If I ever become wealthy, one of the things I'd love to do is fund a culinary museum. Imagine rotating exhibits where visitors can try samples of historical cuisines from around the world. Of course most of them would be loose approximations of the dishes, and no idea if it's financially viable, but still. It would be a ton of fun.
Someone elaborated on the cultural marvel that is the humble American hamburger: that a food made of ground beef, bread, pickle, lettuce, tomato, and a couple sauces - most are rapidly perishable items - can be made on demand, year-round, for the incredibly low cost of one dollar is absolutely amazing.
You'd be wrong in assuming I was thinking about McDonalds in the first place. You took it there, not me. There are plenty of other fast food chains with a $1 menu with subpar food. Why are you projecting?
I hate to say this, but McDonalds offerings appear to have gotten somewhat decent as of late, with regards to McDonald's/Fast Food in general. It's still trash... but I think it's closer to real ingredients than it has been for quite some time.
If we don't see a decade of economic downturn, in 1-2 decades McDonald's may turn into something decently healthy/acceptable, once again in the sense of still being fast food.
We could however see the dystopia of McDonald's only accepting fixed amount of meme doge tokens that go on to hyperinflate, and we'll all be able to shake our fists about how we were promised flying cars but got DogeDonalds
"Mesteparten av råvarene våre stammer fra norske bønder.
Vi bruker for eksempel kun 100% norsk storfekjøtt, kun norske økologiske egg og norske poteter – og når sesongen tillater det, bruker vi norsk salat, tomat og løk. Vi vet at kundene våre ønsker norske råvarer, og derfor er vi helt og holdent avhengige av norske bønder. Ingen bonde – ingen burger. Kanskje er det din nabobonde som har levert råvarene til akkurat ditt McDonald's-måltid?"
Translated by Google because I am too lazy to type my own translation:
"Most of our raw materials come from Norwegian farmers.
For example, we use only 100% Norwegian beef, only Norwegian organic eggs and Norwegian potatoes - and when the season allows, we use Norwegian salad, tomato and onion. We know that our customers want Norwegian raw materials, and therefore we are completely dependent on Norwegian farmers. No farmer - no burger. Maybe it's your neighbor's farmer who delivered the ingredients for your McDonald's meal?"
As an aside, and because we are talking about yeast, McDonald's burger buns are not really dough based risen bread. It's baked foam. Like they squirt it out all foamy and then bake it. (It's possible that no yeast is used, but I'm not sure)
Yeast is used, and the process isn't any different than supermarket white buns.
Industrial white bread processes do tend to involve very high speed/power mixing that incorporates more air and leads to a smaller crumb structure than traditional bread, but it's certainly not squirted out as a foam.
There is nothing amazing about it. the word you are looking for is tragic, deplorable and criminal maybe.
Lets just look at the cruelty of industrial animal farming. There is absolutely no reason meat should cost less or anywhere close to fresh veg. Let alone the leftover disgusting god knows what meat factory horrors that go in a burger.
Its unhealthy garbage that kills people and costs trillions in health care.
Fresh street food in any Asian country, cooked in front of you, is a million times better, not to mention tastier and just as cheap.
It is quite likely that the street food contains ingredients that also come from industrial farming. Only the poorest countries haven't industrialized their farming completely.
Ironically, in poorer countries, the industrialized farming produce is the "deluxe" one, and they will proudly praise the amount of chemicals used on the local markets.
Always wash your veggies if you buy them and inquire about the area they are grown in. Google maps search that area for industry nearby/upstream or landfills
As somebody who's only recently moved to a first world country, the "tragic" part is the amount of fat pretty much every food has it added somehow to it!
I'm literally starving myself atm eating just meat, potatoes, pasta and baked beans as that seems the only food which is still sold at reasonable prices without any added fat.
The hamburger seems pretty healthy to be honest. The unhealthy part is people stacking up to 5-6000 kcal per day from various unsuspecting sources, then comically blaming it on sugar and fast-food...
