Kitchen Experiments: Popping Sorghum (and Amaranth) Part II

Now that I have a bit more time to do stuff, what with recent blogging projects done (again: PHEW), I thought I would give the sorghum popping experiment from a few years ago one last revisit.  As you (and the various commenters who have visited) may remember, this experiment did not go too well for me: popping it in a still or shaken pot yielded few kernels, and using the hot air popper just caused a big mess of, again, mostly unpopped, slightly toasted sorghum kernels.  I say "slightly" because most were blown out of the hot air popper before I knew what hit me.  (Scratch that: the sorghum hit me.  Literally.)

Based on research I've done lately, including from links provided by several of the commenters in the first post, I've come to a few conclusions about what went wrong:

• Some folks had suggested adding moisture to the seeds.  Perhaps the seeds I used were kind of low quality and a bit desiccated already.
• Maybe use a dome popper.  One gentleman from Texas said he and his have been popping it for a few decades, and he uses this method.
• Another commenter from Georgia notes that of all the things she tried, putting the sorghum in a deep pot with the lid on got her the best results, specifically if you turn down the heat in the last munite way low.
• Growing your own sorghum might work out well for you.  Check out the many mail-order non-GM seed companies (one list is here, or else just do a Google search).

Thanks to Andrew Zimmern, sorghum popping has become just enough of "a thing" that some companies have begun specifically selling it and posting helpful videos on Youtube.  Just Poppin was a site whose folks posted once or twice, and had some videos that were useful.  Two in particular stood out for me.  In the first one, they use two teaspoons of olive oil in a pot and (I never caught the exact measurement but it looked like) 1/4 cup of sorghum.

For the second one, they show how to dry-pop it.  And as I discovered too late for my other experiments, one key here is to use a vessel that is not dark on the insides.  Yep, as great as cast iron is, this is one time you need to put it away, unless it's one of those enameled ones that is beige or something on the inside.  Mine is not.

With those ideas in mind, I set out to give a proper finish to my sorghum popping experiment.  The goal: to get as much as possible, and to note which conditions led to that.

The sorghum I used in this experiment was a brand new bag of Shiloh Farms Sorghum Grain.  This stuff is not as easy to find as I remembered - even many of the natural food markets were out of stock of this stuff (though they do normally carry it), but I did find it eventually at the Natural Market in Timonium, where I figured their big shelf of whole grains had it nestled in there somewhere.  In fact, they had a few bags of it.

Oh, and this time I took photos.

I had started with a bag that was a few years old, with pretty lackluster results, prompting my search for fresher stuff.  Maybe one or two kernels popped out of an entire 1/4 cup.  There is my first thing I learned: use fresh ones.

I set up a few experiments on my stovetop.  I gathered the following things for this round of experiments:

• bag fresh sorghum (here: Shiloh Farms brand)
• olive oil
• 1/4 measuring cup and teaspoon
• long wooden spoon
• cast iron crock pot and deep sided stainless steel pot (this latter one yielded the best results)

Though several people have had success with the dome poppers, I opted not to buy one.  My reason: knowing my luck, it will work for everyone but me, so I will just save the $30 to $40 and not buy a new one after all.  However, if you do decide to try a dome popper, make sure it is one that circulates the sorghum.  The ones that blow from the bottom, from what I have read elsewhere on the internet, don't yield the best results.  Also note: the blow hot air poppers typically blow from the bottom.

Experiment 4a: Popping 1/4 cup sorghum in a crock pot with oil while stirring

For this, I waited until the oil was starting to shimmer.  I had the heat up to middle intensity...

...and dumped in a quarter cup of sorghum.  It may not have been as "shimmering" as I needed, because it didn't start popping for at least 20 seconds.

I might have also used more oil than I needed.  I wonder if maybe I almost "deep-fried" the sorghum, in a sense?

At any rate, I wound up with very few popped kernels of sorghum.

Experiment 4b: Popping 1/4 cup sorghum in a crock pot with no oil while stirring

For the next quarter cup of sorghum, the only difference was a lack of oil.  The results are on the right: substantially more sorghum kernels popped than with the oil.  With that, I decided I would likely have the most luck by leaving out the oil and just dry-popping the sorghum.

Experiment 5a: Popping 1/4 cup sorghum in a stainless steel pot with no oil while stirring

One problem remained: a large number of kernels simply burned instead of popping.  It was then that I re-watched the second video, and noticed that the Just Poppin' folks specifically recommend using a stainless steel pot for popping sorghum without oil.  Apparently the blackness of the cast iron just holds too much heat.

After all these years, you might be surprised that I do not, in fact, own a stainless steel stock pot.  I do now.  Seventeen bucks at Target.

First, heat your pot for a minute or two on medium.  Dumping the sorghum into a cold pot will not help pop your sorghum.  Shake the pot to distribute the sorghum evenly, and turn down the flame to low.

The kernels started popping pretty quickly, and with constant stirring I got lots of sorghum hitting me in the hand.

The result is the bottom plate: over half of the kernels popped, though the ones that didn't really didn't, becoming even more scorched than with the other methods.

Experiment 5b: Popping 1/4 cup sorghum in a stainless steel pot with no oil, lidded with no stirring

I also tried popping sorghum with the lid and no stirring, just maybe occasionally shaking the pot.

With this method, it is again important to make sure everything is evenly distributed.

With the lid on, I got a few kernels and a lot of smoke.

Still, this method gave me results that were better than those in the cast-iron skillet, though I also got a lot of scorched kernels.

Experiment 6: Popping amaranth in a stainless stell pot with no oil, while stirring and not stirring

One final thing I tried was popping amaranth.  I understand that you can do this as well, and whatever the case it is easier to do.  As with the sorghum I found a video for it, courtesy of Oldways and the Whole Grains Council, neither of which I knew existed but both of whose existences do not surprise me.

Not so hard, is it?  It's even kind of adorable.

Apparently, amaranth is easier to find in the Baltimore area than sorghum.  It is particularly easy to find in bulk.  The Natural Market in Towson and MOM's in Timonium carry this in bulk.  I got this one at MOM's.

For the amaranth, make sure you even it all out at the bottom of the pot.  Note: I really am using waaaaaaay too much in this photo.  This is a quarter cup.  But it still started popping immediately.

I got a significant amount of popped amaranth.  It was kind of adorable, almost like "Barbie Popcorn".

I also tried covering the amaranth and not stirring it.  This time I only did an eighth of a cup.  Again this was too much.

And again, lot of tiny, tiny popped amaranth seeds.

Conclusions

So I have finally found that I have had the most success with popping sorghum if I do the following:

• use small amounts of sorghum (and amaranth for that matter)
• dry pop it instead of using oil
• use a light-colored vessel, specifically a stainless steel pot
• constantly stir it instead of leaving it to pop all on its own
• heat the pot first, keep it on medium until the kernels get to popping, and then turn down the heat to low.

Now that I've finally found success with popping this stuff, my next goal is to find out what else I can pop.  I've seen videos for rice and wheat on the internet.  This deserves the old college try, doesn't it?

Using Pi for Cake!

Those of you on the Facebook may have seen by now the below photo making the rounds from the page "I fucking love science" (seriously, that's the name of the page).  This is absolutely awesome.  Anybody care to try this?  This photo is completely theirs and not mine.  That and I think it's looking at me.

How to cut a cake into four equal pieces (with one smooth cut).  From the Facebook page "I fucking love science."

Using a can to boost your wifi

This from Discovery.com: I have to try this.  I totally admit that I don't enjoy the taste of canned beer (bottles for me please).  But I have a few soda cans in the recycling bin.  And when I fish one out I must let blog author Jerry James Stone (Twitter: @jerryjamesstone) know how it worked.

Snacking State-by-State: Illinois V - She Fed Me... with Science!

Before I started preparing this final Illinois post, I got what I have to call "Achatz-y". Those of you familiar with the famous molecular gastronome who helms Chicago's Alinea and who recently chronicled his battle with tongue cancer (which could have taken his life, much less his career), will understand what I mean.

Official Name: State of Illinois
State Nicknames: The Prairie State; The Land of Lincoln
Admission to the US: December 3, 1818 (#21)
Capital: Springfield (6th largest city)
Other Important Cities: Chicago (largest in the state and the Midwest; 3rd largest in the US); Aurora (2nd largest); Rockford (3rd largest)
Region: Midwest, Great Lakes; East North Central (US Census)
RAFT Nations: Cornbread & BBQ, Wild Rice
Bordered by: Wisconsin (north); Lake Michigan (northeast); Indiana (east); Kentucky (southeast & south); Missouri (southwest); Iowa (northwest)
Official State Foods and Edible Things: popcorn (snack food); GoldRush apple (fruit); white-tailed deer (animal)
Some Famous & Typical Foods: typical Midwestern foods, especially corn; Native American and pioneer foods; state-specific foods (horseshoe sandwich, shrimp de Jonghe, Chicago dog, Italian beef); also note: deep-dish pizza and hot dogs were first made popular in Illinois

Grant Achatz is one of the leading lights in the whole "molecular gastronomy" movement. Molecular gastronomy is the culinary exploration of the chemical and physical properties of food. It is not something I know much about or have ever been very interested in investigating. Now that I know a bit more about it, I am quite intrigued.

Molecular gastronomy forces you to think of your pantry as a chemical lab of sorts. In his "Postmodern Pantry" section of Achatz's massive Alinea cookbook, Mark McClusky sums up the molecular gastronome's attitude towards food and ingredients:

Go into your kitchen and open your pantry. You're staring at a lab's worth of chemicals. Baking soda? That's calcium bicarbonate if you want to be technical. Cream of tartar? More accurately, it's potassium hydrogen tartrate... Cooking is chemistry. Even the techniques are the same: heating, cooling, purification, dilution, distillation, fermentation. The difference between a saucier and an Erlenmeyer flask...is one of familiarity. [McClusky, in Achatz 2008:16]

Achatz's cookbook is a good go-to source for all the typical ingredients and supplies one would ever need to do molecular gastronomy at home. And it is possible to do this stuff at home, as many websites and online communities, such as the Molecular Gastronomy Network and MolecularRecipes.com attest. But I am still a molecular gastro-noob, so instead of trying spinach foam, melon-cantaloupe caviar or right or anti-grilled anything right off the bat, I thought I would try something a bit more reachable for me, simply turning a liquid fat into a powder, using tapioca maltodextrin.

The recipe: Olive Oil Powder (Alinea-Style)

Tapioca maltodextrin is a modified food starch used by companies to put fats into powder form, but is used by molecular gastronomes to turn oils, butters, and such into powder (this video from Gourmet Magazine's Will Goldfarb shows how to make a nutella powder). There are a few purveyors of this fascinating ingredient, all of them online. You can buy it from a few places online, where it'll run anywhere from $9 to $23 for a pound, or do what I did and order a free sample from the National Starch website.

Unbeknownst to me, barely a month ago Anthony Cipolone of the blog Mr. Onion's Neighborhood did the exact same thing I am about to do, using the exact same recipe in the exact same ingredients. He loves this stuff, and I hope my olive oil powder turns out like his. Science, right?


You need three ingredients and a few supplies:

* tapioca maltodextrin (see free sample note above)
* olive oil (had on hand)
* salt (same)

Not only that, but you will need a digital scale that can display measurements in grams and/or fractions of ounces. The cheapest ones run around $30 at Bed, Bath and Beyond. You don't need a fancy one.


Measure out the ingredients: first the olive oil,


then the tapioca maltodextrin, which will fly all over the place if you're not careful (um, ahem),


and the salt.


Whisk it all together. At first I used my hand whisk but it all just gooped up inside the whisk, so I switched to a fork and then ultimately the whisk attachment on my hand blender, which worked the best.

Nope, the fork just isn't doin' it for me.

Okay, the whisk attachment. That's better.

Because I am clumsy, I had to add a little more tapioca maltodextrin at a time - yes I eyeballed it, which is not exactly scientific I admit.

In the end I came up with something very crumbly and pasty, and not in any way wet.


I did not exactly get a powdery texture, but after pushing it through a strainer (or by its more French-sounding name, a tamis) I got a more powdery substance.


When he did this, Mr. Onion literally said "Strangely enough, I ended up with what looked like grated cheese." I hear ya, brother. I got the same thing. But the taste on the tongue was clearly olive oil. The texture was very slightly grainy at first, turning to silken. It was a most strange experiment, to be sure.


And so my massive sojourn into Illinois is done, from hearty farm food to heartier sandwiches, to Polish and Italian food, to the height of food science, Illinois truly has it all. So this begs my next question: what about Indiana, which is right next door?

Sources:

Achatz, Grant, Alinea. Ten Speed Press: Berkeley, CA, 2008.

Cipolone, Anthony. "Tapioca Maltodextrin: Sprinkle on the Fat". Mr. Onion's Neighborhood, published May 5, 2011.

McClusky, Mark, "Postmodern Pantry". In Alinea, by Grant Achatz.

Some information also obtained from Wikipedia's "Illinois" page and other pages, and the Food Timeline State Foods link to "Illinois".

Cupcakes INSIDE Egg Shells???

According to the Cupcake Project, it's certainly possible. Plus, it's a cool project. Now of course I have to do this.

When Science Meets Easter Candy!

From the University of Nottingham (UK), watch as delicious, overpriced Cadbury Cream Eggs are frozen with liquid nitrogen, are treated with powdered oxygen, and are made to explode from the inside out by being pressurized! It's when food meets geekdom! Thank you, Perry Michael Simon at Chris Hardwick's Nerdist website!

Freezer science: in case you were wondering...

Home-made Thanksgiving stuffing / dressing is still good after sitting double-bagged in a freezer bag in the freezer, after 9 1/2 months. Just thought y'all should know.

Gluten-Free Pancakes Wow Local Girl with Autism

My sister and I hit up Mount Washington Whole Foods and the Health Concern in Towson for gluten-free stuff. Cathy wanted me along since I had done some research on this very topic (NB: I'm still playing with the idea of some allergen-free crumb cake again). The reason? My neice has autism, and much research suggests that a person with autism can benefit from a gluten-free diet. AutismWeb.com summarizes the lowdown for parents interested in fighting autism with allergen-free food:

According to one theory, some people with autism spectrum disorders cannot properly digest gluten and casein, which form peptides, or substances that act like opiates in their bodies. The peptides then alter the person's behavior, perceptions, and responses to his environment. Some scientists now believe that peptides trigger an unusual immune system response in certain people. Research in the U.S. and Europe has found peptides in the urine of a significant number of children with autism. A doctor can order a urinary peptide test to see if proteins are being digested properly.

Studies are underway to examine the effectiveness of the GFCF diet, which has not gained widespread acceptance in the medical community. One recent study found behavioral improvements in children on a GFCF diet, while another study found no significant effects from the diet.

Changing the diet of children with autism is particularly difficult due to their often perseverative nature. This will often result in a very limited diet - for example, there are only a few key foods that my niece will eat, such as pizza, chicken nuggets and pancakes. She refuses to eat much else, no matter what my sister offers her. It's easier said than done to say "Well just make her eat it!" This sort of thing is often said by people who don't have autistic children.

So Cathy's line of attack is to make gluten-free versions of those foods that her daughter doesn't reject.

She bought all kinds of flours, including cake mixes and brownie mixes, pancake mixes and pizza crust mixes, tapioca and brown rice flours and xanthan gum. Again remember, as the helpful customer at WF reminded us, that the best brown rice flour comes from Authentic Foods, because it's ground really fine. Arrowhead Mills' on the other hand regularly makes for a gritty baked good.

Cathy left a phone message for me today: she made gluten-free pancakes for my niece. At first it looked like she wouldn't eat them, so Cathy sadly put them in the fridge. Her daughter said, "No, please," and wanted to finish them. Hopefully this trend continues, and hopefully the gluten-free diet will actually help!

Kitchen Science: "Two Minute" Spaghetti (well not really)

I was going through my typical early Sunday afternoon ritual - listening to Splendid Table on the radio while driving up and down 83 from Wegman's to Whole Foods or Trader Joe's, and maybe Giant. Somewhere around Padonia Road, my jaw dropped into my lap. Lynne Rosetto-Kasper's guest, Kate Heyhoe, author of Cooking Green: Reducing Your Carbon Footprint in the Kitchen, was helping Lynne and listeners with some tips on how to cook in an environmentally-friendly way. A big part of this involves how much energy you use in your kitchen.

One of Heyhoe's suggestions caught both Lynne and myself off-guard: when boiling spaghetti, don't boil it until al dente. Instead, boil it for 2 minutes, and then do the following: turn off the heat but don't remove the pot from the burner, and cover the pot for the remainder of the time that the pasta would have to boil. It will turn out al dente. Needless to say, Lynne was skeptical, but willing to try it. I was almost as skeptical, but curious, so tonight I made up a nice basil-mint pesto* and did the two minute pasta thing.

It worked. The damn procedure worked! The reason it works is because the residual heat in the pot continues to cook the pasta while the lid is covered. Were I to take the pot off the burner or leave the lid off, it would not work. Heyhoe makes similar suggestions for baking things in the oven. You save 7 minutes of heating the kitchen by just, in essence, steaming the pasta until it's al dente. It's interesting enough that I will probably do this again.

* Hey, basil is in the mint family. Why not?

Why you should always take scary food news with a grain of salt

The new report about soda increasing the risk of pancreatic cancer is getting some good play right now. Perhaps it's true. It suggests that soft drink drinkers have double the risk of developing pancreatic cancer as those who do not drink it. But they need a more rigorous study than this one. Many factors were not considered, in a fourteen year study - including high fat diet, consumption of diet soft drinks or fruit juices, family histories of pancreatic diseases, etc. But the sheer numbers of those who developed pancreatic cancer jumped out at me in particular (H/T Village Voice):

The study, as the Washington Post reports, is not without its weaknesses: The total number of pancreatic cancer diagnoses was only 140 (pancreatic cancer is a very rare type of cancer, but it also has a very low survival rate), and 18 of those diagnoses were made among people who drank two or more sodas per week. Twelve cases were diagnosed among people who drank less than two, while the vast majority -- 110 -- were among people who didn't drink any soda at all.

Do also read the Washington Post article as well. It elaborates further.

Not to mention the fact that I know soda isn't the healthiest thing to drink, and I know that pancreatic cancer is a very sad and tragic disease. But these mitigating factors at least should have been considered. As it stands, I probably won't be scared by this study. But it's still a good thing to cut back anyway.

Pombe Ya N'Dizi - Day 7

Stay tuned for a Restaurant Week post on Sascha's 527, where my sister and I went the other night, as well as another food ethnography post on some Tanzanian banana fritters. But to tide y'all over, here are some photos of the Pombe Ya N'Dizi project, day 7.

I am getting ready to strain the banana wine. I have to put it back into the jar, so I need to strain it first into this iced tea jug at left. It almost filled it twice.

Since I had never before made wine, I was kind of surprised by its really strong fermented scent. I was also wondering if it should be cleared up at all yet.

And here's the strained wine, jug cleaned out and refilled. Since it must be airtight, I sealed the rim of the lid with duct tape (yet another use for this versatile wonder of Home Depot).

Super Bowl Sunday holds little interest for me, since the Ravens didn't make it. So it officially become "Straining Day #3" and Day 14 of the Pombe Ya N'Dizi experiment.

Food Science with Julia Child

Julia burns her food on purpose - yes, on purpose - in the name of science. This is from an 80's science series on PBS, The Ring of Truth with Phil Morrison.

"Fleur de Baie" Caramels Part II: Update

Some interesting observations on those fleur de sel caramels I made a few weeks back, in which I replaced the sea salt with Old Bay. If you recall, I could not really taste the Old Bay, so I rolled the caramels in the stuff. I thought it had a fascinatingly salty, spicy, Old Bay taste - something I might eat on occasion, but not something that I would pass up.

Over the past few weeks, these caramels, which have sat in an often un-air-conditioned apartment in their own sealed up plastic container, have gotten a little more crumbly (maybe I just cooked them too fast). Another strange thing has happened at the same time: the Old Bay in the caramels has really gotten pronounced, so that you can taste it without having to roll it in Old Bay. This has resulted in my plain caramels taking on a subtle though still distinct Old Bay flavor, which is quite good. However, it has also resulted in those caramels that I rolled in Old Bay taking on an extremely strong Old Bay flavor that I can best describe as "wince-inducing" - it's like licking the salt and Old Bay off of a steamed crab, minus the crab taste. I don't know about the rest of you, but I'm not used to licking crab shells for any reason. So in the future when I make these "fleur de baie" caramels, I will merely stick to integrating the Old Bay into the caramel itself, and not rolling it in Old Bay. Eventually, the Old Bay will be detectable, and will taste just fine.

I made mozzarella!

Dinner

Yes, a few days ago I made mozzarella while trying to download stuff off my laptop hard drive - vacation photos and the like - that needs reformatting. It wasn't easy, but the digital cooking thermometer that I bought earlier has come to be a real help. After hunting down citric acid (about $5) and liquid rennet (about $8), I finally was convinced by others that I did not have to have non-homogenized milk (though I did find a good source of it with South Mountain Creamery at the Waverly and I-83 Farmers' Markets). Homogenized will work so long as it's no more than just "pasteurized" - that is, do not use "ultra-pasteurized" milk or it will not work!

I followed the ridiculously thorough examples at Instructables.com's page on how to make mozzarella. The one and only suggestion I might make for an otherwise excellent tutorial has to do with their Step 16, in which they tell you to heat and knead the cheese until it is pliable. I kept on kneading and heating, and all I got was crumbly cheese. Undaunted, I looked up troubleshooting suggestions on what to do when your mozzarella is in this state, and found the answer: to become stretchy, the mozzarella must be at least 138°F. Instructables.com never mentions this, but keep it in mind when you use their otherwise excellent website to make your own.

Kneading the mozzarella...

...after heating it to 138­­° (ouchie)...

...and rolling it into a big mozzarella ball.

I swear, this mozzarella really is much richer and denser than the store-bought stuff (from a supermarket, I mean). To be honest, I'm not sure if I'll be able to stomach it again, kind of like so many other things I've bought at farmers' markets (strawberries, blueberries, milk, lettuces of many types, etc). I had some mozzarella, basil and tomato slices tonight for dinner. It took me a while to finish just four small slices of mozzarella - they were that filling for me.

"Fleur de Baie" Caramels

For this week's installment of kitchen science, I set about the task of trying to figure out how to use Old Bay in something dessert-related. Several people have mentioned Moxley's Old Bay ice cream, but they just don't have enough demand to make it. So my thoughts turned to candy, where you often see salt being used in creative ways. Before I knew it, I was adapting a standard recipe for fleur de sel caramels - in this case, this recipe from Epicurious.com.

The making of the caramels was the difficult part. The easy part was adapting the recipe. All I did was replace the sea salt in the recipe with an equal amount of Old Bay seasoning (in this case, 1 teaspoon). I was worried that it wouldn't turn out very good, but I was surprised at how little I could taste the Old Bay. In fact, the only reason I could taste it at all was because I was deliberately looking for it. So my next step was to roll the caramel in Old Bay. This time I could really taste it. I imagine the reaction people might have would be the same as their reaction to Old Bay ice cream: you'll either love it or hate it. But if you like salty caramels then you will probably be more receptive to caramels covered in Old Bay (or your own favorite Chesapeake Bay) seasoning. I liked the flavor, to be honest. I was able to eke out about 50 caramels. Out of the 43 that remained after I taste-tested them, I rolled about half of them in Old Bay. Another fourth I kept plain, with about a fourth each rolled in fine pink Himalayan salt and coarse Celtic sea salt (I also covered one or two in smoked paprika; jury's still out on how I feel about that).

Better success may be had by replacing the teaspoon of sea salt with a tablespoon of Old Bay, since again it is difficult to taste it. But experiment with it and see if you like it.

Food, Inc.

I saw Food, Inc. last night. It didn't tell me much that I didn't already know - especially after reading Michael Pollan's excellent In Defense of Food (Pollan also appeared in the documentary a few times). And still, it disturbed and angered me - specifically the things I did not know. I won't write a lengthy post about it now, except to say that (Oops, looks like I did write a lengthy post about it after all!) After spending 90 minutes at the Charles avoiding all the Brüno traffic, I now have better insights into:

• Just how many things have corn products in them (diapers!?!?);
• Perdue and Tyson (and probably the other one or two megacompanies in "Big Poultry") do a pretty good job of mistreating not only its chickens - to make them much bigger in half the time - but also its chicken farmers - who have to go into hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt to upgrade their chicken houses, even though they make about $20K a year;
• I now know why unionizing workers at Smithfield's Tar Heel, NC, plant are so pissed off;
  
• I also now know about food safety advocate Barbara Kowalcyk and her efforts to pass Kevin's Law, named after her son who was killed by E. coli tainted beef that was recalled - a month after her son ate it, and two weeks after he passed;
  
• And after finding out how thoroughly Monsanto - the same chemical company that holds a patent on a genetically modified soybean - harasses those independent soybean farmers who refuse to use their soybeans, and considering how pervasive soy products are in the American food supply, I don't know if I can ever drink soy milk again (not that I did very much to begin with);
• If you want to grow corn or soy in this country, you pretty much have to roll over for the big corporations and do what they want;
• The organic food folks are pretty torn on corporations like Wal-Mart starting to sell organic food, even though it is the very type of change they are seeking. The documentary features one Gary Hirshberg, maker of Stonyfield organic yogurt, who points out that most formerly independent organic companies are now owned by the Big Guys. Tom's (that you see often at Trader Joe's and Whole Foods)? It's now owned by Colgate.
  

Of course, the film points out some things that both Pollan's book and Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation already discuss that I already had realized:

• The fundamental changes in the food industry over the last 50 years in order to quickly make cheap, tasty, though not always sanitary food (again, Kevin's Law);
• The pervasiveness of high fructose corn syrup and other many and varied corn products and soy products in our food;
• Because we'd rather prosecute illegal immigrants instead of the corporations that hire them, a lot of food corporations are getting away with some very bad things;
• Our nation's FDA and USDA are much more ineffective than they ever were, especially since food industry big wigs have served in the upper echelons of both organizations on and off for decades, under Democratic and Republican presidents;
  
• Perhaps the most important thing in the movie for me: so many people are too impoverished to even be able to buy the more expensive produce - they only have enough money to buy the junk food, keeping them trapped in a cycle of obesity, diabetes, unhealthy food and - again - poverty.

Mind you, it's not a paean to vegan eating. The movie visits Polyface Farms, an independent farm in the Shenandoah Valley where chickens, cows and pigs are roaming around eating the grass and not being cooped up. One guy traveled for five hours just to buy some of this farm's poultry! You will see owner Joel Salatin slit a chicken's throat on this farm. Of course, if you're a vegan you will never consider this humane. Apart from the slit-throating bit, though, this is more humane for the animals, for the workers, and for the consumers.

It's also much more expensive. Which made me realize as I left the Waverly Farmers' Market today: if you are able to buy this kind of produce, you are paying more for quality and humane farm conditions, especially for the meat, which you shouldn't be eating that much of anyway. But spending more for it will probably force me to both buy less of it, and to waste less of it. And this will probably work out to be less expensive for me in the long run, because I'll be buying less (albeit pricier) food at a higher quality, which is therefore more conducive to my health. Will I still stop at Wendy's or the Fractured Prune? Of course, but not often. And Eric Schlosser comes right out at the start of the movie and admits: it's not going to be easy to avoid all the crap in our food in this modern day and age (unless you take up a life of hunting and gathering). This goes for everyone from the ravenous meat-eaters to the uber-zealous vegans.

So what do we do? The movie may be preaching to the choir. Nevertheless, it urges the viewer to do a few things:

• Write our Congressmen and Congresswomen to get the gears moving to change the system (the producers use the regulations on Big Tobacco as an example);
• Go to farmers' markets and independent farmers much more often - and ask them to accept food stamps, so it's not just open those who can afford to go;
• Grow your own damn food! That justifies my new upside-down tomato grower hanging off my porch railing.
• If you know people that hunt, fish or crab, get some of what they bring back with them.

I've written a lot here. But please don't take my word for it, y'all. See the movie for yourself (the trailer is below). And if it's not playing locally (which it probably isn't for some of you), wait for it to come out on Netflix. It's a pretty damn enlightening documentary.

Seeking Cheese-Making Supplies

Y'all, I need your help. Over the next month, I will be doing some kitchen experiments. One of them involves making mozzarella. I need three things: citric acid, liquid rennet and non-homogenized milk. I found the first one at the Natural Market in Timonium (next to that new Giant from the previous post). They had liquid rennet but they were out. Alas, they did not have non-homogenized milk. Apparently, it is simply not sold unless it's skim milk, and even then it might be homogenized. Really: some organic fat-free ilk specifically said "homogenized" on it.

So I know where I can find liquid rennet. It's vegetarian only (which should be alright). But still I have no idea where I can find non-homogenized milk (can't be goat milk - apparently that won't work).

Any ideas on where I can find that milk?

End-of-Grad-School Dinner

Symbolically, food is important to me. Otherwise, why would I be writing a blog - about food? Y'all know I've finished grad school. The last year entailed a year-long internship, starting in August and ending last week. At various points during the internship, I made food and froze it, with the intention of eating it all together in one big meal at the end. I did this three different times:

• August - vanilla spice muffins (from a mix bought on clearance at Williams-Sonoma)
• January (end of Christmas vacation) - Neapolitan Sugo di Pomodoro (smooth tomato sauce), from Arthur Schwartz's excellent cookbook Naples at Table
• March (3/4 way through) - Irish colcannon (mashed potatoes mixed with greens - in this case, cabbage), made around St. Patrick's Day, from the Helen Walsh cookbook Irish Country Cooking

To weave all these frozen foods together, I settled on a meatloaf. The spaghetti sauce covered the meatloaf, and the colcannon was a side dish, along with some of Ina Garten's wonderful roasted broccoli (I also added red bell pepper strips). The muffin was eaten on the side.

The meal

The thing I was unsure about was exactly how well the food would stand up to two or four or nine months in the freezer. I have pulled foods out of the freezer before that survived several months pretty well (like a deer stew I made a few months ago), while others really did not hold up well at all (like some pieces of roasted chicken I stocked away - it's as wonderful out of the oven as it is inedible after six months in the freezer). So how did these foods stand up? Firstly, all of these items were stored on the door of my freezer. Sometimes, items placed there hold up better than they do in the main part of the freezer.

Vanilla spice muffin (total freezer time: nine months) - It tasted fine. The only problem I had was that it fell apart easily, which actually did not ruin the texture since it tended to fall apart anyway.

Tomato sauce (total freezer time: four months) - It was still as tangy and spicy as I remembered. I wish I had poured over the potatoes, too, but they were fine either way.

Colcannon (total freezer time: two months) - I was surprised at how good it tasted. The colcannon included not just potatoes but also butter, cream and boiled cabbage. What surprised me was how well the cabbage froze. It actually tasted and felt the same as when I made it!

Overall, the food froze well. Plus, I know now how well potatoes infused with cabbage turns out after being frozen for a while!

Now I'm going to freeze some of last night's meatloaf and eat it once I find a job!

Kitchen Experiments: Popping Sorghum

Note: I started this post a few months ago. I was inspired by Andrew Zimmern and the elusive idea of itty bitty popcorn. I just got swept up in stuff I had to get done, uploading the photos became a bother, and there you go. I've finally gotten around to posting it.

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Ever since Andrew Zimmern stuffed his face with freshly-popped sorghum kernels in his Ethiopia installment of Bizarre Foods, I have been eager to try doing this myself. If you've never heard of this: apparently, whole sorghum can pop in much the same way that whole popcorn can. The problem: it's not that easy to find pop sorghum in the US, even in such a centrally located area as Baltimore.

In my internet research, I have found out a few interesting recipes and factoids:

• Pop sorghum is very popular as a snack in many parts of East Africa and South Asia. In India, it's called jawar (also spelled jowar).
• You can pop sorghum in a few different ways, both reminiscent to how you pop popcorn. You can either heat about 5 mL (a little less than 1/2 teaspoon) of oil, heated in a covered pot until it's smoking, and then add about 50 g (3 T + 1 tsp) of sorghum seeds until fully popped. Some recipes call for shaking the pot, others don't. The other way to do it is to dump about a cup of sorghum seeds into a hot air popper.
• Apparently, not all types of whole sorghum work for popping. One scientific article - and my own experimentation - showed that some strains of sorghum don't really pop at all. Or perhaps it's the way mine was packaged.

Experiment: Popping Sorghum
Needed:

• sorghum, whole
• covered pot
• covered pan
• cooking oil (vegetable or canola)
• hot air popper

Pre-Experiment: finding whole sorghum
Note that not all "whole sorghum" is "pop sorghum". Also note that most "sorghum" sold in this area is in powdered, flour form. The Natural Market in Timonium carries four score varieties of Shiloh Farms products, but their Sorghum Grain is not one of them. Whole Foods doesn't even know what I'm talking about. The only place I could find it was at - you guessed it - H-Mart. Surprisingly, they had one and only one provider, Choripdong. Theirs is vacuum packed. I don't know if that affects anything or not.

Experiment 1: Popping sorghum in a pan
Zimmern's experience with pop sorghum had him watching Ethiopian women popping it on a large, hot surface, with all the little popped kernels flying up and down as they burst open. My omelette pan, which I bought in a fit of Julia Childish omelette-making hysteria, looked like it would fit the bill. I tried putting a little oil in the pan and once it was hot, pour in about 1/4 cup of whole sorghum.

After shaking it vigorously, I got a bunch of toasted grains of sorghum. Nothing popped.

At all.

Experiment 2a: Popping sorghum in a pot (while still)

My next experiment involved trying to pop the sorghum in a pot much like popcorn used to be popped. This recipe from the ICRISAT (International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics) website is similar to many that explain how to pop sorghum in this fashion:

Pop sorghum
Ingredients:
50g sorghum grain
5ml cooking oil

Method:

1. Heat the cooking oil in a covered container (pot) until smoking hot.
2. Add the sorghum grain and leave to pop at low heat until all grain is popped.

Initially, I would have shaken it. But since the recipe specifically calls for you to leave it alone, I did. After following these directions to a tee - twice - the results were just not pretty. And the whole apartment smelled of burnt sorghum for two days.

Experiment 2b: Popping sorghum in a pot (while shaking)

Since leaving it alone didn't work, I resorted to shaking it the next time, covered. I still used the same amounts of oil and sorghum - 50 g (a little under 1/4 cup) of whole sorghum added to 5 mL (not sure how that translates, but I found something with milliliters on it to measure it out) of smoking vegetable oil, then shaken vigorously.

The results were almost as bad. They would have been as bad had I not gotten about three or four kernels of sorghum popped. Success? Not when you consider that there are hundreds of sorghum kernels in one quarter cup.

Experiment 3: Popping sorghum in a hot air popper

My last trick was to try it with a hot air popper. I did remember reading about one blogger, Loztnausten, and her attempt to pop sorghum on her blog Everything Free Eating, which sees how you can eat while eliminating whole food groups (an intriguing concept for a blog). She recommended using more sorghum kernels than popcorn kernels - if the recipe called for 1/2 cup of popcorn, add 3.4 of sorghum, since it's so tiny that you'll need more just to keep it in place. I may have remembered the advice, but not the measurement, as I think I put in at most 1/2 a cup (thinking I had upped it from 1/4).

So, I dumped about a half cup of sorghum into the popper, most of which came flying violently back out at me, spraying all over my countertop. What's worse, almost none of it had popped. But this technique did yield the most popped kernels of all - about twenty or thirty, but again, out of literally hundreds. It also didn't help that I had to keep stopping it to re-add many of the kernels that flew out at me.

Was the experiment necessary?

Imagine my surprise when I stopped by the Punjab grocery by the Waverly Farmers' Market, looking for a different variety of pop sorghum - or jowar, only to find a big-ass bag of already popped jowar!


My jaw dropped, as it seemed that all of my work was for nothing, since this nice big bag of already-popped sorghum was sitting right in front of me. I asked one gentleman who works there where I could find the unpopped variety (Punjab doesn't sell it). He suggested H-Mart ("the place on Route 40"), where I got this seemingly unpoppable Korean variety, and then maybe some other Indian groceries, or even a Latin market. Plus, in the back of my mind I was thinking an Ethiopian or African grocer might have it, so I will have to stop in one of those places to see for myself. So this experiment is already half-way done. Next step: to try other varieties of sorghum, to see if it's just this variety that doesn't pop well, or if I just don't know what the hell I'm doing.

I have no clue when I will get around to that. For now, I'll just eat the already-popped stuff.

UPDATE: February 22, 2013: Want to see my second and more fruitful (er, grainful) attempt at popping sorghum (and amaranth, too)?  Here you go.

Getting to the Great Cilantro Divide

Josh Kurz despises cilantro. To him, it smells like soap and tastes horrible. He's not alone - many people he knows are exactly like him. As he reports for NPR, people seem to fall into either one of two cilantro-defined groups, those (like him) who hate it, and those (like me and most of the people I know) who love it.

I read the report on the NPR website, but if you want you can listen to it instead, just by clicking on the "Listen" link on the page.