Is It Safe To Eat Cheese Rinds?

Is It Safe To Eat Cheese Rinds?

food   3:03 AM

Whether or not you should eat a cheese rind depends entirely on your taste, as even the most unpalatable rinds are in no way poisonous or dangerous to eat. Often imparting a unique and even complementary flavor, consuming the rind along with the headline act is frequently recommended for some cheeses. On the other hand, not everyone enjoys the flavor or texture of even the mildest rinds, and, in fact, several prominent cheese experts discourage rind consumption altogether.

For those cheeses that have a rind, it may serve one or more purposes, such as imparting flavor, retaining moisture and protecting the cheese from air and the elements. Generally speaking, the harder the rind, the longer the cheese has aged.

If you choose to eat the rind, it will help to know a little about the different types of cheeses and their rinds to see just how daring you’re willing to be. As a general guide to cheese rind eating, here are several “families” of cheese in terms of rinds (or their lack).

Bloomy rind chesses like Brie and Camembert have lovely white rinds that are soft, easy to chew and add a delicate umami flavor (like mushrooms) that many people enjoy. You should know that the “bloom” however comes from penicillium candidum, a special type of mold that is purposely sprayed on the cheese’s surface. Nonetheless, despite its moldy composition, these bloomy rinds are among the most appealing in terms of taste and texture.

Washed rind cheeses are slathered or “washed” in any of a variety of products, including beer and wine to encourage the growth of flavor-imparting bacteria and mold that add distinct flavor and usually make the cheese a bit stinky. These may also be washed in a brine, which can leave salt crystals behind on the rind that impart a grainy texture. Examples of washed cheeses include Muenster and Taleggio, and these rinds may be pinkish, gray, reddish and even a bit mottled.

Blue cheeses have a variety of rinds from the naturally developed, like Stilton, to those wrapped in sycamore leaves like Cabrales. The rinds of these cheeses, which can also include simply foil and plastic, are not traditionally eaten. But, again, if it’s your cup of tea, eat away. It won’t hurt you.

Hard cheeses are typically aged for long periods of time, and after (in some cases) years of aging, their rinds become pretty tough. In addition, given their long aging process, these cheeses may have been wrapped in a man-made casing that isn’t intended to be eaten. Examples of these kinds of cheeses include aged gouda with its wax rind and cheddars wrapped in cloth.

When experimenting with a new rind, experts suggest you start from the part of the slice of cheese that is furthest from the rind and nibble your way outward; by this method, you will enjoy the most delicate flavors of the cheese first, and then experience increasingly stronger flavors. If the flavor and texture continues to be enjoyable, you can continue all the way to eating the rind.  If not, the rinds of many cheeses, such as Parmesan, which some find too strong, make for great flavor additions to a pot of stew.

Why Spicy Foods Can Cause Your Nose to Run ?

Why Spicy Foods Can Cause Your Nose to Run ?

medicine   1:34 AM

In most spicy foods, this is thanks to the same chemicals that cause the burning sensation on your tongue, namely capsaicin or allyl isothiocyanate.  Capsaicin is chemical found in fruits of the genus Capsicum, which includes peppers. It is present, usually in relatively high amounts, in the placental tissue that holds the seeds of the peppers, as well as in lower concentrations in other parts of the fruit.

The capsaicin works as a deterrent to stop various animals, particularly mammals that would crunch the seeds, from eating the fruits or otherwise harming the plants or seeds. It also functions as an anti-fungal agent, which further protects the plants.

Allyl isothiocyanate, on the other hand, is a colorless oil that can be found in things like mustard, radishes, and wasabi.   Like capsaicin, it serves as a defense for the plant against various animals, as well as works as an anti-fungal agent.

These chemicals end up not only causing a “hot” sensation on your tongue, but also irritate the mucous membranes in your nose, causing them to become inflamed.  This triggers those membranes to produce extra amounts of mucous as a defense mechanism to try to keep out whatever unwanted substance or particles are causing the irritation.

This same type of irritation is why your eyes may also become watery when you eat very spicy foods.  The capsaicin or allyl isothiocyanate can irritate the membranes in your eyes, causing your tear ducts to kick into overdrive trying to wash the irritant away.  This can make your nose even more runny as some of the tears drain into your sinuses.

Capsaicin and allyl isothiocyanate also irritate various tissues inside your body, such as your intestines.  This causes your body to react by trying to flush the irritant out.  This is why after eating spicy foods you sometimes have the dreaded “liquid fire” poop.

