#John Steinbeck's 1966 Plea To Create A NASA For The Oceansthree years before the first humans landed on the moon Nobel-prize winning author John Steinbeck published a passionate plea in Popular Science for equal
But besides the sweetness and delicacy of the thinking planning and building the very fact that we do it proves that human beings have not changed e are still incurable incorrigible romantics.
That hydrogen gas can leaven dough just as yeast-generated carbon dioxide does. The result is something known as salt-rising bread.
A century ago a scientist went so far as to bake bread leavened with Clostridium perfringens drawn from an infected wound in
***The origins of salt-rising bread are unclear but seem to lie in the nineteenth-century American frontier where it was likely difficult to obtain fresh yeast or keep a bread starter cool and regularly fed.
The salt-rising process produces a leavened loaf from grains and water in about eighteen hours.
The name is misleading because salt doesn't play a major role. Perhaps salt-rising was just a way of saying yeastless-rising.
scalding-hot liquid to start with then a feverish but perfringens friendly 100 to 115 degrees Fahrenheit for the starter sponge and dough.
or water pour it over some cornmeal and/or wheat flour and a little salt and let the hot mix sit in a warm place overnight until it gets bubbly and smelly from bacterial growth.
Cornmeal and milk accelerate the process and help flavor the bread but they're not essential.
You mix the starter with additional flour water and baking soda into a batter-like sponge and keep it warm for a few more hours until it too swells with bubbles.
Then you add enough flour to make a dough shape it put it in a pan
and keep it warm for another few hours until it has doubled in volume at which point you bake it.
The result is grained a tight dense yet tender loaf with an unusual aroma that's usually described as cheesy.
The social historian J. C. Furnas who learned to love salt-rising bread as a child in the early twentieth century wrote that the flavor was defined once well by my sister as like distant dirty feet
as if a delicately reared unsweetened plain cake had had an affair with a Pont l'Eveque cheese.
In my experience salt-rising breads made with milk smell like a combination of swiss and parmesan--sharp rather than stinky.
Milk-free salt-rising breads tend to be pungent in their own less cheesy way though one of them my all-time favorite so far came out with a wonderful washed-rind aroma.
This curious flavor variability in salt-rising breads comes at least in part from variability in the microbes in the flour and cornmeal that we select to do the fermenting.
The standard recipe for salt-rising bread instructs us to do something we're warned against in the name of food safety:
And yet in salt-rising bread we make a point of encouraging it. The realization that the salt-rising bacterium was a form of pathogen came in 1923 when a USDA microbiologist named Stuart A. Koser analyzed commercial salt-rising starters.
He found that they were teeming with Clostridium perfringens then called the Welch bacillus a microbe already known to be very common in soil water supplies and foods and especially numerous in the human intestine and in sewage.
whether bakery loaves of salt-rising bread contained any of the bacillus. Indeed they did but in the form of spores rather than live cells.
He tested these bread strains on guinea pigs and found that they didn't cause gangrene.
if a known disease strain could grow well enough in dough to leaven it and so pose a hidden hazard to the consumer.
And Koser made bread with these wound bacteria. The salt rising bread prepared with the Silverman strain compared favorably in size
and texture with that prepared from the commercial starter he reported. Regrettably but understandably he didn't report on the flavor.
Less understandably he didn't test the wound-risen bread for toxicity. But his creepy experiment made clear that there were different strains of the bacillus with different toxicities
and that though the strain in the commercial breads was relatively innocuous it was possible that other breads might contain a dangerous strain.
The safety of salt-rising bread was revisited in 2008 by a physician at West virginia University and a microbiologist at the University of Pittsburgh.
whether salt-rising bread should be viewed as the Appalachian equivalent of fugu the poison-laden pufferfish of Japanese gourmands.
They analyzed a number of bread starters and found that all of them contained strains of Clostridium perfringens type A the group associated with food poisoning rather than wound infection.
and the lack of any known cases of the bread causing illness Juckett and Mcclane concluded that it seems reasonable to continue the consumption of this delicious old-fashioned bread.
Where familiar fermentations convert food carbohydrates primarily to alcohol or to lactic or acetic acid Clostridium perfringens produces a cocktail of organic acids that includes acetic and lactic
but also butyric--the characteristic sharp smell of aged cheese--as well as propionic--typical of Emmental-style swiss.
