I first tasted buttermilk at my grandmother’s house in Lincoln, Nebraska. My mother and I had taken the train from Columbus out to Lincoln to visit her family there. I was probably 10 or 12 years old. I came in from playing with my cousin Steve, climbing trees and the like, to find that they were going to make pancakes with buttermilk. I tasted the buttermilk and didn’t like it much. “But,” they said, “wait till you taste the pancakes. They will be like you poured a lot of butter into them!”
And, yes, the pancakes were very good indeed.
Some years later, when I started collecting recipes, I got that buttermilk pancake recipe from my mother’s sister, Elsie, and have saved it ever since. Since it was originally my grandmother’s it is probably over a hundred years old, and was probably made from real buttermilk. Here it is:
2 cups flour
2 eggs
2 tsp baking powder
1 Tb sugar
1 tsp baking soda
½ tsp salt
As a memory guide, Elsie pointed out that you can summarize the recipe as 2-2-2-1-1-1/2.
Mix dry ingredients and add buttermilk until you get a “thickish batter.” Cook in a large cast-iron pan or a griddle. Turn the pancakes when they start to show bubbles.
Buttermilk was originally formed by allowing the milk to stand to separate the cream allowing it to ferment a bit. Then, after churning, they let the buttermilk ferment and thicken. But once centrifugal cream separators were developed, you didn’t have to let the cream set and begin to ferment before churning the butter. So, another way to make buttermilk was developed, where they took part skim milk and added the same bacteria that were found in fermenting the original buttermilk. These were usually Lactococcus lactis and Leuconostoc citrovorum. This was called “cultured buttermilk” and is commonly found in the US, where there is little original buttermilk available.
I have been making excellent pancakes using Friendship Buttermilk for over 20 years. But recently, our local market dropping the Friendship buttermilk, offering only Kate’s Buttermilk. You can still buy it at ShopRite and at some Stop and Shops.
So, it seemed like a good idea to compare the two. We made up two identical batches of dry ingredients and eggs, and added buttermilk to each until we reached a “thickish batter” stage. We initially cooked 4 pancakes on each time on our Presto griddle. But recognizing that the griddle’s heating was uneven and measurement of each pancake aliquot was difficult we then simply put one carefully measured ¼ cup of batter on the griddle from each recipe, and placed them close together so they would have the same cooking temperature.
The result:
The pancake on the right, made with Friendship cultured buttermilk, clearly rose higher than the one made with Kate’s buttermilk. We would assume then that the Friendship buttermilk is slightly more acidic and reacts with the leavening more that the Kate’s recipe did.
How did they taste? We tasted a slice of each pancake without any added butter or syrup. The Friendship pancake had a rich buttery-milky flavor, but the Kate’s pancake was quite bland, with no distinct flavor at all.
So, how do the two buttermilks themselves taste? Not surprisingly, the Friendship buttermilk tasted more like buttermilk. The Kate’s just tasted sour. No real butter-milky flavor at all. So, we are sticking with the Friendship for our pancakes. An experiment with biscuits showed similar differences in rising as well.
Sorry to say, despite all the positive press Kate’s has gotten, we found it quite disappointing.
We have written several times about making a chicken pot pie using an Instant Pot. Briefly, you steam the chicken under high pressure for 15 minutes, and then cut the meat off the main pieces and refrigerate it and toss the bones back into the pot with the backs and wings, add 4 cups or so of water, a leek, carrots and celery and pressure cook for 30-40 minutes more to make the chicken stock.
Then making the stew itself amounts to cooking some carrots and celery pieces in butter for 10 or so minutes until soft, sauteing a few mushrooms in butter in a large pot, adding veggies and making a flour-butter roux and slowly adding broth from the pot until you have a nice thick gravy. Then add a little cream for richness and throw in the chicken meat. Then you bake it to make a pie.
If you make biscuits and put them on top of the chicken stew, it’s a pie or chicken ‘n’ biscuits. If you make biscuits and serve the stew over the biscuits, it’s chicken a’la King. And if you put the stew into little casseroles and top with a puff pastry crust, it’s a chicken pot pie for sure!
But what if you want a pie with a nice flakey, buttery crust? Well, this doesn’t take a lot of time except that you really must chill the pie dough for an hour to keep the butter from melting prematurely. The rest is easy.
