Greasy Art

I fried some chorizo the other day for dinner. That's spicy Spanish sausage. Then I left the sausage grease in the pan overnight. When I got up the next morning, it had congealed. I already had some hot boiling water in the kettle, so I poured some into the frying pan to turn the fat back to liquid while I did the other dishes. When I got around to cleaning the frying pan, it looked like this...

The red (from the paprika in the chorizo) grease had formed itself into perfectly evenly spaced circles in the water.

I've forgotten most of the chemistry that relates to how oil and water interact with each other, but I'm fascinated with self-organizing systems. I thought it worthy of a picture and a blog entry.