An industry dedicated to making foods crispy
bonappetit.com
bonappetit.com
Check out this patent for a horse nugget, for example: https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/63/5b/ef/5e6b6bd...
So if you take that and realize there's more money in palatants for humans than in animals, that'll explain an entire obesity epidemic entirely without any other explanations.
But by dint of this fact, natural flavoring and proprietary crunchification processes and things like that are the thing which will not go away in the general movement against food additives. It's essential to the business.
The number of bakers in France has steadily gone down over the past half century or so. It's been going up a bit recently due to the new phenomenon of upper class white collar workers who quit their job in their 30s to find meaning in their life to do something more "noble" like baking, but it remains to be seen what the long term impact of this will be.
You can manufacture Twix and Cheetos at scale, but not baguettes.
It uses enriched flour (which I doubt makes much difference), but also adds conditioner which really is the culprit of being engineered for mass production.
My mother used to work with a woman who later opened a bakery with her husband and they were well known in the surrounding area for their great bread and bread rolls (this was in Belgium - similar style of bread as in France, baguettes not quite as good but often very close; just saying this wasn't some American sogginess). When I got into making bread at home, I asked him about his special trick to make great bread. The first one was 'experience', i.e. practicing the procedure dozens of times until its perfectly repeatable. And the second was 'a pinch out of my special jar' which he bought from a generic wholesale baking supplies vendor, and which contained the things I mentioned above.
I always add a crushed vitamin C tablet to bread I make; it really helps with the gluten development and the quality of the rise. But most online bread making communities are full of idiots who recoil in horror at such sacrilege - they're all like "if I wanted bread full of chemical additives, I'd buy it in the store" rollseyes. But if you suggest they add a squeeze of lemon juice they they're all cool with it, they just complain about they don't want the slight lemon taste to their bread. Sigh.
Don't get me started on nitrate as a preservative in sausage making and the idiocy 'biological sausage makers' spew about that...
MSG = Kombu Salt
Nitrates = Celery Juice (though this is already done)
HFCS = Artisnal Corn Sugar
The equation of American bread with Wonder Bread is really tired and offensive. Maybe you should spin some tale about how American flour is so, so, different that making bread with flour, salt, yeast and water is so different than in Europe and it comes out completely inedible to those of refined palate.
This varies a lot with the store and in what town you buy the bread. I didn't have this complaint as much in the Northeast as I did out west. But out west, you can find the good stuff if you are more selective and pay more.
I've been ruined by learning about bakeries and good crusty loaves with texture and flavor. Won't eat anything else now.
So I don't know about 'tired', its a real thing.
Im comfortable saying any deli meat or bacon marketed “no added nitrates” is either over priced or subpar quality and , in most cases, being hawked by charlatans who thrive on their customers being low information.
Industrial one may be crispy but have nothing like a good one.
I don't know how it would be better, but I don't think it has to be worse.
The end result is nowhere near what a competent baker can do, working manually and especially when using for instance a wood fire oven
Yes, but a better product can be sold for more. That's why they are making something resembling baguettes in the first place, and not just the cheapest loaf possible.
(Not saying that in practice the factory baguettes are better than what your favourite baker does. Far from it.)
Why?
Oh, perhaps because I wrote 'Yes, but a better product can be sold for more.'?
To be more explicit: Yes, but a better product can be sold for more than a worse product.
(Not: "Yes, but a better product can be sold for more than price of ingredients.")
top sellers on amazon France: https://www.amazon.fr/gp/bestsellers/kitchen/57878031
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/france-bakery-bread...
Even quite on par with what gets sold as artisanal bread in a lot of places. (Though the factory bread is not as good as the real good artisanal stuff, of course.)
So, you can get pretty good quality food from an industrial process, if there's a big market willing to pay for it. It's not even expensive.
