Archive Category: Food & Drinks

Cheese Racing

The sport of cheese racing began in 1997 when a group of friends put individually-wrapped cheese slices onto a barbecue grill to see what would happen. To their surprise, the plastic did not melt or burn. But the cheese expanded, turning the objects into inflated pillows! The object of cheese racing is to see whose slice reaches full inflation first. Full details are at the “official homepage of the exciting cutting edge sport known as Cheese Racing.” Link -via the Presurfer

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Beverage Logo Design Cleverly Uses Emoticon

The folks at the Swedish brewery Krönleins Bryggeri created this line of Cider "Smile" drinks with a clever and playful logo. What? You can’t see the little emoticon of the guy winking his eyes at you?

Link - via Comunicadores, thanks Haendel Dantas!

Compare that with

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Steve Eats Unpleasant Things So You Don’t Have To

This one’s a bit old, but if you haven’t read it yet, it’ll be new (and newly disgusting) to you. Over at The Sneeze, you can find a compilation of every “Steve, Don’t Eat It!” feature, in which Steve eats things most of us only have Fear-Factor-induced nightmares about eating. Think of it like “Jackass” for your stomach. Among the thing he samples: Dog treats, black fungus…and his own wife’s breast milk:

I couldn’t bring myself to just do the whole shot at once, so I started out with a little girly sip. And the truth is it’s not that bad at all. It tastes like milk, just slightly more sweet. And mentally, just slightly more making me want to gargle with Clorox and assume the fetal position while I question my life.

Hit the Link to read more of Steve’s gourmet adventures. WARNING: This is link not for the faint of heart.

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Scientists Make Munch-O-Bot: What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

If robots suddenly develop a taste for human flesh, you can blame Gaëlle Arvisenet and his team of ENITIAA in Nantes, France. They’re developing a robotic mouth:

The artificial mouth comprises a 600mL container, a notched plunger, and variable-speed motors to control the speed of compression and rotation movements. The container is kept at 37°C (98.6°F), and as the food is broken down, helium flows through the device to reproduce breathing.

The researchers compared Golden Delicous apple slices chewed by people told to spit their mouthfuls when they were ready to swallow with slices chewed by the apparatus. The resulting pulp was analyzed for color, texture and aroma.

Consider when a person eating next to you rudely opens their food-stuffed mouth, what you are witnessing is, while completely disgusting, a marvel of nature not easily reproduced.

"Using a previous artificial mouth, we showed that the amounts of extracted volatile compounds were not the same when apples were crushed, cut into slices, or reduced to a puree state. It follows that to study the aroma compounds responsible for global aroma perception, it is necessary to reproduce the changes that the foodstuffs undergo in the human mouth."

Link - via Engadget

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How Much Food Are You Throwing Away?

Just exactly how much food are we throwing away uneaten? Ursula Hirschkorn, 36, of North London kept a diary for a week to discover just how much food her family throws out, and the amount is staggering:

The average family throws away £610 of perfectly good food each year — much of it totally untouched — according to
figures released this week. That works out at £11.73 a week. And all of that adds to the £10billion of waste across the country.

Link

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American Burger Drink Coaster

UK online retailer drinkstuff.com has this clever drink coaster set shaped like an "American burger" (I suppose us Yanks just call it "burger"). The buns, tomato, meat patty, cheese, and lettuce all function as drink coasters, and when you’re done - stack ‘em all up like a burger!

Link - via I Like Totally Love It, thanks Malte Goesche!

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Oreo in China: Not Round, Not Sweet!

Quick: what image comes to mind when I say "Oreo"? The sweet round cookie with a creamy center that you dunk in milk?

Apparently, that’s not the image that comes to mind in China: The iconic cookie is a long, think thick, four-layered water wafer coated in chocolate… and it’s not so sweet. Here’s why:

Oreos were first introduced in 1912 in the U.S., but it wasn’t until 1996 that Kraft introduced Oreos to Chinese consumers. Nine years later, a makeover began. Shawn Warren, a 37-year-old Kraft veteran who had spent many years marketing the company’s cookies and crackers around the world, arrived in Asia in 2005 and noticed that Oreo’s China sales had been flat for the previous five years.

