imlearning2cook
Assistant Cook
I did not know this. Almost exploded the kitchen. How do you cool down a sizzling pan of oil?
...To remove the oil I like to stuff a cup with wadded up paper towels and pour the oil into that and then just put the paper towels in the trash.
Cold water yes, but hot water won't warp the pan.With or without the oil, you probably don't want to put cold water in a hot pan anyhow. It's the fastest way to warp the bottom of your pan!
Just set it to the side, on a turned off cool burner, and wait for the temperature to drop naturally.
Here is a short clip excerpt from the Mythbuster's episode Greased Lightning that shows what happens when you add water to burning cooking oil (fireballs), and to hot oil below the flash point (1 teaspoon of water hitting hot oil instantly produces about 2 gallons of steam).
As a side story...As kids we wee always taught to never use water on an oil fire. We were taught to smother it with baking powder or a lid or something like that.
As a side story...As kids we wee always taught to never use water on an oil fire. We were taught to smother it with baking powder or a lid or something like that. Well I was sleeping over a friends house and we decided to make popcorn on the stove. The oil ended up catching fire and shooting flames that were licking the ceiling. We ran right to the freezer and grabbed the baking soda and dumped that on the fire. The powder came out of the box in one clump and did absolutely nothing. That is when we started to panic. Even though we knew not to use water, in our moment of panic we didn't know what else to do. I grabbed the spray nozzle from the sink and turned on the water and aimed it right at the fire. I do not know how we got so lucky, but it worked like a charm. the fire went right now. Now I am NOT advocating doing that because I know just how lucky we were that we did not make things 100x worse, but thankfully it worked for us against all odds.