In a recent NY Times article, Chef Andrew Zimmern points out the chefs never use Teflon pans, because they don’t need them. These non-stick pans are safe and work fine UNTIL the coating starts to disintegrate or is overheated. In both of those cases, you are then exposed to the poly-fluoro alkyls (PFAS) that have been found to be quite toxic “forever chemicals,” meaning that they don’t break down in the environment, but remain there more or less forever. And of course, the manufacture of Teflon spreads this problem quite broadly.
When my last Teflon pan started to crumble a few years ago, I tossed it and bought a ridged sort of Henkels pan from Costco that claimed to be nonstick. It wasn’t.
But here’s the thing. As Zimmern points out, your cast iron skillet really is pretty much non-stick and utterly durable. I have two such cast iron pans, about 10” and 12” diameters. They were my mother’s and she took good care of them. In fact, those pans are nearly centenarians!
Last weekend, I made my usual bacon and eggs using my 10-inch pan (probably an inside diameter of 9 ½ inches. The results were outstanding! These pictures show the 10-inch pan. We could cook 4 eggs in te 12-incher.
I cooked the bacon as usual, using medium to medium/high heat, and let to pan cool down a bit to medium/low. I like my eggs basted rather than over-easy, so I spooned the bacon fat to cook the tops.
And now, the important test. Did the eggs stick? Not at all. They slipped easily onto my spatula and onto my plate. Another time, I make an egg sandwich with a single egg using just a dab of butter, and it too cooked without sticking.
So forget your 1950s Teflon pan and just use your mom’s cast iron pan, or buy one yourself.
Cleanup? Swirl the pan in hot water, perhaps with a dish brush, and dry it with a paper towel.
Do you have to be careful of using soap? Not at all. These pans wear “like iron.” In fact, we once absent-mindedly ran one through the dishwasher, and with just a swish of oil to re-season it, it was good as new (or old).
As we explained in our previous article, cacio e pepe is a beloved Roman dish made of pasta, pecorino romano cheese, some pasta water and pepper. We explained the research of Giacomo Bertolucci et. el., who determined that most recipes don’t have enough starch in their pasta water to prevent the cheese from clumping. Instead, they proposed added some cornstarch or potato starch solution to the cheese before adding it to the hot pasta.
This approach worked very well. However, food scientist Nathan Myrhvold, the author of the food scientists’ bible, Modernist Cuisine proposed another solution. He suggested adding some sodium citrate to the cheese mixture, which serves to emulsify and stabilize the cheese and also prevents the dreaded clumping.
Well, sodium citrate is easily available online and in cooking stores, and is well known for it uses in making smooth cheese sauces. Just to reassure you, citric acid is the sour taste in citrus fruits such as lemons, limes and all the related fruits, and you can get sodium citrate by mixing lemon juice and baking soda. But since you can get a pound of it (probably a lifetime supply) for around $10 and have it delivered the next day, why bother?
Our recipe
• 240 g pasta (about half a pound, 8.4 oz)
• Water to cover the pasta in a wide, shallow pan.
• 160 g pecorino cheese (5.6 oz)
• 2 tsp sodium citrate (11 g).
• Freshly ground pepper
1. Grate a little more than the 160g of pecorino cheese in a food processor. Save the excess for sprinkling on top. You can use a cheese grater if you don’t have a food processor.
2. Bring the water for cooking the pasta to boil in an open, flat pan wider than the length of the pasta, and cook until al dente. Be sure to test the pasta’s doneness, as it will take longer than the suggested 10 minutes, since the small amount of water will reduce the heat of the boiling water.
3. Scoop out around half a cup of pasta water about a minute before the pasta is done. Add the sodium citrate to this water and stir to dissolve.
4. Mix the citrate pasta water with the grated cheese.
5. Lift the pasta out of the cooking water into a serving bowl.
6. Stir in the cheese mixture a little at a time. Add more pasta water if it is too thick. We ended up adding almost another half cup. The cheese shouldn’t clump at all.
7. Grate pepper into the cheese and pasta and stir it in.
8. Serve right away. This makes enough for two hungry people.
9. Serve with a side salad with homemade blue cheese dressing.
1. Weigh out 7.6 grams of lemon juice and 14.3 grams of baking soda (sodium bicarbonate). This will give you about 11 g of sodium citrate (2 tsp).
2. Slowly pour the lemon juice into the baking soda and stir. The mixture will foam up as it expels carbon dioxide.
3. When the foaming subsides, your paste containing your sodium citrate is read to use. Stir it into the pasta water and add to the cheese just as above.
