The Best Interesting Random Facts
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’s just another case of biologically different strokes. Differences among animal species can be enormous. There’s no reason to expect pests to behave like humans just because humans sometimes behave like pests. The “heat” of cayenne and other hot peppers comes from chemicals called capsaicinoids. In humans and other mammals they irritate the mucous membranes […]
Ammonia itself is an acrid-smelling gas, usually dissolved in water and used for laundry and cleaning purposes. But baking ammonia is ammonium bicarbonate, a leavening agent that when heated breaks down into three gases: water vapor, carbon dioxide, and ammonia. It isn’t used much anymore , if you can even find it, because the ammonia […]
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 […]
The different sensory effects in hot and spicy food are caused by several different chemical compounds. It would be much neater if we had individual descriptive words for each of these sensations, because they are indeed all different. Instead, we apply the words hot, peppery, spicy, pungent, piquant, biting, zingy, and sharp almost indiscriminately to […]
Just because souse and scrapple have funny names and come in refrigerated rectangular blocks doesn’t mean they’re related, except for their porcine parentage. Scrapple, often called Philadelphia Scrapple, is a Pennsylvania Dutch concoction of cooked pork scraps and trimmings (no gruntz) called puddin’, mixed with cornmeal mush, a.k.a. polenta, and spices. Refrigerated, it forms a […]
Paula Wolfert’s concept was that long, slow cooking can produce tender, juicy, flavorful meats that higher-temperature cooking cannot match. And as usual, she’s right, as the recipes in her book amply demonstrate (although none of them approaches 24 hours of cooking). It has always been an oversimplification to say that cooking time and cooking temperature […]
We can’t say that it’s never been done, but we doubt that it has been done very often. And surely few of us would continue to patronize a fishmonger or restaurateur who had been found to try such a trick. At one time, skate was a low-priced fish caught accidentally (in the “bycatch”) by fishermen […]
A calorie is a much broader concept than just heat; it’s an amount of any kind of energy. We could measure the energy of a speeding Mack truck in calories, if we wanted to. Energy is whatever makes things happen; call it “oomph” if you wish. It comes in many forms: physical motion (think Mack […]
Americans seem to have discovered only a few years ago that “chocolate” doesn’t have to mean Hershey bars and Whitman Samplers; they learned that serious chocolate bars, as distinguished from candy bars, could open a whole new world of flavors. There are now dozens of dark chocolate bars on the market from both American and […]
Buckwheat isn’t wheat at all, and even if it were, its flour couldn’t make bread. Buckwheat groats, known as kasha in eastern Europe and sayraisin in France, are the seeds of the plant Fagopyrurn esculenturn , which is not related to wheat or any other grassy cereal plant. The generic word groats refers to hulled […]
Virtually every mention of ceviche (seh-VEE-che; I’ll use the Spanish spelling) by a food writer is accompanied by a gratuitous statement to the effect that lime juice does to protein what heat does to protein, and therefore the fish is essentially “cooked” by the lime juice. Well, does “cooked” mean cooked, or doesn’t it? And […]
Meats don’t spoil because they’re “cured,” which is a catch-all term for any process that inhibits bacterial growth, even at room temperature. But hams can be bewildering. How are they cured? Are all hams salted? Smoked? Do you have to soak them? Cook them? There is no single set of answers to these questions because […]
One can imagine several reasons. Merchants assume that anyone who eats caviar regularly is an easy sell. Caviar deserves it. And least romantically, there is a chemical reason for it. Caviar is the roe of the sturgeon, a huge, dinosaur-era fish with armored plates instead of scales. The sturgeon lives primarily in the Caspian and […]
A freshly cut meat surface isn’t bright red; it’s naturally purplish because it contains the purplish-red muscle protein, myoglobin. But when myoglobin is exposed to oxygen in the air, it quickly turns into bright, cherry-red oxymyoglobin. That’s why only the outer surface of your ground beef is that nice, bright red color that we generally […]
There can be no single rule that covers all the foods we consume, an almost infinite number of combinations of thousands of different proteins, carbohydrates, fats, and minerals that make up our omnivorous diet. “Going bad” can refer to the effects of bacteria, molds, and yeasts; heat; oxidation from exposure to air; or enzymes in […]
