Sex Dust

I know nothing about Gwyneth Paltrow except that she was super-androgynously wonderful in Shakespeare in Love. If you haven't see that film, you are advised to find it next convenient weekend and give it a trial. So many people find Shakespeare a trial that an antidote will not go amiss. Kenneth Branagh's Much Ado About Nothing [prev as home educ tool] is good in a BBC sort of way and is not without its jokes but Shakespeare in Love is freed from the shackles of bardolatory and can play it for laughs. The fact that Tom Stoppard, one of the best English language playwrights of the 20thC was screenwriter for Sh.in.Lo, gives it a depth of characterisation and romantic intensity rare in Rom Coms. I was taaking loike Shagsper arl larst weekend and so Sh.in.Lo and Paltrow frothed up unbidden to the surface of my mind.  Imagine my surprise but two days later to see the said Paltrow being slagged off for putting lives at risk with her dodgy cook books.

It's a rather sad indictment of the state of the nation if you can sue an Ac-Tor over a cook-book that she has gotten published by riding hard the camel of celebrity. The implication is that poor rich Paltrow is somehow responsible if some idiot follows her recipe for cooking chicken and spends the next 3 days on the toilet. Caveat emptor, anybody? Would you follow aNNy advice from Justin Bieber? Victoria Beckham? Gwyneth Paltrow is being slated for suggesting you wash your chicken before cooking it.  I used to do that myself, so I can hardly take the higher intellectual ground on that one. I don't wash the chicken any more because I now know it sends a fine aerosol spray of Campylobacter-laden water all over the kitchen counter, the salad, my eye-brows and the kitchen taps. I know that because I was on the payroll of a six year, million € research project comparing the immune system of chickens Gallus gallus and us Homo sapiens especially w.r.t. the response to Campylobacter.

Once you've started on a Paltrow slag-fest it's only two steps before you find that she is fronting a whole industry of parting suggestible people from their money. Caveat googleator! you pop in a name for a bit of back-ground and within two clicks your eyeballs are on stalks of incredulity. Now, I'm with you on the barricades if you want to stop the poor and dispossessed being exploited by rapacious capitalism. But somehow my passion goes off the boil if I'm expected to protect the rich and foolish from spending their money in dopey ways. And if I wanted to stop people from cashing on on their celebrity then we'd have to have the sort of revolution where I would be the first against the wall when it comes. About 10 years ago, Paltrow launched an on-line newsletter called GooP. The name is based on her initials - separated by two eye-balls on stalks at the daft stuff she advocates. One of her California pals designed the website with an enigmatic [metaphor for deep, clever] drop down menu bar that is curiously hard to read because the typography is not fit for purpose:

Note that the first link is to The Shop. There along with shoes, bags and accessories you can buy [this post has caught up with its title at last] Sex Dust, which is produced by a company called Moon Juice. That sounds squidgy if you have followed the antics of Diana "Landmines" Windsor over the last 30 years or squelchy if not. If you're like me, your brain is now awash with images you'd rather not have over your breakfast cereal. Stop now if you are squeamish but, with all those precious bodily fluids in mind, Sex Dust had me Googling "Freeze Dried Semen". And yes, it is A Thing. Artificial Insemination AI has come a long way: it stands to reason because if the boy and the girl were in the same room or paddock then the need for AI would be diminished, no? The semen 'straws' used to be frozen and transported in liquid nitrogen which requires a bulky container to transport the precious teaspoonful. Someone had the idea of freeze drying the sperm which would allow the stuff to be sent through the post in an envelope. Like so much powdered milk. Scientists are still working on the technology because freeze-drying currently destroys the motility of the wee spermatozoa but not their genes / chromosomes and they have to be injected directly into the ovum [it's called Intracytoplasmic sperm injection (ICSI)] if fertilisation is to have a chance. This is the sort of research that's going down: "Adverse effect of cake collapse on the functional integrity of freeze-dried bull spermatozoa." PMID: 24747720.  But that's just an aside. Revenons nous a nos accessoires de mode:

Sex Dust is member of a product line of wellness "foods". In this case wellness means well-marketed because this stuff is not for theThird World or the unemployed. The word Dust may conjure up powerful positive association with the stuff in Philip Pullman's rather good fantasy-fiction trilogy which Hollywood squeezed into a single film The Golden Compass.

• Beauty Dust
• Ingredients: Organic Goji, Rehmannia, Organic Schisandra, Pearl, Organic Stevia
• Brain Dust
• Ingredients: Organic Astragalus, Shilajit, Maca, Lion's Mane, Rhodiola, Ginkgo, Organic Stevia
• Dream Dust
• Ingredients: Zizyphus, Organic Schisandra, Organic Chamomile, Polygala, Organic Stevia
• Power Dust
• Ingredients: Organic Astragalus, Ginseng, Organic Eleuthero, Organic Schisandra, Rhodiola, Organic Stevia
• Sex Dust
• Ingredients: Ho Shou Wu, Organic Cacao, Shilajit, Maca, Organic Schisandra, Cistanche, Epimedium, Organic Stevia
• Spirit Dust
• Ingredients: Organic Goji, Organic Astragalus, Organic Reishi, Longan, Salvia, Organic Stevia

Here's an investigative journalist taking one for the team by buying a pot of Sex Dust , gagging it down her throat and trying to persuade the stuff to stay down. Everything on the ingredients list above contains a little Organic Stevia which is probably steviol a 'natural' sweetener which was banned as a potential carcinogen by the FDA between 1991-2008. It is derived from Stevia rebaudiana, 'candyleaf' a shrub native to South America. I don't have the patience - right now - to find out the Latin names of the other magic ingredients, let alone get to grips with the efficacy of any of them to promote 'wellness' in anything more that a placebo induced psychosomatic sense. Evidence-based food engineering will have to wait.

