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Acids, Cooking and Inconvenient Corpses.
I’ve written more than a few posts on food science now and it is something of a scandal how I haven’t yet talked about acids in cooking. Acid ranks right up there with salt when it comes to seasoning our food and yet I’ve skirted the issue, mentioned it here and there, but haven’t really Continue reading
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Oxygen, electrons and Scottish chefs: How understanding redox reactions could save you from a bollocking
Many years ago I was working in a restaurant in Scotland and in an effort to save myself some time I prepped a stack of apples we were using as a garnish hours before we needed them. Thinking I’d done something clever I was radiating smugness until a coworker pointed out that the apples would Continue reading
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Trophic shadows and the tyranny of the energy pyramid
Ernest Rutherford, the famous physicist, supposedly claimed that “Science is either physics or stamp collecting”. At the cost of no longer being welcome in the biology department Rutherford was making the point that everything is subject to the laws of physics and ultimately these laws can describe any natural phenomenon. In real life we usually Continue reading
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Pork, another red meat
Fear is a great motivator and, being in the business of motivation, advertising has always been very quick to take advantage of human uncertainty to build demand. An example of this is the famous “The other white meat” campaign for pork that ran in the States in 1987 and was copied here in Australia during Continue reading
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A requiem for bacon
On October 26, 2015 the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) broke my heart. I know this sounds dramatic and maybe even a little silly. International research agencies don’t go around breaking peoples’ hearts. How can I justify this outrageous statement? Well it was on this day that the IARC issued a press release Continue reading
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Everything you ever wanted to know about cream (the food not the band)
Today I want to get back to dairy. In particular I want to get back to milks sexy cousin: cream. Cream comes from milk and we already know that milk is an emulsion of fats dispersed in a watery continuous phase. We also know that the fats in milk are packaged into a globule called Continue reading
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Starch and Gelatinisation in Everyday Cooking
I’m no historian but I think it would be fair to say that for most of history most humans relied primarily on starchy grains and vegetables to keep themselves and their families fed. Grasses like wheat, rice, oats and barley are easy to grow and the seeds, or grains, of these grasses are rich in Continue reading
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Milk: Nature’s Beverage and Its Curious Chemistry
I think humans have an interesting relationship with milk. Most of us start our food journey with human breast milk yet many, long after we’ve out grown any biological need for milk, chose to consume the milk and milk products of other species. To support this we have set up a $800 million dollar a Continue reading
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Coffee I: The science behind the buzz
If you’ve ever been in a coffee shop in the 21st century you’re familiar with the scene; people on laptops, headphones on interacting online while sipping their latte, cappuccino or piccolo. I’m certainly not condemning this behaviour, and have done the same many times, but what strikes me is a weird sense of continuity, a Continue reading
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Fermentation I: Beer and chemistry
I had a long break over Christmas and these are a few of the meals I had during that break: at the local pizza joint a pepperoni pizza washed down with beer, a trip to the German club where I had a pork knuckle with sauerkraut washed down with beer, a trip to a French Continue reading
The Science of Food 