Alarms and Fires and BOOMS! Oh MY!

[Pickles]

As a personal chef, I have heard of MANY disasters from my colleagues...accidentally setting fire to client kitchens/stoves, setting off fire/smoke alarms in the house and having a yard loaded with firefighters within seconds. ...talk about embarassing...as well as scary. So talk about the worst mess you ever got yourself into. And how you saved your kitchen...or didn't! I recommend the portable fire extinguisher, BTW..for us PC's and a regular one in every home kitchen. No matter how annoying that smoke alarm is when it goes off while you're broiling lamb chops--and you rip out the batteries!...remember to re-instate it when you're finished. I did a search for this topic and didn't see anything..so forgive if this is being discussed already.

Edited March 6, 2004 by Pickles (log)

[pjs]

Hand-held Halon filled bottle if you can find one. So much less mess to clean up.

PJ

[...tm...]

It;s not such a big deal in retrospect, but the first time I had a pot full of oil catch fire in my tint 5thg stiry walk-up the first and only thing I could think to do was hold the pot out the window so that it wouldn't set off the fire alarm.

[jackal10]

Traditional story about making crepes suzette in the restaurant, complete with flambe, without looking up first to ensure not under sprinkler head...

[Curlz]

Halon? Can someone enlighten me? Thanks!

[Jake]

Nothing I did, but I will never forget it just the same. As a young child in the early 70's my parents would often take us to fine dining restaurants while travelling. (NB: we had been taught how to behave and did so under threat of punishment. ) One night we were at the typical fancy steakhouse, red and gold velvet curtains and all. As the waiter prepared the cherries jubilee, he set the curtains on fire. Not a SMALL fire, it whooshed right up to the ceiling, waiters were running everywhere, and my brother and I were having a fine time!

Needless to say, the restaurant was evacuated, and no one was presented a bill that evening!! My mother couldn't order the cherries jubilee for years without laughing.

[FistFullaRoux]

Halon is a fire extinguisher material that is usually used around electronics equipment. No residues, and no liquid. It's a non-flammable (obviously) gas that is heavier than air, and displaces oxygen at the bottom of a fire.

Works kind of the same way that CO2 does, but without the mess.

Edited for typos. Yet again.

Edited March 6, 2004 by FistFullaRoux (log)

[Curlz]

Interesting...I've never heard of it before--thanks for the details! Do you know if it's easy to find/buy commercially (in the US)?

[McDuff]

At my first restaurant job we had a Vulcan broiler which had one of those slanted drip pans under the grill to direct drippings into a removable tray. the pan would get crusted over with cheese that dripped off the onion soup crocks and since we didn't do a lot of steaks, the thing had a dry carbonized crust that would start to smolder ominously before bursting into flame, which the chef would put out with milk.

My first Thanksgiving in a new house I was making prime rib and popovers and got a little frisky with the grease in the popover pan. It flooded out, spilled into the flame at the bottom of the oven and caught fire.

Thinking back to Executive Chef Bill Lalor dousing a fire with milk, I did the same thing. POOOFFF! And the reason why one nevers put liquid on a grease fire was demonstrated as the flames came roaring out the vents on the back of the stove and licked up the kitchen wall.

The orange glow was so intense people in the living room could see it reflected on the walls. All I could think was, Well, there goes my investment. My quick thinking brother merely shut the oven door to quell the flames, then threw a box of baking soda on it all. I was left shaking like a leaf.

Executive Chef Bill Lalor's brother Tom once went into that kitchen, turned on the ovens, broiler and salamander, forgetting the key thing of the exhaust fan, and went downstairs to prep. He came back up with his bus buckets to discover he had tripped the Ansul system. Now that was a mess.

[pjs]

Halon is a fire extinguisher material that is usually used around electronics equipment. No residues, and no liquid. It's a non-flammable (obviously) gas that is heavier than air, and displaces oxygen at the bottom of a fire.

Works kind of the same way that CO2 does, but without the mess.

Edited for typos. Yet again.

Yup. Also used extensively in motorsports as the gold-standard for on-board fire suppression systems--think oil fire.

The feds have been cracking down on its use for over ten years as they think it's a threat to the ozone layer, but haven't banned it outright yet. It is considered a hazardous material though. I think the manufacturers keep one step ahead by reformulating. Current flavor is Halon 1211. A 2.5lb hand-held goes for $124 here. If you buy one make sure the bottle is refillable.

PJ

Edited March 7, 2004 by pjs (log)

[Pickles]

  Thinking back to Executive Chef Bill Lalor dousing a fire with milk, I did the same thing. POOOFFF! And the reason why one nevers put liquid on a grease fire was demonstrated as the flames came roaring out the vents on the back of the stove and licked up the kitchen wall.

