People are predicting that eating insects will soon be the next big thing in food trends. If you're squeamish about bugs and creepy-crawlies, you will find that hard to believe, but entomophagy – the consumption of insects for nourishment – is something that over two billion people around the world are already doing, according to the UN. Why is this considered to be a good thing? Raising and harvesting insects requires much less land than raising regular livestock. With the cost of meat rising, people are looking for a new source of protein in their diet. While biting into a bug may not appeal to most people, it may help to know that insects contain more protein and are lower in fat than traditional meats - you get a better feed-to-meat ratio than with beef, pork, lamb or chicken. Some of the more popular insects that can be eaten include crickets, grasshoppers, ants, mealworms, larvae from the darkling beetle or rhinoceros beetle, bamboo worms, mopani worms, silkworms, waxworms, as well as scorpions and tarantulas. However, this doesn't mean you can pop a bug in your mouth the next time you see a particularly tasty one when you're outside, as you have no idea if that insect is carrying germs, is poisonous, or is covered with pesticides. And what do clean, safe-to-eat insects taste like, you ask? It depends on the insect, with some tasting similar to toasted avocado; like bacon soup; or even like a salty Jolly Rancher. Below is a recipe for dry-roasted crickets, which have a taste similar to sunflower seeds. If you're still reluctant to give this a try, note that you probably have already ingested some insect parts, eggs, larvae, or filth inadvertently if you've ever eaten canned corn, canned citrus fruit juices, wheat flour, frozen broccoli, ground thyme, ground nutmeg, chocolate. noodles, or peanut butter. The food laws in many countries don't prohibit insect parts in food, as it's not possible to eliminate pest insects from the human food chain, so instead, they limit the quantity; an average of less than 150 insect fragments per 100 grams of wheat flour is considered a permissible level of insect contamination. With this recipe, you can't say you didn't know what you put in your mouth.
Ingredients
25 – 50 live crickets Note: (Again, because of the germ/pesticide issue, use only crickets purchased from a reliable source. Your best bet is a pet store, farming them yourself, or asking your friend with the pet snake where they get their insects from.)
salt (or whatever seasoning you like to sprinkle on your popcorn)
Cricket prep
Place the crickets in a plastic container or storage bag and keep them in the refrigerator, or the freezer for at least for an hour or until you are ready to use them. Treat the crickets the same way you would treat seafood, and use them while they're still fresh. After removing them from the refrigerator or freezer, place the crickets in a pot of boiling water big enough for the amount of crickets you’re using. Add a few pinches of salt, and let them boil for about two minutes. Once boiled, remove the insects from the water and let them cool. The crickets can now be placed in storage bags and kept in the freezer, or used right away for any number of recipes.
Preheat oven to 200 degrees. Arrange the crickets on a cookie sheet, making sure none of them overlap. Bake them for about 60 minutes or until the crickets are completely dry or dry enough for personal taste. You can test a cricket to see if it’s dry enough by crushing it with a spoon against a hard surface, or between your fingers, at about the 45-minute mark.
Once roasted and cooled down, place a few crickets between your palms and carefully roll them to break off their legs and antennae to further ensure you’re eating a clean and crisp cricket. Season them with salt or whatever sort of seasoning you wish. Eat them on the spot or place them back into the freezer for future use.
As a follow-up to a previous blog entry, I'm going to go a little bit further in showing what you can do with just a little flour and butter. This combination, called a roux, is the basis of many sauces. By cooking the flour in the butter, starch granules in the flour begin to break, and when liquid is added, the granules absorb the liquid, thickening the sauce. A roux can also be made with other melted fats such as lard, bacon fat or any cooking oil. Likewise, any starchy flour, such as rice flour or potato flour, can be used for making a roux.
Knowing how to make a simple white sauce (or to use the fancier French term, a Béchamel sauce), is a key building block in making a lot of different things. I'm going to demonstrate using the recipe from my favourite cooking book:
Melt 14 g butter over medium heat in a pan.
Stir in 8 g flour. Make sure the flour and butter is well blended, and has cooked for several minutes until it's a blond to light brown colour.
Add 256g milk, increase the heat to medium-high, and stir or whisk the mixture constantly until it has thickened. Season with salt and pepper to taste.
With this simple ingredient now at your disposal, you can now add a layer of flavour to your meals. Adding equal parts Gruyère and Parmesan cheese after adding the milk makes a great cheese sauce, more formally called a Mornay sauce; I use mozzarella and cheddar in my macaroni and cheese recipe. A spoonful of mustard or mustard seeds (or mustard with mustard seeds) gives you a mustard sauce that goes well with grilled fish. By letting the roux cook until it gets a dark brown in colour, you can make yourself a bayou sauce by adding onions, garlic, and Creole seasonings. Substituting chicken stock for milk in a blond-coloured roux creates a velouté sauce, which, like a Béchamel, is a starter for other sauces. The addition of lemon juice, egg yolk, and cream to a velouté sauce creates an albufera sauce, good for chicken or asparagus; shallots, white wine, lemon juice, and parsley makes a bercy sauce, which is also good on fish. Adding mushrooms, parsley, and lemon to a velouté turns it into a poulette sauce (good for chicken) while adding diced and sautéed onions, paprika, and white wine makes a Hungarian sauce for use on other meats. “Cream of” anything soup uses a thin white sauce for body, and with the right amount of pan drippings from your roast, you can use a roux to make a simple gravy. You can freeze your roux and store it up to 6 months without any problems. For easier use, put the roux in plastic ice-tray molds until it freezes, then store them in the freezer in a freezer bag.
