Category: Pastry

(Un)Melted Chocolate

Reader Amanda writes:

I received a gift of some good quality, too-dark-for-me-to-want-to-eat chocolate and I decided to turn it into hot chocolate instead of eating it straight. I followed some recipes from the internet and the advice was to heat up a bit of milk, melt chocolate into it and then add more milk and heat the whole thing up. The taste was actually great but there were lots of tiny flecks of chocolate that wouldn’t melt into the milk with the rest of the chocolate and I was wondering what was up with that. I was hoping you might, as the only guy who answers questions about the science of ingredients that I’m familiar with, be able to answer my question.

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What is an Emulsifier?

So asks reader Wale, and it’s just the sort of question I like to answer on a Wednesday morning. The short answer is that an emulsifier is a substance that keeps an emulsion stable. But then what exactly is an emulsion again?

Emulsions are combinations of liquids that don’t normally like to be combined. In the kitchen those liquids are usually oil (or melted fat) and water. Like the members of Arcade Fire and the Flaming Lips, they don’t like to mix with each other very much, yet they can be made to with effort. Shake a jar containing water and olive oil vigorously and you’ll get an emulsion: millions of tiny oil droplets inside the water phase. The problem is that it won’t last very long. After about a minute or so the oil droplets start to recombine and the two phases separate again.

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The (Much Abbreviated) Life and Times of Zhuge Liang

Think of the Three Kingdoms period in China as roughly analogous to Arthurian legend in the West. Like King Arthur and his knights, the central actors in the Three Kingdoms lived in the first few centuries A.D.. In the same way Sir Thomas Mallory romanticized and popularized Arthur, Lancelot and Percival in Le Morte d’Arthur in 1485, Chinese novelist Luo Guanzhong glamorized Zhuge Liang and his contemporaries in Romance of the Three Kingdoms in the late 1300’s.

And while Romance of the Three Kingdoms is much more historically accurate than Le Morte d’Arthur (the third century Chinese kept far better records than the pre-Saxon Birts), it serves much the same purpose culturally. Over the centuries it’s spawned folk tales, books and operas. More recently it’s been the inspiration for comics, websites, video games, cartoons and full-length Lord of the Rings-style feature films. There are Three Kingdoms fan fiction books, role playing games and figurines, and heaps of miscellaneous merch. So while on the one hand it’s legitimate culture and history, on the other it’s nerd heaven.

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Who invented Baozi?

Legend has it that baozi (the earlier kind without baking powder) were invented way back in the 3rd century A.D. by a Chinese military strategist, inventor and writer by the name of Zhuge Liang who lived during China’s famous “Three Kingdoms” period. As the story goes, Liang was engaged in a military campaign in southern […]

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The Silk Road: A Two-Way Street

Most of us know what the Silk Road was. We learned about it in grade school history class: the overland trade route(s) that passed through the Middle East and Asia, connecting the West with the Far East. It’s a rich source of history for people interested in the spread of goods and technology around the Eurasian Continent in the centuries prior to the Age of Exploration. The trouble is schools generally present a pretty compressed view of what the Silk Road was all about.

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The Myth of the Red Chocolate Cake II

I’ve received a little flak this past week from readers who didn’t think my red chocolate myth busting post from last Tuesday was rigorous enough. “No Dutched chocolate!” “You didn’t heat it!”

So OK then. Here goes. First we have a slurry of un-Dutched Ghiradelli cocoa powder and water. Left to right, with a teaspoon of tartaric acid, a teaspoon of baking soda and a combination of both (but only half a teaspoon of each because I didn’t want it exploding all over the place like last time).

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Extract or Emulsion?

Reader Wale brings up an interesting question: what’s the difference between an extract and an emulsion? If you’re unfamiliar with “emulsions” they’re thick gel-like versions of extracts, rarely seen in retail shops but fairly common in professional bakeries.

The main difference between the two is that the flavor compounds in an extract are suspended in an alcohol solution (about 35%), whereas in an emulsion they’re suspended in a mixture of water and vegetable gum. Both deliver the same amount of flavor, at least initially. Baked goods made with emulsions retain more of that flavor after baking.

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Next Up: Baozi

Chinese steamed buns! They’ve gotten a fair amount of attention in recent years, particularly in my old home town of Chicago where the Wow Boa chain has all but taken over the city. They’re fluffy, delicious, addictive and I think it’s high time I made some at home.

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