So I've been making things out of plastic polymers. This of course generates some waste of polymeric nature - mostly residue on a Pyrex beaker I use for mixing. I tried a bunch of commercially available cleaners but I hit on an old idea for a solution (pun intended): old fashioned lye.
Lye is just concentrated potassium hydroxide (KOH). That's what I used to use in a former life as a lab chemist: got a tough-to-remove goo in you flask? Just chuck it in a KOH bath. Pure KOH is not easy to come by AFAIK, but my backyard fire pit offers a convenient solution. Just load up a plastic bucket with ash, add some water and voila! Instant KOH bath. It's mild, but just strong enough for what I need.
This must be an old camping or boy scout trick...am I right, Chip?
59 comments:
Chicklit,
Using lye made from ashes along with whatever fats were available was how the pioneers (and I'll bet a lot of others in the pre-industrial age) made their soap.
Not just that, YH, but the very name "potassium" derives from the word "potash" which means "pot ash." Not the stuff wafting around Denver, but the stuff left after burning wood in a pot. I touched on that briefly back here
The fascinating story of how kalium (chemical symbol K) got renamed potassium is here
This concludes my chemical pedantry.
Now the KOH brothers are to blame for your mysterious & mischievous chemical inventions? figures.
Very interesting. Will it work on the scale that's developed on one of my glass baking dishes? CLR didn't work.
What I meant to say-- it is really astonishing that the KOH brothers have tentacles that reach into your back yard bbq pit.
Deborah: Your bucket has to be big enough for total immersion to get the outside. And it's not very fast -- overnight. You could try letting the wet ashes sit in the pan. There's no odor, but then you have to dispose of the wet ashes. I'm going to let mine slowly evaporate then return them to the fire pit. Ashes to ashes.
I also bought some of this to try out as a degreaser. It's pricey, but I heard it works well. I'll let you know after I get it. All of the best degreasers, e.g., methylene chloride are environmental hazards.
We always did that in the Boy Scouts when we had a pot that had burned food (usually hunters stew) at the bottom.
Worked way better than Brillo.
This is how South American indians treated their corn to turn maize into hominy into masa harina a process in their native language called nixtamal, thus tamales
Anglicized nixtamalization.
This is important !
Pay attention. *snap, snap*
For you see, the process makes maize more easily digestible and nutrients more readily available and accessible to the body. You know how you poop out all those corn kernels -- that doesn't happen with corn processed this way. As maize cultivation was carried northward to North American indians and found a central place in the diet of certain pueblo tribes, they failed to bring the nixtamalization process with them, so too the Spanish, and their heavily maize-related diets led to incidences of curvature of spine in newborns, evident in their burial skeletons.
I saw this on t.v. !
So that PROVES it.
Although unfortunately I cannot find anything online to substantiate such claims. And I TRIED !
Oh, just FORGET it.
But the process does leave behind a flavor. When hot water is added to masa harina the bouquet that rises from the bowl transports you instantly to Mexico, if you are the sort easily transported that way by aroma, and if not then you're just out of luck, and it tells you, "Wow man, this is real. I'm on the right track. Anything I do with this stuff is going to work." And it does. If you are the sort who listens when food talks, and if not then you're just out of luck.
It's also how bakers turned pretzels dark brown on the outside and bread tender inside with their own unique flavor.
For you see, a baker was cleaning his place using a fresh lye solution when through careless he he tilted a tray of fresh pretzels rising as bread rises into the tub of cleaning lye solution. The baker goes, "oh shit. I'll bake them anyway. And he did. And on a dare took a bite and declared "this is great!" and he didn't die. Seems the high heat disables the poisonous mixture molecularly. So says Harold McGee, a famous scientist interested in food, author of On Food And Cooking the veritable Bible used by Cooks throughout the English speaking world.
The story is possibly apocryphal. But it sound good innit.
I notice heavy baking soda solution does the same thing. And baking soda in yeast dough alters the dough considerably. Makes it more manageable, more stretchy more sticky. More fun. It is the secret ingredient to Asian noodles that they stretch unbelievably without using a roller or anything. Just stretch a dough wad and fold the strands and keep stretching and folding until they have hundreds of strands.
It is the secret ingredient to Asian noodles that they stretch unbelievably without using a roller or anything.
Incredible! And all along I thought it was Calgon!
@Young Hegelian: I was channeling Alice Cooper in Milwaukee at my 1:50 PM.
Trooper was a fucking Boy Scout!! Where did you camp, Queens?
That is great news, chick, I really like that baking dish. Thank you.
Where will you get ashes, deborah? Do you have a fireplace?
Just load up a plastic bucket with ash
Well, here is the question. What kind of ash. Does it matter if it is wood or a mixture of wood and paper.
When I was in college and was taking a class in ceramic glaze preparation.....very much a chemistry class where we had to measure the ingredients based on their mole. One assignment was to use ashes in the glaze. We fired the wood. Gathered the ashes. Pounded them in a mortar. Got it wet. Let it dry. Pounded it again and got it wet, then sieved finely....and one more time on the pounding and dry sieving this time.