Have you heard of the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge? Of course you have, it's the fundraising social media sensation that's sweeping the nation. Please consider donating money for research to find a cure to this disease, even if you consider dumping cold water on yourself silly.
Viscosity measures how easy something is to pour. Water has a low viscosity and cold syrup has a high viscosity.
The molecules that make a liquid up flow past and bump into each other. To thicken it, we need to add molecules or particles that will impede the motion of the liquid.
Want to measure the viscosity of a fluid, but you don't have a rheometer? If you have some free time on your hands (and who doesn't?), take a container and put a little hole in the bottom, and measure how long it takes for the fluid to flow through the hole.
How thick or how thin a sauce is can make or break a recipe. Some of the ways to thicken food are:
Reduction: This term you've heard on your favourite cooking show means you take the material you want to thicken, heat it on a stove in an open pan, and you reduce it by simmering it until about half of the water has left, through evaporation.
This works because they were already enough molecules in the material you want to thicken to cause a thickening, but because of all the water molecules in the liquid, they were just too far apart to thicken. It works well if you have a stock, because it has lots of gelatin molecules. But it won't work if you just have something with only very small molecules in it. This is why you can't thicken a brine by boiling it, and why can't thicken wine by boiling it, unless you boil it all the way down till it's a glaze and there's almost nothing left.
Here is guest lecturer Carme Ruscalleda in her native Spanish to demonstrate:
Emulsion: Another oft-heard cooking show word, this is the process of combining two liquids (usually fat and water) that will maintain their distinct characteristics after being mixed. Common fat in water emulsifications include hollandaise sauce and mayonnaise, and common water in fat emulsifications are vinaigrettes and whole butter.
Adding oil is a good way to thicken, but it makes what you're making taste of the oil you're using.
Starch-based thickener: This is a classic French technique of mixing and cooking equal parts flour and fat into something called a roux.
The starch in the flour is heated up to the point that it hydrates and gelatinizes, turning the starch molecules into sticky polymers that make a liquid thick.
Note that you have to cook the roux properly, otherwise it will have a floury taste, and it won't thicken well. You can use cornstarch or arrowroot or other starches, but if you put too much in, your roux will get rubbery and have an unpleasant texture.
Modernist thickener: These are substances used by those who worship at the altar of molecular gastronomy. Xanthan gum, a natural product, is made by fermenting a kind of bacteria. Because of the polymer molecules, very small amounts can produce a large increase in the viscosity of a liquid- in most foods, it is used at 0.5%, and can be used in lower concentrations. Xanthan gum also helps thicken commercial egg substitutes made from egg whites, to replace the fat and emulsifiers found in yolks, and is also used in gluten-free baking, as it gives the dough or batter a "stickiness" that would otherwise be achieved with gluten.
A polymer is a very long, but very flexible molecule, made up of many, many monomers. Polymers have to get out of the way of one another in order for the fluid to flow. This is why polymer thickeners are so effective at increasing the viscosity of a fluid.
Gels can also be used in thickening, as their long polymer molecules stick to each other, in a random way, trapping both water molecules and all other molecules, into something that effectively becomes a solid, like Jell-o. When you break them up, by pureeing it for example, the gel will reform slightly, and create a fluid gel, which acts like a thick liquid.
Agar agar (or just agar) is a natural gelatin product made from seaweed that's been used for more than 1000 years in Asian cooking. Like xanthan gum, only a small amount of agar is needed to thicken your soups and sauces.
Food additives like agar agar and xantha gum can be ordered online at MOLECULE-R.
One of the easiest ways to add flavour and brighten up a dish is to use fresh herbs and spices in the recipe. You can pick some up when you're passing through the produce section of the supermarket, or grow them yourself in your garden or on your windowsill. Your hardier herbs (rosemary, sage) can stay green and fragrant for a week or two, as long as they're refrigerated and don't get wet, but more delicate herbs (basil, dill, cilantro, tarragon), need special attention so they don't blacken or freeze in the refrigerator. To keep these herbs at their best, remove any rubber bands or fasteners from them, and trim off the root ends and the lower parts of the stems to prevent the tops from wilting, as the roots draw the moisture from the leaves. Wash herbs only when you're ready to use them, and use your sharpest knife when chopping them. For more information about herbs and spices, check out the image below.
This week's session is about the transfer of heat in cooking food.