Why Onions Make You Cry ?

Why Onions Make You Cry ?

food   1:21 AM

Onions, along with many other plants in the Allium species (garlic is another popular one), absorb sulfur from the soil.  When onions are chopped, it ends up breaking cells within the onion, which releases certain enzymes.  

These enzymes then react with the sulfur, creating amino acid sulfoxides.  These, in turn, create the highly unstable syn-propanethial-S-oxide, which is a combination of sulfuric acid, sulfur dioxide, and hydrogen sulfide.    When this substance, in a gaseous state, comes in contact with the moisture in your eye, it triggers a burning sensation via the ciliary nerve.

Tears in the eyes are regulated by the lachrymal gland, which is situated just above your eyelids.  When the brain gets a message that there is an irritant in the eye, such as the above syn-propanethial-S-oxide, which gives a burning sensation, it then kicks the lachrymal glands into overdrive, trying to flush the irritant out of your eye(s) with tears.

Cooked onions won’t produce this same effect because the process of cooking the onion inactivates the enzymes needed to make the syn-propanethial-S-oxide.  So you can safely chew the cooked onions without getting teary-eyed.

Best Ways to Stop Onions From Making Your Eyes Water

• Refrigerate the onion at least 30 minutes before cutting.  Alternatively, put the onion in ice-water for a few minutes before cutting.  By cooling the onion, you will slow the enzyme/sulfoxides reaction rate, minimizing the syn-propanethial-S-oxide production.
• Turn a fan on, blowing across the onions and away from you.
• Run water over the onions as you cut them.  The syn-propanethial-S-oxide that cause the eye irritation is water soluble, so can simply be washed away before having a chance to get in the air.
• Cook onions often.  Research has shown that the more you cut onions up, the less the sulfuric compounds will affect your eyes.

What Causes Ice Cream Headaches?

What Causes Ice Cream Headaches?

medicine   11:10 PM

While many theories on what exactly causes ice cream headaches or “brain freezes” have existed for some time, it has only been very recently that it was discovered exactly what is going on here.  It turns out, ice cream headaches are a result of a rapid change in the size of blood vessels as a response to an extreme shift in temperature in the roof of the mouth, particularly the back of the roof of the mouth.

Specifically, what is happening here is that when you stick something extremely cold in your mouth and eat it quickly, such as drinking an ice cold beverage or eating ice cream rapidly, it rapidly cools the palate of your mouth.  Why this is significant is that there is a nerve center located just above the back of the roof of your mouth.  This nerve center includes nerve clusters that send signals to the brain about changes in body temperature.  When these nerve clusters are rapidly cooled by what you are consuming, they are over stimulated and send the message to the brain that the body just lost a severe amount of heat.  This ends up resulting in the rapid contraction of blood vessels in your head.

Shortly thereafter, the temperature at the palate of your mouth goes back to normal and the nerve centers signal everything is fine and the blood vessels end up rapidly dilating.  This all can happen in a matter of a few seconds, but the end result of this rapid contraction and dilation of blood vessels is an extreme, sharp pain, often in your temples, forehead, or sometimes even in your face itself.

This ends up creating a very similar pulsing sensation that many people experience when they get true migraine headaches.  Migraine headaches can even be induced by cold temperatures in some people, leading some researches to believe there is a close connection between what is happening during certain types of migraine headaches and what is happening during an ice-cream headache.

Sugar Does Not Make Kids Hyper

Sugar Does Not Make Kids Hyper

medicine   11:06 PM

In fact, it has been proven in numerous studies that it doesn’t affect their behavior at all.

In one such study, it was found that mothers who think their kids have been given sugar (even though their kids haven’t been given any), will almost always say their kids are acting hyper.  On the flip-side, if they think their kids haven’t been given sugar (even if they have in actuality), they will almost always say their kids are acting normal; even though in both cases there is no actual discernible difference of behavior being observed between the two.  It’s almost all in the parent’s head. 

“Almost”, you say?  Interestingly, if the child believes they have been given sugar and they believe that sugar will make them hyper, some children will act more hyper.  But this again is all in their head.  If they believe they haven’t been given sugar, even though they’ve been given loads, these kids will report no change in how they feel and will act normal.  If they are given no sugar, but they think they’ve been given lots of sugar, they will often report feeling a “sugar rush” and act hyper.  This is more or less just the mysterious placebo effect in action on a small percentage of these kids.

