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Not the dance, that’s merengue, which has plenty of chemistry, too. This concerns that delicious sweet fluff that tops your lemon meringue pie or the lightweight candy sold at bake sales. It’s made by beating egg whites into a foam, which can then be cooked. But getting it right is tricky. It may help to know the scientific reasons it might not turn out they way you expected. Smithsonian’s Food and Think blog tells you all about the meringue that went wrong. Link
(Image credit: Flickr user wiserbailey)
The following article is from the book Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Tunes Into TV.
When TV characters cook, the results are often disgusting.
Drink: Flaming Homer
Show: The Simpsons (1991)
Origin: Homer is bored at home one night -forced to watch his in-law’s vacation slides- and he doesn’t have any beer, so he makes a cocktail from whatever he can find. He pours the leftover bits from several liquor bottles into a blender, along with the accidental addition of “Krusty’s Non-Narkotic Kough Syrup.” Homer thinks it tastes okay… but it’s even better after it’s lit afire by a stray cigarette ash. “I don’t know the scientific explanation, but fire made it good,” Homer says when he recreates the “Flaming Homer” at Moe’s Tavern. Moe then steals the idea and starts serving the drink (for $6.95) and renames it “The Flaming Moe.”
Food: Chocolate Salty Balls
Show: South Park (1998)
Origin: When the Sundance Film Festival comes to town, the soul-singing school cafeteria cook Chef (voice of Isaac Hayes) opens a stand to sell cookies to tourists. His most popular item: His “Chocolate Salty Balls.” It’s a blatant double entendre, and Chef even sings a song about them: “Hey, everybody, have you seen my balls? They’re big and salty and brown!” The song (which reached #1 in England) gives the recipe: cinnamon, egg whites, melted butter, flour, unsweetened chocolate, brandy, vanilla, and sugar. (Curiously, it doesn’t call for salt.)
(Image credit: Garnished Adventures)
Drink: Thankstini
Show: How I Met Your Mother (2005)
Origins: This cocktail, a martini, invented by booze-swilling playboy Barney (Neil Patrick Harris), combines Thanksgiving food with booze. It’s made from two ounces of potato vodka, four ounces of cranberry juice …and a bouillon cube for that poultry flavor. Barney remarks that it “tastes just like a turkey dinner.”
Frosty the Cheeseball Man is just like your everyday snowman, they melt away, except they are far, far more delicious. This terrifying treat was made by the same genius who invented the churpumple pie/cake crossover.
Link Via Geekosystem
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We recently featured a microwave that was hacked to play YouTube videos while it cooked food, but for those who want their kitchen hacks to play a direct role in their food preparation, here are ten ideas to get your food-related geek-juices flowing.
While “sous vide” has been one of the biggest buzzwords in the cooking world for the last few years, those of you who don’t work in kitchens or read cooking websites would be excused for not knowing the term. Sous vide literally means “under vacuum” in French and that’s essentially how this food is prepared –vacuum sealed food is placed in a low heat water bath and cooked very slowly. The cooking method generally allows for foods to cook more evenly, retaining a better texture and its original appearance.
Unfortunately, a quick search on Amazon will show you that a sous vide cooker will run you a minimum of $200. Then you’ll need to buy a vacuum sealer, which will add on at least $30, and non-reusable plastic bags for the sealer that can quickly add up too. All of this is a pretty big investment –especially if you just want to check out the process before you commit.
To hack yourself a cheaper option, Serious Eats suggests using a beer cooler, a thermometer and a few Ziplock bags, which will cost less than $25 total. Just add hot water to your cooler until the temperature is a few degrees above your target cooking temperature, then add in your bagged food, close the lid and let the insulation do the work for you. As for how well the beer cooler holds up to the real deal: in tests, the beer cooler worked every bit as well as a quality $450 cooker.
Most electric yogurt makers only incubate the product, leaving out the critical heating and sterilization process. That’s why Chris Reilly of Make Magazine opted to hack his own yogurt maker out of a Crock Pot that automates the entire process. He call it the “Yobot.”
While the process is pretty involved, for those with the tech skills to pull it off, it seems like a great way to go through the yogurt making process. As a bonus, since you’re already programming a temperature gauge into the Crock Pot, you could easily tweak it just a bit more and make a combination Sous Vide cooker, yogurt maker and Crock Pot in one…now that’s a useful appliance.
