paulraphael

My girlfriend works in a hospital in the Bronx. She's had patients who are obese. huge, huge people, and often with horrible related problems like diabetes and heart disease. More than once, when asked about their diet, they've said "I don't eat anything." Since this sounded suspicious, she'd press them on it, and discover that they really did eat next to nothing. But they drank coke by the 2-liter bottle. It didn't cross their minds that they're getting a bajillion calories from this diet (and nothing else). They were completely mystified by their health problems.

The NY Times did an interesting series on obesity in the u.s. a year or two back. They pinned a lot of it on opportunity, in the form of huge, cheap portions, made possible by the incredibly low price of corn, made possible by Nixon's butchering of the country's farm subsidy program back in the '70s. Short version: the government used to pay farmers not to produce surplusses in glut years, so the food supply stayed stable. Now they pay farmers to produce no matter what, driving prices down, encouraging more overproduction, leading to a permanent glut. When you go to McDonalds, you are surrounded by corn. The beef is essentially cow-processed corn (it's what they're fed); the 72oz soft drinks are mostly corn syrup; the fries are fried mostly in corn oil. It's all practically free, so the portions are huge, and we're raised on "value meals" the size of a wheelbarrow. And this is the second time we've had a corn glut in the U.S. The first time was in colonial days, but back then instead of turning it into junk food they turned it into cheap booze. European travel agents organized corn liquor tours of the colonies, for tourists who wanted to slum a little and get wasted all across the new world.

No one made such a claim. Although it wouldn't be hard to find a diet that includes a reasonable amount of white sugar that's healthy. If you're looking for research to support this claim, I'm afraid you'll be disappointed. This could be true, but now you're talking about diets, not ingredients. It's a more productive kind of discussion. Without getting into the politics of the ban, I believe that artificial trans fats are as deserving of demonization as any ingredient could be. Because 1) their negative health effects, even in relatively small quantities, are heavily documented (their ability to raise ldl cholesterol levels is several times higher than regular saturated fat); 2) if you didn't make the food, you don't know if they're in there unless you're actively asking or inspecting labels; and 3) there are reasonable substitutes. The same can't be said for sugar, which is one of the body's primary nutrients. As with anything else, too much is too much, but there's nothing fundamentally harmful about it (if you can find actual evidence that "refined sugar" is processed by the body in ways significantly different from the sugars in fruits, I'd love to see it. Hint: I've looked.)

As an adendum, this is specifically the kind of thinking that I'm at war against: Hitting google and looking at encyclopedia articles doesn't count as examining the evidence. It counts as looking at other people's interpretations of the evidence (or of rumor, fad, heresay ...) If you want evidence, get on the NIH PubMed database, and see the actual state of the research on the subject. The first thing you'll discover is that there are far fewer simple answers than what most people assume. The second thing is that most fad diets, health kicks, knee-jerk fears are based on next to nothing. If you know anyone who does research, they can help you understand the format and some of the lingo (my girlfriend is an MD PhD, so she's been able to walk me through some of the clinical conventions). Just beware that research is very specific; forming generalizations based on a particular result can send you down the slippery slope encounted by well-intentioned but misinformed journalists (if lab mice get brain tumors from eating half their body weight in chocolate every day, you shouldn't assume you're going to die from a hershey bar. that kind of thing). http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/

I made the mistake once of making an infused syrup with blackberries in a copper pan that had most of the tin lining worn away. The result tasted more like pennies than blackberries! Berries are more acidic than chocolate, but I don't know the chemistry involved ... how strong an acid has to be, or what particular types of acid, before you start leeching signinficant amounts of ion into the food. I'm wondering if the bowl could be effecting the flavor of the chocolate in some subtle ways ... and hoping to find some conventional wisdom on the subject, so I can avoid doing yet another science experiment.

