Will shows off his favorite hot water kettle, which he uses to make coffee every day. Several things make this kettle ideal for serious coffee or tea-making, including the ability to hold water at any temperature for over an hour. Plus, gratuitous slow-motion water pouring!
Jamie and Adam chat with astronaut Chris Hadfield about the limitations of food preparation on board the International Space Station. While astronauts can't really cook their own meals, Jamie and Adam challenge celebrated chef David Chang with the task of devising a recipe that Commander Hadfield can test...in space!
NASA was gracious enough let us spend a lot of time at its Space Food Systems Laboratory when we visited the Johnson Space Center last month, where we learned about different types of food preparation methods and packaging technologies developed over the year for astronauts. The astronauts on Skylab, the Space Shuttle, and the International Space Station all had different food options, and each prepared food differently. Here's a sampling of what was available to astronauts decades ago compared to what's on the ISS menu today.
How does the dining experience in space compare to that on Earth? We visited NASA's Space Food Systems Laboratory at the Johnson Space Center in Houston to learn about the history of space food and sample some of the same food that the astronauts on the International Space Station eat every day. Photos of the food here!
Sam Penix and Sam Lewontin, of Everyman Espresso in New York City, discuss the difference between achieving clarity and body in a coffee brew, and why one comes at the expense of the other. They also give an overview of five different coffee brewing devices (some very familiar to Tested readers) that each deliver a different balance of clarity and body. A great primer video for appreciating the complexities of coffee brewing.
The Ultimate Burger, declares Modernist Cuisine, is no simple creation. It requires a bun with the perfect--not overpowering!--degree of sweetness, a cheese made with sodium hexametaphosphates, and a meat patty ground in such a way that every strand is aligned to produce an even texture. The meat is then cryofried--dipped in liquid nitrogen and then fried in hot oil--to keep the burger as juicy as possible. It's complicated, but it's still simple (and cheap) compared to a new $325,000 hamburger that will be eaten in London in the near future.
While Modernist Cuisine uses science to find the perfect way to prepare and combine foods, Dr. Mark Post of the Netherlands, creator of this burger, is doing something different--he's trying to prove that we can grow edible meat in a laboratory through the use of stem cells.
"In a lab with incubators filled with clear plastic containers holding a pinkish liquid, a technician was tending to the delicate task of growing the tens of billions of cells needed to make the burger, starting with a particular type of cell removed from cow necks obtained at a slaughterhouse," writes The New York Times. "Dr. Post, one of a handful of researchers in the field, has made strides in developing cultured meat through the use of stem cells — precursor cells that can turn into others that are specific to muscle, for example — and techniques adapted from medical research for growing tissues and organs, a field known as tissue engineering...His burger consists of about 20,000 thin strips of cultured muscle tissue. Dr. Post, who has conducted some informal taste tests, said that even without any fat, the tissue 'tastes reasonably good.' For the London event he plans to add only salt and pepper."
Growing the meat for a lab burger isn't cheap--the research has cost $325,000 so far, which means Post's technique poses little threat to the existing meat business. It's a slow process. Post's work uses myosatellite cells, taken from the muscle tissues in a cow's neck. He uses myosatellite cells because they're able to produce new muscle tissue. The cells are placed in a growth medium--in this case, fetal calf serum--and then encouraged to divide and multiply.
Will and Norm get juiced this week while testing two recommended juicers that use different juice extraction techniques. One is a centrifugal juicer that uses a fast-spinning grinding blade, and the other is a masticating juicer that crushes fruit and vegetables into submission. But which yields the most juice?
From NPR Science Friday's series on coffee science: "Here's the scoop on coffee's flavor: the taste comes from compounds locked into roasted coffee beans. Add hot water, and those flavors escape into your pot -- but not all flavors escape at the same time, says Harold McGee, food science writer and author of On Food and Cooking."
Decades before Pasteur discovered that heating food kills off bacteria and prevents illness, a French inventor named Nicolas Appert was placing food in glass jars and heating them. His method of sterilizing food was pasteurization before anyone anyone knew exactly why pasteurization was effective, and it earned him a 12,000F reward from the French Ministry of the Interior in 1810. It was an important invention, but mostly because of what came after. Appert's jarring process quickly made its way to the U.K., and in the hands of another French inventor, quickly became the foundation for canning food.
BBC Magazine's lengthy history of the tin can begins with the story of British inventor and businessman Bryan Donkin, who bought a patent for a tin food container designed to be sealed and heated to preserve food. The inventor behind the patent was a Frenchman named Philippe Girard. Donkin bought it for £1,000 and spent two years reworking it for mass production. He partnered another man to form Donkin and Gamble and begin canning beef.
Then came a big test: Presenting the canned food to some nobles. They liked it. And then things took off.
