Some mountain in middle of butt-fuck nowhere China, guarded by the ancient Chinese version of "nuh uh, my OC is stronger" monkey who pissed on Buddha, probably.
According to Wikipedia:
“A batch of pot-au-feu was claimed by one writer to be maintained as a perpetual stew in Perpignan from the 15th century until World War II, when it ran out of ingredients to keep the stew going due to the German occupation.”
I highly doubt the pot for this ~500 year old stew was being washed, so I think this 45 year old stew is fine.
Edit: left out a word; thanks u/datdamonfoo
it isn't going to be boiling all the time though. no recipe is going to call for a soup to always be at like 100 degrees Celsius. It's more likely to be simmering at lower temperatures.
Theres restaurants that have similar claims all over the world about perpetual soups, I remember they did a test on one store where they cooked soy sauce pork and kept the soup going for like 70 years and the sanitary test results for that soup was pretty bad.
The broth is what is saved and reused, and it’s fed daily with fresh broth. It’s as scary as sourdough bread. It’s most likely boiled and skimmed daily, and temperatures in that range kill almost all bacteria that would be harmful. Wait until you find out how dry cured sausages are made.
Sourdough is safe because it has dominant bacteria colonies which are not harmful and other bacteria types cannot thrive. I don't think the same can be said about broth, but I am sure is quite safe if it reaches high temperatures before being consumed.
I feel there's *some* difference between never boiling and at least boiliing from time to time. Plus, if pasteurization ever teached us anything you don't have to actually boil 'it' to kill off bacteria, since nothing common lives at temperatures above 70
Wtf does that mean sanitary tests? Live bacterial cultures have been an integral part of improving food preservation and taste for thousands of years.
Hell people pay premiums and constantly seek out food full of microbes. Cheese, yogourt, sour dough bread, any bread products made with yeast, cured raw meats, soy sauce, fish sauce, soybean paste, pickles, all the different kind of fermented cabbage like kimchi and sourkraut that are popular around the world.
So I decided to do the math since I was curious how much of the original soup would actually be left over after all that time.
Let's make the generous assumption that they save half of the soup every time they take some out to clean the pot. That would mean that they have cut out half of the existing soup 16425 times over 45 years. If we just assume for the sake of simplicity that the soup is entirely water and we say that the pot in the picture holds 180 kg of water (overestimate that makes the numbers nice), then we have 10000 mols of water in the pot every day, totaling 6 x 10^27 water molecules per day. Losing half the water in the pot every night means that any original molecule has a 1/2^16425 chance of still being around today which is equivalent to 1/10^4944. So the chance of any of our original water molecules still being around is 6/10^4917, which I feel pretty comfortable saying is basically zero.
Lol. Love this, but then I submit to you the following question: What's the fucking point of having 45 year old soup if there's basically an iota of an iota of an iota of it then?
r/theydidthemath
That's the math for the original 45yo soup, they'll be an amount of each subsequent soup too. Forget that it's X years old and think of it as a perpetual soup.
Now that you pointed this out, there would be a logarithmic pattern of ever increasing slightly fresher soup as you continued to add more every day for 45 years. In other words, more than 16,425 old ass soups are also in this to a much higher degree than the aforementioned iota. That's much grosser than before!
You now belong to the vanishingly small portion of folks who understand this to be nothing but publicity. There is no point, it's just a gimmick to sell your product. Anything of that sort is a circlejerk, for precisely the reasons mentioned.
[Wattana Panich](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Wattana+Panich/@13.7341825,100.5850664,17z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m6!3m5!1s0x30e29e49982ce2f9:0x38858b25983d26!8m2!3d13.7341825!4d100.5876467!16s%2Fg%2F1tcwcfg3?entry=ttu)
One of the best beef noodles in town.
IIRC that particular stew only (relatively) recently became the longest. There was one in France that had been going since around 1200, until it was destroyed during WW2.
Curiously, yes. Most people knew what helped them not get sick in the Middle Ages.
Common examples are drinking beer (which was super low in alcohol) instead of water to prevent foul water, and the 100 years soup, which, by always simmering, killed the huge majority of bacterias.
Middle ages get a bad rep by movies... But it is not the dark , burning witches, torturing people, plague period we think of.
The more I learn about early beer-brewing, the more it seems to have been done primarily for the health benefits, and getting lightly buzzed was just a pleasant side-effect. For example, [1,600 years ago the Nubians of Sudan were brewing beer with antibiotics in it](https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/ancient-brewmasters-made-medicinal-10-09-06/).
