Humans have probably eaten some sort of popped corn for hundreds, if not thousands of years. Nevertheless, for a long time, I thought making your own popcorn would require all sorts of special equipment and advanced skills. The opposite is…
Whenever you’re popping corn, whether it’s in a microwave, or on the stovetop, your ears play a crucial role. At the start, the kernels are quiet, not a lot of going on and at some point, your start hearing popping…
Always looking for a new experiment, I decided to try my hand at some black bean brownies the other day. Looking for a fun variation on brownies, and having some left-over sweet potato, I ended up making sweet potato-black bean…
When looking into scientific literature you will find that some ingredients have been researched very intensely, whereas others have barely received any attention at all! Western staple ingredients such as wheat and potatoes have millions of hits when searching for…
For a lot of people, including myself, popcorn is closely associated with cinemas or even watching movies at home. Even though popcorn did get a huge boost thanks to cinemas, popcorn has been around as a snack for much longer,…
Just because you are allergic to milk, use less dairy milk out of concern for the environment doesn’t mean you can’t eat pancakes anymore! It so happens, pancakes don’t really need (cow’s) milk. They’re actually very flexible regarding the type…
Not that many years ago, my only reference to carrot cake was a Dutch joke. It involved a baker and a rabbit, who does not like carrot cake, though makes the baker think he does. In all honesty, a carrot…
You might not think you ever need (or use) moisture sorption isotherms. But if your bag of (icing) sugar has started to clump or your pie crust started to go soggy, you’ve at least come across some of the phenomena…
The simplest of breads are made with just water and flour (such as a chapati). Add a little yeast and maybe some salt or fat and you can make a wide range of breads from a wide range of cultures…
One of the first foods I learned to cook is French toast. Don’t ask me why, but our school’s cooking classes started by teaching us how to make French toast. Of course, over the next several weekends, I wanted to…
If I had to choose only one type of food I’d be allowed to eat for the rest of my life, freshly baked bread would rank high on my list of contenders. The smell, whether it comes from a hot…
It is one of the most important parameters when determining the shelf life of foods. It’s what explains why your pie crust turns soggy over time. And it sounds more complicated than it is: water activity. For any food scientist,…