If you’re sick of leaving your hotel without a home-cooked breakfast, Natalie Tran has a solution. In this video, she shows you how to make oatmeal or soft boiled eggs with a coffee maker, and bacon and fried eggs with aluminum foil and an iron. It might not be the most delicious food in the world, but it’s better than nothing –which is what most hotels offer.
And while you’re at it, whip me up some eggs to go with the hash browns. Surely this imagined future of cooking from a 1930 issue of Modern Mechanix is finally achievable in our time.
Link -via Boing Boing
Tired of staring at your food while it cooks in the microwave? That’s so 1980. Fortunately, students from the University of Pennsylvania have managed to hack a microwave oven to play YouTube videos while your food is cooking. If you don’t feel like waiting, you can also have the microwave text you when your food is done.
Now that’s impressive!
Link Via Geekosystem
One of the few drawbacks to an outdoor grill is the difficulty of making french fries to go with your hamburgers. No more! The Blacktop 360 grill has a deep-fryer right in the middle. Plus a griddle, a warming plate, and an infrared grill. Plus an optional cutting board. And the legs fold up, so it’s completely portable. I know some men who will cook, but only outdoors. Now they can do all the cooking! Link -via Fark
Notice anything strange about the apple pie pictured here? If you noticed there were no apples at all, you are right. That because the picture comes from The Awl’s recipe for an appleless apple pie that uses chemicals to trick your tastebuds. The most important ingredient? Cream of Tartar.
While you won’t win any cooking contests with this recipe, you’ll certainly be able to impress your chemist friends at your next dinner party.
Link Via BoingBoing
This. Changes. Everything.
It never occurred to me to make tart crust out of cookie dough, but here it is. Just shape cookie dough around the outside of your muffin tin and bake with the tin upside down. Then use your imagination for what you can put in the bowls: fruit, yogurt, pudding, ice cream, whipped cream, or nothing at all! Link
(Image credit: Wilton)
Want to know how a bunch of brawny apes evolved into brainy humans? It all comes down to a pair of tongs and a flame.
People and animals eat basically the same food; the only difference is that we cook our meals. But does the ability to flame-broil a burger and burn a meal really make us that special? According to Harvard anthropology professor Richard Wrangham, it does.
Armed with mounting evidence, Wrangham believes that fire-kissed foods are what separated man from beast, allowing our ancestors to grow bigger brains and evolve into the intelligent creatures we are today.
THE MISSING LINK
The story starts roughly 2 million years ago in the age of the habiline -the so-called “missing link” between humans and apes. Habilines walked upright, made primitive stone tools, and had brains the size of oranges (roughly half the size of our brains today). Like chimpanzees, they subsisted mainly on fruits and veggies, with the occasional bit of raw meat on the side. They had strong teeth to chew all that plant matter, and big guts to process all that fibrous material. For them, digestion took an extremely long time. In fact, it’s believed that their bodies were constantly engaged in processing food. (Even today, chimpanzees spend more than six hours a day just chewing.)
So, how did Homo habilis evolve into Homo erectus? The dominant theory since the 1950s has been that meat-eating was responsible for the shift because it required habilines to gradually develop human intelligence. There’s something to the idea: To hunt game, our apelike ancestors had to reply on more than just physical prowess; they had to be clever and cooperate. The better they got at hunting, the smarter they became.
But the “meat made humans” hypothesis rankled biologist Richard Wrangham. In his 2009 book Catching Fire, Wrangham argues that meat-eating alone cannot account for the tremendous physical changes that occurred in the evolution of humans. Instead, he believes that man’s discovery of fire -and more importantly, cooking- did the heavy lifting.
(Image credit: Banksy work, photo by Flickr user Lord Jim)
For decades, many scientists dismissed cooking as a pleasant byproduct of civilization, a symbol of man’s dominion over nature. But Wrangham builds the case that cooking was crucial to human evolution because it made digestion so much more efficient, increasing the amount of energy our bodies derived from what we ate. As a result, humans became better able to think, hunt, sing, dance, paint on walls, and invent new tools. Ultimately, the top chefs were more likely to survive, reproduce, and pass along cooking techniques to their offspring, along with the physical evolutionary changes that come with them -namely, bigger brains.
