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)

Thansgiving Fun

* While making Thanksgiving dinner, I asked my Mom what was in this bowl of sweet-smelling herbs. "Guess. You can test your smell." Two seconds later, as I'm still in the process of bending over to smell then, she blurts out "Sage!"

ME: "Why did you tell me before I could guess?"
MOM: "I like to cheat."

* "Sous Chef" is a fancy name for "chump who is unable or not trusted to cook." I am always the Sous Chef on Thanksgiving.

* Mom has a hand-painted serving platter that she got from France. She loves this platter. I didn't realize how much she loved it until she handed it to me to put on the dining table. "Jason. if you drop this, I will kill you. [laughter] I am serious. I will show no mercy." After we stop laughing, she took the Death Platter back from me and put it on the table herself.

* I bought myself a hand blender for my birthday next week. Mom reimbursed me, and then Michele said she wanted to pay for the gift.

MOM: "Okay. You owe me $40."
MICHELE: "$40? Jason told me it was $20."
TINA: [looking to me] "I thought you said it was $30."
ME: "It is $30. They are trying to one-up each other."

Soup

I bought a cookbook called "400 Soups." I'm not much of a cook, which is why I like making soup. Chop, put in pot, add broth, ignore for one hour. I can do that.

You know what the first soup in this book is? Vichyssoise. That is not a starter soup. For one, I can't tell if the pronunciation is French or Long Island (Vee-shay-soi / Vick-y-soiz) Two, it either has an extra 's', or it is missing an 'n'. That's OK for page 213, but not for page 1.

You know what the first recipe should be? Potato soup. Ingredients: potato, water, bowl. No French peeling the potato or sprinkling cinnamon dust around the edge of the bowl. Just a boiled potato, unpeeled, in a bowl of water, with a fork sticking out of it. Salt and pepper optional.

The first soup should not take culinary beginners into uncharted waters. Give us a confidence booster. Something with celery, not leeks. Herbs that appear in Simon & Garfunkel songs, not Martha Stewart specials.

If I were this book and not a man who reads books, like a Book God peering into the lives of his subjects, I'd move my page 76 to the front. Roasted Pepper Soup would be a good starter recipe.

It looks how it sounds like it will look and has words in its name that everyone can understand. No obscure ingredients either. King Edward potatoes have been usurped by Joe Onion and his gal, Garlic Jill. I'd follow Roasted Pepper Soup up with Green Lentil Soup, and then its cousin, Garlicky Lentil Soup. There should be a good 20-30 pages of pepper and legume soups before Vichyssoise even appears in the table of contents.

To sum up, I would start off with simple pepper and legume soups. Then I would include a table of contents. People wouldn't mind that it came 30 pages into the book because they would be too busy reading the recipes and exclaiming, "Hey, I recognize that ingredient" and "Mmm, this soup is going to taste as good as it sounds, sounds I can confidentially reproduce when saying the name of this soup."

Then you can include Vichyssoise and related soups later in the book in a special "Freak" section with detachable pages, so it's easy to tear out if you want to. The pages should be made out of soft paper, so when you are enjoying a warm bowl of Irish Potato Soup, you can wipe your lips with Avgolemono or Lemon and Pumpkin Moules Mariniere.

Mmmm

On the fridge in a client's house was a promotional notepad from Harris Teeter. The top of each sheet of brown paper was labeled "Shopping List" and had three items preprinted below, with a checkbox next to each one:

Milk
Bread
Harris Teeter Rancher's Beef

Then there were lines below it to write in your own items. Which didn't make sense to me. What else do you need from the grocery store besides milk, bread, and Harris Teeter Rancher's Beef? Toilet paper? No way. The only thing your digestive system is going to poop out after a juicy, mouth-watering slab of Harris Teeter Rancher's Beef is a thank you note.

These three items are the Niña, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria of good taste, and they just landed on Deliciousness Rock. If there is going to be a fourth item, it should be More Harris Teeter Rancher's Beef, with the checkbox already checked.

A Five-Year Conversation in the Pizza Industry, Compressed to a Mere Eighty-Seven Words

PIZZA EMPLOYEE: What do we do with these extra scraps of dough?
PIZZA MANAGER: Turn them into breadsticks, bitch.
[...]
PIZZA EMPLOYEE: What do we do with these extra breadsticks?
PIZZA MANAGER: Bitch, cut them up and pour some cheese on them.
[...]
PIZZA EMPLOYEE: What do we do with this extra cheese?
PIZZA MANAGER: I don't know. What's in the crust?
PIZZA EMPLOYEE: Dough.
PIZZA MANAGER: What the fuck? Stuff some cheese in that bitch.
PIZZA EMPLOYEE: Well, I am a magical talking dog.
PIZZA MANAGER: Damn LSD.

sxhit

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Mercury Free!

"High protein! Low fat!" That's some of the ad copy on my five-lb. bag of Trader Joe's Skinless, Boneless Chicken Breasts, written so shoppers will choose this five-lb. bag of skinless, boneless chicken breasts as opposed to one of the five-lb. bags of skinless, boneless chicken breasts sitting next to it.

