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I read here it isn't possible to boil milk in an electric kettle without a very high probability that it will break it, though someone also mentioned that there are electric kettles that can boil milk. So far so good. But what about blood that has had an anticoagulant added to it?

It's similar to milk in some ways and dissimilar in others. Would you be able to boil blood in an average kettle that has a coil inside? Would a kettle capable of boiling milk also be able to boil blood? Or is it simply not possible to boil blood with any kind of electric kettle?

BloodyCurious
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    Is this a cooking based question, or just curiosity? Biology.SE might be better able to help with the anticoagulant aspect of this question -- there isn't a lot of cooking with blood in general, and so I don't know if you'll get great answers from this site. – Erica Jan 05 '19 at 17:09
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    (@Erica) black pudding and other blood sausages aren't rare, but they don't seem to involve boiling the blood. It's also hard to get hold of large quantities of fresh blood so making them at home isn't common – Chris H Jan 05 '19 at 18:30
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    @Chris H Both cooking and curiosity, actually. I'm curious about cooking with blood, but for some stuff (like drinks that include blood, like the one a bar in Chicago makes that I read about - https://www.ozy.com/good-sht/a-drink-for-the-bloodthirsty/36729) I would have to pasteurise or sterilise it as much as possible to make it safe for drinking; but it would, obviously, have to stay liquid. That's one part of that story. The other is that I've been looking into methods how to best do that. (1/3) – BloodyCurious Jan 05 '19 at 19:41
  • @Erica (2/3) While I was microwaving my milk for breakfast, I started wondering, if an electric kettle could boil milk too. And from milk my mind jumped to blood. ^^ I decided to look up both and found an answer to the milk question here (https://cooking.stackexchange.com/questions/84310/why-would-boiling-milk-in-an-electric-kettle-break-the-kettle), but unsurprisingly couldn't find anything about doing that with blood. – BloodyCurious Jan 05 '19 at 19:42
  • @Chris H (3/3) I'm not sure whether or not blood with anticoagulant can be boiled without coagulating in spite of it, but I guess the only way to find out for sure would be to try it. But it would be great of course if I could first establish the theoretical (im)possibility of doing that with an electric kettle, since that would be by far the easiest way to do it if it were possible. – BloodyCurious Jan 05 '19 at 19:42
  • @Erica Oh, right, Biology... That's a good idea! I'll inquire there about the coagulation issue. But I'm guessing cooks might be more knowledgeable about what electric kettles can handle. :-) – BloodyCurious Jan 05 '19 at 19:47
  • FYI, I think I've figured out the coagulation / boiling issue by now - with the help of biology.se and a few other websites (incl. http://nordicfoodlab.org/blog/2013/9/blood-and-egg). The anticoagulant doesn't have much to do with whether it would be possible to boil blood. It might - might - be possible to boil blood as long as you can do it quickly (so a good electric kettle would be perfect for that IF it could handle blood + if you didn't try to boil too much of it at once) and can then cool it down quickly again (and with a lot of stirring), because it behaves a lot like eggs when cooked. – BloodyCurious Jan 05 '19 at 21:01
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    I'd use a rice cooker. Contact between hot steel heaters and proteins can give you messy, corrosive goo to clean off, and burnt tasting boiled blood. With a rice cooker, the heating element does not directly contact the liquid, plus there's an automatic overtemp shutoff. -No burnt blood taste. – Wayfaring Stranger Jan 06 '19 at 04:26
  • @Wayfaring Stranger Do rice cookers reach boiling point as quickly as kettles? Or can rice cookers also cook at temperatures lower than 65°C for longer? Say, 60°C for 45 Minutes? Sorry if that's a stupid question; I've only cooked on a garden-variety electric stove so far. ^^' Googling rice cookers I also stumbled over multi-function cookers; turns out those might be an option too - depending on how reliably they can stick to the set cooking temperature. Some even have a sous vide function that seems to not require an actual, complicated sous vide set-up. I feel like I stumbled into Narnia. ^^ – BloodyCurious Jan 06 '19 at 12:44
  • @BloodyCurious On quick cook setting, mine reaches boiling on a litre in about 10 min. There's no manual temperature control, rather an overtemp sensor that shuts the device off after the pot temp gets much above boiling. – Wayfaring Stranger Jan 06 '19 at 15:23

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The biggest issue I could see is that kettles usually aren't designed to be cleaned easily, and it would certainly need cleaning.

I'd expect some protein residue to burn onto the element (which would then smell dreadful if left hot for long). This may lead to overheating as in the case of milk, but it would certainly be hard to clean and taint any water boiled in it afterwards.

For pasteurising you really wouldn't want it to boil - in fact one of the links in your comments notes that blood coagulates at lower temperatures than egg so you may have a very narrow window. If an anticoagulant was used it would have to be not inly food safe but palatable.

In general, experimenting in the kitchen is easiest if done in easily-cleaned containers that are also easy to observe. A kettle might be convenient but a saucepan is much more likely to be recoverable afterwards.

Chris H
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