  The orange glow was so intense people in the living room could see it reflected on the walls. All I could think was, Well, there goes my investment. My quick thinking brother merely shut the oven door to quell the flames, then threw a box of baking soda on it all. I was left shaking like a leaf.

That must have smelled awful. Why did he use milk and not water? Especially since it was a dried "crust" fire and not a grease fire. Your other situation sounded dreadful...glad it worked out and nothing was too damaged/destoyed. I think in a panic, people forget the obvious..try to choke off the air supply to the fire. Very often a pot lid could have saved a whole kitchen. Or perhaps even a whole house.

Edited March 7, 2004 by Pickles (log)

[HungryChris]

New Years Day.......The cooks and kitchen crew are not ready for the all day dinner crowd that's about to happen. The cooks come in and light the grills and go upstairs to change into their working garb. The kitchen crew brings out the greese screens that were the last items thru the dishwasher the night before. They put the screens on the grills that are not yet hot enough to alert them to the fact that this wasn't such a good idea.....a passing motorist, Thank god!!! rushes in to say "there is whole shitload of black smoke coming out of the roof exhaust fans!" I shut the grills off and emptied two 1 lb containers of Morten Salt (When it rains it pours) onto them just as they were about to go balistic...Happy New Year, but it could have been worse!!!

Edited March 7, 2004 by HungryChris (log)

[balmagowry]

"Sir! Sir! The digesting machine has burst!"

The pressure-cooker classic: old gasket, forgot to check it, forgot to check the vent. We're making scraps-&-bones stock for a tremendous raised pork pie and in a big big hurry to get the recipe written, racing a deadline etc. etc., so for once... careless. While waiting for the pressure to come up we trot upstairs to get the jump on writing the headnote. Suddenly there's a pop and a loud HISSSSSSSS from belowdecks. We look at each other and immediately know exactly what has happened. Scramble down the stairs and find the entire kitchen bathed in a thin film of pork fat. Track lights over stove - track had taken first direct hit from the geyser and immediately shorted, tripping circuit breaker. (Such a pleasure when things do what they're supposed to!)

This is when I learn something about the anatomy of my kitchen. I have a 4-burner cooktop thingy (dating I think to the 30s), oven separate. Under the cooktop a lovely huge cabinet which is where my pots live. The door of this cabinet being very slightly ajar, I look inside and realize for the first time that the cabinet has no back: it's open to, and not-quite-perfectly-flush-against, the tile wall. The same tile wall which is behind the burner where the pressure cooker blew and which is dripping with pork grease... both above and below. I don't know quite enough about physics and aerodynamics and stuff to explain exactly how this happened, but the stuff has run down the wall into the back of the cabinet and somehow traveled forward, the result being that every pot and pan I own is coated with pork fat.

At this point there is obviously only one thing to do. We do it. We fall against each other and crumple to the grease-covered floor, howling helplessly with laughter. Every time we think we've laughed ourselves out, we make the mistake of looking at the cabinet, or the stove, or each other... and it all starts up again.

We finally manage to get up (not an easy proposition, because the floor is plenty slippery, and at this point so are we), though we give up on controlling the laughter. Hooting idiotically the while, we pull out my entire batterie de cuisine, armful by armful, and schlep it all into the adjoining bathroom, where we dump it all in the huge bathtub. Then comes the Catch-22 of trying to scrub down the kitchen: a losing battle at first because we are so greasy ourselves that we're making more mess than we're cleaning - it's one step forward, two steps back.

I don't remember how long it took to get it all cleaned up and cleaned out, get the pots washed and put away, get the track lighting to the point where it was safe to use, and so on. Days. Weeks. I do know, however, that the top of the pressure cooker was irretrievably ruined (believe me, during the ensuing couple of years we consulted every genius, and tried every tool and every solvent, we could think of - those miserable bits of gasket were permanently fused to the metal); but that all was not lost, because once we managed to get the pot open we discovered that there was still just enough stock left inside it to enable us to finish the pie.

We got off easy that time, I'd say.

[beans]

Scramble down the stairs and find the entire kitchen bathed in a thin film of pork fat.

Oh my! I am wiping tears from my eyes from laughing so hard. But believe me they are empathetic tears and howls of laughter, as I have felt your pain myself in a similar situation that occurred with my grandparents and their pressure cooker.

[balmagowry]

Scramble down the stairs and find the entire kitchen bathed in a thin film of pork fat.

Oh my! I am wiping tears from my eyes from laughing so hard. But believe me they are empathetic tears and howls of laughter, as I have felt your pain myself in a similar situation that occurred with my grandparents and their pressure cooker.

Tell - please tell! I do so love to meet a companion in misfortune. :snif: ... :giggle:

[jmcgrath]

Halon is a fire extinguisher material that is usually used around electronics equipment. No residues, and no liquid. It's a non-flammable (obviously) gas that is heavier than air, and displaces oxygen at the bottom of a fire.