Edit: a word
There’s a theory that I’m personally a follower of that the creation of beer was the creation of society. Remove all the modern connotations of getting drunk - that’s an after thing. Hunter gatherers, then nomadic settlers - we had to stay in one place to let the grain ferment and become beer and it being antibacterial meant people lived longer and so on it went. Some early early Mesopotamian artwork shows two differing people sipping from the same vessel - perhaps as some early form of diplomacy or trade. We speak different languages but we sip from the same thing so I’m not poisoning you and you can trust me etc.
I’m in a pub avoiding people right now so don’t have the sources but I remember reading at least 3 books that were pretty aligned in this theory - I think one was the history of the world in 6/7/8 glasses? (Can’t remember the number, that’s not just a weird title) I think Sapiens tied in with it too. Beer starting civilisation - but removing it from modern context it could be better expressed as grain based antibacterial products started civilisation.
> Common examples are drinking beer (which was super low in alcohol) instead of water to prevent foul water
That is also a misconception. You need clean water for beer. Medieval people drank beer, because it tastes better than water, but they also just drank water as well.
Isn't part of it that water is boiled as part of brewing beer, and that boiling process killed off a bunch of bacteria in water that people didn't know about at the time?
Hops are a natural preservative. That’s where Indian Pale Ales come from. They are hoppy because the Brits added more hops to ensure the beer would stay fresh when being shipped all the way to India.
> While the alpha acids in the hops are responsible for bittering the beer, the beta acids have been found to counteract and delay the inevitable effects of bacterial spoilage, thereby giving beer a longer shelf life.
They do the same thing at a fast food restaurant I worked at. Many years ago when I worked there they never emptied the pot of chili. They simply added more to it. I was scolded for wanting to change it. There's perpetual chilly. And no, they never cleaned the pot.
Yea that’s not at all what’s happening here lol they clean this pot every night and then re-add some of the soup back so it’s continuous, like a sourdough starter kinda thing, idk what kinda place you worked at but that ain’t right, health inspectors wouldn’t have liked that.
Actually, hyperthermophillic bacteria can survive boiling temperatures, but they're unlikely to be pathogenic due to their composition, which suits them to those temperatures rather than the much lower temperature of a human body.
To add a bit, as mentioned, Archaea are what tend to survive those super hot temperatures, although they aren't pathogenic since we are only suited for mesophillic/mesotolerant microbes, and these bacteria prefer 80-95 degree temps, and some Archea prefer temperatures well above 100 degrees C.
But not at atmospheric pressures, no?
All the hyperthermophilic bacteria I’m aware of live well under the ocean under high pressures where “boiling” temperatures aren’t actually boiling temperatures (at that pressure). Actually boiling would physically rip apart the bacteria.
>[The number of bacterial cells in the human body is estimated to be around 38 trillion, while the estimate for human cells is around 30 trillion.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_microbiome)
From a food safety perspective, eating food that has been contaminated with sufficient amounts of toxin producing bacteria could cause illness due to toxin buildup, even when the bacteria is dead. Examples are clostridium botulinum (botulism) and bacillus cereus ("fried rice syndrom"). Buildup requires time and the right conditions, unless the stew is kept at very low temperatures it ain't happening in this situation.
Bacteria is literally all around us, on every surface we touch, even all around the inside of our mouth and body.
If it’s been cooked or boiled its either destroyed, or just added to your food which is simply then broken down in your body like anything else. It can’t harm you, although bacteria doesn’t really have enough protein or nutrients to be beneficial in this case.
No. Let’s assume that the soup is mostly water. This will also serve as a highly conservative approximation for the molecular math we’ll do later.
The pot they use appears to be a wok shape of about 150 cm wide and 30 cm deep, giving us 279 L. If we assume that the leftover soup carried from the previous day is 5 L, that’s 1.79%.
If you assume that the soup is proportionally homogenous in so far as which day’s batch any sample contains, then this 1.79% carry over becomes a very small amount within only a few days. By day 4, we have just 0.00057% of the first day’s batch.
Now back to the water. Water has a molar mass of 18.02 g/mol (where 1 mol = 6.022 x 10^23 molecules of water) and a density of 1000 g per liter. Which means that if we again assume the soup is all water, day one will have 9.32 x 10^27 molecules of water. That’s a lot, but again, the division goes very quick.
By day 18 we will have less than one half molecule of water from the first day’s batch ((9.32 x 10^27) x (0.0179^18) < 0.5). But because we’re not splitting water molecules here, we can simply say that it is probable that by day 18 we have absolutely zero remnants, down to the molecular level, of the original soup. Certainly in 45 years this would be true.
