: Will cannes food tops melt if dropped in boiling soup? I may have dropped a can food top in my soup but i am not sure. It's not in the soup but could it have melted ?

Vote Up Vote Down   0 Reactions

Login to give Reaction!

No, it won't melt to the point where it becomes liquid and mixes evenly with the soup. You cannot have consumed a melted top without knowing it.

There are very few "everyday" metals which melt at below 500 C. Even tin (which I doubt is actually used for food packaging any longer) needs 231 C, while soup is at 100 C max (boiling point of water). If your top was metal, it wouldn't even have softened.

Plastics have a lower melting point, but they are amorphous materials with a very wide transition range. This means, even though they can get quite soft at 100 Celsius, they will remain in one piece. A plastic top could not have melted and mixed with the liquid.

Also, neither metal nor plastic is soup soluble. If you had had some material which melted into the soup (and that's purely hypothetical, after all nobody makes food cans out of gallium), it would have coalesced into visible hard lumps after the soup cooled down.

If there is indeed a can top in the soup, you'll be able to find it, practically in its original state. And the food is still edible.

Vote Up Vote Down   0 Reactions

Login to give Reaction!

With most cans, you would assume that they have been heat processed after sealing anyway, effectively at pressure-canning temperatures (~120°C) or even higher, so the materials will likely be somewhat resilient ... it would be advisable, though, to make sure that the can lid, or the soup after the lid has been removed, gets a couple minutes of boiling or simmering - you don't know what grunge was on the can lid unless you washed the can before opening...

EDIT: printing inks on the can lid might be a point of contention, if anything has been printed on it (compare a can from the same batch, if there should be printing on the cooked lid that isn't there....)...