The Best Interesting Random 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 […]
Mussels are nature’s fast-food gifts from the sea. They are beautiful to behold in their ebony shells, decorated with concentric growth lines. They cook almost instantly (they’re done when their shells pop open) and are very low in fat and high in protein. Their texture is meaty, and they taste of the sea, a little […]
Most of us just don’t know the difference between fatty acids and fats. And there is indeed a difference. Every molecule of fat incorporates three molecules of fatty acids. The fatty acids may be either saturated or unsaturated, and they thereby impart those qualities to the fat as a whole. First, let’s see what a […]
I’m the kind of person who upon being handed a menu in a restaurant scans it for spelling errors before beginning to think about the food. But even though the other day I actually saw “tuna tar tar” on a menu (honest!), this section won’t be about spelling. Anybody can slipp up on that once […]
No. If you have to ask, you don’t deserve them. Pour off the fat, scrape the rest of the “ook” into a jar, and ship it to me by overnight express. Seriously, this stuff is composed of marvelously flavorful juices and gels, and it would be a crime to feed it to your dishwashing machine. […]
Vanilla extract is around 35 percent ethyl alcohol, which has a harsh, biting flavor. Whiskeys and other distilled beverages contain even more alcohol, of course (usually 40 percent), but they are lovingly produced by time-honored flavoring and aging processes that soften the harshness. “Pure vanilla extract,” in order to be labeled as such, must be […]
Chocolate is indeed a difficult material to work with, owing to its complex composition, mostly its content of several different fats. As it arrives in the kitchen from your purveyor in the form of slabs or pastilles, it consists of microscopic particles of cocoa and sugar distributed throughout a sea of solidified fat or cocoa […]
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’m with you. Why overnight? Are we to believe that daylight somehow interferes with the marinating process? What if it’s only two o’clock in the afternoon when we arrive at the critical point in the recipe? How early can “overnight” begin? If we do leave it overnight, must we proceed with the recipe the moment […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Not being a nutritionist, I asked Marion Nestle, professor and chair of the Department of Nutrition and Food Studies at New York University. “Fudge factors,” she said. First of all, the actual energy content of a gram of fat is closer to 9.5 calories. But that would only make the discrepancy bigger. The fact is […]
In a perusal of the acres of cake-mix boxes on the shelves of my supermarket (in space consumption probably second only to breakfast cereals), I found, as expected, a wide variety of baking instructions, specifying a wide variety of baking times and temperatures for different pan sizes, shapes, and materials. And that’s not even considering […]
Yes, but it has been thoroughly washed out before the grits ever get near your breakfast plate. The word lye is related to the Latin for wash, and originally referred to the strong alkaline solution obtained by soaking, or washing, wood ashes in water. (The alkaline material in wood ashes is potassium carbonate, and because […]
Salt tenderizes meat only to a slight extent. If you read further down the ingredient list of meat tenderizers, you’ll find papain, an enzyme found in unripe papayas. That’s what really does the job. All that salt is there primarily to dilute and spread out the relatively small amount of papain in the product on […]
Almost as much human resourcefulness has been expended on shucking clams as on opening childproof medicine bottles, but with far more injuries. People have seriously recommended everything from hammers, files, and hacksaws to execution in the microwave chamber. But brute force is entirely unnecessary, and microwave heat can seriously compromise their flavor. To open clams […]
Free fatty acids. That is, fatty acid molecules that have been broken off from their fat molecules. Most fatty acids are foul-smelling and bad-tasting chemicals, and it doesn’t take much of them to give a fatty food an off flavor. There are two main ways in which the fatty acids can become disconnected: the fat’s […]
The fact that everybody likes sugar certainly has a lot to do with its presence in so many processed foods. Some breakfast cereals, for example, will surprise you with their content of sugar, if you figure it out. To check your cereals (or other manufactured foods) for sugar content, look at the Nurtrition Facts table […]
Clarifying butter gets rid of everything but that delicious, artery-clogging, highly saturated butterfat. But when we use it in sautéing instead of whole butter, we avoid eating the browned proteins, which could also be unhealthful because of possible carcinogens. Name your poison. Some people think of butter as a block of fat surrounded by guilt. […]
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 […]
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, […]
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 […]
I never use them myself because I don’t view the 15 calories in a teaspoonful of sugar as a serious threat to my existence. But artificial sweeteners are a boon to diabetics and others who want to limit their intake of real sugar. Artificial sweeteners, also called sugar substitutes, must be approved by the FDA […]
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 […]
Remove the chopsticks from their paper wrapper through one end, leaving the wrapper intact. Flatten the wrapper and then roll it up until it resembles a miniature roll of paper towels. Hold the sticks parallel to each other, and insert the paper roll crosswise between them, about an inch or so from their top ends. […]
The words tartar and tartare come to us from two different directions. “Tartar” or “Tatar” was the Persian name for Genghis Khan’s horde of Mongols who stormed through Asia and Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages. The Tartars were viewed by Europeans as being, shall we say, culturally challenged, or at the very least politically […]
First of all, contrary to common belief, chocolate doesn’t contain much caffeine at all. A square (one ounce) of unsweetened baking chocolate averages 23 milligrams of caffeine, while a cup of coffee might contain more than 100 milligrams. An ounce of unsweetened chocolate does contain 376 milligrams of theobromine, however, an alkaloid closely related to […]
Bones are a combination of two kinds of substances: soft, organic cells and proteins, which are partly extracted into the water during the simmering of a stock, and a hard, inorganic mineral that doesn’t dissolve appreciably or contribute any flavor. This mineral material in both bones and teeth is primarily a calcium phosphate compound called […]
While edible fats and oils are ultimately biodegradable, they can gum up the works in a landfill for years. They’re not as bad as petroleum oils, however, which are digestible by only one or two species of bacteria and stay around essentially forever. Small amounts of fat can be absorbed in a couple of paper […]
There’s nothing better than a New York, style, kosher, thin-sliced, fat-laden corned beef sandwich on rye. But the diet pendulum has a habit of swinging back and forth, so depending on whether it’s fat or carbohydrates that happens to be in the doghouse when you read this, there will be those who advise you to […]
Chefs I’ve spoken with accept this idea as quite reasonable, and indeed it does seem to make sense on the surface of it, because many substances do indeed dissolve in alcohol but not in water. Nevertheless, the statement is false. The real reason we use wine in cooking is simply that a good wine contributes […]
USDA Prime is indeed the finest and most expensive grade of beef. But we have all at one time or another been subjected to a $5.95 (salad bar included) slab of tough, dry “prime rib” rimmed with vulcanized-rubber fat that clearly deserved to be stamped “USDA Inedible.” Is there some misrepresentation going on here? Not […]
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 […]
The name “water filter” is misleading. The word filtered literally means only that the water has passed through a medium containing tiny holes or fine passageways that screen out suspended particles. When traveling in a country whose water supply is suspect and you ask a waiter whether the water is filtered, an affirmative reply may […]
No matter how thoroughly pureed fruit is, the fiber is still effective. In the dietary context, the word fiber is misleading because it conjures up images of eating coconut husks and mattress stuffing. But dietary fiber doesn’t refer to a physical texture. It’s a catchall term for the components of vegetable foods that humans don’t […]