August 23rd, 2011

how to cook a mastodon

A 1998 article from the Cornell University Chronicle:

Fans of hot, spicy cuisine can thank nasty bacteria and other food-borne pathogens for the recipes that come — not so coincidentally — from countries with hot climates. Humans’ use of antimicrobial spices developed in parallel with food-spoilage microorganisms, Cornell biologists have demonstrated in a international survey of spice use in cooking.

The same chemical compounds that protect the spiciest spice plants from their natural enemies are at work today in foods from parts of the world where — before refrigeration — food-spoilage microbes were an even more serious threat to human health and survival than they are today, Jennifer Billing and Paul W. Sherman report in the March 1998 issue of the journal Quarterly Review of Biology.

“The proximate reason for spice use obviously is to enhance food palatability,” said Sherman, an evolutionary biologist and professor of neurobiology and behavior at Cornell. “But why do spices taste good? Traits that are beneficial are transmitted both culturally and genetically, and that includes taste receptors in our mouths and our taste for certain flavors. People who enjoyed food with antibacterial spices probably were healthier, especially in hot climates. They lived longer and left more offspring. And they taught their offspring and others: ‘This is how to cook a mastodon.’ We believe the ultimate reason for using spices is to kill food-borne bacteria and fungi.”

Further

August 21st, 2011

hashas

I found this poppy spread at the Turkish shop near my house. Ingredients: Poppy.

wiki:

In India, Iran and Turkey poppy seeds are known as khaskhas or haşhaş and are considered highly nutritious, mostly added in dough while baking bread, and recommended for pregnant women and new mothers.

I haven’t experimented much yet. I think it would probably make an interesting alternative to tahini in hummus. It’s nice on a beschuit with hagelslag on top.

Incidentally someone made an experimental tune called beschuit met hagelslag.

August 3rd, 2011

polystyrene foam macaroon of ginger with smoked coconut butter

The restaurant El Bulli is cataloguing its dishes online. I can’t stop looking and marvelling.
Above: ‘polystyrene foam macaroon of ginger with smoked coconut butter’.

More here.

July 30th, 2011

lively cuisine

Odori-don:

A live squid with its head removed is served on top of a bowl of sushi rice, accompanied by sashimi prepared from the head (usually sliced ika (squid) and ika-kimo (squid liver)) as well as other seafood. Seasoned soy sauce is first poured on top of the squid to make it “dance”.

Possibly the creation of a chef who was chastised in childhood for playing with his food.

via kottke

June 13th, 2011

seeing red

Nearly all blood is removed from meat during slaughter, which is also why you don’t see blood in raw “white meat”; only an extremely small amount of blood remains within the muscle tissue when you get it from the store.

So what is that red liquid you are seeing in red meat? Red meats, such as beef, are composed of quite a bit of water. This water, mixed with a protein called myoglobin, ends up comprising most of that red liquid.

In fact, red meat is distinguished from white meat primarily based on the levels of myoglobin in the meat. The more myoglobin, the redder the meat. Thus most animals, such as mammals, with a high amount of myoglobin, are considered “red meat”, while animals with low levels of myoglobin, like most poultry, or no myoglobin, like some sea-life, are considered “white meat”.

Myoglobin is a protein, that stores oxygen in muscle cells, very similar to its cousin, hemoglobin, that stores oxygen in red blood cells. This is necessary for muscles which need immediate oxygen for energy during frequent, continual usage. Myoglobin is highly pigmented, specifically red; so the more myoglobin, the redder the meat will look and the darker it will get when you cook it.

misconceptionjuncton via 3qd

February 23rd, 2011

CO CO CO LA


The radio show This American Life presents a fun, journalistic exploration of the history of Coke’s “secret recipe” and the process of making it. They find an old recipe for Coke and try their best to recreate it for a taste test.

They also put the recipe they found online with instructions if you want to try it yourself. Snip:

For a home recipe, you can get an eyedropper and count drops the old-fashioned way, but if you want to be more precise, Steve Warth at Sovereign Flavors says he estimated each drop was .025 grams, which means you want 0.5 grams of Orange Oil, 0.75 of Lemon Oil, 0.25 grams of Nutmeg Oil, 0.125 grams of Coriander Oil, 0.25 grams of Neroli Oil, 0.25 grams of Cinnamon Oil (historian Mark Pendergrast says the original Coke recipe was made with a kind of cinnamon called Cassia).

