According to the folks at Noma, a Garum (a fermented sauce typically made from seafood originally) made from grasshoppers, moth larvae and koji (for the digestive enzymes) is the most astonishingly nutty, toasty and umami laden sauce imaginable.
Roman garums/SE Asian fish sauces are made by letting the seafood’s own digestive enzymes break down the proteins in their bodies and liquefy over weeks and months. Salt keeps microbes away and the glutamic acid content at the end is off the charts.
It is glutamic acid (one of the amino acids) and its salts (like monosodium glutamate) that our tongues (and even stomachs!) detect and lend that lingering feeling of deliciousness and satiation that is called Umami.
Interestingly, the Roman Empire was absolutely obsessed with fish-based garum but once they collapsed, Europe just forgot about this ingredient. SE Asia still continues to use it in many forms. Vietnamese fish sauce and Thai shrimp paste are 2 examples. Exact same method.
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It still blows my mind that the largest superfamily of genes in the human genome is dedicated to...the sense of smell. One would have assumed that it might be something more critical but it does indeed suggest that we have significantly underestimated olfaction for a long time.
Also, this seeming truism about dogs having a better sense of smell than human beings is, it turns out, only partially true. Dogs are fantastically adapted to orthonasal olfaction (smelling things from the outside) while human beings are absolute gods at retronasal olfaction
Dogs have fantastic external smelling apparatus but very limited brain capacity to process those smells. But human beings experience smell as a pandimensional experience in our brains, and that's what makes cooking such a uniquely human endeavour
If you have wondered how electric rice cookers know when to stop cooking, the engineering behind that is some of the most minimalist brilliance I’ve seen, brilliance that keeps the cost of these appliances down to ridiculously cheap levels.
So 2 high school physics concepts to revise before we understand this 1. Latent heat of water - you can raise the temp of water pretty quickly to close to 100C but then it takes extra heat to actually get past 100 cos of the energy required to actually turn water into vapour
So you can observe this by bringing some water to a boil and checking its temperature. It will rise to 95-96 at a reasonable pace and then slow down because as long as there is liquid water left in the vessel, the temp can’t go above 100C
A short thread on how I approach learning a new skill
Important caveat: how people learn is a deeply personal thing (in much the same way nutrition is) and barring some recent breakthroughs in neuroscience, most “how to hack your brain” advice is usually dubious. What works for me may not work for anyone else
And almost all post-facto “analysis” is fraught with hindsight biases. Learning is almost always never neat and organized. It’s messy and more random than people make it out to be.
As Cyclone Nivar bears down towards the TN coast, we were treated to some spectacular rolling thunder overnight. The kind that starts off as a low rumble and builds up like a dubstep drop into a ear-shattering final crack.
And since it woke all of us up, it was an opportunity to do an #ELI5 on thunder with the son. But to explain thunder, one has to understand lightning, because a thunder is essentially the sonic boom that accompanies lightning
Lightning happens when a massive difference in electrical charge happens between clouds or between cloud and ground. When this difference in voltage becomes too high, things are settled by electrons moving en masse from one point to another to equalise the situation.
I've started writing a column on food science for @Mint_Lounge and the first one is about the science of gluten and how to reliably make soft chapathi and fluffy poori
Episode 2 of my Masala Lab column for @Mint_Lounge explores the versatility of the much maligned refined wheat flour - Maida (and because it’s so versatile, it gets 2 illustrations) lifestyle.livemint.com/food/discover/…
Since the illustrations don't seem to be visible on mobile browsers for many, here they are