These days, the cooking times on most boxes of dried pasta are in the ballpark, but there are exceptions. Boxed macaroni and cheese and other “children’s” pasta products routinely have cooking times that should be cut in half. But even in the best case, cooking times are just estimates. The actual cooking time will depend on the temperature and humidity of your kitchen, the mass and thermal conductivity of your cookware, the power of your cooktop, and on and on.
Category Archives: Food
What the Angels Share
The Mystery of the Canadian Whiskey Fungus
Leave fruit juice on its own for a few days or weeks and yeast—a type of fungus—will appear as if by magic. In one of nature’s great miracles, yeast eats sugar and excretes carbon dioxide and ethanol, the chemical that makes booze boozy. That’s fermentation.
If fermentation is a miracle of nature, then distillation is a miracle of science. Heat a fermented liquid and the lighter, more volatile chemical components—alcohols, ketones, esters, and so on—evaporate and separate from the heavier ones (like water). That vapor, cooled and condensed into a liquid, is a spirit. Do it to wine, you get brandy; beer, you get whiskey. Distill anything enough times and you get vodka. When it’s executed right, the process concentrates a remarkable array of aromatic and flavorful chemicals.
Make Your Geekdom Saving Throw
More Bang for the Calorie
Why Calorie Counts Are Wrong: Cooked Food Provides a Lot More Energy
[T]he Atwater Convention has two big flaws. First, it pays no attention to the extent to which food has been processed. For example, it treats grain as the same calorie value whether it is eaten whole or as highly milled flour. But smaller particles are less work to digest, and therefore provide more net energy. Second, it treats foods as equally digestible (meaning, having the same proportion digested) regardless of processing. But cooked foods, as we’ve seen, are more digestible than raw foods.
Gone Bananas
In addition to precise temperature control, the ripening process also depends on atmospheric design. Over a 24-hour period, each roomful of bananas is gassed with ethylene, a plant hormone that accelerates ripening (and is also, curiously, the most produced organic compound in the world).
I learned about the role of ethylene a few years back, after wanting to ripen some bananas quickly and being told that putting them in a paper bag would do the trick. I did a test with one banana in the bag and one outside as a control, and the one in the bag did indeed ripen faster. And the internet told me that it was the ethylene that did the ripening, which is why “one bad apple ruins the lot” — as fruit like bananas and apples ripen, they give off ethylene, and that accelerates through the process, so one ripe piece cause the others to ripen pretty quickly. The paper bag concentrates the gas relative to it being out in the open and causes more ripening. Curiously, a plastic bag did not work — this could be because humidity inhibits ripening, and it’s possible the permeability of the paper bag allows water vapor to escape but still retain some ethylene to do its magic chemistry.
As You Like It
How to Reheat Soggy Leftover Pizza
There are so many advantages to using this method. There’s no insufferable wait for an oven to preheat (10 minutes in real time is 45 minutes in “I have the munchies” time); you don’t waste all that extra energy (you’re welcome, Planet Earth); and most important of all, you get perfectly crisp crust. In fact, you’ll get a crust that’s hotter and crispier than it was when it was first served.
I personally don’t have a problem with cold pizza, but I’ve been repeatedly told that I’m weird and this could be one of the reasons. I’m also a Gemini, so I never know what to expect.
'Tis the Season
And Physics He Might Have Disliked
Microwave Math That Einstein Would Have Loved
Measuring the speed of light with a microwave is a pretty standard DIY experiment, though I prefer using chocolate chips, given the premise that one should eat the experiment if it’s about food. (Then again, the article suggests Velveeta. Put that on your spam and wonderbread sandwich and it’s still food-free). Sure, Einstein might have liked that.
My nit is with this
To get the most out of your microwave, it helps to understand that it cooks with light waves, much like a grill does, except that the light waves are almost five inches (12.2 centimeters) from peak to peak—a good bit longer in wavelength than the infrared rays that coals put out.
A grill is not really that much like a microwave. A microwave uses (non-thermal) radiation to cook food. A grill uses convection, conduction and radiation. If it just used radiation, you could put a transparent* vacuum system in between the food and the coals and still cook the food, but that wouldn’t give you the expected result. The air is hot, as is the grill itself — you get a pattern burned into your hamburger patty or hot dog from where it lies on the hot grill. Conduction and convection. All three modes of heat transfer play a role.
What is said about the wavelength isn’t wrong, but it does tend to reinforce the mistaken conception that infrared radiation is synonymous with heat. The blackbody radiation that would be emitted wouldn’t have a specific wavelength, since it would be a continuum, and it would include wavelengths longer and possibly shorter than IR, if the source were hot enough. The microwaves, of course, are not heat in a physic sense — in thermodynamic terms that would be considered work, since they do not come from a thermal source; it’s not coming from a temperature difference. An infrared laser could be used to cook, but that wouldn’t be heat either.
I really have no idea if Albert would have liked or disliked such an example, but I suspect glossing over details that give the wrong implication might have bothered him.
*Certainly not one made of pyrex
French Toast in the Renaissance
I was at this restaurant. The sign said “Breakfast Anytime.” So I ordered French Toast in the Renaissance.
– Stephen Wright
Ever wonder how the ancient Romans fed their armies? What the pioneers cooked along the Oregon Trail? Who invented the potato chip…and why? So do we!!! Food history presents a fascinating buffet of popular lore and contradictory facts. Some experts say it’s impossible to express this topic in exact timeline format. They are correct. Most foods are not invented; they evolve.
Popcorn Gun
Popcorn pops because the water inside flashes to steam and expands. If you put the system under sufficient pressure it won’t do this … until the pressure is released, and all of the popcorn pops at the same time.