Thomas has been preparing his food in the kettle for eight years – and it works surprisingly well

Innovative use
Thomas has been preparing his food in the kettle for eight years – and it works surprisingly well

A small financial crisis in his shared apartment meant that a Berlin student had to improvise: he started to boil in the kettle – and stuck with it. Now a cookbook with 100 recipes for the kettle will appear.

“Boy, you need a stove!” his mother said when Thomas told her that he now cooks his food in the kettle. That was eight years ago when this cooking variant was the only option for him. “The gas had been turned off in my shared apartment, we couldn’t pay the bill even though we had joined forces,” says the 36-year-old. “I was a student and had a relatively small monthly budget.” An emergency situation in which he improvised in order to be able to prepare a hot meal. It became a conviction that inspired the Viennese publishing house axis Verlag to bring out a suitable cookbook that will be published in October 2018: “JOW – The Joy of Waterboiling”.

The first dish that Thomas Götz from Aust made in his kettle was very simple, a ready-made soup. But it did not stop. “At some point other things came along – like boiling eggs, first pasta dishes. Until I came up with the idea of ​​frying onions in the kettle for a real soup,” he recalls. Von Aust grew up in the Allgäu, has lived in Berlin for 14 years and “works in the nightlife”, as he puts it. In concrete terms, this means: As a co-organizer of the electro parties “Chantal’s House of Shame” in the Berlin Suicide Circle he is in charge of the PR work.

“You are infinitely flexible”

Aust has long since become a believer and has learned to appreciate the advantages of cooking in a kettle. “One is infinitely flexible. I don’t need a kitchen, just a power connection. It’s economical to use and inexpensive to buy, my device cost 20 euros,” he says. In fact, it’s still the same stove as it was eight years ago, “an amazingly robust device,” praises von Aust. When making a new purchase, he recommends future waterboiling chefs to pay attention to the following:

Anyone who thinks of a kettle easily has the image of an unsightly kitchen appliance in mind. Von Aust explains why: “It’s more of a mental thing that you see the kettle as dusty and chalky and not as an innovative, everyday kitchen utensil,” he believes. “But if, like me, you use the kettle every day and not just to boil water, you clean it every day, just like a saucepan.” He still remembers his friends’ first reactions to being served from the kettle, “they ranged from amused to a little repelled”. But that changed quickly. Von Aust’s masterpiece was to create a three-course meal for eight guests in two kettles.

Supposed disadvantages are advantages

The fact that the temperature of his kettle cannot be regulated is not a problem for von Aust, quite the opposite. “There are only the variants on and off, but that means that nothing can boil over,” he says. “For example, I put pasta in the boiled water, salt, stir and after five minutes I turn the kettle on again. Otherwise I don’t have to worry about anything.”

Aust has been dealing with the topic of food for a long time. He worked for the first time in 2013 with the artists’ association Wiener Axis, from which the publishing house that will now publish his cookbook emerged. “That year they produced and premiered my first play, ‘The Frittate,'” he says. And that went down pretty well.

“A Thermomix is ​​50 times as expensive”

Because the Axis publishing house is still young, it has a Kickstarter campaign to support the cookbook production, with a financing goal of 10,000 euros. A little more than 5000 euros have already been collected. “It serves to make the project better known and as security, which can be essential for a young publisher,” says von Aust. “The cookbook will definitely come out in October.” He hopes that many readers will try this way of cooking. “If only because there is so much heart and soul and young master talent in the book,” he reveals, “and when you see what a device like the Thermomix, which costs 50 times as much as a kettle, caused…”

Aust’s parents have long since made peace with the kettle and accepted their son’s cooking technique – he simply convinced them. “They were very, very skeptical at first. I then prepared the same food on the induction cooker and in the kettle and they couldn’t tell which one came from where. And then they said: ‘Well, then you’re doing it right after all. ‘”

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