Back then, Kraft was selling the U.S. version of Oreos in China. Albert Einstein’s definition of insanity — doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting different results — "characterized what we were doing," says Mr. Warren, vice president of marketing for Kraft Foods International. [...]

Mr. Warren assigned his team to a lengthy research project that yielded some interesting findings. For one thing, Kraft learned that
traditional Oreos were too sweet for Chinese tastes.

Here’s an interesting article by Julie Jargon of The Wall Street Journal on how food giant Kraft finally got nimble by trusting local managers: Link - via Beyond Madison Avenue

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“Legal Weed” Beer is Illegal According to Feds

Vaune Dillmann, a craft brewer from Weed, California, thought that he got a cute marketing gimmick by labeling his beer bottle caps after the name of his town ("Try Legal Weed"). But the Federal alcohol regulators didn't get the humor:

The agency responded that the message on the caps amounted to a drug reference. In a letter explaining its decision, the agency said the wording could "mislead consumers about the characteristics of the alcoholic beverage."

Dillmann scoffs at the notion that his label has anything to do with smoking pot.

"I've never tried marijuana in my life," he told The Associated Press on Wednesday. "I don't advocate that. It's just our town's name."

Apparently, making fun of the town's name is somewhat of a sport with its inhabitants:

A sign posted on the way out of town reads, "Temporarily Out of Weed," while another says "100 Percent Pure Weed." Dillmann noted those examples in an appeal letter he sent to the alcohol bureau, a division of the U.S. Treasury Department.

Once, Dillmann said, his wife, a former teacher, was delayed on a field trip to San Francisco as tourists clamored to pose next to the school bus, which said "Weed High."

Link - via Beyond Madison Avenue

(Photo: Rich Pedroncelli / AP)