The Healing Daily article is the kind of agit prop that I'm railing against. If the claims are based on any scientific research at all, I'd be willing to be bet that they are based on interpretations of the research not shared by the researchers themselves. This kind of discussion makes me insane because it testifies to the horrible state of science education in this country. We have journalists and bloggers writing on scientific subjects who don't understand how science is done or anything about its abilities or limitations. And we have a public that salivates for the latest, hipest, unssupported pseudoscientific claims. I would have to write fifty pages to refute every point in that article. I'm not going to do it, but as a simple example I'll speak to one of them. Glycemic index is a new favorite. The statements that get made about g.i. and thrown around as truths these day, don't make any sense at all. There's a general assumption that eating high g.i. foods is bad. In fact, there are situations (recovering from exercise, for example) when they are the ideal thing to eat. It's also been shown that the body's blood sugar stability and tolerance for high g.i. foods is highly individual. There is no one-size-fits-all data for what g.i. is ideal for all people under all circumstances. Research showing detrimental health effects from from high g.i. foods is not demonstrating that these foods are bad, but that TOO MUCH of these foods are bad ... just as too much fat is bad, too much protein is bad, too much salt is bad, and even too much water is bad. The difference between a beneficial nutrient and a toxin is often a matter of dose and context. There's also a general assumption that simple sugars have a higher g.i. than complex carbohydrates, and that among simple sugars, refined ones have a higher g.i. than unrefined ones. In practice this is not true. For example, here are the glycemic indices of some "bad for you" sweets made with refined sugar: pound cake 54 chocolate cake 38 sponge cake 46 danish pastry 59 Here here are the glycemic indices of some fruits, representing unrefined, natural sugars: raisins 64 pineapple 66 watermeellon 72 And here are the glycemic indices of some complex carbohydrate foods, including whole grains and a root vegetable: rice cakes 77 brown rice pasta 92 parsnips 97 Is this surprising? If so, it's because the science behind g.i. is complex. Finally, there's the idea that you can look at the glycemic index of an individual ingredient and know ANYTHING about how it will effect your body in the context of an actual meal. You can't. Your body doesn't process the food in isolation. Pure sucrose has a pretty high g.i., but when you have it with fats, the total g.i. of the meal plummets. Hence the low g.i. of chocolate cake. Is this an argument for eating piles of refined sugar, or seeking out a high g.i. diet? I hope not. My point is that you need to beware of the pseudoscience (and we drown in more pseudoscience than we do high fructose corn syrup, in my opinion) and respect the complexity of the issues. There are few individual ingredients that desserve demonizing. Almost anything that occurs in significant quantities in natural foods is probably ok--in some proportion--as a part of a good diet.

Might be good shaved really thin, so it melts instantly in your mouth. On top of fruit? with some kind of liqueur?

I've seen that warning on a lot of pans. I bought some calphalon pans back when they were just repackaged commercial pans, and the sticker said the same thing. Probably they assume their customers don't know how to cook, and figure they'll do less damage with less fire.

We've been through it, but I'm not convinced that's the best possible way to do it. In theory you could do better. I'd like to hear from someone who's tried it a few of the more promising ways.

This must come up in commercial pastry kitchens. Do the pros handle the eggs differently if they're not going to be cooked?

What's the prefered way to separate a whole lot of eggs, if they're going to be used raw? I have to do a bunch tonight. Normally I'd just strain them with my hands, rather than doing the housewife method (with the egg shells) or straining with a skimmer. But this recipe has a ton of raw yolks in it, and I'm thinking it might be best to keep my paws off of them. I could also quasi-pasteurize them over heat, but I've never done this and I'm afraid of cooking them by mistake. Thoughts?

Data like mortality rates can only make sense if you break it down to more specific populations than whole countries. For example, in a country like the U.S., if rates of infant mortality, diabetes, and asthma are way up among extremely poor populations, this can have a pronounced effect on the numbers for the total population. But it will actually tell you nothing about the average health of other demographics. If those numbers are actually down for the middle class, then it's unlikely that you can peg those high disease rates on foods or environmental factors that are shared by both groups.

The advantage to this method is that you'll get a crisper char, because the surface won't spend time in the warm oven getting steamed by the underlying meat. The advantages to browning first are that it's easier, and that it kills bacteria on the surface of the roast, so you don't have to worry as much about them if you go really low and really slow. One low and slow approach is to sear first, and then put the roast in a cold oven set to 200 or 250 degrees. This allows the meat to spend a lot of time in the 70 to 140 degree range where the meat's enzyme activity is highest. Time spent in this range accomplishes many of the same effects on flavor and texture as aging, but very rapidly. It's also a favorite temperature range for pathogens, so it could be unwise to go this slow with meat that hasn't been sanitized first on the stovetop.

Oh, yeah, all my bread gets salvaged this way. I don't run it under the faucet. I wet my hands and use them like a paintbrush to dab the water evenly on the outside of the bread. Works really well even for bread that's a couple of days old. The heat of the toaster evaporates the water ... it steams the inside of the bread, and then once the water's gone from the surface the surface can get toasted.

I usually use a copper egg white mixing bowl for melting chocolate. Its conductivity helps the chocolate cool down quickly. But it just crossed my mind that chocolate is somewhat acidic. Does anyone know if it's so acidic as to disolve enough copper ions to interfere with flavor (or good health)?

