How come when you put ice in a deep fryer the reaction following is very violent?
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The key detail,.water is more dense than cooking oils, as long as it’s still a liquid or solid.
That becomes a problem when the oil is hot: the liquid sinks to the bottom as it’s heated up, but once it evaporates, it rapidly rises to the top of the oil. In doing so, it’s pushing hot oil out of the way, which at best creates a huge mess.
The ice rapidly boils off and turns into steam. Steam takes up a lot more space than ice, so when you heat it up super fast it rapidly expands. You know what the scientific name for a rapid expansion of gas? an explosion. The term steam explosion is actually used to describe this exact type of things and they can be very dangerous depending on how rapidly the ice is allowed to turn into steam.
edit* this is also why you should never put water on an oil fire. The water wont be able to properly douse the oil, and instead will just boil away carrying the oil with it.
Instant steam is bad. Steam is what moved gigantic super heavy iron and steel trains. Don’t mess with steam. Tossing ice or water into hot oil makes instant steam. Instant steam is essentially an explosion. Now you’ve made a hot oil explosion.
Steam takes up about 1600x more space than water. This is called a steam explosion and can be extremely dangerous.
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