But I'll devote two minutes to the maths. These dusty products retail, in a nice professional looking jar which contains 42g of material, for $30. That's a tad North of €700/kg.  Where is that on the scale of thing to eat?  Here's a table:
Price per kg

Potatoes €0.80	Fancy Brie €15	Nutmeg €38	Bayleaves €197
Bread Flour €1.25	Cinnamon €17	Dried thyme €37	Dust €700
Cheap Brie €4.50	Cloves €25	Fresh thyme €44	Saffron $9,700

That's sort of interesting. Thyme Thymus vulgaris which grows like a weed in Ireland is more expensive than exotic tropical products from The Spice Islands; that's globalisation for you. And what's with the bayleaves? We planted 2 little bay trees 15 years ago and they are now about 4m tall and 3m across, we have a gold-mine in the back-garden. I've got the name for our retail division:

BooB

Don't eat this ADS home kids

Monday was GLORIOUS [well, not actually hosing down with rain] and I had wrapped up my Monday classes with exams the previous week, so I headed off for the Waterford coast to make the divil-a-lot of noise mowing grass and then having tea with Pat the Salt.  Because it was there after a visit over the weekend, I was offered cake! More to the point I was offered choice-of-cake in the form of Ryan's of Tipperary "We're not such a long way - Away" 50/50 Gateau. This peculiar confection is two half-cakes with slightly different ingredients and quite different colours "Chocolate" vs "Vanilla". I've no idea what it costs but I fear that you're getting less of it than a while ago. Googling gets a number of hits from garages and convenience stores across the Republic, from one of which I have clipped the picture [R]. Those website are claiming 700g but the sticker on Monday's cake says 600g. This is likely a retail finagle: the 'price-point' has to be maintained or sales will collapse; but the supplier / bakery has significantly higher costs. They square this circle by making smaller cakes for the same price. The wholesale price of cocoa increased 50% in 2018. The list of ingredients gets no shorter, though! What you see on the lid is only part of the list because the label continues down the side of the plastic packaging:

Ingredients: Sugar, Vlargarine [Vegetable oils (Palm oil, Rapeseed oil), water, salt, emulsifiers (mono & diglycerides of fatty acids, polyethylene sorbitan monostearate), acidity regulator: citric acid, Vitamin E, flavouring, Colour: beta carotene), WHEAT flour (with calcium, iron, niacin, thiamine), modified starch (Maize), Vegetable Oil (Rape), Whey solids (MILK), Raising agents: (disodium diphosphate, sodium bicarbonate), emulsifiers (propane-1,2-diol esters of fatty acids), WHEAT gluten, Whole EGG powder, Vegetable Oil (Rapeseed), WHEAT starch, vegetable Oil (Palm/Shea), Fat reduced cocoa powder, emulsifier: rapeseed lecithin, Glazing agent: gum Arabic, Shellac, Whole hen EGG, SOYA flour, skimmed MILK powder, maize starch, humectant (glycerol), icing sugar (sugar, potato starch), Unhydrogenated vegetable fat, water, colour: (allura red AC, quinoline yellow, indigotine, sunset yellow FCF, carmosine, ponceau red R4, Black PN), Preservative: potassium sorbate, raising agent sodium dihydrogen carbonate, monocalcium phosphate. 

Sunset yellow, quinoline yellow, carmosine, allura red AC, ponceau R4 may have an adverse effect on activity and attention in children. 

Produced in a factory where nuts are present. 

Allergy advice 
see highlighted ingredients. 

I've deliberately left the print small, as it is on the packing. If the font was easily readable by pensioners, you wouldn't be able to see the goddam cake. There are 50+ ingredients in the list - depending on how many times you wish to count WHEAT - that seems a long way from food or even food-like products. Notes and queries:

• How can you print the red warning about colour-triggers for ADS / ADHD in children on a cake and not question if the whole enterprise needs re-thinking? 
• What is shea oil you ask?
• A viscous glyceride abstracted from the nuts of a West African tree Vitellaria paradoxa. It is used as both a cosmetic and food. It is a cheaper substitute for cocoa butter although the taste is quite different its engineering properties are similar.
• Vlargarine must be Margarine but the print on the label is so cheap the first letter is corrupted.
• It is ominous that water is so high up the list in any cake. When I make cake I don't add any water. But water is free - it falls from the sky - and weighs 1g / cc so is an effective way of bulking out food-like products to save money.
• Shellac! I have painted shellac on furniture. What's next? boot-polish in the 'chocolate' icing??

But perhaps the most ominous information on the label is Best Before 14 May 2019 - that's six weeks away! If it can survive on the shelf or in the pantry for that long, it's because no microbes can make in-roads. If shelf and cough microbes can't digest the stuff, then my intestinal flora is going to choke on it too. It is looking less and less like food.

Here's an antidote: Kouign-amann is a Breton indulgence [transl: im císte | cake butter] that has only three ingredients: bread-dough, butter 30%, sugar 30%. Why bother with another 50 additives?

Eat yer algae - it's good for you.

At the beginning of the Summer, I was walking the beach with Dau.II and Young Bolivar at Kilfarrassy on the Waterford Coast when we met a mother and daughter from the Home Education Network. Dau.II was entirely recognisable although all grown up. We stopped and chatted about the best beaches along the coast and what to do there.  It seems that while I'm scavenging fish-boxes, buoys and old rope, more civilized, or hungrier, folks are scavenging sea weed and the other family had recently been on seaweed gathering workshop with Marie Power, director [-and-sole-employee?] of The Sea Gardener.  Seems that these seaweed-pushing workshops and talks and events have been going for nearly ten years.

Fast forw to last week when Marie Power re-surfaced in the Home Ed Network [aka, in this instance, chatting to my pal Russ] at the same time as Dau.I was visiting from England. Both my girls are in the catering trade but Dau.I is of the vegetarian persuasion and is currently a Dinner Lady in a primary school outside of Stroud. It's a bit complicated but the Woowah Veggie Café where she used to work got the contract to serve healthy food to the kids instead of p'ison like chips and pizza; and Dau.I got a job in the country. ANNyway, she cares about food and the politics or food and Marie was looking for people who'd be on the same wavelength.  Seaweed isn't meat after all.  It was arranged that they'd meet in a seafront café in Tramore and compare notes.

