Food for thought: Something can be crunchy but not crispy, but can something be crispy but not crunchy?
Interesting cooking book:
On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen by McGee, 2007
An industry dedicated to making foods crispy
51–60 of 107 posts
Re: An industry dedicated to making foods crispy
#52I love crispy things deeply. However, the crispifying process seems to generate a lot of advanced glycation end products (AGEs). The safety of ingesting large amounts of AGEs is in doubt.
Re: An industry dedicated to making foods crispy
#53Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree, since the 90s in Ireland every convenience store big enough to have a deli counter has been selling Cuisine de France baguettes. Usually as the popular breakfast roll or chicken fillet roll. They are mass produced and crispy, they are cooked in store by staff with no special training.
I didn't saw yet a single industrial baguette that was better than what my local baker does. Industrial one may be crispy but have nothing like a good one.
They’re pretty good though. And also cheaper. The same argument could be made of chips.
Re: An industry dedicated to making foods crispy
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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. 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 surg…
I agree the government trying to optimize to increasing GDP is not great for society, but it does also optimize for maximum tax revenue increase, so I understand why its done. 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 medici…
I think the point being made is that when the government bears the cost of the externality it is more incentivized to address root causes, as it is a direct driver of savings. I am always looking for this sort of alignment of incentives when structuring a project, and it takes some effort but when you can find it it's dynamite.
Re: An industry dedicated to making foods crispy
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree the government trying to optimize to increasing GDP is not great for society, but it does also optimize for maximum tax revenue increase, so I understand why its done. 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 medici…
I think the point being made is that when the government bears the cost of the externality it is more incentivized to address root causes, as it is a direct driver of savings. I am always looking for this sort of alignment of incentives when structuring a project, and it takes some effort but when you can find it it's dynamite.
With prisons the government bears the cost, and would benefit if fewer people were in prison. In practice, it has lead to for profit prisons and judicial corruption.
Re: An industry dedicated to making foods crispy
#56Earlier quoted context omitted.
It sounds like your tastes are an outlier, and didn't present a good ROI
My impression is that the totally-unsweetened carbonated water market has exploded in the last 5 years...
Even semi-sweetened carbonated water seems to have exploded with White Claw going mainstream.
> 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.
Re: An industry dedicated to making foods crispy
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree, since the 90s in Ireland every convenience store big enough to have a deli counter has been selling Cuisine de France baguettes. Usually as the popular breakfast roll or chicken fillet roll. They are mass produced and crispy, they are cooked in store by staff with no special training.
What makes you think they have only those five ingredients? I’d bet on more gluten, malt, potato starch, a couple exotic salts, and more.
There is nothing wrong with most additives. Even so-called 'artisanal' bakers add 'bread improvers', which contain things like 'ascorbic acid' (ooohh scary! except that its common name is... vitamin C), enzymes or some fast sugars that are entirely converted to alcohol and CO2 by the yeast (i.e. they're just used as yeast feed, no extra sweetness to the final product).
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...
Re: An industry dedicated to making foods crispy
#58Food science is really interesting; I've kind of gotten into it as a hobby lately (having a background in chemical engineering and an obsessive interest in cooking). Last night I was making some melted cheese for nachos and used sodium citrate to emulsify the cheese sauce and sodium hexametaphosphate to sequester the calcium (weird aside: the non-numeric chemical formula for sodium citrate is NaCHO). It's fascinating…
" Last night I was making some melted cheese for nachos and used sodium citrate to emulsify the cheese sauce and sodium hexametaphosphate to sequester the calcium "
Can you expand on this for a non-chemist? What's the effect, flavor- or texture wise, of sequestering calcium?
Re: An industry dedicated to making foods crispy
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree the government trying to optimize to increasing GDP is not great for society, but it does also optimize for maximum tax revenue increase, so I understand why its done. 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 medici…
I think the point being made is that when the government bears the cost of the externality it is more incentivized to address root causes, as it is a direct driver of savings. I am always looking for this sort of alignment of incentives when structuring a project, and it takes some effort but when you can find it it's dynamite.
> I think the point being made is that when the government bears the cost of the externality it is more incentivized to address root causes, as it is a direct driver of savings.
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".
Re: An industry dedicated to making foods crispy
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
How does socialized healthcare change food manuf incentives? 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 helpf…
It doesn't change much in fact. That's why several prominent socialized healthcare nations are extremely obese just like the US. 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…
> 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?