Zippy Facts

Every time I open the refrigerator door, Alex, my Siamese cat, eyes the contents like Willie Sutton peeking into Fort Knox. He knows that that big, white impregnable strongbox contains all the pleasures life has to offer. (He’s neutered.) We humans aren’t much different. Our refrigerators are our treasure houses. Their contents reflect our individual…

Food irradiation is the practice of producers’ subjecting their food products to intense fields of gamma rays, X rays, or high-energy electrons before shipping them to market. Why would they want to do this? Irradiation kills harmful bacteria, including E. coli, Salmonella, Staphylococcus, and Listeria, among others, thereby reducing the danger of food-borne illness. Irradiation…

Saltines, Wheat Thins, Triscuits, Ritz Crackers, grahams, you name it, there’s hardly a cracker anywhere that doesn’t have a pattern of little holes in it. The makers of matzos, the unleavened flatbread of the Jewish Passover, seem to have gone hog wild (you should excuse the expression) on perforations. Matzos are much hole-ier than secular…

Is this a new way of making heat for cooking, after fire, microwaves, and induction ranges? No. The so-called light oven makes heat in pretty much the same way your electric range does: through the electrical resistance-heating of metal. Light ovens have been in specialized commercial use since about 1993 but are now being produced…

Microwave ovens were the first new way of making heat for cooking in more than a million years. Well, now there’s a second one: magnetic induction heating. Magnetic induction has been used for the past decade or so in some European and Japanese food service kitchens, and more recently in commercial American kitchens. They are…

Pressure cookers speed up cooking by making water boil at a higher-than-normal temperature. In the process, they may hiss, rattle, and sizzle like an infernal machine, threatening to redecorate your kitchen in shades of goulash. But your mother’s pressure cooker has been re-engineered to be more mannerly and nearly foolproof. As with all cooking appliances,…

There are two types of so-called instant-read thermometers: the dial-type and the digital readout type. But do they really give you the temperature reading in an instant? Don’t you wish! These reputed speed demons can take anywhere from 10 to 30 seconds to climb up to their highest readings, which are, of course, the numbers…

That depends on what your definition of “is” is. A cup is indeed a cup throughout the land: eight U.S. fluid ounces, whether wet or dry. But you may be wondering: If a fluid ounce is a measure of fluids, how come we use it also to measure flour and other dry solids? And what’s…

Shiny copper is beautiful, and there are some wonderfully effective polishes on the market. But are you a cook or a decorator? The great virtue of copper or copper-clad cookware is that it conducts heat superbly and evenly. For that it deserves to be cherished, not polished. If you try to keep your copper cookware…

I hope I caught you before you put Grandma’s reputed wisdom to the test. The myth says to put a silver dollar in the pan with the mushrooms, and if it didn’t turn dark with tarnish the mushrooms were okay. There is no scientific basis whatsoever to the silver dollar trick. It’s nonsense. I’d call…

The common white or brown button mushrooms in the supermarkets (Agaricus bisporus) are cultivated in beds, or so-called substrate mixtures, that can include anything from hay and crushed corncobs to chicken manure and used straw bedding from horses’ stables. That knowledge bothered me for many years. Repeatedly warned against waterlogging my mushrooms by giving them…

You’ll read in some food books and magazines that you should roll it firmly on the counter. Others recommend microwaving it for a minute or so. These actions sound perfectly reasonable, but I have always wondered whether they really work. I had a chance to find out when my friend Jack, who loves to find…

Ordinary plastic spray bottles are made to spray watery liquids, not oily ones. Water is thinner (less viscous) than oil and breaks up easily into a mist, but the paltry pressure from a trigger pump isn’t enough to break oil down into microscopic droplets, the way a pressurized aerosol can can. Cookware stores and catalogs…

Wash them properly and don’t use them for unintended purposes. After being used to brush on an egg wash or melted butter, a pastry brush becomes gummy and rancid unless you wash it thoroughly before putting it away. Wet it with hot water and work up a lather by swishing it around on a cake…

Believe it or not, a magnetic rack might actually keep your knives sharp longer. In fact, in one of those slick catalogs of expensive gadgets that no one needs, I even saw a magnetic housing for storing your razor, allegedly to keep the blade sharp between shaves. (How it would otherwise get dull between shaves…

First, loosen up your wallet, high quality doesn’t come cheap. The ideal frying pan will distribute the burner’s heat uniformly over its surface, transfer it quickly to the food, and respond promptly to changes in heat settings. That boils down to two qualities: thickness and heat conductivity. Look for a thick pan made out of…

Sticking is a two-way street. In order for sticking to occur, there must be both a stick-er and a stickee. At least one partner must be tacky. Quiz: Identify the sticky one in each of the following pairs: Glue and paper. Chewing gum and a shoe sole. A lollipop and a little boy. Very good.…

