food
clock | May 20, 2007Via Snarkmarket, I found this (probably incomplete) Wikipedia list of the oldest companies in the world that are still operating today under the same name. The oldest one, a construction company in Japan called KongÅ Gumi, just went belly-up after serving their customers since the year 578AD.
And according to a commenter there, the oldest University in continuous operation is University of Al Karaouine in Fes, Morocco.
The oldest company on the list from the Balkans is Apatinska Pivara which has been brewing beer continuously since 1756. They produce one of the most popular local beers, the…
moleculeoftheday | May 18, 2007About a year ago, I covered aspartame, the sometimes-maligned intense artificial sweetener. There is still a camp of substantial size insisting aspartame is deadly. Of course, it's widely sold, and still FDA-approved, etc. There is one group of people for whom aspartame is undisputedly dangerous, however: phenylketonurics.
Aspartame is metabolized via esterases and peptidases - esterases remove the methyl ester as methanol (tiny, tiny quantities, but this is a big part of why some people insist this is a dangerous sweetener). This yields a dipeptide of aspartic acid and phenylalanine.…
omnibrain | May 17, 2007Here is an updated reposting (originally published on 04-26) with further information at the bottom of the post. Enjoy!
=======================================================================I really like soda, especially the kinds with lots of caffeine and sugar. However, I have minor panic attacks whenever I drink them and think about all the corn syrup and other scary junk that goes into the soda flowing through my body. On the other hand I can't stand diet sodas - whose chemicals won't make me fat and diabetic (and probably take a lot longer to insidiously wreck the body) but taste…
drorzel | May 12, 2007Daniel Davies stakes out a controversial position at Crooked Timber:
I tend to regard myself as Crooked Timber's online myrmidon of a number of rather unpopular views; among other things, as regular readers will have seen, I believe that the incitement to religious hatred legislation was a good idea (perhaps badly executed), that John Searle has it more or less correct on the subject of artificial intelligence, that Jacques Derrida deserves his high reputation and that George Orwell was not even in the top three essayists of the twentieth century[1]. I'm a fan of Welsh nationalism. Oh yes,…
angrytoxicologist | May 2, 2007It's been too long a wait for someone to do a study like this. In the wake of the large study that found that vitamin supplements are not helpful and some may be harmful, we have a simple study that should have been done long ago to determine if it's the fruit and veggies or the anti-oxidants that are beneficial.
Let's back up here. Vitamin supplements haven't really been shown to effect actual health outcomes in large studies. Vitamin C has the best evidence going for it, but even that's shaky. We just took the supplements (me included) because, logically, they should work to reduce…
clock | April 21, 2007It is Sunday. You have time to read it. And you should - no excuses! In today's New York Times - You Are What You Grow:
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For the answer, you need look no farther than the farm bill. This resolutely unglamorous and head-hurtingly complicated piece of legislation, which comes around roughly every five years and is about to do so again, sets the rules for the American food system -- indeed, to a considerable extent, for the world's food system. Among other things, it determines which crops will be subsidized and which will not, and in the case of the carrot and the…
moleculeoftheday | April 10, 2007I have a love-hate relationship with microwave popcorn. It can be tasty from time to time. It can be absolutely nauseating, however, at 10am on a Wednesday when someone at work decided to make it for some reason, leaving the office smelling like a movie theater all day. Let's not even talk about the people who let it burn. Part of the reason for popcorn's ability to "carry" is 2-propionyl-1-pyrroline, which can be smelled at incredibly low concentrations.
The compound has a reported odor threshold of 20 picograms per liter, which is 20 parts per quadrillion. Contrast t-butylmercaptan, which…
clock | April 7, 2007Earlier this afternoon, my wife and I went to the Weaver Street Market in Southern Village (which also has a blog) for some wine tasting. You can see the wine list here (pdf).
As the first rule of blogging is never to blog drunk, I had a to wait a couple of hours afterwards before I started to write this post. I wasn't really drunk, but I was happy enough to seriously consider singing on our walk home. I guess I am quite a lightweight...
Our strategy was for Mrs.Coturnix to taste the whites (and occasional red I recommend) and for me to taste the reds (and occasional white she recommends…
moleculeoftheday | March 29, 2007Via Fark: a blog last week remarked about McDonald's chicken products, quoting The Omnivore's Dilemma::
But perhaps the most alarming ingredient in a Chicken McNugget is tertiary butylhydroquinone, or TBHQ, an antioxidant derived from petroleum that is either sprayed directly on the nugget or the inside of the box it comes in to "help preserve freshness." According to A Consumer's Dictionary of Food Additives, TBHQ is a form of butane (i.e. lighter fluid) the FDA allows processors to use sparingly in our food: It can comprise no more than 0.02 percent of the oil in a nugget. Which is…
moleculeoftheday | March 28, 2007The American Chemical Society is having its Spring meeting as we speak. One neat thing about a meeting that tries to take on as broad a field as "chemistry" is that there's all kinds of stuff there. Some of it trickles out to the mainstream media - usually picked up by a science reporter (or maybe a university with some PR savvy). This often has a lot to do with the mass appeal or "sellability" of the story the researchers have. Hear me right, this isn't to impugn the science of people who get written up in the press one bit! It's just that most people don't want to pick up the paper and…
clock | March 20, 2007I have written about the relationship between circadian clocks and food numerous times (e.g., here, here and here). Feeding times affect the clock. Clock is related to hunger and obesity. Many intestinal peptides affect the clock as well.
