TikTok Is Seriously Annoyed By This Dorm Room Pasta Cooking Hack
You can find plenty of food hacks on TikTok, and they tend to come and go. Nobody's still doing last summer's air-fried pasta chip hack, are they?
But one unconventional pasta-cooking method endures on TikTok, and no air fryer is required. All you need is that appliance essential to dorm or hotel rooms: an electric kettle. Normally, these kettles might be used to heat water for tea or coffee. But if you don't have access to a stovetop — again, the college student or hotel guest comes to mind — then the humble kettle can serve as a versatile hot-meal maker.
Without searching very hard, we found TikTok pasta kettle videos from March 2020, February 2021, and November 1. Knowing that one year on TikTok is like 1,000 years in a human lifetime, the pasta kettle hack has had tremendous longevity on the video-sharing platform.
That doesn't mean everyone is on board with it. TikToker @brianasprinz ruffled some feathers with their approach to kettle pasta. Their video, posted on October 21, has been viewed 5.4 million times.
The viral kettle pasta TikTok started a culture war
In their viral pasta video, TikToker @brianasprinz threw some ravioli into a kettle half-full of water to give the pasta kettle hack a try. Their first mistake was calling the kettle a "heaty-up thing." Commenters from outside the U.S. especially were annoyed that @brianasprinz didn't call a kettle a kettle. "Really, do Americans not have kettles?" one commenter asked.
More than that, the fact that an American college student would even think of soiling their kettle with starch was beyond the pale for several commenters. "Who here is British and enraged?" TikTok user @the.crimson.widow asked. Another said, "Americans live on another planet I swear." It wasn't a compliment.
TikToker @brianasprinz tried to be diplomatic to their foreign critics. They posted response and apology videos in the comments, with one showing how they thoroughly wash their kettle after each pasta session. In another response video, they decided to use their kettle the way god and Europe intended: for making coffee.
Here's where you get the impression @brianasprinz is trolling their audience: They dumped coffee grounds directly into the water in the kettle, and the coffee came out a little crunchy. To say commenters were unhappy would be putting it mildly. One comment said it all: "We need another apology video."