The chemistry behind these measurements
Citric acid has the structure
You can also write it as
HOOC-CH2-C(OH)(COOH)-CH2-COOH
Or compactly but confusingly as C6H8O7.
Each of those COOH groups represents a carboxylic acid. Note that there are three of them and we have to neutralize all three.
The molecular weight of citric acid is 192.12 g/mole. Since our 2 tsp of citric acid weighs 11g, we need 11/192 or 0.057 moles of citric acid. Sodium bicarbonate, NaHCO3 has a molecular weight of 84 g/mole, and .057 x 84 is 4.8 grams to make .057 moles. However, since there are three COOH groups, we need three times that much, or 14.4 g of baking soda.
When you mix the lemon juice with the baking soda it foams as carbon dioxide gas is released:
You probably know that I am not a fan of Bonnie Garmus’ error riddled book, but I thought maybe they would clean up all that mish-mosh in the TV series. After all, there are probably hundreds of people working to produce this series based on the book. Foolish me. It’s worse.
I admit I could barely get through one episode, not only because of the scientific errors, but because Elizabeth Zott’s overwhelming paranoia about being mistreated as a woman is so overplayed. And all of the men in the lab are treated as ignorant, overbearing boors, laying it on pretty thick.
The scientific babble about phosphate rings and the like is better than her talking about covalent bonds in the book. But it’s pretty clear that the actress (Brie Larson) has no idea what any of that babble actually means as she races through it.
The writers took an incident from later in the book where she is a TV cooking show host and moved it into the preliminary scenes as a teaser of what is to come. In the book, she tosses out some canned soup because it if “full of chemicals,” but in this scene she adds “bad chemicals” and implies they will kill you. This is utter nonsense, of course, and nothing but pandering to the fears of the uneducated. The FDA regulates additives and preservatives, and no one is going to die!
Zott tells people that she is interested in abiogenesis, or how life began. But she never mentions that we have a pretty good idea how it began. She should know as every chemist does, about Wohler’s syntheses of urea from inorganic starting materials in 1828, showing that there is no difference between living and non-living compounds.
Soon after that, she is shown beginning her own after-hours research and discovering that the bottle of a compound she needs is empty. So, she sneaks into Calvin’s lab to get one of his. We soon learn that she needed some ribose (a simple sugar) for her experiment. But the bottles they show are narrow necked brown bottles, which would be unlikely to be the container for ribose, a white powder. And, in fact, it would be in a commercially labeled wide mouth bottle, because it was easily available from chemical supply companies. Today, it is sold as a dietary supplement, so anyone can see that it is a powder by a simple search.
Just to extend Zott’s humiliation, Garmus throws in a beauty contest for the secretaries, and Zott is asked to join. All of the secretaries are portrayed as ridiculously stupid, which is simply unreasonable. They are working in a research lab and have to know what they are doing. This would never happen in any company, not even in 1951!
Zott and Calvin join up in the same lab before the first episode is over, and Zott reorganizes the lab to make things easier to find. She put all the spatulas in a beaker near the sink. But the spatulas they show are the kitchen spatulas that you might use to spread cake icing. Lab spatulas are considerably smaller, like these:
You’d think someone would check on that sort of thing.
Calvin’s lab is decorated with huge 1-liter and 2-liter round bottoms and Erlenmeyers, all perfectly clean, because the kind of biochemical research they are interested in is actually carried out in very small flasks with milligrams or micrograms of material.
He is also shown eating food (mostly peanuts) in his lab and leaving them on lab benches, where both he and Zott help themselves. This is a lethally dangerous idea and again would never happen in any real lab. You don’t eat on the lab bench (or preferably at all) in the lab!
Calvin is also shown showering under the lab safety shower. This is very cute, but they don’t work that way. Once you pull the chain, they stay on until you reach up and turn off with the lever. They are made to drench you if you spill something dangerous on yourself. And they can’t be enclosed like that: they have to be accessible from anywhere in the lab within 10 seconds.
And finally, Larson mispronounces citrate with a long “I,” saying sy-trate instead of sit-rate. Surely someone on the staff would know better than that. This is just embarrassing.
Bonnie Garmus’s novel Lessons in Chemistry has been wildly popular since its 2022 publication, and praised by nearly everybody. The story of Elizabeth Zott, a Master’s student at UCLA who was attacked and raped by her research supervisor makes quite a tale. In this story, she is denied permission to continue for her Ph.D. and essentially expelled, for defending herself from this attack. Sadly, it is all too believable.
