Entries tagged with 'science'
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[Photographs: Cooking Issues] Leave it to mad scientisty chef Dave Arnold to think, forget the oven, I'm going to prepare my Thanksgiving turkey in a double immersion circulator. Here's how it worked, as explained on the French Culinary Institute's blog Cooking Issues: He filled a stock pot with duck fat and butter, and jammed the cavity with herbs. He then used two circulators set at 65°C. A hose was attached to one of the circulator's spouts and pushed into the cavity of the bird so that hot fat was not only circulated on the outside of the bird, but also injected into the center. It was circulated for two hours, chilled in a blast freezer, and then packed it...
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We've all experienced dry turkey. The kind that's just bad enough, you wonder why the pilgrims didn't eat prime rib during that first fall. The solution? Brining. And here's why.
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[Original art: Kevin Van Aelt] Have you ever looked at gummy worms and thought, wow those sure resemble DNA coils? Well, artist Kevin Van Aelt did and made this chromosome chart out of the candy slugs. Check out his portfolio here. Related Photo of the Day: Jellybean Children How to Make Candy Corn Collection of Stuck Tic Tacs...
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If you can make mayonnaise out of egg yolks and oil, why not make mayonnaise out of egg yolks and rendered animal fat? Introducing meatonnaises: mayos made with beef, bacon, duck, and lamb fats.
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[Photograph: Robyn Lee] As fresh-from-the-hen eggs become more available at farmers' markets and as more people jump on the backyard chicken coop bandwagon, peeling hard-boiled egg shells may become trickier. According to Wired Science, fresher eggs are scientifically harder to peel. You may think you're a pro-peeler, only to end up with a crater-filled blob. As Harold McGee points out in On Food and Cooking: The best guarantee of easy peeling is to use old eggs! Difficult peeling is characteristic of fresh eggs with a relatively low albumen pH, which somehow causes the albumen to adhere to the inner shell membrane more strongly than it coheres to itself. But don't worry—this doesn't mean you have to cook questionably spoiled...
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Just about every cookbook has a different technique for boiling eggs. Should you deal with vinegar? Cover the pot? Use old or new eggs? Finally, an investigative look at how to boil the perfect eggs.
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Alton Brown, in his typical MacGyver-of-the-food-world ways, hatches this idea for emergency oatmeal. All you need: a coffee pot, two pouches of instant oatmeal, a mini honey and jam packet, an herbal tea bag, a wee bit of salt, and water (how much depends on your gloopy consistency preference). The man becomes a savior to oatmeal eaters in motels everywhere. The video, after the jump....
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[Photograph: Robyn Lee] Most deep-fried fish sandwiches from chain restaurants—including Denny's, Long John Silver's, and most certainly McDonald's—use hoki, a pretty ugly, bug-eyed fish found deep in the waters around New Zealand. But that may change, according to this New York Times piece. Drops in hoki spawn and damaged ecosystems have inspired the World Wildlife Fund to fight for reduced hoki fishing. In response, the New Zealand ministry has cut the allowable commercial catch quota from roughly 275,000 tons to 100,000 tons, which means McDonald's had to shrink its usual consumption of about 15 million pounds of hoki to 11 million pounds per year. "It could go up if the quota goes up," said McDonald's senior director of global...
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[Daily Mail] If you've been losing sleep over the soggification of biscuits after dunking them into hot beverages, you're in luck. Felice Tocchini of the Fusion Brasserie restaurant in Worcester, England, claims he's created a state-of-the-art biscuit able to survive up to one minute in a hot drink before disintegrating into mushy bits. According to Daily Mail, the current record is 25.5 seconds for a chocolate digestive. Tocchini spent three weeks testing ingredients. Key factors included the layering of flour and oat-based doughs to build strength, adding sweet potato slivers to hold everything together, and coating the biscuits with an egg-based glaze before baking. According to Dr. Len Fisher, who wrote How to Dunk a Doughnut, dunking releases up...
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Nearly one-third of all honeybee colonies have collapsed over the last couple of years, hence the phenomenon's name, Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD). The issue involves more than just honey. As crop pollinators, honeybees provide a $15 billion value to U.S. farmers. According to Time, a new study shows that the guts of CCD-afflicted bees contain unusual fragments of ribosomal RNA. But good news: the disorder may be on a decline....
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