Who’s the guy in the brown shirt? He’s got a great face for radio! Why that’s Joe Pastry! Tonight I’ll have the honor of judging a local chef showdown at the Kentucky Science Center’s food science celebration MegaBITE. I’m told the event will be Iron Chef-like, except that the chefs will be using nothing but lab equipment to prepare the meal. I hope I survive. If you live in the Louisville area stop on in!
READ ONBoy, this is fun, isn’t it? Based solely on the titles of today’s posts, someone might confuse me for someone who actually has a clue about chemistry. So anyway, anandamide. This one is a favorite of fluff piece writers everywhere as it is a possible explanation for chocolate’s “pleasure giving” properties. It belongs to a class of chemicals known as cannabinoids, which as the name implies are similar in structure to THC, the psychoactive compound found in cannabis.
Anandamide is present in chocolate in amounts so tiny as to be almost not worth mentioning. However defenders of the cannabinoid theory of chocolate and pleasure continue to press on, pointing out that not only does chocolate contain anandamide, but two other multi-syllabic compounds (N-oleoylethanolamine and N-linolenoylethanolamine) that are so-called cannabinoid breakdown inhibitors. In other words
READ ONAnother alkaloid found in chocolate is theobromine. Like caffeine, theobromine is a nervous-system stimulant, though much milder. In high enough doses it can be mood-altering, but then there are those words again: in high enough doses. Most chocolates, especially milk chocolates, don’t contain anywhere near enough to create an effect, particularly since theobromine also acts […]
READ ONCaffeine does quicken the pulse, but chocolate doesn’t contain as much caffeine as people think. Yes, three ounces of pure, unadulterated chocolate liquor may contain as much caffeine as a cup of regular coffee, but a three-ounce bar of your average milk chocolate contains less than a tenth as much. A bar of dark chocolate, […]
READ ONVery interesting question, reader Brandi! Exactly what are you planning to do with this mud cake? You certainly do read a lot about chocolate and its love-inducing/mood altering/stimulating qualities in magazines, however the reality is that chocolate delivers little if anything in the way of real world effects. Like all foods chocolate contains a wide […]
READ ONThat’s a good question. From what I can tell, the animating idea behind it is similar to that of a flourless chocolate cake: a dense confection for those times when conventional chocolate cake simply isn’t enough. Though this cake is lighter and was probably invented earlier. Nearly all of the recipes I’ve found call for melted bar chocolate in the mix, and usually cocoa powder besides. Many have a topping. The American versions — which I’m noticing are often called “Mississippi mud” cakes — are generally topped with marshmallow, the European versions with meringue.
READ ONHere’s something that I confess I’d never heard of before reader Nokanen in Finland requested it back in March. A few other readers in the region of Northern Europe weighed in just afterward on the subject, so for a while I was thinking that this was some sort of exotic European device. I’ve since discovered […]
READ ONWooohooo!! Now THAT’s the kind of super-nerdy question that really kicks a Joe week off right! I thank you for it, reader Denny! The answer is no, you can’t make a custard with beaten egg and water in the way that you can with, say, beaten egg and milk. All that happens when you heat it is, well, egg drop soup. The question is: why?
The answer is because egg protein molecules repel each other. They’re negatively charged and as a result they naturally push away from each other like two same-sided magnets. In order for a gel network to form, those proteins need to attract — or at least not repel — one another as they uncoil. They’re then free to bond with each other side-to-side to create a molecular mesh. That mesh reduces the flow of the water and the result is
READ ONLove that question, Susanna! The lemon meringue pie recipe below has cornstarch in both the filling and the meringue, to serve as both a thickener as well as a stabilizer in the event the egg proteins get too hot. But how exactly does that work? Well you may remember me talking about “the clenching fist” in the past, a metaphor that describes what happens when intertwined egg proteins get too hot and curl up…squeezing out water as they tighten into little clumps. That’s curdling. It can’t ultimately be prevented but it can be forestalled by the addition of starch to the mixture. Starch molecules do a couple of things in a custard. First, they absorb some of the heat energy, thus protecting the more delicate proteins. Second, they get in between
READ ONReader Nick asks:
[When making lemon meringue pie] why can’t the filling just be left on a low simmer while I’m making the meringue? Since there’s a lot of cornstarch in it the odds of it curdling seem remote. Wouldn’t that be a better solution for keeping it hot?
Hey Nick! I like that thinking! However I don’t think it would work for a couple of reasons. Firstly, despite the amount of cornstarch in the filling you still run the risk of curdling the filling the simmering goes on for more than a minute or so. The mixture is so thick there isn’t much convection in the pan, so the filling on the bottom absorbs a whole lot of heat if you aren’t whisking it constantly. And even assuming you have a third hand to whisk with
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