The other day I wanted to buy some biscuits: 24% fat. Before that I bought (first and last time) some hotdogs, while they're processed normally they're still healthy, not the ones in this country though.. 3 minutes after dropping two of them on a frying pan, I find them floating in a 1.5cm of grease that just started melting from them. Where I come from, I'd have to add some 10-15ml of sunflower oil so that my hotdogs don't stick to the pan...
Fast-food is really healthy compared to what normal people can buy in any mainstream supermarket, worst part is big name brands will usually have the most fat and sugar packed into their foods.
Your information is wrong. I wouldn't worry about fat so much, and if it's leaking into the pan, you're not eating it.
The real issue is sugar. The body uses or passes most fat. Sugar historically was hard to come by so the body stores it. I recently moved to the Midwest and am shocked at the addition of sugar to everything. And at the size of people.
> the incredibly low cost of one dollar is absolutely amazing.
It's remarkable indeed. However, this can be the case only because we don't pay for externalities (including high emissions of CO2, barbaric exploitation of animals). This model isn't sustainable.
I have to say for Sweden of all countries to open a museum making fun of other culture's cuisines makes me think of "Don't throw bricks when you live in a glass house."
I’ll agree with the Swedes. The examples of food such as Korean child feces wine isn’t going to be easily beaten by anything the Swedes make.
Some of the descriptions of the food with stories are pretty funny.
> A German landlord evicted a tenant without notice after he opened a can of surströmming in the apartment building’s stairwell. When the landlord was taken to court, the court ruled that the termination was justified when the landlord’s attorney demonstrated their case by opening a can inside the courtroom.
Were I to become wealthy, I would want to build a "self sufficient" community that fostered art and education, and use that as a template for more of the same. Of course easier said than done, but it damn it would be rewarding.
I've read that a sourdough culture is truly a local product in the sense that the community in your jar quickly changes in accordance to the environment it is in (e.g. your kitchen) and what you feed it with. So it does not really matter where you get your initial culture or whether you start one by yourself, as within a week or so of frequent feeding the culture has converged to your very own unique distribution of strains of yeast and bacteria.
I don't think this is true. I have a culture that is about three years old. It really hasn't changed. The flavor is the same. If you don't handle your culture with some care to proper food handling safety then you probably will get some funk going but in my experience that funk turns to junk shortly thereafter and you're 'starting' over.
My culture is about 10 years old, split off one of my fathers. Every so often I check his - it looks, smells and tastes different.
I strongly believe that the flour you feed it changes the culture.
I don’t really look after mine though. I top it up occasionally, and it always works, even after months.
I find it vaguely amusing every time I see an article of book on caring for your starter. It doesn’t need much, and if a few millennia in a dried out pot doesn’t prove that, nothing will.
I personally tried a few times to jumpstart my own sourdough culture, and it all ended in failure. The cultures I have now have been extremely robust (I have left them alone for 2 months, and in 2 days they are back to live as is nothing happened).
So I don't know if that is the case, I just know that the cultures I was given worked incredibly well.
I appreciate that he used Kamut, which is a trade name for a cereal brought back from Egypt to Montana, United States, by a soldier who was stationed there.
The berries are much larger than wheat, if I recall correctly they called it "pharaoh's wheat" before adopting the Kamut moniker. Nowadays it's mostly a product of Montana- a very different climate from the Nile valley.
Somewhat unrelated, but my wife has recently found a way to make _awesome_ European (aka actually edible) bread at home, using a very simple recipe. The protip is you need to bake it in a well pre-heated Dutch oven, that's how you get the crust right. Commercial ovens inject steam for the same purpose, but you can't do that at home. Dutch oven apparently simulates the same effect. A $5 loaf of "fancy" bread can be baked at home easily with ~50c worth of ingredients. She used this book to figure this out: https://www.amazon.com/Tartine-Bread-Chad-Robertson/dp/08118.... She tried numerous recipes from it (some of which were ridiculously elaborate), but the simplest and least time consuming one turned out to also be the best, not to mention the most practical on the day-to-day basis.
