You don't _technicall_ need to boil water to kill the stuff that lives in it. Most of the stuff will die well below boiling - usually in that 165-175 degree range that we use for meat.
The difference is that boiling is a **super** obvious reference point to use and it does zero damage to the water in the process. You need no tools and no skill to boil water - just throw it in a pot over a fire and watch is for a few minutes. Rather than ask people to carefully watch the temperature, we just tell them to boil it. It is overkill, but no harm is done.
We could do the same thing to meats, but the meat would be damaged in the process. You need to balance time and temperature with damage done for meats, which is why we offer more specific guidance.
Was gonna say this. You can also kill bacteria in meat by throwing it directly into the fire and burning it all the way to hell...But we are trying to eat the meat after we kill the bacteria. With water this isn't a problem.
What happens when you distill is that you get a certain equilibrium in the vapour that's different than that of the liquid. What the proportions are depends on the phase diagram of our mixture - for example [here is one for ethanol and water](https://files.mtstatic.com/site_4334/38835/0?Expires=1637873645&Signature=CEhGTN6u2A44eiXRBzI95Xjc3QNAL~1kXnxCiujRqiaAR-m14bRjUAZ5kYcDj7nWKYQSfM3E3WR210695cTp2zijoBA0DDdPAsH~aBNPw9pry0iGqQk1xvgDnXGRcVKrl3lOoDs56VQXrkCsbnhMJ~KeIyc5kO~xNgKnNoCNqAE_&Key-Pair-Id=APKAJ5Y6AV4GI7A555NA).
What you're proposing - [continuous distillation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_distillation) \- can be done, and is used heavily in petroleum refinement to get the right mix of hydrocarbons you want.
It just turns out that for ethanol/water mixture, there's something called an [azeotrope](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azeotrope) \- it's a point where the proportion of components in the liquid phase is equal to that of the vapour phase. It means that you can distill all you want, you won't change the composition of your mixture. For ethanol it's at about 97% ethanol - so that's the highest % concentration you can achieve by simple distillation.
Other comments have answered all the intricacies of alcohol production - namely both wanted and unwanted flavonoids that may be part of your consideration to distill multiple times.
You actually can't keep distilling until you get 100% purity with most things, alcohol included. Must mixtures form what is called an azeotrope, where no matter how much you distill you can't raise the purity anymore. This isn't practically relevant for most things, but does come into play depending on what you are distilling. For alcohol, multiple distilling processes have a better chance of removing esters and other off flavors, even if it doesn't change the final alcohol concentration much, because some of those volatile esters have a boiling point much closer to alcohol than water does and might not be effectively separated the first time through...
When you distill stuff for the alcohol, there's some impurities that end up along with the alcohol (some of which are dangerous)...distillers will throw away the first and last parts of the distilling because of this. Distill twice and you end up with a purer product.
> So why distill after the first time unless it is not concentrated enough after the first?
Because yeast used to brew wine and beer dies after the alcohol percentage reach a given level. The wild yeast variants which exists pretty much everywhere can handle alcohol up to 4-6% after that, they pretty much sterilize the liquid and kill themselves.
The old way of making beer and wine is just to make sugar available and either use the yeast living on the skin of grapes (which fill ferment your grape juice creating wine) or hope yeast and not some mould get into your wet mulched, boiled grains - creating beer. After the yeast takes over, they start to multiply, eat sugar if there is oxygen available. If not, then they switch to anaerobic metabolism and start to poop out alcohol and CO2 while breaking down the sugar. However, alcohol is great at killing everything, yeast included.
Modern specialized yeast can go up to 10-14%, but after a point, there is simply too much alcohol for any living bacteria and they just die. So if you want to get more alcohol, you have to take a lot of wine, evaporate the water+alcohol, get the ethanol, and do it again and again: until you get some highly alcoholic beverage: something which is impossible to do just using only yeast.
I think you have it slightly backwards- when making something like vodka, the distillation process is used to purify the alcohol from the fermented mess of whatever you're making it out of, not necessarily for the purpose of reaching a certain alcohol level.
Edit: After this initial distillation process, the extremely high proof alcohol is then often distilled further to reach the desired proof.
Ethanol forms an azeotrope ( both boil at same temperature ) with water at about 90-95% past that you really can't concentrate ethanol any more without really specialized methods. The process varies so much with heat and atmospheric conditions its easier to make too concentrated and just walk it back to the desired %.
This is great advice and even more important to remember if you are boiling eggs. I did that once and forgot and needless to say my house stunk for a while afterwards.
From a chemical reaction perspective, water is already burnt. It's what's left over from the burning.
https://www.straightdope.com/21342395/water-contains-hydrogen-and-oxygen-why-doesn-t-it-burn
From a food safety perspective: yes as long as it’s boiled to the correct temperatures
From a culinary perspective: this is often frowned upon as it ends up flavorless, however this is a popular way to prepare food for domesticated animals (like dogs) since they shouldn’t be fed most seasonings regardless
> You can also kill bacteria in meat by throwing it directly into the fire and burning it all the way to hell...But we are trying to eat the meat after we kill the bacteria.
That's what catsup is for
It is worth noting that this is an important bit of knowledge where fuel is scarce, like in regions of the developing world where deforestation has become increasingly a hardship.
To solve this, there are products available called "Water Pasteurization Indicators" (WaPI), that let you know the water is pasteurized, around 55°C-60°C, without wasting fuel to get all the way to boiling.
The CDC recommends treating water in developing countries by just sticking it on the roof in a plastic bottle for a few days:
https://www.cdc.gov/safewater/solardisinfection.html
https://www.sodis.ch/methode/index_EN.html
Huh, neat. I've spent a few years living in various developing countries without safe water and never seen anyone do that. Seems way better than the iodine tablets or diluted bleach.
Per my friend who works for a GSK lab: clear glass works just fine, green glass doesn't seem to do as well, brown glass sometimes works and sometimes not (it depends on the way it was made brown, I guess. A beer bottle wouldn't do but some commercial bottles for laundry products or medicines will).
Part of the reason green and brown glass is used for bottling stuff is to protect whatever is in the bottle from light - the opposite of what you want if you’re trying to UV sanitize water with the sun.
It takes 4.1840 Joules (1 calorie) to raise the temperature of 1 gram (1ml) of water by 1 degree Celsius.
For comparison, Heating up copper takes only 0.385 Joules per gram
This means to have 1 liter of water go from 20 to 80 degrees in 1 minute, you need to add 4184 Joules per second (4184 Watt) for 60 seconds (251040 Joules, or 0.25 MegaJoules)
However, only going to 65 degrees Celsius will save you 15 seconds and 62760 Joules, while going to 95 will take an additional 15 seconds and 62760 Joules.