On the other hand, caffeine will absolutely make a good percentage of kids hyper.  So while many parents attribute the hyperactivity in kids that often follows drinking a lot of soda as being caused by sugar, it is actually generally the caffeine doing the work.

In the end though, excessive amounts of processed sugars is bad for kids (and adults too!), in a variety of ways.  Best to stay away from them as much as possible outside of natural sugars found in fruits and the like; pro-tip: corn syrup = bad too.   Although, according to recent medical studies, it’s not entirely clear yet whether corn syrup is worse for you than sugar, but it is clear that both are pretty bad for you at the levels most people eat on a daily basis, moderation of course being the key for healthy in-take in both cases.

On the other hand, maybe it’s best to just not eat anything at all; probably the best way to avoid eating unhealthy things 

Why do bananas go bad faster in the refrigerator than at room temperature?

Why do bananas go bad faster in the refrigerator than at room temperature?

food   11:24 PM

If by “go bad” you mean that the banana peel gets incredibly grotesque looking, then this is true.  However, if you mean that the inside gets all mushy and tastes awful, a-la extreme over ripeness, or the old wives’ tale that bananas in the refrigerator will produce poison gas or other toxins, neither of these are correct.  Despite the fact that the banana peel will turn dark brown, making it appear “bad”, the part you eat inside actually stays quite good in the refrigerator.

In fact, such banana selling companies as Chiquita and Dole recommend you do this to make the banana last longer in its perfect ripeness stage. Once a banana reaches its optimal ripeness for your tastes, but not before, stick it in the refrigerator to drastically slow the conversion of starch into sugars, almost to the point of stopping the ripening process.

The peel will quickly begin to look like the banana’s rotted, due to the polyphenyl oxidase enzyme in bananas polymerizing phenols in the peel into polyphenols.  But other than the somewhat unappetizing blackened peel that results from this, it won’t negatively affect the banana in the short term. Remove the blackened peel and throw it away and you’ll see that the flesh inside is as delicious as ever.

It’s important not to put the bananas in the refrigerator before they’ve reached the level of ripeness you like though.  As Chiquita bananas says, “If you place your unripe Chiquita bananas in the refrigerator, they may not be able to resume the ripening process even if they are returned to room temperature.”

Bananas can typically be kept this way in the refrigerator for about a week. This is obviously significantly longer than an optimally ripe banana will last at room temperature, which always seems to me to be approximately 6 seconds. If you don’t like cold bananas, simply let the blackened looking refrigerated banana sit at room temperature for 30 minutes to an hour or so and then remove the peel and eat it.

If you find the look of refrigerated bananas too unappealing, there are other ways to keep bananas fresh longer.  For instance, you can slow the ripening process of a banana by keeping the banana away from other fruits, including the bananas on the same hand the finger came from. Bananas put off large amounts of the hormone ethylene, relative to many other fruits.  This triggers and quickens the ripening process significantly.  In fact, if you’d like to speed up the ripening of some green bananas or other fruit or vegetables, put them in a paper bag together over night.  The trapped ethylene will quickly ripen the fruit, and the paper bag will still let enough oxygen in to keep the ripening process going smoothly.  On the same token, putting fresh bananas in the same container as an overripe banana will rapidly accelerate the ripening process of the fresh bananas, which is already quite a fast process.

Another banana ripening/timing tip is rather than buying bananas all from the same hand, which usually means all the fingers will be about the same ripeness, pick bananas from different hands of varying ripeness, some that are ready to eat now down to ones that won’t be ready for at least a few days or more.  Now keep the bananas stored separately.  This way you won’t have the annoying problem of having a hand of bananas that all ripen on the same day, resulting in you inevitably having to throw some of them out.

Why do doughnuts have holes?

Why do doughnuts have holes?

food   2:34 AM

Because bakers make them that way…   In truth, nobody knows for sure why people started putting holes in the fried cakes.  

There are some outlandish tales from a sailor, Captain Hanson Gregory, who claimed to have invented the holed doughnut in 1847 at the age of 16. There is even a plaque in Rockport, Maine near Clam Cove that states “In commemoration. This is the birthplace of Captain Hanson Gregory, who first invented the hole in the doughnut in 1847. Erected by his friends, Nov. 2, 1947.”

There are a variety of versions of this tale, but the version he himself put forth in the Washington Post (Mar. 26, 1916) was as follows:

Now in them days we used to cut the doughnuts into diamond shapes, and also into long strips, bent in half, and then twisted. I don’t think we called them doughnuts then—they was just ‘fried cakes’ and ‘twisters.’

