Posts

Profeciency 8: Kitchen Science Round-Up

Good Eats: The Bulb of the Night Conclusion: I am Alton Brown's #1 Fan I feel like I'm cheating a bit as I write this blog post, because with the show Good Eats , you don't have to stretch very far to connect concepts from class to concepts in the show. This was one of my favorite shows growing up (I was almost exclusively a Food Network watcher) and it was fun to revisit some topics from class.  Cell structure as a natural microreactor The most immediately ChemE-relevant moment comes when Brown explains why crushing garlic makes it so much more pungent. Inside each garlic cell, an enzyme called alliinase is physically separated from its substrate, alliin, a sulfur-containing amino acid. The cell wall acts as a compartmentalization barrier, essentially functioning like a two-compartment reactor where the reactants are kept segregated until you want the reaction to occur. When you crush or mince the clove, you rupture the cell membranes and allow alliinase to contact alliin,...
Post a Comment
Read more

Proficiency 7: Food Preservation

Image
The Evil-Looking Microscopic Spiders that Might Save Your Food They're not exactly alive , but they're also not exactly dead. They have been known to "walk" from one living thing to another with its legs. Once they attack their victims, they hijack it, forcing it to replicate its genetic material. No, I didn't stay up too late watching The Last of Us  last night, I'm talking about bacteriophages , the viruses you've never heard of that might be the solution to antimicrobial resistance and help reduce food-borne diseases.  Also known as just "phages", bacteriophages are viruses that infect and replicate only in bacterial cells: think smallpox for prokaryotic organisms. Despite the fact that I had never heard of them before today, it is estimated there are more than 10^31 bacteriophages on the planet, more than every other living organism on Earth (including the bacteria which phages target) combined. Phages are hugely diverse, highly specialized, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Profeciency 6: Polymers

Image
I Am Addicted to Sugar and that's Okay as Long as I Know Some Science Behind It Like the seven deadly sins, there are also seven forms of immoral enjoyment for sugar: the seven stages of cooking sugar, shown below.  Each stage unlocks its own realm of culinary possibility. Each is named by the result of cooking to the indicated temperatures, which are usually carefully monitered via a candy thermometer.  Each stage is named for the result of the "cold water test": what happens when a small amount of the hot sugar syrup is dropped directly into cold water? The softball stage is called such because you can literally form a soft, pliable ball with the cooled sugar as opposed to the firm or hard balls of the next few stages. This simple test was the original candy thermometer, used by confectioners long before precision instruments existed. While there are many types of sugar in our corn syrup and table sugar concoctions, sucrose is a good approximation for all the hydrophili...
Post a Comment
Read more

Proficiency Five: Emulsions

Image
  I go to Bed Every Night and Have Nightmares About my Hollandaise Sauce Breaking: an Attempt at the Classics My roomates love brunch, and while I will never admit it to them, brunch doesn't seem to love me back. Brunch simply causes too much friction between me and my wallet, which is why I sometimes "don't wake up to my alarm" when we're supposed to go to PEGGS (Eliza, I'm kidding, please don't kill me). Why would I pay $15 for a plate of eggs I could make for virutally free? As a result of this sentiment, I generally don't beleive in brunch: but there is one major exception. I beleive in eggs benedict. And I can't get eggs benedict without participating in brunch. It seems I am at an impasse. This week, I will be venturing into the world of preparing my own eggs benedct so I will never have to shell out 1/3 of my grocery bill on one meal again.  Eggs benedict relies on the "delicate emulsion" of hollandaise sauce, which is as nutorious...
Post a Comment
Read more

Profeciency 4: Morphology

Image
The "Fakin' Bacon" I Ate at Seventh-day Adventist Camp as a Kid was Gross, but is There Any Hope for Plant-Based Protein Sources for Us Meat Lovers? There are very few good arguments for why we should continue to eat meat in the 21st century. The environemental impact is massive (with one Oxford paper finding that " livestock farming contributes 18% of human produced greenhouse gas emissions worldwide"), its extremely inefficient (producing just one kg of beef takes 25 kg of grain and ~15,000 L of water), it causes unnecessary animal suffering, and commercial farming is a massive massive  contributor to antibiotic resistance, which the WHO considers to be "The Biggest Health Threat of Our Time." While notable ethical and environmental exceptions to the problem of meat eating and livestock keeping can be made for various cultural reasons and smaller scale animal based agronimies, the vast majority of those living in the industrialsed world are hard pres...
Post a Comment
Read more

Proficiency 3: Heating

Image
"Oh Don't Worry, the Alcohol Will Burn Off" Says Someone Who Knows Nothing About Boiling Points From bananas foster to cherries jubilee, rum cake to Coq au Vin, to moules marinières to penne alla vodka the culinary world is FULL of boozy dishes. When I was a kid, I was always shocked when a friend’s mom pulled out a bottle of wine not to drink but to put into the food (isn’t that stuff for grown up?!) but I was constantly reassured that “the alcohol burns off.” But how safe is it to eat these dishes if you’re avoiding the strong stuff? Thanks to researchers at the Nutrient Data Laboratory at the Beltsville Human Nutrition Research Center, the Agricultural Research Service, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, we have the USDA Table of Nutrient Retention Factors, an analytical investigation on alcohol retention (among other nutritional components). Three heating methods were tested to determine the extent of alcohol lost in food preparation: no heat application, flaming...
Post a Comment
Read more

Proficiency 2: Chemical Reactions

Image
While your Christmas cookie table may be full of chocolate chip, snickerdoodle, and peanut butter cookies, Christmas tabes of the early 1800s were more likely filled with a decidedly different type of cookie. These cookies, from the beautifully embossed and delicate German Springerle, To the light, crumbly, melt in your mouth Swedish drömmar (dreams), To the zesty olive oil baked Greek Ladokouloura biscuits,    To the crisp, air filled Lebanese Yansoon (Anise) Cookies Are a bit different than the chewy, rich cookies we are used to. This is thanks to a leavening ingredient from days gone by: hartshorn, a.k.a bakers ammonia a.k.a  ammonium carbonate. As discussed in class, hartshorn recipes yield a very dry, crispy, air-pocket filled cracker-like cookie, partially out of necessity. During baking, ammonia gas must be given the opportunity to fully leave the cookie: if it remains trapped inside, a risk with a moist or thick cookie or other pastry, your final confection will t...
Post a Comment
Read more