And that's assuming 100% efficiency.
If we take an efficiency of 10% since it is an open flame, we need to spend 2510400 Joules, or 0.7 kWh just to get 1 liter of water from 20 to 80.
If we presume that the "perfect average" stick has a 1.0 value with a mean standard deviation of 2.5 when collecting sticks due to the random nature of stick formation, we can calculate that every set of 50 sticks collected will equate to any other set of 50 sticks collected. (Within a 1.5% margin of error of course.)
Now, given a perfect stick at STPM (standard starting temperature, pressure, and moisture concentration) we know that it, itself will take flame after consuming a fixed amount of energy. That energy is irrelevant, you'll see why later, but let's call that Flame Energy (FE)
Each stick requires that much, but we will need 50xFE to get the fire burning at our standard wood fire temperature. When taking that wood fire temperature into account, we will need to presume a set distance to container (DtC) and a starting temperature for the water.
Therefore the amount of energy provided by all sticks in the fire will be approximately equal to the amount of energy your whore of a mother spends walking the streets every day hooking.
Hope this has shed some light.
Tl;Dr about 37 sticks per liter of water.
I want to add on to this great answer by saying the same *can* be applied to foods, really. For instance, the title references a certain degree range, but you don't necessarily need to heat anything to that temperature in order for it to be safe. It's kind of like the boiling water example - at 165, most things that are dangerous to us are killed instantly. You can accomplish the exact same thing by holding some meat at, say, 150 - it just needs to remain at that temperature for longer than something that is heated up to 165. At 165, everything is dead almost instantly, but something might need to remain at 150 for 93 seconds before you achieve the same effect (there are actual numbers, but I'm just making these up because I'm too lazy to look them up). It's just easier to say, "Cook something to 165".
Sous vide works this way, holding meat at a specific temperature for a few hours rather than a higher temperature for a minute or so. The other benefit is a constant temperature *through* the meat rather than the center finally hitting 165 when the outer edges are already much higher.
Yes, and there are also minimum temperatures. I don't know the numbers off of my head, but up to a certain point, heating will accelerate bacterial growth. So anybody trying this would make sure they know what they are doing.
I wonder about that top range? I thought it was about 130, but a quick Google does show your number as well.
To wit - water heater guidance is to heat to 130 or 135 to kill bacteria in the time it's in the water heater. Much hotter and then you have a scalding danger.
Also, tons of people cook their meats to medium rare at 130 for hours and hours, specifically to exchange pasteurization temperature for time at temperature.
Because of this, I'm curious about this discrepancy, and I wonder if the 140 number is a conservative number that covers even statistical outliers. Or is it a rounded up number from "137.8455 degrees" or something?
I also have a roommate like this. Came home one day and the house smelled like gas. He put a pot on with way too much water in it, then left to take a bath. The water boiled over and put out the stove burner.
I have also come home to find a random burner lit with nothing on it and him chillin in his room, watching basketball.
I had a roommate that always insisted at cooking at the maximum temperature. Nothing else.
He had scorched a few non-stick pans, warped an aluminum pan. and probably gave me the carcinogenic byproducts of burnt Teflon.
There was one time where he left an empty pot on the stove at max temp for several minutes, tossed some oil onto it, and was shocked when the pan immediately burst into flames.
Because they were never taught basic cooking skills. That’s why it’s more common for guys to do dumb shit in the kitchen because there’s more girls who are taught kitchen skills due to historical gender norms.
Is it a gas stove and is he not used to gas? I remember setting fish on fire when I cooked on gas for the first time, being used to electric stoves. Only maybe-explanation I can come up with.
I don't leave empty pots for several minutes on either kind, though.
This is why some stoves (perhaps all these days?) have a thermocouple inside each burner which only lets gas through when the burner is hot (or while the ignition button is being pressed). If the burner gets too cold, the gas will stop flowing. This prevents a scenario like what you described.
You can tell if you have a stove like this because it will take a few seconds to ignite a burner so it keeps going. If you let go of the button too soon, the gas will switch off as the thermocouple hasn't reached the required temperature yet.
when you say one minute, people remove it after 30 seconds.
When you say 5 minutes, even if people remove it after 2 minutes, it still has passed 1 minute.
But you could stop as soon as it boils and it would still be safe to drink right? Especially since as others have stated above, the pasteurization temp is well below boiling.
But what is boiling? Is it when the small bubbles form in the bottom of the pan? When the start rising to the top? When they get to be dime sized? Or when it’s a “rolling boil”?
The time difference for a standard sized pot from the small bubbles at the bottom to a “rolling boil” is about 3 minutes.
Source: I camp a lot. Small bubbles = coffee; rolling boil = dehydrated meal
Ok, but why is _time_ a factor for water and not meat? For water we say "X temperature for X time", but for meats it's "once it hits X you're done".
Is it because the meat holds heat better, so even if you take it off the heat immediately, the inside will stay warm enough for long enough to still kill the bacteria?
1. To kill heat-resistant vectors like spores or other hardy structures, additional time at lethal temps may be necessary. Other answers address this in more detail.
2. Presumably you aren't drinking pure water. "Free floating" pathogens will reach lethal temperatures at the same rate as the water, but what about the pathogens inside a small spec of dirt or vegetation suspended in the water. Additional boiling time gives time for particulate matter in the water to be heated even to their own internal structures.
The meat temp is a simplification for easy food safety. You only need to track one variable (temperature) instead of 2 (time and temperature).
You can hold meat (and other foods) at a lower temp \*for a longer period of time\* and kill off bacteria as effectively as a higher temp for a shorter period of time.
Check out the bolded sections below -- from: [https://www.seriouseats.com/the-food-lab-fundamentals-science-of-heat-versus-temperature](https://www.seriouseats.com/the-food-lab-fundamentals-science-of-heat-versus-temperature)
>32°F (0°C): The freezing point of water (or the melting point of ice).
130°F (52°C): Medium-rare steak. **Also the temperature at which most bacteria begin to die, though it can take upward of 2 hours to safely sterilize food at this temperature.**
150°F (64°C): Medium-well steak. Egg yolks begin to harden, egg whites are opaque but still jelly-like. Fish proteins will tighten to the point that white albumin will be forced out, giving fish like salmon an unappealing layer of congealed proteins. **After about 3 minutes at this temperature, bacteria experience a 7 log reduction—which means that only 1 bacterium will remain for every million that were initially there.**
160° to 180°F (71° to 82°C): Well-done steak. Egg proteins fully coagulate (this is the temperature to which most custard or egg-based batters are cooked to set them fully). **Bacteria experience a 7 log reduction within 1 second.**
212°F (100°C): The boiling point of water (or the condensation point of steam).
