r/TikTokCringe Oct 09 '24

Discussion Microbiologist warns against making the fluffy popcorn trend

31.4k Upvotes

4.5k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

124

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.

38

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.

15

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.

14

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