Relax. Don’t sue. There was no metal in your vegetables. I’ll bet it was mainly the carrots that got charred, right? Here’s what probably happened. Frozen foods usually contain ice crystals. But as I pointed out earlier, solid ice doesn’t absorb microwaves nearly as well as liquid water does. The defrost setting on microwave ovens…

Microwave energy is absorbed primarily by water in the food. The waterlogged canned peas and their surrounding liquid absorb microwaves at pretty much the same rate and will therefore get hot more or less equally. When the water begins to boil, the peas are at about the same temperature, whereupon you undoubtedly consider them to…

The answer may strike you as disappointingly simple: The microwaved food may not have been as hot to begin with. Many factors, such as the type, quantity, and thickness of the food, affect how it will heat in a microwave oven. If, for example, the chosen on-and-off cycle of the magnetron isn’t exactly right for…

Microwaves change the molecular structure of foods. The process is called “cooking.” All cooking methods cause chemical and molecular changes in our foods. A cooked egg certainly has a different chemical composition from a raw one. No method of cooking will destroy minerals. But heat will destroy vitamin C, for example, no matter how the…

No and yes. No, it’s unlikely that anything serious will happen, but yes, you should be careful. Microwave-heated water that hasn’t yet come to a full, vigorous boil can indeed be a booby trap. Because microwave energy is absorbed only by the outer inch or so of the water in a cup, the resulting heat…

In principle, the answer is simple: Containers whose molecules aren’t dipoles and will not absorb microwaves. Such molecules will not be jerked around by the microwaves and will not get hot. But in practice, the answer isn’t quite so simple. Surprisingly, in what many people perceive as our overregulated society, there appears to be no…

An old, beat-up oven with a warped door may indeed let enough microwaves out through the cracks to be a hazard, but there is extremely little leakage from today’s carefully designed ovens. Moreover, the instant the door is opened, the magnetron shuts off and the microwaves disappear like the light when you turn off a…

Light bounces off mirrors; microwaves bounce off metal. Radar is a kind of microwave that bounces off your speeding car and cooks your goose. If what you put in the oven reflects too many microwaves back instead of absorbing them, the magnetron tube can be damaged. There must always be something in the oven to…

It’s hard to design a microwave oven in which the intensity of the microwaves is completely uniform throughout the entire volume of the box so that food in all locations will be subjected to the same heating power. Moreover, any food in the oven is sucking up microwaves and upsetting whatever uniformity there might otherwise…

Before it can heat the food, a conventional gas or electric oven first has to heat some two to four cubic feet of air (“preheating the oven”), after which the hot air must transfer its heat energy into the food. These are very slow and very inefficient processes. A microwave oven, on the other hand,…

Because it is. The magnetron cycles on and off to allow periods of time for the heat to distribute itself through the food. When you set the oven for a percentage of full “power,” what you’re adjusting isn’t the magnetron’s wattage; it can operate only at its full, rated power (but see below). What you’re…

Unlike their electromagnetic cousins the X rays, which are of much higher frequency and energy, microwaves can’t penetrate food more than an inch or so; their energy is completely absorbed and turned into heat within that region. That’s one reason for the “cover and wait” injunction of recipes and “smart” ovens: It takes time for…

Don’t try to find the answer to that question in food books. With only one exception, every book in my food library, including those devoted exclusively to microwave cooking, either evades the question entirely or gives the same misleading answer. Evading the issue only reinforces the less-than-helpful notion of a magic box. But promulgating a…

There is so much anxiety among home cooks about microwave ovens that you’d think they were kitchen-sized nuclear reactors. The situation is not helped by some authors of food books, who seem not to know the difference between microwaves and radioactivity. Yes, they are both radiations, but so are the television radiations that bring us…

With tongue firmly planted in cheek, the British essayist and critic Charles Lamb (1775–1834), in “A Dissertation on Roast Pig,” tells how humans first discovered cooking or, more precisely, roasting, after “for the first seventy thousand ages” eating their meat raw by “clawing or biting it from the living animal.” The story, purportedly discovered in…

The U.S. Code of Federal Regulations, Title 27, Chapter 1, part 7, etc., etc., etc. says that “the terms ‘low alcohol’ or ‘reduced alcohol’ may be used only on malt beverages containing less than 2.5 percent alcohol by volume” and that nonalcoholic beer must contain less than 0.5 percent alcohol by volume. By volume? Yes,…

It used to be that the federal government prohibited brewers from listing the percentage of alcohol on the labels of beers to discourage people from choosing their beverages based on alcohol content. But that’s not true anymore. In 1935, two years after the repeal of Prohibition, the Federal Alcohol Administration (FAA) Act prohibited the labeling…