I started baking bread after coming across this article on HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22625590
I found it to be a nice, accessible way to get started, with clear and simple instructions. Later on I cultivated a sourdough starter and am using that instead of instant yeast, but still following the same steps. (One learning point that took me too long to realize is that everything becomes much easier if you use high protein flour, more rise. Healthier starter.)
I just got done feeding my first attempts at making a starter from scratch. One thing I didn't realize is how important it is to clean all of the discarded starter from every surface while its still wet. It's kinda messy haha.
Oh yeah that stuff is like concrete when it dries up. Already had to replace my bin. Good luck with your starter, exciting! Mine is a year and a half old now. Amazing how it just keeps going
Yes, read up on varieties of flour used by professional bakers and buy some on online instead of your local super market (hint most supermarkets don't even have the right flour). It makes a lot of difference. Alternatively, find some local mill and source from there. It's worth the extra money. Also learn about the different ways flour is processed at industrial scale. Basically bleaching and sterilization are two things you don't want as a home baker. You can make it work if you really have nothing else but why go through the trouble?
Another good tip is to feed your starter with whole wheat or rye flour. It has more nutrition and especially Reye has a lot of natural sugars in it too.
There are a lot of recipes out there obsessing about weights, timings, etc. The important thing to realize is that you need to adjust those numbers to the flour used, the ambient temperature, humidity, the state your starter is in when you start, and probably a dozen other factors. In other words the numbers are not actually that important and you can totally wing it if you know what you are doing.
The importance of measuring is not repeating what the recipe says but doing the same things consistently between bakes and adjusting as you go in a semi data-driven way. In my case, I take 60 grams of starter (which is 50/50 water and flour) and add 70 grams of water and flour to make what is known as a levain (basically a glass of starter that I let ferment on the counter). The rest of the starter is replenished and goes back in the fridge.
The significant thing here is that I end up with a 100 grams of flour and a 100 grams of water. These are just nice numbers to work with when I have to calculate the hydration. That's the only reason for those numbers. Cup measurements are not precise enough, even if you are in the US. Using volumetric measurements for weight has a very high margin of error in a process with a low tolerance for exactly that.
How high you can push your hydration is a function of what flour you use and how much skill you have handling the dough. Too low and you end up with a brick instead of a bread. Too high and you're making focacia instead of a nice puffy bread. This is why you want to get the right flour. It will allow you to push the hydration higher. Also the flavor profile benefits. Good flour makes things easier and tastier.
>Basically bleaching and sterilization are two things you don't want as a home baker. You can make it work if you really have nothing else but why go through the trouble?
Hard disagree. Bleached flour is much easier to work with for the home/inexperienced baker. Hydrates easily, dough tends to be less tacky, better volume etc. It's only when you've got the basics down and want to get into the weeds with details that I'd recommend getting into specialty flours that are less likely to be chemically bleached.
> Commercial ovens inject steam for the same purpose, but you can't do that at home. Dutch oven apparently simulates the same effect.
At least in the UK, consumer ovens are available (starting at the low-mid end) with water reservoirs and a steam function.
But you don't need that, if you don't have a casserole (aka 'Dutch oven') you can put a tray over the bread, and a container of water underneath. Remove them when you'd remove the casserole lid.
I bake a loaf slightly more often than weekly, and do this occasionally because my casserole isn't large enough, and usually squashes the top flat.
> in the UK, consumer ovens are available (starting at the low-mid end) with water reservoirs and a steam function.
Same here in Norway so I suspect that they must be available all over Europe as they are made by companies like AEG, Miele, and so on. They aren't even desperately expensive any more.
But I bake a loaf in a cast iron casserole at 250 C in a conventional oven. Lid on for the first half hour, take off the lid and bake for a further 15 minutes. Makes a nice crust.
