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.
But by dint of this fact, natural flavoring and proprietary crunchification processes and things like that are the thing which will not go away in the general movement against food additives. It's essential to the business.
To be fair the best French baguettes are crunchy and soft at the same time and have only water, flour, salt, sugar? and yeast, so nothing much to be afraid of there.
And they require an immense amount of skill to make, which means you can only find really good bread in communities where a baker artisan can run a sustainable business. In the age of home grocery delivery, it's an uphill battle.
The number of bakers in France has steadily gone down over the past half century or so. It's been going up a bit recently due to the new phenomenon of upper class white collar workers who quit their job in their 30s to find meaning in their life to do something more "noble" like baking, but it remains to be seen what the long term impact of this will be.
You can manufacture Twix and Cheetos at scale, but not baguettes.
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.
You can take any random supermarket bread and say it happens to not be as good as your standard, but the process that makes it mass market, making the dough and freezing it in the factory, and baking it in a store, I don't believe has to meaningfully compromise the quality.
I don't know how it would be better, but I don't think it has to be worse.
The manufacturing process makes them worse. On a mass scale, every cent counts and the first thing to take a hit is the quality of the flour and the density of the dough. Then it's machine mixed, frozen, and baked in the very same condition at all time in electric ovens and that makes for a pretty forgettable taste and texture.
The end result is nowhere near what a competent baker can do, working manually and especially when using for instance a wood fire oven
> On a mass scale, every cent counts and the first thing to take a hit is the quality of the flour and the density of the dough.
Yes, but a better product can be sold for more. That's why they are making something resembling baguettes in the first place, and not just the cheapest loaf possible.
(Not saying that in practice the factory baguettes are better than what your favourite baker does. Far from it.)
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...
If you won’t, I’ll jump in. There’s evidence that it would be a positive choice to drop nitrates from ones diet entirely, but any cured meat product that claims to be nitrate free is either unrecognizable as what the label says or preying on consumer ignorance. Generally it is the second option, and celery salt is the smoking gun. Here’s an article on the subject: https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/food/celery-juice-viable-a...
Im comfortable saying any deli meat or bacon marketed “no added nitrates” is either over priced or subpar quality and , in most cases, being hawked by charlatans who thrive on their customers being low information.
The equation of American bread with Wonder Bread is really tired and offensive. Maybe you should spin some tale about how American flour is so, so, different that making bread with flour, salt, yeast and water is so different than in Europe and it comes out completely inedible to those of refined palate.
Eh, I don't think using "American bread" as an expression for bad bread is all that horrible, just like "being on Italian time" (or Brazilian or whatever) or for people who are habitually late or "going Dutch" for splitting a bill is all that bad - even when I do know Italians and Brazilians who are always on time, and Dutch people who will pay for their table. Then again, it's 2020, so I guess I should change colloquialisms like this.
My complaint about bread here in the states (I am American) is not that it's soggy so much as Americans have very high tolerance for stale bread, which means stores will often leave stale bread to fill the shelves completely, and I guess less "artisanal" brands will make their bread much less appealing when fresh because the market tolerates bland, hard textured, flavorless goods.
This varies a lot with the store and in what town you buy the bread. I didn't have this complaint as much in the Northeast as I did out west. But out west, you can find the good stuff if you are more selective and pay more.
It uses enriched flour (which I doubt makes much difference), but also adds conditioner which really is the culprit of being engineered for mass production.
Even quite on par with what gets sold as artisanal bread in a lot of places. (Though the factory bread is not as good as the real good artisanal stuff, of course.)
So, you can get pretty good quality food from an industrial process, if there's a big market willing to pay for it. It's not even expensive.
It's funny you'd say that, one of the thing that has been killing bakeries for the past 5 years is the broad adoption of bread making appliances. Small home appliances where you poor the ingredients, mostly half of water and half of flour, then it does the whole mixing and cooking by itself in a few hours. The bread always comes out warm and perfect. Making bread has never been easier.
