Comment by nijave
3 years ago
I think it's a halflife/timing thing. Once it hits boiling, it's instance death for most microbials.
You can keep it a lot lower for longer but it's also potentially difficult to tell the temperature (easier to say, bubbles? It's hot enough)
Not really. Most microbes will be dead in a minute at about 70C. Milk pasteurization is done at 60C, after all. Most importantly, it'll kill salmonella.
Some hardy bugs and/or spores can survive regular boiling anyway, so you're not aiming for total sterilization.
It would be a really cool coincidence if the temperature at which water boils happened to be the magic number that killed most bacteria (unless it killed them because it boiled water they depend on to function or something), but I don't think that's the case - I think that boiling is something that's easy for humans to do and to perceive that also happens to be above the safe threshold and kill enough of the bacteria that harm us to make it a useful break point, even if the actual 212* isn't especially relevant.