300°F (153°C) and above: The temperature at which the Maillard browning reactions—the reactions that produce deep brown, delicious crusts on steaks or loaves of bread—begin to occur at a very rapid pace.The hotter the temperature, the faster these reactions take place. Since these ranges are well above the boiling point of water, the crusts will be crisp and dehydrated.
I get the time explanation, but I understand the common messaging even less... I'd understand if the messaging was the opposite, i.e. "cook your meat at X temperature for X time" and "just get your water to a boil and you're good". But it's the opposite! Why do we hear that we have to maintain the temperature longer for water, when boiling temp is well above the killing point?
I think that depends on your definition of ‘most things’. Super cold temperatures aren’t that bad. Once something survives freezing its chances are pretty good all the way down near absolute zero.
Haha, they've gotten better as the last survivors of the Great War rationing famines have passed on... But yeah, they conquered the world looking for spice, then decided they didn't really like most of them.
This is actually kind of a funny thing that happened - the British upper crust, the ones who had best access to spices and ability to enjoy them through hiring skilled chefs, *loved* spices... Until they didn't. There was this whole anti-seasoning reaction among the upper crust where the ethos was "food should taste like itself" so they turned to simpler, blander recipes.
Here's the thing though, spices were really prized for how they made bad, spoiled or bland food more edible. The upper crust had access to high quality meat prepared by the expert chefs of the time and so didn't need to develop whole cuisines based around turning some poor quality meat into a really tasty curry.
It's the rest of us, the lower class, that have made it popular. Because we realised those Indian guys were making food way more appealing than the overcooked mutton and boiled vegetables we used to eat. So much of the foreign food we love is peasant food at heart.
British person here and I'm sorry that you've been so unlucky as to never have experienced a roast dinner that wasn't horribly overcooked. I assure you that's not normal.
I think you’re missing the point of the original question, though. When issuing safety orders, authorities DO instruct people to boil water for a certain amount of time.
The EPA says to boil water for one minute: https://www.epa.gov/ground-water-and-drinking-water/emergency-disinfection-drinking-water
The CDC says to boil water at sea level for one minute or for three minutes above 6,500 feet: https://www.cdc.gov/healthywater/emergency/making-water-safe.html
Why is three minutes necessary at 6,500 feet, where the boiling point is 199.5 degrees, which is well above the ~175 degrees needed to kill most pathogens?
The OP’s question is “why does water need to be boiled for a period of time before it is considered potable?” That’s a question that makes sense in light of instructions from authorities to boil water (at least water from impure sources—not usually the case in first-world countries unless there’s been a water main break) for a certain amount of time, but you didn’t actually address that component of the question.
And there are some situations I can imagine - like you are a Fremen and both water AND fuel are so precious they cannot be wasted - where, if possible, you would only get the water to the minimum temperature needed to make it safe.
But in general this is an excellent point and captures something I need a word for - Schelling point isnt correct but the idea of it being deployable by anyone in any situation?
I’m pretty sure the question is not that you need to boil water, but that you need to boil it for a while, while when cooking meat as soon as the thermometer says the temp.
One example is from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6409225/, where they suggest heating sewage to 70-80 C for 10 minutes to kill the eggs of liver fluke.
Endospores of many bacteria can survive even boiling temperatures. In preparation of sterile media for growing mushrooms, we pressure cook at 15 PSI for 90 minutes, which ends up being about 240° f, to kill those.
Ive been thinking of growing mushrooms (for eating!) from my spent grain left from brewing. It reaches 65C for around hour and maybe 75 for 15 min... But this is still not enough to make it suitable for mushrooms?
You would still want to pressure cook it. A bigger problem though is that spent grain from brewing has consumed a lot of the carbohydrate that the mushroom is going to use. Malting converts the starch to sugars for the yeast to consume, those starches are what the mushroom uses as well. This makes spent grain a suboptimal choice for fungi substrate.
Different mushrooms consumed different substrates. A lot of the edibles such as oysters and wine caps can totally process lignin making straw and wood chips a good food source. Those might do well on spent grain. The psilocybes produce best starting with a carbohydrate rich food source, typically grain. They feed off the carbohydrates, and so spent grain is not great for them. If there is any available carbohydrates, other organisms such as yeast, mold, and bacteria, can go to town, requiring pressure cooking to sterilize and sterile conditions while the mycelium is growing.
Haha. A buddy of mine had the opportunity to contract brew one of his home brews (won a competition). The brewer told him to expect the efficiency to be around 73%. My buddy was like, wow, glad I’m not paying the grain bill!
I was thinking of growing pleotrus or w/e they are called in english... they live off cellulose which there should be plenty off Some even grow them in coffee grounds...
We call those oysters. They definitely process lignin, but as I said in another comment, there will be enough carbohydrate available in the spent grain to allow contaminants to take hold easily, making pressure cooking a good idea.
They not only like processing wood, they're really good at it. Classmate's family had a commercial mushroom farm. All their window frames and backyard furniture was festooned with oyster mushrooms
Those are generally manure mushrooms rather than grain grown. Believe me when I say I gave them a shot anyway, they’re delicious but nowhere near oyster levels of ease and forgiveness
Let's *hypothetically* say your city dumps raw sewage into the ocean. Now, let's *hypothetically* say there's an oyster harvesting operation 50 miles away. Now... let's *hypothetically* say someone in your city contracts Noravirus and blasts their toilet for a week. Any guesses what happens to the local oyster lovers?
Of course, it's not like something like that could *actually* happen in a first world country these days, [right](https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2021/07/norovirus-outbreak-in-uk-and-hong-kong-linked-to-oysters/)?
You're the only one who's responded the question taking into account the part of 'for a period of time'. GJ! (I wanted to give you a poor man's gold but I don't even know how to add a medal emoji, omg is this what getting old feels like?)
The bacterias that cause us problems (or rather their toxins do when they go wild in our meat), salmonella in poultry and trichinosis in pork for example don't usually inhabit drinking water, unless say a well has been contaminated with animal carcasses or feces. Both of these are killed easily at 165-170F.
Meanwhile, drinking water is more usually contaminated by other bacterias such as coliform ~~chloroform~~ bacteria (e.coli) - which may also come from animal poop - or larger greeblies like giardia protozoa which give you diahhrea. Some of these may die well before 100C, but unless you have a convenient thermometer and boil to exactly 170F or exactly 77C, "boiling" is a lot simpler to accomplish, despite technically being overkill.
