I'll admit to having long-term skepticism about the use of artificial sweeteners, dyes, preservatives, and a lot of other things in our world.
But I also admit that artificial blues are way more vibrant and pretty on M&Ms than the spirulina-based candies.
I know that Aldi's private label goods have eliminated products with artificial dyes, I wonder if they sell any blue candies.
Last week's video looked at whether Mexican Coke contained any glucose or sucrose or fructose.
This week's video follows up on that with a whole lot more accuracy and precision in a college chemistry research lab at Shippensburg University.
The lab student then tested a much fresher, sucrose-sweetened Sarsaparilla soft drink from a local, Pennsylvania bottler.
then...Then...THEN, they test an American Coke flavored by cane sugar, something the video host said he didn't think existed in the past bunch of decades.
...and visited NPR studios.
It's been a whole lot of years since I've done a Benedicts Test, so I'm going to trust that our YouTube host from Reactions (a channel from the American Chemical Society - ACS).
Luckily he used a second test, a glucose monitor, to back up the results.
Fascinatingly, the video goes on to possibly debunk the idea that Mexican Coke doesn't contain any actual sucrose - which it should if it was made with cane sugar as it claims to be.
See, the video started with trying to recreate those results - that Mexican Coke doesn't contain any sucrose - from a journal article, but the video ends with a deeper understanding: that sucrose undergoes an "acid-catalyzed sucrose inversion to free fructose and glucor...in the low-pH environment of most carbonated beverages."
So the presence of glucose in the Mexican Coke doesn't mean that Coke is lying to us but perhaps that it's just more complicated.
Yes, I've been watching a bunch of food science videos - mostly from Adam Ragusea - recently.
Food science is fascinating. In fact, it was my second choice for a new high-interest, low-homework science class back when Princeton was making a set of new, at-the-time-semester-long science classes about twenty years ago. First choice was material science because I'd just taken the first year workshop from ASM and was geeked about how cool it was.
By the way, they have student camps, too.
Last week I posted a video from Adam Ragusea showing that garlic and egg yolks both contain compounds that can emulsify sauces. Linked from that video via YouTube was this video who contains a little more background on emulsions in the kitchen.
That's a whole lot of garlic there, Adam.
My wife is firmly opposed to mayonnaise in just about any form or dish, so that stuff only crosses our threshold when I buy it - usually in a premade potato salad from Jungle Jim's.
But I'm fascinated by the emulsifying abilities of both egg yolk and garlic, and Adam does a great job of explaining the inherent science in both in this video.
Fritz Haber was brilliant. His discovery of the Haber-Bosch process to produce ammonia from the air was a miracle, allowing for the vast production of fertilizer which lead to our ability to feed the billions of people on our planet, rightfully earning Haber an Nobel Prize.
Yet, he also produced chlorine gas and conducted experiments that eventually lead to the development of pesticide gases such as Zyklon B, used to kill millions of Jewish people in Nazi concentration camps. I'm not sure where Haber would have fallen when his soul was weighed upon his passing from this Earth, but I know we couldn't feed as many as we feed without the Haber-Bosch process.
Today's SciShow video explains how the Haber-Bosch process produces carbon dioxide and some of the alternative processes that chemists are exploring that wouldn't produce carbon dioxide along the way.
Do not eat.
It's such a simple instruction that we've all read a hundred times or more on the tiny silica gel packets that come in sneaker boxes, shirts shipped from warehouses, and many more fabric and leather goods.
But why shouldn't you eat silica gel? If it's just silica, then it's the same as sand. While eating sand might be unpleasant, it's not necessarily unsafe if it's clean sand.
The increased surface area of the silica gel - one gram of silica gel has more than 700 square meters of surface area according to the video - is the issue. That surface area and its attractiveness toward polar molecules - water, ammonia, and other small molecules - cause it to absorb 40% its weight in water, making it a spectacular desiccant.
In general, the silica gel wouldn't do too much harmful to your body unless it had a cobalt chloride coating.
 |
| Source - https://xkcd.com/3131/ |
See, it's funny because...honestly, I'm not sure that it really is all that funny.
Yes, there was an actual 2025 incident in which a shipments of frozen shrimp was found to contain cesium-137 contamination.
I read through the Wikipedia and explainxkcd articles about the incident, and I can't really figure out how the contamination of the Cikanda Modern Industrial Area got into the shrimp.
I do know, however, that the novelty of new ways to screwing up can be both interesting and a bit of terrifying.