Works kind of the same way that CO2 does, but without the mess.

Perhaps you are thinking of a dry powder extinguisher. CO2 does not leave any residue.

This reminds me of a barbecue contest I was running. The fire chief complained that Ansul would make a lot more mess than water. It took me a while to convince him that a grease fire was much more likely than a problem with the wood the teams were burning.

Jim

[Mayhaw Man]

I may have told this story in another thread, but if I did it still bears retelling.

Before my wife and I were blessed with two fine boys we regularly had lots of people over to eat on Sunday afternoon. There were some regular, permanent guests and they would usually bring a friend or two. THis would pretty much add up to 15 or so people for a Sunday afternoon in the country (these are mostly Quarterites from New Orleans and they think that my old hotel in the woods is Outermost Siberia). All manner of food was served, usually with a loosely pre arranged theme-crawfish boils, shrimp 20 ways (literally), Crabfest, Fried and nothing but Fried, pig roasts, goat roasts (don't knock it til you've tried it) etc. This was fun and we still do it occasionally, but not like we used to. Usually on Sunday we are just too tired from the week to put on a big show for city folk.

Anyway, on this particular Sunday the theme was "Starters, All Apps, All the Time". Everything served was some sort of starter and we had the usual collection of fabulous ingredients. Lots of wine and beer ( I forgot, I ran a brewery for 15 years and beer was how I knew these people in the first place, mostly, and at that point we all drank with gusto and no guilt-as twenty five year old Beer Gods are wont to do ) and other spirits were consumed and there was plenty of laughter and smarty pants word play. It was a hell of a lot of fun.

My wife Robin, aka The Lovely Mrs. Mayhaw, was in the kitchen (which is open to a very large sitting area where most everybody was) was whacking up stuff in my Cuisinart preparing the spicy/veg mixture for crabcakes (with backfin, not lump-what a waste of good crabmeat lump is in crab cakes). I was happily stuffing muchrooms with more crabmeat and not really paying much attention to her. All of a sudden she let out a howl like someone who had just cut off the end of her pointing finger and sliced through (clean through-to the bone) two others. The reason that she howled like this is that is exactly what she had done. Don't ask me how. I don't know and to this day she can't tell you. I have actually tried to recreate this and have never been able to get the top off fast enough to hit the blades with something while it is still spinning.

Anyway, she was immediatly screaming "I'll never paint again!" (she makes her living as an artist and art dealer) and other less savory statements. We grabbed her up and my friend Fred Flames threw her in his truck with me in the back and we flew to the emergency room, leaving ten or so stunned diners in our house who (we realized later) didn't really know why we had left in such a hurry.

When we got to the emergency room it turned out that the doctor on duty was a friend of ours and he whisked her into the work room and whacked her with something to lighten her load a bit. Her hand was a mess and when we got the dish towel peeled off it was clear that we had not arrived at the hospital with her whole hand. We had apparently not noticed (it was pretty gross, you wouldn't have wither) that she had actually cut off the tip of her pointing finger just below the nail. Fred hopped in the truck and went back home to locate the finger (yuck, thanks Fred). It was neatly nestled in a cuisinart bowl full of onions and garlic.

They got the other two fingers sewed up and by that time the missing digit had arrived. It was cleaned up, pronounced useable, and reattached. The guy did a fabulous job. While she is still missing a little feeling in it, otherwise it is completely normal.

Three hours later (about 6 p.m.) we arrived home to a whole array of finely prepared appetizers and she actually sat down and ate (she couldn't feel a thing thanks to modern chemistry and a friend in the emergency room). Mrs. Mayhaw is a well known trooper and absolutely never a wet blanket at a party (except for the time that I ACTUALLY put on a lamp shade for a party hat, but that is another much more ugly tale) and wanted to let everyone know that everything was going to be fine and that they could all lighten up.

The moral of this story is (sorry I can't help myself)

Sometimes in life you get appetizers, other times you get finger food.

[balmagowry]

Sometimes in life you get appetizers, other times you get finger food.

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAUUUUUUUUUUUUUGGGGGGGHHHHHHH!

Half for the story itself, and maybe a little more than half for the punch line.

Holy slicer-blades, Batman!

I can fall vastly short of topping that, with a slightly gruesome episode involving a stand-mixer and a couple of fingers and a pushing of the wrong button (intending to release the beaters, not start them!) and a failure to unplug and... well, see, it was a Mixmaster and it was a much less antediluvian one than mine at home which dates back to the 50s and doesn't have an On/Off button, only the rheostat action, so when it's off it's off and when it's on it has to go through Very Slow before it runs Very Fast, and the only button it has is the release button, so really it was a perfectly understandable mistake to make.... Anyway, I was way way luckier than Mrs. Mayhaw, especially given that there's nothing mysterious about how fingers might encounter beaters set on high and get between them at exactly the wrong moment. Once I got over the initial shock I was hugely relieved to discover that all of me was in one piece, which was more than could be said of the bowl of egg whites. Also fortunately, both of the latter (bowl and eggs) were replaceable, and ultimately the nut roll I was making came together beautifully and was a tremendous success - and I kinda kept the bandaged hand under the table and let someone else do the slicing for once. But I got one hell of a good scare, and had to be very tender with that hand for some weeks. Whew. I didn't even do anything that required surgery, but oooh the faintness and wobbliness and unreality... shock can be a wonderful thing.

