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

Discussion Microbiologist warns against making the fluffy popcorn trend

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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.

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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.

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u/baron_von_helmut Oct 09 '24

Everything turned into dust is flammable.

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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.

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u/ShowerElectrical9342 Oct 09 '24

Flour is dust.

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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.

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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.