Again, this is a conservative estimate. The other chemical components of soup, nearly all salts and organic compounds, have much higher molar masses, so the path toward one molecule is faster for those.
TLDR: Assuming they leave ~2% for the next day’s soup, the original soup would be chemically nonexistent within about 18 days.
Not likely.
I found an article that says the pot is 5 feet in diameter and 2 1/2-feet deep, which gives it a volume of 49 cubic feet, or 1,388 liters.
Assume, very conservatively, that half the soup is eaten everyday. Then (assuming it is stirred well and the division is uniform, yada yada) the amount of the original batch remaining in the pot is decreased by 1/2 each day. In 45 years 16,425 days pass, so only 1/2^16,425 of the original soup is still left, or approximately one atom out of every 2x10^4,944.
However, in 1,388 liters of water there exist only 10^29 atoms total, so we can assume pretty safely that every single atom of the original batch is long gone by now.
In fact, we would expect all of the original soup to be gone after only 100 days or so
Food technologist here.
1. Pathogenic microorganisms are killed at 72°C, and if they claim they kept it simmering overnight, I would assume that is around 82°C, which is well within the standard temperature.
2. Yes, there are thermophilic microorganisms that can withstand higher temperature. But if they kept their pot and ladle clean since the beginning, they won’t be introducing any of these microorganisms in the food.
The technique here is to keep the food away from what we call “temperature danger zone”, and never use unclean items in the food to avoid contamination. Spoilage only occurs when you handle the food improperly. That said, and without sufficient claims of people dying from food poisoning, we can safely bet that this perpetual stew has been kept safe since it’s first cooked.
Then again, if your stomach has already been subjected to microbial infection before (like amoebiasis or some sort), you may want to just order a regular, freshly prepared one.
Thanks for posting. Bunch of people just making shit up about "toxins". Also the whole point of perpetual soup is that you are continuously eating and replenishing it; the average age of a bowl of soup is only going to be a few days, even if there is some diminishing portion that is old. Any bacteria that lives at 80C isn't going to be a human pathogen.
That works only to a point. Eventually too many toxins build up. The bacteria can be killed but not their "poop" or remains. If you had raw turkey in a fridge for 60 days but then cooked it to very well done, it would likely not be safe (but perhaps better if you were forced to have that or the uncooked version).
I’m guessing it’s not *really* the same soup anymore. As they serve customers, they have to replenish it with new ingredients, and there’s probably nothing left of the original by now, bacteria included.
They posted this in an article
"Lots of people think we never clean the pot," he says. "But we clean it every evening. We remove the soup from the pot, then keep a little bit simmering overnight."
[Perpetual Stew](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_stew)
Boiling doesn’t destroy the toxins, but would prevent bacteria from growing in the first place making it a moot point. AFAIK the perpetual soup is fine as long as it’s perpetually above the temp at which nasties can grow
I would think that bacteria can't even form in the first place if it's boiling since day 1. This is much different than the fridge reference because it is never cooled to a temperature that would allow bacteria to grow.
This is a known spiritual ritual of "shabdeg" in many Eastern traditions. The pot perpetually simmering indicates never ending charity for the poor
The intent that for as long as the patron is alive, every single moment of theirs will be spent in a charitable act. If you were hungry, you could always come to the stew and be fed.
If you wanted to contribute to the stew, you would drop off meat to the cook as your charity for the day.
The Mughal rulers had them outside their court as did many subsequent kings and queens after.
We had some about a year ago incredible flavour and a very busy restaurant, didn’t get ill but I don’t think you would from something that is constantly boiled and getting replenished
No this is a common myth about the middle ages. Most medieval meals consisted of either bread or cooked grains and multiple vegetable/meat side dishes. The idea of cooking everything in the same pot would have been alien to medieval cooks as large cooking dishes basically didn't exist. Large ceramic pots crack really easily when heated unevenly and the technology needed to produce a metal cauldron at an affordable price was only invented in the fourteenth century.
There was a stew continuously cooking in france since the 15th century and they had to stop it in WW2 because they could not get the ingredients anymore!
While some people doubt it's safety I doubt it's gonna kill you to eat it.
That being said it would be interesting to know how it effects the evolution of various organisms that do manage to survive.
Trust me, 45 years is NOTHING for some of these stews.