There is a lot of research on food-entrainable oscillators, but almost nothing on the possibility that there is a separate circadian pacemaker in the intestine. It is usually treated as a peripheral clock, entirely under the influence of the SCN pacemaker in the brain, even when it shows oscillations in clock-gene expression for several days in a dish.…
aardvarchaeology | March 16, 2007
I got Dick, babies.
Having failed to find any of the suet necessary to make the British dessert Spotted Dick, I settled for a surrogate. The third butcher I talked to told me that he had beef tallow for sale that he usually uses to make black pudding. I bought half a kilogram of the waxy yellow stuff and took it home triumphantly. Self-raising flour is unknown in Sweden, but Google made it easy to find the proportions of flour, baking soda and salt. Mixing the dough was also easy, and I have some experience with steaming Chinese dishes, so I took Dick through that unscathed.
The pudding…
clock | March 14, 2007We are starting this summer's Foodblogging series of events early - on April 21st & 22nd. We'll start where it all begins - at the farm! We will rent a couple of vans and do a tour of local farms, most of them organic and/or sustainable. I am assuming we'll get to sample some local fare at each farm. Bring your boots - it can still be quite muddy at the farms in April in NC.
Get more information about the FoodBlogging series and sign up for various events at the wiki.
aardvarchaeology | March 13, 2007
Spotted Dick is a traditional British dessert. I must have it.
More exactly, I must make it. And to that end, I must find suet. I was twice thwarted in this on my lunch hour as I asked at reputable Stockholm butcher's counters. Neither had it, one didn't even know what it was, both referred me to each other.
Suet is hard tallowy tissue that clusters around the kidneys of mammals. Indeed, the Swedish word for it, njurtalg, means "kidney tallow". Victorian Britons used it as shortening in puddings, most famously in Christmas pudding.
Spotted Dick is a steamed, massive, doughy thing tasting of…
moleculeoftheday | February 28, 2007I'm almost cheating, since this one is so closely related to cynarin. Chlorogenic acid is yet another compound found in artichokes, as well as coffee. In addition to modulating your ability to taste sweetness (though not in the levels or conditions found in coffee, it would seem), it has some specific metabolic effects.
Chlorogenic acid has the ability to alter some aspects of glucose metabolism. I don't work with it and I'm not sure where people are on what all it does biologically, but it has attracted enough attention to make its way into patent preparations for weight loss.
moleculeoftheday | February 27, 2007I am always completely confused when I meet someone who doesn't like artichokes. Not in the cheese-based dip, though that's not bad, either. I take my artichokes steamed, with a big bowl of drawn salted butter. The savory-sweet taste, the smooth texture, that puzzling satisfaction of only getting a little food out of your substantial efforts (sunflower seeds, anyone?), and the fact that it's probably the only food you eat by biting down and pulling the free end from your mouth all add to the experience.
My favorite thing about artichokes, though, is the fact that everything tastes oddly sweet…
moleculeoftheday | February 26, 2007Great entry from Khymos last week. Isohumulone is a compound found in beer imparting some of the (good) bitterness. Unfortunately, the magic of photochemistry can wreak havoc on it.
Isohumulone can be excited by the agency of riboflavin, an endogenous chromophore, causing it to cleave into a pair of radicals, one of which can react with free cysteine radicals in proteins, yielding a low molecular weight thiol, which can give beer that "skunky" taste. Dark bottles prevent this, but as the entry points out, clear-bottled beers are far from immune.
drorzel | February 25, 2007(Recipe from Mark Bittman's The Best Recipes in the World)
Chicken Stock: 3.5 cups
Saffron Threads: 1.0 pinch
Extra Virgin Olive Oil: 3.0 Tbs
Onion, Minced: 1.0 medium
Rice, Short/Medium Grain: 2.0 cups
Shrimp, Cut Up: 2.0 cups
Salt, Pepper: to taste
Parsley: for garnish
Pre-heat the oven to 500 F, and warm the stock with the saffron.
Heat oil in 10-12 inch overproof skillet over medium-high heat. Add the onion, and cook until translucent (4-5 minutes).
Add the rice and cook until "glossy" (whcih I take to mean "all the grains are well coated with oil"), 1-2 minutes.
Add salt, pepper, stock,…
moleculeoftheday | February 16, 2007Cinnamaldehyde is a straightforward-looking molecule:
It's the principal odorant in cinnamon. If you're in the Seattle area, your cinnemaldehyde use is being monitored. Drug precursor? Guess again...
Cinnamaldehyde is oxidized in vivo to cinnamic acid, which you excrete in your urine:
Rick Keil at UW has been collecting treated sewage destined for Puget Sound and analyzing it for cinnamic acid (along with other flavoring agents, food signatures, and their metabolites). Apparently Christmas cookies make an appreciable spike in vanilla consumption as measured via Seattleites' urine.
I just…
omnibrain | February 13, 2007 ClinkShrink from Shrink Rap sent me these great (anatomically correct) brain treats last fall. If anyone wants to get me a Valentines Day present, this would be it. ;)
[edit by Sandra - I need a chocolate brain too, but only to replace the one in my head that doesn't work very well. Also, what's up with Steve and ClinkShrink, hmm?]