Same in Germany. The small bakeries are dying. But at least in Germany and France even the supermarket bread is way ahead of most even the fanciest US bread.
Baguettes are not really healthier than chips. The same can be said for sushi (well sushi got some other stuff that's good for you, but let's just think weight loss). They're mostly just carbs.
If Americans had sushi and baguettes they wouldn't be slim like the French and Japanese, they'd eat sushi till they are 110% full (the Japanese aim to not stuff themselves at meals) and then carry around a bag of baguettes for in-between grazing (the French prefer set meals).
They'd also blame everything on their delicious national cuisine, rather than on themselves.
You have to skip over a lot of chemistry to say baguettes are the same as chips. I’m not convinced food is all about macronutrients. I think frying things in hot oil has been shown to generate some potentially harmful substances though Im sure the jury is still out on how much you’d have to eat to be dangerous.
Here's an interesting take I heard recently- in addition to the move to white flour, some also suspect the move away from slow, natural leavening (sourdough) to fast, industrial leavening (instant yeast) has contributed to making bread less healthy. In support of that claim, notice the low glycemic index of sourdough bread.
Yes. "Crispiness is a stimulant to active eating; it appears to hold a particular place in the basic psychology of appetite and hunger satiation, spurring one to continue eating."
And that's how the food industry turned America into a nation of oinkers. Even modest convenience stores now have entire aisles of chips.
> 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 surgeon doing their lap band surgery gets paid, and a lot of insurance companies and middlemen make money. So everything is happening as planned.
Without socialized healthcare, there is no incentive for food manufacturers to make their foods not addictive. I wonder if there will ever be regulation regarding this as there is for alcohol and cigarettes. Mandatory calorie counts on fast food menus and such are barely scraping the surface.
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 helpful policy. Though things get ethically questionable very quickly.
Might be more helpful to look into why 7/11 in Japan is full of so much healthy food compared to 7/11 in USA where you're lucky to find a shrink-wrapped apple, and what kind of cultural shift is needed to bring about that change. I feel like that difference summarizes why we are so screwed. We've lost the plot somewhere along the line.
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 to adult obesity among major nations (ie not Tuvalu or Tonga), New Zealand is #11, Canada is #13, Australia is #14, Britain is #20.
The only way you can really control that as the parent was trying to imply, is through direct government control of all food consumption and production.
> 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?
France, too, seems to have hit a cultural inflection point. Obesity rates are quickly climbing. Maybe it's bias, but over the past several years I've also noticed several stories about how McDonalds is becoming more popular in France, as well as the flight of the middle-class out of traditional towns into suburban homes, shopping in suburban malls.
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 medicine. One might even argue that people have less incentive to work on being healthy when their healthcare is paid by someone else.
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".
That is a pretty optimistic view of US government agencies that I don't share. Most fight tooth and nail to increase their budgets so I think don't heathcare being socialized (and becoming the largest agency in the government) would likely increase the government interest in a healthy population.
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.
> 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.
You realize that by definition there will always be more money in human food than animals? The only reason to feed animals, is to feed human, thus any cost related to animals food will be included in human food.
An industry also has much clearer cost to benefit, it's quantitative, it's clear that if you can get the same benefit for 1$ less or if you can get 1$ more out of something that cost less than that, again it makes sense. In the consumer world though, it much less clear, marketing has a much greater power there for example. Most people won't do the math on what's will feed them the most efficiently, they go by taste, they go by packaging, they go by brand awareness.
Food 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 to me how much work goes into this stuff. There are decades worth of research articles studying the effect of melting salts on cheese.
Honestly, I'm a bit surprised that processed foods don't taste dramatically better than restaurant food considering how much work goes into optimizing everything. I suppose a large part of this process is not strictly optimizing for flavor, but rather shelf life and cost among other factors. Although I do know a lot of Michelin star chefs will use whatever additives are necessary to make a dish taste as good as possible — at least if they don't have a strict focus on natural, locally sourced food.
