No, that’s not an expression of surprise. It’s pudding cups in bowls made from chocolate, shaped by dipping balloons into it and letting it harden.
Category Archives: Food
Osmosis is in the Kitchen with Dinah
Suggestion for anyone who replicates this: Try it with food coloring (something that will give contrast)
So Helpful I Could Cry
Eat Me! Technology FTW
Chocolate printer crafts sculptures from cocoa
Using new digital technology, a printer designed by researchers in England allows you to create your own designs on a computer and reproduce them physically in three dimensional form in chocolate.
I Think Thermodynamics Still Wins
Potatoes bad, nuts good for staying slim, Harvard study finds
The findings add to the growing body of evidence that getting heavier is not just a matter of “calories in, calories out,” and that the mantra: “Eat less and exercise more” is far too simplistic. Although calories remain crucial, some foods clearly cause people to put on more weight than others, perhaps because of their chemical makeup and how our bodies process them. This understanding may help explain the dizzying, often seemingly contradictory nutritional advice from one dietary study to the next.
Every time I read a study where they imply that energy isn’t conserved, it seems that they sneak in a caveat, like this:
Although the study did not evaluate why potatoes would be particularly fattening, other research shows that starches and refined carbohydrates such as potatoes cause blood sugar and insulin to surge, which makes people feel less satisfied and eat more as a result, Mozaffarian said.
Eating more = more calories consumed.
A Headline Query Whose Answer Might Be "Yes"
Could Liquid Nitrogen Help Build Tasty Burgers?
“The freezing followed by the burst of high heat lets you brown the outside without overcooking the inside,” Dr. Myhrvold said. And the deep-frying is supposed to be a technological improvement over the classic White Castle spatula-on-a-griddle technique.
“On a griddle,” he explained, “even when you press a burger with a spatula, you can’t make all of it contact the surface because the edge of the burger is crenellated, with all these nooks and crannies formed by the cylinders of raw meat. But if you put it in hot fat, that fat penetrates and you get a super-thin layer of crispy Maillard browning all the way around those meat fibers.”
Putting it in Your Mouth Does Not Make it Food
Chad’s been doing a series on non-adademic careers for scientists, and the first in this year’s batch: PNAS: Amy Young, Saponifier
It’s a noble effort , reminding people that there are many options outside of the professor-begetting-another-professor path, which is not sustainable, but the reason I really took notice was that this brought another topic onto some sharper focus, namely my position that everyday cooking/baking — when one simply follows the recipe in the cookbook — is not science. A lot of cooking, I think, doesn’t get past the level of I cooked too long and it’s burned/dried out, which is barely dipping your toe into the soufflé of science. (And Jennifer seemingly disagreed with this position, but it turns out it was mostly semantics — that cooking, done properly, is not about blindly following recipes is something with which I agree. The issue is blindly following recipes.)
Here’s the relevant part of Amy’s soap cooking approach that isn’t always followed in food preparation
If I hadn’t had the importance of keeping a proper lab notebook drilled into my head in my formative years, I would never in a hundred years be able to keep up with all the product lines I’ve got now. (Which colorant did I put in this one, again? And how much? Wait, wasn’t this the fragrance that made the soap seize up on me last time? I should probably try a lower temperature. And so on.) It may be six months or more between making batches of a given kind of soap, so keeping track is vital. Not to mention the product development phase, in which the thing just doesn’t work right, and I have fifteen different things to try varying; I’ve talked with colleagues who run similar businesses, and they seem to operate in a “just change stuff until it works” mode, rather than changing one element at a time (even if I run a dozen or more iterations simultaneously) so as to know which thing or combination of things created the desired effect. It’s invaluable in crafting the more complex items.
This really shows the systematic approach; it’s important to know what cause leads to which effect, and to quantify what you’ve done.
One-Sided Food Argument
Thought that this should exist after describing pasta as having different gauges (like wire), whether it’s solid-core (like spaghetti) or hollow core (ziti) at lunch at my recent conference. And it already exists.
Coffee, Julie?
Pretty neat: Coffee Joulies
Coffee Joulies are miniature thermodynamic heat storage devices. They cool your coffee by absorbing excess thermal energy when it is too hot. This energy is stored inside the Joulies. When your coffee reaches the right temperature, the Joulies slowly release this stored energy, keeping your coffee at the right temperature.
From their kickstarter page:
This amazing feat of thermodynamics happens thanks to a special non-toxic material sealed within the polished stainless steel shell. This material is designed to melt at 140 degrees Fahrenheit, and absorbs a lot of energy as it melts. This is how Joulies cool your coffee down three times faster than normal. Once it reaches this temperature, the special material begins to solidify again, releasing the energy it stored when it melted. This is how Joulies keep your coffee warm twice as long.
The better insulated your cup, the better Coffee Joulies work. Simply using a lid goes a long way. This is because less heat is lost to the environment, and more is stored within the Joulies themselves.
That energy is, of course, the enthalpy of fusion. Think of an ice cube: the ice absorbs energy as it melts, maintaining the same temperature but cooling the beverage down. What these people have done is use a material that melts at a convenient temperature for hot beverages and that takes advantage of the reverse process that happens in the freezer — the transition back to a solid, releasing that energy, at the melting point.
The site doesn’t specify the material, but the various forms of paraffin wax have melting points around 140 ºF with large heat capacities and enthalpies. Which would be pretty much what you want to use.
(The bit about the lid and/or insulation keeping things warm works without the Joulies, too)
It's Why Men Like to Barbecue
Men Will Cook If Danger Is Involved. -Rita Rudner.
Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories: Cooking hot dogs via electrocution
Disclaimerzilla: While we could give you lots of warnings about all the different dangers involved and how to possibly skirt them, the simple truth is that this just isn’t safe. If you are foolish enough to attempt this, you will have to deal with pointy things, raw electricity out of the wall, hot steam, and the possibility of fire. If that isn’t enough, and you succeed, you are still faced with the possibility of having to eat a hot dog. In summary: do not, under any circumstances, cook hot dogs this way.
Note: the LEDs are not edible.
h/t to J