The usual evasive answer to this question is “one or two drinks a day.” But what is “a drink,” anyway? A bottle of beer? A glass of wine? A brimful, six-ounce martini? There are tall drinks and short drinks, stiff drinks and weak drinks. One man’s drink may look to the next guy like a…

You’re not expected to sniff it for evidence of moldiness. That’s rare in this day and age. Moreover, when a small amount of the wine is poured for monsieur or madame’s approval, a couple of swirls and sniffs will tell all that one needs to know. If the wine smells and tastes fine, who cares…

I asked the same question on a trip to Portugal and western Spain, where more than half of the world’s cork is grown, but I was unable to get a satisfactory answer. It was like asking a silkworm about polyester. Back home, I learned why many wineries are switching to plastic stoppers. Yes, they’re more…

The most important thing in opening a bottle of Champagne is to accomplish the task with such aplomb that it will appear to your guests as if you do it every day. This is very difficult to pull off while wincing at the expectation of imminent disaster. So conquer your fears by practicing a couple…

The bottle had undoubtedly been treated roughly some time earlier, without having been given enough time to recover. It must rest quietly on ice or in the refrigerator for at least an hour before being gently removed and opened. In contemporary American society, Champagne is not meant to be drunk anyway. It is meant to…

If you can’t finish the whole bottle and you want to keep the leftovers gassy and sassy until the next pizza, just stopper it tightly and keep it cold. You knew that. But why? The objective is to keep all of the remaining carbon dioxide in the bottle, because it’s the carbon dioxide, bursting its…

My first reaction was no, not if there isn’t a slow leak somewhere in the bottle’s seal. But after extensive research, which consisted of dialing the 800 Consumer Information number on a Coca-Cola label, I find that it is not only possible, it’s quite common. After prompting the nice woman who answered the phone to…

Don’t laugh. That’s a good question. So good, in fact, that I thought of it myself when I learned that 15.2 billion gallons of carbonated soft drinks and 6.2 billion gallons of beer were consumed in 1999 in the United States. And what do you suppose happened to all the carbon dioxide in those beverages?…

I don’t know what you’ve been drinking, but there are plenty of riskier beverages out there than Tang and Coke. I’d be concerned about this particular duo only if my stomach were made of soap scum or rust. Just because a chemical does something to one substance doesn’t mean it’ll do the same thing to…

It’s a mistaken notion that all carbonated soft drinks are rich in the chemical element phosphorus (which almost everyone, it seems, wants to misspell as “phosphorous”). The only thing that all carbonated soft drinks have in common is carbonated water: carbon dioxide dissolved in water. Beyond that, they contain a wide variety of flavorings and…

Microwave-heated water isn’t as hot as kettle-heated water, even though it may look as if it’s boiling. Water for tea must be boiling hot in order to extract all the color and flavor. Caffeine, for example, won’t dissolve in water that’s much cooler than 175°F. That’s why the teapot, or if you’re a bag-at-a-time brewer,…

There is only one plant, Camellia sinensis and a couple of hybrids thereof, whose leaves can be steeped in hot water to make real tea. They may have different names, depending, among other things, on where they were grown. Some of those “tea” bags you may be offered, such as chamomile, for example, do not…

The chemicals used to decaffeinate coffee are related to cleaning fluid, yes, but different. Like my Uncle Leon. In chemical families, as in human families, there are both similarities and idiosyncrasies. Caffeine itself, for example, is a member of the alkaloid family of powerful plant chemicals that includes such bad actors as nicotine, cocaine, morphine,…

It depends. (You knew I was going to say that, didn’t you?) A direct comparison is complicated by the fact that there is no such thing as “regular coffee.” We have all had everything from vending-machine dishwater to truck-stop battery acid. Even at home, there are so many ways of brewing coffee that no generalizations…

Acidity often gets a bum rap. Maybe it’s because of all the television commercials for drugs designed to control heartburn and acid reflux. But the acid in our stomachs (hydrochloric acid) is thousands of times stronger than any acid you’ll find in coffee. It’s only when the acid gets out of the stomach, splashing up…

As we have all learned from experience when the etiquette police were looking the other way, the cooling of hot food by blowing on it works best with liquids, or at least with wet foods. You won’t substantially diminish the heat of a hot dog by blowing on it, but hot tea, coffee, and soup…

Freezer burn” has to be one of the more ridiculous oxymorons going. But take a good look at that emergency pork chop that’s been in your freezer much longer than you ever intended. Doesn’t its parched and shriveled surface look as if it had been seared? The dictionary tells us that seared doesn’t necessarily refer…