Why Chefs Are Switching to Purified Water in the Kitchen

If you’re passionate about cooking—whether or not you do it for a living—you probably pay attention to the details. Keeping your knives sharp, allowing meat to come to room temperature before cooking, and rinsing your rice may all be things you’re diligent about. However, there could be a detail you’re missing: the quality of the water you cook with and consume.

It may be more of an afterthought, but cooking with tap water could affect the taste, texture, and smell of your food, and worse, you’re consuming the contaminants that it carries.

Water is an ingredient like any other. Shouldn’t yours be high quality so that your dish turns out the way you want? In this blog, learn how unfiltered tap water affects food during and after the cooking process.

Is it Safe to Cook With Tap Water?

You might think cooking with tap water is perfectly safe, especially if you first boil water to remove contaminants. You should be in good shape, right?

Not quite. First, consider that boiling water only removes some contaminants, including:

• Viruses.

• Protozoa.

• Other pathogens.

So yes, the concentrations of those specific contaminants may go down. However, boiling water will not kill chemicals, microplastics, and neurotoxic microorganisms. In fact, concentrations of certain pollutants, like lead, can actually increase after water has been boiled.

When you’re cooking your pasta or rice, there will still be contaminants in the water, which will end up in the food you eat.

Now, imagine water that doesn’t get boiled at all. This may mean that any and all undesirable particles in the water end up in whatever you’re consuming. 

Considering the potential risks to your health and safety, cooking with tap water, even after it’s been boiled, is something you should avoid.

 

Does Tap Water Change the Flavor of Your Food and Drinks? 

While protecting your health is the most important thing to consider, we’d be remiss if we didn’t mention the other side effect of using tap water in your recipes: It can change the flavor!

Consider chlorine, as an example. Ironically, chlorine is used to disinfect the water that comes out of your tap. However, it has a distinct smell and taste, which you might very well detect. The odor and taste can be carried onto your dishes. The same can be said for heavy metals like lead. Hard water, which contains high concentrations of minerals like calcium and magnesium, is another culprit. Other industrial chemicals with potent odors or tastes might also be present.

Other Effects of Cooking With Contaminated Water

Once again, hard water can strike by making your vegetables tougher because the minerals may interfere with the softening of food that happens during the cooking process. It can also leave your food bitter-tasting. 

Furthermore, if you allow the residue from the hard water to build up on your pots and pans, it can impact the heat distribution, which can then affect not only the cook times but also the quality and taste of your food, along with the color. (If you see a white film on your cookware, that’s likely hard water. You might notice it on your shower curtains/doors, too.)

If you bake with yeast and your bread always seems to fall flat, contaminated tap water might be to blame. Water with high concentrations of minerals or chlorine can change the gluten structure of dough. So, your bread may end up tough, or you might notice that the fermentation process doesn’t seem quite right.

How to Filter Your Water Before Cooking

If you want something more efficient than boiling water, you need a filtration system. But the technology it uses matters. For instance, the filters built into most refrigerators aren’t nearly powerful enough to remove anything beyond larger particles. The same can be said for most filters that come in pitchers or attach to the faucet of your kitchen sink.

The latest in water filtration technology is reverse osmosis (RO). Reverse osmosis is the ultimate “screen,” removing impurities big and small so that the only thing that makes it through is water molecules. 

The Sans water purifier takes it a step further with a four-layer filtration system. This includes not only a reverse osmosis filter but also UV-C purification, activated carbon, and a dedicated volatile organic compound (VOC) filter. This gives you water that’s up to 99% free from pollutants, including fluoride, microplastics, forever chemicals, nitrate, lead, and chromium. An additional mineral and pH filter is available, too.

The countertop design requires zero installation and comes with a removable pitcher. Sans auto-fills and instantly dispenses hot water, so you’ll always have fresh H2O at the ready when you’re cooking up something tasty, or you want a cup of tea or coffee.

Be sure to change the filters on schedule so that they continue functioning optimally. You can opt to get on a filter plan so that your new filters are automatically delivered every 12 months, and you save money on them, too!

Tap water is unreliable. Boiling it is inconvenient and ineffective. Filtration via reverse osmosis is the best thing you can do to purify your tap water. Learn more about the Sans water technology and how we do filtration differently.