Burning means to oxidize, which kind of means to combine with oxygen (and also kind of means to lose electrons), and metals can oxidize - we just normally call it rusting or corroding.
So, yes, metals can sort of burn but mostly it happens too slowly for us to notice it happening whereas burning happens way faster. To get that to happen, you'll need to get more metal exposed to more oxygen all at once - like by burning steel wool.
It's not pyrophoric or anything, but it's kind of neat.
Today's video has Dan explaining how baking soda helps with browning (facilitating the maillard reactions), tenderizing ground meat while letting it stay moist, and can help speed up the cooking of kidney beans, onions, polenta, green beans, and broccoli.
Some explanations are so remarkably simply that I never would've thought of them.
I've heard of hopper crystals in bismuth for years. I always assumed that they were studied by a scientist named Hopper. In this video, Adam Ragusea explains that they're actually called hopper crystals (not Hopper crystals) because they resemble the shape of a hopper that feeds ingredients into a production line.
And that's just the surface level of new knowledge that I got from this video. Adam spends much more time trying to explain why making hopper crystals of salt - the ones he shows and that I have in my cabinets at home as Maldon salt - is hard to do. Apparently they only form in super-saturated salt solutions and then only stay hopper-shaped pyramids until they either bump into other crystals to form a raft or get heavy enough to sink to the bottom of the solution and in-fill with more salt.
If only they could get them to grow in space - as an International Space Station experiment shown in the video recounts...
I'll fully admit that I assumed this was going to be a dead simple explanation. Leaf cover decreases friction because leaf-on-leaf friction is less than train-on-rails friction.
Turns out it's a lot more complicated than that, needing to look at pectin and the creation of a natural 'jam' on the rails.
Who would've guessed that the chemistry of leaf litter would result in longer travel times in the month of November in England?
Took me a while to figure out what the heck that was about, but I've been watching Adam Ragusea for a while now. His videos are a nice balance of cooking technique and science. Plus I like his style - at least in these shorter videos. (Admittedly his filmed podcasts drive me a little bonkers - as is the case with most hour-long podcasts that seem like fifteen minutes of content stretched and rambled out to a full hour.)
I'm fairly well convinced that my next stovetop needs to be induction, not gas.
