Marlene Parrish - What Einstein Told His Cook 2

Nevertheless, because high levels of bromate have been found to cause cancers in rats, many consumers fear it, and the American baking industry, in consultation with the FDA, has voluntarily stopped using it. Canada and the United Kingdom have banned the chemical altogether.

Incidentally, the claim that the bleaching of flour destroys its vitamin E is true but empty, because wheat flour contains negligible amounts of vitamin E to begin with.

THE FOODIE’S FICTIONARY:Couscous—a couple of couses

ARISE AND COMBINE

I have a recipe that calls for self-rising flour, but I can’t find any where I live. Can I make it myself?

Sure. Self-rising flour is flour that has some baking powder and salt already mixed into it. Most of the bigger supermarkets carry it. But to make it yourself, just add about 1½ teaspoons of baking powder and ½ teaspoon of salt to each cup of all-purpose flour or cake flour and mix well. A gently wielded whisk does the best mixing job.

PASSING THE BUCK

What kind of wheat is buckwheat? Could I make bread out of buckwheat flour?

No, for two reasons: buckwheat isn’t wheat at all, and even if it were, its flour couldn’t make bread.

Buckwheat groats, known as kasha in eastern Europe and sayraisin in France, are the seeds of the plant Fagopyrum esculentum , which is not related to wheat or any other grassy cereal plant. The generic word groats refers to hulled and cracked grains of any kind, such as wheat, buckwheat, oats, or barley. When the grain happens to be corn, groats morphs into grits .

The name buckwheat comes from the German and Dutch for “beech wheat,” because its edible seeds, shaped like tetrahedra (pyramids with four equal, triangular sides), resemble beechnuts. The seeds can be cracked down into groats or ground to flour and added to wheat flour for making buckwheat pancakes. But buckwheat flour isn’t good for breadmaking because when wet it forms very little gluten, the elastic protein that traps gas bubbles and gives bread its open structure and chewiness. Wet buckwheat flour is just barely sticky enough for the Japanese to make soba noodles out of it.

THE FOODIE’S FICTIONARY:Gluten—a person who greedily eats too much

THE PASTA ROSTER

Is there any reason for using one shape of pasta rather than another, such as using flat linguine rather than round spaghetti? I would think that the shape with the greatest surface-to-volume ratio would absorb the most sauce and be most flavorful. So why do people use all of those other shapes?

Surface-to-volume ratio? I’ll bet you’re an engineer.

For one thing, the almost limitless variety of pasta shapes provides both fun for the eye and differing sensations in the mouth. But there are also real differences in their compatibility with different sauces.

It’s not a matter of the pasta absorbing sauce through its surface; pasta isn’t that absorbent and sauces aren’t that liquid. But some sauces adhere better than others and will stick to the pasta surface no matter what its shape. And, of course, the more surface area there is, the more sauce can stick.

Ultimately, however, it’s a matter of how well the heap of pasta on the plate envelops and incorporates the sauce and how well the pasta will retain the sauce when it’s twirled on a fork or, in the case of a small, compact shape, when it’s picked up on a spoon. The overall result is dictated by both stickiness and mechanics.

Most sauces are chunky to some degree, and the spaces that the chunks must nestle into—the empty spaces within the pasta tangle—are very different for long pasta such as spaghetti and linguine, for tube pasta such as penne and rigatoni, and for special shapes such as conchiglie (seashells) and farfalle (bow ties). Obviously, a pile of fat spaghetti will have more empty spaces than a pile of thin spaghetti, which can nestle together more compactly.

One should therefore try to match the sauce to the pasta shape.

Fusilli (springs), for example, hold on to chunky sauces well; the larger tubes, such as rigatoni, are good with meat sauces; fettuccine goes well with sticky sauces that coat its flat, ribbon-like surface, such as in fettuccine Alfredo. Spaghetti is probably the most versatile shape, but when it is extra-thin, as in angel hair or capellini , it’s best with thin, liquidy sauces that distribute themselves throughout the heap by capillary action. Capellini Alfredo would sit in the plate like a ball of mud.

Table 5 on the following page lists the pasta-and-sauce pairings recommended by the Barilla Alimentare S.p.A. pasta company of Parma, Italy, for a few of the shapes it distributes in the United States. For pictures of these shapes, along with everything else you could possibly want to know about pasta manufacture and technology, the website www.professionalpasta.it lists 822 shapes from abissini to zituane . Many of these, however, are aliases used in different parts of Italy.

But hey, the pasta police are greatly understaffed and under-funded, so you can probably get away with any cockamamie combination of shape and sauce that you enjoy.

Mangia!

THE FOODIE’S FICTIONARY:Al dente—an Italian fender bender

THE FOODIE’S FICTIONARY:Rigoletto—a type of pasta

PLEASE DON’T EAT THE MATTRESS

If I make a smoothie by blending fruit with milk, yogurt, or whatever, are the positive effects of the fiber eliminated by processing the fruit in a blender?

No. No matter how thoroughly pureed it is, the fiber is still effective.

In the dietary context, the word fiber is misleading because it conjures up images of eating coconut husks and mattress stuffing. But dietary fiber doesn’t refer to a physical texture. It’s a catchall term for the components of vegetable foods that humans don’t have the enzymes for digesting, and that therefore have no energy value and pass through our digestive tracts unchanged (which is their major virtue). We used to call it bulk or roughage. Although it has no chemical or nutritive value, it is essential for physically moving everything we eat through the processing plant we call the alimentary canal.

Dietary fiber, found in fruits, vegetables, and grains but not in animal products, has been found to decrease the risk of certain disorders such as colon cancer, although that finding has been challenged. Nevertheless, fiber is one of the main reasons that eating fruits and vegetables is so important to health.

There are both water-soluble and water-insoluble fiber substances, and nutritionists recommend eating lots of both kinds. The soluble ones are mostly pectins and gums, found in fruits; they’re what cause fruit jellies to gel. Tart apples, crab apples, sour plums, Concord grapes, quinces, gooseberries, red currants, and cranberries are especially high in pectin. The most common insoluble fibers are cellulose and lignin, the binder between the cellulose fibers that make up the structural framework of plants’ cell walls.

Some termites can digest and utilize the energy inherent in cellulose and lignin, but we humans can’t. On the other hand, termites are lousy at Scrabble.

THE FOODIE’S FICTIONARY:Roughage—the opposite of smoothage

FIBER OPTIONS

I was reading the Nutrition Facts chart on my box of cereal. I thought that, by definition, fiber is indigestible and therefore has no calories. But this box shows fiber as carbohydrates. Can you sort this out?