chamcham Wrote:Rule 13:
Eat only foods that eventually will rot.

I guess this rules out honey.

Asriel Wrote:sometimes my bacon gets really dry before it gets done cooking, so it just gets really hard, and it gets really chewy.
other times it's really greasy, which makes it nice and crisp and delicious.

i cook it at the same heat on the same pan. what could be causing the difference?

Do you have hot spots on your pan? Do you preheat your pan before adding the bacon? How do you cook it?

The other thing that could account for it could be the actual bacon. Pork belly (the part where bacon comes from) is not exactly consistent, and some parts could have more fat, some could have less.

For cooking it, I use medium-low heat and flip it constantly. It's not a burger, where flipping it causes it to dry out and you only want to flip it once.

I am quite nerdy when it comes to bacon, since I've cured my own. =)

Generally how it goes is:
wake up, wash pan, if needed. This is the same pan I use to cook pretty much everything. Then I put it on the stove at 3 lights out of 7. Usually works for everything.

Preheat for as long as it takes to get the bacon out of the fridge. Very rarely, altthough it does happen, that it preheats while I wash my dishes.

Then yeah I do flip it quite constantly, but it seems like if it's going to get dry, it will usually be dry before I even flip it for the first time.

It makes me want to eat all the bacon first to get it out of the way, instead of intermittently to give me a delicious treat of pig meat in between my actual main dish.

chamcham Wrote:Rule 2:
Don't eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn't recognise as food.

My great-grandmother is senile, and sometimes tries to eat nickels.

Just saying.

JimmySeal Wrote:

chamcham Wrote:Rule 13:
Eat only foods that eventually will rot.

I guess this rules out honey.

Interestingly enough, the author has admitted that honey is an
exception to that rule.

chamcham Wrote:

JimmySeal Wrote:

chamcham Wrote:Rule 13:
Eat only foods that eventually will rot.

I guess this rules out honey.

Interestingly enough, the author has admitted that honey is an
exception to that rule.

Honey will not rot only if it is sealed due to the lack of are and the tight fructose bonds. So, once you open the jar to eat it, it becomes a food that has the ability to decompose or "rot". Therefore honey is an acceptable food. BTW, buckwheat honey has Polyphenols in it (all honey has PP but buckwheat has the most) that has shown to be a good defense against drug resistant "super-bugs".

Asriel Wrote:Preheat for as long as it takes to get the bacon out of the fridge. Very rarely, altthough it does happen, that it preheats while I wash my dishes.

UPDATE:
After 2 days of research (cooking it one way one way, and then another the next) I have discovered that THIS was the problem!
If I put the bacon on the pan before I even turn on the stove, the result is some pretty excellently delicious bacon.

THANKS FOR THE TIP! I'm eating it right now

Some of you seem to know about nutrition. 2 questions:

Vertero Wrote:High-fructose corn syrup is everywhere.

What's the issue here - is it just that too much sugar is bad? Or does the type of sugar make a difference? I have a recipe that calls for powdered sugar (ingredient: fructose). I don't want my Margaritas to kill me.

Also, does anyone know about bovine growth hormone being allowed in the States? Canada banned it (in part because it shows up in milk). Though I don't recall that there was any proof of adverse health consequences. Are Canadian regulators overly cautious or is the US beef lobby that much more powerful? I went without cereal for 2 years in NYC.

chamcham Wrote:My favorite book on food is called "Food Rules".

I really disliked "In Defense of Food" by the same author. Most of it is obvious stuff that anyone concerned about health knows already (i.e. eat whole grains, eat less in general, exercise, eat lots of veggies and fruits). The rest of it is a bunch of preaching-to-the-choir stuff with very little support. All of his scaremongering against "processed food" has little to no scientific basis, and his attempt to redefine the word "food" to fit his ideological standpoint is a similar tactic that you see in many ideological extremists. He includes a bunch of urban legends (like the idea that twinkies never go bad) and prefers empty platitudes ("don't eat anything you can't pronounce!") to actual research.

Sure, if you look at a box of crackers you see things like "Sodium acid pyrophosphate", but if you take the time to actually look at what these ingredients are, you can see that they've been tested and found to be safe by scientists. Scaremongerers like Pollan want you to believe that the scientists are not to be trusted and that your only guide to deciding what to eat should be what letters and words have been chosen to name things (so I guess "baking soda" is fine even though it's equally "chemical"), but to me this is absurd.

He constantly claims that we should look to our ancestors, and yet our ancestors died in their 30's and 40's. Of course modern medicine (with all the things that you "can't pronounce") has a lot to do with that, but the same science that brought modern medicine has also produced the modern food supply as well.

