Azure A's List: Food

• addition of oat flour, which helps the grains and nuts stick together into those much-coveted clusters. Another is the use of sugar; as much I like liquid sweeteners like honey and maple syrup, they seem to produce a tougher, chewier granola.
• pulse rolled oats in a food processor a few times to break them down to about half their original size. It won't be exactly the same but it will come close.

• Using quick oats means more clusters, quicker cooking time, and a lighter, crunchier texture. Grind half of the quick oats to a fine powder in the food processor, then mixed them with the other ingredients. The oat powder will help everything come together into your beloved clusters.

   

  One final granola-maker pro tip: If you're using dark baking sheets, decrease the baking time to avoid burning your batch.

• salt can be obtained from the ocean and produced by evaporating the water and leaving behind the salt. This salt can also be processed to produce a sea salt that looks and feels basically identical to table salt. However, because there are often additional minerals left following the evaporation of the sea water, sea salt can provide a little more nourishment in this context than other forms of salt.
• What is the advantage of these larger-sized chunks? There is no nutritional advantage related to size, but kosher salt gets its name because it was originally designed to help in the koshering of meats.
• Any version of salt can be iodized or non-iodized. In the United States, iodized salt was introduced into the marketplace in the early 1920's in an effort to help lower the incidence of goiter.
• To know whether you'd be better off purchasing iodized or non-iodized salt, it's important to know how effectively your diet is providing you with iodine.

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• In the U.S., the Food and Drug Administration says that any product that’s been ultra-filtered and no longer contains pollen isn’t honey.
• Ultra filtering is a high-tech procedure where honey is heated, sometimes watered down and then forced at high pressure through extremely small filters to remove pollen, which is the only foolproof sign identifying the source of the honey. It is a spin-off of a technique refined by the Chinese, who have illegally dumped tons of their honey – some containing illegal antibiotics – on the U.S. market for years.
• Elimination of all pollen can only be achieved by ultra-filtering and this filtration process does nothing but cost money and diminish the quality of the honey
• “In my judgment, it is pretty safe to assume that any ultra-filtered honey on store shelves is Chinese honey and it’s even safer to assume that it entered the country uninspected and in violation of federal law,”

• Chinese honey has long had a poor reputation in the U.S., where – in 2001 – the Federal Trade Commission imposed stiff import tariffs or taxes to stop the Chinese from flooding the marketplace with dirt-cheap, heavily subsidized honey, which was forcing American beekeepers out of business.

   

  To avoid the dumping tariffs, the Chinese quickly began transshipping honey to several other countries, then laundering it by switching the color of the shipping drums, the documents and labels to indicate a bogus but tariff-free country of origin for the honey.
• Food scientists and honey specialists say pollen is the only foolproof fingerprint to a honey’s source.

• The U.S. imported 208 million pounds of honey over the past 18 months. Almost 60 percent came from Asian countries – traditional laundering points for Chinese honey. This included 45 million pounds from India alone.

   

  And websites still openly offer brokers who will illegally transship honey and scores of other tariff-protected goods from China to the U.S.
• “The removal of pollen will make the determination of botanical and geographic origin of honey impossible and circumvents the ability to trace and identify the actual source of the honey,” says the European Union Directive on Honey.
• The majority of the honey that Bryant’s analysis found to have no pollen was packaged as store brands by outside companies but carried a label unique to the food chain.
• Who actually bottled these store brands is often a mystery.

• Concocting a sweet-tasting syrup out of cane, corn or beet sugar, rice syrup or any of more than a dozen sweetening agents is a great deal easier, quicker and far less expensive than dealing with the natural brew of bees.

   

  However, even the most dedicated beekeeper can unknowingly put incorrect information on a honey jar’s label.

   

  Bryant has examined nearly 2,000 samples of honey sent in by beekeepers, honey importers, and ag officials checking commercial brands off store shelves. Types include premium honey such as “buckwheat, tupelo, sage, orange blossom, and sourwood” produced in Florida, North Carolina, California, New York and Virginia and “fireweed” from Alaska.

   

  “Almost all were incorrectly labeled based on their pollen and nectar contents,” he said.

   

  Out of the 60 plus samples that Bryant tested for Food Safety News, the absolute most flavorful said “blackberry” on the label. When Bryant concluded his examination of the pollen in this sample he found clover and wildflowers clearly outnumbering a smattering of grains of blackberry pollen.

   

  For the most part we are not talking about intentional fraud here. Contrary to their most fervent wishes, beekeepers can’t control where their bees actually forage any more than they can keep the tides from changing. They offer their best guess on the predominant foliage within flying distance of the hives.
• No one can say for sure why the FDA has ignored repeated pleas from Congress, beekeepers and the honey industry to develop a U.S. standard for identification for honey.

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• the nature of starch—a complex carbohydrate found in all sorts of plant matter, including dried cocoa—and water.
• starch molecules are like. When dry, they start out tiny and shriveled. They can flow freely past each other. But expose them to water, and they start growing, getting bigger and bigger, until they eventually rub up against each other and bind, creating a water resistant barrier.

• When a clump of cocoa powder lands on the surface of a cup of water or milk, the first parts to get wet are the starches on the outside, which rapidly expand, forming a waterproof seal. As you stir and submerge these clumps, that seal ends up forming around the entire clump, protecting the interior from getting wet. Once it resurfaces, the shell falls off due to gravity and the surface tension of water, exposing the dry powder inside.

    

  This is something you'll notice not just with cocoa powder, but with other starchy powders as well—anyone who's ever tried dropping raw flour or cornstarch into a hot gravy to thicken it will know that you'll end up with impossible-to-destroy little floating clumps of flour with a dry core.
• Fat molecules are naturally averse to water—they shy away from it like my dogs from a bath, and tend to stick together when confronted with it. Dry cocoa is about 12 percent fat by weight, so when you drop it into water, those fat molecules stick together (much like the starch), forming an impenetrable shield.

• Starch does not swell in fat, so by combining flour or cornstarch first with a fat like butter or oil and mixing it until homogenous, you end up coating the individual starch granules, preventing them from swelling and sticking together when you first add them to the liquid. After you add it, eventually the fat melts away, the starch is exposed, and can be safely incorporate neatly and smoothly.

    

  You don't want to add butter or oil to your hot chocolate, so with cocoa powder destined for the cup, the best fat to use is dairy—combine your powder with a small amount of full-fat milk, half-and-half, or—better yet—cream. It should dissolve much more easily. Once smooth, add the remaining hot water or milk.

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