I think people are quick to jump on simplistic ideas about what kinds of refinement are bad, and what kinds of chemicals are bad. While there's plenty of scientific evidence showing that wheat germ and bran can be beneficial, there is no evidence suggesting that flour is somehow made harmful by sifting those things out. There is likewise no compelling scientific evidence suggesting that refined sugars are somehow harmful (agit prop blogs and books based on annecdote really do not count as evidence). Nutritionists would rather have us look at diets as a whole rather than at individual foods or ingredients. A diet too high in refined sugars often correlates with either too high a calorie intake, or too low an intake of more important nutrients. This is not the same as saying that refined sugars are harmful. In addition, the folk wisdom of "avoid anything with scary sounding chemical names" can be misleading. There are plenty of wholesome seeming natural plants that are harmful (most obviously hemlock, and a whole range of mushrooms, less obviously foods like fiddlehead ferns). And there are plenty of scary sounding chemicals that are the stuff of life. Consider this ingredient list: Cyclohexane, methylcyclohexane, hydrocarbon, dimethylcyclohexane, ethylcyclohexane, 1,1-diethoxyethane, ethanol, alpha-pinene, 1-methylpropan-1-ol, toluene, alpha-fenchene, camphene, hexanal, an ethyl butenoate, butan-1-ol, beta-pinene, sabinene, xylene, car-3-ene, myrcene, alpha-phellandrene, 3-methylbutan-1-ol, limonene, beta-phellandrene, gama-terpinene, para-cymene, alpha-terpinolene, cis-hex-3-en-1-ol, 2-furfural, ethyl octanoate, alpha-copanene, beta-caryophyllene, ehtyl decanoate, sabinyl acetate, alpha-humulene, ethyl dodecanoate I know people who would fear contracting cancer just from reading a list like that. But it's actually just a partial list of the naturally ocurring flavor compounds in a mango. As a broad generalization, I think it's smart to choose minimally processed foods when the choice makes sense, and to likewise avoid chemical additives and food substitutes (fake sugar, fake fat, etc.). But it's important to recognize the limitations of any generalization. It's better to actually learn about the ingredients involved, rather than to leap to simple conclusions on a topic that's by its nature complex.

I bet that records of mortality rates and food-borne illness would show that we're a lot safer.

Enough with all the health food. How about a Chocolate Marquise? http://recipes.egullet.org/recipes/r1993.html

My short answer: stop thinking about it.

They're great braised; it's also my favorite cut for soups. Practically impossible to overcook. I make over and over again based on a James Peterson recipe ... a Moroccan tagine-style lamb soup with tomatoes and dried apricots. Shanks would be perfect for any lamb soup.

My girlfriend is in her fist year of medical residency at a hospital in the Bronx. If you're not familiar with the life of a resident, look up "indentured servitude" on Wikipedia, or just read some of the letters written by Russian soldiers at Stalingrad At any rate, she loves food, but has little access to good food of any kind, and virtually no time to cook. Anything more complicated than heating something up on the stove or in the microwave will probably be too much, although she's ok with preparing some things a day or two in advance, like rice. Some things I've been considering are those chef-made, frozen sous vide meals (expensive ... I'd get them for her as presents), and those ready-to-eat indian meals (by companies like tasty bite). One catch is that she's a ravenous meat-eater, and would only be satisfied by something like the tasty bite meals if she was able to add some pre-prepared meat. Any ideas?

This was a recent thread about probe thermometers: http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showto...0entry1499788 There were some interesting suggestions, including one that sent me to scientific websites looking for other options. It might take some snooping around to find the best deal, but there are some products that compete well with the thermapen, which seems to be a repackaged scientific thermometer. Here's just one option: http://www.bestlabdeals.com/CheckTemp_4_Fo.../haninmp019.htm

So far, Bar Keepers Friend hasn't scratched anything of mine. But I've seen lot of scrub sponges labelled "safe for all surfaces" scratch stainless steel. All my pans are at least a little scratched from years of using these things without really paying attention, but I've switched to using much softer ones, like the scotch bright domi pads, or other similar ones that just have fabric on the outside. Plain sponges work also.

I think the issue is less hardness of the food than a kind of toughness that could grab the edge of the blade. If the blade catches in something of certain consistencies, and you torque it one way or another, you could chip the edge. After a certain degree of hardening, kinfe steel takes on a brittle failure mode, so it chips instead of bending. I have some softer knives with faint ripples in the edge; those would likely have been chips if I did whatever I'd done with my gyuto. I don't cut a lot of pineapple, so I don't have much sense of it. I read elsewhere that by "pumpkin," JCK might be talking about some heavier duty kinds of squash or gourds.

I'm trying to cultivate the habit of using as many cues as possible simultaneously. It's easy to get in the habit of just using one (visual, feel, time, thermometer, etc.). The nice thing about using several, beyond getting multiple opinions, is that you get to learn more about what each cue really indicates. You start to get a sense of how something feels when the center is 140 degrees, and how long it takes for that cut of meat at that size to get to that temp, etc. You also get a better sense of when one of your indicators isn't trustworthy. For example, when I was experimenting with roasting chickens, I used a probe thermometer (placed in the section between breast and thigh) to monitor doneness. I became a slave to the thermometer, and didn't pay attention to other signs. A couple of times, the reading was way off, and I ended up pulling the bird out ten degrees over- or undercooked. It turns out that with a chicken, thermometer placement is really tricky, and there can be a range of over ten degrees between the thermometer tip being in flesh, in an air pocket, or against a bone. This issue is separate from the accuracy of the thermometer, which is pretty good ... it's more along the lines of the difficulties with using them that you mentioned. Now i might use a thermometer, especially in an unfamiliar oven, but I don't obey it without looking at other indicators, like surface browning and the looseness of the hip joint.