Yep I do the same. Though I've been erring shorter with the lid on (and experimenting with a tray of water as I mentioned) trying to save it from being squashed.. really I should just buy a bigger casserole! (And a bigger kitchen with space for it when not in use..)
Using a dutch oven is indeed a fantastic way to get a lovely crust and good oven spring in your bread! I often will mist the loaf before putting it in which I find helps a little with a good rise.
I do occasionally like to make longer loaves such as baguettes which aren’t really easy to fit inside of a dutch oven, especially if I am using a forming pan. One method I have used to get good oven spring and a nice crust at home in those cases is to place a large cast iron griddle on the bottom rack of the oven, and a few minutes before baking, placing a pan of water—a square bread pan works great for this—on it and wait for it to come to a visible simmer. The cast iron does a good job of retaining and re-radiating heat quickly after opening the oven, and the pan of water adds enough steam into the baking chamber to help get a good rise during the bake. Bake on a middle rack of the oven and remove the pan of water after 10-12 minutes of baking to finish the bake with a dry oven, and you’ll still end up with good color and a nice, crunchy crust.
This method has worked pretty well in a variety of standard electric home ovens new and old that I’ve used over the years.
And 100% agreed on simple recipes being best! The loaves I’ve made with just flour, water, salt, and yeast have tended to be the crowd-pleasers. Thousands of years of bread and beer being diet staples have definitely made their mark, I suppose.
You can steam up the Dutch oven by chucking in a few ice cubes as the loaf goes into the pot.
I generally put the load into the pot on a bit of baking paper (to save my knuckles touching the hot pot) and I put ice cubes into the pot, down the side of the paper so that water doesn’t pool under the dough.
Probably not need to a baker, but if you add a bit of fat (butter or oil) and some honey you can get a thick, dark crust and tasty crust.
> We took many samples and will continue to build our sample library over the next year or so. This is important as we need to learn which microorganisms are old and which are modern contaminants.
I wonder if there's an update on how this went, and if they were able to show that this was actually an ancient yeast, not just a modern sourdough starter.
Are you sure environmental yeast didn’t make its way in there? I’d wager you’d have to bake in the laboratory to prevent other yeast from entering the dough. From the photos it’s on some gingham cloth in someone’s yeasty house.
I don't really get the point of the sterilized equipment. Surely if anything is going to contaminate the experiment with modern yeast, it's the freshly milled flour.
Presumably you'd want to test the active starter to see if the ancient strains of yeast took hold.
Edit: nevermind, I missed that the flour was sterilized too.
The posts are from before they lab-tested if it was contaminated; and no news since aug 2019? Likely, it was contaminated and not ancient.
Yeast/bacteria is everywhere. Any flour/grain can be turned into sourdough. The "feeding/culling" process ensures whatever strain is strongest/adapted survives that day.
75 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 117 ms ] threadIf we don't see a decade of economic downturn, in 1-2 decades McDonald's may turn into something decently healthy/acceptable, once again in the sense of still being fast food.
We could however see the dystopia of McDonald's only accepting fixed amount of meme doge tokens that go on to hyperinflate, and we'll all be able to shake our fists about how we were promised flying cars but got DogeDonalds
"Mesteparten av råvarene våre stammer fra norske bønder.
Vi bruker for eksempel kun 100% norsk storfekjøtt, kun norske økologiske egg og norske poteter – og når sesongen tillater det, bruker vi norsk salat, tomat og løk. Vi vet at kundene våre ønsker norske råvarer, og derfor er vi helt og holdent avhengige av norske bønder. Ingen bonde – ingen burger. Kanskje er det din nabobonde som har levert råvarene til akkurat ditt McDonald's-måltid?"
Translated by Google because I am too lazy to type my own translation:
"Most of our raw materials come from Norwegian farmers.