" 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?
Smooth texture, that doesn't break (separate into oil and protein) with heat. Those ingredients and/or similar ones are principally responsible for what makes "processed cheese" processed. So think Velveeta or Kraft Singles, but potentially made with higher quality cheese.
Good quality hard and semi-hard cheese made with rennet should melt and not separate. E.g. gruyere, cheddar, gouda or emmental, particularly the protected varieties.
If good cheese didn't melt it would probably not be considered an attractive characteristic and it would not be something people bother to try and simulate with additives.
You can of course melt almost any unprocessed cheese without separating it, but they all split if overheated and don't behave well with added liquid (e.g. in sauces) without assistance from some additive. Processed cheeses with these "melting salts" have categorically different melting characteristics, they aren't trying to merely simulate regular cheese; they start as out as regular cheese after all.
>> You can of course melt almost any unprocessed cheese without separating it, but they all split if overheated and don't behave well with added liquid (e.g. in sauces) without assistance from some additive.
That is really not my experience. Are we both talking about good to high quality European hard and semi-hard cheeses, especially PDO varieties?
Edit: come to think of it, I should probably also check what you mean by "overheated". E.g. in Greece, where I come from, saganaki [1] is a signature dish that consists of a slab of graviera or kefalotyri (hard cheeses, in the alpine style) deep-fried in batter. I've had my share of sagnaki and I've never seen one break and separate in the way you say.
Yes, some preparations even rely on cheese separating. E.g. parmesan tuiles, even when prepared with PDO Parmigiano-Reggiano or Grana Padano can be seen breaking and expelling their fat before crisping. Every preparation of onion soup I've seen, even when using proper Gruyere or Comte, has an oil slick on top that has been expelled from the cheese. The cheeses used in saganaki (which I've never seen battered, only fried directly) weep oil before they melt.
Processed cheeses, on the other hand, will typically burn before they break. And they flow very differently when melted.
In that case I have no idea what you're talking about :)
I think we may be talking about different things. I don't eat processed cheese
so I don't know how it behaves. A quick search on the internet tells me that
processed cheese can be melted to the point it is poured. It is then used in
sauces. For sure, you can't pour real cheese. So I'm talking about the
kind of melting you see, e.g. in a raclette:
Yes, real cheese will weep when you heat it but that's not "oil". Depending on
the age of the cheese, some of it is whey and the rest is butterfat. But your
description of "breaking" makes it sound like you expect cheese to cleanly
separate in a puddle of butterfat and a chunk of protein, whereas real cheese
will melt into a viscous fluid. That is - if it's cheese that melts in the
first place. For instance, feta or haloumi don't melt, etc. I suspect I might
misunderstand your description of "break" though.
Regarding saganaki, it is prepared with many different cheeses, normally Greek
cheeses. I have no idea how Greek-style cheese behaves, that is prepared
outside Greece, but feta will not melt and only weep whey, whereas graviera,
kaseri, kefalotyri etc "yellow cheeses" (as we call them) will melt. Saganaki
is battered (or sometimes rolled in flour) for this reason- to keep the cheese
from spreading after it melts. That's how it's made in Greece. I guess it's
made in a different fashion outside of Greece.
Finally- although I've never tried to make tuiles from parmesan, there is a
large industry of counterfeit Parmiggianio Reggiano:
I use oil interchangeably with butterfat in the context of dairy. I'm aware cheese does not contain vegetable oil or petroleum.
The raclette in your linked video has begun to separate and formed an oily sheen on the outside. If you continued to cook it in a pan it would eventually form a puddle of fat.
I don't consider (real) parm ill-behaved when making tuiles. They're yummy.
I'd expect it to form a puddle of molten cheese. So you 'd say that the raclette in the video is "breaking"?
The way you said it I thought you were describing something really awful that you wouldn't want to eat. I don't see why you'd have to add er additives to cheese otherwise.
Edit: OK, I still don't get it. Do you have a picture or a video of what you're describing?