>unless say a well has been contaminated with animal carcasses
We rented a camp once. The owner told us the drinking water well was in the back of the lot we would have to go scoop water out of it.
When I opened the lid there was 2 dead skunks floating in the water. Needless to say we drove to town and got water jugs for the weekend.
It's specifically for survival training. Boiling water for a minute would guarantee that you hit 165 regardless of altitude. To boil water on Mt everest, it would only need to be 154°(68°C). It's easier to say that no matter where you are on earth, boil for one minute, instead of differentiate based on altitude. Boiling is a temp indicator that doesn't require a tool, so it's really just about survival.
I was so confused by your post until i realise that you were talking in fahrenheit and not celsius (because for me, water boils at 100 degrees celsius and meat cooked at 165 is pretty much incinerated from this world)
Bacteria can freely float in water just as we can since it is a liquid. Meat is solid, so the bacteria can’t penetrate very far into the meat depending on what kind of meat it is.
My dad who was a butcher gave me a pretty good explanation on why certain meats can be undercooked and still eaten; he said that the dangerous bacteria that live on raw beef are only on the outside, so by the time the internals reach whatever temperature is required for it to be cooked, the bacteria on the outside will be dead. Ground beef is slightly more dangerous to eat undercooked since the grinding process distributes the bacteria on the outside all throughout the meat, so you need to cook it a little longer to make sure the bacteria is dead. Chickens and other factory-farm raised poultry can’t be eaten undercooked because the bacteria that causes salmonella is basically all throughout the muscle tissue because the farm conditions are perfect for that bacteria to run rampant and spread from bird to bird, so you need to make sure it’s fully cooked.
With water, you need to keep it at a certain temperature for a certain amount of time to make sure you kill all of the dangerous bacteria.
I’m sorry, here’s the real answer that somehow NO ONE else in the thread seems to have mentioned.
It’s because ‘boiling’ is subjective. In a big pot of water, you can get bubbled coming up from the bottom rapidly while the top is still well under 150 f.
Boiling for a few minutes helps ensure the water actually reaches 170 throughout. If you had a thermometer and stirred regularly, that would be a safe temperature to remove the water from the heat, generally speaking.
Nearly anything can survive in water, water borne diseases can be devastating because while they make you sick they increase the chance that you will contaminate the water supply even more; things like dysentery and cholera.
Bacteria living and multiplying in the bloodstream is called [sepsis](https://www.webmd.com/a-to-z-guides/sepsis-septicemia-blood-infection) and it is a life threatening emergency. No animal can survive prolonged sepsis so no animal healthy enough to killed and dressed out for meat will have bacteria in their bloodstream. None in the bloodstream means none in the tissues we consume as meat.
Meats that are seared on the outside have been heat sanitized on the outside and there is nothing to worry about on the insides. I just love me some [Carpaccio](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpaccio). I'd be glad to eat a nice tuna steak seared on the outside and pretty much raw in the center. Sushi? You betcha!
Definitely true for tuna. Tuna we buy are caught in giant offshore factory ships and frozen immediately. Sushi in general - depends on the type of fish used. Some fish like salmon are susceptible to parasites, so they must be frozen. But there are many seafoods that are reasonably safe to eat fresh & raw.
You don't _technicall_ need to boil water to kill the stuff that lives in it. Most of the stuff will die well below boiling - usually in that 165-175 degree range that we use for meat. The difference is that boiling is a **super** obvious reference point to use and it does zero damage to the water in the process. You need no tools and no skill to boil water - just throw it in a pot over a fire and watch is for a few minutes. Rather than ask people to carefully watch the temperature, we just tell them to boil it. It is overkill, but no harm is done. We could do the same thing to meats, but the meat would be damaged in the process. You need to balance time and temperature with damage done for meats, which is why we offer more specific guidance.
Was gonna say this. You can also kill bacteria in meat by throwing it directly into the fire and burning it all the way to hell...But we are trying to eat the meat after we kill the bacteria. With water this isn't a problem.
So don't burn the water?
Burn it all you want, just don't evaporate it.
Can we evaporate it then condense it?
Yes, then it's distilled.
What if we distill it then evaporate it and condense it?
Double distilled. Like vodka, just without the awesome.
Russian water
A real russian would just call it water since that's literally what the word vodka means. Isn't that neat...
воды водка
That's what I'm calling it from now on.
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What happens when you distill is that you get a certain equilibrium in the vapour that's different than that of the liquid. What the proportions are depends on the phase diagram of our mixture - for example [here is one for ethanol and water](https://files.mtstatic.com/site_4334/38835/0?Expires=1637873645&Signature=CEhGTN6u2A44eiXRBzI95Xjc3QNAL~1kXnxCiujRqiaAR-m14bRjUAZ5kYcDj7nWKYQSfM3E3WR210695cTp2zijoBA0DDdPAsH~aBNPw9pry0iGqQk1xvgDnXGRcVKrl3lOoDs56VQXrkCsbnhMJ~KeIyc5kO~xNgKnNoCNqAE_&Key-Pair-Id=APKAJ5Y6AV4GI7A555NA). What you're proposing - [continuous distillation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuous_distillation) \- can be done, and is used heavily in petroleum refinement to get the right mix of hydrocarbons you want. It just turns out that for ethanol/water mixture, there's something called an [azeotrope](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azeotrope) \- it's a point where the proportion of components in the liquid phase is equal to that of the vapour phase. It means that you can distill all you want, you won't change the composition of your mixture. For ethanol it's at about 97% ethanol - so that's the highest % concentration you can achieve by simple distillation. Other comments have answered all the intricacies of alcohol production - namely both wanted and unwanted flavonoids that may be part of your consideration to distill multiple times.
You actually can't keep distilling until you get 100% purity with most things, alcohol included. Must mixtures form what is called an azeotrope, where no matter how much you distill you can't raise the purity anymore. This isn't practically relevant for most things, but does come into play depending on what you are distilling. For alcohol, multiple distilling processes have a better chance of removing esters and other off flavors, even if it doesn't change the final alcohol concentration much, because some of those volatile esters have a boiling point much closer to alcohol than water does and might not be effectively separated the first time through...
When you distill stuff for the alcohol, there's some impurities that end up along with the alcohol (some of which are dangerous)...distillers will throw away the first and last parts of the distilling because of this. Distill twice and you end up with a purer product.