For example, we use only 100% Norwegian beef, only Norwegian organic eggs and Norwegian potatoes - and when the season allows, we use Norwegian salad, tomato and onion. We know that our customers want Norwegian raw materials, and therefore we are completely dependent on Norwegian farmers. No farmer - no burger. Maybe it's your neighbor's farmer who delivered the ingredients for your McDonald's meal?"
Industrial white bread processes do tend to involve very high speed/power mixing that incorporates more air and leads to a smaller crumb structure than traditional bread, but it's certainly not squirted out as a foam.
I noticed it a decade ago after not eating their for years.
Only certain stores participate in McDoalds prices they advertise on tv.
(For price, you can't beat In and Out.)
This guy thinks the Big Mac should cost $200
Lets just look at the cruelty of industrial animal farming. There is absolutely no reason meat should cost less or anywhere close to fresh veg. Let alone the leftover disgusting god knows what meat factory horrors that go in a burger.
Its unhealthy garbage that kills people and costs trillions in health care.
Fresh street food in any Asian country, cooked in front of you, is a million times better, not to mention tastier and just as cheap.
I'm literally starving myself atm eating just meat, potatoes, pasta and baked beans as that seems the only food which is still sold at reasonable prices without any added fat.
The hamburger seems pretty healthy to be honest. The unhealthy part is people stacking up to 5-6000 kcal per day from various unsuspecting sources, then comically blaming it on sugar and fast-food...
The other day I wanted to buy some biscuits: 24% fat. Before that I bought (first and last time) some hotdogs, while they're processed normally they're still healthy, not the ones in this country though.. 3 minutes after dropping two of them on a frying pan, I find them floating in a 1.5cm of grease that just started melting from them. Where I come from, I'd have to add some 10-15ml of sunflower oil so that my hotdogs don't stick to the pan...
Fast-food is really healthy compared to what normal people can buy in any mainstream supermarket, worst part is big name brands will usually have the most fat and sugar packed into their foods.
The real issue is sugar. The body uses or passes most fat. Sugar historically was hard to come by so the body stores it. I recently moved to the Midwest and am shocked at the addition of sugar to everything. And at the size of people.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It's remarkable indeed. However, this can be the case only because we don't pay for externalities (including high emissions of CO2, barbaric exploitation of animals). This model isn't sustainable.
Some of the descriptions of the food with stories are pretty funny.
> A German landlord evicted a tenant without notice after he opened a can of surströmming in the apartment building’s stairwell. When the landlord was taken to court, the court ruled that the termination was justified when the landlord’s attorney demonstrated their case by opening a can inside the courtroom.
The host was furloughed by the Disney Channel during COVID, so used his time to focus on his side project. An example of COVID's creative destruction.
https://sourdo.com/classic-sourdoughs-book/
https://thechalkboardmag.com/sweet-on-sour-ed-wood-on-the-an...
He was in National Geographic Magazine, January, 1995 discussing this as well. I have two of his cultures for sourdough and they work great!
I strongly believe that the flour you feed it changes the culture.
I don’t really look after mine though. I top it up occasionally, and it always works, even after months.
I find it vaguely amusing every time I see an article of book on caring for your starter. It doesn’t need much, and if a few millennia in a dried out pot doesn’t prove that, nothing will.
So I don't know if that is the case, I just know that the cultures I was given worked incredibly well.
The berries are much larger than wheat, if I recall correctly they called it "pharaoh's wheat" before adopting the Kamut moniker. Nowadays it's mostly a product of Montana- a very different climate from the Nile valley.
Another good tip is to feed your starter with whole wheat or rye flour. It has more nutrition and especially Reye has a lot of natural sugars in it too.
There are a lot of recipes out there obsessing about weights, timings, etc. The important thing to realize is that you need to adjust those numbers to the flour used, the ambient temperature, humidity, the state your starter is in when you start, and probably a dozen other factors. In other words the numbers are not actually that important and you can totally wing it if you know what you are doing.
