[grey_whiskers]

Nice story on Teflon. IIRC the discovery of Teflon was pretty much an accident too, involving some pressurized tanks of a some fluoridated gas which spontaneously polymerized (not "depolymerized).

Reminds me of a long ago story in Analytical Chemistry about a strong taste appearing sporadically in ready-made cake mixes which baffled the flavour chemists.

Apparently some of the test batches had used iodized salt, which ended up creating trace quantities of iodoform during the baking process.

The reason it was so hard to nail down was
a)not all of the batches had used iodized salt
b)not all of the iodized salt created iodoform
c)only about 25% of the population had a particular sensitivity to iodoform.

Oh, the things that make you wonder!

Cheers!

[HiTech RedNeck]

Shouldn't there be some cooks' lore about this issue if so? It's practically universal to use salt in home baking, and the most convenient thing would usually be iodized table salt. I've been at many a potluck with homemade cakes and never heard anybody complain about them tasting weird.

[Myrddin]

That was quite a detective job. I recall the story about the tetrafluoroethylene gas polymerizing inside the cylinders. What an odd way to discover that it would polymerize into something so useful.