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Comment by rtkwe | Hacker News Reader

Yeah that's definitely the issue with the shellfish. I'm just more surprised the allergen is sufficiently different from the smell that they are disconnected in peanuts.

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Molecules responsible for smells tend to be small, on the order of 100-300 Daltons—otherwise they aren’t able to diffuse easily in the air.

The vast majority of allergens, on the other hand, are proteins, with the very smallest proteins being on the order of 1 kiloDalton. Large proteins get up into hundreds to thousands of kDa.

I suspect that peanut boiling in a pot would also be problematic. The oil and water vapor and would provide a carrier.

I also suspect there's not much reason to boil peanuts in water outside of the very specific (and delicious) snack called boiled peanuts. I can't really think of any other dish that uses them as a normal ingredient. Most of the time you'd toast them in oil for dishes or use peanut oil afaik.

In Indian Cuisine, peanuts are sometimes boiled, and are indeed delicious

Boiled peanuts are staples at baseball games in the south. They are so good.

I love boiled peanuts and I'm always tempted on roadtrips to grab some when I go through areas where they appear as gas station snacks. Usually that's when I'm down into South Carolina or farther south.

There are quite a few dishes that use peanuts as an ingredient. Satay sauce for example.

I ended up in the hospital after walking by my roommate who was washing off a knife with peanut butter on it in hot water in the sink. I just inhaled a single breath of steam and in minutes I couldn't breathe!

My first thought here would be to blame "solid" particles of peanut butter flung into the air by blasting them with a water stream, unrelated to temperature

That does sound like something that would be a real issue, but only in close proximity

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