Of course, if your consumers don't care or only care for the 'wrong' things, you get: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chorleywood_bread_process
If Americans had sushi and baguettes they wouldn't be slim like the French and Japanese, they'd eat sushi till they are 110% full (the Japanese aim to not stuff themselves at meals) and then carry around a bag of baguettes for in-between grazing (the French prefer set meals).
They'd also blame everything on their delicious national cuisine, rather than on themselves.
Well, that's what you get when the economy's health is measured by broad and sweeping measures like GDP. In the current American economy, the fries company makes 20% more, the doctor treating the obese person eating too many fries or the surgeon doing their lap band surgery gets paid, and a lot of insurance companies and middlemen make money. So everything is happening as planned.
Without socialized healthcare, there is no incentive for food manufacturers to make their foods not addictive. I wonder if there will ever be regulation regarding this as there is for alcohol and cigarettes. Mandatory calorie counts on fast food menus and such are barely scraping the surface.
I do also wonder about where it makes sense to draw the line when it comes to nutrition policy. We all share finite healthcare resources, especially as it becomes more socialized.
I think at the very least it becomes even more obviously predatory for you to make money off peddling addictive junk food to the masses. I would start there when thinking of helpful policy. Though things get ethically questionable very quickly.
Might be more helpful to look into why 7/11 in Japan is full of so much healthy food compared to 7/11 in USA where you're lucky to find a shrink-wrapped apple, and what kind of cultural shift is needed to bring about that change. I feel like that difference summarizes why we are so screwed. We've lost the plot somewhere along the line.
That includes: Britain, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Greece, Israel.
All have adult obesity levels around or over 25%. Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Britain are among the most obese nations on the planet - despite having world-class socialized healthcare systems.
When it comes to adult obesity among major nations (ie not Tuvalu or Tonga), New Zealand is #11, Canada is #13, Australia is #14, Britain is #20.
The only way you can really control that as the parent was trying to imply, is through direct government control of all food consumption and production.
This is an alarmist representation. Incentives can work just fine in a market-driven economic system, witness the most recent tax cuts that were passed into law. Would a generous tax cut for stores that sell mostly fresh food be that bad?
I don't see any reason why one needs to socialize healthcare in order to regulate foodstuffs. Food manufacturers are going to make their foods stuffs addictive if people buy them more because of that, not whether a country has socialized medicine. One might even argue that people have less incentive to work on being healthy when their healthcare is paid by someone else.
Thank you, this is indeed the point that was intended. It's not a direct case of the food manufacturer saying "Hey we have socialized healthcare, let's make healthier chips", it's the government thinking "Damn, we have a lot of obese people, let's have incentives or rules that make manufacturers produce healthier foods".
> "You'll need a LOT of data to support the general hypothesis that humans who eat 20% more of any food will get fat,"
But that's just the thing, theoretically I could choose to eat any number of healthy things, but guess what I think about when I get hungry?
And that's how the food industry turned America into a nation of oinkers. Even modest convenience stores now have entire aisles of chips.
You realize that by definition there will always be more money in human food than animals? The only reason to feed animals, is to feed human, thus any cost related to animals food will be included in human food.
An industry also has much clearer cost to benefit, it's quantitative, it's clear that if you can get the same benefit for 1$ less or if you can get 1$ more out of something that cost less than that, again it makes sense. In the consumer world though, it much less clear, marketing has a much greater power there for example. Most people won't do the math on what's will feed them the most efficiently, they go by taste, they go by packaging, they go by brand awareness.
Honestly, I'm a bit surprised that processed foods don't taste dramatically better than restaurant food considering how much work goes into optimizing everything. I suppose a large part of this process is not strictly optimizing for flavor, but rather shelf life and cost among other factors. Although I do know a lot of Michelin star chefs will use whatever additives are necessary to make a dish taste as good as possible — at least if they don't have a strict focus on natural, locally sourced food.
Can you expand on this for a non-chemist? What's the effect, flavor- or texture wise, of sequestering calcium?