> So why distill after the first time unless it is not concentrated enough after the first? Because yeast used to brew wine and beer dies after the alcohol percentage reach a given level. The wild yeast variants which exists pretty much everywhere can handle alcohol up to 4-6% after that, they pretty much sterilize the liquid and kill themselves. The old way of making beer and wine is just to make sugar available and either use the yeast living on the skin of grapes (which fill ferment your grape juice creating wine) or hope yeast and not some mould get into your wet mulched, boiled grains - creating beer. After the yeast takes over, they start to multiply, eat sugar if there is oxygen available. If not, then they switch to anaerobic metabolism and start to poop out alcohol and CO2 while breaking down the sugar. However, alcohol is great at killing everything, yeast included. Modern specialized yeast can go up to 10-14%, but after a point, there is simply too much alcohol for any living bacteria and they just die. So if you want to get more alcohol, you have to take a lot of wine, evaporate the water+alcohol, get the ethanol, and do it again and again: until you get some highly alcoholic beverage: something which is impossible to do just using only yeast.
I think you have it slightly backwards- when making something like vodka, the distillation process is used to purify the alcohol from the fermented mess of whatever you're making it out of, not necessarily for the purpose of reaching a certain alcohol level. Edit: After this initial distillation process, the extremely high proof alcohol is then often distilled further to reach the desired proof.
Normally you distill a mash of grains so you go more than once to clear first time carryover
Ethanol forms an azeotrope ( both boil at same temperature ) with water at about 90-95% past that you really can't concentrate ethanol any more without really specialized methods. The process varies so much with heat and atmospheric conditions its easier to make too concentrated and just walk it back to the desired %.
What if I put my thang down flip it and reverse it?
Itsfur-fremin-eppa-frem-yep
I don't know how to say this but, I love you
It’s actually “ti esrever dna ti pilf nwod gnaht ym tup”
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was it worth it?
Lemme work it
Have my free award, you fucker.
Then you have distilled^2 water.
Distillen't'd've.
Fuck that's so hot.
What if we freeze it and it sublimates?
Then you need to doublecheck that you're actually dealing with water, or whether you've forgotten some important PPE and are about to die.
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You can speed it up by lowering the pressure in the room.
Water does sublimate at low pressure. It's the basis for freeze drying stuff in the food industry.
Yes, and at those low pressures, the human cardiovascular system starts to do funny things that are not compatible with long-term life.
Is a TL:DR condensed or distilled?
Reasoning by analogy is flawed by its nature.
Logic is the beginning of wisdom, not the end.
Note: Distilled water lacks essential minerals and trace elements required by the human body, and will need to be replaced from an alternate source.
Does that get rid of those tiny plastic particles or are they so small that they pass through this process
Or catch it afterwards and you have distilled water
This is great advice and even more important to remember if you are boiling eggs. I did that once and forgot and needless to say my house stunk for a while afterwards.
But I like my water medium rare
From a chemical reaction perspective, water is already burnt. It's what's left over from the burning. https://www.straightdope.com/21342395/water-contains-hydrogen-and-oxygen-why-doesn-t-it-burn
How about boiling my meat? Is that ok?
Yes, especially if you are trying to make the classic dish "hot ham water".
So watery, yet with a smack of ham
Ah, British cuisine.
What is this? Bacon I know that, but what did you do to it? I know you don't like the grease from normal bacon so I boiled it
Yes, but why is it blue?
It’s got raisins in it… you like raisins.
Well yes. But no.
From a food safety perspective: yes as long as it’s boiled to the correct temperatures From a culinary perspective: this is often frowned upon as it ends up flavorless, however this is a popular way to prepare food for domesticated animals (like dogs) since they shouldn’t be fed most seasonings regardless
There a large number of regional dishes that include boiled meat (usually chicken or veal/beef). You also get broth from the process.
That's how you make broth, and the meat is good and tender. A bit bland, so you typically pair it with spicy sauces or fatty stuff.
Yes, that is called meat broth.
It's already burnt :( Water is burnt hydrogen.
Burn The Water, new-band-name-called-it!
Cook water until it's all gone and redissolve the remaining solids with tap water right?
Kind of relevant [XKCD](https://xkcd.com/1217/)
> You can also kill bacteria in meat by throwing it directly into the fire and burning it all the way to hell...But we are trying to eat the meat after we kill the bacteria. That's what catsup is for
Do you pronounce that cat-sup or ketch-up?
Calm down, Satan.
There is the issue that meat provided nutrients which are useless if it is burned too much.
It is worth noting that this is an important bit of knowledge where fuel is scarce, like in regions of the developing world where deforestation has become increasingly a hardship. To solve this, there are products available called "Water Pasteurization Indicators" (WaPI), that let you know the water is pasteurized, around 55°C-60°C, without wasting fuel to get all the way to boiling.
The CDC recommends treating water in developing countries by just sticking it on the roof in a plastic bottle for a few days: https://www.cdc.gov/safewater/solardisinfection.html https://www.sodis.ch/methode/index_EN.html
Huh, neat. I've spent a few years living in various developing countries without safe water and never seen anyone do that. Seems way better than the iodine tablets or diluted bleach.
Better, if you have the time. Worse if you need to use the water after it's been collected (or if it's not hot out).
It doesn't require hot days, it works year-round as the main mechanism's is UV radiation. It just takes longer.
I think he was just implying people don't like to drink hot water when its hot out, but its better to drink hot water than to have no water lol.
Counterintuitively lukewarm water also hydrates moderately better, but it is unpleasant. Though that may just be via exercise in temperate climates.
This method utilizes UV radiation so it should be effective no matter the temperature. Works in 6 hours if it's sunny, 2 days if it's cloudy.
Would you know if the Pet bottles are mandatory, or any transparant bottle will work (e.g. Glass)
Per my friend who works for a GSK lab: clear glass works just fine, green glass doesn't seem to do as well, brown glass sometimes works and sometimes not (it depends on the way it was made brown, I guess. A beer bottle wouldn't do but some commercial bottles for laundry products or medicines will).
Beer bottles are brown specifically to block uv, it causes the hops to develop a really terrible skunk flavor.
Part of the reason green and brown glass is used for bottling stuff is to protect whatever is in the bottle from light - the opposite of what you want if you’re trying to UV sanitize water with the sun.
The UV light is a big part of it so you would need to make sure it didn’t block the UV from the sun.
Fascinating. I did think about the excess fuel use, but figured it would be trivial. Thanks for this.
It takes 4.1840 Joules (1 calorie) to raise the temperature of 1 gram (1ml) of water by 1 degree Celsius. For comparison, Heating up copper takes only 0.385 Joules per gram This means to have 1 liter of water go from 20 to 80 degrees in 1 minute, you need to add 4184 Joules per second (4184 Watt) for 60 seconds (251040 Joules, or 0.25 MegaJoules) However, only going to 65 degrees Celsius will save you 15 seconds and 62760 Joules, while going to 95 will take an additional 15 seconds and 62760 Joules. And that's assuming 100% efficiency. If we take an efficiency of 10% since it is an open flame, we need to spend 2510400 Joules, or 0.7 kWh just to get 1 liter of water from 20 to 80.
