Food
Culture
19 rabbit holes · 12 people exploring
Common starting questions
- does sourdough really taste different depending on where it's made?
- Is the croissant Austrian or French?
- Why does cilantro taste like soap to some people?
- Why don't birds feel spicy food?
- Why is corn for tortillas soaked in lime?
Rabbit holes
- there's a library of sourdough starters in Belgium
A baking company keeps over a hundred sourdough starters from around the world in fridges in St. Vith, and supposedly refreshes each one with flour from its home region so they don't drift. It's a seed vault but for bread.
Ravi Subramanian · 5 sources
- garum: the fermented fish sauce Romans put on everything
Fish guts and salt fermented in the sun for months. Sounds awful, tastes like umami. Southeast Asian fish sauce is a very close relative.
Yuki Tanabe · 5 sources
- Japanese curry probably came via the British navy, and the Japanese navy still eats it every Friday
Curry reached Japan in the Meiji era via the British, as curry powder rather than anything directly from India, which is why it's a thick roux stew. The navy adopted it, and the JMSDF still serves curry on Fridays.
Yuki Tanabe · 6 sources
- is the croissant actually Austrian?
Kind of both. The kipferl, a crescent-shaped roll, goes back centuries in Austria. The flaky laminated croissant came much later in France, after a Viennese bakery made the shape fashionable in Paris. The siege-of-Vienna origin story is a legend.
Ravi Subramanian · 6 sources
- water drops skate on a hot pan because they're floating on steam
Cooking question that turned into a physics evening. Past a certain temperature the bottom of the drop flash-boils and the drop rides on its own layer of vapor, so it lasts way longer than it would on a merely hot pan.
Ilya Smirnov · 5 sources
- Momofuku Ando invented instant ramen in a backyard shed at 48
1958, Osaka. After months of trial and error in a shed behind his house, Ando landed on flash-frying the seasoned noodles, which dries them and leaves tiny holes so they rehydrate fast in hot water. Cup Noodles followed in 1971.
Noor Rahman · 5 sources
- fortune cookies are Japanese
Descended from a Japanese cracker. Chinese restaurants in the US took them over, partly because Japanese Americans were sent to internment camps during WWII.
Beatriz Oliveira · 4 sources
- cilantro tastes like soap to some people. it's (partly) genetic
Inês Carvalho · 5 sources
- birds can't feel chili heat, and that's kind of the point
Vera Lindholm · 6 sources
- ketchup used to be fish sauce
Probably from a Hokkien word for fermented fish sauce. English versions were made of mushrooms, walnuts, oysters. Tomato came later; Heinz won by dropping the preservatives everyone else used.
An Bui · 5 sources
- cooking corn with lime kept people healthy for thousands of years
Mesoamerican cooks have cooked corn in alkaline lime water for thousands of years. When corn spread to Europe and the American South, the crop traveled but the technique didn't, and people living mostly on corn got pellagra.
Ravi Subramanian · 6 sources
- an Italian bank takes cheese as collateral
Credem in Emilia-Romagna lends money to Parmigiano makers against wheels of their cheese, which sit aging in the bank's climate-controlled warehouses while the loan runs. Collateral that gets more valuable while it waits is honestly a great deal for everyone.
Kwame Darko · 5 sources
- the Big Mac index started as a joke
Kwame Darko · 5 sources
- MSG was discovered by a chemist trying to work out why dashi tastes so good
1908, Tokyo. Ikeda isolated glutamate from kombu broth, named the taste 'umami', and a businessman started selling it as Ajinomoto. It took most of the century, and the discovery of actual taste receptors for it, for umami to be widely accepted as a basic taste.
Yuki Tanabe · 6 sources
- Japan has a national fungus
Aspergillus oryzae, koji, is the mold behind sake, miso, soy sauce and mirin. The Brewing Society of Japan named it the 'national fungus' in 2006.
Frida Nyström · 6 sources
- surströmming cans bulge because the fish is still fermenting
Baltic herring fermented with just enough salt to stop it rotting, then canned while it's still fermenting, so the cans swell over the months. You open it well away from the table, ideally punctured underwater in a bucket. In 2006 several big airlines banned it, calling the bulging cans potentially explosive.
Rob Fitzgerald · 5 sources
- every banana you've eaten is a clone
Yuki Tanabe · 5 sources
- almost all vanilla is hand-pollinated, using a trick a 12-year-old figured out in 1841
Outside Mexico, vanilla orchids barely set fruit because their natural pollinators aren't there. On Réunion in 1841, Edmond Albius, a 12-year-old enslaved boy, worked out a fast way to pollinate each flower by hand with a thin stick and his thumb. Commercial vanilla is still done that way, one flower at a time.
Ravi Subramanian · 6 sources
- pretzels are dipped in lye and that's why they're brown
Valentina Russo · 6 sources