The importance of measuring is not repeating what the recipe says but doing the same things consistently between bakes and adjusting as you go in a semi data-driven way. In my case, I take 60 grams of starter (which is 50/50 water and flour) and add 70 grams of water and flour to make what is known as a levain (basically a glass of starter that I let ferment on the counter). The rest of the starter is replenished and goes back in the fridge.
The significant thing here is that I end up with a 100 grams of flour and a 100 grams of water. These are just nice numbers to work with when I have to calculate the hydration. That's the only reason for those numbers. Cup measurements are not precise enough, even if you are in the US. Using volumetric measurements for weight has a very high margin of error in a process with a low tolerance for exactly that.
How high you can push your hydration is a function of what flour you use and how much skill you have handling the dough. Too low and you end up with a brick instead of a bread. Too high and you're making focacia instead of a nice puffy bread. This is why you want to get the right flour. It will allow you to push the hydration higher. Also the flavor profile benefits. Good flour makes things easier and tastier.
Hard disagree. Bleached flour is much easier to work with for the home/inexperienced baker. Hydrates easily, dough tends to be less tacky, better volume etc. It's only when you've got the basics down and want to get into the weeds with details that I'd recommend getting into specialty flours that are less likely to be chemically bleached.
At least in the UK, consumer ovens are available (starting at the low-mid end) with water reservoirs and a steam function.
But you don't need that, if you don't have a casserole (aka 'Dutch oven') you can put a tray over the bread, and a container of water underneath. Remove them when you'd remove the casserole lid.
I bake a loaf slightly more often than weekly, and do this occasionally because my casserole isn't large enough, and usually squashes the top flat.
Same here in Norway so I suspect that they must be available all over Europe as they are made by companies like AEG, Miele, and so on. They aren't even desperately expensive any more.
But I bake a loaf in a cast iron casserole at 250 C in a conventional oven. Lid on for the first half hour, take off the lid and bake for a further 15 minutes. Makes a nice crust.
I do occasionally like to make longer loaves such as baguettes which aren’t really easy to fit inside of a dutch oven, especially if I am using a forming pan. One method I have used to get good oven spring and a nice crust at home in those cases is to place a large cast iron griddle on the bottom rack of the oven, and a few minutes before baking, placing a pan of water—a square bread pan works great for this—on it and wait for it to come to a visible simmer. The cast iron does a good job of retaining and re-radiating heat quickly after opening the oven, and the pan of water adds enough steam into the baking chamber to help get a good rise during the bake. Bake on a middle rack of the oven and remove the pan of water after 10-12 minutes of baking to finish the bake with a dry oven, and you’ll still end up with good color and a nice, crunchy crust.
This method has worked pretty well in a variety of standard electric home ovens new and old that I’ve used over the years.
And 100% agreed on simple recipes being best! The loaves I’ve made with just flour, water, salt, and yeast have tended to be the crowd-pleasers. Thousands of years of bread and beer being diet staples have definitely made their mark, I suppose.
I generally put the load into the pot on a bit of baking paper (to save my knuckles touching the hot pot) and I put ice cubes into the pot, down the side of the paper so that water doesn’t pool under the dough.
Probably not need to a baker, but if you add a bit of fat (butter or oil) and some honey you can get a thick, dark crust and tasty crust.
I wonder if there's an update on how this went, and if they were able to show that this was actually an ancient yeast, not just a modern sourdough starter.
Presumably you'd want to test the active starter to see if the ancient strains of yeast took hold.
Edit: nevermind, I missed that the flour was sterilized too.
A Conversation with the Team That Made Bread with Ancient Egyptian Yeast - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20649495 - Aug 2019 (16 comments)
Baking bread from a 4,500-year-old yeast from Ancient Egyptian pottery - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20624396 - Aug 2019 (16 comments)
Yeast/bacteria is everywhere. Any flour/grain can be turned into sourdough. The "feeding/culling" process ensures whatever strain is strongest/adapted survives that day.
> Update: my wife is decimating the Egyptian bread.
Partnership in a sentence if I've ever heard it.