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Comment by photochemsyn | Hacker News Reader

Another benefit of using reusable glass wherever possible: plastic additives leak into experiments and samples. This has been known for over a decade:

(2008) Bioactive Contaminants Leach from Disposable Laboratory Plasticware

https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.1162395

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Glass also leaches silica, sodium and other materials into experiments (particularly at high pH), it just depends what contaminants are most concerning for your specific work.

I use a glass bowl for whipping egg whites, because you can't do that in plastic. The microscopic traces of oil that remain in the plastic stop it foaming.

Apparently the best thing to use is a copper bowl that you keep just for that, but I don't make enough things with egg whites to be worth it. It seems that the copper ions coming off the bowl make the egg proteins stick like crazy.

I use a metal bowl. If you really want to remove the oils, wash with vinegar before use - I don't usually bother, but did when whipping egg whites for a wedding cake.

IIRC, copper stabilizes the egg whites so they stay foamy for a decent time, but they don't always get as stiff as they do in a glass or metal bowl and it is definitely harder to overbeat. To be fair, if you are whipping by hand, you probably are in no danger of this. And for those that don't know, folks usually use something like cream of tartar in eggs to do a similar stabilizing, though you still get stiff foam.

Interesting. You think this can affect making carbonara sauce(yolks, possibly some whites, black pepper and pecorino)?

I always did it in a porcelain bowl, seems to work fine.

Pretty much, you want a smooth bowl that won't hold a greasy residue on the surface. Plastic holds some greasy on the surface, so it doesn't work well even with good cleaning. It won't be impossible, mind you - I've used the plastic container with my stick blender to beat an egg white - but generally is more difficult, especially if you are using arm muscles to whip it instead of electricity. Ceramic, glass, stainless steel and copper all work well, though, just make sure they are clean.

Thanks, I should be fine then. It's been so long since I had chef made carbonara I wasn't sure.

I don't know. Only one way to find out, I guess!

I dislike the sound of a wire whisk on a metal bowl. But I've found stainless steel mixing bowls work well too.

They sell whisks with silicone covering the bits of metal that make contact. They sell more than one style (balloon and the one with the coil). They do not make the same sound.

Isn't copper unhealthy

Everything's unhealthy if you have too much of it, pretty much everything is essential in small enough quantities. Look at cobalt - it's lethally poisonous at surprisingly low levels, fairly unpleasant long before that, and even in its non-radioactive form it causes cancer. But it's also a trace element that shows up in vitamin B12, and without cobalt all your myelin falls off your nerves and you die.

Metals generally are.

Soap can also leach into your reagents. We used to maintain separate bottles labeled no soap to make media because it affected transformation frequency. Still, I’m on team reuse.

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