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The Origin of Booze

A historical look at the stuff that gets us hammered. Who’s ready for the first round? Beer To quote Homer Simpson, is there anything it can’t do? Most likely invented in Persia circa 7,000 B.C.E., beer’s gone on to become hugely important in almost every ancient society it’s touched. Back in Sumerian culture, the drink was considered positively divine - a fact confirmed when archaeologists dug up the 4,000-year-old "Hymn to Ninkasi." The ode to the goddess of brewing actually doubles as a recipe for a barley-based beverage guaranteed to make people feel "exhilarated, wonderful and blissful." The epic of Gilgamesh tells us a similar tale; one of the main characters, Enkidu, is said to have had "seven cups of beer, and his heart soared." After seven rounds we can definitely see why. In ancient Egypt, wages were often paid to the poor in beer, or as they called it, hqt. It was sort of light beer, apparently, and not very intoxicating, which explains how construction workers of the day managed to drink three daily rations of it and still build their masterpiece: the not-at-all-leaning pyramids of Giza. Wine A wine snob will happily tell you, for hours on end, how difficult it is to make a decent wine and how many complicated steps are involved. This may be true, but it’s ridiculously easy to make basic wine. The beverage in its roughest form probably goes back thousands of years to primitive cultures who mistakenly left grapes in the sun for too long and then attempted to eat them. As it turns out, all the yeasts needed to ferment grapes actually grow on grape skin. (No additives necessary!) Around 5,000 B.C.E., the people of present-day Georgia and Iran started making wine in clay pots. By the time of ancient Greece, wine had acquired a religious significance; perhaps in homage to Dionysus, the Greeks planted vines in all their colonies, including France and Egypt. (We’d love to know what the French make of the fact that they have the Greeks to thank for their vaunted grapes.) California winemakers should also praise God, literally, for the fruits of their labor: when Christian missionaries arrived there, they planted the region’s first vines so they’d have something to transmogrify into the blood of Jesus when they took Communion. Champagne As you probably know, bubbly comes from the Champagne region of France, a longtime center of trade (and also a region in the path of rampaging hordes: Attila the Hun, among others, left footprints there). As you may also know, Dom Perignon was in fact a real person - his first name was Pierre - and, in a sense, he’s the inventor of the sparkly stuff. A Benedictine monk, the Dom served as treasurer of an abbey in the Champagne region starting in 1688. The region had slightly chilly weather that year, and the growing season was unusually short anyway - which meant grapes spent less time fermenting on the vine and more time fermenting in cellars. Essentially, it was this process that led to carbon dioxide being trapped inside the bottles. At first the Dom was horrified; this was a sign that he’d failed in his duties as treasurer (which included, for some reason, winemaking). Try as he might, he couldn’t get rid of the bubbles. Finally, resigned to dealing with them, he blended grapes to make a light white wine, which suited the effervescence far better than a heavy red. He also realized he’d have to solve another problem caused by trapped carbon dioxide: a considerable number of his bottles exploding. So, instead of stopping them with wood and oil-soaked hemp, he started using a soft material from Spain: cork. This lovely story, by the way, doesn’t sit so well with the natives of Limoux, France. They allege that they were making sparkling wine in their backyards as early as the 1500s, and that Perignon stole their idea. We’ve got to side with the Dom on this one: After all, the guy was a monk. Vodka Believe it or not, the name really does come from the Russian word for "water," which is "voda," and the Russians have a pretty good claim to inventing the stuff. Production from grains has been documented there as far back as the 9th century. It wasn’t, however, until around the 14th century that vodka became known as the Russian national drink, and for good reasons; it was served everywhere, even at religious ceremonies. Poland likes to boast that its own vodka production goes back even further than Russia’s, to the 8th century, but what was going made in that region at the time was more like grappa or brandy. Later Polish vodkas were called "gorzalka," or "burnt wine," and were used as medicines, as were all distilled liquors in the Middle Ages. Vodka was also used as an ingredient in early European formulations of gunpowder. By the way, for those of you who turn your noses up the fruit-infused vodkas that have recently hit the market: they’re the original. Early vodkas were not quite as palatable as your average Grey Goose, so makers often masked the taste with fruits and spices. Gin If you’re unsurprised that vodka used to be given as medicine, you probably won’t be shocked to learn that gin was invented specifically for that purpose. 14th-century Europeans distilled juniper berries in hopes of fighting the plague (then again, almost everything they did was in hope of fighting the plague). But gin as we know it didn’t come along until the mid-1600s. That’s when one Dr. Sylvius concocted the first formulation in the Netherlands, hoping it would serve as a primitive type of dialysis for kidney patients. (We’re guessing he didn’t particularly care about its effect on the liver.) By the end of the century, gin had become popular in Britain because it was sold at cut-rate prices, despite a very widespread rumor that it could induce abortion, which lead to it being nicknamed "mother’s ruin." Later, when the Brits started to occupy India, they found it useful in yet another medical mixture: the gin and tonic. The quinine in the tonic water was effective in fighting malaria. Tequila As vodka was to Russia, tequila was to Mexico; it’s been made there since at least the 16th century and was originally used in religious rituals. (Having drunk a little too much tequila once, we can testify to its ability to cause drinkers to beseech God for mercy.) The name comes from a town founded in 1656. And while José Cuervo didn’t exactly invent the drink, he was the first to commercialize it. As for its migration northward, a fellow named Cenobio Sauza brought the stuff to the U.S. in the late 1800s; we can’t help but wonder if this is why frat boys on spring break still refer to this stuff as "the sauce." Rum Yo-ho-uh-oh and a bottle of rum - the drink tastes great, but its history isn’t so sweet. The story, as far as we can tell, starts in India, where in 300, B.C.E., Alexander the Great saw some sugarcane and memorably called it "the grass that gives honey without bees." All well and good, until Christopher Columbus went and brought sugarcane to the Caribbean. There, it flourished and became the engine of the slave trade. Africa sent slaves to the Caribbean, which sent sugar to New England, which sent rum and other goodies to Africa, which sent more slaves to the Caribbean. Known as the triangular trade, pondering the implications of it all is enough to make a person want a stiff drink. But not, preferably, one steeped in rum.

The article above was reprinted with permission from mental_floss‘ book In the Beginning. From Big Hair to the Big Bang, here’s a Mouthwatering Guide to the Origins of Everything by our friends at mental_floss. Did you know that paper clips started out as Nazi-fighting warriors? Or that cruise control was invented by a blind genius? Read it all in the book!

