- Natto Commuter Pass. Really. A Tokyo restaurant has innovative ways to sell/serve natto.
- How to give an academic talk. I agree with almost all of this but it leaves out two important things: 1. Be as emotional as possible. Convey as much emotion as possible. 2. Tell stories. A good talk is a story.
- Repetition in the history of diets
- Fermentation bubbles back into the mainstream (newspaper article)
- Stinky cheeses in China
- Aaron Swartz lawyers accuse prosecutor Stephen Heymann of misconduct
- Michael Wolff on Renata Adler
Thanks to Rashad Mamood.
Our dinner last night was a particularly good Bigos – a Polish dish of sauerkraut and meats. We decided that it was distinctly better for having been in the freezer for a couple of weeks. I checked Wikpedia where I found that this is a known phenomenon. My question is: are there other fermented foods that gain from being frozen (or refrigerated) for a while?
Seth: My experience is that dishes get better after a day or so in refrigerator when they are soups or casseroles or the like and have lots of spices. Back then I never ate fermented foods so can’t comment on that aspect of it. I have always suspected that the dish gets better because the first time you eat it it is a new flavor (home cooking is inexact) and the flavor becomes associated with calories. The second time you eat it — after refrigeration or freezing — the flavor-calorie association makes it taste better. So I predict something you don’t say: The Bigos was home-cooked and this was not the first time you ate it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bigos
“As with many stews, bigos can be kept in a cool place or refrigerated and then reheated later – it is said that its flavour actually intensifies when reheated. ”
We’ve eaten Bigos for decades – my wife had Polish neighbours when she was a child, and a Polish flatmate later. She (my wife) used to make Bigos as a one-off, but recently made plenty and froze the surplus. We were struck by how much richer the previously frozen dish tasted last night. We did NOT think that the improvement was due to the meats tasting better – the whole dish did, and the dominant component is the sauerkraut. So we concluded that it was the sauerkraut that gained by being frozen. Maybe we should try freezing sauerkraut alone?
Seth
On an old post about Natto (https://sethroberts.org/2009/03/28/natto-shopping/), you say to a commenter something like, “Nice try, spammer, natto never has corn syrup in it.” I wanted to comment there, but comments are closed.
A Japanese friend discovered, much to her horror, that all six brands of natto available at Sunrise Mart, a popular Japanese market in New York City, contained corn syrup. She had never looked at the ingredients before, but I recently got her eating along the general lines of Perfect Health Diet.
Another Japanese friend mentioned that if you ever see these ingredients on a label, they are different forms of HFCS:
ブドウ糖果糖液糖
果糖ブドウ糖液糖
高果糖液糖
砂糖混合異性化液糖
Best
Peter
Seth: Thank you for correcting me.
Reminds me I didn’t eat my natto for the day! The brand I’m eating here in Shanghai, China has plain old sugar, no fructose. None of the natto I’ve ever eaten has been sweet, so I wonder just how much HFCS is in that natto your friend looked at.
True, the natto never is sweet, which is why the presence of HFCS is so strange and never suspected. But I did some more research and discovered this page, which claims that the sweetener (either sugar or corn syrup) is for the accompanying flavor packet, which may be discarded.
https://theconsciouslife.com/top-probiotic-foods.htm
So I guess we’re good.
Seth: THAT makes sense.