Next to the announcement of these strange properties of chicken is "No hormones!" It made me feel relieved. And that worried me. Because if I saw "No hormones" on a box of Chips Ahoy! cookies, I wouldn't feel relieved. I'd wonder what the hell where hormones are doing in cookies in the first place. But my reaction made me realize that I've been conditioned to accept a level of crap in my food, ingredients and treatments that would shock people from a 100 years ago, and likely people a 100 years from now, in the same way the old practice of using mercury in everything from medicine to lead paint shocks us.

It turns out that "No hormones!" is as silly of a claim for chicken as "Low fat!" The USDA bans hormones from being used in raising hogs or poultry, and requires manufactures that put "No hormones!" on the packaging to also put "Federal regulations prohibit the use of hormones in poultry" [or pigs].

And if you're not yet convinced I need to leave the house more often, after I read this on the USDA's web site, and mused about the interplay of all these messages while eating a Twix bar, I wondered if all of these messages were just a way for a subversive copywriter at Trader Joe's to get people thinking along these very same lines. For if the package only had "No hormones!" on it, and the USDA disclaimer, I wouldn’t have given this a second thought. It was this message next to all these obviously silly messages that got me thinking.

Perhaps it was the copywriter pressuring management to put "No MSG!" and "Minimally processed!" on the package, each exclamation point a gentle nudge to consider why the lack of perversion of our food should make us excited. Perhaps this was his or her way to inflame the hearts of the buccaneers that patronize Trader Joe's, to light the trick birthday candle in all our hearts, the candle that lights again ever after it's blown out, unless you douse it in water, the water that melts from the frozen chicken after you put it in the refrigerator to defrost.

For the record, I was outside for 15 minutes today.

Looking up a word in a dictionary for people who stutter

"Does potatoes have three p's or for?"

My creative faculties fizzled out hours ago. My last six posts have been patched together from the arms and limbs of previous pieces scattered on my hard drive. It's been fun reading my old writing and seeing what parts of it hold up. For many of the pieces I had forgotten I had wrote them.

In fact, this is the last half-decent one I could find on my hard drive. I'm not sure it's funny, but it's the closest I've got right now.

Fun Games To Play in Stores

Home Depot
YOU: Excuse me. Do you have a boss smasher?
EMPLOYEE: A what?
YOU: A boss smasher. You know, metal head, wooden handle, good for smashing things.
EMPLOYEE: You mean a hammer?
YOU: Yeah, that'll do.

Giant
YOU: Do you have any rotten produce?
GROCER: We don’t carry rotten produce in this store.
YOU: [very glum] Oh.

Safeway
YOU: Can you hand me a tomato?
GROCER: Here you go.
[Put tomato in pants.]
YOU: Can you hand me another tomato?
[repeat]

Misleading Misleading

I was surprised to find out that Grape Juicy Juice is not 100% grape juice. In fact, it's not even close. The company added just enough grape juice to die the mixture purple.

This is Wrong. If you buy a bottle of grape juice, you would expect it to be a mixture of grape juice and water, right? So when you buy a bottle of Grape Juicy Juice, a name that advertises, right on the bottle, more juiciness than your regular 100% grape juice, they're raising the bar. That bar is at 19'6", and Sven Gzevoltz isn't going to pole vault to the gold on Gatorade.

At the absolute minimum, one would expect 100% grape juice, at that merely ordinary 100% would only be justifiable if this unfermented wine were made up of powerful Schwarzenegger atoms that gave it a richer, more powerful flavor than competing juice. One could even reasonably expect super-saturated juice, like 150% or 200% juice, as if the Schwarzenegger atoms got drunk and made the water molecules flee to escape their repeated fondling.

Yet this "Juicy" Juice, or as I'll call it in a letter to their customer service office, "Purple Urine Acid," falls so short of its name that the juice mocks it.

Thanks to the Grammar Granny, This is Now the Fifth Version of This Joke

Snack foods is one of the few industries where the question "How many z’s does cheez have?" is appropriate. The other industry--soy products.

Search Engine Fun

Dear person who found this site searching for "who+told+you+you+could+eat+my+cookies":

Arnold, Gray Davis told me I could eat your cookies. And guess what? Davis just passed a 47% cookie tax...on high-faluting, fancy cookies. HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA. Because of you, he's a man with nothing left to use. Tomorrow: 117% increase on car models with 'mm' in its name. Bummer, huh? Also, if you compare tax dollars to cookies beforehand, this would make a great line in a debate: "I have one thing to say to Gray Davis. Who told you you could eat my cookies?"

Dear people who found this site searching for "mo+rocca+pictures", "pictures+of+mo+rocca", and "mo+rocca+gay":

1. I don't know if he's gay. Really. I don't. I checked the guidebook. He's not listed.

2. Are you sure you're not looking for porn star Mo Cocca?

3. Well, OK then. If you're going to come here anyway, you might as well get what you're looking for.



Dear people(!) who found this site searching for "poop+on+a+pancake":

I can't believe I'm doing this.