"In 1813, the Admiralty bought 156lb of Donkin's food, feeding it to sick sailors, because it was mistakenly thought that scurvy was due to over-reliance on salted meat," writes BBC. The praise from seamen for this unexpected addition to their daily menu was warm and glowing, from every corner of the globe.
William Warner, surgeon of the ship Ville de Paris, wrote in 1814 that canned food 'forms a most excellent restorative to convalescents, and would often, on long voyages, save the lives of many men who run into consumption [tuberculosis] at sea for want of nourishment after acute diseases; my opinion, therefore, is that its adoption generally at sea would be a most desirable and laudable act.' In Chile, there is a cove named Caleta Donkin, so called because the crew led by Capt Fitzroy were so delighted with their canned food."
Between 1814 and 1821, the Admiralty's orders for canned foods increased from around 3000 pounds to 9000. The BBC goes on to write about how underappreciated Donkin's role in history is--his name rarely shows up in the history books--and how canned food hit a major stumbling block decades after Donkin had left the business to pursue other engineering challenges.
In 1852, spoiled meat from another supplier known for his cheap prices caused mass condemnation of canned foods. Canned foods were suddenly distrusted, and could've been usurped by other forms of preservation. But then a savior arrived: Condensed milk. Read the BBC's feature for the full story of the can's rise, fall, and milky salvation.
Will shows you how to make a great cup of coffee using the new Able Brewing manual pourover coffee system. Precise timing, temperature, and quantity of both coffee and water used are all important to the chemistry of coffee brewing--here's how to do it right.
After making coffee with it for several months, Will reviews the Able Kone Brewing System, a carefully designed ceramic manual brewer for making pour-over drip coffee. This system has been in development for over a year, and the finished product is beautiful.
We didn't make it to this year's SCAA Event in Boston, where the US Brewer's Cup and US Aeropress Championships were held this past weekend. But Sprudge has chatted with Andy Sprenger, the winner of this year's top US Aeropress award, about his winning brewing method (which was also awarded most innovative). Sprenger is a well known name in the coffee brewing competition circuit, having won the past (and only) two US Brewer's Cups in Houston and Portland, and was the close runner up at the World Brewers Cup. This year, he participated in the US Brewers Cup as a judge. He was also formerly the head roaster at Ceremony Coffee Roasters in Annapolis, Maryland, though he recently announced that he is starting his own coffee company in Colorado.
Sprenger's winning Aeropress recipe marks a return to the inverted brewing method, after last year's US champion Charlene De Buysere won with a normal non-inverted recipe. But Sprenger incorporated something even more unique: an additional Hario V60 conical filter trimmed down to fit the Aeropress to pre-filter 18 grams of coffee before it goes through the standard Aeropress filter and cap. Crazy, right? Of course, the process is a little more complicated and precise than that. The full recipe is from Sprudge's report of the event:
Place inverted Aeropress on a scale, tare, add 10 grams of coffee. “I used a fine drip grind,” Andy tells us after the competition. Trim down and pre-wet a V60 filter and carefully fold it on top of the Aeropress chamber. Add an additional 8 grams of coffee to the V60 filter.
Start your timer, and pre-infuse the V60 filter for about ten seconds with 203-205 degree water. Pulse pour 120 grams of water total over the course of a minute and a half. Carefully remove the V60 filter. Add an additional 150 grams of water to the Aeropress chamber (this’ll take around 20-25 seconds).
Pre-wet that Aeropress paper filter, cap the chamber, invert the Aeropress – and very slowly press it down. Gentle. Pour and enjoy.
Watch Sprudge's tutorial video of Andy Sprenger's winning brewing method below. Recipes from previous years' Aeropress champions can also be found here.
Science Friday is a two-hour radio show syndicated on NPR stations around the country, and has been broadcasting for over two decades. In the past few years, they've also started releasing video segments for the web to accompany show topics, produced by media editor Flora Lichtman. This week's segment is about a favorite topic of ours, coffee brewing. Baristas demonstrate the nuances of cupping (slurping), and a food expert provides insights like why we call coffee seeds beans.
Tea bags are paper--cheap, simple, harmless paper--except when they're not. Today many packaged tea sellers have moved to plastic bags, which are often marketed as "silky" bags because, well, it sounds better. But they're made of plastic or nylon, materials that bring with them certain health concerns. We've read about particles from plastic water bottles being toxic. When she heard about plastic being used in tea bags, The Atlantic writer Taylor Orci decided to see if those tea bags are be dangerous, too. The results of her research aren't encouraging.
