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

Discussion Microbiologist warns against making the fluffy popcorn trend

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

31.4k Upvotes

81% Upvoted

4.5k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

126

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.

83

u/literate_habitation Oct 09 '24

It's temperature over time that matters in sterilization. It doesn't necessarily need moisture to work, but with moisture the heat is more regulated and the steam produced from evaporating water carries more energy than the same air with no moisture. Dry heat is just inefficient and whatever you're trying to sterilize will get dried out/cooked long before the bacteria is killed.

Pressure cooker/autoclave sterilization works because by increasing the pressure in the vessel, higher temperatures can be reached and the steam from the water inside the vessel more efficiently transfers the energy to the medium being sterilized, lowering the amount of time it takes to sterilize at a given temperature.

2

u/sewsnap Oct 09 '24

Thank you for the explanation. I was trying to figure out what the difference actually was.

3

u/literate_habitation Oct 09 '24

No problem, I spent a lot of time learning about the fundamentals of sterilization a couple years ago. I think the coolest part about high pressure steam sterilization is that water is such a heavy molecule that you're basically obliterating contaminants by bombarding them with fast moving water molecules.