Apart from some talk and comparing-of-notes, Dau.I came away with an Almond & Orange Bar . . . with seaweed. The seaweed was honestly in smaller type because organic seaweed mix is only 6% of the ingredients by weight. Here's the whole Table of Contents:

• wholegrains (rolled oats, wholewheat flour, wheatgerm), free range eggs, grapejuice concentrate, milled organic seeds (flax, hemp, sunflower & pumpkin), butter, organic seaweed mix (6%) (sweet kelp, dilsk, sleabhcan), flaked almonds (6%), coconut, raisins, dark chocolate (unsweetened chocolate, sugar, cocoa, butter, soy lecithin, natural vanilla) orange juice, orange oil (2.2%). allergens in bold print.
  That's 20 ! ingredients, more or less, depending on how you count/bundle them.

Dang those bracketted ingredients! Is it even legal? If flax Linum usitatissimum, hemp Cannabis sativa, sunflower Helianthus annuus and pumpkin Cucurbita pepo were treated as separate ingredients, then butter would float to the top. And there is butter again as part of the dark chocolate; if the ingredient list means anything at all, surely they should be bundled together?  And note the Latin name for hemp and ask what is the difference between this product and the hash brownies of the flower-power 1960s.

The seaweeds (all Irish and organic) are

• sweet kelp Laminaria saccharina is the new kale as we found with Bren Smith and his vertical sea-farm in Long Island Sound.
• dilsk Palmaria palmata, aka dulse, dillisk, duileasc, red dulse, sea lettuce flakes, or creathnach
• sleabhcán - it's hard to discover the Latin/Linnean binomer for this is because  "sleabhcán latin" is a googlewhack. Heck, google doesn't even offer an image for sleabhcan. I think it's the same as laver Porphyra umbilicalis perhaps more familiar from the other side of the world as nori which come to the market as green sheets with which you wrap up sushi. The Welsh make bara lafwr = laver-bread with it. More info here including this memorable (and TMI!) quote somewhat resemble the byproduct of a seal’s hayfever upon the rocks. Any algologist is invited to share their expertise in the comments.

But the proof of the pudding almond & orange bar is in the eating and we shared the 45g bar among 6 people to see what they thought. I guess, in the back of many of the tasters minds was Bob's Famous Flapjacks a bar with only 5 ingredients - 6 if you include the optional pinch of cinnamon and costing about €2/kg. The A&O-bar verdict was "sort of like a tea-brack but drier" certainly not over-sweet and with some substance to it: chewy, like.  It's hard to know when you're meant to eat it though: is it a between-meals snack, a robust dessert or something you'd have with a cup of tea? You can buy these bars direct from The Sea Gardener at €10/4 bars. that's about 5c/g or a fabulous €55.50/kg. But the Supervalu in Tramore is selling the bars, as a local product, at €2 a pop, which is only €44/kg.  That's a LOT of health. I hope that enough are sold to keep Sea Kitchen on the road. For me empowerment and education are the real value of Sea Gardener - you can find simple edible food for free on the sea-shore that will diversify your diet and help your children engage with the food that they eat.

Food engineering II

I fancy myself as a food engineer, but of the structural rather than chemical sort.  Last Summer I compared a traditional Victoria sponge with less than 10 ingredients with its commercial equivalent which requires more than 40 foods & chemicals.  When Dau.II was visiting last weekend, as well as exploring the attics, she put on a hazmat suit and investigated the deep-freeze.  Actually our deep-freeze is not too bad, there are no biological specimens and we do try to rotate the stock.  But she did discover a relatively recent cache of frozen pizzas and apple-pies from Aldi. Maybe two months ago, I dropped into Aldi on the way home from work to buy some milk and butter and saw apple pies marked down to €0.99 and I dithered about whether it was worth it.  A couple of days later, as the sell-by date approached, the same pies were down to 50c, so I bought three . . . and a couple of Quattro Formaggi frozen pizzas which were in the same bin at the same price.  The pie I assayed the following weekend was fine and the price was right.

Nothing would please my girl last weekend but that we should take out one of the emergency convenience food pizzas and eat it within the hour.  The whole idea of frozen pizza being a convenience food  is sort of bonkers because there is nothing easier to make than home-made pizza, or simpler, or cheaper.  All it needs is a little elapsed time and maybe 8 minutes of labour.  Ingredients: bread dough (flour, water, salt, yeast), tomatoes [passata, or tinned and blended], cheese.  Optional: basil, oregano, pepperoni. To make a pizza into a convenience food you have to process the ingredients and add all kinds of other stuff a) to keep the ingredients apart until cooking commences b) to keep the material in appetizing condition for weeks or months.

Stone baked pizza base topped with tomato sauce, mozzarella cheese, red Cheddar cheese, Gorgonzola cheese and goats cheese. (no apostrophe for the goat, tsk!). Ingredients: Pizza base (Wheat flour, water, sunflower oil, Dextrose, salt, yeast); MOZZARELLA CHEESE (20%) (Milk); TOMATO SAUCE (18%) [water, tomato puree, sunflower oil, sugar, salt, dried oregano, fried onion (onion, sunflower oil, rice flour, salt), garlic power, black pepper, cayenne pepper. RED CHEDDAR CHEESE (7%) [Cheddar cheese (Milk), colour: annatto]. GORGONZOLA CHEESE (5%) (Milk), GOATS CHEESE (5%) (Milk).  The most likely food allergens/neuroses are helpfully highlighted in bold.  There is a somewhat disconcerting disclaimer as well: May contain celery, egg, fish, crustaceans, and soya.  I know the USDA allows a certain number of insect wing-cases to appear in food products because they are a) tiny b) unavoidable  . . . but lobsters?!?  There are a lot of extras in the table of contents but this product doesn't appear to need truly weird chemicals like stabilisers, anti-oxidants and emulsifiers.

Verdict: it's like eating cheese on a biscuit. There is so little give in the cooked product you could probably use it as an emergency gusset plate for a bridge.