I've found that even dairy-free breads can sometimes be good and cheesy. It should be possible to select clostridium cultures and starter ingredients to produce distinctive flavors reliably.
The most useful practical survey for the salt-rising experimentalist is a 2002 article by Reinald S. Nielsen in issue 70 of Petits Propos Culinaires the quirky small-format journal
Nielsen had started making salt-rising bread in the 1950s and over the years collected and tested old recipes
and sent samples to a microbiology lab for analysis. He discovered that cornmeal is a far richer source of Clostridium perfringens than wheat flour
or organic including packaged breakfast oatmeal and shredded wheat but even bark from oak and black locust trees.
Don't lick the spoon or nibble the raw dough. Just in case. Remember which family of microbes you're playing with.
Salt-rising bread is started most conveniently in the evening to bake late the following afternoon. Ãakes 2 8ãx 4ãloavesto make the starter:
and water to the starter then stir in enough flour to make a thick batter.
Cover and keep warm again for 3 to 4 hours until the batter is spongy with bubbles.
To make the bread: 1 t salt the sponge 3 to 4 C all-purpose flour1.
Stir salt into sponge then knead in enough flour to make a resilient dough. Divide the dough between 2 greased loaf pans
and allow to rise in a warm place until the volume has increased significantly 2 to 6 hours. 2. Preheat oven to 425ãf.
It would make the most sense to plant fast-cycle salad crops first says Jean Hunter a professor at Cornell who studies food-processing and waste-management systems for long-term living away
and wheat and after that they might plant protein and oil-rich crops such as soybeans and peanuts.
which to prepare their own meals to determine their preference. She found that participants were bored much less by their food
Worse he says the disease's rapid spread endangers banana crops beyond Mozambique s borders.
On multiple plots in the Mozambique farms plants were sharing water drainage facilities a practice that might allow contaminated water to spread from one plot to another.
Likewise infection from common irrigation sources was one of the primary ways the Gros Michel version of Panama Disease spread in the mid-20th century.
Another likely vector for the spread of the disease was local people walking across the farmland on their way home says Viljoen.
and would take many many years to spread even if it does move out of Asia. Following the news from Mozambique Chiquita took a more realistic stance.
Or if consumer and regulatory resistance breaks down a transgenic banana perhaps crossed with Fusarium-resistant peppers.
Such research could reveal the best least methane-ey diet for cows. Or maybe the cow of the future could take probiotic supplements to boost her gut population of non-methane-producing microbes?
or a mixture of both contains about 1 percent nicotine and flavoring such as menthol fruit or classic tobacco.
so that it has drought-resisting qualities originally discovered in sorghum resists changing its starches in response to not getting enough water.
and a molecular textbook) and estimating which ingredients might combine for a dish pleasing to a human palate Watson has been creating unlikely culinary works.
what might make for a good dish. A person piloting the app starts with an ingredient;
I chose bacon during a demo from IBM Watson Group researcher Patrick Wagstrom. Because I am in Austin
Watson spit out a list of potential dishes it could make with those restrictions--it seems to be some kind of Michelin-star-worthy soup auteur--and
I went with a quiche. Following a second of number-crunching it showed me a list of ingredients it was planning on using.
Wagstrom admits it's bugged out a few times in this section forgetting dough etc. A few tweaks later I had a recipe for a respectable-sounding quiche made with comte cheese.
Well recipe might be a stretch. There's an option where Watson can compute some vague thoughts on how one might cook a quiche (cook the butter add the cheese)
but nothing you'd feel comfortable taking as gospel. Instead Watson turns cooking into a game of artificially-intelligent Chopped giving you the ingredients and letting you mix combine and remix to taste.
Watson doesn't have a mouth Wagstrom says. If you have talented some chefs though that could lead to a spark of constraint-induced creativity.
At the food truck in Austin ICE chef Michael Laiskonis a pastry chef by training had Watson select a Vietnamese-themed kebab dish that included apple as determined by an online poll from IBM.
Apple isn't exactly your typical kebab ingredient --and neither are strawberries which were included also in the recipe
--but the result was subtly sweet and surprisingly pleasant next to a bit of ground pork.
One time he tells me Watson requested a dish created by cottage cheese and pork belly. And the result wasn't bad.