Orci learned that plastic tea bags are most commonly made from polyethylene terephthalate or food grade nylon. Phthalates are materials widely used in the plastic industry--they're also the materials in plastic bottles linked to health issues like infertility and hormone disruption. She discovered that, unsurprisingly, these plastics and nylons have melting points far above boiling water's 212 degrees. Tea drinkers don't have to worry about plastic bags melting and poisoning them. But that's not the only issue.
"There is another temperature point for plastics, though, that we may need to worry about, called the "glass transition" temperature (Tg) ," writes Orci. At glass transition temperature, the plastic material becomes more porous. Bonds aren't breaking, and the solid isn't changing states into a liquid, but that doesn't really matter--what matters is that, at the glass transition temperature, a plastic tea bag will start leaching more chemicals.
Orci continues: "In the case of PET and food grade nylon (either nylon 6 or nylon 6-6), all have a Tg lower than the temperature of boiling water. For example, while the melting point of PET is 482 degrees Fahrenheit, the Tg is about 169 degrees. Both nylons have a lower glass transition temperature than PET. (Remember that water boils at 212 degrees.)"
The question is, are there unhealthy phthalates in these plastic tea bags that we should worry about? As long as the plastics aren't leaching anything bad, there's little cause for concern. Orci found that Lipton's platic tea bags claim to use "the same food grade material clear water and juice bottles are made of." But, as mentioned earlier, those bottles aren't exactly safe. Studies have shown notable concerning effects on human and animal health.
While plastic tea bags aren't going to make you sick overnight--and probably never will do much to you, unless you drink a ton of tea--it makes sense to limit exposure to them, just like other similar plastics. More health studies and explicit regulations on what's safe for use in foods would help, too. Read Orci's full article for more information from experts and the argument for plastic tea bags, which notes the pollution of paper manufacturing.
Mysteries that have persisted for more than 100 years have finally been laid to rest, as chemists at the University of Detroit Mercy recently studied and identified dozens of liquid compounds collected at the Henry Ford Museum. Those liquids belonged to the slippery self-identified "doctors" and peddlers of the 1800s and early 1900s more commonly known as snake oil salesmen. Their snake oil, as the chemists discovered, sometimes contained healthy vitamins and minerals. But that wasn't always true.
Surprising Science reports that other bottles sitting on the shelves at the Henry Ford Museum contain toxins. It's no wonder snake oil salesmen garnered such a legendery reputation--poor, ignorant townsfolk buying magical potions to cure their sore backs sometimes ended up chugging lead, mercury and arsenic, three ingredients that are not good for curing back pain.
The chemists point out that these ingredients weren't necessarily used maliciously. After all, it's against a salesman's best interests to kill his buyers. Often, these compounds resulted from ignorance and experimentation and operating on common sense rather than meticulous research. "Mercury was long used as the primary treatment for syphilis, as it kills the spirochete bacteria that cause the disease, though it can also harm the patient," writes Surprising Science.
To analyze the liquids that have been sloshing around in glass bottles for over a century, the chemists used nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, which determines the chemical properties of molecules. And snake oil, despite its name, didn't always indicate a liquid. The chemists also used X-rays to study snake oil powders and pills.
Their findings will help the Henry Ford Museum entertain and inform visitors exploring their collection of snake oils. Well, Hollister's Golden Nugget Tablets would help you cure your syphilis, but taken in large quantities they would also give you mercury poisining and potentially kill you. The more you know!
NPR's Planet Money produced this mesmerizing short film about the workings of a modern day potato chip factory, showing the process from the unloading of a giant trailer full of potatoes to the bagging of the fried chips. The most amazing part of the video is the demonstration of Herr's chips' OptoSort system: a camera identifies off-color chips on a wide conveyor belt and uses thousands of tiny air jets to push unwanted ones into a separate bin. Altogether, the factory produces several tons of chips every hour.
Apple sauce? No thanks. Food sticks? Yuck! In NASA's recent Space Food Hall of Fame voting, those two foods came in dead last, losing out in popularity and influence to other astronaut foods like freeze-dried ice cream and Tang. NASA put together a history of space's most famous foods which explains why each is significant. Apple sauce, for example, was no great feat of food engineering, but it did keep astronaut John Glenn nourished as he became the first American to orbit the Earth. He squeezed the apple sauce out of an aluminum tube, the same way that CSA's Commander Chris Hadfield eats his Maple syrup.
Today, astronauts aboard the International Space Station eat like kings compared to the early Mercury and Gemini astronauts. What's surprising about NASA's brief history lesson is that astronauts have been eating pretty well for a long time. Some of the foods we most associate with astronauts--for example, freeze-dried ice cream--only went to space once, on Apollo 7. It survives today as a popular novelty shop item and space camp delicacy, but astronauts generally had better eats during the Apollo program.