Beer, bread - simplify, simplify

497 years of simplicity in German beer.

On the this day in 1516, the first Reinheitsgebot (purity order) was published in Ingolstadt in Bavaria.  By uncritically re-churning the idea, over the last many years, that German beer is composed of only four ingredients, I have been guilt of gross (33%) exaggeration.  A bit of research shows that in the original order only barley, water and hops are allowed. Everything else is streng verboten. In 1516 Pasteur was 300 years in the future, spontaneous generation (geese from barnacles, and so on) was universally accepted and yeast may not have been recognisable as an ingredient. 

I’ve extended my misapprehension to insist on only four ingredients for bread (flour, water, yeast, salt) and I stick by that.  Next time you buy one of those dreaded sliced-pans check out the (>4) excess on the table of contents.  If that gives you pause, join me in baking your own bread at home.  Actually, I’ve been on a bit of a sourdough jag recently which gets me back into Reinheitsgebod territory: flour, water,  salt . . . and a bit of stuff from the last batch (which didn’t and doesn't count).

The mention of bread is relevant here, and not only because bread and beer are the two great products of fermentation by Saccharomyces cerevisiae.  The original Reinheitsgebod was brought in, at least partly, to manipulate the market to ensure the availability of cheap bread by preventing the brewers from making mere booze from wheat or rye, and diverting those staples from Pudding Lane.

The effect of the Gebot was to homogenise the sorts of beers available so that every shaggin’ bierstube served essentially the same lager – an early-modern example of macdonaldfication.  So it made the world more boring, but as the previously used ‘preservative’ ingredients included out-there hallucinogens like fly-agaric mushrooms Amanita muscaria and henbane Hyoscyamus niger, not to mention soot and twigs, it was safer too.

Modern beer is, of course, completely safe – except insofar as it makes you foolishly try to txt while driving – but so gypped about with additives and processing as to warrant the phrase “tis a long way from food that was rared”, and that goes for shop-bought bread too - yes, even the 'baguettes', 'ciabatta' and 'chapattis'.

Like chocolate like water

No, this isn't the film review section, where we might say a few cogent words about Like Water like Chocolate aka Como Agua Para Chocolate, the 1992 magical realist film directed and produced by Alfonso Arau.  We had that a tuthree years ago at the local Films-with-Subtitles Society for our annual watch and eat night.  Rather we're going to set out our food-engineering stall again complaining about very expensive water.  We've seen this food-finagle in sausages, margarine, cake, spice-burgers; water weighs a kilo per litre and it falls from the sky, so is very cheap bulk if you sell food by the weight.  I was in Aldi on the way home after work the other day and I saw a Tarte au Chocolat reduced to €2 for 500g which is rather cheaper than real food like pork chops or cheese. I scooped it up and was mildly annoyed when the check-out price turned out to be €2.99 . . . but not annoyed enough to kick up a rumpus and have it put back in the cooler.

Like any other shopper with eyes bigger than his stomach and an inability to think straight when hungry, I was seduced by such bold statements on the packet as "Specially selected" "Deliciously decadent", the ghastly slogan "A work of CHOco L'Art" and the fact that the confection was 'french'. Part of me rebelled at the note of "made with all butter pastry" - without flour and some water it won't make pastry!  But I bought it, brought it home and therefore had to eat it.

Mmmm good, but 500g is a lot for a boy to eat. I should have paid attention to the "serves 6" label but the front cover of the packet was so busy with assertions, puns and french that I missed that.
Burp! and I didn't need to floss.
Then, too late for holding back, I read the Table of Contents.

CHOCOLATE GANACHE FILLING: (48%) water, DARK CHOCOLATE (12%) (Cocoa mass, sugar, emulsifier lecithin (sunflower), natural flavouring, sugar, ground almonds, pasteurised egg, concentrated butter (milk), cocoa mass, modified potato starch, skimmed milk powder, whey (milk), cocoa powder, cream powder (milk), thickener (sodium alginate), stabiliser (diphosphates), colour (carotenes), natural flavoring). BUTTER PASTRY (31%): wheat flour, sugar, CONCENTRATED BUTTER (22%) (milk), pasteurised egg, water, raising agents (diphosphates, sodium carbonates, salt). CHOCOLATE GLAZE (14%): water, DARK CHOCOLATE (36%) (Cocoa mass, sugar, fat reduced cocoa powder, emulsifier lecithin (sunflower), natural flavouring), sugar, palm fat, glucose syrup, skimmed milk powder, fat reduced cocoa powder, lactose (milk), emulsifier (citric acid esters of mono- and di-glycerides of fatty acids), water, sugar, DARK CHOCOLATE STICKS (1%): sugar, cocoa mass, cocoa butter, emulsifier lecithin (soya), CARAMELISED ALMONDS (1%) (almonds, sugar), glucose syrup, gelling agent (pectin), acidity regulator citric acid.

To make sense of this you have to pay close attention to the nested hierarchy of brackets otherwise you'll conclude that the sum is a lot more than the parts: 48% + 12% + 31% + 22% + 14% + 36% + 1% + 1% = 165%.  But even if you reconcile the maths, there are a lot of ingredients: 48 named items, which reduces to 36 when you eliminate duplicates (sugar appears seven (7!) times in various sub-categories). And too many of the sub-contents begin with Water. Some of these ingredients must be to keep this pie in a state of suspended microbiological activity for at least 18 months - the sell-by date is Mar 2018 - and the rest must be necessary to allow transport via England from France where it is manufactured using ingredients from various countries. What is concentrated butter?  Whatever it is I regret eating it.

Finally, hidden in plain sight in the barrage of small print that takes up half of the back side of the packaging it claims: No artificial colours, flavourings or preservatives. That can only be true in a food lawyers mind: modified potato starch is a long processed way from the humble spud; and diphosphates, sodium carbonates and citric acid sound, and indeed are, a lot more chemical than natural. Hmmm, Food Lawyer, now that sound like a 21stC profession for an ambitious young girl. Food Engineers are so last century, dahhhling.