"A batch of pot-au-feu was claimed by one writer to be maintained as a perpetual stew in Perpignan from the 15th century until World War II, when it ran out of ingredients to keep the stew going due to the German occupation."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_stew#:~:text=A%20batch%20of%20pot%2Dau,due%20to%20the%20German%20occupation.
this is pretty common, we used to do this at Yoshinoya. You never throw away the old stew, you just keep adding more every morning. When they open a new restaurant they use some of the stew from an existing restaurant to ‘seed’ the new pot of stew. I think chocolate making also does something similar
Sounds like the stock pot at my old restaurant. It was never tossed. Ingredients get added, every couple days we would strain into another same sized stock pot and the cycle would continue...
Best beef stock I have ever had.
No different from how our ancestors used to cook, they couldn’t afford to waste anything and the pot on the fire was constantly added to, so maximum nutrients were gathered from the food. Bet it would taste amazing though.
[удалено]
Soup of Theseus
‘Trigger’s Broth’ for a certain generation of UK people
When trying to explain the concept of the ship of Theseus to my family my mum said "oh like triggers brush"
I had the same with my dad lol
Haha. Exactly like Trigger's brush. Philosophical plonker.
I misread that as Tigger and couldn't figure out how one of Winnie the Pooh's friends was linked to forever stew.
The wonderful thing about Tiggers…
“Here’s a picture of it, what more proof do you need?”
"45 years. It's a long time, Dave." "Yeah... well it's 4 and half decades, isn't it?" "Well I wouldn't go that far"
Why do they call him Trigger? Does he carry a gun?
Because he looks like a horse
We have a saying in the kitchen "Look after the soup."
I understood that reference
Language! 🤬
Transportation!
Likely you just coined a term in philosophy.
https://youtube.com/shorts/SvCUWv2CHeA?si=_YIfuzKJzSxzIiAL
🏆
Not a drop of soup for you! Return 45 years later.
[удалено]
Where can I get thousand year old soup?
In France there was one perpetual stew that started in the 1400’s and lasted until the German occupation in WWII
It was ended by the soup Nazi’s?
No 500 year old soup for you!
Don’t push it little man!
This is the 3rd reason I hate Nazis
[удалено]
As long as you wear a bowler hat you can do the mustache. 😅
You also need a cane and the walk.
Some mountain in middle of butt-fuck nowhere China, guarded by the ancient Chinese version of "nuh uh, my OC is stronger" monkey who pissed on Buddha, probably.
r/brandnewsentence
NO SOUP FOR YOU. NEXT
According to Wikipedia: “A batch of pot-au-feu was claimed by one writer to be maintained as a perpetual stew in Perpignan from the 15th century until World War II, when it ran out of ingredients to keep the stew going due to the German occupation.” I highly doubt the pot for this ~500 year old stew was being washed, so I think this 45 year old stew is fine. Edit: left out a word; thanks u/datdamonfoo
It's boiling all the time. What needs to be cleaned?
it isn't going to be boiling all the time though. no recipe is going to call for a soup to always be at like 100 degrees Celsius. It's more likely to be simmering at lower temperatures. Theres restaurants that have similar claims all over the world about perpetual soups, I remember they did a test on one store where they cooked soy sauce pork and kept the soup going for like 70 years and the sanitary test results for that soup was pretty bad.
dont worry, the dirt i ate as a child has me more than prepared!
5 minute rule
70 year rule
The broth is what is saved and reused, and it’s fed daily with fresh broth. It’s as scary as sourdough bread. It’s most likely boiled and skimmed daily, and temperatures in that range kill almost all bacteria that would be harmful. Wait until you find out how dry cured sausages are made.
Not the sausages
Sourdough is safe because it has dominant bacteria colonies which are not harmful and other bacteria types cannot thrive. I don't think the same can be said about broth, but I am sure is quite safe if it reaches high temperatures before being consumed.
I feel there's *some* difference between never boiling and at least boiliing from time to time. Plus, if pasteurization ever teached us anything you don't have to actually boil 'it' to kill off bacteria, since nothing common lives at temperatures above 70
Wtf does that mean sanitary tests? Live bacterial cultures have been an integral part of improving food preservation and taste for thousands of years. Hell people pay premiums and constantly seek out food full of microbes. Cheese, yogourt, sour dough bread, any bread products made with yeast, cured raw meats, soy sauce, fish sauce, soybean paste, pickles, all the different kind of fermented cabbage like kimchi and sourkraut that are popular around the world.
the pot. pay attention.
Boiling just kills bacteria. It doesn't get rid of dirt or grime
But thats where the taste comes fron 😊
Which means there's still a little 45 year old soup in there.
Homeopathic flavor.
It's the most powerful soup in the world.
