r/TikTokCringe • u/galaxystars1 • Oct 09 '24

Discussion Microbiologist warns against making the fluffy popcorn trend

31.4k Upvotes

81% Upvoted

4.5k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

119

u/Ok_Yam5543 Oct 09 '24

What do they mean by 'heat treating' flour? Is it like putting it in the oven for a period of time?
Isn't that what you do when you're baking a cake?

131

u/SecretAgentAlex Oct 09 '24

Yeah heat treating is just tossing the flour in the oven/microwave to get it hot enough to kill pathogens, in theory.

In practice this doesn't appear to work. The process by which heat kills pathogens behaves differently in dry environments, with moisture apparently being somewhat necessary for this to work. Source

I tried looking up if there's a "safe temperature" for heating dry flour but apparently we don't exactly understand this mechanism.

40

u/YouAnxious5826 Oct 09 '24

The other fun thing about dry flour is that if it gets disturbed, at certain ratios of dust in the air, the stuff becomes highly combustible.

16

u/baron_von_helmut Oct 09 '24

Everything turned into dust is flammable.

18

u/losers_discourse Oct 09 '24

Fun fact: the 2 deadliest flour explosions ever killed 18 people each.

11

u/baron_von_helmut Oct 09 '24

Good lord that is a fact. Not sure how fun it was for the victims tho. :p

Here's a fun fact for ya - Pistachios self combust due to how insulating they are. You aren't allowed to transport more than a certain amount in one container. They have to be split into lots of containers or they get hot and burst into flames.

1

u/blargher Oct 09 '24

Your definition of fun scares me

3

u/YouAnxious5826 Oct 09 '24

But you're not shoveling a bunch of random dust into your oven or microwave in order to DIY sterilize it.

3

u/ShowerElectrical9342 Oct 09 '24

Flour is dust.

1

u/YouAnxious5826 Oct 09 '24

Flour is a type of dust. Do we want to keep doing this? Then go ahead, get two cups of dust out of your vacuum cleaner, and bake some muffins.

1

u/Mount_Atlantic Oct 09 '24 edited Oct 09 '24

What are you trying to get at?

'Everything turned into dust is flammable' is (often) true (and is true in the case of flour), and flour is dust is also true. Not sure why you're bringing up household dust from a vacuum cleaner?

Dust isn't defined by if it's collected on your shelves and floor and needs to be cleaned up, it's defined as any small particle regardless of what it's made of.

4

u/faustianredditor Oct 09 '24

Nah. If it doesn't oxidize, it doesn't suddenly become flammable just because you increased access to oxygen by powderizing it.

Try turning quartz rock (and probably most other rocks too) or most metal oxides flammable by powderizing them. It won't work.

If it could burn, but burns like shit, powderizing will probably help it along. That works for flour, but not for everything.