What a Surprise: caution

The other morning, when I went to wash the skillet, it has what looked like chocolate syrup in it.

I asked dear hubby what he had in the skillet.  He said nothing.  I said what ever this is it is like a bad penny that just keeps coming back.

He looked at it and said that stuff was coming from the silicon spatula.  The spatula had a tiny crack that I could not see.

The silicon liners that I bought for the air fryer burned up the first time I tried to use them.

Have you had some cooking surprises?

For me it was when pyrex changed their formula. I was used to anything with that name being like the chemistry set glass, but the new stuff wasn't. I poured some water into it and BANG it was in bits.

Food grade silicon melts around 250C / 480F. I'm guessing things get hot in your kitchen?

K Kaba wrote:Food grade silicon melts around 250C / 480F. I'm guessing things get hot in your kitchen?

From my experience, not all "food grade" silicon meets that spec. I am starting to be very suspicious of all of it.

Here in Brazil glass plates and mugs are ubiquitous. Everyone has some (or did, until people started getting more money to get fancier tableware!). When we first moved here 20 years ago we bought a set, and over the years plates got lent out and never made their way back home, I acquired arthritis in my hands and dropped and broke a lot of things.
In the end we just had about 6 mugs left. Which decided to self-destruct for no reason. Several times I heard an explosion in the kitchen, only to find many, many shards in the cabinet. Luckily they were in a closed cabinet, not hanging on a mug hanger like my current mug collection. It eventually got all of them, I have no idea why. Other people have told me it happened to them too, I imagine there must have been microcracks or something that just one day decided to give up. But for a while there I was thinking more about poltergeists....

Several years ago, my wife worked for a wood products importer. She had to go to one of the mills in Guyana for a week and she came home with a large bowl and a mortar and pestle that were made from Purple Heart. This is a very dense tropical hardwood. The wooden bowlwent from round to oval within about a week. One day we heard a loud bang in the kitchen and found the bowl had spontaneously cracked. The mortar and pestle are still functional after many years. The bowl is as well, if you don't mind the crack.