An old trick when boiling vegetables is to add a little bit of baking soda to the water. This is supposed to help retain the color in the vegetables better. Now, that should be put to the test. A couple of weeks ago me and a chemist friend did a little testing. We cooked five pieces of broccoli in one liter of tap water, adding a teaspoon of E 500, (B)aking soda, E 335 and E 334 to four different samples. The last was (N)eutral.
Now, E 500, or sodium bicarbonate as it's most often referred to gave the best result. Baking soda did not do to bad colorwise but left a soapy touch on the broccoli. E 334, aka Tartaric acid gave more loss of color, only topped by E 335 sodium tartrate that really messed up the poor broccoli. So to no-ones surprise, the more acidic the worse for the vegetables. Use a bit of sodium bicarbonate in the water (10 ppt) to retain color in the boiled veggies
We made it to the finals this year! Here is our menu (recipes and pictures will follow after the finals)
As most of you know, OS X 10.5 Leopard is here and with a bucketload of new and/or improved features and functionalities. One neat little feature in Safari that I immediately started using is "Open this page in Dashboard" .
The starter in the upcoming national championship must be based on stockfish. I would be going out on a limb if I told you that this is an ingredient I know and love. Stockfish, the heart and soul of bacalao, is basically salted, then dried cod. Now, this was done to the fish to preserve it and has remained a delicacy and a favorite in Norway, Portugal and to some degree Italy. My way of attacking this challenge is to break with tradition, deconstruct tradition or just go nuts. First take tomorrow will focus on these ideas:
This is the first recipe I'm developing for the upcoming national championship for amateur cooks. This will one of the components for the dessert, if the other team members agree. As of now this i s just an concept, I've only done this recipe once, but it looks like it has potential. First time around I shallow fried the slices, next time I'm gonna deep fry them.
Pineapple Fritters aka. Alcoholic Pineapples
(10 servings)
- 10 pineapple rings
- 50g caster sugar
- 40ml Kirsch
Batter
- 100ml Vodka
- 100ml lager
- 50g white rice flour
- 75g flour
- 10g baking powder
- 10g maple sirup
Sprinkle pineapple rings with sugar and Kirsch
Gently make batter and tranfer to siphon retaining as much of the bubbles as possible. Charge siphon with 2-3 CO2 charges and chill for an hour or so.
Shake siphon and squirt batter into a bow
Dust pineapple rings with flour to make the batter stick
Cover pineapple rings in batter and fry in 220 ºC groundnut oil until golden brown
Now, you might think that the batter recipe is a bit odd, but there are several good reasons for the unconventional ingredients. First of all, I did not come up with this myself, the batter is partly inspired by an fish n' chips batter recipe by Heston Blumenthal.
The point of the batter is to be as light and bubbly as possible. The vodka is there because the alcohol quicky evaporates when fried, the beer for the bubbles, the rice flour for the lightness, the baking soda to make it even lighter. By using a siphon one ends up with an extremely light batter.
Xanthane gum is great for creating ketchup-like textures in sauces and dressings, stabilizing meringue and other egg-white based foams, enhancing the texture in ice-creams and thickening milk and fruit based mixtures. There are three things that makes this product great. First of all it works in a wide PH-range. Secondly it works in wide temperature range allowing the creation for instance hot gels. Last but not least it's not alcohol soluble making an interesting additive when playing with alcohols. By combining it with E410 or E412 one can greatly enhance it's gelling and stabilizing properties.
Links:
Wikipedia
Two new Richard Dawkins documentaries!
Parallels just released a new version of Parallels Desktop for Mac adding 3D support among other improvements. With this move my preference shifts from VMWare Fusion back to Parallels. VMWare introduced 3D support a few months back, but Parallels Desktop beats VMWare Fusion flat out in performance. Your move, VMWare :)
Before leaving for a trip to the desert we stopped at this beautiful monument in Sharm built in memory of the 148 people killed in a tragic plane crash in 2004
