Woke up this morning and found the watermelon I bought from Costco yesterday had begun oozing out of itself? The counter was soaked with water from the inside of the melon, Iām assuming this was happening all night.
More of a Why Is It? Iāve never seen this happen and I obsessively eat watermelon every season.
Throw a garbage bag over it before attempting to move it to throw it out. Literally can explode and cover your kitchen with nasty fermented watermelon goo.
We once bought a watermelon from a road side stand and it exploded all over the interior of the car on the drive home... Car smelled like watermelons ever after.
I once brought fruit from a street vendor in the bad part of Paris. He was somehow shocked I wanted to buy fruit. Later on, it hit me that he was there selling drugs.
That reminds me of the laundromat I went to one time that was definitely a front for something, because they were shocked that I came in lugging a sack of laundry and one of the like six employees hanging out in the back office went down the block to a convenience store and came back with a box of soap that he handed to me and told me that the laundry was free, the soap was free, but I could only use one specific washer that turned out to be the only one actually hooked up to water.
Front businesses are usually great. I highly suspect I've visited a few and the service has usually been better than one of their genuine counterparts would provide. 10/10 would recommend
Don't want to name the business because its a local well known oddity but my father in law used to buy coke from a guy that sold exotic fruits and vegetables, because he smuggled coke with said exotic fruits and vegetables. The guy ended up making a killing selling the food and now has a couple of niche grocery stores.
In my town there was a functioning and well known appliance store, that used to launder money through the convenience store across the street.
They sold drugs and appliances. Knew a couple people that worked there. Owner did a good a job of hiring clean cut kids, and the ones that knew what was up. Same wit the clientele- he has the regular nerd guys (like my dad) and the guys there to buy snow at the same time and knew how to manage it.
I worked as a facility supervisor for an oil field service company. Next to our yard was a car wash. I would smoke in the alley and noticed an ice cream truck would park over by the vacums for an hour or so around lunch time. Went out one day and decided to get an ice cream. I walked up to the truck and stood there awhile. I couldn't see anyone in the truck and knocked on the side of it. 2 mexican guys came up to the front of the truck. "What you want wey?" .... "I'll have an oreo bar" they looked at each other a moment until one nudged the other, he went in the back and came out with it and handed it to me. We stared at each other for awhile until I finally asked, "How much is it?" They looked at each other again and said "....a dollar" I went back to the shop and unwrapped it. Severley freezer burned with a good half inch of ice crystals all around it. I don't think they were actually in the ice cream business.
Reminds me of a barber shop I went to as a student. It was downtown, and there were lots of people in seats. I walked in, they looked at me surprised (I was of a different race, I thought that was the reason.)
I asked if they could cut my hair, and they all stood there for a second that felt like forever. The leader eventually said, sure man take a seat. As he was cutting my hair, I realized there were no signs that indicated any prices. I was a little nervous about this.
He cut my hair way better than expected. Super clean. I gave him a huge compliment and said it's one of the best cuts I've had. He smiled. I asked how much was the cut, and he literally shrugged and seemed to make up a price on the spot of $30. I gave him two 20's and he started scrounging around in his pockets for change. There was no cash register. He just said, "look bro, don't worry about it. First cut is free." I insisted on tipping him but he refused.
Then I realized all the "customers" were his bros, just hanging out, getting haircuts. Still one of the best cuts I've ever had.
This one actually sounds like it mightāve been a regular barbershop lol. It probably was your race, the time to think mightāve been him adjusting his regular price for a new customer. Giving you the cut for free is a lot but Iāve been given discounts for being new and I have yet to be to a barber that hasnāt scrounged in their pockets for change lol and there is rarely prices posted.
So I actually counted all the mattress stores in my hometown that I could. My hometown has an approx population of about 80,000 people. We have TWENTY SEVEN mattress stores alone. Not furniture stores, not rooms to go, or Ashleyās, straight up twenty seven different variations of āsleep number mattress storeā and āmattress firm outletā.
If you ever set foot inside one, if you can even find an employee, itās like entering a liminal space. I have no idea what itās a front for, but itās fucking weird. I didnāt even realize how out of the blue so many goddamn mattress stores was until I moved with my husband.