Combine those with 8 ounces of food grade alcohol. This ingredient, we’ll be frank, will be kind of a pain in the ass to find. Important: Do NOT use Ethyl Rubbing Alcohol or Rubbing Alcohol or Denatured Ethyl Alcohol. These will make you sick. You need food grade ethyl alcohol. Sometimes people swap Everclear or other neutral grain spirits for this, and our beverage guys suggest this as an easy, cheap substitute.

Recipe. Listen online.

I want to try Coke’s predecessor: French Wine Coca, a wine, caffeine and cocaine drink. Sounds too weird not to try. From Wikipedia:

French Wine Coca was marketed mostly to upper class intellectuals, afflicted with diseases believed to have been brought on by urbanization and Atlanta’s increasingly competitive business environment. In an 1885 interview with the Atlanta Journal, Pemberton claimed the drink would benefit “scientists, scholars, poets, divines, lawyers, physicians, and others devoted to extreme mental exertion.”

French Wine Coca at Wikipedia.

February 12th, 2011

Parsley Seaweed Soup

A recipe I wrote for parsley and seaweed soup. The parsley soup element is based on various recipes I found online, and the seaweed was just an afterthought that actually works very nicely. If you like seaweed.

February 1st, 2011

flowering kales

Wiki:

Many varieties of kale are referred to as “flowering kales” and are grown mainly for their ornamental leaves, which are brilliant white, red, pink, lavender, blue or violet in the interior or the rosette. Most plants sold as “ornamental cabbage” are in fact kales. Ornamental kale is as edible as any other variety, provided it has not been treated with pesticides or other harmful chemicals.

Kale is undervalued.

January 1st, 2011

Koupepia

Koupepia is the Cypriot name for stuffed vine leaves or what the Greeks call “dolmades”. Yesterday I tried a variation on the traditional recipe, using apricots instead of raisins, and it was very successful. So I typed out the recipe for future reference.

December 17th, 2010

evolution of a book

I’ve been working on a translation of a poem into sounds and smells. The sounds and smells are released in synchrony by a machine (made with help from my engineer friend Brecht) that selects scented beakers using the turntable of an old record player.

You can download an excerpt from the audio track here, smells not included. This one is the translation of the second stanza, which begins “fondants, fudge, caramels, taffy brittles”, and lasts one and a half minutes. The whole piece is approximately eleven minutes long.

I may improve upon the audio, smells and machine over the next weeks. This is a sort of work-in-progress or, I suppose, the continued evolution in my mind of the original text.

November 14th, 2010

so that’s why they’re called eggplants

Aubergine at wikipedia. (via reddit)

November 7th, 2010

sugar corn sirup butter milk

If truth is more beautiful than the contrived, then the most beautiful kind of poetry is perhaps the entirely accidental kind… The kind that comes into being with no aesthetic intentions attached and sleeps until the perfect alignment of observer, time and space.

Take this digitized recipe book “experimental cookery from the chemical and physical standpoint” — its contents pages are dripping with divine word combinations. A choice selection:

sugar corn sirup butter milk
sugar cookery
sugar cookery classification of the carbohydrates

fondants, fudge,
caramels, taffy, brittles
stages of cookery of sucrose solutions

classification of ice creams
ices and sherbets

plant pigments part 5
crisping pickles

meat. grading and stamping of meat.
definition of meat and flesh
federal inspection of meat

breaking mayonnaise

I feel like I found a €50 note on the pavement. For more unintentional poetry, see this spam poem I found in 2008.

Incidentally, some of the experiments in this book sound fun/interesting. I found the book when googling for information about boiling vegetables in milk.

Addendum: Another food science word I discovered recently and developed affections for is farinaceous, describing a mealy, floury, starchy nature (from farina, latin for flour).