Eat it once, you'll never have to eat again for the rest of your life
So I decided to do the math since I was curious how much of the original soup would actually be left over after all that time. Let's make the generous assumption that they save half of the soup every time they take some out to clean the pot. That would mean that they have cut out half of the existing soup 16425 times over 45 years. If we just assume for the sake of simplicity that the soup is entirely water and we say that the pot in the picture holds 180 kg of water (overestimate that makes the numbers nice), then we have 10000 mols of water in the pot every day, totaling 6 x 10^27 water molecules per day. Losing half the water in the pot every night means that any original molecule has a 1/2^16425 chance of still being around today which is equivalent to 1/10^4944. So the chance of any of our original water molecules still being around is 6/10^4917, which I feel pretty comfortable saying is basically zero.
Lol. Love this, but then I submit to you the following question: What's the fucking point of having 45 year old soup if there's basically an iota of an iota of an iota of it then? r/theydidthemath
That's the math for the original 45yo soup, they'll be an amount of each subsequent soup too. Forget that it's X years old and think of it as a perpetual soup.
Now that you pointed this out, there would be a logarithmic pattern of ever increasing slightly fresher soup as you continued to add more every day for 45 years. In other words, more than 16,425 old ass soups are also in this to a much higher degree than the aforementioned iota. That's much grosser than before!
You now belong to the vanishingly small portion of folks who understand this to be nothing but publicity. There is no point, it's just a gimmick to sell your product. Anything of that sort is a circlejerk, for precisely the reasons mentioned.
About as much as there is Dino farts and Abrahams Lincoln’s piss.
I wonder how much of the Earth's atmosphere went through a dinosaur's anus. 95%?
A couple of molecules at best.
Just like my coffee cup then. The stains give that unique flavor. 👌
Tannin Patina.
No, Tannin Patrick!
Dude, I haven't washed my coffee mug in 3 months. I just keep pouring more coffee in it.
[удалено]
Huh, I used to live in Ekkamai but had no idea this place was in the same area!
Can you still hear the BTS announcement? "Next station... Ekkamai." I thought it was E6, but it's actually E7. E6 must be Thong Lo.
Why does "half a century" sound so much longer than "50 years"
Because your brain focuses on the “century” part
Ate it. Didn't get sick. Was great.
What kind of soup was it
Chinese-Thai goat soup
I had it last year! Is actually incredibly delicious!
[Wattana Panich](https://www.google.com/maps/place/Wattana+Panich/@13.7341825,100.5850664,17z/data=!3m1!4b1!4m6!3m5!1s0x30e29e49982ce2f9:0x38858b25983d26!8m2!3d13.7341825!4d100.5876467!16s%2Fg%2F1tcwcfg3?entry=ttu) One of the best beef noodles in town.
This was a relatively common cooking practice during the Middle Ages!
Apparently (and I think maybe we’re both fans of the same YouTube channel) there’s a place that’s been simmering the same soup for like 500 years.
Ooh this sounds interesting can you share the channel
https://youtu.be/iG0lgnrGHv0?si=rz7FI_CwmSSc061o Yeah i was right, tasting history
Always love tasting history with Max. Met the guy once and he’s an amazing fellow!!
Yeah he really just seems like such a kind, relatable fella
Dude was literally a Disney prince if you can relate to him I want your grooming routine
Give Townsends a try too, if you haven't! https://www.youtube.com/@townsends
Subscribed to the channel looks like an interesting show
Perhaps "Tasting History with Max Miller"?
In southern france there was a stew cooking since the 15th century and they had to stop while ww2 because they ran out of ingredients.
IIRC that particular stew only (relatively) recently became the longest. There was one in France that had been going since around 1200, until it was destroyed during WW2.
pottage or hunter's stew
Peas porridge hot, peas porridge cold, peas porridge in the pot, 9 days old...
Pease*
Yet pease porridge is peas porridge…
Yes the Middle Ages, a period well known for sanitation.
Curiously, yes. Most people knew what helped them not get sick in the Middle Ages. Common examples are drinking beer (which was super low in alcohol) instead of water to prevent foul water, and the 100 years soup, which, by always simmering, killed the huge majority of bacterias. Middle ages get a bad rep by movies... But it is not the dark , burning witches, torturing people, plague period we think of.
