Hello again, and hereby continues the streak of midweek special issues. This one has ten nice pieces on something or the other from the world of food and drink. And since I am partial (majorly) to tea, I’ll leave this here before we start off. - The Wizards of Chinese Tea.
- Feel the Burn: Why do we Love Chilli? - Bob Holmes, in this extract from his new book, uncovers the science and psychology behind why we eat chilli. Why do we seek out the pain? How do we rate and rank these hot objects? And researchers even found that the chilli seekers and lovers had different personalities than people who would ordinarily shun hot peppers.
When Byrnes and Hayes tested nearly 250 volunteers, they found that chilli lovers were indeed more likely to be sensation seekers than people who avoided chillies. And it’s not just that sensation seekers approach all of life with more gusto – the effect was specific to chillies. When it came to more boring foods like candy floss, hot dogs or skimmed milk, the sensation seekers were no more likely to partake than their more timid confreres. - Why Should a Melon Cost as much as a Car? - The best strawberries in Japan sell for $500 each. A bunch of grapes sold in 2016 for $11,000. And muskmelons are the kings; $27,000 for a pair. Each fruit species has a color brochure and tasting notes.
- The Fifth Taste - A nice deconstruction of what constitutes the umami taste. I learnt that umami in Japanese merely means “delicious taste”.
- The Unusual Company Behind Sriracha, the World’s Coolest Hot Sauce - David Tran is the CEO of Huy Yong Foods, which manufactures the now ubiquitous sriracha sauce. However, the company does not do publicity, does not know where the sauces are sold, and allows many copies and ripoffs that eat into its profits and revenues.
His dream, Tran tells Quartz, “was never to become a billionaire.” It is “to make enough fresh chili sauce so that everyone who wants Huy Fong can have it. Nothing more.” - Uncanny Patty - “Impossible Foods has created something extraordinary: a vegan burger catered to the most voracious of carnivores. It is the next chapter in America’s proud and disgraceful history with the burger, our most important cultural export. It promises to do a lot of good — but is it any good?” Something I am interested in and passionate about.
The look and structure of the Impossible Burger is similar to actual ground beef — more so than any other plant-based burger on the market — but it’s still not quite the same. In the transparent packaging it’s shipped to restaurants in, tendrils of the plant-based proteins (mostly wheat and potato) are visible within the nebula of red mass, the fat in the mixture coming from coconut oil. In its raw state, it tastes similar to an uncooked potato dipped in blood: vegetal, with an unmistakable, iron-rich minerality, a flavor that most of us would associate with our first yanked tooth.
As unappetizing as that sounds, it’s that flavor that is at the heart of what makes the Impossible Burger unlike any other plant-based meat product on the planet. The catalytic ingredient is a molecule called heme, something found in all living things, but particularly abundant in meat. “Every living cell has heme as an essential biomolecule,” Brown said. “But the things that we call meat have orders of magnitude higher levels of heme than virtually anything found in the plant world.” - Salt Life - Great longread about salt, encompassing many details of the techniques involved in harvesting salt from the sea.
First step: select and collect seawater, which he does from up to 20 different locations around Marblehead. This is the base of his salt. “Just like you would have a center chord in a song, like Pachelbel’s Canon in G, for example,” he says. “And then on top of that, we layer the different kinds of minerals, to tease out the main note.” This means adding more seawater, from any number of locations, depending on tide, temperature, and season. He brings it back to his saltern, a small building next to Father Andrew’s house in a quiet residential neighborhood in Marblehead, to blend the water “much like a blended whiskey.” Next, he slowly and carefully reduces the water down. On the holy mountain in Greece, says Father Andrew, they did this in iron pans heated over branches that had fallen off of nearby trees. But in Marblehead, he had to devise a more modern way: enameled cast-iron pots, induction boilers, and rack ovens. It’s a 27-step process, he says, involving measuring, adjusting, and resting. (He claims that periodic resting allows the salt to form its crystals.) The process takes about 2½ days per batch.
- Texture is the Final Frontier of Food Science - The author of this piece says that he has a problem with foods that feel bland because of their lack of texture. He also says that a lot of us as eaters downplay the role texture plays. And, in a rather radical conclusion, he says that engineering well textured food can make junk food healthier.
Texture is an important indicator of a food’s fat content. If we can figure out how to trick our tongues into sensing more fat than is actually present in a food, we can increase satiation while decreasing a food’s calorie count. That’s why some researchers are finally turning their attention to these taste-making sensations. - The Coffee Shaman - This is about George Howell, the man behind the frappuccino.
Over his forty-year career, he has become a shaman of coffee. He’s known among third-wave coffee producers as a prophet of the terroir-focused, light-roast way of life, a man who gives three-hour PowerPoint presentations detailing every facet of the production process, and the rare boomer in a scene made up mostly of people who were either in grade school or not even born when George opened his first shop. People who have worked with him, or seen him speak, or run into him in Ethiopia or Guatemala (“at origin,” in coffee-world lingo), talk about his enthusiasm, his taste, his curiosity, his strong opinions on coffee processing. But mostly they talk about his pragmatically mystical conviction that a higher truth of coffee exists, and that we can figure out how to get to it.
Also interesting, The curious story of how transatlantic exchange shaped Italy’s illustrious coffee culture. - The Vine Curtain - A story of the wine industry in Moldova. It’s a struggling country which isn’t coping all that well with its soviet antecedents.
- A Falafel House Divided - To end this issue, the story of Fouad and Zouhair Sahyoun, two brothers who learnt the craft of falafel from their father and are now competing with each other in two mirror-like stalls next to each other.
“I don’t work for money, I work for my father’s name,” Fouad said. “Either you work for the name you have or work however you want to make money. I chose the name. He’s not my brother anymore. It’s over. It’s expired.”
Have a great week, and look forward to seeing you Sunday. :)