Posts archived in Curiosity

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June 13, 2009

Curiousity: Why are English cucumbers plastic-wrapped?

Question: Why are English cucumbers plastic-wrapped?

Answer: To keep the moisture in.  Most (supermarket) cucumbers are waxed to keep the moisture in, because of the larger surface area of English cucumbers’ wrinkly skin, it’s easier to wrap than wax.

Other interesting facts about cucumbers:

Read the rest of this entry »

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May 13, 2009

Beet Cake Pictures!

SarahR made Beet Cupcakes!

Camera phone pictures clearly demonstrate that though beet cake batter is pepto-bismol purple/pink (!) and beet cake is not red.

Batter is purple/pink:

Purple beet cake batter

Baked cakes are brown:

Beet cake brown once baked

All iced up:

Beet cake all iced up

Recipe review, via Gchat:

5:59 PM me: were the muffins yummy?
6:16 PM Sarah: fine–i prefer carrot cake, though.

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April 6, 2009

Beet cake is not red

I was eating the leftovers of raw beet slaw along with carrot cake for lunch and thought, if beet cake exists, it must have an awesome color.

Unfortunately, when I turned to the internet, I learned that’s not the case.  According to this recipe from Cooking Light, beet cake can indeed be made just like carrot cake and the batter is bright red but the cake bakes up to a golden brown:

beet-cake-ck-665202-l

From Cooking Light

This is really disappointing.  Shredding that many beets would be way too messy to justify a golden brown cake.

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March 23, 2009

Curiousity: Can you deep fry with butter?

Question: Can you deep fry with butter?

Ignore for a moment whether you’d personally want to.  It just seems like something that would be trendy if possible.  Maybe pre-recession trendy, cause that much butter isn’t cheap, but trendy along high meets low comfort food lines. Or something up Paula Deen’s alley.

Answer:

Whether you can deep fry with a fat is dependent on the smoke point – above which an fat/oil becomes unusable.  According to Wikipedia and Google books version of What Einstein told his cook, deep frying requires fat at a temperature of 345–375 °F.  Without a lot of care, the temperature may reach 400 °F.

Regular butter, smoke point = 350 °F – no, too low
Your average clarified butter (butter w/ milk solids removed), smoke point = around 400 °F – tempting fate
Ghee (Indian clarified butter w/o any water), smoke point = 485 °F – deep fryable!

Other than cost, my best guess for why deep frying with ghee isn’t the rage is that a lot of the buttery taste is in the butter fat.  Ghee has a unique taste of its own though, would be interesting…

Also, in my research found the fantastic Cooking for Engineers website.  Worth checking out.

This book looks pretty interesting too: