Food Additives...

[jeshyr]

I'm just watching a BBC documentary about food additives - it's really interesting actually.

The presenter has just made bacon with potassium nitrate concocted from horse manure, wood ash, and piss... and he ate it. I am thoroughly impressed with the guy's constitution and also strangely don't feel like eating any dinner just now...

r

PS
He also turned some of it into gunpowder and blew it up, which was quite cool.

PPS
I did not know you needed so MUCH salt to salt meat.... wow!

PPPS
Oh wow now he's eating Spam. That's MUCH worse than piss-cured bacon ... eww!!

Comments

[acelightning]

back in high school chemistry, the teacher demonstrated the process of distillation by mixing some harmless but repulsive chemical (i don't remember what - this was 50 years ago!) into water and passing the beaker around the classroom for us all to go "ew". then he distilled it in the classic manner, creating a beaker full of clean, pure water. he took a drink of it, and passed the beaker around again, daring anyone else to taste it as well. i was one of only two people in the class who did :-)

just because certain chemicals can be extracted from piss and manure doesn't mean they *are* piss and manure, of course. potassium nitrate is KNO₃, whether it's found as a mineral ("saltpeter"), or extracted from organic waste. (in either case, it gets purified before it's used for anything.) nitrates are very useful chemicals - they can be used for fertilizer, explosives, or food preservation.

Spam ("Spiced Pork And Ham") is just random cuts of pork, including ham (which is cured with nitrates and nitrites), pureed and mixed with various spices and binders, then cooked during the canning process. there's nothing inherently unsavory in it - it just tastes nasty anyway :-)

and it takes a HUGE amount of salt to make salted meats. when that was the only way to preserve meat without refrigeration, it took even more salt (and sugar, and smoking) than that. today's processed meats are more or less just flavored with the mixture of salt and sugar (and nitrates, which react with meat proteins to give bacon and ham their characteristic reddish color) and just lightly smoked, or even flavored with liquid smoke. but "country ham" made the old-fashioned way has to be soaked in water to dissolve some of the salt out of it before you can eat it!

[dragonsally]

This is my favourite history of food lesson for the day.

[acelightning]

as jeshyr can tell you, i've got a head stuffed full of entertaining and occasionally useful information :-)

(i also used to have a marvelous book about the science of food, but it got destroyed (along with all my good cookbooks) by seawater as a consequence of Superstorm Sandy. i'm going to replace all those books, but it may take a while.)

[splodgenoodles]

Oh wow now he's eating Spam. That's MUCH worse than piss-cured bacon ... eww!!.

Yes. I'd take the piss.

[dragonsally]

We watched that show when it was on earlier this year - absolutely fascinating, if a little icky at times.