Every once in a while it might recommend lemon juice and cream. Tweaks are being made. You can read the recipe
and instructions for the apple kebabs below or check it out at IBM's site. ground pork:
and held in ice watergranny Smith apple: 1 tablespoon brunoise additional for garnishginger: 3 1/s teaspoon dividedlime zest:
1/2 teaspoon finely choppedvietnamese curry powder: 1 teaspoon dividedvanilla bean: one split and scraped pod discarded dividedlard:
cut into fine dice1) First make the pork meatballs. Thoroughly mix ground pork scallion 1 Tbsp apple tsp grated ginger 1 pinch lime zest 1 pinch lemon zest tsp mint tsp Vietnamese curry powder pinch white pepper vanilla bean split
and scraped until combined. Season with salt and add lard as needed. Portion and roll the mass into 24 meatballs weighing approximately 10g each. 2) Arrange the meatballs in a single layer into lightly greased roasting pans
and place in a 160ã/320ã convection oven for approximately 20 minutes or until thoroughly cooked.
Reserve. 3) To prepare the curry chicken whisk together the water oil 1 tsp lime juice 1 tsp lemon juice
and tsp curry powder Marinate the chicken in the curry mixture for about 30 minutes. Transfer the chicken and remaining marinade into a shallow saucepan over low heat stirring until chicken is cooked thoroughly about 10 minutes.
Allow the chicken to cool in the marinade. Remove the chicken and cool. 4) To prepare pineapple broth combine the pineapple juice 1 vanilla bean split
and scraped 2 tsp grated ginger 1 tsp lemon juice 1 tsp lime juice and 1 pinch each lemon and lime zest.
Gently heat to 60ã/140ã. Cover and allow to infuse one hour. Strain and season with salt and white pepper;
reserve warm. 5) Next make the flash pickled shiitake mushrooms. Sautã Â the mushrooms in a shallow pan with vegetable oil and season to taste.
and remove sliced ginger. Adjust seasoning and acidity as desired. 6) To assemble into each dish place two of the warmed pork meatballs
and portioned chicken. Top with a small amount of the diced apple cucumber and strawberry followed by the pickled shiitake and carrot mixture.
Pour a small amount of the pineapple broth into the dish and finish with the scallion mint chive and 1 pinch lime zest.
Season with Maldon salt and an additional grind of white peppe
#8 Steps To Sustainable Meat And Milkglobally deforestation driven by clearing land for cattle alone accounts for close to one-fifth of global greenhouse gas pollution.
The amount of poop urine and farts produced by hundreds or thousands of cows in CAFOS (concentrated animal feedlot operations) often leads to water pollution
and air pollution the latter largely methane a powerful heat-trapping gas that contributes to destabilizing the climate.
To add to the environmental insults meat animals are fed about 1 billion metric tons a year of the same cereal grains that humans consume increasing the pressure on supplies of food and fresh water.
Meat production is on track to more than double by 2050. In response an international research team suggests eight ways to make ruminant agriculture aising cows goats sheep buffalo camels llamas reindeer and yaks for meat and dairy nvironmentally sustainable.
Publlished this week in the journal Nature the strategies favor diverse approaches tailored to local conditions rather than a universal approach that ignores local cultures geographies economies and environmental realities.
These include grazing fodders like hay and straw and silage (a feed created from the entire cereal plant not just the grain).
It's how ruminants are supposed to eat judging from the fact that they naturally have forestomachs that can break down fibrous plant matter into nutritious calories
In other words and very simply less human food into animal feed. It can be done: 95 percent of milk in the European union comes from grass-fed livestock the article notes
while in New zealand milk cows get just 10 percent of their diet from grains and 90 percent from grazing.
and like Alice tailing the white rabbit through Wonderland he discovered an upside-down world almost cartoonish in its horrors.
Primitive grinders reduced those bits to lentil-size fragments which children then sifted through and sorted by color.
and when you burn them you get a whole cocktail of cancer-causing stuff. Puckett estimated that just more than half of the material processed in Guiyu actually got recycled judging from the tons of plastic leaded glass and burned circuit boards discarded near waterways and in open fields.
and two corrugated rollers grab the cars pancake them and suck them into a 5000-horsepower hammer mill where 16 free-swinging 400-pound steel hammers spin 500 rpms around a rotor unleashing hell.
and extruded into spaghetti-like strands. Those are sliced into mustard seed ize pellets the product MBA sells to its customers.
