ichudov@Algebra.Com (Igor Chudov) wrote :
One thing I would like to buy is a pressure cooker.
I have found them to be of little use. Save some $, try a garage sale.
Another is a kind of charger that charges water with CO2, to make homemade fizzy water insteado f buying it at stores. In Russia these things were called syphons. Any ideas?
Apparently they're called siphons here too : http://www.williams-sonoma.com//srch/name.cfm?ftype=name&imgs=on&name=soda
igor
Try your regular stove. Set it to, say, 400 degrees and pray that the papers will remain legible. I'd prbobably be more likely to be attacked by meteorites or abducted by aliens than be anthraxed via mail, but *if* I had to sterilize mail, I would use a stove.
In labs an autoclave is used to sterilize everything.
Autoclaves are basically pressure cookers, high pressure steam at 121 deg. Celsius and ~2 Bar kill everything.
If 121C is adequate why not use the same temperature in your oven? I doubt the absolute pressure matters. A nitrogen atmosphere might be a good thing to reduce oxidation of inks and paper. I doubt it would help your new Visa card though. Mike I use 107C in a conventional oven for ~8hours to do pork ribs. I'm considering getting a smoker to do the last hour though.
On Tuesday, October 16, 2001, at 12:04 PM, mmotyka@lsil.com wrote:
ichudov@Algebra.Com (Igor Chudov) wrote :
One thing I would like to buy is a pressure cooker.
I have found them to be of little use. Save some $, try a garage sale.
Different strokes. I use mine a fair amount. It's a Kuhn-Rikon, recent generation, lots of safety features. Cuts cooking time for some items by a factor of several--beans, for example. Thoroughly cooks things like chicken and pork while keeping them juicy. There are less expensive models from Mirro and others. Yard sale machines are likely to be the very old, 1950s-60s generation that our mothers used (or your grandmothers, for the kids here).
Another is a kind of charger that charges water with CO2, to make homemade fizzy water insteado f buying it at stores. In Russia these things were called syphons. Any ideas?
Apparently they're called siphons here too :
Available in any kitchen store. --Tim May, Corralitos, California Quote of the Month: "It is said that there are no atheists in foxholes; perhaps there are no true libertarians in times of terrorist attacks." --Cathy Young, "Reason Magazine," both enemies of liberty.
On 16, Oct, 2001 at 12:04:46PM -0700, mmotyka@lsil.com wrote:
If 121C is adequate why not use the same temperature in your oven? I doubt the absolute pressure matters.
It does! It's the heat *and* saturated steam atmosphere. You can dry-sterilize things at normal atmospheric pressure using (AFAIR) ~160C for 4-8 hours. Have a nice day Morten -- Morten Liebach <morten@hotpost.dk> PGP-key: http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0xD796A4EB https://pc89225.stofanet.dk/ || http://pc89225.stofanet.dk/
mmotyka@lsil.com wrote:
ichudov@Algebra.Com (Igor Chudov) wrote :
One thing I would like to buy is a pressure cooker.
I have found them to be of little use. Save some $, try a garage sale.
I used to use them a lot. Great for beans et.c And not as expensive as a goode steamer :-) [...]
Try your regular stove. Set it to, say, 400 degrees and pray that the papers will remain legible. I'd prbobably be more likely to be attacked by meteorites or abducted by aliens than be anthraxed via mail, but *if* I had to sterilize mail, I would use a stove.
In labs an autoclave is used to sterilize everything.
Autoclaves are basically pressure cookers, high pressure steam at 121 deg. Celsius and ~2 Bar kill everything.
If 121C is adequate why not use the same temperature in your oven? I doubt the absolute pressure matters.
Pressure cooker much faster to heat up. Also for large samples the water adds heat to sample faster - food in an oven at 200 degrees is often not much more than 100 inside while the outside is already roasting. Personally I would quite like to keep microbiological samples separate from my cooking equipment :-)
A nitrogen atmosphere might be a good thing to reduce oxidation of inks and paper. I doubt it would help your new Visa card though.
But oxygen is just the thing to be nasty to bacteria. Hit them with activated oxygen. Peroxide works wonders - kills all known bacteria (yes, even spores) and doesn't permanently damage the environment :-)
participants (4)
-
Ken Brown -
mmotyka＠lsil.com -
Morten Liebach -
Tim May