Gaillimh húicéir

On Sunday I was down with Pat the Salt. clearing out the fridge for dinner. A week ago The Boy had shipped me a case of a selection of beers from The Beer Club, Ireland's on-line off-licence. These have been sitting in said case waiting for a special occasion.  As I left home on Sunday, I took a blind sample from the box to fortify me for an evening watching the telly.  It was a bottle of Galway Hooker Amber Lager and very nice too after a couple of hours in the fridge. It's interesting from a couple of aspects.

1) One is the paucity of ingredients: water, barley malt, wheat malt, hops, yeast. Although much less than sou'wester cake [N > 40] and sausages [N=16] it's rather extravagant compared to the German Reinheitsgebot [prev] of 1516 which allowed only Wasser Gerste Hopfen [Gerste is barley not yeast auf Deutsch]. Presumably the yeast fell from the ceiling of the old breweries or the hands of the brewers. The bold ingredients in the Galway Hooker listing are allergy triggers, of course; for the psychocoeliacs and the real ones.
2) The label breaks into European periodically / randomly: Sisältää ohramallasta-innehåller kornmalt = "contains barley malt" in two languages FI and SE. And then mindst holdbar til: se flaskenhals which is DK for 'best before: see bottle-neck'. Why those languages? and why not consistently one or all?

I was on a roll with Google translate so thought I'd put Galway Hooker into Irish for a title to this post. That delivered Gaillimh fraochún and I thought I'd better do a reciprocal best hit analysis which revealed that fraochún is a whore; hooker being slang for the same profession. I know that prostitutes used to hang out near Spanish Arch near the Galway docks but that's not the hooker meant by the independent brewery: as you can see from the top of the label [R above]. It is rather the robust class of red-sailed, gaff-rigged, single-masted shallow-draft fishing vessel [example L] that used to be the standard working sea-boat around and across Galway Bay.  And can someone tell in the comments what, if any, connexion there might be between fraochán [bilberries Vaccinium myrtillus prev] and fraochún ?  It turns out that fraoch is the Irish for common heather or ling Calluna vulgaris. Must be the same in Scot's Gaelic because Norrrth o' the borrrderr, you can but a bottle of Fraoch Heather Ale. But, be warned, it's a bit madey-uppy when it comes to the ingredients: Water, Malted Barley, Malted Wheat, Heather, Bogmyrtle, Hops, Ginger, Yeast. Ginger? Holy legless boozers, is it Enid Blyton's Five Get Drunk on Ginger Beer we have here?

Do you want a damn-fool band-width consumer to show you how beer is brewed? Try Galway Hooker's click and watch an amber bar move about a schematic pipeline.

Sausage

"Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect
in proportion as we know how they are made".  

This quote is often misattributed to Otto von Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor, but we know better.  Whoever said it, the sentiment is certainly applicable to sausages: you really don't want to know what goes into them.  When I was a dirt-poor graduate student, living in the Western suburbs of Boston, I used to eat whatever looked cheap or was on a 4 for 3 deal at the local supermarket.  One Winter I discovered hot-dogs which were tasty and amazingly cheap.  You could buy a tin or a jam-jar of the things immersed in brine and sold for half-nothing, with a few slices or toast and a tin of beans I could stoke up for a cold night before going back to work early next morning. That went on for a few weeks . . . until I read the table of contents one  evening while the wieners were warming. It is 35 years ago so I don't have the label in front of me but it went something like "pork, chicken, pork byproducts, chicken meat by-products, chicken non-meat byproducts, water . . . and trailed off in a long-tail of lesser ingredients. I wasn't so delicate that I refused the meal, but it didn't go down well and I never bought or ate hot-dogs again. In my research at the time I learned the ominous phrase mechanically-recovered meat MRM: which starts with the bones and sinew that have been cleaned of flesh as close as a butcher's knife can work. These parts are put in a mill with steel ball-bearings until they are polished a brilliant white: a pink slurry is periodically tapped off from the bottom of the vat - and sent to make hot-dogs and chicken nuggets.  Another name for MRM is mechanically separated meat MSM.  In the trade the resultant paste is called pink slime or with a spuriously scientific gloss that a good acronym generates "lean finely textured beef" (LFTB) or "boneless lean beef trimmings" (BLBT).  Is it just me or does it all remind you of the acronyms conjured up by the rainbow of gender-and-sex options that are now on the table: MSM (ooops that again), LGBT, LGBTI, LGBTQ, BLT no strike that: bacon lettuce and tomato should definitely align with the meatacronyms

I was down at the Outlaws last Sunday to help them through their enormous Christmas cake, do a little bit of heavy-lifting, cook their dinner, and even catch the last 20 minutes of the Ireland vs England rugger match (Triumphal 19-09 score). I came away with one of a pair of packets of sausages that Herself had bought on a promotional 2 for 1 deal - we have a lot in common when it comes to bargains, The Beloved's Mother TBM and me. I knew that they wouldn't get round to eating both packets before the sell-by date and sausages was one of the things my mother taught me to consume quickly - or risk a long talk with the porcelain telephone.  I'm quite a bit bigger than TBM is, so there was little she could do to keep both packets of sausages. <Bullying in the home alert>

This is what I got: "6 leek & cracked black pepper Irish pork sausages made in Co. Monaghan". With a picture of "Tony O'Regan One of our farmers" and an uncredited pig - who isn't smiling as broadly as Mr O'Regan. It is just possible that they have already removed the pig's hind-legs to make a couple of delicious hams. A week ago, I found in our fridge two

"Basted pork chops 

with added water 

100% Irish Pork"

which I mis-read as "with 100% Irish Water". Nowhere in the small print did it explain what, why or how these chops were "basted" - a process of re-slathering cooking meat with exuded juices; but it is interesting that water (which is the cheapest filler available) is here trumpeted as a miraculous additional ingredient - like blue whiteners in laundry detergents.

