I need custard.

Kitchen science can be rather intriguing.

I found mixing Bird's Custard powder fell into that category.

At a specific moment when there was just enough added liquid (milk), the mix would resist stirring as it became a dilatant non-Newtonian fluid. Yet the same fluid would trickle off the spoon, albeit appearing to be (but not quite) lumpy. Is it something to do with corn starch?

So where, in the kitchen, could you easily demonstrate Bernoulli?

Sam

Chilling out in Melbourne

Sod it, I'll just toddle down the road to Sainsburys for a tub of Birds. Walk good for me and if there's any 'nasties' in it, little harm done as I don't make custard very often - hate cleaning saucepan, damn milk.

Lazy John

The original Birds custard was developed because the wife of the company founder was allergic to eggs and he wanted to find her a substitute

Thanks for brightening up my morning ...

🤣

**LINK*

https://youtu.be/Iz9KnPZWOgs

If you want to fill your swimming pool with custard you can walk on it.

Mike

Edited By Mike Poole on 14/08/2023 10:34:28

Edited By Mike Poole on 14/08/2023 10:35:27

I don't make custard very often - hate cleaning saucepan

Make it in a Pyrex jug in the microwave - no pan to clean.

Nigel B.

Just let a container with a rounded lip and a gentle supply of water overflow. Looking from the side, a " Bernoulli Line " can be seen where the surface of the water dips as it accelerates over the curved lip and the acceleration causes a local pressure drop at the surface. Water flowing over a wier is a good example.

I'd rather be chilling out in Melbourne than here in Solihull!

Edited for spelling correction

Edited By GordonH on 14/08/2023 11:56:51

I can remeber at some time in the South of London an explosion in a custard factory where dust blown through ducting exploded. You can see the place as you leave London on the southern line.

Used to demonstrate that in school science lessons with a 2.5l paint tin (new and bought empty) and a bunsen burner. blowing into a bit of rubber tube caused custard powder in the tin to be sprayed about in the tin where the flame from the bunsen blew the lid off with a satisfying bang!

While the experiment was supposed to show that you need to expose a large surface area and not just a heap of custard powder to burn it was not a very successful experiment as pupils didn't really see the point - and after one colleague showed you could get the lid of the tin to blow off with no bunsen or custard, just a hard blow we stopped doing the experiment.

Edited By Nick Clarke 3 on 15/08/2023 08:41:26

All of this talk of explosive custard is a wicked urban myth spread by militant "ice cream at all costs" North American dessert eaters. I can confidently say that in all my years of making custard, I have never had a pan of it do so much as burst into flames even when cooking on a gas ring.

Now, the old "treacle tin" experiment in the chemistry lab was quite a different story...

A few years ago several workers were killed when a factory producing wood flour exploded, and lots of coal mine explosions were made a lot worse by coal dust, the dust being made airborne by an initial fired damp explosion. I've seen reports of grain silos going off as well, down to dust created by conveyors

And mine, although this thread reads as if many of the posters have been imbibing fermented custard...

Custard powder with very little water was also used at school to demonstrate a thixotropic paste.

In the early '70s I was labouring in the cutting room at Players' factory, moving bins of shredded tobacco leaf to the driers. There was usually a haze of tobacco dust hanging in the air. Dry tobacco burning as readily as it does, how it never blew up I don't know. Nor how I escaped any of the various lung diseases.

Hi, custard powder will explode, I saw a film where it happened in a custard factory, don't know if it was the one that Clive Hartland has mentioned though. You can't just light a fuse that is inserted into a pile of custard though. This type of explosion is known as a dust cloud explosion, where there is a large cloud of enough dust that is airborne inside a building for instance, and the smallest spark or flame can set it of. There are many products that are able to produce airborne dust, that this can happen too, that you wouldn't think would exploded in this way, which is one reason why good and efficient dust extraction should be used in these sort of areas. I knew one man that was a contractor in my old job at times, who was killed by a dust explosion at a different company he was doing work for, when a spark entered a silo that was being filled at the time, which produced dust to form in the top of it, can't remember the product, but not something that you would have thought would explode.

Regards Nick.

I am unfamiliar with the explosive capabilities of custard in any form. I am however reminded of the demise of the treacle mines in my old home town of Hemel (treacle bumstead) Hempstead. It was in the mid 1800s that the largest treacle mine in Hemel, if not in England, suffered a devastating explosion that caused many injuries. It couldn't be determined if the explosion was caused by the treacle fumes being ignited by a candle, or by a spark by a steel tipped treacle drill. The mining of treacle in England was determined to be too dangerous. Ever since then we have imported our treacle.

Only the rich could afford mined treacle, the working classes had to make do with artificial treacle.

Reading too much Terry Pratchett perchance. See The Fifth Elephant to explain the formation of the treacle mine

John

treacle mines - Chobham Surrey (goes nicely with custard.

Treacle Mine

It is well known that there were treacle mines in Pudsey, between Leeds and Bradford. When the Cornish tin mines started to go out of business, the Pudsey treacle barons bought one and had it shipped up north so they could dog out the treacle ready tinned. As Pudsey lies in a dip between it's 2 larger neighbours it suffered from chronic smoke problems. The ducks evolved to fly backwards to keep the soot out of their eyes.

Other local industries included the manufacture of whim-whams, 'for t' ducks to peek on'. I've no idea what it means either!

In the middle ages, "treacle" had medicinal connections, so if something like say calamine was being mined, you had a treacle mine