Chef's Shockwave

I’m not a chef, although I did spend some time working in restaurants, and even briefly considered making a career run.

During my time cooking, I picked up some great tricks I use all the time, whenever I’m making food for myself or my family. Properly cutting vegetables, using the clean-as-you-go method, and keeping everything I need within arms reach have all been incredibly helpful tips, and I love to use those today.

However, not all of the culinary knowledge came from my time in restaurants. There are tricks your family shows you when you’re growing up, for example. One trick that was passed down to me by way of this sort of tribal knowledge is whenever the lid of a jar is stuck. Maybe you want some pickled jalapenos, or perhaps it’s spaghetti sauce—whatever it is, you’ve been there.

If you’re like me, one of your go-to tricks is to bang a spoon around the side of the lid.

Presto! It opens like magic.

Maybe my grandmother showed me this trick. I’m pretty sure the first time I saw this was when I was very young, and I can’t remember not knowing that it worked.

Knowing exactly how it worked was another matter entirely. For the longest time, I was confident that the spoon changed the physical shape of the lid. It made sense to me: if a lid was on too tight, you could release its grip by moving the lip of the lid away from the glass jar.

Finding out that you’re dead wrong about something can have a few different effects on your psyche. When the actual explanation is way more fascinating than you thought it was, that can really smooth things over for you and make accepting the new reality much, much more palatable.

That’s what happened with my desire to understand why the spoon-jar trick works.

It turns out that what’s happening is way, way cooler than just deforming a lid by banging it—although physical banging can work, too. Jars are typically vacuum-sealed whenever they’re stored somewhere for a long time, and that vacuum seal can be incredibly strong—stronger even than the jar’s materials.

When you smack a spoon handle against the side of the jar, a tiny shockwave travels through the glass and up to the lid. This shockwave can slightly deform the metal, allowing just a small amount of air to permeate the seal.

Alternatively, if some debris is blocking the lid from twisting, the shockwave might cause said debris to loosen up. That’s what happens when you tap the side of a ketchup bottle to get the stuff to start flowing.

I don’t know about you, but I can’t stop thinking about shockwaves any time I open a jar now that I know this. One possible contributing factor could be that the coolest Transformer’s name was Shockwave, and someone I knew had this toy:

Do you know any tribal or secret culinary tricks like this? Have you ever discovered that something you’ve been using your whole life (like this chef’s shockwave) isn’t what you thought it was? Is there a Transformer cooler than Shockwave?