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Cthulhu Cake

Photo: raingirllori

Flickr user raingirllori made a Cthulhu-themed cake:

Here is Cthulhu rising from the oceans, using a convenient little island with a tower on it to climb up. The base was cherry-chip cake, the island and tower a mix of cherry chip and yellow cake with chocolate frosting. Also used small chocolate ‘pearls’ as rocks. Cthulhu himself is all fondant, with two chocolate pearls that I seeped in red dye for eyes.

Link Corrected Link

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Porky Pooper and Friends.

To a kid, this candy dispenser must be either utterly disgusting, or the coolest thing ever. As one of Porky’s distributors describes him:

These cute little pigs dispense dainty candy doo doo for the munching pleasure of friends and loved ones. Just pop off the head to fill the body with jelly beans and let the silly giggles begin. Each 4-inch plastic pig poops jelly bean droppings when you push down on its behind.

Mmmm … who can resist shelling out up to $5.90 for a 1 oz portion of candy doo doo? Or over $20 for their Pooping Herd of Reindeer? Are Pez dispensers just not cool enough nowadays?

Link via Wacky Archives

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Cigarettea: Tea Bags Shaped Like Cigarettes

Don’t smoke your cigarettes … drink ‘em! Here’s an idea so crazy it’s brilliant: Cigarettea by Schnaider.

Cigarettea are tea bags that look like cigarettes. All you have to do is dip one in a cup of hot water and let it steep (the "filter" will act as a fluotation device). Instead of tobacco, the cigarettes have tea leaves! Link - via GearFuse

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Happy 50th Birthday, Conveyor Belt Sushi!

Wouldn’t you know it, the conveyor belt sushi is 50 years old this month!

Yoshiaki Shiraishi (1914-2001) opened the first conveyor belt sushi Mawaru Genroku Sushi in Osaka in 1958. The concept has revolutionised the Japanese food culture, with thousands of conveyor belt sushi restaurants operating around the world.

According to Wikipedia, Yoshiaki was inspired to invent the conveyor belt sushi after watching beer bottles on a conveyor belt in an Asahi brewery.

Link | Wikipedia entry on Conveyor Belt Sushi - Thanks Jee!

(Photo: mstephens7 [Flickr])

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Album Cover Bento Boxes

We’ve posted about spiffy Japanese bento lunch boxes before, but the ones made by the folks at Obacchi Jacket Lunch Box are special: they make album cover bento boxes! This one above is the Evil Empire album by Rage Against the Machine.

Link | Original website [in Japanese]

Previously on Neatorama: The Best Bento Boxes EVAR: Mario and Homer Simpson | Cute Bento

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Why Food Prices Are Skyrocketing

What’s going on with food? Rice price has skyrocketed around the world, leading to riots in third world countries like Bangladesh, Haiti, Egypt, and the Philippines. Two large warehouse chains in the US (Costco and Sam’s Club) have gone so far as to put a quota on how many bags of rice and flours you can buy.

Overall, the price of grocery has jumped tremendously (if you’re the grocery shopper of the family, then you’d know what I’m talking about):

Many analysts expect consumers to keep paying more for food. Wholesale food prices, an indicator of where supermarket prices are headed, rose last month at the fastest rate since 2003, with egg prices jumping 60 percent from a year ago, pasta products 30 percent, and fruits and vegetables 20 percent, according to the Labor Department.

The culprit? The skyrocketing price of oil (obvious) and corn (now not a lot of people actually know about it):

Several factors contribute to higher food prices, analysts say, but none more than record prices for oil, which last week closed above $105 a barrel. Oil is not only driving up production and transportation costs, but also adding to demand for corn and soybeans, used to make alternative fuels such as ethanol and biodiesel.

As a result, corn prices have more than doubled in commodity markets over two years, and soybeans nearly tripled, according to DTN, a commodities analysis firm in Omaha. Meanwhile, with poor harvests in major wheat-producing regions, wheat prices have more than tripled.