That s all Biddle will tell me. He won t explain how the separation processes work.
He s attending a dinner hosted by the Climate Change Forum ith guest ministers of trade
and environment from several countries nd he s having lunch with Britain s head of green economy in the department for economic growth.
Steel when it burns it s like spaghetti says B. J. Yeh the technical services director for APA he Engineered Wood Association.
Called the Timber Tower Research Project it reimagines Chicago s 42-story Dewitt Chestnut apartment tower
I cannot even grapple with the idea even with races of dogs cattle pigeons or fowls;
Our poor boy had the rare case of second rash and sore throat...and as if this was not enough a most serious attack of erysipelas with typhoid symptoms.
#Chickens Wear Prosthetic Dinosaur Tails, For Sciencethe humble chicken is distantly related to the T. rex.
How could we make chickens walk like they're little dinosaurs? A new study provides the equally important answer!
but there being few dinosaurs available stuck a prosthetic tail on the creatures'fowl analog raising them from birth to adapt for walking in a more dinosaur-like way.
As you can see from this video the chicken was made successfully to walk like a doofus.
The space-grown edibles include peas dwarf wheat and Japanese leafy greens. They look great
which astronauts are able to grow several generations of crops before the modules'nutrients are used up.
#Finding What Puts The Heat In Hot Peppersto engineer a better pepper you'd have to go out into the field ctual fields around the world nd look at different traits measurements and yield.
but it also helps reveal a few interesting secrets hiding within the pepper's genes. Because peppers are not so different from their cousins the potato
and tomato the genome could also elucidate more about the evolution and adaptation of other delicious species. One of the study's co-authors Allen Van Deynze has been working with peppers for about 20 years.
He's also a director of research at the University of California Davis Seed Biotechnology Center. Van Deynze studies hot peppers in part because he enjoys eating them.
%It adds the spice to many food dishes but it also puts the pain in defense repellants has antifungal properties
So if you ike the author here hought that peppers held the spice in their seeds you would be wrong.
The real hottest part of a pepper is in the white tissue that holds the seeds (known as the placenta.
The study suggests that the pungency from peppers was evolved through new genes by unequal duplication of existing genes.
while the test could be used to distinguish between cacao varities it wouldn't necessarily result in better-tasting chocolate as that may be influenced more strongly by production techniques.
and raw meat have. In their experiments Radboud and Burenhul asked both native Jahai speakers and native English speakers to name smells on scratch-'n'-sniff cards and colors on chips.
How about this English speaker's description of the smell of cinnamon? I don't know how to say that I have tasted that gum like Big Red
or something tastes like what do I want to say? I can't get the word.
Jesus it's like that gum smell like something like Big Red. Can I say that?
#Field trial with lignin modified poplars shows potential for bio-based economythe results of a field trial with genetically modified poplar trees in Zwijnaarde Belgium shows that the wood of lignin modified poplar trees can be converted into sugars in a more efficient way.
These sugars can serve as the starting material for producing bio-based products like bioplastics and bio-ethanol.
Under the magnifying lens researchers could see that eggs that gave rise to drones were penetrated not by sperm.
Tomatoes that will be canned for sauces and juice are harvested from plants that stop growing earlier than classic tomato varieties
whether premature infants are receiving the correct amounts of nutrients they need to thrive. The study could lead to a new innovation in personalized medicine:
If infants'growth rates are lagging behind the norm it is likely they are not receiving the nourishment they need said Charles F. Simmons Jr.
and performs a spectroscopic analysis of the liquid at wave lengths unique for each nutrient. When the analysis is complete the machine gives a breakdown of the milk's composition of proteins fat and carbohydrates.
As plants spread to higher latitudes and elevations they evolved in ways that helped them deal with cold conditions.
The proposed expansion--roughly 2000 additional square miles--would encompass the largest upwelling site in North america better protecting the nutrient-rich waters that support everything from reefs and seabird colonies to endangered whales.
#Greater dietary fiber intake associated with lower risk of heart diseasein recent years a decline in both cardiovascular disease (CVD)
They add that an additional 7g of fiber can be achieved through one portion of whole grains (found in bread cereal rice pasta) plus a portion of beans/lentils or two to four servings of fruit and vegetables.