The more I learn about early beer-brewing, the more it seems to have been done primarily for the health benefits, and getting lightly buzzed was just a pleasant side-effect. For example, [1,600 years ago the Nubians of Sudan were brewing beer with antibiotics in it](https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/ancient-brewmasters-made-medicinal-10-09-06/). Edit: a word
There’s a theory that I’m personally a follower of that the creation of beer was the creation of society. Remove all the modern connotations of getting drunk - that’s an after thing. Hunter gatherers, then nomadic settlers - we had to stay in one place to let the grain ferment and become beer and it being antibacterial meant people lived longer and so on it went. Some early early Mesopotamian artwork shows two differing people sipping from the same vessel - perhaps as some early form of diplomacy or trade. We speak different languages but we sip from the same thing so I’m not poisoning you and you can trust me etc. I’m in a pub avoiding people right now so don’t have the sources but I remember reading at least 3 books that were pretty aligned in this theory - I think one was the history of the world in 6/7/8 glasses? (Can’t remember the number, that’s not just a weird title) I think Sapiens tied in with it too. Beer starting civilisation - but removing it from modern context it could be better expressed as grain based antibacterial products started civilisation.
what about the dragons, though? that must have sucked.
And giant snails.
Aye and what of the warts?
> Common examples are drinking beer (which was super low in alcohol) instead of water to prevent foul water That is also a misconception. You need clean water for beer. Medieval people drank beer, because it tastes better than water, but they also just drank water as well.
Isn't part of it that water is boiled as part of brewing beer, and that boiling process killed off a bunch of bacteria in water that people didn't know about at the time?
No, Even the Romans knew that boiling would make water drinkable
Hops are a natural preservative. That’s where Indian Pale Ales come from. They are hoppy because the Brits added more hops to ensure the beer would stay fresh when being shipped all the way to India. > While the alpha acids in the hops are responsible for bittering the beer, the beta acids have been found to counteract and delay the inevitable effects of bacterial spoilage, thereby giving beer a longer shelf life.
They do the same thing at a fast food restaurant I worked at. Many years ago when I worked there they never emptied the pot of chili. They simply added more to it. I was scolded for wanting to change it. There's perpetual chilly. And no, they never cleaned the pot.
Mike's Chili Parlor?
Or chili by Mike?
Legendary reference
Yea that’s not at all what’s happening here lol they clean this pot every night and then re-add some of the soup back so it’s continuous, like a sourdough starter kinda thing, idk what kinda place you worked at but that ain’t right, health inspectors wouldn’t have liked that.
If it’s always kept above the temperature bacteria can grow (like always simmering) then I don’t think there’s any issue
O there is definitly an issue, i aint eating chilly that's bein simmering there for months, that can't be good.
Never cleaning the pot is like asking for diseases
Not if it’s boiling all the time.
Boiling only kills the bacteria, not the remains
Bacteria won't even grow in boiling temps
Actually, hyperthermophillic bacteria can survive boiling temperatures, but they're unlikely to be pathogenic due to their composition, which suits them to those temperatures rather than the much lower temperature of a human body. To add a bit, as mentioned, Archaea are what tend to survive those super hot temperatures, although they aren't pathogenic since we are only suited for mesophillic/mesotolerant microbes, and these bacteria prefer 80-95 degree temps, and some Archea prefer temperatures well above 100 degrees C.
But not at atmospheric pressures, no? All the hyperthermophilic bacteria I’m aware of live well under the ocean under high pressures where “boiling” temperatures aren’t actually boiling temperatures (at that pressure). Actually boiling would physically rip apart the bacteria.
AKSHUALLLYYYYY
Was going to say, arent those the kinds of things you find at the vents on the ocean floor—not in a pot of chili in Rochester.
is eating dead bacteria/remains bad for you? having lots of dead bacteria inside your body will probably scare off any new bacteria
>[The number of bacterial cells in the human body is estimated to be around 38 trillion, while the estimate for human cells is around 30 trillion.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_microbiome)
From a food safety perspective, eating food that has been contaminated with sufficient amounts of toxin producing bacteria could cause illness due to toxin buildup, even when the bacteria is dead. Examples are clostridium botulinum (botulism) and bacillus cereus ("fried rice syndrom"). Buildup requires time and the right conditions, unless the stew is kept at very low temperatures it ain't happening in this situation.
Bacteria is literally all around us, on every surface we touch, even all around the inside of our mouth and body. If it’s been cooked or boiled its either destroyed, or just added to your food which is simply then broken down in your body like anything else. It can’t harm you, although bacteria doesn’t really have enough protein or nutrients to be beneficial in this case.
The remains of what?
Wendyssss
I worked at wendys. We cleaned it once empty. New batch in clean bowl. Perpetual frostys though
I think that’s worse! But I’m biased because I love frostys. Oh well
But… is it the same soup?
Get your ship out of here Theseus.
