Certainly the two items in my title have nothing to do with each other. They are just the two things on my mind recently. This past week I have been rather negligent in posting and cooking. This is because I've been eating the majority of my meals at a conference in Rutgers University. Every morning I take the blasted nj transit there to listen to lecturers about statistical mechanics and now about probability and discrete systems. Any connection to food? There is of course a ton of instances where statistical mechanics plays a large role in food science (I'm not an expert in either fields, so I'll just mention some examples briefly).
1. Ice cream making (preventing large crystals from forming during freezing).
2. Bread making (creating a matrix of starch and protein so cause wholes and rising).
3. Emulsions (like mayonnaise).
4. Chocolate (my brother mentioned this to me. It turns out that chocolate has like 5 different phases which must be properly navigated in order to have all of the characteristics desired).
I'm sure there are books about this... maybe if you know of one you can post it in the comments.
Another observation about statistical mechanics is that almost all of the old generation of practitioners have breads... I thought that was kind of funny.
Changing gears, I'm preparing myself mentally for my latka cooking this coming sunday. I expect to make upwards of 300 latkas, plus maybe cook some of the blintzs I made a few weeks back. If I have time I may make some fancy schmancy latkas with sweet potato or the likes. Anyway, I'll post on monday likely to update as to the success of the latka party. Hopefully by that point my hands and clothing will have ceased being translucent from the excessive amount of oil on them.
4 comments:
Just remember, a healthy dollop of sour cream can cover up any latke imperfections.
The question with latkes, it always seems to me, is how finely to grate the potatoes. Might statistical mechanics shed some light on the correlation among width of potato pieces, evenness of doneness (?), and mouth feel?
When it comes to the size of the grate for latkas I am in favor of a large grate for a few reasons. Doing too fine of a grate makes the potato mixture too soupy and necessitates too much addition of flour or matzoh meal to thicken it up. For a statistical mechanic/ probability remark, if you use a really fine grate, then the oil can, while cooking it, "percolate" into the inside of the latka. This results in oily insides, which don't sufficiently drain when removed from the pan. Having a large grate lets everything get cooked but makes sure that oil does not get trapped during cooking. Lastly, I really like the inhomogeneity of the surface of a coarsely grated latka after it is fried.
Post a Comment