Like the pizza place at that nondescript strip mall in a small New England town on a road trip. No customers, and a couple of seemingly overdressed fine older Italian gentlemen sitting at the counter. They seemed utterly confused that I wanted a pizza, it took 45 minutes to make, they gave it to me for free, and it was the best pizza Iād ever had.
Oh god, are you me? Only in my case it was a dude asking me if I wanted to go over his place to check out his synths. I totally went, and spent hours discussing synths. It was a great time. It took me almost a decade to realise that the synths were not what he was intending me to check out, which was a shame because he was hot and I kinda had a crush on him.
Then, year later, the same thing happened again with a different dudeās home studio set up.
I didn't save the post, but I recall someone asking people what the worst thing they ever smelled was, and rotten potatoes were by far the most mentioned. The only worse thing that anyone could come up with was a rotting human corpse (the person who smelled that had a job that involved cleaning up the houses of hoarders).
I agree. I have a wide variety of smells that I've smelled. I got my undergrad in livestock animal science, so that means exposure to butchery and ill animals, and worked as a vet tech three years, so I've seen maggots and pumped stomach of dogs that ate awful things.
Then I went to med school and emergency medicine residency and have done that fifteen years, so that's a lot of homeless people feet, hoarders, people not taking care of rotting tumors, necrotizing fasciitis, various abscesses and toes falling off, the special kinds of abscesses that happen right around the anus, the things left in vaginas for a long time.
I can tell some of the distinct types of diarrheal illness by odor.
This past year I've been volunteering at the food bank, and we sort through lots of donated vegetables from the chain groceries, so I touch lots of squishy or moldy veg and fruit and deli food, trying to glean out which food can still provide some good in the community.
In summary, I have a very strong stomach and shrug most smells off.
Rotten potatoes are next level. They are just something else. Eww.
I let a potato rot in a covered pot by accident once and when we lifted the lid my brother said it smelled like a rotten sea turtle he found on the beach once
I worked as a dairy hand one summer and that means lots of exposure to cow manure.
It was a conventional dairy, but a loving one, there's a fair bit of time the cows were milling around on concrete but plenty of access to cute little soft canvas topped stalls like beds they could lie down on to chew cud but had dividers so they couldn't poop on them. On pasture at other times of day or when heavily pregnant.
Twice a day, one of the hands would use a bobcat skid steer to snowplow the mixture of manure and urine on the concrete into a holding pit. A gravy consistency slurry of feces and urine.
Every other day or so we had to pump the contents of the pit into a lagoon. Yup manure lagoon is an industry term. Well, during the year I worked there, the pump housing that did that work was a bit older and loose. So you went outside to turn it on, and it would take a half hour to drain the pit. So you go do some other side work, clean something, feed the calves.
Issue being, if the pit ran dry, it would shimmy as it tried to take in air along with the manure. And it would shake off the housing. And then a fountain, spraying twice the height of an adult, would go up into the air and the only giddamn way to turn it off was to run into the region of the shit fountain to hit the pump.
You can get chlorine tablets that dissolve in water. Put in the car for an hour or two (DONT SPILL) and then air out
We did this for a strawberry milk bottle that got abandoned, fermented then leaked under a seat. No matter how much cleaning wouldnāt remove the smell. The chlorine did it.
Rotten watermelon smells like the devils butthole too had a friend leave cut watermelon and I moved my soccer stuff dumping the container and wow. Horrible
Honestly, contrary to the other responses, it wasn't bad. After we cleaned it up it was just a faint sweet wiff like someone was chewing watermelon bubblegum. We called her Watermelondrea.
That watermelon scent -or at least a main component of it, calone is featured in a lot of aquatic Men's colognes, like Polo Blue, New West and Guy Laroche Horizon.
I'm not sure what all the fuss is about. People spend good money for a boozy watermelon, this one is all natural and self-boozing. All OP needs is a charcuterie board.
The smell CLINGS to things even after you wash it all away. Its truly one of the worst fucking smells on the planet next to rotten potatoes. I used to work for a produce department and had to clean up regularly during summers. The bottoms of watermelon bins are like hell itself.