If good cheese didn't melt it would probably not be considered an attractive characteristic and it would not be something people bother to try and simulate with additives.
That is really not my experience. Are we both talking about good to high quality European hard and semi-hard cheeses, especially PDO varieties?
Edit: come to think of it, I should probably also check what you mean by "overheated". E.g. in Greece, where I come from, saganaki [1] is a signature dish that consists of a slab of graviera or kefalotyri (hard cheeses, in the alpine style) deep-fried in batter. I've had my share of sagnaki and I've never seen one break and separate in the way you say.
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Processed cheeses, on the other hand, will typically burn before they break. And they flow very differently when melted.
I think we may be talking about different things. I don't eat processed cheese so I don't know how it behaves. A quick search on the internet tells me that processed cheese can be melted to the point it is poured. It is then used in sauces. For sure, you can't pour real cheese. So I'm talking about the kind of melting you see, e.g. in a raclette:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5U1crD18iM
Yes, real cheese will weep when you heat it but that's not "oil". Depending on the age of the cheese, some of it is whey and the rest is butterfat. But your description of "breaking" makes it sound like you expect cheese to cleanly separate in a puddle of butterfat and a chunk of protein, whereas real cheese will melt into a viscous fluid. That is - if it's cheese that melts in the first place. For instance, feta or haloumi don't melt, etc. I suspect I might misunderstand your description of "break" though.
Regarding saganaki, it is prepared with many different cheeses, normally Greek cheeses. I have no idea how Greek-style cheese behaves, that is prepared outside Greece, but feta will not melt and only weep whey, whereas graviera, kaseri, kefalotyri etc "yellow cheeses" (as we call them) will melt. Saganaki is battered (or sometimes rolled in flour) for this reason- to keep the cheese from spreading after it melts. That's how it's made in Greece. I guess it's made in a different fashion outside of Greece.
Finally- although I've never tried to make tuiles from parmesan, there is a large industry of counterfeit Parmiggianio Reggiano:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5U1crD18iM
Which might well explain ill-behaved "Parmiggiano Reggiano".
The raclette in your linked video has begun to separate and formed an oily sheen on the outside. If you continued to cook it in a pan it would eventually form a puddle of fat.
I don't consider (real) parm ill-behaved when making tuiles. They're yummy.
The way you said it I thought you were describing something really awful that you wouldn't want to eat. I don't see why you'd have to add er additives to cheese otherwise.
Edit: OK, I still don't get it. Do you have a picture or a video of what you're describing?
Either way, did you figure this out yourself from your chemistry background, or can you recommend a book that is "applied chemistry for dummies with a focus on cooking" without going all "modernist cuisine"? To me, cooking is applied chemistry, but the vast majority of all cook books are "here's a pretty picture, follow these exact steps to recreate".
https://www.seriouseats.com/2016/07/whats-really-in-american...
My favorite article is one where he reverse engineers a McDonald fry. His reverse-sear steak is also good.
1. Don't restaurants serve processed food, not to mention with fewer constraints since they don't shove the ingredient list in your face?
2. Who says the reason for a zillion weird ingredients is optimizing the consumer experience? Maybe it's actually a traditional way of trying to prevent competitors from duplicating a product? Recently, I've noticed an increasing number of products in mainstream US grocery stores that are more or less "processed food", but they have a small number of normal food-type ingredients, in dramatic contrast to those that are full of additives and weird stuff. Yet they aren't marketed as "organic" or otherwise suggestive of orthorexia.
I wouldn't describe as a failing of the Coca-cola company the fact that I don't like coke. Everyone has preferences. I would describe as their utter failure the fact that the first time I enjoyed drinking a cola since age 10 was when I had an unsweetened cola-flavoured La Croix.
For the longest time I didn't understand why vending machines exist, until I went to Japan and noticed I was always within arm's reach of a refreshingly bitter tea.