Mais revenons nous a nos saucissons!  Q. What have Supervlau ordered up for our dinner? A: Irish pork (70%), Water, Pork Fat, Rusk (contains Wheat), Corn Flour, Leeks (2.2%), Salt, Flavourings, Black Pepper, Sugar, Yeast Extract, Stabiliser (Triphosphates), Preservative (Sodium Sulphite), Antioxidant (Sodium Ascorbate), Sunflower Oil, Natural Port Casings. I've put the table of contents in green because it is clearly an act of patriotism to eat these things. "These Irish leek and black pepper sausages were made with selected premium cuts, fresh leeks and cracked black pepper, using a slow-blend process to create a full texture and flavour."  You may be sure that they were quite delicious, because they have been designed by food engineers (in Co. Monaghan).  Water is essential, not least as a lubricant for the slow-blend process but you don't want it leaking out of the sausages as/when they cook; so you add filler (meal) to absorb the water.  It's clever to add two sorts of filler Rusk (contains Wheat), and  Corn Flour because ingredients are listed by descending % and you don't want it to seem that there is more filler than pork fat. Stabiliser (Triphosphates) is also interesting - adding this opens up the protein (meat & meal, both) matrix so it holds more water.  All these ingredients are regulated by the EU so that the chicanery of the food industry is reduced to a level commensurate with consumer health. There are upper limits for the amount of water which is added to food - the regulators are trying to tread the line between legitimate ingredient and cheap adulterant.  It is analogous to tax-avoidance (which is perfectly legal) and tax-evasion (which is a mortal sin) . . . or is it the other way round?

ANNYway, it's movie time!  Roll the pink stuff! Chicken Nuggets [4m25s]  hotdogs [5m].  Enjoy!

The Blob on Food Engineering: Twinkies - Cake - Pizza - Labels - Structural

Whacaccino go again

[You're getting this because of a weird blogspot glitch. I wrote an earlier version of this piece but when I pressed the [publish] button the thing disappeared from 'drafts' but failed to appear on the website. So I sat  down to recreate the post while it was still fresh in my 'memory'. An hour and a half later, I recd an e-mail from one of the handful of folks who get Blobs delivered, at their request, by e-mail a) saying thanks and b) attaching the whole text of the lost ms. Turns out that the recreated rewrite was pretty close [see alignment at bottom].  So apologies if you've seen something very similar to this before. Further investigation showed that the post, launched on 7th October was somehow published with a date of 28th September; probably because I messed up on 'scheduling']  
Mais revenons a nos breuvages!

What do you call a dentist who doesn't like tea?
Denis.
Why do Communists only drink infusions? 
Because proper tea is theft.
I've been having a fare amount of tea anxiety recently. Me, like George Orwell, I'm a simple chap, and because of the culture in which I was brought up, I like a nice cup of tea [R source] When I was young and full of vim, I made tea by spooning leaves into a mug and brewing the stuff hot and strong. When the restoring cuppa was finished, I'd often spoon out the soggy tea-leaves and eat them too - rrrrroughage!  Now, however . . .
The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slippered pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound
. . . I make my tea weak. So weak indeed that it is more like making mystical passes with a tea-bag over the cup than actually brewing tea.

I have no time at all for 'infusions' of chamomile, rooibos, ginger&goatsblood, bedtime, woowah-lift, fennel. These are not tea. I am with Wikipedia for the definition: Tea is an aromatic beverage commonly prepared by pouring hot or boiling water over cured leaves of the Camellia sinensis, an evergreen shrub native to Asia. I'd even make a, not really strongly argued, case that these infusions are potentially hazardous because, while tea and coffee have been extensively investigated by biochemists and medical science, we know much less about the chemical contents of random herbs and bushes that you find behind the potting shed.  While I'm moaning about misnamed beverages, I'll have a swipe at almond, soya, oat milk. I'm sorry but these are not milk any more than chamomile is tea. What evolution has developed as a miracle elixir for raising mammal-pups, the food engineer has to imitate with chemistical emulsion. Compare:

• Soy milk
• Filtered Water, Whole Soybeans, Cane Sugar, Sea Salt, Carrageenan, Natural Flavor, Calcium Carbonate, Vitamin A Palmitate, Vitamin D2, Riboflavin (B2), Vitamin B12.
• Milk
• Milk

Quite apart from the semantic objections, here is a list of reasons why soymilk is dodgy. To ring the changes in an exciting life, on Saturday, at home, if it is going, I'll have medium-large cappuccino. I don't do Starbucks, so I don't know the difference between cappuccino and latte, and I may be getting the latter. This Saturday coffee ritual was a cause of huge amusement to our Polish pal Tadek who stayed with us for two winters 10 years ago: "Hej Bobek, saboda, kawa har har har" then he'd make me keep him company eating chunks of cold pork fat because we were men.

Occasionally, coffee will be off-menu and the current replacement is Macaccino which is a combination of three completely different plant-products:

• Carob is the bean from the carob tree Ceratonia siliqua which in Order Fabales included with peas, beans and the locust tree.
• Maca from the root of  Lepidium meyenii a member of the Order Brassica / Crucifer which includes mustard, kale, radish and cabbage.
• Lucuma is from the fruit of an Andean tree Pouteria lucuma, Order Ericales, the heathers, but  also including tea, persimmon, azalea and blueberry.

As you see these ingredients are not a million miles from recognisable food-plants but each will have its own pharmacopoeia and who knows what will happen if the raw ingredients are dried, powdered and mixed with hot water?  Part of the effort to push this beverage out on the market so that some entrepreneur can build a ranch-house with a hot-tub overlooking the Pacific coast, is to present a lot of dubious claims and hype on a web-site. I've been to macaccino.com and been snowed under with data, which I love because data-is-analysis but also presented with dubious claims and assertions Dense superfood nutrition  - boosts immunity - adaptogen energy - healthy fatty acids etc. But there's also a sort of patronizing gloss to the snow-job. Here's Aaron telling how to make a cup of his product. How difficult can it be to spoon powder into a cup and add white emulsion and hot water, that it requires an instructional video?