Each student added their ashes to the same formula and glazed our pieces for firing (cone 8 I believe). It was amazing how different each person's glaze turned out depending on the wood that they used. Oak made a very nice greenish yellow.
:-)
@DBQ: I would say use raw wood ash from trees or lumber. Trees use and sequester potassium which is why it's there. The paper pulping process may chemically remove some of the potassium (which is water soluble).
Actually Staten Island. Camp Pouch.
Alpine in New Jersey.
Spruce Pond on Route 17.
Ten Mile River in Narrowsburg NY.
Millions of Scouts from NYC camped there.
We all know the koh lye.
Oak made a very nice greenish
Before the petrochemical industry, many dyes came from trees and plants. The red/blue dye in old fashioned litmus paper came from lichens. The dyes are pH sensitive and treating wood with base might explain the color change. Just a guess.
April Apple said...
We all know the koh lye.
OK, that was cute.
Troop, wasn't there a big BSA camp at Fire Island?
I don't know about glass, but if you're having trouble cleaning steel cookware, Barkeeper's Friend is supposed to be the best stuff out there.
All of the best degreasers, e.g., methylene chloride are environmental hazards.
Lol. No doubt. But you could let her in on the college chemistry lab "secret" for cleaning most organics out of your glassware: Acetone.
Granted, Deb would probably not be able to get away with using enough of it to kill off the wildlife in her vicinity, but in the amounts offered in the form of nail polish remover you could probably have enough to scour something.
My English friend's faucets were absolutely grimy white. I tried to even Amazon order a bottle of Soft Scrub (lactic acid) to use on it. But they're even stricter apparently and wouldn't process the order.
Assholes!
Before the petrochemical industry…
The development of which coincided IIRC with the pharmaceutical industry - i.e. aniline. (And staining microscopy slides).
Configuring mass equivalent-based quantities when working with multiple valences is such a damn pain in the ass. It's pretty much the only challenge in the field that makes me still curse aloud.
Barkeeper's Friend is supposed to be the best stuff out there.
Yes!! It is. I have several cans of it that I ordered from Amazon. Can't buy it locally. Its fantastic on my stainless cookware. Pretty harsh on your hands though. Either wear gloves if you are sensitive or be sure to wash well after and use some lotion.
Cleans and polishes using a soft cloth or sponge without scratching the finish.
I didn't know dry cleaners used Calgon. Perchloroethylene! Ancient Chinese secret!
Trooper, I would love to hear more about your Boy Scout. What got you interested. How long were you a Scout? How far did you advance? This is fascinating to me.
I tried acetone and turpentine too but they didn't work for me. They work as solubilizers. KOH works because it frees up the surface siloxy groups on glass. Concentrated KOH, spiked with ethanol, will actually etch glass. It's a bit like HF, but opposite in polarity. This is why they both always comes in plastic bottles or jugs.
Remember the scene in "Breaking Bad when Walt sends Jesse shopping for their home lab (which required HF)? He tries telling him over the phone which plastic tub to buy (HDPE) but of course the HS dropout fails.
Anyways, deborah, acetone might work for you too (it didn't for me) but it's pretty smelly. No, stinky smelly. "Blinded By Science" smelly.
The way Scouting worked in my day is that you went to the Camps that the NYC Boy Scout Council owned. Each Council or District owned various places and you could just reserve a spot for tents or leanto's or maybe a cabin.
But it was usually Pouch or Alpine.
They were the closest and you could get there by bus or subway or the ferry.
Pouch on Staten Island was a trip. You could sneak out to the bodega to buy cigarettes. Good times.
If DBQ recommends a last-resort product then that's all the final proof I need.
Pretty interesting about the different woods and glazes. That sounds cool.
I was a Life Scout but could never make Eagle because I couldn't swim for shit.
The troop was a real neighborhood thing. We had guys who were in it for fifty years. The nucleolus were a bunch of guys who were in WW2 and Scouting brought back the camaraderie of their Army days. So they would come to Summer Camp every year.
You had several generations passing down knowledge. The troop still has a reunion every year up at TMR. I don't go much anymore because I am too busy. But I still run into guys all the time when they come back to the old neighborhood.
This will play in later in the Joey Gallo series. Most likely in the next book.
Of course, grease is trickier than ordinary small amount organic compounds.
I knew about HF but not KOH for etching. It's so weird that glass is less durable than polyethylene when it comes to those things.
I never really watched Breaking Bad, which is unfortunate as it would have been cool to see a chemistry-based show. But I always like to take my time with those things and get the visual images going as strong as possible. I like my chemistry blatant, descriptive and as colorful or at least visual as possible.
I'll bet Troop was never a Cub Scout. "Be square and obey the law of The Pack" was a bridge too far.
I went to Eagle, but had more of a straightedge side to me initially.
I suppose I still do, in some ways. I'm irreverent, but liked the outdoorsy scouting thing and the civic ideal.
Glad to hear Troop you went as far as you did with it. You're a good guy, and we'll just get a jet ski to lug you around in your hot tub if anything goes awry.