You can find a bunch of buttery piecrust recipes by a simple search, and they all more or less require 2 sticks of butter, salt and 2-1/2 cups of flour and some ice water. But there are some differences. The important advance in ideas about butter crust came from a relatively recent article by Kenji Lopez-Alt in Serious Eats. In it, he theorizes that the flakiness of piecrusts come from fat coating the flour, rather than the other way around. And, that you should coat the flour with fat and then add the rest of the flour to interleave flour and butter in the crust. This works really well. One writer, writing for Inspired Taste, explained this recipe quite clearly.
Making the piecrust
½ lb (2 sticks) very cold unsalted butter, cut into little cubes
2-1/2 “scant” cups of flour (see below)
1 tsp Kosher salt
6-12 Tb ice water
(for dessert pies add 1 Tb sugar)
The real trick here are those scant cups of flour. One way to achieve it, is to spoon the flour into a measuring cup and then level off the cup with a table knife. That means you have to repeat this 3 times: 2 for the cups and one for the half cup.
A better way is to just weigh the flour out, and forget all that spooning. If you just scoop flour out into your measuring cup, the flour will weigh just about 5 oz or 142 g. If you sift the flour, 1 cup will weigh about 120g. But if you use that spooning technique, you will have only about 112 grams in a cup. This is about 4 oz instead of 5. So, it really is a scant cup.
But instead, why not just weigh it to start with? Let me note that I use King Arthur flour which may be more or less dense than some other flour, But the weight will still be what you use.
Use a food processor
The easiest way to make this crust is in a food processor. If you don’t have one, you can use a pastry blender for about a minute instead. I did it both ways. They both work fine.
Add 168 g (1-1/2 scant cups) of flour to the food processor (or bowl).
Add the salt (and sugar if a dessert) and pulse or stir briefly to mix.
Lay the cubes of very cold butter on top of the flour and mix it in by running the food processor for around 15 seconds. You now have the fat coated flour. You should be able to pinch some together and have it hold its shape. Lacking a food processor, just work the butter into the flour with a pastry blender.
Add 112 g more flour (another scant cup) and pulse for a few seconds to mix the buttery flour with the new flour. (Or mix with a fork or pastry blender.)
Turn the flour mixture into a bowl and sprinkle ice water over it, starting with about 6 Tb of water. Mix together with a fork or rubber spatula.
Keep adding tablespoons of ice water and mixing until you can press the dough together in the bowl with your spatula and it will hold its shape. Depending on the flour and the humidity, this may take 12 or more tablespoons of water. In a warm kitchen in warm weather, you may have to refrigerate the dough during the ice water mixing process.
Take the flour out of the bowl and mound it into a ball. If it crumbles, put it back in the bowl and work in a little more icewater.
Cut the ball in two, press each one into a thick pancake, wrap with plastic wrap (or use a zipper bag) and refrigerate for at least an hour. The dough will keep for several days, and you can freeze if you want to.
When you are ready to make the pie, take the dough out of the refrigerator and let it warm for a few minutes. Preheat the over to 375˚ F (206˚ C).
Then place it on a floured surface or pastry marble and press it slowly across the dough with a rolling pin until it begins to give. Then start rolling it out until the dough is wider than your pie pan. Fix any cracks by pinching them together.
Then fold the dough into quarters and lift it into the pie pan and arrange it with the extra dough hanging outside the pan. Don’t cut it off yet.
Pour the chicken stew into the pie pan, roll out the top crust and lay it on top of the pie. You may not need all the stew. Freeze the rest for another pie later.
Fold any extra dough from both crusts under the top crust and then go around and pinch the border to look a little decorative.
Cut a couple of long slits in the pie and put it in the oven.
Bake for 15-20 minutes, until the pie filling is bubbling. Serve hot.
You will have made a delicious, flakey, buttery piecrust that your diners will love. Serves 3-4 people.
In high school, I had a Yashica 6×6 and a Minolta 35mm. And while they were good for their time, my high school had a Rollei Twin Lens Reflex (TLR) for use of the photo group, and I just had to upgrade and get one of my own after using it.
My father bought me a used Rollei 3.5 for high school graduation and I held onto it and used it for nearly 40 years. If you want the complete list of cameras I owned, along with some pictures, I wrote about them a couple of years ago.
But in the 1990s, I started to see that my Rollei TLR images weren’t as sharp as they used to be. I felt that it would probably be too expensive to repair and sold it. Then I put together (quite) a bit more money and bought a slightly used Rolleiflex 6008 Integral SLR along with a grip and an extra film back (shown at top of article).
It has an f/2.8 80 mm PQ Planar (Zeiss) lens with leaf shutter up to 1/1000 of a second (for PQS lenses, and 1/500 for PQ lenses.) PQ stands for Professional Quality. This model was made from 1995-2002, and I believe I bought mine around 1997-8. And unlike the venerable TLRs, this camera has a huge variety of interchangeable lenses made for it.
The reviews of this Rollei SLR were really positive and still are. The camera has shutter priority, aperture priority manual and fully automatic exposure settings. It also has several TTL metering settings: center weighted mullti-zone, 1% spot and multi-spot metering. And since the film advance is battery driven, you can take multiple exposures a half second apart. These features put it far ahead of the competing Hasselblad.
While the camera performed well optically, it was plagued by the terrible batteries that Rollei provided. They didn’t hold much charge or last that long, and new batteries, which were expensive, were no better. So, I put it away and concentrated on a series of Nikon digital cameras: D70, D80, D7200 and now a Z6.
Not long ago, I thought I might be able to sell that Rollei and get a TLR instead. Of course, I had to make sure it worked. But of course, both batteries were dead and no longer chargeable. There are now after-market replacement batteries available, some of which simply welded in new rechargeable AA cells in the original Rollei battery case. But, most of them required an expensive new charger. Finally, I found a replacement battery system complete with charger on eBay from a user with the id mignon1. It works flawlessly and comes with a plug-in charger so you can recharge the battery without removing it from the camera!
I didn’t need a darkroom!
So, I took a few rolls of film on my “new” Rollei and was simply astonished at what a great camera it still is. My first rolls were using black and white film: TMax-400, Ilford HP5+ (ISO 400) and FP4+ (ISO 125). I developed them in my basement darkroom, loading the film into the developing tank inside a big changing bag I bought from Adorama. This bag is 25” x 22” x 17”, so you have plenty of room to unroll 120 film and spool it into your developing tank reel.
And, while I have a complete darkroom, it turns out that with a new Epson v600 scanner, I really never needed to fire up the Beseler enlarger. While the scanning software provided with the Epson scanner is perfectly adequate, you can get faster scans and a bit more flexibility by buying a copy of Silverfast. For black and white, it seems to manage resolution better, and it does a better job color rendering from color negatives than Epson scanning software does. The detail is amazing and the color quite stunning. I sent that roll to The Darkroom to develop the negatives, but did the scanning and printing here at home. It turns out you can also buy color C-41 developer kits quite cheaply, and there are only two baths rather than the old 5 or 6, so it is as simple as b/w processing.
Scanning
But does scanning do as good a job as analog enlargement? I ran some tests by printing out the same photo both ways, and could not see any difference at all! Scanning a 6×6 cm negative, gives you around a 100 megapixel scanned image: more than you’ll ever get from your digital camera, and the gray scales are identical as well. In examples below, the left hand image was scanned from the original negative, and right hand image was printed in the darkroom using Ilford Multigrade paper and a #3 contrast filter. They are essentially identical results even when printed at 8×10 inches.
Negative scanned by Silverlight
Negative printed on Ilford Multigrade with #3 contrast and scanned from print.
(I will have to say that I can probably knock out 8×10 prints in the darkroom faster than going through all that scanning and printing, but photographic paper is way more expensive than printer paper, and I don’t have to wash out the trays afterwards.)
This Rollei SLR is built like a tank. Heavy, sturdy and well made and will probably last for many years. It does however, weigh nearly 5 lbs and the best way to carry it around is in a padded gadget bag that distributes the weight across your shoulders. I keep a tripod in my trunk, as well. If you are used to taking hundreds or thousands of shots a day, the Rollei makes you rethink your composition, since each roll has only 12 shots. You will find that every shot is likely to be a winner. Think of the Rollei as a more portable view camera that can get the high-resolution pictures you really wanted.
So I’m not selling my Rollei 6008! It’s the best “new” camera I ever bought!
With the great success of the Pressburger chain, where they cook the burgers on both sides at once, in a big press, we wondered if we could do something like that at home.
Well, we have a sandwich grill where both sides are heated, so we tried to cook our burgers on it. Our grill is a Cuisinart Griddler, but any sandwich grill will do.
We set the grill to 375˚ F, and let it heat up. Then we buttered a couple of hamburger buns and toasted their insides on the griddle, and then set them aside to keep warm.
Then we weighed out two burgers. We like our burgers at a little more than ¼ pound, so we weighed two lumps of meat to about 4.25 oz. Then we seasoned them with salt and pepper and put a little pat of butter on each one.
