Question:
I made a pan of hamburgers and by accident flipped them with a dirty milchig spatula that I used this morning to make a cheese omelette. What do I now do with the hamburgers, the flieshing pan and the spatula?
The spatula still has cheese residue on it.
Answer:
The hamburgers should all be thrown out. the hamburgers should not be given to an animal or to a gentile, but should be put into the garbage, where no one will benefit from them. The reason is as follows. The torah tells us 3 times “lo tivashel gedi bchalev iom” don’t cook the meat of a kid in it’s mothers milk. Chazal tell us there are three distinct torah prohibitions regarding basar b’chlav. 1. That they may not be cooked together 2. If the meat (not chicken or fowl) were cooked together we are biblically forbidden to eat the mixture. 3. If the two were cooked together we may not benefit from the mixture at all. In kosher homes it is rare to have an instance of real basar b’chalav, but what you are describing, if the hamburgers were beef, then we have a case of a biblical mixture of meat and milk that were cooked together, and we may not give it to a gentile or an animal to eat.
Regarding the spatula and frying pan, since they absorbed the basar b’chalav taste, considered “issura balah” and it was in a frying pan which would be considered a dry heat, both of them would need libun chamur in order to kasher them. In order to accomplish libun chamur we would have to heat the frying pan and spatula, hot enough that they will give off a reddish glow. The spatula will most probably not survive such an intense heat, and regarding the frying pan it will come out looking quite charred. You can do libun chamur by placed them in a self cleaning oven when it is on the self cleaning cycle. I can’t say what condition they will come out, but if they are use able afterwards, they will then be kosher again.
Sources:
Y:D 87-1,3, 121-4.