I had always mentally equated that bottled drink == headache-inducing sugar rush and it necessarily had to be that way. Even when they made a sugar free drink, they just loaded it with other sweeteners.
But that was really just an optimization process gone wrong and gotten trapped in a local minimum, I guess. I hope they're starting to learn their lesson.
I'm sure they do. That's why they came out with the baked chips, hundreds of non-sugar diet drinks (e.g. slightly flavored 0 calorie water). We all eat. We all get addicted. They just need to find your poison and optimize it.
> I hope they're starting to learn their lesson.
As this article shows, they've got an entire industry to learning every possible lesson.
Maybe it just took them a long time to spread to Canada.
1. Everything can be shipped online, so niche targets have more options. I have a memory of craving Yoo-Hoo in college, in the mid-2000's and seeing no local outlet for it, and therefore I went on Amazon and purchased six boxes of the stuff. I got what I wanted, although by the time I was done with those six boxes, I was very much over Yoo-Hoo.
2. The move towards stocked-fridge offices as seen in every SV tech campus, which make more of these items a B2B purchase, and therefore incentivize developing and marketing products on the basis of productivity-enhancing qualities. In the not so distant past it was more common for a campus cafeteria to be relatively modest, putting things in the hands of the culture more generally...
...and there is evidence for a "big sugar" industry conspiracy in the late 20th century pinning the blame for heart disease on high-fat diets, and therefore shifting the culture for a whole generation, but primarily in North America. Other countries did not have the same kinds of trends. And since that marketing position has gradually decayed they are forced to start selling water minus the sugar, indeed they anticipated that happening when they started bringing out diet sodas in the 80's.
Anyway, diet sodas have been around forever but to my memory always attempted to taste as sweet as the sugary drinks.
I used to like their drinks back when it was possible to find them in stores, perhaps 15-20 years ago. But I'm pretty sure they were all sweetened...
> A 12-ounce White Claw also has 100 calories, 2g of sugars, and 2g of carbs.
Unsweetened, flavored carbonated water really became cool recently rather than just something people drank when they were taking a break from alcohol or coca cola. I'd be dumbfounded if numbers didn't back this up among people 25-40 in the past 5 years.
That is orthagonal to the engineering that goes into making millions of chips a day. Just because I don't enjoy going on Royal Carribean cruises doesn't mean I shouldn't appreciate the logistical miracle that goes behind the scenes to make 12,000 meals a day. Nor does it diminish the engineering miracles that went into making this huge city in the middle of the ocean where you can hang out and have a martini while playing casino. Not my thing but amazing nevertheless.
Ever looked at Cigarette manufacturing line? I have. And it is insane! 10,000 cigarettes a minute. My jaw was on the floor. Deeply immoral business but I think that's orthagonal.
Oh I think not... for that you would need to visit Nottingham, PA ;). https://www.herrs.com/visit-us/
They also have an expert project how we'll likely have delivery vehicles in the future with deep fryers built in.
[0] https://www.npr.org/2019/10/23/772775254/episode-946-fries-o...
Ah, like Zume for french fries! In fact this would give something for Zume to do with their abandoned robotic pizza delivery trucks. Just replace the ovens with deep fryers.
And if Zume doesn't pick up on this, Softbank Vision Fund will be sure to invest.
Interesting cooking book:
On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen by McGee, 2007
To me it just looks to be a small convection oven (which I have), but doesn't seem to offer any advantage except maybe ease of cleaning or power consumption.
Are they better sealed so little heat leakage or a stronger fan?
https://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-air-fryer/
"The Best Air Fryer Is a Convection Toaster Oven"
Definitely sticking with the oven.
Food science is important work—it took a LOT of attention relative to comms in the first half of XXc.
[1] https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/magazine/where-is-the-salt...
Off the top of my head, the only "non-mushy" cuisine I can think of might be a meat heavy one and maybe an uncooked vegetable one. The former definitely describing my upbringing in Texas. Felt like I grew up on beef and mustard greens.