This is mildly embarrassing, but I have allowed a very nice piece of cookware to sit in the back of the fridge for (mumble mumble) months with a small amount of organic material in it. I peeked in it yesterday and it’s full of grey mold. I think it’s grey. I closed it very quickly after peeking at it because I was afraid something would crawl out of it and turn me into a pod person.
The material is aluminum and it’s oven safe. Should I bleach it to visual cleanliness and then let it bake for a few hours? How likely is the mold itself to be dangerous while cleaning it? Can I safely wash it in the sink? Should I carry it outside and douse it in diesel? Should I call the CDC and let them do the hazmat-and-tent thing from E.T.? Is nuking it from orbit the only way to be sure?
Please put my mind at ease and tell me the best way to safely and thoroughly clean it. Need answer fast-ish, as I will have a houseguest in town for the week and do not want to have to explain the biohazard in the fridge.
PS: The internet has plenty of reasonable and no doubt accurate advice which I am choosing to ignore in favor of you people. Please pretend to be a chemist, biologist, forensic crime scene investigator, or professional mafia cleaner when giving your answer.
Aluminum will not absorb any of the nasty stuff. A thorough cleaning with dish soap and hot water should be enough. You could add a little bleach to the rinse water to sanitize it. I base my answers on the time I spent mess cooking while in the Navy and working behind the bar and in the kitchen of a tavern.
Clean the non-porous surface with detergent and water first. Sodium hypochlorite bleach solution is OK for sanitizing cookware (dilute it 50x to obtain a ~1000 ppm solution) but make sure there are no scents or thickeners or other potentially toxic adulterants. Let it do its work for a couple of minutes.
I’d just scrub the crap out of it with dish detergent and a mildly abrasive sponge, and then boil some water in it for 10-15 minutes. That way you’re not having to worry about bleach or anything like that.
99% of the effective work is the washing, not the sanitizing. All whatever your sanitizing method does is catch whatever you didn’t clean off the surface. (this is the old homebrewer in me talking).
Once The Wolf Shows up, they’ll walk you through it.
You did ask for a professional mafia cleaner, no?
More seriously though, I’d probably put on some spare nitrile or heavy gloves, move the whole pan to a large trashbag, and (gagging) scrap everything out of the pan into the bag to seal ASAP. Once everything I can get off by hand is done, I’d set the pan on the concrete floor of my garage with just off the boil water from the electric kettle and plenty of heavy duty dishwasher soap for a soak.
Pour the water off onto the nearby Dutch elm that WILL NOT DIE in the yard, then take back for a more-or-less normal kitchen washing. If nothing visible remains, then a brief sanitation with a bleach mixture, and maybe a just peace-of-mind run through the dishwasher after the bleach has been carefully washed out.
If there was any remaining visual discoloration after the bleach, or anything that didn’t come out with steel wool or abrasives, then I’d give it a roast in the oven, but I doubt it - I’d probably nuke it from orbit at that point.
Just to be clear, mold is all around you, all of the time. The mold that colonized this pot was not spontaneously generated from nothingness, and is almost certainly still resident in your refrigerator. You are constantly inhaling spores of mold, and unless you are eating fresh baked bread or that Wonder Bread crap with no digestible nutrients, you are consuming mold in your food and drink. So the idea that you have to do some kind of special, radical cleaning to eliminate the mold from your existence is just not realistic.
Now, there are molds and other fungi that are particularly toxic to breathe or consume, but while mold is resilient it has to be present in significant quantities to produce enough toxins to do harm. Unlike bacteria and viruses, fungi will not generally grow inside your digestive tract, so trace amounts of spores are not really a concern. Some molds can survive boiling temperatures at atmospheric pressure so just boiling water for many minutes is not any kind of guarantee of sterilization, but physical removal of the visible mold and the scrubbing of the surface with a soap or detergent should be adequate. As @racer72 says, aluminum is not porous to any degree, and except for surface scratches will not be able to ‘absorb’ any spores. Bleach may work at eliminating any residual material but a soaking and a good scrub in hot, soapy water is really all that is necessary.
Well, I gots an M.S. in microbiology (Science!), and if it was me*, I’d scrape as much moldy crap as possible into the garbage. Then I’d squirt a bunch of dish detergent into the pot, add hot water and let it soak for an hour or so, then scrub out, maybe repeating the process once if it doesn’t look totally clean.
*usual disclaimer about how this should not replace the advice of a PhD fungologist. I did however toss out a package of hot dogs today that was apparently left over from the 4th of July and had sprouted an impressive array of pale gray and black mold, and am not dead yet. I also survived the recovery and disposal of an ancient date nut bread and cream cheese sandwich that got lost in the back of my high school locker, causing several nearby students to pass out from sheer revulsion.
Do not do this, you will just strengthen it’s immune system. I used to fill the litter boxes with bleach and water then pour the pee bleach water on our weeds. Wanna know what happened? Clean, thriving weeds, that’s what happened. Nuke the Dutch elm from orbit just to stop wasting your time.
To the OP, I’d use the same disposal method as @Jackmannii , but I’m speaking as a professional cheesemaker.
As Stranger mentioned, the mold spores came from inside your fridge, so you have already ingested them…just not in their more visible stage.
The OP doesn’t say whether the aluminum is coated or anodized, but that strikes me as an important part of deciding what to do.
Cooking in “raw” aluminum cookware is a good way to produce nasty results. I once simmered a freshly made pot of homemade payapa in an aluminum pot - sadly the entire recipe had to be thrown out.
Not that I’m recommending this, but couldn’t you just put the pot, mold residue and all, in the oven for 30 minutes? Wouldn’t that kill anything in and on the pot? Assume the pot has no meltable handles.
It might, but it might also splatter the inside of the oven and make even more of a mess.
If the cookware is really that important, and worth cleaning, first get rid of the contents. Scrub with normal dishsoap and an appropriate brush or sponge, hopefully one that you’ll willing to throw out.
Rinse. Repeat until clean. Maybe change the brush or sponge to a newer one.
Well gang, I’m afraid the cookware is a loss. After initial scrubbings it had quite a lot of residue that I couldn’t get out. After trying a series of increasingly harsher cleaning methods, I ended up scrubbing a good chunk of the coating right off.
My own fault several times over! Thanks for the advice, everyone.
Oh, I’m pretty sure that nuking the elm from orbit will still not work. It’ll pull a Harold and become some form of unkillable plant mutant that will outlast our entire society. Frikin’ elms. I just was targeting it in my endless hate of it and it’s bretheren.
But @Johnny_Bravo - sorry that the pan was a loss. Still, 'tis the season to be shopping I guess? Or was there some other reason we celebrate this time of year? Treat yourself to a new pan and give the other one a Viking funeral! ( just kidding, if it’s coated and compromised, I don’t want that stuff going airborne)