The story is essentially a charming fantasy where Elizabeth leaves the research institute where she took a job to become a TV cooking show host, where she emphasizes the chemistry in the recipes she describes. I call it a “fantasy” because of her dog Six-thirty with a 1000-word vocabulary, who apparently can read Proust, and her preposterously precocious daughter, who is reading Dickens around age 4. The story over all is a lot of fun: especially in the first two acts. The third act is a deus ex machina ending that seemed a bit much, and more worthy of Gilbert and Sullivan.
But, let me interject that I was a chemistry graduate student about the same time as her story, graduating from Oberlin College in 1964 and getting my Ph.D. in organic chemistry from Ohio State in 1969. And Garmus and her editors simply did not take a lot of care in describing the chemistry and the labs of those days, and these clinkers spoiled the elegance of her beguiling tale. I note that female Ph.D. scientist Ricki Lewis has somewhat similar views you should read as well. The following contains spoilers.
One event Garmus comes back to several times, is that women in the lab are so uncommon that everyone assumes they must be secretaries, even in graduate school where there are sure to be female students. The fallacy, of course, is that secretaries dress professionally, while student researchers wear lab attire: sweatshirts and jeans are common, or grubby lab coats. I still have one of mine.
Having missed her chance at a Ph.D. (at least at UCLA) Zott takes a job at Hastings Institute, a sort of Nevermore Academy for second string scientists. But among them is Calvin Evans, an up-and-coming scientific wunderkind who is carrying out research on abiogenesis, the conversion of common chemicals into components found in living organisms. Of course, the book makes no mention of Wohler’s synthesis of urea from inorganic materials in 1828 or the Miller and Urey experiment in 1952 that started with a flask of gases (water, methane, ammonia and hydrogen) likely to have been in existence before life began. After applying an electric arc inside the closed system, Miller found that several essential amino acids had been formed. (Lewis mentions this as well.)
The initial confrontation between Zott and Evans comes about when her lab needs beakers, and she learns that he has boxes of them. Beakers? What the heck would she want beakers for? They are essentially glass vessels open to the air and, I might note, easily spilled. If she is doing biochemistry related to her own interest in abiogenesis, she’d be doing it in small, closed flasks under nitrogen or argon.
Needless to say, these two socially inept scientists are quickly attracted to each other and soon move in together. While they are attracted by their scientific discussions, Garmus can’t reproduce them very well. She quotes them arguing about the number of covalent bonds in some compound: basically, an introductory high school or freshman chemistry topic. In fact, we have no idea what either of them are actually working on.
Bunsen burners
The book mentions Bunsen burners throughout, as if they are part of the standard research lab. But they are not. Open flames in an organic chem lab are an invitation to bench fires. I never saw a Bunsen burner after I left undergraduate school, and when I visited a couple of years later, they had all been replaced with electric appliances.
Heating mantle
Hot plate with magnetic stirrer
Basically, chemists use hot plates and heating mantles, which wrap the round-bottom flasks they use in carrying out reactions. And many hotplates have a second control knob that controlled a spinning magnet under the heating surface. Then you put a small Teflon covered magnetic bar in the flask, and used the rotating magnet to spin the stirring bar and keep the solution stirred.
Cooking is Chemistry
One of the principal ideas we are to get from Zott’s abilities as an excellent cook is that “cooking is chemistry.” And it is indeed, but Garmus’s examples are not that persuasive. While living with Evans, Zott does most of their cooking, and makes notes like
@200˚ C/35min = loss of one mol. H2O per molecule sucrose, total 4 in 55 minutes = C24H36O18.
The reason why this is utter nonsense is that there are probably hundreds of compounds with that compressed empirical formula. It tells us absolutely nothing about what the compound is or what is actually going on!
In a later scene, after she has set up a lab where her kitchen was, she has a sack meaninglessly labeled C8H10N4O2. Since she uses it to make coffee for her neighbor, we are to infer that the label refers to a formula for caffeine. But it would have been more correct and almost simpler to have simply sketched the molecular structure instead:
Caffeine
After her first show, she makes out a shopping list, including CH3COOH, which no one recognizes as acetic acid (or vinegar). If she’s not trying hard to be obscure, she could have written “vinegar” in the same number of characters, or HOAc, the usual abbreviation. In that abbreviation “Ac” stands for the acyl group, CH3C=O and the H attached to the oxygen is the acidic proton. Concentrated (glacial) acetic acid is nasty stuff, and not suitable for salads. Vinegar is about 4% acetic acid, and she should say so.
She also keeps saying “sodium chloride” for salt, but chemists would usually just say “table salt” to distinguish it from other salts in the lab. Or, they might say “NaCl,” which is shorter, still.
During one of her shows she takes questions from the audience and one woman confessed she had really wanted to be an open-heart surgeon. Zott asks her the molecular weight of barium chloride, and she quickly answers “208.23,” so Zott assures her that she is ready for work towards a medical degree. I don’t know a single chemist who could answer that off the top of her head. We’d look at the periodic table and find the atomic weight of barium and of chlorine (137.327 and 35.453) and knowing that the formula is BaCl2, we’d calculate the atomic weight and come up with the same answer. But answering that immediately is just a parlor trick for a few people with photographic memories who are super-calculators. It doesn’t say much about her knowledge of science. (OK, maybe this was a joke, but it didn’t land that way.)
In another amusing moment, she was given a can of the sponsor’s soup. She tosses it into the trash, because “it’s full of chemicals.” Well of course it is. Everything, including water, is a chemical. She then goes further suggesting products like that would eventually kill you. This may be Garmus’s opinion, but it shouldn’t be Zott’s, because there is no science behind it. Preservatives added to canned soup are there to keep it from killing you. And there is no evidence that they are dangerous. “Full of chemicals” is just a random slogan based on ignorance and would not be Zott’s view.
Publications
Throughout the book, Garmus refers to the nonexistent magazines Chemistry Today and Science Journal. If she means Science she should have said so. It’s a major publication. Other professional journals she might have mentioned are the Journal of the American Chemical Society, Journal of Organic Chemistry,Proceedings of the National Academy and Nature. I don’t think the ACS journal Biochemistry existed yet. But for news, she should have mentioned Chem & Engineering News, which is a weekly chemistry news magazine published by the ACS.
However, if her boss Donatti copied her notes and published a paper, it would have taken him weeks or months to write that paper and probably a year for it to be refereed, edited and published. So, it appearing two months after Zott returned is just literary license.
Calvin Evans’ Death
Sadly, their loving relationship is cut short by a freak (and preposterous) accident. His original gravestone gets damaged, and when she has it remade, she included the inscription below.
She says that she is “opting for a chemical response that resulted in happiness.” This is probably the structure for oxytocin, but a more accurate structure drawing is shown below, that would be easier to engrave on stone.
Oxytocin
Oxytocin is sometimes called “the love drug,” because it is associated with romance, sex, childbirth and lactation. She could have written it on the tombstone more succinctly as the 9 amino acid components:
Cys – Tyr – Ile – Gln – Asn – Cys – Pro – Leu – Gly – NH2
Or even more compactly in biochemist’s notation as
CYIQNCPLG-NH2.
Conclusions
This is a funny and entertaining book, that would have been more authentic if they’d talked to some lab chemists about how labs really operated in 1960s. Some of us remember them quite well. Read it and enjoy it, with a grain of salt (er, sodium chloride).
Oh, and there is no conceivable reason why Elizabeth would be using a cyclotron (p. 6). They are primarily for physicists, and sometimes for radiation therapy. And finally, The Mikado dialog is not racist (p.21), and the soprano does not cause all the trouble. That job is reserved for Koko, the patter baritone!
The photo at the top of the article is from the set of “Jekyll and Hyde, the Musical,” performed at the Wilton Playshop in November, 2022.
We make scones for breakfast fairly often, because as we showed earlier, you can make them quickly and they are quite delicious.
But, a couple of days ago, we made some of the worst scones we’d ever made.
As you can see, the recent scones were a flat-out disaster. We had used new baking powder and everything, but they were a flop. What had gone wrong?
Well, the immediate suspect was the baking powder. Baking powders sometimes fails because it was stored improperly: in a hot warehouse or truck, for example. Let’s explain how this works here.
Baking soda is just sodium bicarbonate, NaHCo3. You use it when acidic ingredients such as buttermilk, sourdough or yoghurt are included in the batter. The baking soda will react with any of those acids to release carbon dioxide, CO2, which causes bubbles that make the dough rise.
Baking powder is sodium bicarbonate mixed with one or more acids in dry crystalline form, such cream of tartar (tartaric acid), monocalcium phosphate, sodium aluminum pyrophosphate, or a couple of others. Double acting baking powders (and most of them now are) contain two acids, one that reacts immediately when liquid is added and one that reacts only when heat is also applies. In all cases, the baking powder also contains cornstarch, to help keep the mixture dry and add bulk to make it easier to measure.
But you can easily test baking powder by putting a couple of teaspoons in a bowl, and adding boiling water. Just microwave a cup of water in a pitcher for a minute or so until it bubbles a bit, and pour it over the baking powder. It should foam up right away as you see below.
New baking powder foams up in hot water
But let’s look at that suspect baking powder: no foam at all, it scarcely breathes a word!
Suspect baking powder
In fact, it doesn’t really look at all like the other sample. In fact let’s look at the package:
If you’ve ever been given a can of Diet Coke or Diet Pepsi and it tastes a little off, or way off, you probably just toss it out. Why does this happen and what can you do about it?
Many diet soft drinks are sweetened with aspartame a leading non-nutritive sweetener that works very well in cold or room temperature foods. Aspartame is little more than 2 amino acids (aspartic acid and phenyl alanine) stuck together in a peptide linkage with one extra methyl group. This useful colored diagram came from the paper by Prodolliet, et. al. [1].
Aspartame, showing aspartic acid(red), phenyl alanine (blue) and the methyl ester (magenta)
Aspartame was discovered in 1965 by James M Schlatter, while working at G.D. Searle. He said that he had made the aspartame (methyl ester) and was trying to recrystallize it to purify it, when some of the mixture bumped outside the flask. Later, when he licked his fingers to turn a page, he discovered a very sweet taste. Since he realized that the compound he made was unlikely to be toxic, he tasted it and found it extremely sweet indeed. In fact, aspartame is about 200 times as sweet by weight as sugar.
Searle patented this product, naming it Nutrisweet and Equal. Officially, aspartame has a half-life of about 300 days in solution at about pH 4, about the pH of soft drinks, but half life means that half if it as gone by that time. And if the cans are exposed to a hot storeroom or stored in a warm summer garage, they may deteriorate faster.
Why does it start to taste awful?
Diet sodas have a date on the package: it’s not the “sell-by” date, it’s the “use-by” date. Depending on you grocer, this may be 2 to 2-1/2 months from the date you bought it. Grocers are not too good at stock rotation of diet sodas, so it is up to you to make sure you don’t get an early one. Nearing the end of January, we have picked up cartons dates from Mar 21 to April 11 in the same stack! Unless you only buy one or two at a times, this won’t matter, but if you buy several on sale (and they all do this) you need to be watchful.
Carton date
Can date
So what happens? Well, the simplest thing that happens is that the two amino acids come upzipped: this is called hydrolysis, since it always amounts to adding a water molecule at a carbon-oxygen bond. If you unzip aspartame into the two amino acids and remove that methyl to become methanol, you have a tasteless mixture of pretty harmless compounds. Your body easily metabolizes that bit of methyl alcohol and you are none the worse for it. This is described in the Prodolliet paper [1] and in the one by van Vliet [2].
Aspartic acid
Phenyl alanine
Methanol
What tastes so awful?
It is easy to understand that a solution of those two amino acids might well be tasteless, which is one of the outcomes when diet sodas age. But what about that really vile taste you sometimes encounter in old diet sodas?
I think there are two possibilities. If you look at the various steps aspartame undergoes as it unzips [1], you discover that one of the intermediate products is a form of diketopiperazine. The basic compound is shown below along with the derivative, sometimes also referred to as DKP that is actually produced:
Basic diketopiperazone
DKP found in aspartame decomposition
Bothwick [4] has described the taste of DKPs as “bitter, astringent, metallic, and umami.” This is not surprising, since ring compounds with one or more nitrogen usually are pretty smelly. And a table of the concentrations of intermediates in van Vliet[2] shows that DKP occurs in significant amounts. But, in case you are concerned about their toxicity, Ishii et. al [3] studied aspartame and DKP for 104 weeks in Wistar rats and found no toxic effects at all.
The other possibility, albeit less likely, is another form of the sweetener called β-aspartame, which differs only in the position of that NH2 group: it is moved one carbon to the left. This isomer has a pronounced bitter taste, and does occur during aspartame decomposition, but in much lower concentration. But again, it is harmless.
beta-aspartame
Diet Coke mythology
You can’t discuss diet sodas for very long before someone brings up the old saw the diet sodas cause weight gain. The theory was that the sweetness induces hunger and you eat more actual food to satisfy it.
In 2008 Fowler and Williams[5] published a paper noting a correlation between obesity and diet soda consumption. A correlation, not causation. But in 2009, Chen and Appel [6] monitored 810 adults for 18 months, recording their beverage intake. They found weight gain from sugar sweetened beverages and but no weight gain from artificially sweetened beverages.
Finally, in 2012, Maersk and Belza [7] compared satiety scores for milk, sugar sweetened beverages and artificially sweetened beverages, and found no evidence that artificially sweetened beverages increased appetite or energy intake, concluding that “diet colas had effects similar to water.”
Regarding unfounded rumors that artificially sweetened beverages had some neurological effect, a panel of 10 experts examined all the current literature [8] and concluded:
The data from the extensive investigations into the possibility of neurotoxic effects of aspartame, in general, do not support the hypothesis that aspartame in the human diet will affect nervous system function, learning or behavior. Epidemiological studies on aspartame include several case-control studies and one well-conducted prospective epidemiological study with a large cohort, in which the consumption of aspartame was measured. The studies provide no evidence to support an association between aspartame and cancer in any tissue. The weight of existing evidence is that aspartame is safe at current levels of consumption as a nonnutritive sweetener.
So aspartame is safe before and after it degrades into the component amino acids, but for the best taste, you should check each package’s expiration date.
References
Prodolliet, Jacques; Bruelhart, Milene (1993). Determination of Aspartame and Its Major Decomposition Products in Foods. Journal of AOAC INTERNATIONAL, 76(2), 275–282. doi:10.1093/jaoac/76.2.275
2,5-diketopiperazines in food and beverages: Taste and bioactivity, A Bothwick and NeilC DaCosta, Crit Rev Food Sci Nutr. 2017 Mar 4;57(4):718-742 doi:10.1093/jaoac/76.2.275
Fueling the obesity epidemic? Artificially sweetened beverage use and long-term weight gain. SP Fowler, K Williams, et. al., Obesity (Silver Spring). 2008 Aug;16(8):1894-900. doi: 10.1038/oby.2008.284. Epub 2008 Jun 5.
L Chen and L J Appel, et. al. Am J Clin Nutr. 2009 May;89(5):1299-306. doi: 10.3945/ajcn.2008.27240. Epub 2009 Apr 1.
M Maersk, A Belza et. al., Eur J Clin Nutr . 2012 Apr;66(4):523-9. doi: 10.1038/ejcn.2011.223.
The garlic bulb is a really unusual plant. Each clove in the garlic head is actually a single swollen leaf, according to Harold McGee. Garlic’s strong taste and smell is actually a protection the plant evolved: when an animal bites into it, the strong taste is released, repelling the animal.
A whole garlic clove has only a mild taste and aroma, but when you cut into it, the enzyme alliinase is released from one part of the bulb and reacts with the compound alliin (a derivative a the amino acid cysteine) in another part of the bulb to form allicin, which has the characteristic garlic aroma and taste. Note that the plant evolved this defense to keep away animals, and garlic is actually quite toxic to dogs and cats: you should avoid letting any get into their food.
The alliinase enzyme is quite sensitive to temperature. Students of Professor John Milner at Penn State carried out a simple experiment where they placed garlic cloves in a microwave oven for one minute. While the garlic cloves appeared unchanged, analysis showed that the enzyme had completely disappeared after heating. They noted that other types of heating are sure to give the same results.
So this means that you need to chop the garlic before heating or cooking it, and that you should let the chopped garlic stand for a few minutes before adding it to the food you are preparing, to allow time for the enzyme to work to develop the flavor.
Garlic has much more sugar in it (fructose) than onions do, and is thus more prone to burning. Cook it at low temperatures when sautéing it, or add it directly to a liquid.
These two facts explain why dishes like Chicken with 40 Cloves of Garlic are so mild. The garlic cloves are never cut up: and the alliinase is destroyed by heating soon after the cloves are added to the pot.
Always buy fresh heads of garlic. Avoid the ones in little boxes, as they may be very old. You should also avoid bottled peeled garlic cloves in oil, as they are prone to develop botulism, according to McGee. And do not refrigerate garlic, which also will reduce the flavor.
Garlic peeler
When peeling garlic, you can use the simple rubber garlic peeler tube shown above, or you can use Jacques Pepin’s technique, and just cut a small slice from the root end of the clove. This will free the skin and it will just about come apart in your hand. You can also just crush the garlic and pick out the peel from the rubble.
And how do you get that garlicky smell off your hands? Rub them with salt and then wash as usual.
Cable news, even when its reporting is sound, is rife with advertising of products you never heard of. And for good reason, advertising is relatively cheap on cable news and anyone can flood the news with “wonderful new products” that probably aren’t that great.
Prevagen does not improve your memory, as explained in this Harvard Health blog. . You have probably seen Prevagen ads everywhere. Targeted particularly at seniors who may experience normal word finding difficulties, the claims may mention “studies,” but not “doctors,” because no doctor recommends. It. Allegedly extracted from jellyfish (apoaequorin) actual studies have shown no significant effect, although by rearranging their data (called p-hacking) Quincy Biosciences has claimed it does. The FDA does not agree as explained in this Science Based Medicine article. The Global Council on Brain Health concludes that “there is no convincing evidence to recommend daily dietary supplements for brain health in healthy older adults.”
The ASPCA does not help your local animal shelter. Despite their tear-jerking ads, the ASPCA is a New York City organization, and is not an umbrella organization for your local SPCA. Give to your local animal shelter instead. Further the ASPCA has been criticized for euthanizing pets rather than saving them.
Mr Clean Magic Eraser. These products look like a good idea and have positive reviews, although it is not clear how they improve on a damp paper towel and some SoftScrub. According to reviews at The Spruce, “Because the eraser works by scrubbing at the surface with tiny but extremely hard threads, you should not use on highly glossy or satin finishes….it is not appropriate for paneling or wood finished surfaces. It will strip away the surface and create damage and the sponge does begin to break down after [several] uses.
Tac Shaverby Bell and Howell. The reviews of this shaver are mixed, but according to this review apparently it didn’t last long and the beard trimmer didn’t do much. The Bell and Howell company you may remember from years back essentially got out of the technology business in the 2000’s and is now just a name owned by Westview Capital Partners.
Yoshi Copper Grill Mat– It “sort of works” but can’t be placed over an open flame. You could use it on a gas grill with covered burners, though.
Spin Power – is a multi-outlet charging station for your cordless devices. It does not include any spot for phones that can be charged by induction. It has mixed reviews on Amazon as you might expect from anything from ASOTV.
WATCHMAN – is an implant from Boston Scientific for stroke prevention. It is FDA approved and in wide use, But it was criticized in a handful of studies cited by Dr David Becker from Chestnut Hill Temple Cardiology and by Dr John Mandrola of Baptist Medical Associates of Louisville. If you are a candidate for this implant, discuss these objection with your cardiologist. The product has been generally successful.
Spurtles – I never heard the word outside of the commercials from Lucinda’s Kitchen. They seem to be a set of wooden kitchen utensils made of acacia wood. Lucinda claims these exactly fit pans and jars and are more useful than what you have now. (I seriously doubt that.) You must hand wash them rather than tossing them in the dishwasher. This review calls them low-quality, not durable and having delayed delivery.
In the summer of 1978, a group of IBM executives met in Armonk to form the Instrument Systems Task Force and explore IBM’s entry into the chemical analytical instrument business. The IBM PC was not yet even a glimmer in Don Estridge’s eye, and the only well-known personal computers were the Apple II, the Tandy TRS-80 and the Commodore Pet.
By October, IBM’s Corporate Management Committee had approved the venture and IBM Instruments was soon formed. This book explores and memorializes the rise and successes of IBM Instruments and its eventual demise, only about 6 years after it was announced. To many, this was a shocking failure from one of the greatest computer companies in the world, and it is worth taking some time to examine how the Instrument Division grew and how it finally was shut down.
It tells the never-before written full story of IBM Instruments and why everyone who worked there misses it.
This corporate Greek tragedy details the ideas for great products like a redesigned NMR spectrometer console that concealed obsolete electronics, to a desktop computer far ahead of its time that received far too little support.
Successes included an excellent AF series NMR spectrometer and an IR spectrometer based on new PC-AT, as well as a satellite PCNMR workstation package for the PC-AT that revolutionized the organization of NMR labs.
But eventually, IBM’s Instrument business unit was shut down and we all went off to other jobs. What they did wrong was mostly management-based, not technical and the book explains it in detail.
CBD oil is the abbreviated name for cannabadiol, an extract of one of several cannabinoids found both in marijuana plants (cannabis sativa) and in hemp. CBD oil is not psychoactive and won’t get you “high,” but if extracted from marijuana plants, there may be trace amounts of THC (tetrahydrocannabinol), the active component in marijuana in the extract. Usually, “CBD oil” is made by extracting CBD and then dissolving it in neutral carrier like coconut or hemp seed oil.
It is a popular “natural” remedy, and has been suggested as treatment as a pain reliever, treatment for depression, cancer-related symptoms, acne, neurological disorders, heart health, substance abuse and diabetes protection.
However, there are just about zero studies of CBD oil’s actual effectiveness in the published medical literature. This extensive review of CBD oil and marijuana by David Gorski in Science Based Medicine explains that CBD oil has only been found to be helpful and is approved for treatment of two rare forms of epilepsy. There are no other documented benefits. Wilkerson and McMahon discuss how CBD oil seems to work in this one case
One problem is, the CBD oil is not a consistent mixture. Depending on how it is extracted, its concentration will vary, as will the number of associated impurities, which may include traces of THC. So possible benefits (if any) are not going to be consistent. Essentially this is herbalism, treatment with herbs where the exact concentration of possibly beneficial components are unknown.
An interesting article by Richard Freedman, MD was published in the NY Times last December in which described CBD-based candies as a “fruit flavored placebo.” But more to the point, he cites a 2017 study in JAMA that only 26 out of 84 samples of CBD oils, tinctures and liquids contained the amount of CDB claimed on the labels. Eighteen of them contained THC, which could lead to impairment or intoxication and a quarter contained less CBD then specified. The FDA has also issued warning letters to producers whose products did not contain the amount specified.
In 2017, the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine published a review of some 10,000 studies on the health effects of cannabis and cannabinoids. The review is over 400 pages, but here is the summary chapter. They found only a few small, randomized trials of CBD and concluded that there was insufficient evident that CBD was effective in treating insomnia, Parkinson’s, and smoking addiction, and only limited evidence that it was useful in treating anxiety.
And to move directly into utter quackery, there is now a CBD infused sports drink being promoted by retired NFL player, Terrell Davis.
That’s it. There are no other substantive studies on CBD except the one finding it helpful as an adjunct in treating two uncommon forms of epilepsy.
Other than that, there is simply no evidence that CBD is effective for anything except profit margins!
What about CBD with THC?
In his somewhat critical New Yorker article on medical marijuana, Malcolm Gladwell points out that all of the studies on marijuana effects were done using older strains of marijuana. All such studies were required to use the same plants, grown for research at the University of Mississippi. Modern breeding techniques have allowed the development of newer strains with about 10 times higher concentrations of THC. And we have simple no idea what the effects of these higher concentrations might be. We don’t know if the body responds linearly to this drug, or whether it responds more than that. We don’t know if there are new side effects or any indications of additive properties. We just don’t know.
There is strong evidence that cannabis or cannabinoids are effective
for the treatment of chronic pain,
as anti-emetics for treatment of nausea induced by chemotherapy.
For improving patient-reported multiple sclerosis spasticity symptoms
There is moderate evidence that cannabis or cannabinoids are effective in improving short term sleep outcomes
associated with obstructive sleep apnea syndrome, fibromyalgia, chronic pain, and multiple sclerosis
There is limited evidence that cannabis or cannabinoids are effective
Increasing appetite in HIV/AIDS patients
Reducing symptoms of Tourette’s disease
Improving social anxiety symptoms in people with that disorder
Improving symptoms of PTSD
There is limited evidence that cannabis or cannabinoids are ineffective for
Dementia
Glaucoma
Depressive symptoms
There is no evidence that cannabis or cannabinoids are effective for
Cancers
IBS
Epilepsy
ALS
Huntington’s chorea
Parkinson’s
Dystonia
Addiction treatment
Schizophrenia
Negative effects of cannabis
The same National Academies study found associations between cannabis use and
Lower birth weight (substantial)
Development of schizophrenia and other psychoses (substantial)
Increased symptoms of mania and hypomania in bipolar disorder (moderate)
Increase suicide ideation (moderate)
Pregnancy complications for the mother (limited)
Later outcomes in the offspring (not refutable)
Cognitive impairment in learning, memory and attention (moderate)
Impaired academic achievement (limited)
Increased rates of unemployment (limited)
And, in Alex Berenson’s new book Tell your Children the Truth about Marijuana, he also draws connections between marijuana use and mentally ill criminals. Essentially, he asserts that they are all pot smokers.
What is disturbing to me is that despite the very low level of medical value of both CBD oil and actual cannabis, and the very high amount of risk it seems to present, the “marijuana industry” has been very successful in promoting their products as beneficial, when objective evidence simply does not support these conclusions.
Nothing could be more indicative of this slippery slope than the fact that the Wilton Continuing Education department was offering a class in the benefits of CBD oil taught by a woman from a marijuana dispensary, whose bio clearly shows how strongly she believes in the medical benefits of cannabis, but who has very little actual scientific training. When I pointed out the articles showed how little benefits actually existed, they did not cancel the class.
And, in Alex Berenson’s new book