The idea that cooked food offers more energy than uncooked food doesn’t immediately make sense. After all, recent studies show that cooking can leach food of its calories and nutrients. To understand the answers, we need to look inside -literally.
more …
When fantasy genre and food enthusiast Adam Bruski read the “A Game Of Thrones” novels by George R.R. Martin, he paid close attention to an aspect that i’m sure very few reading the books have even noticed-the amazing sounding recipes. So he has taken it upon himself to recreate the recipes, using only ingredients which would have been available during the Medieval period, on his cooking blog “Cooking Ice And Fire”. Bruski’s passion for food shines through in his recipes, of which there are six so far, and the fantasy food turned haute cuisine recipes range from the strange (cold egg lime soup) to the sublime (veal cutlets blanched with almond milk). With many more books and recipes to go, Adam aims to show us all what we’ve been missing while reading through the series, and how we can bring home exotic and interesting flavors from our favorite fantasy novels!
The guys from Epic Meal Time are blowing up YouTube with their crazy food-centric comedy videos, recipes seemingly created by Paula Dean while she was on acid, and devil may care attitudes that make them a big hit with the ladies. Every recipe these guys dream up starts with trays full of bacon, and become more and more insane as another ingredient is added. This edition, entitled Sausage Fest, shows you how to make sausage out of big macs and beef sandwiches, among other crazy combinations of (often fried) food which have never been stuffed in a sausage casing before. Let Epic Meal Time show you why things get strange in the kitchen when you’re cooking drunk.
You know how microwave ovens heat or defrost your food unevenly? You must either rotate or stir your food between zaps to get it “done.” Lenore at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories accidentally uncovered the pattern her microwave uses when she heated some Indian snack crackers called appalams.
Holy crap!
As an area of the cracker cooks, it bubbles up in just a few seconds, leaving clear marks as to where there is microwave power and where there isn’t. For this particular microwave, Saturn-shaped objects will cook evenly.
Obviously what is happening is that there are two hotspots in this microwave: one in the center, and one offset from center which traces out a circle thanks to the rotating plate in the bottom.
And then, like any good scientist, she recreated the entire experiment in four other microwave ovens to see if the results could be duplicated. Link
We sell some pretty cool aprons over in the Neatoshop, including some superhero ones, but just in case we don’t have exactly what you’re looking for, check out Bethany Sew-and-Sew’s shop. Bethany makes customized aprons in superhero styles and more. She even has some Princess Peach, Mario and Alice In Wonderland ones that are simply adorable.
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Today is the feast day of St. Lawrence, who tradition says was martyred by being roasted alive. He supposedly even made a joke about it: “Turn me over, this side is done.” St. Lawrence is now the patron saint of cooks, which may be a nod to his famous sense of humor.
What will Catholics eat today in honor of the saint’s feast day? Some traditions call for cold cuts and other uncooked foods, in pious avoidance of anything that would too closely resemble Lawrence’s burned flesh.
But others go the opposite direction, celebrating the manner of his death with a barbecue. As Evelyn Vitz, author of A Continual Feast: A Cookbook to Celebrate the Joys of Family & Faith throughout the Christian Year explains on her blog, “We decided that serving barbecued chicken is a great way to signify his triumph over the fire.” A contributor at the Catholic Cuisine blog interprets the theme another way, with cupcakes decorated to look like grills, complete with little shish kebabs made of frosting.
Smithsonian has the story, and a list of other saints connected with cooking. Link
I know the Fourth of July is pretty much over by now, but summer sure leaves us with plenty of time for grilling and while many of us are ok with the classic dome-grills, these 15 awesome grills on WebUrbanist are certainly a lot more stylish. I’m a particularly big fan of this wall-mounted grill.
BBQ Sword Cooking Fork - $27.95
It’s your Dad against the grill! This Father’s Day arm Dad with a proper weapon. Get him the BBQ Sword Cooking Fork from the NeatoShop! Now Dad can burn steaks in swashbuckling style.
Be sure to check out the NeatoShop for more fabulous Cooking Gadgets and Father’s Day Gifts!
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I don’t know about you guys, but I have a soft spot for seriously strange and seriously niche blogs. Paula Deen Riding Things is one of those blogs.The name says it all. The entire site consists of images of Paula Deen riding on things. Enjoy.
Pi Day, March 14, is long gone, but Serious Eats has only now released the winners of their Pie Day Contest. The one above won first place, but I love the Pi Within A Pie.
