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:

Baked cakes are brown:

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.

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:

I’ll hold off on digestion for a while.

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

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).  Once inside the pore, the molecules may be “detected” by one of the taste receptor cells (cells in center of image).  The receptor cells contains receptors which are known to detect 5 basic tastes: sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami (savory).  Each receptor cell only contains receptors for one basic taste but one taste bud may contain all five kinds of receptor cells.  Though some areas of the tongue are more sensitive to one basic taste than another, the common textbook image of a “tongue map” is false – sweet is not just on the tip of the tongue, sour is not just on the side, etc.

Once a receptor cell detects enough of a basic taste, it sends a signal which travels through the afferent nerve (bottom of the image) to the brain. The signals tell the brain about the food we’ve ingested.  Sour helps us detect unripe and spoiled fruit, avoid tissue damage from acids, and maintain a balance between acids and bases.  Knowing how salty food is helps us to maintain our water and ion levels.    Umami indicates protein and peptides (like proteins but short).  Sweet indicates carbohydrates.  Bitter helps us identify toxic foods.  The reaction to these basic tastes is hard wired – infants during their first feeding smile at sweet and grimace at bitter.

Next: Each of the 5 basic tastes.

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

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).

Aroma happens in the nose.  The “scent” of food travels up through the nasal cavity to the nose.  The nose has about 350 kinds of receptors that detect different odarant molecules.  Without smell, you only get sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and umami and all the rest of the delicious “chemical” details, are sensed by these receptors.

‘The X Factor’ happens everywhere else.  It is our internal state of mind when eating (happy, starving, exhausted), how the dish looks (disgusting, tasty, ridiculous), the people around us, what memories the food inpires, etc.  ‘The X Factor’ is why on a sunny day after a pick-up soccer game at summer camp, a warm and soggy thin ham and American cheese sandwich can taste incredible.

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