;-)
Me neither. I never did that cub thing.
Or the We belows. Or whatever they were called.
Good thing you can bet Troop hates hipsterism too much to do the douchey male nipple ring thing, or else one might get tempted to lug him around with the jet ski via the most accessible "latches".
That would be weird but you see things like that in Vegas.
Ah, Vegas.
Our troop was a little different. You see several of the kids had fathers who were ...errr..connected so to speak.
We cooked pasta and meatballs on every hike. Wine for everyone.
We went for Horsemanship merit badge at Monticello Raceway.
One time we had to leave early because one of the kids brothers was run down on Rapeyle Street when they were trying to get his father.
I never did the Cub Scout thing. Everybody wanted to be in the Main Troop. The younger kids just went along with the older ones. Everybody and their brother were in it. It was a real neighborhood thing.
Hey but I don't want to hijack Chickie's thread. Carry on.
It's so weird that glass is less durable than polyethylene when it comes to those things.
The -O-Si-O- bonds as in glass are very strong which explains why it takes so much energy to rip oxygen away from silicon to make chips for example.
-CH2-CH2- bonds as in polyethylene are thermodynamically unstable but kinetically inert. It takes the very strongest of acids or the inside of an enzyme to polarize the CH bond.
If Sixty Grit were here, he would say that he polarized a C_H bond.
I'm sure it's all relate-able. Sorry to hear about the street incident, though.
I remember one of the older kids (patrol leader, actually) I thought was cool got the scoutmaster upset and he yelled at him to hand over some diversionary thing - I couldn't remember if it was paper or fabric or what. He compliantly held it out if front of him and when the scoutmaster angrily grabbed it, the boy held on. ANd kept a straight face. This repeated a couple times, with the scoutmaster getting redder and the patrol leader remaining just as composed. Until he let go.
I never pulled stuff like that, but still somehow found it funny. You could cause little ruckuses every now and then, but during the summer was when we made up for it by earning badges more seriously. All good.
Ritmo I went to a hipster joint in Fort Greene on Saturday night. $28 for three glasses of wine.
There is a reason I hate hipsters.
There's more than just one reason.
Anyway, it's not like micro brewers are hipsters, but here's at least a funny clip with the inimitable Triumph on the subject - if you don't find it too diversionary.
Triumph is a genius. And a god.
ANd a dog.
Chickie I apologize if this isn't topical. But then, brewing is chemistry. Different chemistry, but finding a relate-able point could be a fun challenge.
Troop and Ritmo, Thanks. I tried Scouting, went on a camporee and hated it. I have a friend who made Eagle Scout. His favorite part was something you touched on, smoking cigs on trips. I would love to hear more from you guys as you see fit.
Aren't olives cured in lye?
I don’t really have tattoos. :)
Just looking for an avatar and posted the above comment before I’d made up my mind.
Chick, I have a free-standing wood stove that vents out the chimney. Haven't used it as much as in the past, relying more on electricity.
Ritmo, thanks for the acetone suggestion, I'll try it though hate the smell of it and nail polish.
DBQ, thanks for the Barkeeper's Friend tip. I remember when we lived in and old farmhouse that had an old-fashioned tub with the enamel mostly worn off the bottom. We'd use Zud to get out the rust stains. Good times :)
I was once in a greasy diner and there was this pot that was blackened and crusted like you wouldn't believe. We were drunk at the counter and razzing the short order cook like we did every Saturday morning around four o'clock.
He laughed at us and said "what do you shit head college boys know about anything." Put the pot on the burner and poured a bottle of Coca Cola in it. Cleaned that sucker slick as a whistle.
He turned to us and said "Just think what that does to your insides."
I can't stand cigarette smoking and fortunately didn't know anyone in the scouts who could.
I took seriously that thing about treating your body/physical health well. It didn't seem controversial to me when I was young.
As we get older, we might get to appreciating certain physical vices more and more. But the allure of being an ashtray mouth just never made sense to me.
Even cigars or pipes should be (slightly) better. But then, the companies never loaded those things with enough toxic additives to make them more addictive than heroin.
Acetone was moreso my attempt to round it back to basic organic solvents. But I agree with Chick that greases can be especially tricky and require extra special approaches. Of course, if something's thin enough to wash away with soap, that works to simply solubilize it. But if it's a really thick job, it might work to try Zout detergent. That's got enzymes that even break down what gets on dishes.
But cooking changes the chemistry of things. So if what you've got is some kind of precipitate (scale) that won't wash away, that sounds like the scale on bathroom faucets that Soft Scrub (lactic or citric acid) is good on.
And then, there's the BKF that me and Bunny mention. I've never tried it myself, but it's supposed to be the solvent of last resort for getting off whatever's still stuck to any cookware that multiple washings have failed to remove.
That last post was for Deborah.
Thanks, Rit, it's a scale build-up on a glass pan. I'll try the softscrub, I didn't know it was organic.
Soaking feed corn in lye and then grinding it up is how you get grits. Its more digestible than corn meal mush, which grits resembles.
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