September 21st, 2010

see vitamin c

WHFoods.com on lemons:

For the most antioxidants, choose fully ripened lemons and limes:

Research conducted at the University of Innsbruck in Austria suggests that as fruits fully ripen, almost to the point of spoilage, their antioxidant levels actually increase.

Key to the process is the change in color that occurs as fruits ripen, a similar process to that seen in the fall when leaves turn from green to red to yellow to brown- a color change caused by the breakdown and disappearance of chlorophyll, which gives leaves and fruits their green color.

Until now, no one really knew what happened to chlorophyll during this process, but lead researcher, Bernard Kräutler, and his team, working together with botanists over the past several years, has identified the first decomposition products in leaves: colorless, polar NCCs (nonfluorescing chlorophyll catabolytes), that contain four pyrrole rings – like chlorophyll and heme.

After examining apples and pears, the scientists discovered that NCCs replace the chlorophyll not only in the leaves of fruit trees, but in their very ripe fruits, especially in the peel and flesh immediately below it.

“When chlorophyll is released from its protein complexes in the decomposition process, it has a phototoxic effect: when irradiated with light, it absorbs energy and can transfer it to other substances. For example, it can transform oxygen into a highly reactive, destructive form,” report the researchers. However, NCCs have just the opposite effect. Extremely powerful antioxidants, they play an important protective role for the plant, and when consumed as part of the human diet, NCCs deliver the same potent antioxidant protection within our bodies. “

Actually that excerpt didn’t have much to do with lemons specifically. But there is some juicy info here.

August 25th, 2010

popping e’s

One BBC reporter spent the day eating as many e-number filled (e-numerous?) foods as possible in order to make a point about the widespread fears attached to their consumption.

By the end of the day I felt like a balloon of slurry on the verge of bursting. I’d eaten 50 different E numbers, but have I eaten enough to poison myself?

No, said my GP, Dr Jonty Heaversedge, who explained that the basic toxicology principle for safe consumption was a 100-fold safety margin.

Scientists work out how much of any E number an animal can eat on a daily basis before having any ill effects, divide that by 10 (in case humans are more sensitive than animals) and then divide by 10 again, just to be safe.

He concluded that one shouldn’t discriminate against food that contains E-numbers:

Are these actually bad for you? Words like “preservative”, “emulsifier” and “stabiliser” sound bizarre and scary for something you put in your mouth. But lemon juice is an antioxidant preservative, also known as E330 (citric acid), egg yolk is emulsifier E322 (lecithin) when added to oil to make mayonnaise, and stabilisers include E460, or cellulose, which comes straight from plants.

One commenter on the BBC website notes:

And E300 is vitamin C! Most people think Es is a classification system for chemicals instead of a multi-language labelling scheme.

All the same, I understand why people are hesitant to eat food whose ingredients are obfuscated with code.

The Day I Ate As Many E-Numbers As Possible @ BBC News. (Photo by Flickr user RuneT)

August 13th, 2010

a model of the universe in a pot of boiling water

Image courtesy of Flickr user VeloSteve.

Does adding salt to water really make it boil quicker? Not by any significant degree, according to the article Everything you ever wanted to know (plus more!) about boiling water.

Adding a handful of salt to simmering or boiling water certainly appears to make it rapidly boil. This is because of little things called nucleation sites, which are, essentially, the birthplace of bubbles. In order for bubbles of steam to form, there needs to be some sort of irregularity within the volume of water—microscopic scratches on the inside surface of the pot will do, as will tiny bits of dust or the pores of a wooden spoon. A handful of salt rapidly introduces thousands of nucleation sites, making it very easy for bubbles to form and escape.

Ever notice how in a glass of champagne the bubbles rise in distinct streams from single points? It’s a good bet that there’s a microscopic scratch or dust particle right at that point.

On a much grander scale, entire galaxies were formed when matter started to collect in gravity wells formed initially by tiny nucleation sites in the early universe. This baffles scientists (if there was nothing before the big bang, what then were these primordial nucleation sites?). But that’s neither here nor there (or perhaps it’s everywhere?)

The full article is boiling over with further factoids. Read more at Serious Eats.