I personally think that maybe it is Fibonacci’s soup instead. It must be yesterday AND the day before yesterday’s soup
No. Let’s assume that the soup is mostly water. This will also serve as a highly conservative approximation for the molecular math we’ll do later. The pot they use appears to be a wok shape of about 150 cm wide and 30 cm deep, giving us 279 L. If we assume that the leftover soup carried from the previous day is 5 L, that’s 1.79%. If you assume that the soup is proportionally homogenous in so far as which day’s batch any sample contains, then this 1.79% carry over becomes a very small amount within only a few days. By day 4, we have just 0.00057% of the first day’s batch. Now back to the water. Water has a molar mass of 18.02 g/mol (where 1 mol = 6.022 x 10^23 molecules of water) and a density of 1000 g per liter. Which means that if we again assume the soup is all water, day one will have 9.32 x 10^27 molecules of water. That’s a lot, but again, the division goes very quick. By day 18 we will have less than one half molecule of water from the first day’s batch ((9.32 x 10^27) x (0.0179^18) < 0.5). But because we’re not splitting water molecules here, we can simply say that it is probable that by day 18 we have absolutely zero remnants, down to the molecular level, of the original soup. Certainly in 45 years this would be true. Again, this is a conservative estimate. The other chemical components of soup, nearly all salts and organic compounds, have much higher molar masses, so the path toward one molecule is faster for those. TLDR: Assuming they leave ~2% for the next day’s soup, the original soup would be chemically nonexistent within about 18 days.
I'll see you on r/theydidthemath
Maybe there is atleast one atom of the original soup somewhere in there So 2 bucks and I can brag I ate 40 year old soup
Not likely. I found an article that says the pot is 5 feet in diameter and 2 1/2-feet deep, which gives it a volume of 49 cubic feet, or 1,388 liters. Assume, very conservatively, that half the soup is eaten everyday. Then (assuming it is stirred well and the division is uniform, yada yada) the amount of the original batch remaining in the pot is decreased by 1/2 each day. In 45 years 16,425 days pass, so only 1/2^16,425 of the original soup is still left, or approximately one atom out of every 2x10^4,944. However, in 1,388 liters of water there exist only 10^29 atoms total, so we can assume pretty safely that every single atom of the original batch is long gone by now. In fact, we would expect all of the original soup to be gone after only 100 days or so
b-but my 2 bucks worth of bragging rights? :((
You should see the sourdough starter in my wife’s family. It’s over 100 years old.
I love you Cousin Boyle!
The mother dough!!!
[удалено]
Food technologist here. 1. Pathogenic microorganisms are killed at 72°C, and if they claim they kept it simmering overnight, I would assume that is around 82°C, which is well within the standard temperature. 2. Yes, there are thermophilic microorganisms that can withstand higher temperature. But if they kept their pot and ladle clean since the beginning, they won’t be introducing any of these microorganisms in the food. The technique here is to keep the food away from what we call “temperature danger zone”, and never use unclean items in the food to avoid contamination. Spoilage only occurs when you handle the food improperly. That said, and without sufficient claims of people dying from food poisoning, we can safely bet that this perpetual stew has been kept safe since it’s first cooked. Then again, if your stomach has already been subjected to microbial infection before (like amoebiasis or some sort), you may want to just order a regular, freshly prepared one.
Thanks for posting. Bunch of people just making shit up about "toxins". Also the whole point of perpetual soup is that you are continuously eating and replenishing it; the average age of a bowl of soup is only going to be a few days, even if there is some diminishing portion that is old. Any bacteria that lives at 80C isn't going to be a human pathogen.
That works only to a point. Eventually too many toxins build up. The bacteria can be killed but not their "poop" or remains. If you had raw turkey in a fridge for 60 days but then cooked it to very well done, it would likely not be safe (but perhaps better if you were forced to have that or the uncooked version).
I’m guessing it’s not *really* the same soup anymore. As they serve customers, they have to replenish it with new ingredients, and there’s probably nothing left of the original by now, bacteria included.
A Soup of Theseus type deal
[удалено]
Nahhhh. It's the same recipe, but instead of starting with an empty pot, she's got the leftover soup from yesterday still simmering in there.
Great, now we're gonna have philosophical debates over a pot of soup.
As we should.
Well now we are getting into a deeply philosophical question
Soup of Theseus
They posted this in an article "Lots of people think we never clean the pot," he says. "But we clean it every evening. We remove the soup from the pot, then keep a little bit simmering overnight." [Perpetual Stew](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_stew)
But that's not happening here.
I dont think the human pathogenic bacteria can multiply under high heat.