If you’ll pardon the double negative, cream cheese doesn’t contain no calcium. In the jabberwocky world of food labeling, zero is not the same as none. When you come right down to it, there’s no such thing as a zero amount of anything. All anyone can say is that the amount of something is too […]
Most of us think of white sugar from sugar cane and sugar beets as somehow less natural than honey. Perhaps because they are not produced by hairy insects? But chemically, there is quite a difference. Sugar cane and sugar beets are loaded with sucrose, whereas honey’s sugars are primarily fructose (39 percent), glucose, (31 percent), […]
Nitrites accomplish their meat-curing magic by first being themselves transformed into (reduced to) nitric oxide (NO), a process that takes place only slowly by the action of natural antioxidants (also known as reducing agents) in the meat. The nitric oxide then bonds to myoglobin, the main pigment in red meat, to form nitric oxide myoglobin, […]
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 […]
French onion soup tastes nothing like raw or fried onions. It’s all in the different chemical reactions that take place at room temperature, at the wet temperature of boiling water, and at the high and dry temperature of frying. Raw garlic and onions have little or no aroma until cutting or chewing breaks open their […]
People put up with fishy-smelling fish because they’re probably thinking, Well, what else should it smell like? Odd as it may seem, though, fish needn’t smell like fish at all. When they’re perfectly fresh, only a few hours removed from carousing around in the water, fish and shellfish have virtually no odor. A fresh “scent […]
The modern version of the marshmallow is only about a hundred years old, but it’s a new take on a several-thousand-year-old treat. The magical material we call marshmallow is named after the marsh mallow plant (Althaea officinalis), whose roots contain a sweet, gummy sap that has been used as a confection and for its supposed medicinal […]
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 […]
Some of my older readers may remember milk delivered to the doorstep in bottles. I’ve read about it in my history books. The milk had a separate layer of cream at the top. Why? Because cream is just milk with a higher proportion of butterfat and, because fat is lighter (less dense) than water, it […]
Freshly ground salt is better for the people who sell those fancy salt mills and combination salt-and-pepper grinders in so-called gourmet shops. The idea seems to be that if freshly ground pepper is so much better than the powdered stuff in cans, then why not use freshly ground salt as well? That’s a delusion. Unlike […]
It doesn’t have to be either lumpy or greasy. We all know people who can make it both lumpy and greasy at the same time, don’t we? Lumps and grease arise from the same basic phenomenon: Oil and water won’t mix. In your gravy, you want some of each, but you have to trick them […]
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 […]
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 […]
Pastry dough must be kept cool during rolling so that the shortening, most often a solid fat such as butter, lard, or Crisco, doesn’t melt and soak into the flour. If it does, your pie crust will have the texture of a shipping carton. Flaky pastry is produced when many thin layers of dough are […]
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. […]
Not all bacteria are killed at 212°F (100°C ). Some of them can survive by protecting themselves within virtually invulnerable coatings. They’re then called spores. Most species of bacteria reproduce by binary fission, each organism splitting into two whole new organisms. That’s why they can grow at exponential rates. Once they get started, bacteria can […]
In cooking, we are continually mixing and blending ingredients. But there are several distinct kinds of mixtures. Emulsions are only one of them. A combination of solid particles, such as salted and peppered flour or a blend of dried spices, is a simple physical mixture. But when liquids are involved, a mixture can take on […]
European butter has more fat. Commercial butter is 80 to 82 percent milk fat (also called butterfat), 16 to 17 percent water, and 1 to 2 percent milk solids (plus about 2 percent salt if salted). The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) sets the lower limit of butterfat content for American butter at 80 […]
The Food Safety and Inspection Service (FSIS) of the USDA won’t let anyone sell mechanically separated meat. It’s a reaction to “mad cow” disease. Mechanically separated meat is meat that has been separated from the bone by a machine, rather than by knife-brandishing humans. The first time I saw the words mechanically separated beef on […]
There is no such thing as a nonfat edible oil. Fats are a family of specific chemical compounds, and an oil is just a liquid fat. Nor do the sprays have to contain a substitute for oil, because, are you ready?, they are oil. Those handy little cans, so great for coating baking pans and […]
