28 December 2015
New old stuff
- The pre-mayonnaise vitello tonnato continues with Vitello tonnato and the mayonnaise conundrum. Either way, I don’t get enough of it.
- Reinventing the Greenhouse goes to China to examine proper solar-heated greenhouses, just like a 1978 book on my shelves. How soon before these become a thing in urban agriculture?
- Fun, guys:
- The Year in Fungi from Nicola Twilley.
- Speaking of Chemistry explains the taste of truffles in a video.
- Behold, the Agar Art Contest. Not strictly food, but how can you not like people who paint pictures with fungi (and bacteria)?
- Tucson Becomes the First UNESCO-Designated Creative City of Gastronomy in the U.S.. Shameless plug for my interview with Megan Kimble, Tucsonite and author of Unprocessed.
Maybe you’ve read about experiments that show that when potato crisps crunch louder, people say they’re fresher. And beyond crisps, all sorts of taste sensations can be manipulated by the sounds that surround them. Heavy metal apparently renders a Cabernet Sauvignon more robust. The drone of an airplane engine renders the umami of tomato juice more or less irresistable, a fact I can attest to. Top chefs are using sound to manipulate the dining experience, but when it comes down to it, I was very doubtful that drinking beer while listening to music would have any noticeable effect. I was wrong.
Visitors to Rome are often astonished not so much by the big famous fountains that dot the city but by the smaller flows that gush or trickle from what seems like every street corner. All that water, going to waste. Those drinking fountains – known locally as nasoni or big noses – deliver endless streams of delicious, cold water night and day, summer and winter, and it surprises many people to learn that public water fountains have been a feature of the city since well before the Republic. Indeed, clean water was the right of every Roman citizen.