Lessons From Almost Burning My Apartment Down

Sometimes a little knowledge and preparation are all you need to avert disaster and improvise with the unexpected. I discovered this one day a few years ago when I created a quite unintentional flambe in my kitchen…

(Disclaimer: do not take anything I did or even say to do as absolute advice on what to do in case of a kitchen fire. Go ask someone who didn’t almost burn their apartment down…)

One evening, I was hanging at my apartment with my buddy Mike, and we decided to cook dinner. Being men, we opted to make manly steak. Being friends, we decided to collaborate on the cooking process. The challenge with this was that we had two different styles of cooking steak…

My method was to get a cast iron skillet really hot, spread some canola oil onto the steak, and then drop the steak into the pan.

Mike’s method was to heat a regular pan to medium high heat, melt some butter, then cook the steak in that.

If you know anything about cooking, chemistry, physics, or common sense, you can see the problem in combining these two methods. At the time, clearly neither Mike nor I know anything about any of those things…

You see, we opted for my “get a cast iron skillet really hot” method. And let me tell you, a cast iron skillet over high heat can get very hot indeed. We then decided to go with Mike’s “let’s use butter instead of canola oil, ’cause hey, butter tastes better, right?”

For those of you unfamiliar with the culinary arts, allow me to introduce the term “smoke point” to you. This is the temperature at which a fat (butter or oil, in this case) begins to smoke. Butter has a very low smoke point (350 degrees F). Canola oil has a very high smoke point (470 degrees F). If you’re wondering, no, you do not want your fat to reach its smoke point.

The reason you use Canola oil in a blazingly hot skillet is that it can handle the heat. As we were about to discover, a cast iron skillet over high heat gets well above butter’s smoke point.

We toss the butter into the skillet and instantaneously, “WHOOSH!” smoke starts billowing out of the pan.

Lesson #1: If you’re going to improvise, you need to understand the fundamentals of what you are doing. Randomly combining steps without knowing the fundamentals is a sure path to disaster. Bitter, smokey, ugly disaster.

Mike and I look at the smokey skillet, and then at each other. “Um…this isn’t good.”

There we are, staring at smoke pouring from the pan, when suddenly, the smoke turns to fire. Now the butter in my cast iron skillet is on fire.

Lesson #2: Standing around frozen in inaction is generally not a good way to deal with the unexpected

Now here is where the stupidity gets real interesting. Before I explain what happened next, let me give you a little back story…

You see, while I was just a wee young lad, someone said, “never throw water on a grease fire.” I understood the words, but they didn’t make sense to me. Fire was fire, and water puts out fires, right? So I asked an “adult,” and the adult’s answer was something along the lines of, “well, since water and grease don’t mix, the water just pushes the grease and fire around instead of putting it out.” Ok, I suppose that made sense.

(Note: at no point in that conversation was the term “geyser of fire” used. It should have. As you’ll soon see…)

In retrospect, this turned out to be one of the many situations where an adult, for whatever reason, pulled half an answer out of their ass, when they should have really said, “I’m not sure, but you never should, because it would be really, really bad.”

So here I am with a grease fire in my kitchen, and the only reason I thought not to use water was because the water would “just push around the grease.”

“But I have a skillet, a contained area! If I just put in a bit of water slowly, that will mitigate the ‘pushing around’ problem and put out the fire, right?”

Lesson #3: Consider some of the things you have leaned and believe, and then consider the source. Is it time to revisit some of those truths?

So in my ignorance, I

a) pick up the flaming pan
b) move the flaming pan to the sink
c) wait for it….
d) wait for it…
e) turn on the water!

WHOOSH!

My goodness! I suddenly found myself on the set of the Towering Inferno, right there in my kitchen. A “geyser of fire” erupted from the pan towards the ceiling.

This time, I would like to credit my 20 some odd years of martial arts training for the fact that immediately as the “geyser of fire” started erupting, I a) did not drop the pan screaming and b) immediately crouched down and got the pan as low as possible so that the top of the geyser did not hit my ceiling. (yes, in retrospect I know that moving the pan at all may have led to grease spillage, which would have been bad. At the time though, things worked out…)

It is true that water and oil don’t mix, and the water will spread the fire. But not just by pushing it around. There’s a lot more to it. It involves rapid evaporation, steam, grease molecules, and a few other things. I don’t want to misinform you, so look it up on Google yourself.

Lesson #4: The more you know, the better you improvise.

Now I am crouching on my floor with a “geyser of fire” coming out of my skillet. Interestingly, the “geyser of fire” had spread to the oven mitt I was using to hold the skillet, so that was on fire too. Not a big blazing fire, just a little flame on the thumb of the oven mitt. You know, to keep things interesting.

The logical thing to do at this point would be to pull out my fire extinguisher and use it on the fire. That would be the logical thing, except for one small problem:

At this point, I didn’t own a fire extinguisher

Lesson #5: The better you prepare, the better you improvise.

Fortunately, the “geyser of fire” had fallen to a small flame before the fire on my oven mitt ate it’s way through to my thumb. I was able to put the skillet back on the (now turned off) stove, extinguish the oven mitt fire, take off the mitt, and then monitor the small skillet fire until it went out. Which it eventually did.

(If you’re wondering: yes, the next day I did go out and buy a fire extinguisher. I also learned that in a pinch, my big box of kosher salt is good for putting out small grease fires too.)

In retrospect, this is a very funny story because it all worked out, no one got hurt, and my apartment (and the 11 other units in the building) did not burn down to the ground. It could just as easily have turned into a major tragedy. Fortunately, there was only a small amount of butter to start with (as opposed to being a major grease fire with a whole pot of oil, for example)

The overall takeaway lesson here is simple: If you want to be successful and if you want to be able to flow with the unexpected Dings of Life, a little preparation and a little knowledge go a long, long way…

***
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By Avish Parashar. As the world's only Motivational Improviser, Avish uses techniques from the world of improv comedy to engage, entertain, and educate audiences on ideas around change, creativity, and motivation. Connect with Avish on Google+

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