An unexpected result

I'm taking a little break from studying to write this post. We have our Block II exam this coming Monday and Tuesday, and I have still have a lot to learn about renal, respiratory, and cardiology before then! But I have decided to pause and tell a little story.

First I have to tell everyone that I like to make pizza. I make the dough with my stand mixer and then bake it in the oven using a pizza stone and pizza peel. When I first opened the stone right after the wedding, I read the instructions printed on the cardboard packaging. They instructed me to "season" the stone by rubbing vegetable shortening into the top and baking it in the oven at 350 for 1 hour. I did this, and it smelled like burning fat for a while. Since then, whenever I used the stone for pizza, it always filled the apartment with the awful stench of burning fat. Sometimes it even gave off thin gray smoke that stung my eyes a little bit. Lisa hated it and just wanted to get a new stone...

However, I found a message board online where several people claimed that their stones also had burning fat problems, and the consensus was that if you put the stone in the oven and ran the self clean cycle, all the fat would get burned out and the stone would be good again. I waited until Lisa was not home and gave it a shot.

Things went well at first. The oven heated up way past the 500 degrees that it is capped at for normal cooking and I started to smell some burning fat. I was sitting at the dining room table keeping an eye on it, when all of a sudden a ball of fire erupted from inside the oven with a loud whoosh sound. I jumped up and shut the oven off, but as soon as I did, that thin gray smoke started pouring out of the vent and began to hurt my eyes/lungs. I ran and opened all the windows and doors in the apartment, even though it was an 85 degree day in Houston.

The fats that were absorbed into the stone had become volatile and mixed with the air in the oven, the same way gasoline vapors would at normal temperatures. Either the fats got hot enough to reach their autoignition point (which could be possible since the oven reaches 800 degrees during a self clean), or the calrod in the oven gave off a spark (I don't actually know if that could happen, but somehow there was fire). The pizza stone had tuned a darker color, and lots of crispy junk had formed across the surface.

Now the good news:
- The oven received no damage and works fine.
- After a day or so the apartment no longer smelled like burnt vegetable shortening.
- After cleaning the stone very well, I used it to make pizza and there was NO smell! Internet wisdom prevailed!
- Dinner tomorrow is pizza, the dough is in the fridge.

Alright, now I have to learn about the marvelous kidneys.