That's cool, although I do somewhat have the same reaction as the poster downthread that I don't really have the experience that cheeses in my dishes separate.
Either way, did you figure this out yourself from your chemistry background, or can you recommend a book that is "applied chemistry for dummies with a focus on cooking" without going all "modernist cuisine"? To me, cooking is applied chemistry, but the vast majority of all cook books are "here's a pretty picture, follow these exact steps to recreate".
I am not the poster you originally responded to and have no formal background in chemistry. That said, On Food And Cooking: The Science And Lore Of The Kitchen by Harold McGee is the prototypical recommendation for food science basics. The following link is a write-up more specific to processed cheese.
"Honestly, I'm a bit surprised that processed foods don't taste dramatically better than restaurant food"
1. Don't restaurants serve processed food, not to mention with fewer constraints since they don't shove the ingredient list in your face?
2. Who says the reason for a zillion weird ingredients is optimizing the consumer experience? Maybe it's actually a traditional way of trying to prevent competitors from duplicating a product? Recently, I've noticed an increasing number of products in mainstream US grocery stores that are more or less "processed food", but they have a small number of normal food-type ingredients, in dramatic contrast to those that are full of additives and weird stuff. Yet they aren't marketed as "organic" or otherwise suggestive of orthorexia.
When I was in college, I had a roomate who interned at Frito Lay. We got a lot of "beta" samples of new stacks that weren't public - the amount of engineering that goes into making snacks on ultra high volume scale is insane. I tested a bunch of snacks and provided feedback - which goes back into the engineering iteration loop before the snack is perfected, optimized for cost and manufacturability. It was indeed fascinating. There are hundreds of parameters to optimize - for e.g. the shape of the chip can affect how much oil it can retain affecting cost, taste, nutrition, etc.
I know that these things are optimized like crazy, but I often feel like the focus groups must just not include people like me. Most of the processed food industry makes foods that I find sickly sweet or absurdly oily, among other issues. Soda for example.
I wouldn't describe as a failing of the Coca-cola company the fact that I don't like coke. Everyone has preferences. I would describe as their utter failure the fact that the first time I enjoyed drinking a cola since age 10 was when I had an unsweetened cola-flavoured La Croix.
For the longest time I didn't understand why vending machines exist, until I went to Japan and noticed I was always within arm's reach of a refreshingly bitter tea.
I had always mentally equated that bottled drink == headache-inducing sugar rush and it necessarily had to be that way. Even when they made a sugar free drink, they just loaded it with other sweeteners.
But that was really just an optimization process gone wrong and gotten trapped in a local minimum, I guess. I hope they're starting to learn their lesson.
I don't like Frito Lay snacks as much as I don't like local gourmet snacks made by some hipster company. They are both bad for you unless you moderate consumption.
That is orthagonal to the engineering that goes into making millions of chips a day. Just because I don't enjoy going on Royal Carribean cruises doesn't mean I shouldn't appreciate the logistical miracle that goes behind the scenes to make 12,000 meals a day. Nor does it diminish the engineering miracles that went into making this huge city in the middle of the ocean where you can hang out and have a martini while playing casino. Not my thing but amazing nevertheless.
Ever looked at Cigarette manufacturing line? I have. And it is insane! 10,000 cigarettes a minute. My jaw was on the floor. Deeply immoral business but I think that's orthagonal.
> but I often feel like the focus groups must just not include people like me.
I'm sure they do. That's why they came out with the baked chips, hundreds of non-sugar diet drinks (e.g. slightly flavored 0 calorie water). We all eat. We all get addicted. They just need to find your poison and optimize it.
> I hope they're starting to learn their lesson.
As this article shows, they've got an entire industry to learning every possible lesson.
The slightly flavoured water is a very new development -- the la croix I mentioned. When I had it, I thought for once, they've finally found something I like. But why did it take so long?