But we haven't time to be drinking hot beverages all morning when there are data to analyse. Aaron has employed some real biochemists to digest the proteins in his cocktail to their component amino acids and reports their concentration in mg/10g powder. This is has the ring of truth because two of the twenty protein-constituent amino acids are missing. The amides Asparagine Asn N and Glutamine Gln Q aren't in the list because when you do a proteolytic digestion you destroy the amide bonds as well as the peptide bonds and convert these amides to their equivalent acid: Aspartic acid Asp D and Glutamic acid Glu E. I give the three-letter and 1-letter abbreviations [prev] in all cases. What's troubling is that Cysteine Cys C is nowhere to be found in Macaccino. That cannot to be true and must be a piece of slack-bob editting. Elsewhere on the site, an infographic of the benefits of particular amino acids appears. Cysteine appears there <whoop whoop internal inconsistency alert>; but Serine Ser S is missing and they've invented a 21st amino acid called maganese. Thinking from those errors and inconsistencies that the whole list of ingredients might be a bill-of-goods,, I compared the relative concentrations to the proportions found in UniProt the database of protein sequences. The graph of that analysis [R], show that the proportions are 'within the normal range' and that Arginine and Glutamic acid are higher in Macaccino than you might expect. As well as being an essential component of all proteins, Glutamic acid, serves us as a neurotransmitter. If the marketeers at Macaccino were scientifically literate <harrumph!> they might seize this information and add it to the miracle-grow benefits of their product.

Sou'wester cake

We went to visit the 't-laws yest-arvo. I mowed the lawn, split some logs and got a Bunter-worthy feed for my 'pains'.  Good deal for me!  There was so much "cake" left over that I was urged to take half away with me, because there's only so much two pensioners can eat.  It may seem churlish to call this gift-horse confection "cake" rather than plain cake.  But 'tis a long way from food it was r'ared.

Compare:
Victoria sponge: equal weights of sugar, soft butter, eggs and flour, smidgeon of vanilla.  Combine in arcane manner.  Bake.  Fill with cream, lemon curd (sugar, butter, eggs, lemon) and/or fresh berries. Ingredients N < 10. 

Verdict: Simply, richly, gluttonously delicious.

Confiserie Firenze Peach and Passion Fruit Gateau: Cream (38%), sugar, water, wheat-flour, egg, peach (5%), glucose syrup, margarine (vegetable oil, vegetable fat, water, salt, emulsifiers, mono- and di-glycerides of fatty acids, soya lecithin, citric acid), glucose-fructose syrup, wheat starch, white chocolate (sugar, whole milk powder, cocoa butter, emulsifier: soya lecithins, natural vanilla flavorings), dried apricot, pork gelatine, emulsifiers, mono- and di-glycerides of fatty acids, polyglycerol esters of fatty acids (contains soya), modified starch, passion-fruit juice concentrate (0.3%), citric acid, lemon juice concentrate, colour (curcumin. carrot extract), natural flavoring, thickener: sodium alginate, gelling agent: pectin, raising agents: diphosphates, sodium carbonates, dextrose, acidity regulators: sodium citrates, potassium citrates, sodium carbonates, iodised salt.  Ingredients N > 40. 

The first lie is in the second word because the 'gateau' is made in Neckarsulm near Stuttgart 621km north of Firenze.  The first outrage is in the third ingredient - water - water is cheap, it weighs a kilo per liter and the gateau is sold by the weight; and there's more water in the margarine.  The first chemical solecism is referring to glucose and dextrose as if they're not exactly the same thing. The most obvious dishonesty is putting 'passion-fruit' in the marketing title when it contributes but 3 parts in 1000.  And while there are allergy warnings for eggs, gluten, milk, soya and wheat and the omnipresent may contain traces of nuts, nobody thinks it fair, necessary or appropriate to clearly inform potential vegetarian consumers that the product "definitely contains pig trotters".

Verdict: disconcerting to eat food the colour of an oilskin sou'-wester, tasty (those food engineers earn their salt as well as using copious amounts of it in their creations)

Student Enterprise Awards

Busy all day in labs and I was thinking of going home but went to get a cup of tea because I still had some busy-work to do.  The ground floor foyer of the Institute was heaving with schoolkids sitting behind wee desks pushing ideas and/or product out.  It was the county finals of the Student Enterprise Awards.  So I went to chat to them all so that they had an opportunity to sell themselves and their idea.  Very diverse set of ideas but some overlap.  Two groups in the Christmas decoration business: one making rather swish holly wreaths and the other a miscellany of hand-made decorations from re-cycled goods.  Two groups in the smoothie business - taking orders and selling fruit-pap (not a fan, me: I still have my teeth) to their school-mates.  One group of lads had invented an overshoe to protect the studs of footie-boots when they walked home - I had to tell them about galoshes which are so old they're extinct.  Another bund had designed and produced a 2ndry school discount card valid at several dozen local businesses.  Their card looked chirpy and neat and was selling well at €5. "Wow, it paid for itself in the first week" - Satisfied 5th-former.  One lad and two partners and was using his Dad's laser etcher-cutter to make polycarbonate key-fobs: €10 for a bespoke one-off or €1.50 if you'd order 1,000.  Not what you'd expect to sell in a  recession perhaps?  
The thing I liked best was a €5 make-your-own rich-choc-chip cookies kit - add butter and eggs and bake.  The girls had cellophane bags filled with the ingredients in layers tied off with a little ribbon attaching a recipe on a greeting-card.  It looked gorgeous.  Weirdly IMO they were selling the same ingredients in a 500ml Kilner jar for twice the money which I told them look awful.  But the discount-card girls on the other side of the hall all preferred the Kilner jar option, so I went back and told the cookie company to ignore my comments.
A great end to the day!  The kids so articulate and savvy, it gave me hope for the future of Ireland Inc.  They all seemed to be under-pricing their product, however, notably by valuing their time at less (sometimes much less) than the minimum wage.  Then again, I know a stay-at-home mum who spent 20 C20th years tying ribbons into bows for chocolate boxes on piece work.  The rate was ridiculously low: far far below the minimum wage if we had one back then.  But she said that it was easy work that could fill in idle moments and could be done while talking or watching telly . . . and without it they wouldn't have been  able to afford a holiday in all those twenty years.