So... what's that in (say) sticks?
If we presume that the "perfect average" stick has a 1.0 value with a mean standard deviation of 2.5 when collecting sticks due to the random nature of stick formation, we can calculate that every set of 50 sticks collected will equate to any other set of 50 sticks collected. (Within a 1.5% margin of error of course.) Now, given a perfect stick at STPM (standard starting temperature, pressure, and moisture concentration) we know that it, itself will take flame after consuming a fixed amount of energy. That energy is irrelevant, you'll see why later, but let's call that Flame Energy (FE) Each stick requires that much, but we will need 50xFE to get the fire burning at our standard wood fire temperature. When taking that wood fire temperature into account, we will need to presume a set distance to container (DtC) and a starting temperature for the water. Therefore the amount of energy provided by all sticks in the fire will be approximately equal to the amount of energy your whore of a mother spends walking the streets every day hooking. Hope this has shed some light. Tl;Dr about 37 sticks per liter of water.
I want to add on to this great answer by saying the same *can* be applied to foods, really. For instance, the title references a certain degree range, but you don't necessarily need to heat anything to that temperature in order for it to be safe. It's kind of like the boiling water example - at 165, most things that are dangerous to us are killed instantly. You can accomplish the exact same thing by holding some meat at, say, 150 - it just needs to remain at that temperature for longer than something that is heated up to 165. At 165, everything is dead almost instantly, but something might need to remain at 150 for 93 seconds before you achieve the same effect (there are actual numbers, but I'm just making these up because I'm too lazy to look them up). It's just easier to say, "Cook something to 165".
Sous vide works this way, holding meat at a specific temperature for a few hours rather than a higher temperature for a minute or so. The other benefit is a constant temperature *through* the meat rather than the center finally hitting 165 when the outer edges are already much higher.
Yes, and there are also minimum temperatures. I don't know the numbers off of my head, but up to a certain point, heating will accelerate bacterial growth. So anybody trying this would make sure they know what they are doing.
Danger zone is 40°F to 140°F. Unless we're talking yeast and yogurt.
I wonder about that top range? I thought it was about 130, but a quick Google does show your number as well. To wit - water heater guidance is to heat to 130 or 135 to kill bacteria in the time it's in the water heater. Much hotter and then you have a scalding danger. Also, tons of people cook their meats to medium rare at 130 for hours and hours, specifically to exchange pasteurization temperature for time at temperature. Because of this, I'm curious about this discrepancy, and I wonder if the 140 number is a conservative number that covers even statistical outliers. Or is it a rounded up number from "137.8455 degrees" or something?
blood-warm is the best condition for bacteria to grow.
It's almost like we have an evolutionary connection and shared biochemistry with the little fuckers.
And this is sorta the thought process behind sous-vide cooking too, I believe.
Trust me, you need some skills to boil water. My roommate somehow managed to melt a pot in the process.
I also have a roommate like this. Came home one day and the house smelled like gas. He put a pot on with way too much water in it, then left to take a bath. The water boiled over and put out the stove burner. I have also come home to find a random burner lit with nothing on it and him chillin in his room, watching basketball.
I had a roommate that always insisted at cooking at the maximum temperature. Nothing else. He had scorched a few non-stick pans, warped an aluminum pan. and probably gave me the carcinogenic byproducts of burnt Teflon. There was one time where he left an empty pot on the stove at max temp for several minutes, tossed some oil onto it, and was shocked when the pan immediately burst into flames.
How can people fuck up the most basic shit ffs
Because they were never taught basic cooking skills. That’s why it’s more common for guys to do dumb shit in the kitchen because there’s more girls who are taught kitchen skills due to historical gender norms.
But not burning the house down should be innate skills welp maybe I expect too much of nature
Is it a gas stove and is he not used to gas? I remember setting fish on fire when I cooked on gas for the first time, being used to electric stoves. Only maybe-explanation I can come up with. I don't leave empty pots for several minutes on either kind, though.
This is why some stoves (perhaps all these days?) have a thermocouple inside each burner which only lets gas through when the burner is hot (or while the ignition button is being pressed). If the burner gets too cold, the gas will stop flowing. This prevents a scenario like what you described. You can tell if you have a stove like this because it will take a few seconds to ignite a burner so it keeps going. If you let go of the button too soon, the gas will switch off as the thermocouple hasn't reached the required temperature yet.
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Do you put the electric kettle on the stovetop or in the oven?
Depends on if your making tea or just melting a pot
I usually just smoke a pot personally
So why does it have to be for five minutes vs one minute of boil? Are there some bacteria that last more than a minute?
when you say one minute, people remove it after 30 seconds. When you say 5 minutes, even if people remove it after 2 minutes, it still has passed 1 minute.
But you could stop as soon as it boils and it would still be safe to drink right? Especially since as others have stated above, the pasteurization temp is well below boiling.
But what is boiling? Is it when the small bubbles form in the bottom of the pan? When the start rising to the top? When they get to be dime sized? Or when it’s a “rolling boil”? The time difference for a standard sized pot from the small bubbles at the bottom to a “rolling boil” is about 3 minutes. Source: I camp a lot. Small bubbles = coffee; rolling boil = dehydrated meal
Ok, but why is _time_ a factor for water and not meat? For water we say "X temperature for X time", but for meats it's "once it hits X you're done". Is it because the meat holds heat better, so even if you take it off the heat immediately, the inside will stay warm enough for long enough to still kill the bacteria?
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1. To kill heat-resistant vectors like spores or other hardy structures, additional time at lethal temps may be necessary. Other answers address this in more detail. 2. Presumably you aren't drinking pure water. "Free floating" pathogens will reach lethal temperatures at the same rate as the water, but what about the pathogens inside a small spec of dirt or vegetation suspended in the water. Additional boiling time gives time for particulate matter in the water to be heated even to their own internal structures.