These crops have a profound impact on food prices because they form foundations for many products, including oils, sweeteners, and flour. Corn, for example, is a key ingredient in livestock feed. When the price of corn rises, so does the price of feed, and ultimately, so do the prices of meat, poultry, and eggs.

Robert Gavin of The Boston Globe has more: Link

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Food that Takes the Shape of Its Container

"Food?" is a Flickr photoset by Zach Kowalczyk where he takes photos of food that has taken the shape of its container!

This one to the left is cranberry sauce, which comes in a can (I think this is obvious to US readers, but I’m not sure if people outside the US actually eat cranberry sauce from a can)

Link - via Core 77

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World’s Most Expensive Ice Cream Sundae

The Three Twins Ice Cream shop in the Oxbow Public Market in Napa is selling the World’s Most Expensive Ice Cream Sundae for $3,333.33 (a banana split made with syrups from three rare dessert wines, served with an ice cream spoon from the 1850s. If you order a day ahead, they’ll have a cellist perform while you eat).

But if the World’s Most Expensive Ice Cream Sundae is not glam enough, you should try their “The World’s More Expensive Most Expensive Ice Cream Sundae”. For $60,000, you’ll get ice cream made from the disappearing glacier from Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania, Africa!

Link - Thanks Sabrina!

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Grilled Cheese Invitational

Last weekend, the 6th Annual Grilled Cheese Invitational was held in Griffith Park, Los Angeles.

The event was the Olympics of grilled cheese making: 140 competing teams, hundreds of cheese-hungry judges (those lucky people who got in to eat free sammiches), and thousands of free grilled cheese sandwiches (and one grilled cheese wedding cake!)

Link | Gallery at LA Weekly | Pic of the Grilled Cheese Cake at Cookie Yum Yum Blog - Thanks Mark Mauer!

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Monkey Spoon

The Spoon Museum has a wonderful entry on "Monkey Spoons," a type of unusual spoon used by the Dutch settler in the New York/Hudson River area to commemorate birth, marriage, and death:

The English and some continental societies placed a great emphasis on births. The occasion of a birth was a blessed event and parties and gatherings were held. Prosperous citizens would often give an apostle spoon to new born babies at the time of their christening. The silver spoons bore the image of an apostle as the finial. The hope was that the baby would observe this finial every time it was fed. One spoon was often used by a person for their entire life. The phrase to "be born with a silver spoon" stems from this practice.

But the Dutch settlers of the Hudson Valley region were not as religious as other groups and they did not place the same emphasis on births. Instead they place greater emphasis on marriage and a very heavy emphasis on death. They did, however, adapt the concept of using a spoon to symbolize these important life transitions.

But where did the term "Monkey Spoon" comes from?

That is a good question, and no one knows for sure. Several hypotheses have been made and you are free to accept the one that suits you.

1. Since the monkey spoons all have a hook on the stem and they hang by that hook, it would "look like a monkey hanging by its tail" (my favorite).

2. Most monkey spoons have a small figural emblem on the high part of the curve. I haven’t seen any that look like a monkey (Some later reproductions supposedly had a monkey as a word play on the name), but there is one style that is very hard to figure out. Some people see a "monkey" in this figure.

3. When people drink too much they often act strangely. In Dutch the term "zuiging the monkey" is a reference to drunkeness.

Take your choice. There is no "wrong" answer.

Link - via Lisa Rogak, Thanks Stefanie Hutson!

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Why New York Pizza is so Tough to Replicate

Wired contacted a chef, a food development consultant, and a food scientist to investigate the difference between pizza in New York and in San Francisco. The differences are in the ovens and in the water. Consultant David Tisi explained the oven.

“As you cook, some ingredients vaporize, and these volatilized particles can attach themselves to the walls of the baking cavity,” Tisi says. “The next time you use the oven, these bits get caught up in the convection currents and deposited on the food, which adds flavor.” Over time, he says, more particles join the mix and mingle with the savory soot from burned wood or coal — the only fuels worth using — to create a flavor that you can’t grow in a garden: gestalt, if you will.