Cooking by the handful

. . . and not by the book. When Dau.II and Dau.I were still living at home and spending a helluva lotta time in the kitchen, I put a huge sign above the stove asking

"Are we going to measure or are we going to cook?"

I ripped the idea from a cook-book that had no recipes when we were given it but rather blank pages and an occasional inspiring Foodie quote. But it was also a homage to my grandmother's apple pie which was done entirely by feel and experience. I'm not even sure if Grannie had a weighing-scales in her kitchen. I was consciously trying to encourage experimentation: what will happen if the recipe calls for 8oz of flour and you only got 7? Is there a substitute? Will it make any difference? How can you compensate?

I'm not saying recipes are without value, no cook should have to reinvent the wheel of getting the proportions correct for Madeira cake: if you double the butter, most of the excess will end up  in a puddle on the oven-floor. That happened to my first 2019 Christmas cake, perhaps because I had no ground almonds but kept the same amount of butter as my standard recipe. But it's also really important to reflect on allowable variation. We spent a part of last weekend doing a final wrap on the green-beans and tomatoes in the polytunnel. We were a little slow off the mark this year, so the plants didn't really have a full season to grow big, come to flower, get jumped by the bees and set fruit. Accordingly there were a good few green tomatoes which were never going to get red enough to offer to the vicar in a sandwich. Obviously the thing to do is make Green Tomato Chutney.

Obviously the thing to do next is get on Google to get a handle on the proportions. The first three recipes came from BBC ▲, RTE ● and GIY ■[Grow-It-Yourself] only the last of which has an obvious credibility in the business of growing and preparing food. All of these options bulked out the ingredients with apple, onion, sultana, sugar, vinegar . . . and tomato; and then got fussy with the spices - cinnamon? clove? chili? which add punch for flavour but are small potatoes in weight. What struck me was the wild variation in the amounts included in each recipe. And the fact that some give weights in kg and some in old money lb. The only thing was to enter the data into Excel and have it compute percentages for these six bulk ingredients. When thus normalised it is clear that the wild card is the start opf the show. In the ■ recipe, apples and tomatoes get parity of esteem; on the other hand, recipes ▲ and ● had about 5x more tomatoes than apples. As I'm trying to use up toms and have refused bushels of apples all this Fall, I won't be using ■ this year, thanks. I'll have to buy some vinegar, everything else I have, except maybe time.

Sausinges

Call me Calvin, but I do have a thing about waste; especially food waste. Not sure where it came from but it can be hard work while living with a family who are chronic over-caterers. My cooking relatives always include The Unexpected Guest in their portion control. We live so remote that unexpected guests are really rare even at Christmas time. In normal times, I am eating alone for about half the week because The Beloved is away minding her dear old dad in Waterford. Standards definitely drop when I'm looking after myself: why use a plate if you're going to have to wash it up later. My own dear old dead dad used to cite Dean Swift and the Boot-boy whenever we used to cut corners on standards. But, heck, the old man is dead so I <la la la> can't hear him.

Several months ago, we acquired three packets of "bread-crumbs" on the cusp of their sell-by date. I'm fairly sure that, if we still kept chickens, those food-like products would have been converted to eggs but absent chooks I popped the bread-crumbs into the deep-freeze imagining that I'd find a use for them. Eeee, I do like a treacle tart which is basically a flan-case filled with golden syrup and enough bread-crumbs to stop the molten golden slopping over into the bottom of the oven. And I was intending to use some crumbs in this sicky-sweet manner but in October the coconut granola muscled its way to head of the sell-by list and into Sweetie-pie Thrifty Pie. Needless to say, I got zero help in ploughing through this daunting dessert. And having done that, I sank back exhausted from the task of using up the effin' bread-crumbs.

I have talked about pink slime before: it is the central ingredient in Irish sausages and you don't want to enquire to closely about its origins. Two weeks ago, I was in the supermarket, buying my 'umble groceries - and a mighty slab of marzipan against the next Xmas cake. The lady behind me had a bright pink cylinder of sausage meat and I said I'll have some of that next time I'm in Tesco. She was probably intending to make rissoles even through she didn't live in Wexford. Me, I reckoned that if only I had some bread-crumbs I could do my bit for rissole nirvana. And the following Saturday The Beloved and I were on a rare road-trip together and rocked up the Tesco Superstore in Gorey where I was spoiled for choice for Irish Pork Sausage Meat:

• Cheapo €2.00/lb: INGREDIENTS: Pork (70%), Water, Wheat Flour (Wheat Flour, Calcium Carbonate, Iron, Niacin, Thiamin), Potato Starch, Salt, Flavouring, Dextrose, Stabiliser (Pentasodium Triphosphate), Yeast Extract, Preservative (Sodium Metabisulphite), Antioxidant (Sodium Ascorbate).
• Or Finest* €2.50: INGREDIENTS: Pork (85%), Water, Wheat Flour (Wheat Flour, Calcium Carbonate, Iron, Niacin, Thiamin), Potato Starch, Salt, Spices (White Pepper, Nutmeg), Stabiliser (Disodium Diphosphate), Flavouring, Yeast Extract, Dextrose, Preservative (Sodium Metabisulphite).

The expensive stuff[ing] might be 25% more expensive but it has 21% more pork {and accordingly less water) and added white pepper and nutmeg <ace!> but less vitamin C <boo!>. In the spirit of Christmas, I went for the more expensive option, not least because the contents looked like it had some structure . . . or at least flecks of different shades of pink. I tried a few recipes but found that equal(ish) weights of bread-crumbs and pink and a child's handful of finely diced onion worked nicely. Less bread-crumbs exuded a puddle of fat . . . oh yes, and an egg beaten in certainly help glue the rissoles together. Baked in the oven is good because we are no longer allowed to deep-fry them in lard like my mother did in the 1960s. <yum>The last rissole took a selfie [R] on an appropriately pink plinth just before it fulfilled its destiny as food. </yum>