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Linda Monach has embarked on a culinary adventure and is chronicling it on the blog Burgers Here and There.
A couple of years ago my parents moved in with us to help take care of our daughters as my husband and I juggled two stressful careers. My dad likes simple food and struggles with some of my more adventurous meals. This year, at Father’s day I made him his favorite dinner of hamburgers and pork and beans. That’s when inspiration hit – could I take the beloved burger and make it the vehicle for introducing my dad to new flavors? Indeed, looks like I can!
So, here’s the goal…create one burger recipe for every country in the world.
Monach is not trying to recreate the hamburgers of the world, but trying to put the flavors of the world’s traditional cuisines into each hamburger meal. She’s got several nations covered so far, all beginning with A. Link -via Metafilter
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Modernist Cuisine is a six-volume set of cookbooks that goes on sale today. The $625 set isn’t for those of us who use a microwave for most meals. This cookbook looks into the science of cooking and the ultimate methods of getting to the ultimate results. For example, this hamburger take a total of 30 hours to make!
Take the book’s hamburger. Prepping the lettuce and tomato requires a vacuum sealer. The cheese is restructured—heated with ingredients like carrageenan and cooled in a mold—for a gooier texture. And making the burger itself requires hand-grinding the beef and using half-cylinder molds to catch the strands and gently form the patties.
Get a closer look at the burger at the Wall Street Journal’s interactive feature. Link to article. Link to hamburger. -via Nag on the Lake
Amy from Very Culinary made a trailer for her site that mirrors the Inception trailer exactly, except that it’s about cooking. She also posted a shot-by-shot comparison in case you want to see how closely the two trailers match. Link -via The Daily What
Research by the Department of Anthropology at the Smithsonian natural history museum shows us that Neanderthals were not all that different from modern humans in their eating habits. They ate grains and vegetables as well as meat, and they cooked their dinners, too!
Researchers found grains from numerous plants, including a type of wild grass, as well as traces of roots and tubers, trapped in plaque buildup on fossilized Neanderthal teeth unearthed in northern Europe and Iraq.
Many of the particles “had undergone physical changes that matched experimentally-cooked starch grains, suggesting that Neanderthals controlled fire much like early modern humans,” PNAS said in a statement.
Stone artifacts have not provided evidence that Neanderthals used tools to grind plants, suggesting they did not practice agriculture, but the new research indicates they cooked and prepared plants for eating, it said.
Link -via J-Walk Blog
The editors of Slate asked their readers how Thanksgiving cooking traditions get passed from one generation to the next. They collected stories and posted them. It seems that in many families, the one who cooks every year has a hard time giving that position up to anyone else. Some even refuse help from those who should be learning how to do it.
My mom doesn’t accept much help in the kitchen, holidays or Mondays—not because she doesn’t trust others to get it right, but because she just doesn’t know how to slow down. Never did. And accept help? She’s as likely to do that as she is to ask for it; i.e., not at all. She reminds me of the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, who systematically gets his appendages hacked off in battle but still won’t call it a day. Make no mistake, having grown up as one of five girls in an inner-city, working-class home, I’m no stranger to hard work. But there was never a time when we did more work than she did. Ever. Even at 83, I’m not sure it’s even possible to outwork my mom. As she’s aged, all we can manage is guerrilla warfare.
My mother and grandmother helped me learn the family recipes as soon as I was old enough to be interested, and I’ve been hosting the family feast for quite a few years now. Now if I could only get my children interested… How about your family? Link
How many of these pasta shapes can you name? How many can you use in a recipe? This is a small sampling of the pastas listed at The Geometry of Pasta. Click on a shape and find out what to call it and how to use it in Italian meals. There are recipes as well. Link -via the Presurfer
I hope I’m not the only person on the planet who cannot understand why dining at one’s home or apartment has to be so complicated. Personally, my favorite meal situation is when I am sitting on a large boulder near timberline looking at chipmunks and pine trees, while eating a sandwich, an orange and a candy bar. The flat part of the boulder makes for an adequate table. That is my idea of dining “out”.
