Welcome to How To Cook That, I'm Ann Reardon and this is another episode of debunking. In this
first hack we are looking at the bizarre trend of using excessive amounts of cleaning products
to clean the toilet 🚽 They tip so many products in there that they can't even flush the toilet
without sticking their hand in to unblock it. Cleaning chemicals are expensive so they're
just flushing money down the toilet. Apart from it being such a waste of money and bad
for the environment to use all those chemicals unnecessarily, the main issue i have with this
is they are mixing different chemicals together and when you do that they can react together and
create toxic gases! You don't have to look very far to know that this is a bad idea ... a mixture
of cleaning products caused overwhelming toxic fumes that killed the manager of a Buffalo Wild
Wings and sent 13 others to the hospital. Don't mix cleaning chemicals together it's a really
dangerous idea. Next we have a DIY jewellery hack by Five Minute Crafts. They repeatedly dip their
finger in melted wax to get a thick coating then they saw off a section of wax to make
a ring shape they then trace a pattern onto it and carve out a flower shape into the top of the ring.
Now some jewellers do indeed use wax to carve out designs when they're designing new pieces
of jewellery but it's a specific type of wax it's very hard so that it will hold its shape and if
we look at the website for the jeweller's wax we can see that it has a melting point of around 240
degrees celsius or 460 Fahrenheit. You could not dip your finger into that or you're going to end
up with really really bad burns and that's why the jeweller's wax comes already available in shapes
that jewellers can use ... so you've got your long cylinders for the rings and the ones that are
fatter at the top for the signet type rings. But that's not what they used in this video so they
must have used a wax with a much lower melting point something like a paraffin wax melts at about
60 degrees celsius you may have seen that in the shops that do the wax hands and usually they'll
dip the hand into ice first to make it really cold and then into the wax repeatedly to get a layer of
the wax to be able to get its shape but that wax is really, really soft so they then fill that with
a different type of wax that is firmer before they give it to the person or it's just going to crush.
You couldn't use it for carving these sort of fine details that they're showing in this video.
If we keep watching the video you can see that it then changes when they're carving the flower
shape to suddenly look like a plastic shape not wax at all and looking at it side on now how do
they think they got from this shape to this shape? Instead of carving wax stools can also 3D print
there's certain 3D printing materials that will melt at the same temperature as the wax does so
they can use it in this process so what they do is they take either the wax or the 3D printed thing
and put it into a mould adding gypsum all around it and then they heat that up so that the wax
melts out and you're left with the mould that you want for your metal you then fill it with your
molten metal put it into water and that gypsum just sort of dissolves away like chalk and then
you end up with the piece of metal in the shape of what you'd carved originally. So the second
half of what they showed in that process was correct it was the first half that was totally
incorrect and mixing the truth in with the lies there makes it harder for people to distinguish
because it makes it all seem like it must be true and it must be believable even when it's not.
So why did they make up a fake beginning why didn't they just show it 3D printing rather than
showing someone dipping their hand in wax? Well I think it's because this thumbnail showing someone
dipping their hand into wax looks far more DIY and and achievable and doable than this thumbnail
would have. The truth is just not as clickable and the current YouTube algorithm really favours
things that have a high click-through rate. If we look at one of the most successful creators on
YouTube Mr Beast you can learn from the way that he does his thumbnails ... if you look at this one
the title says: walking into random stores with a hundred dinosaurs. But if you watch the video
there's only about 10 or 11 dinosaurs and they didn't even go into a store we didn't even get
in the door we got kicked out but that title would just not be as clickable and it certainly
wouldn't have got 31 million views! If you look at this next one it says i didn't eat food for 30
days and the thumbnail says day 19. But if you watch the video he only made it to day 14.
And if we swap out those numbers again it's just not as clickable as it was before ... still not
recommended from a health perspective please do not just stop eating for two weeks i would not
recommend that you do that or follow that video at all but you get the idea. YouTubers are having to
do more and more clickbait in order to get that high click-through rate and please the algorithm
and get recommended that's something I am not very good at but unfortunately something we all have
to consider. Mel sent me this next video where they tell you to wrap string around a bottle add
alcohol light it up dump it in water and now you have a green bracelet. This is totally ridiculous
if you use string and alcohol and heat to break glass you end up with really roughly broken glass,
if you put that on your arm it is going to cut you. Even if we look back at their original video
you can see that their's is jagged thick glass and then in the next shot it is perfectly smooth and
thin and probably a plastic bracelet bought from a shop. Effie sent me this next video asking is this
true or has it been faked? The lady takes a very wilted lettuce and puts it in leaf side down into
some iced water and leaves it overnight and then in the morning ... it's just like new. Let's test
it out i've got a couple of wilted lettuces this one is pretty good in the middle but the edges are
looking a little bit sad and I've got this one here which is really quite wilted again the middle
is still okay but the outside leaves are really not great. Let's put both of those into iced water
in the same way the lady did and then leave it on a time lapse overnight so we can see what happens.
There is a tiny change in the first hour but then after that nothing happens at all. It would have
made more sense to me if she trimmed a tiny bit off the stem of the lettuce and flipped it over
so that it's stem side down so it can draw up water the way it does when it's growing like
with flowers in a vase, so let's flip it over and leave it overnight again and see what happens. Wow
that's making much more of an impact that's pretty cool to watch it's rehydrating before your eyes.
