You've got a bright future in crazy Victorian inventions if you can make a steam-powered time machine to get there.
this post was submitted on 25 May 2026
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Best answer
It's a better Idea than using electricity, wires don't go well with heat, and you have to charge batteries.
Of course you'd actually need the idea because fusion should be possible and we don't have that yet.
At a rolling boil you could probably get the pot stirring itself with surface geometry. Bubbles boil upwards, so putting the right fin shape should get it spinning. Seems like it would require a bunch of machine work so it would probably be prohibitively expensive to make.
This exists. I tried to find a link or video but it seems to have disappeared.
Edit: Here's a page on it. It's from 2012 though, I guess the idea never really took off.
https://newatlas.com/kuru-kuru-nabe-self-stirring-saucepan/22709/
I had a friend with a similar pot (might have been the same one shown there) and... oh my god, it was impossible to wash. Just awful. Neat to watch but oh man, never got used after that.
Why? It just looks like bumps, no? Did a sponge not get in there?
They're pretty pronounced so there's deep overhangs + not much working space on the interior. Fine to wipe down sure, but anything requiring even a little scrubbing was miserable and a standard dishwasher's spray was blocked by the geometry. We tried to use it a couple times because it was neat but then everyone in the friend group collectively gave up on it as being very not worth it.
Can you imagine cleaning such a monstrosity though?
This already works with noodles if you place them vertical the middle and then twist them and let them fall in a spiral pattern leaning against the edge of the pot. As they soften and fall in they will spin in a toroidal shape powered by the bubbles.
Bro has never seen boiling water.
It's called soup.
Then my soup isn't working.
True, there are soups like that.
Well I didn't want to say anything, but now that you brought it up...
Self-stirring pots are called soup? Sounds like that could be confusing.
If you get a good rolling boil, you shouldn't need to stir macaroni.
Tho it is a bit of a waste of energy, since a rolling boil is more than you need to cook pasta.
I remember my high school science teacher saying that once you reach boiling point any extra energy input is wasted.
That doesn't seem to be true in practice though.
I guess in a full rolling boil more of the water is at boiling point rather than just the layer at the bottom.
If it's uniformly heated, sure, the liquid is at max temperature. But even in a pot of just water, the convection isn't that fast on its own. Bubbles move very fast, liquid does not. The top is cooler. Even the center of the bottom is cooler, as the vapor bubbles will primarily form in a ring the size of the burner. The non-bubbling vapor cools the surface water at the top and the pot walls cool from external airflow. While near-boiling water may effectively be as hot as it needs to be to cook pasta, there's still gaps between boiling, rapidly boiling, and actually being at the boiling point uniformly
What? You still need the burner on if the pasta needs 7-11 minutes, or it'll lose heat.
Nah it means, once the water is at a rolling boil, turning the heat up more wont increase the heat of the water, just the rate at which its becoming steam.
Of course, the heat will dissipate if you turn it off.
Convection currents have entered the chat
It shouldn't be difficult at all to add a stirrer that gets spun by the inductive field of an induction stove.
What I'd love to have tough is a pan with built-in temperature sensor, so that I can control the temperature of the pan directly instead of only being able to control the energy output of the stove.
Rice cookers do this, in a very simple way! They operate under four basic facts:
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Assuming you've added the correct amount of water, rice is cooked when all the water has boiled away.
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Water's temperature can't go over 100°C. After that, any additional energy goes toward boiling it away.
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The temperature of cooked rice and air, without water, can go over 100°C.
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Metals of different elements expand at different rates under different temperature conditions.
So the water gets up to temperature and begins to boil. As it boils away, it cooks the rice. Once it's all gone, the temperature of the cooked rice (and thus the cooker) begins to rise above 100°; when it does, one half of a strip of two metals touching the cooker expands further than the other, bending the strip, breaking a contact, and opening the switch, which turns off the heating element.
Expanding beyond this very simple mechanism is absolutely possible! But the more configurable you want the temperature to be, the more expensive it gets. I bet the simplest way to do this would be to have a few different little probes you can clip to the inside of the pan, one for each temperature you might want to keep a pan at. Inside each would be a bimetallic strip calibrated to that temperature.
The non plus ultra would be an NFC (or similar technology) temperature sensor, so something that doesn't just return "temperature is higher/lower than X" but that actually returns a temperature.
That way you could control the target temperature via software.
Sure, but the more you pack into a small probe that's explicitly supposed to get wet and hot, the more likely something inside is going to dramatically fail and leach some sort of terrible something into your food and cost you hundreds of dollars to replace every time it died. A bimetallic strip wrapped in teflon, completing a simple circuit, and plugged in by a heat-resistant cable to your range/hob/cooktop would be easier, cheaper, and less likely to kill you.
Sous vide devices do this but they don’t go above boiling and probably won’t work well with higher viscosity liquids.
I think there is some chemistry equipment that does that?
hot plates have a motor and a magnet that couples with a stir bar.
there is however this sort of thing for stoves: https://www.amazon.com/JossaColar-Fireplace-Electric-Accessories-Thermometer/dp/B0BDM14HVM
That's for a wood stove, to distribute heat throughout the home. While it might be possible to repurpose it, I don't think it's very practical
Stir plates use magnets and magnetic stir bars, and can be used without heat
Made my own stir plate once with a computer fan, magnets, and a potentiometer. I am sure they come with heat if needed. They can come with extremely large stirring bars.
With modern induction cooking this should not be as problematic. You can use the magnetic field to put something in motion
There are things called stovetop fans that look like just a metal base with a fan attached to it, but they have a Peltier module or Stirling engine hidden inside. They use heat from the stove to turn the fan and blow warm air around the room. Should be able to make something using that trick that sticks down into a pot and stirs things. The thickness of the stuff being stirred will be the issue.
Convention currents, but different soups will have different thicknesses and the more heat that's required, but more likely it is the soup on the bottom will burn. Too many variables to design around.
You could make pots that can use a magnetic stirrer like they use in labs, but then you have to fish out a magnet from your soup.
Presumably you can use something like a Stirling engine to power a stirrer.
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I've thought long about this, specifically those devices that use the pizeo electric effect to move a fan.
Problem is that you need a temperature difference to make the effect go. But ideally I'm imagining a fish that swims around the pot converting heat to work.
I'm kinda surprised we can't do this by simply insulating the center-most half of the pot's bottom. When heated on a burner, this would make the outsides hotter than the core, which ought to cause our soup to rise along the sides of the pot and then roll back to the center, forming a nice current that auto-stirs.
I suspect the reason we don't do this is that eventually, even insulated, the center would still reach equilibrium & we'd lose our circulation. In order to keep this going, we'd need to change the burners, not the pots. We'd need to design burners to be hot on the outside but cooled at the center.
Extrude the insulated center and it might work.
I could swear I've seen some sort of small three pronged thing that you drop into your pot, and as the liquid boils, it spins and stirs it.
I've got one! It's shit. For anything more viscous than, say, hot chocolate it's just vibrates in place.
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Ok here’s my pitch: a pot with a steam powered magnetic stir bar system built into a sealed loop in the bottom.
yes there is , in chemistry they have this weighted object that is put in solution to stir it while its hot.
Those don't work via the heat tho, the plate has a rotating magnetic field that rotates a magnetic stirrer
Maybe on an induction stove top
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