The Best Interesting Random Facts
Almost everyone has heard that advice: Throw in some chunks of raw potato, simmer them for a while, and they will absorb some of the extra salt. But as with so many common beliefs, this one, to my knowledge, has never been tested scientifically. I took that as a challenge and set up a controlled […]
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 […]
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 […]
Kosher salt is misnamed; it should be called koshering salt because it is used in the koshering process, which involves blanketing raw meat or poultry with salt to purify it. Kosher salt may be either mined or taken from the sea; nobody seems to care. Its crystals, however, must always be coarse and irregular, so […]
Cloves are probably the strongest of all aromatic spices, containing up to 20 percent of an intense, sweetly pungent essential oil. Originating, appropriately enough, in the Spice Islands, now part of Indonesia, they are the dried flower buds of the tropical evergreen tree Syzygium arornaticurn. Dried clove buds have a stem and a head, a […]
At the fish market, select one lively, tail-flipping, claw-raising lobster per person. You pick up a lobster by grasping its back, behind the head. If it droops when picked up, forget it and come back another day; it’s not fresh. Take the lobsters home in a container that allows lots of breathing space and keeps […]
You come home after a hard day’s work. You don’t feel like cooking, and you can’t face the hassle of going to a restaurant. Where do you turn? To the freezer, of course. And like a crowd of football fans, a little voice in your head begins to chant, “DEE-frost! DEE-frost!” Scanning your frozen assets, […]
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 […]
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, […]
They’re just different species. Some shrimp are pinker and some are grayer, even when they’re still gamboling about on the ocean floor. But all of their shells turn bright pink when cooked. That color is in the shells all along, but it is masked by darker colors that break down when heated. At least in […]
Spam isn’t that bad, there’s nothing strange in the meat even though it’s cheap. It’s pork shoulder that’s been chopped, spiced, and formed into loaves. Every meat packer runs into the problem that some parts of an animal are more popular than others. For the George A. Hormel Company in 1937, the unwanted part was […]
There is virtually no blood in red meat. Most of the blood that circulates through a cow’s veins and arteries never makes it to the butcher shop, much less to the dinner table. Not to get too graphic about it, but down at the slaughterhouse, just after the critter is dispatched, most of the blood […]
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 […]
Yup, your lasagne is actually eating holes in the metal. (No reflection on your cooking.) Aluminum is what chemists call an active metal, easily attacked by acids such as the citric and other organic acids in tomatoes. In fact, you shouldn’t cook tomato sauce or other acidic foods in aluminum pots because they can dissolve […]
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 […]
The stuff is coagulated protein, held together by fat. While it won’t hurt you, it won’t taste good and it’s best to remove it on purely aesthetic grounds. When protein is heated, it coagulates. That is, its long, convoluted molecules unfold and then clump together in new ways. What happened was that some of your […]
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 […]
Surimi is fish flesh that has been minced and fabricated into crab-and shrimp-like shapes. Developed in Japan to utilize the waste scraps from filleting and to exploit some of the less desirable fish species caught in the nets, it has gained a foothold in the United States as a low-cost alternative to the real things. […]
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, […]
Vinegar has been known for thousands of years. No one even had to make it in the first place, because it actually makes itself. Wherever there happens to be some sugar or alcohol lying around, vinegar is on the way. Any chemist will tell you without a moment’s hesitation that vinegar is a solution of […]
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 […]
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 […]
In Spanish, empanada means “breaded,” derived from pan, meaning bread. But that’s a bit misleading, because in Latin America today an empanada is a filled pastry, almost any kind of pastry made from flour or cornmeal and filled with almost anything imaginable, but usually with meats or seafoods of some kind. We might call them […]
Outdoor grilling is great for meats and fish, but grilling most vegetables can be a problem. Put them on the grate and they tend to fall through into the fire; put them on skewers and some parts will burn while others steam. Roasting vegetables in a hot oven is a lot easier. It results in […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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. […]
The orange stuff on Cheetos is a combination of various dyes and seasonings, and it’s the only part of Cheetos that has any cheese whatsoever in it. Like similar products, the main part of these “cheese” coated chip products is not cheese but a cornmeal concoction. The cornmeal, with whey and oil added, is mixed […]
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 […]
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 […]
The white film on chocolate is called “bloom” and is caused by excessive or varying temperatures. You have committed the crime of chocolate abuse by not storing it properly. The white film is not mold and is perfectly harmless, affecting only the chocolate’s appearance and to some extent its texture. Milk chocolate typically consists of […]
There are just too many uncontrolled variables when cooking. The cruel fact of life is that when a recipe tells you to cook for “x hours at y degrees,” it’s only a guideline, an educated guess, a ballpark estimate. It’s what worked, most of the time, for the elves who tested the recipe, but there’s […]
The answer to that question is an unequivocal “It depends.” You can make burned-on-the-outside, raw-on-the-inside chicken equally well over charcoal or a gas flame. As in all cooking, what matters is how much heat the food ultimately absorbs; that’s what determines its done-ness. Grilling infuses the necessary amount of heat by subjecting the food to […]
While its name may be a bit nutty, liquid smoke is a legitimate and useful product. It adds a smoky flavor to foods without our having to go out and chop wood and build a fire and do all the rest of it. Smoking is one of several ancient methods of curing or preserving foods, […]
The pungent and tear-producing (lachrymatory) compound in the essential oil of grated horseradish is allyl isothiocyanate, commonly known as mustard oil. It’s in black mustard seeds also. It is created when the plant cells are cut apart by the grating, which releases an enzyme called myrosin and a compound called sinigrin. These two chemicals were […]