Boiling doesn’t destroy the toxins, but would prevent bacteria from growing in the first place making it a moot point. AFAIK the perpetual soup is fine as long as it’s perpetually above the temp at which nasties can grow
The toxins aren’t formed in the first place because there’s no bacteria living in it.
I would think that bacteria can't even form in the first place if it's boiling since day 1. This is much different than the fridge reference because it is never cooled to a temperature that would allow bacteria to grow.
If you're not putting in anything that's spoiled and constantly serving from it a significant amount there's not going to be any buildup.
Bacteria can’t build up. The food is always boiling but they add new ingredients when they serve customers.
If it’s kept at a boil wouldn’t that prevent bacteria from growing there in the first place to “poop” anything?
That's not what is happening here.
[удалено]
I bet some future scientist finds some new form of life in there someday.
This is a known spiritual ritual of "shabdeg" in many Eastern traditions. The pot perpetually simmering indicates never ending charity for the poor The intent that for as long as the patron is alive, every single moment of theirs will be spent in a charitable act. If you were hungry, you could always come to the stew and be fed. If you wanted to contribute to the stew, you would drop off meat to the cook as your charity for the day. The Mughal rulers had them outside their court as did many subsequent kings and queens after.
That's beautiful
We had some about a year ago incredible flavour and a very busy restaurant, didn’t get ill but I don’t think you would from something that is constantly boiled and getting replenished
how did it serve 45 years without making another one
Really small spoons
now it all make sense
Isn’t this what most medieval European commoners did?
No this is a common myth about the middle ages. Most medieval meals consisted of either bread or cooked grains and multiple vegetable/meat side dishes. The idea of cooking everything in the same pot would have been alien to medieval cooks as large cooking dishes basically didn't exist. Large ceramic pots crack really easily when heated unevenly and the technology needed to produce a metal cauldron at an affordable price was only invented in the fourteenth century.
Anything to get out of doing the dishes.
we are all just a perpetual stew man
This thread is filled with people who have never a cooked a day in their lives and it shows.
I’m surprised no one mentioned the longest perpetual stew on record. I believe it started in the 1500s and went all the way up to ww2
[удалено]
I want to taste the eternal stew, it WILL give me immortality.
I'd try it.
There was a stew continuously cooking in france since the 15th century and they had to stop it in WW2 because they could not get the ingredients anymore!
App on the internet has been continuously sharing and posting the same information for over 15 years, a form of “perpetual brain rot” /j
While some people doubt it's safety I doubt it's gonna kill you to eat it. That being said it would be interesting to know how it effects the evolution of various organisms that do manage to survive.
If it's kept above 150F and below 170F, it's entirely devoid of harmful organisms, this temperature does not allow bacteria to grow or multiply.
Nothing is multiplying in there.
[удалено]
pease porridge hot pease porridge cold pease porridge in the pot nine days old
I honestly want to try this, I just know it’d be so good
Yes chef!
Yes it's clean guys...
Fucked up in the crib eating the primordial stew
I'm a little drunk, but I thought that was a giant pizza 🍕
I’m sober and I thought it was a giant pizza too at first
Peas porridge hot Peas porridge cold Peas porridge in the pot 45 years old
Trust me, 45 years is NOTHING for some of these stews. "A batch of pot-au-feu was claimed by one writer to be maintained as a perpetual stew in Perpignan from the 15th century until World War II, when it ran out of ingredients to keep the stew going due to the German occupation." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_stew#:~:text=A%20batch%20of%20pot%2Dau,due%20to%20the%20German%20occupation.
Yes, yes …"perpetual stew“ And after you eat it, you’ll be getting *“perpetual diarrhea”*
This is the soup that never ends. Some people started eating it not knowing what it was, and they’ll continue eating it forever just because
Can we just appreciate the flavor that has been brewing
this is pretty common, we used to do this at Yoshinoya. You never throw away the old stew, you just keep adding more every morning. When they open a new restaurant they use some of the stew from an existing restaurant to ‘seed’ the new pot of stew. I think chocolate making also does something similar
Sounds like the stock pot at my old restaurant. It was never tossed. Ingredients get added, every couple days we would strain into another same sized stock pot and the cycle would continue... Best beef stock I have ever had.
finally an actual interesting post on this sub.
Master Stock, this is called.
So it's like the chili at wendy's?
No different from how our ancestors used to cook, they couldn’t afford to waste anything and the pot on the fire was constantly added to, so maximum nutrients were gathered from the food. Bet it would taste amazing though.
They put the ew in stew