Then we flipped the two of them onto the griddle and closed the lid, pressing down on the meat to form it into patties. We set a timer for 1 minute and opened the grill. If you like them a little darker, 90 seconds is plenty.
We checked the interior temperature with an instant-read thermometer, finding it already about 152˚F. We put a slice of cheese on one and let it cook another 15 seconds or so and then put them both on buns.
The burgers were tender and juicy, and delicious. By cooking both sides at once, you loose less moisture and get a moister burger!
They were so good, we’ll probably continue to cook them this way.
But what if you have a crowd? We’d suggest toasting all your buns ahead of time and keeping them warm, while you cook the burgers 2 or 3 at a time. Since they take only a minute, you can have them all on the table before the first one comes off the gas grill!
Of course, if we’re in a hurry, we’ll still go to Pressburger!
In the above photo the right hand tomato was from a Terra Fresh treated plant, but it was picked a but later than the redder one on the left.
If you read much online gardening social media, you probably were bombarded with ads for Terra Fresh. This product claims to prevent tomato diseases and increase you yields of tomatoes by as much as a factor of two.
The selling on the website is very aggressive: once you access the site, it makes it hard to leave because of “Wait, don’t go” pop-ups. The first thing they show you is “Lifelong Gardener” Lex Case. He tells you that this is an “All natural blend of plant extracts that wildly increases the microbial population around your plant.” Other places, they refer to these as “phytochemicals,” which also means “plant extracts.“ Whatever you do, don’t click on “CC,” the closed caption options, because it appears to be nonsense from another plane; “…Express love with me in breathe easy social operation…”
Other than that you can’t look anywhere for more information, because terrafreshhome.com has only one main page and no menu. You can, of course order bottles of Terra Fresh, but there is no more information about what the bottles contain.
The ingredients are not “organic,” (which is only a marketing term) but are “all Natural (which doesn’t mean anything either.)
A single 16oz bottle costs $29.95, but there seem to be discounts of 10% you can apply. If you try to order just 1, you’ll get an Email urging you to order at least 3.
We bought just one. You get a 16oz bottle with about 1 oz of brown liquid in it, to which you add 15 oz of “purified water,” whatever that means. Then for each plant, you dissolve ¼ tsp of this solution in 1 pint of water and pour it around the roots. They suggest every 2-3 weeks: we actually did it more like once a week.
We planted 14 tomato plants in our garden this year, and among them were 3 Amish Paste tomatoes, grafted to stronger stems to make them more disease resistant, and sold by Totally Tomatoes or Vermont Bean Seed (these are the same company). We decided to treat one of the three Amish Paste plants. We also grew 3 large tomato plants of the variety “BW,” produced by Prof Harry Klee’s lab at the University for Florida. His group has developed tomato varieties with excellent flavor, based on extensive consumer panel testing. We also treated one of the BW plants with one pint of the Terra Fresh solution weekly.
Tomato diseases
We followed instructions from several gardening experts, and removed the bottom leaves from each plant, and any that would touch the ground. Since the season was so dry, we saw no evidence of early or late blight on any plants, but of course Septoria Leaf Spot showed up about the time the plants set fruit. Treatment with Daconil helped somewhat, but we mostly just removed each leaf the developed spots as soon as we “spotted” it. The first plant to develop leaf spot was #4, which in fact was one being treated with Terra Fresh.
Harvest
This was a difficult season for gardening in Connecticut because we had a very dry summer, with only about 0.5 inches of rain in August, which slowed down ripening. In addition, even though our garden plot is fortified on all sides, including roof netting, thirsty raccoons began attacking the plants in late August. It is now the last week of September, and while there are still plenty of green tomatoes on most plants, ripening is much slower., as we decided to cut off the experiment in report the results.
Amish Paste
For the Amish Paste tomatoes our 3 plants had the following yields:
Amish #2 – 17 tomatoes, 125 oz
Amish #4 – 13 tomatoes, 77.5 oz *
Amish #6 – 10 tomatoes, 71 oz.
The plant marked with the asterisk(*) was treated with Terra Fresh and was far from the winner.
BW large tomatoes
BW #1 – 11 tomatoes, 136 oz
BW #13 – 9 tomatoes, 114 oz *
BW #12 – 4 tomatoes, 40.6 oz (partial shade)
Again, the Terra Fresh plant(*) was not the winner, but somewhat closer to the winner than the Amish Paste plant was.
So despite Lex Case’s extensive and aggressive advertising, this product doesn’t seem to do much positive. It may actually have retarded the growth a bit.
