Cooking With Tap Water ?

[Kira]

The oil-in-pasta-water trick is an old standby but the resulting coating also prevents any sauce from cohering to the pasta. But, as mentioned, the specific chemistry may require desperate measures.

We have a shallow well. The mineral content is high but nothing like when a rabbit drowns in the well. That's a YUK.

 

[Danno]

My kitchen cold water taps and fridge water go through a 5 micron sediment and a 5 micron carbon filter, while the fridge has the fridge filter as well.

The water tastes like, well, water. Which is the end goal.

 

[skyactiv]

Maybe you cooked the pasta too long? My wife has always used filtered water pitchers. She replaced a Brita pitcher with a ZeroWater dispenser bought at Wal-Mart and the water is very good.

 

[OhOMG]

Originally Posted By: bubbatime
I use a ton of olive oil in cooking. Dr said my good cholesterol was amazing, whatever that means. That being said, olive oil is expensive. I keep a small bottle of vegetable oil on the cabinet for cooking pasta. One tablespoon in the water prevents sticking noodles.

If you have normal tap water (doesn’t smell or taste too bad), then definitely use it for cooking. Bottle water for cooking is wasteful and expensive.


+1

When I purchase olive oil, I usually get the largest container of the cheapest one. It is simply too very expensive to get it any other way. You only notice the taste differences in olive oil if you drink it directly, as well. Extra Virgin only.

 

[Alfred_B]

Originally Posted By: Merkava_4
Tried it for dinner tonight and the first thing I noticed is the pasta sticking to the pan as I'm trying to pour it out into the strainer. With bottled water, the pasta comes out of the pan easy and never sticks.


It really depends on the locality. Most tap water in the US is contaminated with pollutants or agricultural runoff so drinking it or cooking with it is not advised.

Not sure why that pasta would stick like that, my guess would be the calcium content in the water.

 

[Garak]

Originally Posted By: Alfred_B
Most tap water in the US is contaminated with pollutants or agricultural runoff so drinking it or cooking with it is not advised.

It is?

 

[DBMaster]

Originally Posted By: Garak
Originally Posted By: Alfred_B
Most tap water in the US is contaminated with pollutants or agricultural runoff so drinking it or cooking with it is not advised.

It is?


Hmm. I do know that there are plenty of potential contaminants in tap water that are not identified in normal testing, i.e. byproducts of pharmaceuticals. If I am to believe the water quality report my city sends me annually, the byproducts from agriculture, fallout, naturally occurring minerals, etc. are well within the ceilings allowed. Does it taste good? Nope. I started using a reverse osmosis system in the early 1990s. I wasn't thinking about safety, really. I was thinking about how I wanted to drink water almost exclusively and how much easier it was to do so when it didn't taste and smell like a moldy swimming pool. It's especially bad in the summer when the algae blooms occur and they notch up the chlorine content. Supposedly, the city is going to add UV treatment soon which will allow them to cut down substantially on the chemical sanitizing agents.

 

[Alfred_B]

Here is the database for the tap water contaminants. I've never been able to find a locality which didn't have any that were not above health guidelines.

https://www.ewg.org/tapwater/#.WdKFbvmPKpd

 

[DBMaster]

Originally Posted By: Alfred_B
Here is the database for the tap water contaminants. I've never been able to find a locality which didn't have any that were not above health guidelines.

https://www.ewg.org/tapwater/#.WdKFbvmPKpd


Well, that's interesting. My annual water quality report only lists the legal limits, not the "health guidelines." I'm not feeling motivated to research EWG's source material for the health guidelines. They are obviously MUCH lower than the legal limits. Why would the legal limits be set so far above the levels that supposedly cause all those health issues?

 

[ArcticDriver]

Originally Posted By: Alfred_B
Originally Posted By: Merkava_4
Tried it for dinner tonight and the first thing I noticed is the pasta sticking to the pan as I'm trying to pour it out into the strainer. With bottled water, the pasta comes out of the pan easy and never sticks.


It really depends on the locality. Most tap water in the US is contaminated with pollutants or agricultural runoff so drinking it or cooking with it is not advised.

Not sure why that pasta would stick like that, my guess would be the calcium content in the water.


News to me.

 

[ArcticDriver]

Originally Posted By: Alfred_B
Here is the database for the tap water contaminants. I've never been able to find a locality which didn't have any that were not above health guidelines.

https://www.ewg.org/tapwater/#.WdKFbvmPKpd


Well I guess it depends on how much trust a person has in EWG.

Certsinly noble ambitions but possibly utopia is a bit of a reach.

I will continue drinking my tap water.

 

[HangFire]

There's plenty of pure well water- like mine, as I had it tested, and have the chemical results.

I think you'd be hard pressed to find a community where somebody's tap water wasn't polluted at one time. Put all those dots on a map, and it would look rather bleak. That has little to nothing to do with the state of most people's tap water, most of the time.

 

[DBMaster]

It was interesting how EWG's site showed that Corpus Christi was in violation status several times in recent years. The tap water down there is nasty, though, I never thought unsafe. But, once you get used to something like R/O water all tap water ends up having off flavors to it.

 

[kschachn]

Originally Posted By: ArcticDriver
Well I guess it depends on how much trust a person has in EWG.

About as much trust as you should have in some random "organization" that purports to have noble purposes but clearly has political intentions instead as shown by their website. In other words, zero.

Once places like that start yapping about their politics I cease to listen.

 

[Garak]

Originally Posted By: Alfred_B
Here is the database for the tap water contaminants. I've never been able to find a locality which didn't have any that were not above health guidelines.

What are they selling, or are they just another supposed non-profit? Without delving into politics, looking at their main page, it's not a science web page, it's an activist page. Also, look at the individual community pages closely. I found pages where they claim that water had contaminants above guideline (whose guidelines?), yet still met federal standards. Which is it? The water either falls within limits or it does not. Their list of communities is also far from exhaustive. I'd like water as pure as possible, but there's a difference between preference and necessity, or preference and safety. Not all of North America is Flint, Michigan. Even when Regina's water stank to high heaven, it was very safe. It just didn't taste good, until they brought in carbon filtration.

I've mentioned it a few times already. I'm not fan of David Suzuki, but he was spot on when he said he'd be raising holy heck if he had no confidence in drinking the water the comes out of his taps. 80 years ago, my grandparents were running to a well with a bucket to get water to drink. Today, we have people running to the store to get water to drink.