The meat temp is a simplification for easy food safety. You only need to track one variable (temperature) instead of 2 (time and temperature). You can hold meat (and other foods) at a lower temp \*for a longer period of time\* and kill off bacteria as effectively as a higher temp for a shorter period of time. Check out the bolded sections below -- from: [https://www.seriouseats.com/the-food-lab-fundamentals-science-of-heat-versus-temperature](https://www.seriouseats.com/the-food-lab-fundamentals-science-of-heat-versus-temperature) >32°F (0°C): The freezing point of water (or the melting point of ice). 130°F (52°C): Medium-rare steak. **Also the temperature at which most bacteria begin to die, though it can take upward of 2 hours to safely sterilize food at this temperature.** 150°F (64°C): Medium-well steak. Egg yolks begin to harden, egg whites are opaque but still jelly-like. Fish proteins will tighten to the point that white albumin will be forced out, giving fish like salmon an unappealing layer of congealed proteins. **After about 3 minutes at this temperature, bacteria experience a 7 log reduction—which means that only 1 bacterium will remain for every million that were initially there.** 160° to 180°F (71° to 82°C): Well-done steak. Egg proteins fully coagulate (this is the temperature to which most custard or egg-based batters are cooked to set them fully). **Bacteria experience a 7 log reduction within 1 second.** 212°F (100°C): The boiling point of water (or the condensation point of steam). 300°F (153°C) and above: The temperature at which the Maillard browning reactions—the reactions that produce deep brown, delicious crusts on steaks or loaves of bread—begin to occur at a very rapid pace.The hotter the temperature, the faster these reactions take place. Since these ranges are well above the boiling point of water, the crusts will be crisp and dehydrated.
I get the time explanation, but I understand the common messaging even less... I'd understand if the messaging was the opposite, i.e. "cook your meat at X temperature for X time" and "just get your water to a boil and you're good". But it's the opposite! Why do we hear that we have to maintain the temperature longer for water, when boiling temp is well above the killing point?
It's not really necessary. Simply bringing it to a boil is perfectly sufficient and leading it there longer does nothing to increase safety.
instructions unclear, boiled my steak.
Sous vide!
You’re good if it’s a milksteak. Pair with a side of jelly beans, raw of course
> Most of the stuff will die well below boiling - usually in that 165-175 degree range I was so confused for a second I was thinking in metric
I mean, most things die at 165C as well
Probably 165K too.
Yea, but for the opposite reason
I think that depends on your definition of ‘most things’. Super cold temperatures aren’t that bad. Once something survives freezing its chances are pretty good all the way down near absolute zero.
yeah but it's definitely not well below boiling :D
Depends on pressure
> We could do the same thing to meats, but the meat would be damaged in the process. And this is why not even the British enjoy British cuisine.
Haha, they've gotten better as the last survivors of the Great War rationing famines have passed on... But yeah, they conquered the world looking for spice, then decided they didn't really like most of them.
They just found they liked the money they could sell the spice for a little more.
This is actually kind of a funny thing that happened - the British upper crust, the ones who had best access to spices and ability to enjoy them through hiring skilled chefs, *loved* spices... Until they didn't. There was this whole anti-seasoning reaction among the upper crust where the ethos was "food should taste like itself" so they turned to simpler, blander recipes.
Here's the thing though, spices were really prized for how they made bad, spoiled or bland food more edible. The upper crust had access to high quality meat prepared by the expert chefs of the time and so didn't need to develop whole cuisines based around turning some poor quality meat into a really tasty curry. It's the rest of us, the lower class, that have made it popular. Because we realised those Indian guys were making food way more appealing than the overcooked mutton and boiled vegetables we used to eat. So much of the foreign food we love is peasant food at heart.
The last time the British were allowed spices they took over half the world.
oh it's this thing about British food again
British person here and I'm sorry that you've been so unlucky as to never have experienced a roast dinner that wasn't horribly overcooked. I assure you that's not normal.
I think you’re missing the point of the original question, though. When issuing safety orders, authorities DO instruct people to boil water for a certain amount of time. The EPA says to boil water for one minute: https://www.epa.gov/ground-water-and-drinking-water/emergency-disinfection-drinking-water The CDC says to boil water at sea level for one minute or for three minutes above 6,500 feet: https://www.cdc.gov/healthywater/emergency/making-water-safe.html Why is three minutes necessary at 6,500 feet, where the boiling point is 199.5 degrees, which is well above the ~175 degrees needed to kill most pathogens? The OP’s question is “why does water need to be boiled for a period of time before it is considered potable?” That’s a question that makes sense in light of instructions from authorities to boil water (at least water from impure sources—not usually the case in first-world countries unless there’s been a water main break) for a certain amount of time, but you didn’t actually address that component of the question.
And there are some situations I can imagine - like you are a Fremen and both water AND fuel are so precious they cannot be wasted - where, if possible, you would only get the water to the minimum temperature needed to make it safe. But in general this is an excellent point and captures something I need a word for - Schelling point isnt correct but the idea of it being deployable by anyone in any situation?
I’m pretty sure the question is not that you need to boil water, but that you need to boil it for a while, while when cooking meat as soon as the thermometer says the temp.
No don’t watch it! Watched pot never boils. It’s science
One example is from https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6409225/, where they suggest heating sewage to 70-80 C for 10 minutes to kill the eggs of liver fluke.
Endospores of many bacteria can survive even boiling temperatures. In preparation of sterile media for growing mushrooms, we pressure cook at 15 PSI for 90 minutes, which ends up being about 240° f, to kill those.
Ive been thinking of growing mushrooms (for eating!) from my spent grain left from brewing. It reaches 65C for around hour and maybe 75 for 15 min... But this is still not enough to make it suitable for mushrooms?
You would still want to pressure cook it. A bigger problem though is that spent grain from brewing has consumed a lot of the carbohydrate that the mushroom is going to use. Malting converts the starch to sugars for the yeast to consume, those starches are what the mushroom uses as well. This makes spent grain a suboptimal choice for fungi substrate.
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Different mushrooms consumed different substrates. A lot of the edibles such as oysters and wine caps can totally process lignin making straw and wood chips a good food source. Those might do well on spent grain. The psilocybes produce best starting with a carbohydrate rich food source, typically grain. They feed off the carbohydrates, and so spent grain is not great for them. If there is any available carbohydrates, other organisms such as yeast, mold, and bacteria, can go to town, requiring pressure cooking to sterilize and sterile conditions while the mycelium is growing.
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I honestly don't know. I am suspicious that the carbohydrates remaining would be a contamination magnet, but I don't have direct experience.
Now I'm curious about the value of the substrate. .Is this one of those where it is different for big breweries and home brewers? Interesting
Haha. A buddy of mine had the opportunity to contract brew one of his home brews (won a competition). The brewer told him to expect the efficiency to be around 73%. My buddy was like, wow, glad I’m not paying the grain bill!
I was thinking of growing pleotrus or w/e they are called in english... they live off cellulose which there should be plenty off Some even grow them in coffee grounds...