The researchers conclude that diets high in fiber specifically from cereal or vegetable sources...are associated significantly with lower risk of CHD
and coronary heart disease events will in fact accrue with higher dietary fiber intakes. He says that teaching patients to eat whole grains is still challenging
The recommendation to consume diets with adequate amounts of dietary fiber may turn out to be the most important nutrition recommendation of them all he concludes.
Among the largest human-related sources of methane are ruminant animals (cattle sheep goats and buffalo) and fossil fuel extraction and combustion.
In addition to reducing direct methane emissions from ruminants cutting ruminant numbers would deliver a significant reduction in the greenhouse gas emissions associated with the production of feed crops for livestock they added.#
#Among agricultural approaches to climate change reducing demand for meat from ruminants offers greater greenhouse gas reduction potential than do other steps such as increasing livestock feeding efficiency or crop yields per acre.
and easily infect farm animals such as cows sheep pigs and chickens. Humans can be infected by eating undercooked meat or unwashed vegetables.
Infection rates vary around the world: In the United states it's about 10 to 15 percent
and meat and forest products like timber or wood furniture also contributes. But that seems to have caused forests to decline in the countries selling the forest goods to China as well as a spray of other impacts.
An effort to decipher the Amborella genome--led by scientists at Penn State university the University at Buffalo the University of Florida the University of Georgia
at Buffalo. Scientists who sequenced the Amborella genome say that it provides conclusive evidence that the ancestor of all flowering plants including Amborella evolved following a genome doubling event that occurred about 200 million years ago.
and pasture management practises will greatly help to control against production losses due to gastrointestinal parasites.
Ducks geese and swans are waterfowl an order known to scientists as Anseriformes. Hens pheasants partridges and turkeys are game-birds (Galliformes.
Both orders are famous not just for their flesh but also for their striking and elaborate plumages
if a fast-food restaurant reduces the calories in a children's meal by 104 calories mainly by decreasing the portion size of French fries?
Prior to 2012 the Happy Meal was served with one of three entr e options (chicken nuggets cheeseburger hamburger) a side item (apples or small size French fry
) and a beverage (fountain beverage white milk chocolate milk apple juice. By April 2012 all restaurants in this chain served a smaller size kid fry and a packet of apples with each CMB.
or promoted in children's meals can reduce calorie intake and improve the overall nutrition from selected foods
Importantly balancing a meal with smaller portions of favored foods might avoid reactance and overeating.
The price of sugar has increased at a rate considerably above inflation over the last 30 years.
Bacteria are used widely in sugar cane production as well as with other crops where they help to break down organic matter in the soil to make vital nutrients available to the growing plants
Hamlet's preference for dressing entirely in black is meant not to be a fashion statement
In the same spirit we leave out sherry and biscuits for Santa and some carrots for his reindeer.
and may slow the spread of this noxious pest even ultimately controlling it suggest researchers from the University of Illinois at Chicago.
or perhaps more efficient than other methods to slow the spread of this pest said Flower.
When emerald ash borer larvae emerge from eggs laid on the tree they burrow in
and eat their way through the phloem layer of the tree the vascular system that delivers water and nutrients from root to branch.
Slowing its course may give researchers time to learn more about how it can be controlled.
The research suggests that the woodpeckers are likely slowing the spread of emerald ash borer.
Sugar beet accounts for nearly 30%of the world's annual sugar production according to FAO and provides a source for bioethanol and animal feed.
What do foodstuff like muffins bread or tomato sauce have in common? They all contain different amounts of white refined sugar.
But what perhaps may result amazing is that this sugar is probably sourced from a plant very similar to spinach or chard but much sweeter:
the sugar beet. In fact this plant accounts for nearly 30%of the world's annual sugar production according to the Food and agriculture organization for the United nations (FAO.
Not in vain for the last 200 years has it been a crop plant in cultivation all around the world because of its powerful sweetener property.
Information held in the genome sequence will be useful for further characterization of genes involved in sugar production and identification of targets for breeding efforts.
and artificial selection gene regulation and gene-environment interaction as well as biotechnological approaches to customize the crop to different uses in the production of sugar
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