We had a little safety incident at the house. It's not really wood related, but wood does figure into it if you read closely. In any event, I spent an hour of my life cleaning up a big mess when I could have been doing something else.
I had heard of such a thing, but never saw it happen on a kitchen stove before. I’ve seen it happen with a microwaved glass of water, but I pretty wwell dismissed that it could happen in a steel pan full of food. I was cooking some pork rib tips. These are pork ribs sawed about 1 1/2 inches long. Wal-Mart sells them in big plastic tubs. I had actually cooked them the day before. I cut them into individual one-bone pieces and boiled them in water for about 45 minutes. Then I let the pan cool and put it in the refrigerator.
The next day, the pan was cold, and there was a hard white layer of pork fat on top of the pan's contents. I wanted to cook the ribs for another hour or so before adding vegetables, and I sat the pan on the stove on Medium High. I sort of propped up one side of the lid with a fork so they wouldn't boil over. After a little while, I lifted the lid, and as I did, the pan exploded. It sounded about as if I had slammed the pan down on the burner pretty hard.
Bang! My wife was across the kitchen, up on a step stool, and it must have been pretty loud where she was standing, to judge from her reaction. My daughter was standing behind me, and she got startled, I don't know if it was the loud bang or Mommy's reaction, but she was yelling "aye-yi-yi-yi" just like Mommy was. (My wife tends to use that as her default startled interjection, and I intentionally taught it to my daughter around the time she turned 1, because it is hilarious when my wife says it and the baby repeats it.) I'm the only one who got splattered, and not badly.
About 2/3 of the 6-quart pan's contents had been ejected. There was liquid on the 8' ceiling and all over the stove, backsplash, hood recess, and nearby cabinets. Ribs were on the stove and on the floor and stuck behind the stove, and little pieces of pork were on the cabinets and backsplash and coffee maker and toaster and microwave oven. The worst of it was the pork fat, which solidified wherever it got, which was everywhere. It took me about an hour to clean up the mess. No, I think the worst of it was that this stove was installed about 50 years ago, and you do not want to see what’s under a kitchen stove that’s sat in the previous owner’s kitchen and not been cleaned behind for 50 years while you’re cooking dinner. In fact, I’m making a mental note to take an non-scientific survey to see whether I observe plumbers to be skinny and underfed-looking in general.
I figure this was a case of superheating. All the pores in the pan and the food were probably liquid-filled, and all the dissolved air had likely been driven out of the pan contents by boiling. The solidified fat probably acted as a good barrier and kept air from dissolving in the cooled pork broth overnight.
I'm sure that somewhere there is a recommmended method to prevent superheating in the kitchen. It would be really tedious and stupid to stand there stirring a pot the whole time it's coming to a boil. Nobody does that except maybe with cream sauces and stuff like that. I guess if I had stirred the pot before heating it, the air that would have dissolved and entrained in the cold liquid might have provided an air/liquid surface for the hot liquid in the bottom of the pan. At least, I’d have cracked that hard pork fat vapor barrier. Come to think of it, I think I remember a long time ago hearing a recommendation to stand a wooden spoon in a pot before boiling it, and that would make a lot of sense.
