3 Minute Brownie. Well, 4 or 5 minutes with the mixing and all.
I can neither confirm nor deny the veracity of this recipe.
Category Archives: Food
The Most Ridiculous Thing I’ve Heard … Today. This is not a Repost.
Brooklyn Dem Felix Ortiz wants to ban use of salt in New York restaurants
“No owner or operator of a restaurant in this state shall use salt in any form in the preparation of any food,” the bill reads.
Now, I know I’ve tried to make the case that food preparation, as practiced by most people, is not science, this does not change the fact that what happens in the preparation of food is actual chemistry. And that if you change the ingredients, you change the food. Note that “no salt” is not the same as “no sodium.” Potassium chloride is still a salt, it’s just not table salt. And the bill says “salt in any form.”
I understand the intent is probably to eliminate the excess salt in some foods, but the choice of adding salt, or not, to a food after it has been prepared is not the same as eliminating it during the preparation. In bread, for example, it plays a chemical role”
By mixing with salt, wheat flour produced gluten from gliadin and glutenin whose elastic property is characteristic in bread and noodles.
and it has more roles, too, other than taste. (Hmmm, there’s a salt manufacturer’s association. Of course there is.)
Add to this the fact there is salt already present in many foods. Can you add eggs to a recipe without running afoul of the law? Cheese has salt in it, too. Remember, it’s “salt in any form.” What a stupid proposal.
If Only it Were Thus
Send Him to Sweden
The Nobel prize for Food Science
It must be cartoonsday.
Taking it to the Next Level
If the Möbius bagel wasn’t enough, here’s an animation of how to cut a toroid into four linked pieces: Tetrabagelectomy
Update: Now there’s the octobagel
Infrared is Soooo Tasty
Researchers use infrared cameras to determine taste quality of Japanese beef
At a taste testing held by the two Gifu institutes on Jan. 29th, twenty-four nutritionists, livestock industry experts, and consumers were asked to rank two samples of super high-quality Hida-gyu, boiled quickly in a Japanese hotpot, on ten points, according to the Yomiuri. Of the twenty-four participates, fourteen gave a better ranking to the samples that were determined to have higher levels of Oleic acid by the researchers’ infrared camera technique. One of the institutes’ lead researchers, Tomoyuki Tanaka, told reporters, “I want to improve the accuracy.”
How to Kill Mathematicians
Give them pizza, apparently. They’ll starve.
The perfect way to slice a pizza
They can’t think about sharing a pizza, for example, without falling headlong into the mathematics of how to slice it up. “We went to lunch together at least once a week,” says Mabry, recalling the early 1990s when they were both at Louisiana State University, Shreveport. “One of us would bring a notebook, and we’d draw pictures while our food was getting cold.”
The problem that bothered them was this. Suppose the harried waiter cuts the pizza off-centre, but with all the edge-to-edge cuts crossing at a single point, and with the same angle between adjacent cuts. The off-centre cuts mean the slices will not all be the same size, so if two people take turns to take neighbouring slices, will they get equal shares by the time they have gone right round the pizza – and if not, who will get more?
If you really want to mess them up, serve a pizza which isn’t round, and you need to value the crust differently than the rest! That’s like the sheet cake problem — trying to fairness-optimize the volume of cake and surface area of icing. (Gee, I wonder if round food was invented to keep the peace amongst the mathematicians, and allow them to solve other problems)
Or, you could give them a ham sandwich.
(To be fair, I can easily see many scientists falling into a similar analytic trap.)
Now That's Cooking With Science
Physics Buzz: When chemistry dunces bake
What about my deflated cakes? I remember baking a very sad birthday cake that cooked but didn’t rise. Incredibly, a detail as tiny as what baking powder I used could have been the culprit. While baking soda reacts immediately, baking powder usually makes bubbles twice—once when cool and once when heated. But this all depends on the acids in the baking powder. If a baking powder happens to release all the bubbles in the first stage, when mixed, you’ll lose out on most of your leavening if you don’t act fast. Considering how slow I am about going about things, this could very well be an explanation.
Bonus for including the Möbius bagel at the end.
(I still maintain that most food preparation doesn’t rise to this level, to allow it to be called science. Jennifer and I will have to agree to disagree)
Oliver Twist: May I Have Some … Möbius?
Mathematically Correct Breakfast
It is not hard to cut a bagel into two equal halves which are linked like two links of a chain.
You may be compelled to ask why anyone would figure out how to do such a thing. I understand why, but cannot explain.
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Something to consider: the nutritional content of a cubic lightyear of cream cheese
Bork, Bork, Bork!
Cocktail Party Physics: taster’s choice
With all due respect to Tom, cooking, done properly, is not about blindly following recipes: it involves a lot of prediction and testing by experiment to get a dish just right. The recipes just give you the basic framework.
I think the key phrase here is “done properly,” which I suspect applies to a minority of cooking. As Jennifer had noted
[W]hat he’s really objecting to is not cooking per se, but the blind following of a recipe/instructions, which isn’t any more scientific than rote memorization of scientific facts.
I have absolutely no problem with saying that there can be a whole lot of science in cooking, if you approach it that way. So go read the whole thing, it’s good (as usual), and has the Swedish chef.