Steam Explosion - Flash Boiling in Cooking

Flash Boiling in Cooking

There is also a cooking technique called flash boiling, in which a smaller amount of water is used so as to quicken the process of boiling. An example of this technique is used to melt a slice of cheese onto a hamburger patty, whereby the cheese slice is placed on top of the meat on a high-heat surface (e.g., a hot frying pan), and a small quantity of cold water is thrown onto the surface near the patty. A vessel (such as a volume-rich small pot or frying-pan cover) is then used to quickly seal the steam-flash reaction, which disperses much of the steamed-water on the cheese/patty. This results in a large release of heat, transferred via vaporized water condensing back into a liquid (a principle also utilized in refrigerator and freezer production).

Read more about this topic:  Steam Explosion

Famous quotes containing the words flash, boiling and/or cooking:

    The point of the dragonfly’s terrible lip, the giant water bug, birdsong, or the beautiful dazzle and flash of sunlighted minnows, is not that it all fits together like clockwork--for it doesn’t ... but that it all flows so freely wild, like the creek, that it all surges in such a free, finged tangle. Freedom is the world’s water and weather, the world’s nourishment freely given, its soil and sap: and the creator loves pizzazz.
    Annie Dillard (b. 1945)

    O but we talked at large before
    The sixteen men were shot,
    But who can talk of give and take,
    What should be and what not
    While those dead men are loitering there
    To stir the boiling pot?
    William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)

    For the writer, there is nothing quite like having someone say that he or she understands, that you have reached them and affected them with what you have written. It is the feeling early humans must have experienced when the firelight first overcame the darkness of the cave. It is the communal cooking pot, the Street, all over again. It is our need to know we are not alone.
    Virginia Hamilton (b. 1936)