Heat is described as a difference in temperatures. Something feels hot because your hand is colder than the thing you touched. When you touch the hot object, energy in the form of heat is transferred from the object to your hand because of the difference in temperatures
As any cook can tell you, it's tough to make things by applying heat in order to make it taste good. The reason is that in order to properly cook something, it is not sufficient to cook the inside of the thing you're trying to cook to a target temperature. It turns out you also have to have the outside hit another target temperature. And that target temperature for the outside is higher than the target temperature of the inside, higher even than the boiling point of water. So to perfectly cook a meatloaf, or vegetables, or whatever you want to eat, you need to get the outside of the food a temperature higher than the boiling point of water, while getting the inside to a temperature below the boiling point of water.
Why is it necessary to cook the outside of a food to a temperature that's higher than the boiling point of water? It's because it's needed to make a very important set of chemical reactions, called the browning reactions. Not surprisingly, these are the reactions that tend to take food and make it have a brown colour. Called the Maillard reactions, after the chemist Louis Maillard who discovered and described them in the 19th century, the way these reactions work is that they are a reaction between carbohydrate molecules, like a sugar, and a protein, which could be a single amino acid. At high temperatures, the combination of a carbohydrate molecule and a protein will lead to hundreds of small molecule by-products. Some of these by-products are colour compounds. They tend to be brown, which is the reason food gets that brownish colour when it cooks.
This is why when you take a piece of fish, seal it in plastic, and cook it sous-vide style (that is, cook it in a constant temperature heat bath), there won't be any flavour molecules produced because the temperature is well below that of the Maillard reactions. Your fish will have a perfect texture, but it would taste quite bland.
If we put a piece of meat or a piece of fish into an oven at a temperature much higher than 100 degrees, the centre of it, where there's lots of water, can't get higher than 100 degrees, because it can't go above the boiling point of water. The only way that it can actually go above that temperature is if you actually boil off some of the water in whatever it is it you’re cooking, so there's a thin layer around the outside where it's actually dried out. Once it's dried out, in that dried out layer, in that thin layer which is dry, you could push the temperature above 100 degrees Celsius, and you can start to get close to the temperature that's needed for browning reactions. That's the reason really that there's a thin crust of brown around food when you cook it because these temperatures can only be hit in the part of the food where it's actually dried out.
Carme Ruscalleda, chef and owner of restaurant Sant Pau, demonstrates her method of cooking a steak.
Michael Brenner and Daniel Rosenburg ttalk about the physics of how heat is transferred to food.
Microscopically, the air around the food being cooked is hot, meaning the molecules are whizzing around like mad, causing the molecules in the food to start whizzing around like mad, and eventually, they all get hot.
Heat diffuses into food like a random walk, which brings us to the Equation of the Week, L=4Dt−−−−√or L is equal to the square root of 4 times D times t, where L is the length of the food, D is the diffusion constant that's governing the random walk and t is time. Scientists call it the heat diffusion concept.
Different foods have different heat diffusion constants. Knowing this and the above equation allows you to estimate how long it takes to cook different foods. I would still recommend using a kitchen timer, however.
The week's lecture ends with a demonstration of how to make a better French fry, a lab assignment consisting of making a molten chocolate cake, and a homework assignment of making fried ice cream balls. I'll post my attempts of making at least one of these recipes in the future.
I'm planning on going camping with some people who enjoy their bacon as much as they enjoy their booze, so I'm bringing some bacon-infused whiskey for the nights around the campfire. I'll be using a technique called fat washing, a process of using fat to “wash out” undesirable molecules. The flavoured fat will bind with the alcohol molecules, creating flavours that you wouldn't normally get in traditional infusing.
Ingredients
1 package bacon (you will need to cook about half the package to produce the required amount of bacon fat)
1 bottle (375 mL) of whiskey or bourbon
Take 4 teaspoons (20g) of filtered bacon fat, and mix it with the entire bottle of whiskey. If you have an immersion blender, this would be a good time to use it.
Let rest at room temperature for at least 12 hours.
Longer times and higher temperatures will yield a stronger infusion, so you’ll want to experiment. As good as it was, I was a bit disappointed that I didn't get hit in the mouth with bacon when I tried the Hogsback Brewing Company's Aporkalypse Now oatmeal bacon stout. For this experiment, I've added several pieces of the cooked bacon to the batch, and will be letting the mixture sit for 10 days.
After the infusing has been completed, place the mixture in the freezer until the fats have solidified. Filter the alcohol, through a coffee filter, or by other means, for as many times as you see fit. It is now ready to be used in your beverage of choice.
How did this batch turn out? Stay tuned...
UPDATE: I started the straining process on the 29th, using the best strainer and coffee filters money can buy from the dollar store. I may have lost about a third of the whiskey during the straining process, but it did remove the top layer of fat that you see in the above image, and all the fat particles and tiny pieces that came off of the bacon. It made a smooth whiskey and cola, you can really taste the bacon flavour in the last few sips. I would recommend giving your mixed drinks a good stirring or shaking to get the bacon whiskey's full flavour.
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