Back home, nobody stood in the kitchen doing maths. Here the Stromrechnung arrives once a year, and it is often the moment people realise that dal simmering for an hour is not free.
So I sat down and worked it out properly. Real dishes, real German prices, and — this is the part most articles skip — the cases where changing your cooking saves you almost nothing.
Your kitchen is not your biggest bill. Heating, hot water, the fridge running day and night, the washing machine — those are usually far bigger. Cooking is somewhere around a tenth of a normal household's electricity.
So nobody is going to cut their Stromrechnung in half by buying a pressure cooker. What you can do is stop losing thirty to eighty euros a year for no reason at all. That is a weekend grocery shop. It is worth ten minutes of attention.
All the numbers below use 35 cents per kWh, which is roughly where German households sit in 2026. Your own price is printed on your Stromrechnung as ct/kWh. If yours is different, the comparisons still hold — only the size changes.
One thing nearly everyone gets wrong. A 2000-watt hob ring does not use 2000 watts for the whole hour. It uses full power to reach the boil, then much less to hold a simmer — maybe 600 to 800 watts. If you calculate at full power the whole time, you will frighten yourself with a number that is three times too big. The figures below split it properly.
This is where the real money is, because it is the longest cook and most of us do it several times a week.
Open pot: about 10 minutes at full power to get it boiling, then 35 minutes of simmering. That works out to roughly 0.74 kWh — about 26 cents per pot.
Pressure cooker: around 5 minutes to build pressure, then 8 minutes cooking. Roughly 0.26 kWh — about 9 cents.
Seventeen cents a time. Cook dal or rajma five times a week and that is about €44 a year. A decent pressure cooker costs €40 to €70, so it pays for itself in roughly a year — and after that it keeps paying, plus it hands you back half an hour every time you use it.
This is the single clearest win in an Indian kitchen in Germany. If you only change one thing, change this one.
| What you cook | The usual way | The other way | Saving per year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dal / rajma 5× a week |
Open pot ~26 ct |
Pressure cooker ~9 ct |
≈ €44 |
| Chai water 2× a day |
Pot on the hob ~10 ct |
Electric kettle ~4 ct |
≈ €45 |
| Tikka, samosa, small bakes 3× a week |
Oven + preheat ~51 ct |
Air fryer ~18 ct |
≈ €52 |
| Rice 6× a week |
Hob ~11 ct |
Rice cooker ~11 ct |
almost nothing |
| Chapati on the tawa daily |
Electric hob ~12 ct |
No real alternative | — |
Look at the rice row for a second. A rice cooker uses low power but runs longer, and it comes out almost exactly the same as the hob. Anyone telling you a rice cooker will cut your bill is guessing. Buy one because it switches itself off and never burns the rice — that is a good reason. Saving money is not.
Chapati is the same story. There is no cheaper way to make a chapati, and there does not need to be. Twelve cents a day for fresh roti is not where your bill is going.
Your hob, your minutes, your electricity price — the calculator does the maths and shows you the yearly difference in euros.
Open the cooking cost calculator →Most rented flats in Germany come with a Ceranfeld — the flat black glass. It heats the glass first, then the glass heats the pot, and a fair amount of that heat goes into the room instead of the food. Induction heats the pot directly and gets to the boil noticeably faster.
But be careful with this one. Replacing a working hob costs hundreds of euros and will never pay for itself in electricity. If your flat's hob is old and slow, a single plug-in induction plate for €40 to €60 is the sensible test — use it for the long-simmer dishes and keep the built-in hob for everything else.
Induction needs pots with a magnetic base. Stick a fridge magnet on the bottom of your pot: if it holds, the pot works.
Before you buy anything, do this. Work out your own saving first, then divide the price of the appliance by it. If the answer is more than about two years, it is not a saving — it is a purchase, and you should decide it on convenience, not on the bill. Plenty of things in this article are worth buying. Not all of them are worth buying for you.
These are Amazon.de links. If you buy something through them, Desii Deals earns a small commission from Amazon. The price you pay is exactly the same. We list the rice cooker last and say plainly that it saves no money — that is the kind of list we want this to be.
For most households it is around a tenth of the electricity used. Heating, hot water, the fridge and the washing machine are far bigger. Changing how you cook is worth doing, but expect to save tens of euros a year, not hundreds.
It uses the same hob at the same power — the saving comes entirely from finishing in a third of the time. For dal or rajma cooked several times a week that works out to roughly €40 a year at 35 ct/kWh, which is more than the cooker costs.
Not really. It uses less power but runs longer, so the two come out about the same. Buy one because it switches itself off and frees your attention, not because it will lower your bill.
Air fryer for small amounts, because there is almost no preheating and a much smaller space to heat. Oven for a full tray, since the air fryer would need several rounds and you would lose the advantage.
Usually not without the landlord's agreement, and the cost would never come back in electricity savings. A single plug-in induction plate is the practical alternative and needs nothing more than a socket and magnetic-base pots.
On your annual Stromrechnung or in your provider's online account, shown as ct/kWh. Ignore the fixed monthly Grundpreis for this calculation — you pay that whether you cook or not.
All figures are worked out at 35 ct/kWh with realistic simmering power, not full power for the whole cooking time. They are close estimates for comparing methods, not a prediction of your bill. Run your own numbers in the calculator.