Well, sir, they used to fry all right around the edges, but when you had the edges done the insides was all raw dough. And the twisters used to sop up all the grease just where they bent, and they were tough on the digestion.

Well, I says to myself, ‘Why wouldn’t a space inside solve the difficulty?’ I thought at first I’d take one of the strips and roll it around, then I got an inspiration, a great inspiration.

I took the cover off the ship’s tin pepper box, and—I cut into the middle of that doughnut the first hole ever seen by mortal eyes!

…Well, sir, them doughnuts was the finest I ever tasted. No more indigestion—no more greasy sinkers—but just well-done, fried-through doughnuts.”

He then claims to have taught this to a variety of people and thanks to being a sailor, the holed doughnut idea spread throughout the world.

Whether this is true or not (I’m personally extremely skeptical, particularly because Captain Gregory seems to have changed the details of the tale significantly as he aged), most bakers do think that the reason doughnuts have holes is the reason Captain Gregory stated, to get rid of the slightly doughy center.

My personal favorite theory, which seems quite plausible given the timing of it and given that people have been frying up dough and making doughnut-like cakes for centuries and no one thought there was much need to remove the center, excepting some who would put fruit and the like there instead, is simply that it made a convenient way to display the cakes for sale.  Around the same time doughnuts with holes popped up in New York City, bagels were also becoming very popular in New York and were commonly put on display stacked on wooden dowels.  It may simply be that bakers in New York first got the bright idea to put holes in the dough before frying when one or more of them thought to display the doughnuts in the same way as bagels, on dowels, which no doubt saved display space.  With this theory making more evenly fried dough may or may not even come into play.

Why Popcorn Pops !?

Why Popcorn Pops !?

food   12:39 AM

First a little background, Popcorn or “zea mays everta” is a special kind of Flint corn, also known as “Indian corn” and sometimes “Calico corn”.  Flint corn is readily recognizable as the kernels have a hard outer shell, likened to flint, hence the name.  This hard outer shell is essential in making popcorn kernels pop.  In fact, popcorn is the only type of corn that will pop.

So why does popcorn pop?  There are three main elements of popcorn that have to come together to produce popcorn kernels that are good for popping.  Those three elements are: the percentage of water content; hard, undamaged, water impermeable shell; and a starchy center.

When the kernels are heated up, the water inside begins to steam.  Assuming the water impermeable shell doesn’t have any cracks in it to let the steam escape, this creates a simple little steam/pressure cooker.  The starch inside the kernel then turns into a kind of gel-like substance as a result of this.  Eventually, the pressure of the steam gets so great that the hard shell bursts, typically around 135 psi.  When this happens, the steam rapidly expands, which results in the gel expanding out and hardening into airy foam.  What’s going on here is that as the gelatinized starch expands, it forms thin airy bubbled jelly.  These jelly bubbles will fuse together and then solidify very quickly as they are exposed to air and cool off.  The cooling sets the starch and protein polymers into the white puffy flakes.

The Red Juice in Raw Red Meat is Not Blood

The Red Juice in Raw Red Meat is Not Blood

food   11:18 PM

The red juice in raw red meat is not blood. Nearly all blood is removed from meat during slaughter, which is also why you don’t see blood in raw “white meat”; only an extremely small amount of blood remains within the muscle tissue when you get it from the store.

So what is that red liquid you are seeing in red meat?  Red meats, such as beef, are composed of quite a bit of water.  This water, mixed with a protein called myoglobin, ends up comprising most of that red liquid.

In fact, red meat is distinguished from white meat primarily based on the levels of myoglobin in the meat.  The more myoglobin, the redder the meat.  Thus most animals, such as mammals, with a high amount of myoglobin, are considered “red meat”, while animals with low levels of myoglobin, like most poultry, or no myoglobin, like some sea-life, are considered “white meat”.

Myoglobin is a protein that stores oxygen in muscle cells, very similar to its cousin, hemoglobin, that stores oxygen in red blood cells.  This is necessary for muscles which need immediate oxygen for energy during frequent, continual usage.  Myoglobin is highly pigmented, specifically red; so the more myoglobin, the redder the meat will look and the darker it will get when you cook it.

This darkening effect of the meat when you cook it is also due to the myoglobin; or more specifically, the charge of the iron atom in myoglobin.  When the meat is cooked, the iron atom moves from a +2 oxidation state to a +3 oxidation state, having lost an electron.