Book Notes: What Einstein Told His Cook

Robert l. Wolke writes a food column for The Washington Post in which he explains the science behind food, cooking methods, and so on. I read a collection of his columns, "What Einstein Told His Cook", and really enjoyed it. Here is a handful of the interesting parts, paraphrased:

* Caramelization is the heat-induced browning of a food that contains sugar, but no amino acids (which make up proteins). Onions contain amino acids, so technically one can't "caramelize" an onion. When a food with amino acids in addition to sugar is heated to induce browning, such as onions, a set of chemical reactions take place called Maillard reactions. (pg 23)

* White chocolate has no chocolate in it. It is the fat from the cacao bean mixed with milk solids and sugar. (pg 34)

* Salt expose: Salt Sense is real salt, but it can claim to have "33 percent less sodium per teaspoon" because the salt crystals are flaky and fluffy, taking more room in a teaspoon than regular salt. (pg 46).

* His general point about salt is that all types of salt--table salt, sea salt, popcorn salt, kosher salt--are either identical or virtually identical chemically. The only significant difference is the size of the salt grain. (pg 42, others)

* Most European butters have a higher minimum milk fat content, which give them a richer flavor than American butters. (pg 78)

* The point of pasteurization is to heat a liquid to a temperature that will kill or deactivate dangerous microorganisms. Traditional pasteurization, not used much anymore, heats milk to 145-150 degrees F for 30 minutes. Flash pasteurization heats milk at 162 degrees F for 15 seconds. Ultra-pasteurization heats it to 280 degrees F for only 2 seconds.

The ultra-pasteurization equipment heats the milk under a high gas pressure to raise the boiling point of milk and prevent it from evaporation during the process. The process also increases the milk's shelf life by 4-5 weeks compared to flash pasteurization. (pg 91)

* Potato chips bags have opaque windows to keep out ultraviolet light, which speeds up the oxidation process of the fat in chips, turning them rancid. As a general rule, keep all fats and oils out of strong light. (pg 118)

* Green skin and sprouting eyes on a potato are sources of solanine, a toxic alkaloid. The solanine doesn't lie deep, so you can cut these parts of the potato
off and use the rest. (p 119)

* Salt (mixed with a bit of water) preserves food because it kills or deactivates bacteria by osmosis. Osmosis is the passing of water through a membrane to balance out the concentration of water in a 2nd solution. The salty solution sucks out the less-salty water in the bacterium, making it shrivel up and become inactive. (pg 138) I wonder if water could bring a dried-out bacterium to life.

* If you aren't defrosting a home-frozen food in the microwave, put it in a metal pan. Metals are great heat conductors, better than air or water, and will transfer the room's heat to the food faster than those methods. A bowl of warm water changed every half-hour is better for bulky foods, like a whole chicken. (pg 201)

* You can sterilize a sponge by placing it in a microwave and running it for 1 minute. The sponge has to be wet or it could smoke or catch fire. (pg 255) This article, from the original study, recommends two minutes so I would go with that.

* Most microwaves can only operate at full power. When you select "50% power", the microwave is cycling on and off so it is only on 50% of the time. An exception is a microwave with "inverter technology", which can deliver a lower level of power. (pg 256)

* Microwaves can penetrate glass and not metal. The reason the metal grate on a microwave door blocks microwaves is because microwaves are 4 3/4 long, too long to fit through the tiny gaps in the grate. (pg 260)

* The most important quality of a frying pan is heat conductivity. The best heat conductor is silver. (I couldn't find a silver frying pan for sale online though). The next best is copper, which conducts heat 91% as well as silver. Too much copper can be toxic, so the pan will need to be lined with a less toxic metal, such as stainless steel or nickel.

Next is aluminum, which conducts heat 55% as well as copper. The aluminum will need some type of coating to protect it from damage from food acids. The worst conductor among common skillet materials is solid stainless steel, only 4 percent as good as silver.

* He tested how much water button mushrooms absorb when you wash them, and found that it's next to nothing. I've found this to be my experience too, in spite of the warnings against washing mushrooms. (pg 286)

* The reason for different measuring cups from liquids and solids (usually with wider mouths than liquid measuring cups) is to account for how the two substances settle in a container. One cup of a liquids will fill all available space in the container. One cup of a solid like sugar or flour will settle unevenly and leave small caps among the granules. Most measuring cups for solids have wide mouths to let the solids spread out more and fill the spaces between them (more like a liquid).

He mentions a product called a Perfect Beaker that does a good job measuring both dry and liquid substances. (pg 293)

Book Notes: "For the Love of a Dog"

I'm starting a very irregular feature called Book Notes. I have a poor memory and have trouble remembering the interesting facts or bits of trivia I read in great non-fiction books like Blink or Freakonomics.

