Modernist Cuisine brought the art and science of food together beautifully in the pursuit of the perfect burger.
I want to try one. But wow. So complex.
Tag: Food Science
Science Says: “Don’t freeze your coffee”
Serious Eats is your favourite food blog. You just may not know it yet. They conducted a blind taste test (with the help of my food hero J. Kenji Lopez-Alt.
The table was littered with tiny paper cups numbered one through eight, each representing a different method for storing coffee beans:
- 1. Whole beans stored at room temperature in a Ziploc bag (Ziploc bags are not hermetically sealed—air can still escape and enter the bag)
- 2. Whole beans stored at room temperature in a one-way valve bag (from which CO2 can escape but stale-making air can’t get in)
- 3 and 4. The same beans stored in the freezer
- 4, 5, 6, and 7. Ground coffee stored in the same 4 manners
The grinds and whole beans all came from the same batch. The coffee was stored for two weeks before we cracked it out, to get the full effect.
The taste test followed an earlier, less scientific, test, which came up with the following conclusion (which I agree entirely with)…
“Looking at the results with an open and caffeinated mind, my recommendation is to treat fresh-roasted coffee just as you would fresh-baked bread: Better to buy a little bit, use it up while it’s fresh, and buy more when needed. And, just as with fresh-baked bread, the second-best—though by a mile—option is to prepare it into individual servings and store them air-tight in the freezer (in the case of bread, that means slices; for coffee, that means premeasured doses you’d use to make a certain size batch of joe at a time), using only what you need at any time and never letting them thaw and refreeze.”
When beans thaw they sweat and their chemical make-up changes. It’s bad. Mmmkay.
Happy Meals? Happy times… a study of burgers over time
J. Kenji Lopez-Alt does cool stuff with food. And he’s just done it again. He set out to debunk a popular myth about McDonalds – the idea that their burgers not decomposing is somehow a damning indictment on their food. How? Well, he cooked some home made burgers and recorded similar results.
Here’s where he describes his experiment, and here are the findings.
His conclusion:
“… the burger doesn’t rot because it’s small size and relatively large surface area help it to lose moisture very fast. Without moisture, there’s no mold or bacterial growth. Of course, that the meat is pretty much sterile to begin with due to the high cooking temperature helps things along as well. It’s not really surprising. Humans have known about this phenomenon for thousands of years. After all, how do you think beef jerky is made?
Now don’t get me wrong—I don’t have a dog in this fight either way. I really couldn’t care less whether or not the McDonald’s burger rotted or didn’t. I don’t often eat their burgers, and will continue to not often eat their burgers. My problem is not with McDonald’s. My problem is with bad science.”