Scary kitchen accident?

[applestar]

We had a bit of a scare-after-the-fact last night.

My heavy glass 1 qt milk bottle with silicone ring under a plastic twist-on lid EXPLODED in the refrigerator.

This is the bottle that contained my actively bubbling, cultured rice milk, which had NOT exploded for over a month+. I had added another 1/4 bottle or so of more rice milk a couple of days ago, and fed it with turbinado sugar.

It was lively and I was burping the bottle regularly… but I must have become careless, and probably over-tightened the lid (normally only finger-tight to allow gas to escape under pressure).

After I had gone to sleep, the two DD’s heard a dull “pop” and discovered the milk dripping and glass shards everywhere.

They woke me up and it took us 4 hours to empty and clean up the fridge, in addition to the 1st hour they were working on figuring out assessing the overwhelming damage and removing larger fragments and sopping up, and decided to wake me for directions.

Sometime in the midst of the cleanup, it dawned on us how much worse it could have been had the thing exploded when someone had the door open….

Here are the last two strawberries that had been inside a typical vented berry clamshell — you can see the two gleaming shards of glass that struck one of them through an opening:

A plastic bottle of BBQ sauce that had been close to the milk bottle had a sharp shrapnel that was EMBEDDED in the plastic, and three of dozen eggs in a drenched and broken glass-covered paper pulp carton had cracked though not completely broken (we rinsed the intact eggs and relocated them to another egg carton, and salvaged the three cracked ones into hard boiled eggs).

…At least my fridge got an unexpected top-to-bottom, THOROUGH cleaning — with help from my DDs that wouldn’t have been easy to solicit otherwise.


…I’ve had my share of accidental burns and minor knife injuries, but I can’t remember as scary a kitchen accident since my early cooking days — like when I had a pan of oil catch fire …or maybe when I was first learning to cut vegetables as a teen and stabbed my palm with a big knife — foolishly was holding a cabbage in my left hand while trying to core it. I still have the scar — ER doc said I was lucky not have cut some important tendons.


EVERYBODY, please be mindful in the kitchen.

[imafan26]

That is scary. I have had cans explode in the heat and when they were old and I did not clean out my pantry and other storage places soon enough.

I have always been worried about active fermentation. I don't do it very often, and I would probably forget to burp the bottle regularly, That is why I got fermentation lids for the regular mouth canning jars. that way I don't have to worry about the gas build up. Which reminds me I have some pickled onions in the refrigerator over a year. I probably should open that bottle just in case.