Posts archived in Curiosity

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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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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:

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February 22, 2009

Baby Blues: Digestion

baby_blues1

I’ll hold off on digestion for a while.

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Taste with your mouth

As The Flavor Bible describes it, taste is “what is perceived by the taste buds.”  In common use, “taste” also includes what is we perceive through our noses while eating, but we’ll start by just addressing taste in the mouth.  In the mouth, most taste buds are on the tongue (though taste buds have also been found throughout the mouth).  Taste buds are visible to the naked eye by using a mirror and sticking out your tongue.  (They’re the little bumps.)

This is a diagram of the inside of a taste bud:

709px-taste_budsvg

From Wikipedia Images

While food is in your mouth, it is broken down by chewing and saliva.  Some molecules find their way into the taste pore (labeled on the top of image).  Read the rest of this entry »

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February 17, 2009

Evolution and why we cook

Earlier this week Wired wrote about Harvard primatologist Richard Wrangham’s talk at the American Association for the Advancement of Science meeting.  Dr. Wrangham spoke about the evolutionary advantages to cooking.

In a numbered list:

  1. Kills parasites.  (Preventing us from getting sick.)
  2. Heat softens food making it less energy intensive to digest. (Less energy spent digesting food is more energy for other things.)
  3. Heat breaks down starch and protein which increases the body’s ability to digest them. (For the same amount of food, we get more starch/carbs and proteins cooked than raw.)

Evolutionarily, when humans learned to control fire (up to 790,000 years ago) and cook their food, eating became more energy/nutrient efficient (2 = less energy in and 3 = more energy/nutrients out).  This may well have played a big part in supporting the energy needs of the human brain, allowing us to evolve such big smart crazy connected brains (the accurate scientific phrasing clearly).

Related:

Book sized story from Dr. Wrangham available in June. Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human

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February 16, 2009

Breaking down the Experience of Eating

To understand the experience of eating, one step is to define the components that go into that experience.  Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg’s description of flavor in The Flavor Bible (highly recommended!) defines the components more elegantly than I could:

FLAVOR = TASTE + MOUTHFEEL + AROMA + “THE X FACTOR”
Taste = What is perceived by the taste buds
Mouthfeel – What is perceived by the rest of the mouth
Aroma = What is perceived by the nose
“The X Factor” = What is perceived by the other senses — plus the heart, mind, and spirit

Scientific detail on each will follow in future posts, but the basics (summarized from The Flavor Bible and coursework):

Taste happens in the mouth, primarily on the tongue.  The taste buds have 5 kinds of sensors (called receptors) which sense sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami (savory).

Mouthfeel happens in the mouth.  Exactly as the name implies, it’s feeling (or touching) with our mouths, just like we feel with our hands, feet, etc.  The sensation include temperature, texture, piquancy (or spicyness), and astringency (causing puckering). Read the rest of this entry »