They look much much better now but for food safety reasons I would say do not do this hack. If you
think about it a lettuce grows in soil and it's then picked and it goes along a production line
and it is then packaged there are lots of places along that line that it could be
contaminated on those outside leaves with some listeria or some E. coli or other bacterias
and then what happens when you get it and you submerge it in water you are giving it plenty
of water for that bacteria to multiply and also to go from just the outer leaves
into the water you're then putting the lettuce into the water and the lettuce is drawing up that
water and any of that bacteria into the actual lettuce leaves which you're then going to eat.
So that is really not a good idea it is not a safe hack so don't do that one. Next we have a baking
hack adding foil to the tops your tins really helps with even bake they come out nice and fluffy
perfectly flat on top, saves any wastage from having to trim off any uneven or crunchy tops.
Sounds awesome, let's test it out. Now some cakes are more prone to doming on the top than
others so I've chosen a cake mix that looks like it domes pretty badly. I've made up two boxes
of cake mix and put the exact same quantity of batter into each tin. We'll cover one tightly with
foil and leave the other one uncovered and bake those. Cakes dome because the outside edges near
the metal tin bake and harden before the cake is finished rising which then forces the cake to rise
in the middle where it's softer on top. Wow this one's gone really crazy 🤪 If we take the foil off
the other one and you can see that it has hit the foil which has stopped it going quite as mad but
if we look at them side by side the one covered in foil is definitely better but it's still going to
need trimming if you want to use it for a flat layer for a cake. So let's try that again with
a different cake recipe this one i'm going to use one that has a much runnier batter. You can see it
is rising slightly more evenly hasn't gone totally crazy like the other one did but we still get that
dome on top. If we take the foil off this one you can see it's not as brown because the foil has
protected it from the heat and if we tip those out and look at them side by side you can see the one
that didn't have the foil obviously is still domed and has quite a bit of browning, the other one
to me still looks just as domed so will this hack give you totally flat cakes? No it probably won't
the recipe makes far more of an impact. The other things that can make a difference is
baking it on a lower temperature at the start of your baking so it has a chance for the whole thing
to heat up and rise before that top sets and also using the wet cake strips around your tin so it's
cooling the edges and giving the middle a chance to heat up they're the two ways that would be more
effective at getting a flat cake but the recipe is going to be the thing that makes the biggest
difference in there too. Next a reminder to parents that if young kids are watching youtube to
not only keep an eye on what they're watching but if they've got headphones on make sure you take
a listen as well. After I mentioned this in a previous video one of my patrons said he did
just that when he walked past his niece who was watching videos he had a listen and was quite
shocked at what was actually being said. To give you an example if you were seeing a kid
with headphones on watching this video what would you expect they would be listening to
maybe some music maybe how-to instructions but no they would actually be listening to a story
I won't play the whole thing here but just to give you an idea of the voice it's told in ... one
night audi was staying with her mother and sister after she got in a fight with her baby father.
Audi's sister had woken up to some loud screaming. It continues on to tell a dramatized type version
of a real crime that was very disturbing and quite horrific that happened many years ago,
definitely not something you want little kids listening to and there are more and more of these
story time videos that seem to be cropping up ... they've either got cake decorating or puppies and
kittens and stuff that would be attractive to little kids to watch but then they have a story
being told in the background. This slime video has a story about a young girl hitchhiking at night:
someone stopped just a couple of meters away and casually asked where are you heading girl? After
my eyes had gotten used to the light i managed to make out the face of a smiling man i really didn't
have any choice, staying alone at night on an unfamiliar highway would have been a much crazier
idea than getting into a car with a stranger, so I told him my address and i just i trusted fate.
Never get into a car with a stranger even if you're completely lost in the middle of nowhere
you wouldn't get into the car with them you would ask them to call your parents and if you don't
know your parent's phone number you would ask them to call the police and the police would come and
get you and take you to your home. You just, it's never the resort to get in the car with a stranger
you just don't do that sort of thing. But the other thing that concerned me about this video
is it kept flashing out this short link all the way through the video and all the way through the
story so I decided to follow it and see where the short link went. At first it looks like it's just
taken you to a page with more slime videos but if you try and click on any of those videos it says
that the link is not working but it instantly takes you through to the app store to download
a Chinese video sharing app. To use the app you have to give it permission to use your camera,
your photo album your location and anything you copy to the clipboard including passwords.
Although it says you have to be over 17 to use the app it didn't ask for my age for me to install
it or start using it at all. If I did want to share a video which is shared publicly with my
location on it it did ask for a phone number so at least hopefully that would rule out too
many young kids just sharing publicly videos of themselves with their location which just seems
kind of dodgy that it's in the kids video and linking them directly through to that. If you
see anything you want me to debunk you can send me a link to the video using the email that is below
this one. Please do also send me the timestamp if you're sending me a 20 minute video rather than me
having to watch the whole thing to find the bit that you were talking about. Here is a list of
absolute legends these guys are patrons and they help this channel to run and make videos for you
guys to watch so thank you so very much. Make it a great week and i will see you on Friday 💕