BW1 – not treated
BW 13 treated with Terra Fresh
And finally, among the paragraphs of nonsense on their sell-page, you will find:
One of our founders lost his son to cancer a few years ago. We are convinced that he got sick to begin with due to the chemicals we are bombarded with every day. We started Terra Fresh to be a part of the solution to that problem.
Terra Fresh
This is an appeal to emotion and gullibility, since he never identifies any actual causality in the unfortunate young man. It is just nonsense, much that we may feel for the unnamed “founder.”
So we still have most of the bottle if someone wants it. We don’t think the experimental results were very positive, though.
Several weeks ago, Genevieve Ko published a fascinating recipe for Lemon Ricotta Pancakes in the Sunday New York Times. She used superlatives like “most tender,” “fluffy,” “light” and “comforting,” and we just had to try them.
The pancakes are light because the recipe has 3 eggs, buttermilk, ricotta and only ¾ cup of flour. And the unique part of her version is that the batter also has some grated lemon zest. To counter that, she recommends serving them with a blueberry sauce. Here is her recipe:
Ingredients
¾ cup flour
1 ½ tsp baking powder
¾ tsp salt
¼ cup sugar
1 lemon
1 ½ tsp vanilla extract
3 large eggs
¾ cup whole milk ricotta
¼ cup buttermilk
2 tsp melted butter
Lemon zest in sugar
Bubbles forming on lemon pancakes
Heat a griddle to “medium low.” We chose 350˚ F.
Whisk the flour, baking powder, and salt in a small bowl.
Put the sugar in a large bowl and grate the lemon zest into it, Work in with your fingers.
Mix in the vanilla
Add the eggs and whisk until foamy on top.
Add the flour, ricotta and buttermilk and whisk until uniform.
Butter the griddle generously and drop ¼ cup portions onto it. Cook 2-3 minutes until bubbles begin to from. Turn each pancake gently and cook about 2 more minutes.
Serve with butter and blueberry sauce.
Blueberry sauce
! pint blueberries
½ cup sugar
½ cup water
2 tsp cornstarch
Place all ingredients in a saucepan, mix and heat to a boil. Cook for about 5 minutes, until thickened.
Stack cut open
There is no doubt that these are light, delicious pancakes. Ko says the recipe makes 12-14 pancakes, but since they are so small and not all that filling, this recipe serves just a bit more than two people. We each ate two stacks of 3 pancakes without any trouble. You could have to double it to serve four. And, of course, you could omit the lemon zest if you wanted to serve them with maple syrup.
Grandma’s recipe
This is our old family recipe that was handed down from my mother’s mother, Edna Neely, who probably learned the recipe in the latter part of the 19th century. The copy I got came from her daughter, my aunt Elsie, many years ago. It is a simple recipe that you can remember as 2-2-2-1-1-1/2:
2 cups flour
2 tsp baking powder
2 eggs
1 Tb sugar
1 tsp baking soda
½ tsp salt
Buttermilk
Over time, I’ve reduced the baking soda to about ¾ tsp so that the buttermilk flavor comes through more strongly.
Mix the dry ingredients together.
Break the eggs into the mixture and add buttermilk to make a “thickish batter.”
Cook on a griddle at 375˚ F until bubble form and then turn them and cook another two minutes.
Buttermilk pancakes rising
Stack of buttermilk pancakes
How they differ
We usually make bigger pancakes, using maybe 1/3 of a cup of batter each, but you certainly can make them smaller like the ones in Ko’s recipe. They are nearly as light as Ko’s and much less work. It is also easy to make, say a 1-1/2 recipe to serve more people, but the basic recipe will serve 3-4.
I’ll probably make Ko’s recipe from time to time because they are really good with blueberry sauce, but it is so much more work than Grandma’s recipe and if you put a stack of 3 ¼-cup sized pancakes from each recipe side by side, the difference is relatively small.
We tried cooking this recipe at the lower temperature as Ko recommends, and this works fine too. They just take slightly longer to cook. However, we did find that the lower temperature cooked those frozen sausage patties more uniformly without burning them.
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
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We thought that the Newman’s Own pizzas we say in the grocer’s freezer would be a nice change from our making our own. The pictures, at least, looked enticing. So we picked up a couple of them: Supreme and Harvest Vegetable.
Boxed pizzas
The pizzas come in a box and sealed in plastic as well, on a cardboard disk about 10 ¾ inches. So, the pizzas are about 10 ½ inches each.