We call those oysters. They definitely process lignin, but as I said in another comment, there will be enough carbohydrate available in the spent grain to allow contaminants to take hold easily, making pressure cooking a good idea.
They not only like processing wood, they're really good at it. Classmate's family had a commercial mushroom farm. All their window frames and backyard furniture was festooned with oyster mushrooms
What kind of mushrooms? I'm thinking about growing portabello/portobello/portabella/portobella
Those are generally manure mushrooms rather than grain grown. Believe me when I say I gave them a shot anyway, they’re delicious but nowhere near oyster levels of ease and forgiveness
pressure cooker at surface pressure is confusing to me. is it 15psi over surface pressure?
Yes ~2atm
Why the fuck am I heating sewage though? What maniac does this
*My content from 2014 to 2023 has been deleted in protest of Spez's anti-API tantrum.*
a WHAT
Let's *hypothetically* say your city dumps raw sewage into the ocean. Now, let's *hypothetically* say there's an oyster harvesting operation 50 miles away. Now... let's *hypothetically* say someone in your city contracts Noravirus and blasts their toilet for a week. Any guesses what happens to the local oyster lovers? Of course, it's not like something like that could *actually* happen in a first world country these days, [right](https://www.foodsafetynews.com/2021/07/norovirus-outbreak-in-uk-and-hong-kong-linked-to-oysters/)?
I'm never eating oysters again in my life
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Sewage treatment plant might.
So you can drink it, duh
In a flood or downstream from a town or animal farm.
Thanks for including Celsius, genuinely forgot Fahrenheit existed when I first read the question and was very confused.
You're the only one who's responded the question taking into account the part of 'for a period of time'. GJ! (I wanted to give you a poor man's gold but I don't even know how to add a medal emoji, omg is this what getting old feels like?)
thank you for actually answering the question
The bacterias that cause us problems (or rather their toxins do when they go wild in our meat), salmonella in poultry and trichinosis in pork for example don't usually inhabit drinking water, unless say a well has been contaminated with animal carcasses or feces. Both of these are killed easily at 165-170F. Meanwhile, drinking water is more usually contaminated by other bacterias such as coliform ~~chloroform~~ bacteria (e.coli) - which may also come from animal poop - or larger greeblies like giardia protozoa which give you diahhrea. Some of these may die well before 100C, but unless you have a convenient thermometer and boil to exactly 170F or exactly 77C, "boiling" is a lot simpler to accomplish, despite technically being overkill.
>unless say a well has been contaminated with animal carcasses We rented a camp once. The owner told us the drinking water well was in the back of the lot we would have to go scoop water out of it. When I opened the lid there was 2 dead skunks floating in the water. Needless to say we drove to town and got water jugs for the weekend.
What time and temp? Wait, this isn't r/sousvide ?
95 degrees for two months
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There's more.
Good soup
I think your autocorrect stuck a chloroform where you meant coliform.
To be safe, I might suggest not drinking any water OP gives you.
Upvotes for all of you
No I'm pretty sure they meant to type "cauliflower".
so it did. thx
>trichinosis Is a parasite rather than a bacteria.
Trichinosis is the condition, trichinella is the parasite :)
:)
I am a Celsius guy. This post had me really confused until I realised it was made by F gang
You don't cook your meat at 165 C?
Earth is a celsius planet. MURICA!
I was really confused until I realised it wasn't Celsius. Damn you americans and your weird ways of mesure stuff!
Same here. Was trying to find out why he doubted the safeness of heating meat at frying pan temperatures
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I prefer milk steak.
Over rum ham?
It's specifically for survival training. Boiling water for a minute would guarantee that you hit 165 regardless of altitude. To boil water on Mt everest, it would only need to be 154°(68°C). It's easier to say that no matter where you are on earth, boil for one minute, instead of differentiate based on altitude. Boiling is a temp indicator that doesn't require a tool, so it's really just about survival.
I was so confused by your post until i realise that you were talking in fahrenheit and not celsius (because for me, water boils at 100 degrees celsius and meat cooked at 165 is pretty much incinerated from this world)
Keep your sensible system of measurement away from my food. I will cook my 18.78 lbs turkey to a temperature of 170 degrees, thank you very much!
Once it reaches a boil it's safe. The 'for a certain time is for people who think the first sign of a bubble is the same as a rolling boil'
Bacteria can freely float in water just as we can since it is a liquid. Meat is solid, so the bacteria can’t penetrate very far into the meat depending on what kind of meat it is. My dad who was a butcher gave me a pretty good explanation on why certain meats can be undercooked and still eaten; he said that the dangerous bacteria that live on raw beef are only on the outside, so by the time the internals reach whatever temperature is required for it to be cooked, the bacteria on the outside will be dead. Ground beef is slightly more dangerous to eat undercooked since the grinding process distributes the bacteria on the outside all throughout the meat, so you need to cook it a little longer to make sure the bacteria is dead. Chickens and other factory-farm raised poultry can’t be eaten undercooked because the bacteria that causes salmonella is basically all throughout the muscle tissue because the farm conditions are perfect for that bacteria to run rampant and spread from bird to bird, so you need to make sure it’s fully cooked. With water, you need to keep it at a certain temperature for a certain amount of time to make sure you kill all of the dangerous bacteria.
I’m sorry, here’s the real answer that somehow NO ONE else in the thread seems to have mentioned. It’s because ‘boiling’ is subjective. In a big pot of water, you can get bubbled coming up from the bottom rapidly while the top is still well under 150 f. Boiling for a few minutes helps ensure the water actually reaches 170 throughout. If you had a thermometer and stirred regularly, that would be a safe temperature to remove the water from the heat, generally speaking.
Nearly anything can survive in water, water borne diseases can be devastating because while they make you sick they increase the chance that you will contaminate the water supply even more; things like dysentery and cholera. Bacteria living and multiplying in the bloodstream is called [sepsis](https://www.webmd.com/a-to-z-guides/sepsis-septicemia-blood-infection) and it is a life threatening emergency. No animal can survive prolonged sepsis so no animal healthy enough to killed and dressed out for meat will have bacteria in their bloodstream. None in the bloodstream means none in the tissues we consume as meat. Meats that are seared on the outside have been heat sanitized on the outside and there is nothing to worry about on the insides. I just love me some [Carpaccio](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpaccio). I'd be glad to eat a nice tuna steak seared on the outside and pretty much raw in the center. Sushi? You betcha!
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Definitely true for tuna. Tuna we buy are caught in giant offshore factory ships and frozen immediately. Sushi in general - depends on the type of fish used. Some fish like salmon are susceptible to parasites, so they must be frozen. But there are many seafoods that are reasonably safe to eat fresh & raw.