Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with foodscience

How do you test a food for vitamins?

Caravantea — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 05:35:30 -0800

How do they figure out what kind of vitamins and nutrients are in food? I understand how the figure out calories, but how did they ever figure out that a banana had potassium or oranges were full of vitamin C in the first place?

Re-colorable clothes

mccarty.tim — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 16:01:04 -0800

ChemistryFilter: What chemicals are out there that can stain a t-shirt, but then be quickly dissolved with a chemical? Bonus points: Chemicals are safe enough for compost heap, and won't dissolve in a washing machine. I'm in an environmental class at my college and my assignment was to redesign a common object to be more environmentally friendly and similar to ideas presented in cradle to cradle. My concept is a reusable graphic t-shirt that has a design that can be dissolved and reprinted so that t-shirts that are no longer wanted or considered stylish can be reused without having to buy entirely new shirts, saving cotton, shipping, overseas labor, etc. I have the idea pretty well planned out aside from what chemicals I would need. I'm thinking about using natural pigments like the one in red wine that can be dissolved with ammonia.

Are there many other pigments like this? It's not critical that I explain every chemical reaction, but I think it would help my assignment look like a better idea if I charted out how every step of the process would work. The only missing gap is the specific chemicals.

The Science of Instant Pudding

hyperfascinated — Sun, 02 Apr 2006 23:17:22 -0800

I just made instant pudding with lo-fat almond milk (it's what I had on hand) and it didn't work- it never thickened into pudding. Why didn't it work? What is it about dairy milk that makes instant pudding work properly? Would it work with soy milk?

Battle Refrigeration!

stet — Sun, 23 Oct 2005 13:23:31 -0800

Taming an uneven refrigerator? You know how one can increase the performance of an oven by leaving a pizza stone in it? I'm wondering if the same can be done with a fridge. Our refrigerator is one of the crappy kind that has only a single temperature adjustment and doesn't maintain an even temperature throughout. Near the freezer, food freezes and toward the bottom my vegetables aren't cold enough. It rankles. Also it spoils a lot of food.

Since a pizza stone or similar stored in an oven helps maintain a consistent internal temperature by absorbing heat when the oven overheats and radiating heat when the oven temperature drops, the oven just plain works better with a big ole heatsink inside of it.

What occurs to me is that a similar trick could be employed in my fridge. Perhaps if I were to store those blue cold packs or similar throughout the fridge, the internal temperature could be kept more even. Has anyone out there experimented with this or something similar? Failing that, is there a better way to increase the performance of a crappy refrigerator? Bonus points will be awarded for solutions that also lower the humidity of the refrigerator.

One caveat is that the fridge is miserably small and techniques that require taking space away from food storage are less than ideal. And no, our landlord has no interest in buying us a new fridge.

Slicing and Dicing Mashed Potatoes

adrober — Sun, 02 Jan 2005 14:55:12 -0800

If you were a food scientist, and a chef at a restaurant handed you a bowl of mashed potatoes and challenged you to figure out how many potatoes were in there and what kind of potatoes they were, how would you go about it? (Bonus if you can do it without leaving the restaurant.)

Supportive in the Kitchen

Frasermoo — Wed, 17 Nov 2004 02:14:13 -0800

My beloved fiancee is trying to improve her cooking, with a course and by diving into cooking books. As the guinea pig, it is in my interest to help her on her way. [more inside] I'm looking for good books, and in particular a book which explains the science behind cooking which I'm sure I read about here once before.

How many calories in gum do you ingest from chewing it?

jdroth — Tue, 02 Nov 2004 12:31:36 -0800

Any food scientists out there? I have a bag of Double Bubble bubble gum left over from Halloween. Each piece of gum has 19 calories. How many of those calories am I actually consuming when I chew a piece? (It makes sense to me that I'd actually have to swallow the gum to have consumed all 19 calories, but maybe I'm wrong...)