Pizzas before baking
You cook them in a 425˚ F oven for 10-12 or 11-13 minutes: the veggie one takes the slightly longer time. You are supposed to remove them from the cardboard disk, but the picture didn’t make that clear, and after we put them in the oven, we discovered that fact in the text, and used our pizza peel to lift them off the cardboard to continue cooking. You are supposed to cook them until the cheese melts and the crust browns a bit. Because of our snafu, this took a bit longer then 12 minutes, but they came out looking pretty nice.
Pizzas just out of the oven
We cut them into 6 pieces each.
While we thought the flavors of both pizzas were quite good, they really were diminutive. The thickness was less than 1/8 inch, except for the occasional pepper or sausage lump. The pepperoni was sliced so thin it only had one side. Surprisingly, the ingredients suggested that this was a yeast dough. It certainly didn’t rise much.
Edge view of Supreme pizza
The package said that a serving was 1/3 of a pizza, or two of the six slices implied in the package picture. That was about 250 calories, which is not going to fill you up very much. Each of the 6 slices weighed about 1.8 oz, meaning that the whole baked pizza weighed about 10 oz. Initially the pizzas we 15.7 or 17 oz meaning that there was at least a 5 oz water loss in baking. By contrast, the pizza we usually make produces slices of about the same dimensions that weigh about 5 oz each.
Essentially, this was a tasty 2-dimensional pizza, that left us kind of hungry. I guess if we had looked at the grocery receipt and found they were only about $7.50 each, we shouldn’t have been surprised. We did go away hungry, though.
At about this time of year (or sooner) you may be thinking about what you’ll be growing next year, especially if one or more varieties of tomatoes were particularly successful. You can, of course, just buy new seeds every year, but if you are growing an unusual variety, you may want to consider saving seeds from the most vigorous plants. In our case, we grew some really successful varieties bred at the University of Florida, and they specifically suggested that we save their seeds, since they’d rather not be in the commercial seed business.
You can save seeds from any variety, but you will have the best results from ones that are open pollinated, meaning that the seeds will produce the same variety of plant as the parent. This may not be true of hybrid varieties and saving them is a bit riskier: you can’t be sure their progeny will be the same as the parent plant.
Some writers suggest only saving “heirloom” seeds, but this is probably a bit extreme. Heirloom really means that most growers have gone on to something better than that variety. Heirlooms may have lower yields and be less disease resistant. There are still plenty of great tomatoes you can save seeds from, such as Better Boy, for example.
You want to pick a good example of the fruit to take seeds from, but it needn’t be perfect. The tomato could be cracked or have a recent slug or fruit borer hole, as long as it hasn’t rotted.
The difficulty in saving tomato seeds is that they are enclosed in slippery little gelatinous sacs, that are hard to work with. And that gel sac also includes a growth inhibitor, so the seeds won’t sprout within the plant. You need to remove that as well. We’ll show here how to overcome that problem below.
(Seeds do sometimes sprout inside a tomato, which is a kind of a surprise, but is usually harmless. It’s called ovipary.)
Saving the seeds
Cut the tomato in half and scoop out some seeds and the accompanying sacs. We used a melon baller, but a spoon would also work. Put the seeds in a fine strainer and rinse them with running water. We used the sprayer setting on our kitchen faucet to try to blast open the little sacs. This works to some extent, but we found that alone this wasn’t enough. Those seeds neve germinated.
The next step, recommended by a number of writers is to use Oxyclean stain remover. Put some tap water into a glass or pitcher and add a tablespoon of Oxyclean powder. Stir it in, and then add the seeds, including the gel and any bits of tomato that have seeds attached.
Let them soak in the mixture of half an hour. During this time, the seeds will probably float to the surface. Then pour the seeds and some of the solution through the strainer again and rinse the seeds using running water. Pick out any bits of tomato that end up in the strainer.
Finally, prepare a paper plate with a napkin or coffee filter on it to catch the seeds, and dump the seeds onto that tissue. Incidentally, seeds may stick to a napkin, and parchment paper is better, but of course, it doesn’t absorb much water. Label the plate with the tomato variety and let the seeds dry on the plate for 1-2 weeks.
After that, put the seeds in envelopes and label the envelopes. Put the seeds in a zip lock bag and keep them in a cool, dry place. You can even store them in the refrigerator or freezer according to the Florida research group.
Testing the seeds
You might want to test the seeds to make sure they will germinate. To do this, put two or three seeds in a damp paper towel, and enclose it in a zip lock bag. The seeds will sprout in around 10 days.