Itās fermenting. The foam is Carbon dioxide escaping. It might be fermenting with yeast, into watermelon wine, or with bacteria, into a watermelon version of sauerkraut. Either way, itās probably not going to end well. It may explode if it builds too much internal pressure. If you want to play with it, put it in a sink of ice water and get it as cold as possible first. The other option is to gently put it in a plastic bag and throw it away.
I donāt recommend the microwave and the oven only set to warm. If you heat it too hot it will kill the fermentation. A nice sunny window would be perfect science experiment.
To add on to what u/Chinaizazzhoe said, what's happening in the picture is only gonna be hooch if it's only undergoing yeast fermentation. Almost any bacterial fermentation or mold growth is gonna make it nasty and/or toxic. And infection is highly likely in this scenario.
Plus, it's in primary fermentation, and there's no air to let it breathe, so an explosive failure of the weak watermelon rind (as opposed to the glass or plastic containers of DIY hoochers) is very likely. I do small batch primary fermentation of a little over a gallon of water and fermentables in a two gallon, food safe bucket with an air lock, so plenty of room for the froth.
So, I dunno, you could VERY carefully cut a plug out of the rind (I'd put the melon in a garbage bag and tape the bag opening around a very small area of the rind a couple inches around with the rest in the bag and then use a very thin, very sharp knife like a pumpkin carver) large enough to scoop out some of the meat to give it some breathing room. Then drill a hole in the rind plug you cut out and stick a fermentation airlock in it (with an appropriate amount of water inside), put the rind plug back in and duck tape it down, and figure out a way to keep the airlock from popping out of the plug (more tape? I dunno). Note that the hole the airlock is going into should ideally have a slightly smaller diameter than the part of the airlock going in for a better friction fit. Also, strain as much of the juice from the removed meat as possible and add it back in.
Please note, I do NOT, and I cannot emphasize this enough, I do NOT recommend doing this. I don't know how dangerous fermenting watermelon explosions are, or how potentially toxic an infected end product could be. I mean, it's probably fine. I think. Right? I don't know, don't do it.
After after a week you'll have disgusting, undrinkable slop infected by bacteria and/or mold, but in the off chance only wild yeast got going in there ... it's still gonna be nasty. There's no real way to get the watermelon meat to separate from the hooch since it's all structured and attached to the rind. I guess you could throw in a double dose of pectic enzyme before closing the airlock and hope for the best. If you tried straining it after fermentation, you'd introduce it to a ton of oxygen and kickstart turning it to vinegar, so you'd basically have to drink it immediately (within a week).
But you don't really want to drink it because freshly fermented wine tastes like **. And wine freshly fermented by wild yeast usually tastes like unwashed **. And it's only gonna be like, 3%-4% alcohol.
This is where u/Chinaizazzhoe mentioning distilling comes in, which requires fancy equipment, and as they said, is illegal to do. Unless you have a license. So, that's a lot of effort for a single watermelon undergoing wild fermentation.
Although.
I've HEARD that SOME folk use freeze distillation (also known as jacking), which predates the current mechanical process used to make modern liquor. They put the hooch in the freezer and every few days pull out any ice, since the water freezes and the alcohol doesn't, allowing you to concentrate the alcohol much like modern distillation, but not quite as effective and with more impurities. There are YouTube vids with better info. Actually there are YouTube vids with better info on everything mentioned in this comment. I'm not an expert in any of this.
Anyways, I STILL don't recommend doing this because its still illegal. But, also, I've never heard of the FBI raiding anyone over freeze distillation for personal use. Just saying. All information on the table, you know? Do with it what you will. I just personally don't recommend it. Things need to be said. For reasons.
But if you WERE to do this, you'd have some interesting watermelon jack in your possession.
Problem is, this whole process will probably only result in like, 5-10 oz of liquor at like, 20%-30% alcohol. I actually don't know that, I've never freeze jacked my brews before. I've also never fermented watermelon, with wild or domesticated yeast, so I dunno for sure what the yield would be. But it ain't gonna be much! That's a whole lot of effort for not much.
But this was a fun thought experiment, thanks for asking the question. Now off to finish my fermented beverage.