August 13th, 2010

‘Flavours of Cyprus’ Soup

A flavoursome and satisfying soup of brown rice, lentils and vegetables with the traditional Cypriot flavourings of lemon and mint.

Very nutritious, providing plenty of fibre and a full protein compliment through the combination of whole rice and lentils.

I coined a recipe for a soup that reminds me of the flavours of Cypriot cooking. See the recipe at We Gotta Eat.

August 13th, 2010

the complimentary protein song

From the University of Cincinnati Professor Stein Carter:

Amino acids are just great
When sitting on your plate.
Your body needs all twenty kinds
To build your bones and minds.
But there are eight that we can’t make:
Essential ones to take
Within your food so you’ll be set,
But some are hard to get.
Three limit others’ usefulness
If you consume much less.
Combine these foods to get them all
So you’ll grow big and tall:
Whole grain with milk or grain with bean
Or peas with seeds between
Or maybe try all three or four
If you want something more.

You must of course hear the accompanying music to appreciate this musical mystery. Don’t quit your day job, Professor Carter!

Here’s the science bit: an explanation of dietary protein requirements at the same website..

Our bodies use amino acids in a specific ratio to each other, so if a person doesn’t get enough of one of them to match with the rest, the rest can only be used at a level to balance with that low one. Most of these amino acids are fairly easy to get in a reasonably well-balanced diet. However, there are three that are a little harder to get than the rest, thus it is important to make sure you’re getting enough of these three. These three are called limiting amino acids, because if a person’s diet is deficient in one of them, this will limit the usefulness of the others, even if those others are present in otherwise large enough quantities. The three limiting amino acids include the sulfur-containing ones (methionine and cysteine), tryptophan, and lysine.

…

Because of publicity from certain agricultural industries, many people in our culture have been taught to think that it is necessary to eat meat to get protein, but this is not true! People in many other cultures do not eat meat yet do get enough protein in their diets. It is true that there are areas of the world where people need to raise cattle and eat meat to survive. For example, in certain arid areas of Africa where almost nothing grows, cattle can graze on the meager grass that’s there that people can’t eat, and the people can eat the milk and meat from those cattle. In our country, the climate is much better, and we can raise many varieties of edible plants, thus we have available alternate (and often better) sources of protein. Some plant protein sources, like soybeans, have a better amino acid balance for humans than meat.

Well, I never.

July 26th, 2010

Would you like the fish, or the fish?

And interesting question from an old article at The Straight Dope:

Why didn’t Eskimos get scurvy before citrus was introduced to their diet? They have a traditional diet of almost entirely meat and fish. Where did they get their vitamin C?

And the answer:

This calls to mind a question I’ve dealt with before: Why do the Eskimos (or Inuit, as those in Canada and Greenland generally prefer to be called) stay there? It turns out that the people of the north have a highly evolved physiology that makes them well suited to life in the arctic: a compact build that conserves warmth, a faster metabolism, optimally distributed body fat, and special modifications to the circulatory system. One marvels at the adaptability of the human organism, of course, but still one has to ask: Wouldn’t it have been easier just to move to San Diego?

Much of what we know about the Eskimo diet comes from the legendary arctic anthropologist and adventurer Vilhjalmur Stefansson, who made several daredevil journeys through the region in the early 20th century. Stefansson noticed the same thing you did, that the traditional Eskimo diet consisted largely of meat and fish, with fruits, vegetables, and other carbohydrates–the usual source of vitamin C–accounting for as little as 2 percent of total calorie intake. Yet they didn’t get scurvy.

Stefansson argued that the native peoples of the arctic got their vitamin C from meat that was raw or minimally cooked–cooking, it seems, destroys the vitamin. (In fact, for a long time “Eskimo” was thought to be a derisive Native American term meaning “eater of raw flesh,” although this is now discounted.) Stefansson claimed the high incidence of scurvy among European explorers could be explained by their refusal to eat like the natives. He proved this to his own satisfaction by subsisting in good health for lengthy periods–one memorable odyssey lasted for five years–strictly on whatever meat and fish he and his companions could catch.

Read further at The Straight Dope.

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