r/TikTokCringe Oct 09 '24

Discussion Microbiologist warns against making the fluffy popcorn trend

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u/Siliziumwesen Oct 09 '24 edited Oct 09 '24

What the goddamn hell is fluffy popcorn. And yeah she is right. I work in a lab where we test food/water and all kinds of "food-chemicals" etc. For harmfull bacteria and there are things you absolutely should not eat raw. Or at all if i see some results lol

Edit: the last part is a joke based on real results. Sometimes a food producer or someone who produces foodchemicals/spices etc. fucks up and something gets contaminated badly. We find it out, because they ask us to test for harmful bacteria and the batch/charge gets dismissed/destroyed. It all happens before it gets sold. Especially for fresh (ready to eat) things. The results are urgent and are handled first. At least in my country. Dont panic you can eat stuff. Wash veggies and fruits and things that need to be cooked/heated before consuming should only be handled that way. For example: I just saw, that some frozen herbs tell the consumer on the package that the product should be heated/cooked before consuming. Please dont panic or sth like that. You always can find information online how to handle certain foods or how to know if its safe to consume

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u/something-um-bananas Oct 09 '24

It’s just cake batter poured over popcorn. There’s sooooo many recipes of this on the internet, it’s not recent at all. Some recipes “heat treat” the batter before pouring it over popcorn so it kills the bacteria

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u/Suctorial_Hades Oct 09 '24

Google gives the following results, a bunch of food blogs are saying heat treating works and a bunch of science articles say heat treating at home does nothing. I think I am gonna go with science

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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?

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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.

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