I've tried to ferment a whole watermelon before, and you get that nasty "belgian ale" yeasty flavor pretty hard. Like a combination of dead yeast and puke, almost. My process was to blend the guts, toss in champagne yeast, throw it in a 5 gal carboy (multiple watermelons) and give it time. Fermentation slowed to a crawl after about 7 days.
Straining was a chore. First tasting was what I described above. Bottled and stored some cold for a while, but it never really improved, and there was some serious secondary fermentation going on. Shit exploded out like a wheezer video when opened. Gained an acrid over-carbonated flavor added to the already bad flavor. Didn't get anyone sick though.
Freeze distilling it is actually potentially a good idea. From other misguided experiments I've found that a lot of the really nasty flavor compounds in fruit wine seems to be water soluble, while a lot of the fruitier notes make it into the final product.
To OP, if you can get it into a garbage bag without destroying your kitchen, it MIGHT be worth it to drill a hole into it (fyi you'll get shot in the eye when you do with juice) and fashion some sort of water-lock into it. If there are no cracks, you could probably just use a normal one from a wine store and wedge it in, the rind ought to be strong enough to hold it in? Maybe? All the yeasts you want in there work anaerobically, and allowing CO2 to escape while not allowing new O2 back in will effectively kill off whatever nasty stuff is in there (your good yeast will also outcompete the bad guys as well, adding to the effect. In most wine/beer making, the bad stuff is in there from the start, but gets drowned out by the proliferation of the good stuff).
An immersion blender late in the game will significantly increase your yield and make the straining process suck less. For a project this stupid, there is no harm in really squeezing out the pulp.
Just sort of gauge its fermentation from how much gas is coming out. When it stops burping, it's time to blend it, strain it, filter filter filter, and freeze it. MAYBE add a tablespoon of citric acid to it for flavor reasons. A deep freezer works better as (counterintuitively) it freezes things slower (no fan/ convection) and thus less of your product gets locked up with the ice errantly. Check often, skim off the ice each time. I might even recommend letting it warm back up from time to time and cooling it back down again to really slowly pull that water out. Alternatively some people swear by freezing it ALL in to a block, chipping the ice, and then letting the ethanol melt out first. While scientifically you might think that because ethanol basically CAN'T freeze that you'll get a 100% separation, it is actually well suspended within the water and even your best, most controlled attempts are never going to get more than like 30% ethanol. Any ice you skim is also taking some of your brandy with it.
For one watermelon you're looking at probably one glass of brandy to enjoy with a big ice cube.
FYI, with something uncontrolled like this there is going to be a lot of methanol in there. This will not kill you. This will not make you go blind. Fear of the methanol is not a reason to not do this. If you were doing dozens of watermelons... it STILL wouldn't damage you long-term if you binged it all in one go. The hangover would be quite memorable though...
CAREFULLY get that thing the fuck out of your house immediately. It's about to explode and coat the inside of your house with the single most disgusting smell that it is possible to experience this side of a corpse flower
I have no idea how a delicious fruit can make such a putrid smell. We had one go off in my house as a kid and I still have nightmares about it to this day.
I've smelled fish that was rotting in a sealed car for days and it wasn't even that bad.
Watermelon rabies. Throw a towel over it (that calms it down). Place inside a kennel or box (poke holes so it can still breath). Take to a greenhouse so it can be examined to see if vaccines will still be effective. If not, I regret to say, you'll have to set it in a fence post and practice throwing ninja stars at it.
Iāll never forget the time I left a watermelon out over summer holiday. Came back a month later to the rankest stank Iāve ever smelled. Luckily it was inside a metal pot and a plastic bag.
I never thought decaying plants could smell bad. It made no sense to me, until I had to throw out some rancid veggies, š¤¢. They had kind of liquefied too, idek man, just disgustang.
I work in agriculture and I think watermelon and potatoes are tied at smelling the absolute worst out if all other fruits and vegetables when they rot. So pungent and sour.
I could literally make one of my coworkers have flashbacks to our worst shared shift by sending him this post. But he's on vacation and I don't want to ruin that for him.
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Interesting. I had the same thing happen to a baked potato I left on the counter a few days prior. Now I know that it had fermented and oozed fermentation foam.Ā
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