The act and process of preparing food, dining, and then cleaning up seems to entail too much work and too much equipment, like it was designed for the needs of a regiment of soldiers, or for a family on a large country estate in England which employs kitchen servants. Typically, a standard kitchen with cupboards, drawers and refrigerator includes redundant and special-purpose items. There are large knives, small knives, large-size stainlessware items for serving food, small spoons, forks and knives for personal dinnerware, tiny stainlessware for olives or cranberry sauce for Thanksgiving dinners; there are various sizes and shapes of pots and dishes, microwavable containers and refrigerator storage containers; there are table mats and napkins; there are scouring pads, sink drain cleaning chemicals, dishwasher and/or dishwashing soap, sponges (ranging in texture from smooth to multi-surfaced artificial pads for coarse scrubbing), metal polish, stainless steal pan cleaners, sink scrubbing powders or bricks, dishwashing gloves, storage racks, bins, drawers and cupboards. And there is food: Condiments, mayonnaise, salad dressing, olive oil, vinegar, jams, jellies, frozen foods, canned foods, microwaveable foods, fresh fruit, dried fruit, milk, diet drinks, cereals of many types, coffee or tea, alcoholic beverages.
There is often wine or beer to help deal with the stress of dining.
At times, I have wondered whether food itself should be made simpler. In a gag, comedian Steve Martin once referred to an imaginary uni-food, a single substance that is all one would eat day and night, year after year. The simplicity of such an idea appeals to me. Above, I have depicted a future dining event involving seniors who eat either refurbished or uni-substance foods.
But seriously, I would be happier if the process of eating and cleaning up after a meal required as few steps as possible. Eating is, after all, simply a body function necessary for its maintenance. If I could don some type of hat and suit that fed me, wiped my mouth, caught my crumbs and drools, I imagine I would be happy. Or, instead of having a dining suit, I would be happy having an automatic one-stop dining machine.
Mira Grant, author of the zombie novel Feed, shows how to make adorable braaains cupcakes for the zombies in your life.
So you’re preparing your ultimate zombie-themed dinner party, and you’re stuck for a dessert. Or you’re entertaining a zombie who’s recently gone vegetarian, and is jonesing for those good old days of gray matter and the delicious taste of human brains. Whatever your reasons, you need a brainy treat that puts the “sweet” back into “sweetmeats.”
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by jimmdare.
Have you ever considered putting a little Star Wars in your kitchen? How about a lot? Over at NeatoGeek, Jill has quite a collection of Star Wars-themed kitchen accessories and gadgets that might make your favorite chef smile -and then pull out a light saber to toast your marshmallows for you! Link
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Harvard anthropologist Richard Wrangham argues that the ability to cook food contributed to human evolution:
“Cooked food does many familiar things,” he observes. “It makes our food safer, creates rich and delicious tastes and reduces spoilage. Heating can allow us to open, cut or mash tough foods. But none of these advantages is as important as a little-appreciated aspect: cooking increases the amount of energy our bodies obtain from food.”
He continues: “The extra energy gave the first cooks biological advantages. They survived and reproduced better than before. Their genes spread. Their bodies responded by biologically adapting to cooked food, shaped by natural selection to take maximum advantage of the new diet. There were changes in anatomy, physiology, ecology, life history, psychology and society.” Put simply, Mr. Wrangham writes that eating cooked food — whether meat or plants or both —made digestion easier, and thus our guts could grow smaller. The energy that we formerly spent on digestion (and digestion requires far more energy than you might imagine) was freed up, enabling our brains, which also consume enormous amounts of energy, to grow larger. The warmth provided by fire enabled us to shed our body hair, so we could run farther and hunt more without overheating. Because we stopped eating on the spot as we foraged and instead gathered around a fire, we had to learn to socialize, and our temperaments grew calmer.
Wrangham also asserts that cooking strengthened the bonds within early hominid communities and established lasting gender roles.
Link via Choice | Photo: flickr user flowcomm, used under Creative Commons license
From Raytheon’s radar business to your breakfast of leftover pizza, the story of microwave cooking is an interesting read. Like computers, they took off when the size (and price) came down.
The 1947 Radarange was a whopping six feet tall, weighed nearly 750 pounds, and required its own 220 volt electrical line and a dedicated water line for the cooling tube. It sold for $2000, or nearly $22,000 today. Not yet an appliance for the home cook, Raytheon marketed the behemoth appliance to high-volume, quick service restaurants. Busy diners, ocean liners and hospitals all purchased their own Radaranges, cooking hamburgers and sheet cakes in less than 30 seconds.
Link -via Boing Boing
