Last night my sexy husband and I signed up for a Netflix account so we could watch a movie instantly over his xbox. The plan was to watch the movie while we ate these awesome desserts we got from Whole Foods the day before. I thought the desserts would go well with coffee, so I put some water on to boil while we searched for a decent movie to watch. It seemed like water was taking forever to boil (and I smelled hot metal...new stove?), so after a while I went to check on the water. I figured I'd grind the coffee beans while I waited for the water to finish up. In the kitchen, the hot metal smell was really strong, and the kettle on the back burner wasn't even steaming. Instead the front burner underneath my empty dutch oven was red-hot. "Crap!" Fearing that the pot would be fused to the burner, I picked it up immediately. It lifted easily. "Whew!" I tilted my head to look at the bottom of the pot, expecting to see some back char markings. Instead I saw a weak spot. "I ruined my pot!"...the pot in my hands ....that was getting hotter!
I called for my sexy husband to come...quickly. I had no place to set it down. He came, grabbed some pot holders, and took the pot from me. Disaster averted. I was distraught. I ruined my pot. I told him that the bottom was ruined. He tilted the pot to see....
...and hot, molten, liquid metal started pouring out of the bottom of the pot!
I have no idea how it happened...or how the liquid metal didn't land on one of us. But it didn't. It landed on the stove top, the handle of my new, beautiful oven, and all over the floor before we got the pot outside. When we came back in to survey the damage, we noticed that metal had been pouring into the stove before I even lifted the pot. There was a golf-ball sided piece of metal in the tray under the burner and a larger piece of metal under the tray.
The metal on this step stool is permanent. 
The metal on the floor came off, leaving permanent black scorch-marks.
My sexy husband kept trying to tell me that this is just a little mark on my beautiful, new stove. "Maybe I could just put a towel over it."
That didn't really help.
The piece of metal under the drip tray.
This should give you a sense of scale.
Should this story have a moral? Don't leave empty pots on the stovetop? Don't turn on the wrong burner? Don't buy cheap sets of pots and pans from Target? I mean, who knew that you could liquefy your pots on a burner in less than the time that it takes in boil water?
I had nightmares last night. I dreamed that I liquefied my pot. Each time I woke up, I told myself that it was just a dream. It couldn't possibly happen. But it wasn't. And it did.
4 comments:
my goodness! what a weird experience! this is pretty alarming, by the way--what if you accidentally cooked all the liquid out of a dish inside one of these pots? would the same thing happen?
i'm glad you're both okay. that could have been much worse...
Wow, I'm amazed. Molten metal! Like Cindy, I'm so glad that you guys didn't get hurt.
Wow, I think I'm getting ideas now for metal sculpture, though not with melted dutch ovens. I would rate that an 8 out of 10 on kitchen disasters.
My uncle wrote this on my facebook: "Coils reach 2000 degrees. Aluminum melts at 1200 degrees. I believe it. Go with cast iron next time. ;)"
I looked the pot over yesterday, The inside of the pot is unaffected, and the copper plating on the bottom is unaffected except a slit along the edge on one side where the aluminum core poured out.
Is that a manufacturing defect?
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