Did you know that if things go just wrong enough, you can create blue canola oil? I didn’t either until the other day when I decided to make some fries to go with some burgers I made.
Hungry Yet?
It was going to be a delicious meal. Some big Idaho potatoes were into thick fries (the best kind when you make them at home). I was making sliders with ground beef and just a little bit of sausage. I had fresh buns, salad greens, Vidalia onions, and spicy mustard all ready to go. The fries were timed just right with the patties so that everything would be ready to go at the exact same time. It was going to be perfect. I grabbed a metal colander to scoop out the fries (I couldn’t find a slotted spatula), dipped it in to grab my deep fried potato prize, but suddenly my cooking oil turned a bright turquoise.
I scooped out the fries and laid them to cool on a paper plate. The color change had gotten to the fries. They were contaminated. I wasn’t sure what caused this horrific turn of events, but something told me that these were inedible.
Unless it comes with the suffix -berry, I’m hesitant to trust blue food.
I was stymied. What could create blue canola oil? I knew it had to be linked to the metal strainer, but how? I always thought the strainer was steel, had it magically turned into copper? Even if it did have copper in it, how did that suddenly dissolve into canola oil?
And then the solution hit me:
Keyboards!
Remember a few posts ago when I was going over my Model M mods? You know, this one. Remember how I dyed my keycaps blue? Yeah…. about that…
It seems that I somehow mixed in my crafting colander with my food-safe cookware. The iDye Poly I used for that project was formulated to dye polymers. Most polymers a craft oriented person would want to color are hydrophobic in nature. It follows that a very hydrophobic liquid (canola oil) would dissolve the dye quite readily.
Since this little event, I have separated my metal strainers in a more obvious manner. Accidentally using lab ware for human consumption is no joke. Now the real question: what do I do with all this blue canola oil?