Saruman and Crabs

Once, while eating in a crab restaurant, I remarked to a friend how leveling our wooden mallets against these creatures served in caskets of Old Bay was as close as we would come to the caveman. Felling a tiger with a spear has been replaced with bits of shell hitting our bibs and the floor where grass once lied underneath.

An insightful observation, I thought. A few seconds later, almost out of earshot, I heard a man make almost the same comment. He didn't overhear me. I realized what I said was an obvious observation, one that comes to most people who have eaten crabs and know the caveman archetype.

On that note, I searched for "saruman hamas leader" in Google. Six hundred hits.

Stainless Steel

I have never had silverware. That is, silverware containing silver. My cutting and poking utensils have always been made out of steel. Stainless steel. Cause I ain't a peasant.

Has silverware ever been made out a non-stainless steel? Did this conversation often occur decades ago?

GUEST: "There's a rust spot on my fork."
HOST: "Oh, that? Don't worry. It's stainly steel."
GUEST: [bites into fork] "Actually, it's chocolate."
HOST: "I'm so embarrassed. I couldn't afford stainly steel. I was hoping no one would notice."
GUEST: "The only thing I noticed is that it's delicious. Pass me a serving spoon!"

Funny Blog

You can never go wrong with a story about fried Twinkies.

Trader Joe's

I pointed out to the cashier that he charged me twice for a $2.49 box of cereal. He countered with a "Forgot to charge you for the salmon" ($4.29). Damn. When did the turnaround on karma become so efficient?

Junkfood Olympics

I wish there were a Junkfood Olympics. I ate a box of Ho-Hos in two days and, after scarfing down the last chocolate swirl coffin and pounding it down my cake-crusted esophagus, I was ready for more. Keep in mind, I am a triathlete. At the same time, I emptied a clip of 10 mini-sized Kit-Kats in my stomach and balanced the high sugar intake with some nutritious chocolate chip granola bars, which, to a homage to the granola that inspired it, were not double-dipped in chocolate.

What would the Junkfood Olympics news coverage be like?

SWEDISH OLYMPIC TEAM WARMUP BROWNIES LACED WITH THC; WHOLE TEAM ELIMINATED

RUSSIAN DISGRACES COUNTRY, EATS APPLE
'I am a fraud', cries Sergei.

U.S. VICTORY BITTERSWEET; TEAM CAPTAIN HAS HEART ATTACK, DIES, STILL FINISHES PIE

Tomato Toes

Why isn’t there a brand of corn called "Children of the Corn"? This is just the type of nutritional shortsightedness caused by a lack of vitamins that makes me angry. Drug czars and pine green giants lament that kids don't eat more vegetables, yet there isn't not one corn company brave enough to draw little faces possessed by an evil force on all the kernels.

Of course, if you are a super-intelligent German, perhaps created by Nazi scientists in the 1930s and recently awaken from your cryogenic chamber, the solution is obvious: Herr Grosse Dollars, bilden diese produkte!

Peas in a Rod—A white rod with this on it: "Hey kids! Sugar inside!" The rod is stuffed with peas. That'll teach those muthafuckers.

BroccoDoReMi—Move over Snap, Crackle, and Pop. Broccoli stems and singing sensations Do, Re, and Mi are going to Vitamin K-ick it old school.

Mixed Vegetballs—Chunks of carrots, squash, cauliflower, and tomatoes, joining forces for the first time in a duct-taped ball. Dunk it in the hoop, then in your mouth.

Mystery Bag: This bag is covered in colorful question marks. It has no name, no logo, no nutrition facts, and no UPC code. Sometimes it appears in the freezer section. Other times in seafood, or inside a box of Cocoa Puffs. What wild surprise could it be? There's only one way to find out! And that way is to read this next sentence: the bag always contains brussel sprouts.

Remove Meal from Oven with Glove

If I worked for a frozen food company, I would write really dumb instructions for the boxes, just to see if people would follow them.

“Wrap burrito in tin foil. Put into microwave for five minutes. Come on, do it. Don’t be a pussy.”

I Wish I Knew

"What Are You Eating Today?" That's Arby's new slogan. Let's see...Double Roast Beast Sandwich...costs 99 cents...I have 50/50 on meat.

Groceries

My benchmark for physical fitness is the amount of groceries I can carry from my car to my townhouse. You may be able to bench 10x3 reps of 200 lbs., but can you lift $48.27 of groceries in one trip…post coupon?

When will ESPN2 stop airing the Strongman Challenge and show an event relevant to the common, everyday consumer: The Green Giant vs. Brawny. I have Brawny close to pinning The Green Giant until the little, green asparagus kid sneaks up behind Brawny and whacks him with a chair.

Speaking of Brawny, why is the company’s mascot a lumberjack? Starfish doesn’t put a fisherman with a spear through a dolphin on its can. And although it would be funny to see Bill Cosby ride in on a hoofless horse, I don't think Jello wants to change their image. "Remember, if it can't clippity-clop, it's part of a Jello Pudding Pop!"