They can identify the market but not have the right way of reaching it. Two of the biggest changes in the past few decades:
1. Everything can be shipped online, so niche targets have more options. I have a memory of craving Yoo-Hoo in college, in the mid-2000's and seeing no local outlet for it, and therefore I went on Amazon and purchased six boxes of the stuff. I got what I wanted, although by the time I was done with those six boxes, I was very much over Yoo-Hoo.
2. The move towards stocked-fridge offices as seen in every SV tech campus, which make more of these items a B2B purchase, and therefore incentivize developing and marketing products on the basis of productivity-enhancing qualities. In the not so distant past it was more common for a campus cafeteria to be relatively modest, putting things in the hands of the culture more generally...
...and there is evidence for a "big sugar" industry conspiracy in the late 20th century pinning the blame for heart disease on high-fat diets, and therefore shifting the culture for a whole generation, but primarily in North America. Other countries did not have the same kinds of trends. And since that marketing position has gradually decayed they are forced to start selling water minus the sugar, indeed they anticipated that happening when they started bringing out diet sodas in the 80's.
Seems like Safeway and Walmart these days are all stocked with at least four competing brands of drinks that are just carbonated water + flavour, even out in rural areas. That should have been possible before online shipping and SV beverage cabinets.
Anyway, diet sodas have been around forever but to my memory always attempted to taste as sweet as the sugary drinks.
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.
One can of coke can be turned into 3x as much coke by watering it down. I do this at BBQs or parties, and people look at me funny, but it turns the sweetness down to a manageable level.
I’ve been oddly interested in this topic ever since I read about the process of making the Taco Bell Doritos Locos Taco. Would you happen to know a good way to learn more about food engineering?
It certainly stands if you base the decision on volume anyway. And millions of people have heard of Herr's. I can only empathize with those who haven't.
NPR's Planet Money podcast did an episode last Oct related to this [0]. It was pretty cool to hear how the rise in food delivery services (drive-throughs before that) created an entire industry for engineered cooking oil that helped keep fries crispier, longer.
They also have an expert project how we'll likely have delivery vehicles in the future with deep fryers built in.
> They also have an expert project how we'll likely have delivery vehicles in the future with deep fryers built in.
Ah, like Zume for french fries! In fact this would give something for Zume to do with their abandoned robotic pizza delivery trucks. Just replace the ovens with deep fryers.
And if Zume doesn't pick up on this, Softbank Vision Fund will be sure to invest.
They also talked about a delivery method that may keep fries fresh and crispy for 40 minutes (or it may have been in 99% Invisible or some other podcast). Never heard about it again.
Sort of related - has anyone purchased one of these counter-top air fryers?
To me it just looks to be a small convection oven (which I have), but doesn't seem to offer any advantage except maybe ease of cleaning or power consumption.
Are they better sealed so little heat leakage or a stronger fan?
I 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.
One of my favorite(only?) bits of sci-fi/food-engineering trivia is that Gene Wolfe (The Book of the New Sun) was the mechanical engineer who developed the machine that cooked the first Pringles chips:
East Asian and Central Asian food is still extremely salty, so nothing is being replaced. People in Asia overall consume far more salt than even Americans.[1]
Where are you from, for comparison? The stereotypical cuisine from most nations I can think of is "mushy", from Indian curry dishes to noodle dishes to breads/pastas to beans/legumes to basically anything that's carb heavy.
Off the top of my head, the only "non-mushy" cuisine I can think of might be a meat heavy one and maybe an uncooked vegetable one. The former definitely describing my upbringing in Texas. Felt like I grew up on beef and mustard greens.
You're not alone. As an American, it's something I'm aware of too. Vegetables especially seem to be cooked in a way that barely retains their textures, unless they're very lightly steamed.
Check out this patent for a horse nugget, for example: https://patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/63/5b/ef/5e6b6bd...
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.
But by dint of this fact, natural flavoring and proprietary crunchification processes and things like that are the thing which will not go away in the general movement against food additives. It's essential to the business.