With the holiday season just around the corner, you’ve probably already started planning what to serve at gatherings like Thanksgiving. It takes high-quality ingredients to whip up a delicious holiday meal that all your guests will love. But there’s one important ingredient you might be overlooking: water. The quality of the water you use when cooking or baking makes a huge difference. Unfiltered water can cause unintended negative effects on the dishes you’ve worked so hard to prepare, including taste, texture, and appearance.
How Cooking with Filtered Water Improves Food Quality
Whether you rely on well or city water, there are likely impurities present that could impact your food’s taste, texture, or color if they aren’t filtered out. Some common contaminants include:
- Chlorine: Found in city water, chlorine and chloramines leave water with a chemical or bleach-like odor and taste. When in contact with dissolved organic matter, chlorine can cause disinfection byproducts (DBPs), which are potentially toxic.
- Sulfur: Commonly found in well water, sulfur causes a rotten egg odor.
- Iron: Commonly found in well water, iron leaves a metallic taste and a reddish brown or yellow discoloration.
- Manganese: Commonly present in well water, manganese may cause water to appear brown.
- Sediment: Sometimes present in tap water, dirt, clay, silt, rust, and other sediment particles cause water to appear cloudy or murky.
- Hard water minerals: Often present in city or well water, hard water minerals calcium and magnesium leave a white, chalky residue on surfaces.
Baked Goods
Filtered water is ideal for baking better bread, rolls, biscuits, cookies, and other baked goods. Water is key to forming gluten, which helps doughs rise and form the right texture. Water also helps disperse ingredients like salt, sugar, and yeast throughout the dough. Hard water minerals and chlorine in particular are problematic for baking. While it’s fine to have some calcium and magnesium in your water, excessive hard water minerals limit fermentation. This results in tighter gluten, making dough denser and chewier than desired once baked. Chlorine has similar effects and chlorine can also leave a slight aftertaste in baked goods. Filtered water helps create a smooth, elastic dough that bakes more evenly and doesn’t impact taste.
Produce
Fruits and vegetables benefit from filtered water. Boiling or steaming produce like vegetables is a common cooking method. It helps the vegetables not only retain flavor but also achieve the preferred texture. Hard water, chlorine, and other contaminants can add a distasteful flavor or toughen vegetables during cooking. These contaminants may also leave vegetables looking dull and less vibrant. Filtered water keeps produce tender and crisp, maintains its bright, appealing color, and allows the food’s actual taste to shine through.
Pantry Staples
Pantry goods like rice, pasta, beans, and noodles rely heavily on water quality during cooking. Impurities in water can affect starches in some pantry goods, leading to undercooked or unevenly cooked pasta or noodles. Hard water can also make beans, lentils, and rice more tough as the minerals in hard water interact with proteins. Filtered water for cooking mitigates these issues, resulting in more evenly cooked pantry goods.
Sauces and Broths
Sauces like gravy, stocks, and broths are commonly used in holiday meals and can take on a chemical or metallic taste from unfiltered water. Broths and stocks may also appear cloudy as a result. Filtered water allows the pure flavor of your sauce, gravy, or broth to come out naturally.
Beverages
Similar to sauces and broths, beverages are highly affected by unfiltered water. Even if you’re just adding ice to a drink, unfiltered water used to make ice may ruin a carefully crafted drink. The better your water tastes, the better your beverages will taste, too.
What Does a Water Filter Do?
Water filters reduce the quantity of contaminants in water by trapping them within filter media. As water flows through filter media, impurities remain caught in the filter while water molecules pass through.
Keep Reading: Do I Need a Whole House Water Filter?
Some filters are designed with multiple stages of filtration, such as Kind Water’s Whole House Water Filter, which includes both a sediment and an activated carbon filter to address a wide range of common yet potentially harmful contaminants. As a whole house filtration system, this product ensures filtered water flows from every faucet.
Shop Kind Water’s Whole House Water Filter
Kind Water’s Reverse Osmosis Drinking Water System offers six stages of filtration, providing customers with exceptionally clean drinking water. However, this system only filters water at the point of use, such as from a kitchen or bathroom sink.
Shop Kind Water’s 6-Stage Reverse Osmosis Drinking Water System
What Does a Water Softener Do?
Water softeners specifically target hard water minerals like calcium and magnesium. There are two common types of water softeners available: salt-based and salt-free. Salt-based systems use a process called ion exchange to reduce calcium and magnesium in exchange for sodium. This process does slightly increase the amount of sodium present in water, which may pose an issue for those with strict sodium intake limits. Salt-free systems rely on Template Assisted Crystallization (TAC) cartridges to alter calcium and magnesium structures so they are unable to clump together to form scale. Therefore, TAC doesn’t actually reduce mineral levels, meaning they may still impact food when cooking.