[GG Mora]

Well, there was the time I turned a bottle of Irish Whiskey into a bottle rocket on one of my first nights on the line in my first and only restaurant job:

Small kitchen, midsummer, hot as hell outside, hot as f*** behind the line. The butter kept on hand for finishing sauces was a liquid pool & the wines, oils and booze used for cooking were probably approaching 100° in their bottles. There was a lull in the action, just a few entrees working, and Chef stepped off the line to replenish something or other and asked me to finish a steak with whiskey sauce he had going. Pulled the steak, tossed in a few green peppercorns, took the pan from the burner and spun around for a splash of whiskey -- good girl, play safe: add the spirits OFF the stove, then put the pan back on to flame it (bottle still in hand). Spun again to return bottle to shelf, noticed only a dribble of whiskey left & figured WTF, drain it...spun back to the stove and poured the last of the whiskey...flame from the pan traveled up the stream of whiskey to the bottle & ignited the superheated fumes inside which shot the bar pourer out the top with a quick hiss and a VERY LOUD BANG which attracted the attention of everyone in the kitchen...all eyes on me -- I just held up the bottle, said "cool!" and tossed it in the trash. I was able to fake sangfroid well enough that I secured my spot on the line then and there. Nevermind that my knees were trembling under my checked pants.

Edited to add: the bar-pourer top was found that October when we shut down for a week and tore apart the kitchen for a massive cleaning. It was behind the refrigerator in the pantry, 15 feet from where I was standing at the time of the, um, event.

Edited March 8, 2004 by GG Mora (log)

[balmagowry]

Nevermind that my knees were trembling under my checked pants...

...which had begun the evening as striped pants, I bet. Zowie, what a story! Good for you for keeping your cool. Not many would have had the presence of mind.

[beans]

Scramble down the stairs and find the entire kitchen bathed in a thin film of pork fat.

Oh my! I am wiping tears from my eyes from laughing so hard. But believe me they are empathetic tears and howls of laughter, as I have felt your pain myself in a similar situation that occurred with my grandparents and their pressure cooker.

Tell - please tell! I do so love to meet a companion in misfortune. :snif: ... :giggle:

Similar story.

It was July in Sitka and I think I was about 12 years old. My mother and I were visiting Sitka for the Summer, and for some reason I can't remember where she was during this whole event.

My grandparents were cooking some cut of beef for dinner. It was salmonberry season and there was a whole forest of those shrubs growing on half of their yard and we were child slave labour suited up with coffee cans draped around our necks with the aid of a old, worn out piece of fabric, rag. We were to pick to the brim and then repeat. We were all out of doors when the event occurred. My grandfather was down at the harbour working on the boat. My grandmother was our supervising child labour boss. I guess they figured all would be routinely fine as whatever was to be our dinner was pressure cooking away while we collected makings for large batches of jam, jelly and preserves.

Then we heard this horrific kaBOOM! The kind that you can hear the house walls creek and windows rattle when they give way to the force of exploding air. My cousin and I run inside to see the splotch mess of foodstuff from ceiling to wall to floor. This wasn't as bad as your situation because at that time, my grandmother's stove was separate and away from the rest of the cabinetry and appliances.

My grandmother was so irked and my equally impish cousin and I had a really hard time from laughing -- only further annoying her.

From that very day, I decided I would not ever own a pressure cooker myself, but I still snicker thinking about that incident.

edti: It's been a typo kind of day.

Edited March 8, 2004 by beans (log)

[lleechef]

Mayhaw Man,

You just have the BEST stories!

[balmagowry]

From that very day, I decided I would not ever own a pressure cooker myself, but I still snicker thinking about that incident.

Oh, Beans, no - you gotta get back up on the horse - even if you weren't on the horse before. I absolutely swear by my pressure cooker. Of course, I don't know if I trust them new-fangled ones or them ancient scary ones; but mine (its identical replacement, that is ) is the Presto 6-quart from the mid 70s or so and it may well be the single most useful pot I own. Of course, it is certainly a good idea to check the gasket a trifle more often than every decade or so - but that's not a particularly onerous requirement. And that is the only trouble I ever had with one, and it was entirely my fault. In fact, I even had a replacement gasket handy - I just hadn't gotten around to putting it in. So doubly my fault.