Book Notes will be a list of some of these facts and bits of trivia. The first book is For the Love of a Dog by Patricia B. McConnell.

The book is about the science behind the emotional life of dogs. Along the way she ties in a lot of human psychology and retells interesting experiments on dogs and other animals. It is an excellent book for anyone who has a dog, or human/animal psychology in general.

"Wolves will always feed their puppies, even if they themselves are starving. Lions eat first, letting their young starve if there is enough food." (pg 22)

"Behaviorists and trainers hear, almost on a daily basis, that a client's dog must have been abused, because she reacts so fearfully to strangers, However, many of these dogs are just shy, and they aren't any more comfortable around unfamiliar strangers than shy people are." (pg 118)

"Researchers have found that people who express no preference for using one hand or the other have higher than expected levels of generalized anxiety disorders." (pg 119) [Well, of course. They don't know which hand to use.]

"In just a few generations, they'd bred a group of rats who were able to move through a complicated maze in no time, especially compared with the "dull" group, who were bred for their lackluster performance. Only there was one problem--it turned out that the "bright" and "dull" rats weren't at all different in their ability to solve problems. The "dull" rats were simply afraid of new environments, and when placed in one were less likely to explore than the "bright" ones were." (pg 123)

(reworded) Pavlov's motivation for wanting dogs to drool was so he could study the extra-large chromosomes that saliva contains. (pg 147)

"Monkeys can learn to be afraid of snakes just by watching a video of other monkeys acting fearfully around them, but they don't make the same association if you edit the video and replace the snakes with flowers." (pg 151)

"On a lighter side, rats have also been found to produce a vocalization during play that for all the world sounds like the equivalent of human laughter. Biologist Jaak Panksepp found that these chirping noises are associated with responses in the brain correlated with pleasure, that they occur during play, and that they can be elicited, believe it or not, by tickling from human caretakers. The tickled rats even began to seek out their human playmates and became socially bonded to them." (pg 215)

"People whose brains have naturally lower levels of dopamine have trouble feeling that anything is 'enough' to satisfy them, and often indulge in high-risk behavior in a desperate attempt to feel contentment." (pg 215-216)

"...the psychologist Nathan A. Fox found that 'exuberant' four-month-old babies (babies who became especially happy and excited by novel events; about 10 percent of the ones studied) had the same level of joyfulness at seven years of age as in infancy." (pg 216)

"Our perception of happiness even seems to be affected by the biology of sleep/wake cycles. In most people, happiness is highest between four and ten hours after getting up, and lowest at the beginning and end off our day." (pg 216) [She later makes the point that research also suggests we have significant influence on our levels of happiness, outside of our genetic baggage]

"The tendency to feel excited and energized when anticipating something was first discovered by Wolfram Schultz, who trained monkeys to press a lever for a food reward. The experiment included a light that came on right before the food was released. Schultz found that the monkeys' brains had the highest levels of dopamine right after the light came on, but before the food was released. That means that the monkeys were more excited when they were anticipating the food than they were when they actually got it." (pg 221)

"However, in dog language, the direct stare and forward movement is a stopping signal, one that means the opposite of what we intend. Your dog is much more likely to come if you turn your body sideways and move backward a bit while you call 'Come!' " (pg 226)

"Lord knows dogs are an evolutionary success story: just compare the numbers of dogs in any given country with the numbers of wolves." (65 million dogs, a few thousand wolves) (pg 246) (This note is for myself. This passage gave me an idea for a skit that takes place a few hundred years ago. A dog pulls a wolf aside and politely hints that the wolf should start being nicer to humans for his own sake. "DOG: Look, all I'm saying is that they got these things called guns, and it wouldn't hurt to lick their faces one in a while.")

"One researcher taught dogs to select the larger of two objects to get a food treat, regardless of the shape or composition of the object." (pg 264)

(reworded) Dogs watched items being placed by a screen, one by one. When the screen was lifted, the dogs stared longer at the objects if it was the "wrong" number of objects than if it were the number of objects they expected. The experiment was originally done with babies, who have a similar response starting around 5-months-old. (pg 265)

(reworded) This is one of my favorite dog experiments. The author mentions it on pg 267.

"Fighters and poker players are famous for being able to control the expressions on their faces, for obvious reasons. Perhaps that's why dogs descended from fighting lines are also often difficult to read--fighters of any species aren't negotiating or communicating. they're trying to disguise their own emotions while looking for an opening to attack." (pg 284)