J Kenji Lopez-Alt is a chef who leans into the science side of things (check out his The Food Lab if you want to find some science-based recipes).
In this video - one I'm presenting as a companion piece to yesterday's Adam Ragusea's video - Kenji presents a method of cooking eggs that are easiest to peel and a chart that shows the exact cooking time necessary for whatever quality of egg yolk you want.
 |
| Source - boingboing |
At some point the tediousness of a cooking method outweighs the value of the cooking method.
A thirty-two minute egg that involves mostly thirty-two minutes of active cooking seems to push that tediousness too far for my tastes, especially since I'm not desperate to eat 'perfectly' cooked eggs.
Along the way, however, Adam Raguesea uses some of that thirty-two minutes to explain why egg prices spiked within the last couple of years and the value and decreased funding of public science under the Trump administration.
I don't know Adam's political viewpoints, but I'm pretty sure his views on the values of science align with mine.
His views on egg cooking also seem to agree with mine, because he's not sure all this egg time is worth the trouble.
This sounds like a much more expensive, labor-intensive method of producing homemade Coca Cola.
...but it would give you big hipster, crunchy nuts and berries vibes, though, and it would be really cool to do if you have the time, money, and soda water.
Big fan of Adam Ragusea here.
He does a great job balancing useful cooking information, science, and his perspective on the sometimes overreaction to and misunderstanding of that science. He's also really good at integrating the sponsor ads smoothly.
In this video, Adam goes through what's in liquid smoke, how you can make it at home, and how you can use it in food.
I'll warn you that this is a much more complex look at the side products of incomplete combustion, something we barely touch upon in our high school chemistry courses at Princeton. I do mention that it's officially complete combustion that produces just carbon dioxide and water vapor but that incomplete combustion can produce other products like carbon and carbon monoxide.
I found it interesting that fruits turning brown does not necessarily mean that it is going bad. I always viewed brown fruits as spoiled, but now I might view that differently.
Learn more about fruit browning at this link.
Now, as long as he doesn't make cherry coke from from scratch, too, we should be okay.
I love the idea of quasi-carbonating the sugar solution to trap unstable bubbles as it solidifies.
I also love that the large rocks of pop rocks look to be a little dangerous, actually.
I would absolutely eat that big rock.
A few years back - when we were still in the previous iteration of Princeton High School - I had my AP chemistry students make cupcakes with three separate leavening methods: baking soda, baking powder & soda, and mechanical leavening (whipping egg whites). The three methods are fascinatingly different and produce very different results.
In this video Adam and his baker friend look at the differences between box cake mix and from-scratch cakes. They're not quite looking at just the leavenings, but the science behind the differences are fascinating.
I'm sometimes sad that we went with material science rather than food science as one of our science electives at Princeton. I wish I had a good curriculum for high school students to explore food science, but that would also require a cooking classroom - something that our principal at the time of the building of new Princeton High School wasn't interested in building anything that practical.
I've posted before about the importance of pH on food preparation, but the increase in browning is one of the easiest ones for home cooks to exploit.
Want something to brown better without having to increase the heat? Increase its pH.
With that being said, I personally can't stand big, fluffy pancakes. Give me thin pancakes any day of the week.
If you're interested in food chemistry, check out On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee, How to Read a French Fry by Russ Parsons, or The Food Lab by J Kenji Lopez-Alt. I own them all and have read through and cooked out of some of each of them.
There's so much to say about the dyes that are used in our food from whether artificial or natural dyes are better, why certain red dyes aren't vegan friendly, whether some dyes can cause or affect ADHD, why we need to dye our food at all, why Aldi isn't using artificial dyes in any of their products, and much more.
This video is a bit long at twenty minutes, but it covers a whole lot of ground.
That just doesn't seem right.
I get that esters like methyl anthranilate are pretty typical in the artificial flavor and smell world. In fact, when I was a high school student, we made a banana ester (isoamyl acetate - hmm, I wonder if I could bring that back for my chemistry classes next year.)
But the soaking of an apple in something that's used as a bird repellant to make a grape-flavored apple (check the Grāpple website via the internet archive) seems...problematic.
American cheese is sort of cheese.
Well, it's cheese with some sodium citrate added to it, anyway, stabilizing the emulsion of fat and water that normally breaks when any aged cheese is heated and melted.
And it's tasty and heck, so shut up.
(I'm tempted to buy that sweatshirt that Dan's wearing - but more likely in maroon than in yellow.)