I'm not saying that the food supply is perfect, but books like Pollan's annoy me.

Quote:What's the issue here - is it just that too much sugar is bad? Or does the type of sugar make a difference? I have a recipe that calls for powdered sugar (ingredient: fructose). I don't want my Margaritas to kill me.

It's not clear. The main problem with high fructose corn syrup is that most things that use it are unhealthy in general (like pop), and it's not clear that replacing the HFCS in a Coke with cane sugar would make it any more healthy. As far as I know, there are no studies that definitively prove that HFCS is worse than other types of sugars, although there are some studies that point in that direction.

Thora Wrote:Some of you seem to know about nutrition. 2 questions:
What's the issue here - is it just that too much sugar is bad? Or does the type of sugar make a difference? I have a recipe that calls for powdered sugar (ingredient: fructose). I don't want my Margaritas to kill me.

Fructose isn't necessarily a bad sugar. Fructose occurs naturally in fruits as sucrose, which is 50/50 fructose and glucose. Powdered sugar should be sucrose...

HFCS is created from corn using some complicated chemical process. It's used both as a preservative and as a sweetener, which is how it sometimes finds it way into your whole wheat bread. I don't know if it'll necessarily kill you, but some studies link it to obesity. Generally I think that most foods that have HFCS aren't too healthy to begin with if you replaced it sugar. I doubt soda made with HFCS is that much more healthier than sugar. (The taste is certainly different though, which is why many prefer sugar-based soda.)

This:

"The medical profession thinks fructose is better for diabetics than sugar," says Meira Field, Ph.D., a research chemist at United States Department of Agriculture, "but every cell in the body can metabolize glucose. However, all fructose must be metabolized in the liver. The livers of the rats on the high fructose diet looked like the livers of alcoholics, plugged with fat and cirrhotic."[56] While a few other tissues (e.g., sperm cells[57] and some intestinal cells) do use fructose directly, fructose is almost entirely metabolized in the liver.[56]

"When fructose reaches the liver," says Dr. William J. Whelan, a biochemist at the University of Miami School of Medicine, "the liver goes bananas and stops everything else to metabolize the fructose." Eating fructose instead of glucose results in lower circulating insulin and leptin levels, and higher of ghrelin levels after the meal.[58] Since leptin and insulin decrease appetite and ghrelin increases appetite, some researchers suspect that eating large amounts of fructose increases the likelihood of weight gain.[59]

Excessive fructose consumption is also believed to contribute to the development of non-alcoholic fatty liver disease.[60]
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Everybody, better stop eating fruit!!

yudantaiteki Wrote:He constantly claims that we should look to our ancestors, and yet our ancestors died in their 30's and 40's. Of course modern medicine (with all the things that you "can't pronounce") has a lot to do with that, but the same science that brought modern medicine has also produced the modern food supply as well.

It's more to do with reduced child mortality rates. If you made it to 10 years of age in 1900 you'd be likely to live till you were 60 (http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005140.html).

Thx for the info. Interestingly, the powdered sugar package is labeled: "Pure Fruit Sugar. Fructose: a natural healthier sugar" hmm

My friend suggested using the supposedly healthful Agave Nectar instead (which, coincidentally, is made from the same plant as Tequila.) Unfortunately, it turns out to be mostly fructose as well. (Wikipedia's 'agave nectar' entry mentions other potential problems with pure fructose.) Oh well, I don't plan on consuming excessive amounts...

Sammy Wrote:Everybody, better stop eating fruit!! roll

Well, this is what was confusing me. Apparently, eating fructose in fruit is not the same as eating pure crystalline fructose for a number of reasons.

I have a package of fructose which claims to be a healthier alternative to table sugar. I no longer believe that's correct. Do you know differently?

yudantaiteki Wrote:He includes a bunch of urban legends (like the idea that twinkies never go bad) and prefers empty platitudes ("don't eat anything you can't pronounce!") to actual research.

I actually kind of like that rule, though. It implies that a chemist could safely eat more food than other people simply because of education. Likewise, someone with a severe speech disorder should apparently just starve to death.

There is this commercial that makes me laugh, it says "Remember, if you can't pronounce it, chances are it's not natural." Most of the actual names of things are hard to pronounce. All plants have their real "scientific" names. St.Johns wort is Hypericum perforatum. The poppy plant (yes the same one heroin and all your narcotic pain killers come from) is papaver somniferum, which actually isn't that hard to pronounce. But you get the idea.
But it goes both ways. Tylenol or parecetamol (depending on where your from) is Acetaminophen. Which is a really cool sounding word.