The most popular entrant into the Space Food Hall of Fame are M&Ms (technically "candy coated chocolates, since NASA doesn't promote brands), which grabbed about 12.25 percent of the vote. M&Ms have traveled to space more than 130 times since 1981. They're perfect for their simplicity--easy to eat, tasty, and (we imagine) fun to play with in zero gravity.
The next most popular item, the Skylab food system, grabbed 12 percent of the vote. Skylab's food system shows off how advanced space food had become by the 1970s. NASA writes "The goal of the Skylab food system was to balance two things: the need for rigorous scientific experiments about the effects of spaceflight on the human body, and the need to make space food appetizing. In the relative roominess of the Skylab module, food scientists were able to try out a new food tray complete with heating elements and a collapsible drink bottle. Skylab also had a refrigerator and a freezer, and stirrups to allow floating astronauts to "sit" down together for a meal. Skylab had almost all the amenities of a terrestrial kitchen, even though it was orbiting more than 200 miles above the earth." It's not clear from NASA's site who was polled in this vote, though we hope it was astronauts and NASA food scientists.
The space shuttles focused on foods that could be rehydrated, since the electricity generated by its fuel cells produced water; astronauts were able to plan their meals before flying to space, which was a huge step up from the gelatin-coated food cubes of the earlier Mercury missions.
Some more space food fun facts: Tang came in third in the contest and is easily one of the foods (or drinks) most associated with NASA, but the space agency didn't actually invent Tang. It was created by General Foods in 1957, and according to NASA, Kraft Foods now sells over $1 billion worth of Tang annually. The space food stick doesn't quite have the same cultural recognition, but NASA writes that it "is considered by many to be the forerunner of today's energy bar."
And, finally, if you ever wondered whether a Japanese astronaut has made sushi in space--while wearing a chef hat--the answer is yes. Video of that below!
What could be more harmless, more innocent, than a potato? The common nickname spud makes potatoes sound so ordinary, so dull. They're small, and brown, and not especially tasty until they're coated with butter or fried. Harmless. Unless you eat them green. Then, suddenly, you're looking at possible nausea, diarrhea, headaches, vomiting, and death.
Such is the curse of solanine, an alkaloid chemical in potatoes designed to protect them from harm. It's a classic defense mechanism--potatoes produce solanine to ward off insects and fungi--so the more solanine inside a potato, the more likely it is to survive. Unfortunately, that chemical also makes the potato poisonous.
Food researchers ran into solanine problems when they tried to breed a special potato, called the Lenape, back in the 1960s. BoingBoing's Maggie Koerth-Baker has the story. The great thing about the Lenape was its sugar and starch content. Fried into potato chips, it turned a perfect golden brown. The bad thing about the Lenape was that it made people sick. Here's the explanation:
In this video produced by the University of California, Charlie Bamforth, the head of Malting and Brewing Science at UC Davis, shows the basics of beer-making and reveals how to pick the freshest pint when you're at a pub. Plus, he explains why beer is better in a brown bottle over a green one, and why can is a better container for beer. Twist-off bottles are the worst!
Daredevils eat spicy peppers for the rush. Just for the thrill of it. After exposing their mouths to the fire of capsaicin, they usually lose the ability to do anything other than uselessly fan their hands in front of their faces, moan, and cry. Sometimes they curl up into a ball. Those are all universal signs for too hot, and they get the point across, but they're not exactly scientific. We typically turn to the Scoville scale to estimate how hot peppers are. Tabasco sauce sits in the low thousands, while the extreme peppers like the Moruga Scorpion climb up around two million.
There's another way to measure a pepper's hotness--or, rather, the amount of capsaicin it contains--called High Pressure Liquid Chromatography. This is science's way to take on peppers. As pepper site TheChileMan summarizes, in the HPLC test, "A chile solution is placed into the chromatograph machine, and under high pressure, the machine separates the capsaicin from the total volume of liquid and thus calculates the concentration of the capsaicin in parts per million (ppm)."
First a pepper is ground up, and then its powder is placed into a vertical column with a solvent and forced through a packing material like a gel. The test is all about determining how much capsaicin is in the ground up pepper. Because different molecules will adhere to the solvent in different ways, the high pressure test is able to force the different materials into separate layers in the column. And once the capsaicin is separated, scientists can tell exactly how hot a given pepper is.
Though it's still not quite that easy; capsaicin isn't the only heat element in the pepper. There are other compounds, like Dihydrocapsaicin, that bring with them varying degrees of hotness. Each one has to be quantified before the amount of capsaicin present can be multiplied and converted to the Scoville scale. This method has replaced diluting peppers until their hotness can no longer be felt--that was the original way to determine Scovilles--but High Pressure Liquid Chromatography is far more accurate. And it doesn't require tasting peppers over and over again, which is something mouths everywhere should be thankful for.
