. The. WHAT??

This is exactly the knot that Becky Krystal was trying to tease apart when she wrote her article, “How to boil water. Yes, really” (apologies for the lack of a gift link). If you grew up learning to cook from someone knowledgeable, it’s likely the kind of cooking question that has never even occurred to you. You probably have an intuition for what boiling and simmering mean. But if you don’t have that education, these breezy terms solidify into stumbling blocks.

I’m not a journalist like Becky, but I think about these kinds of issues all the time because I want to write generous recipes: recipes that feel like taking the reader by the hand instead of pointing aggressively at their knowledge gaps. There’s always a balance. A recipe that explains every little thing can be difficult to follow simply by virtue of its word count.

But if you’ve ever been even a little unsure about the difference between boiling and simmering, know that you are among good company! And service journalism about how to boil water isn’t clickbait—it’s exactly the kind of cooking knowledge multivitamin we should all take from time to time.

• Why we should all be cooking radishes more.

• Becky’s tips for making the perfect quesadilla.

• Joy of Cooking as the antidote to AI slop.

• Reminiscing about a very alcoholic eggnog recipe.

• How to chop onions without crying (it’s a fecund subject apparently).

• The Washington Post food section’s recent focus on service journalism.

Sometimes we retitle recipes with good intentions, but it creates confusion. That’s what happened to our caller this week who thought we’d jettisoned our Hot Blueberry Sauce recipe. But really, we’d renamed it Blueberry Compote and moved it to the Fruits chapter. We hope the caller was happy to be reunited with their blueberry sauce! For those looking to make it, it’s on page 178, and for our recipe of the week we paired it with Cornmeal Waffles on page 643.

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