Author Joe Brown is partial to the New York style, and describes how he brings home six pies every time he visits. Link -via Digg

(image credit: David Owen)

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Activate

Activate is a new drink that stores vitamins and herbs as powder in a chamber inside the cap. When you twist the cap clockwise, a small plastic blade cuts the seal in the chamber allowing the ingredients to drop into the water below. Just shake and drink.

Link: YouTube

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White Sox Banned Bottled Water in the Dugout: Must Protect Gatorade’s Image!

Ed Price, who covers the New York Yankees for New Jersey’s The Star Ledger, noticed that there’s an odd sign in the dugout of the White Sox’s stadium: "NO BOTTLED WATER ON THE BENCH." (Even in the humid Chicago summers!)

Gatorade is Major League Baseball’s "official sports drink." So instructions were sent that no player could be seen drinking anything but Gatorade in the dugout. Not even Aquafina, which is the "official water" of MLB. Not even bottles of water with the labels removed.

White Sox clubhouse personnel said if players take bottled water onto the bench, all the bottled water will be removed from the clubhouse as punishment.

Link - via J-Walk Blog

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Homemade Coffee Printer

If you are envious of people who can do latte arts, then buy yourself some parts from eBay and build yourself a coffee printer for your home! (Results may vary from those in the video).

Link [youtube video] - via Hacked Gadgets

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Pacarrotman: Pac-Man with Veggies!

Apparently Neatorama reader Jason Sanders never heeded his parents advice of not playing with his food. That turned out to be somewhat of a good thing, because we now can watch this: Pacarrotman, a 35-second Pac-Man stop-motion parody made with a camera, a plate, some veggies and a strawberry.

Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] - Thanks Jason!

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Tea-Over-Ice Pitchers

Tea-Over-Ice from Tea Forté is a set of two pitchers: the smaller one, used to brew the hot tea sits on top of the larger one, which holds ice.

The idea is that after your tea is brewed, you can simply flash chill it by pouring it over the ice for a glass of iced tea (the pitchers are made from heat-resistant glass)

Brilliant! Link - via swissmiss

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Last Meal on the Titanic

96 years ago today, April 14th, 1912, the last meal was served aboard the Titanic. First class passengers were served a ten-course masterpiece. Later that night, the ship collided with an iceberg. 1517 people died when the ship sank; 723 were rescued. Cooking Monster takes a detailed look at the menu that night and how the dishes were prepared. Link -via Grow-A-Brain

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How to Make Individual Portions in Freezer Bags

Here’s a neat tip from Biggie of Lunch in a Box blog on how to make individual portions in freezer bags:

I operate from more of the spur-of-the-moment approach to cooking, so it’s essential to have a well stocked freezer and pantry. One drawback, though, is that if I’ve frozen food in big blocks, I can’t use just a bit quickly without defrosting the whole thing.

Enter my Japanese-language freezing books. A standard tip for freezing ground foods or thick sauces in small portions is to first put the food into a large freezer bag and press it out as flat as possible, eliminating air pockets. (Making it thin speeds up defrost time due to the increased surface area, and pressing out excess air guards against freezer burn.) Use a long chopstick or ruler to create divisions within the food, forming individual portions. This way when you freeze the entire bag, you’ll be able to quickly break off just as much as you want to use, no more.

Read the entire tip here: Link - Thanks Deborah Hamilton!

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Behold the Atheist’s Nightmare: the Banana

It comes with a non-slip surface, a three-level color indicator system for fast and accurate quality information, an innovative curved design, and much more.

Link [YouTube] - via Pusha

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$100 Cup of Joe… er… Cat Droppings

Giving a whole new meaning to coffee tasting like crap, the secret behind the special blend about to go on sale at an upmarket department store in London, is that it is made from cats’ droppings. The beans are extracted from the droppings of the palm civet, a cross between a cat and a monkey which lives in Indonesia.

Better make mine a double!

Link

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The Sickest Photo You’ll See Today …

I betcha that - if they are what I think they are, then this is the grossest photo you’ll see today. Heck, even if they’re not what I think they are, it’s still gross.

So gross that I’m not going to show it here on Neatorama, but you can click away to see it over at One Large Prawn: Link [SFW, maybe. You've been warned]

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