Why Asian food tastes so different to Western Food

Gizmodo has a great article looking at why Asian food tastes so, well, Asian. The short version is that we in the West tend to pair our food flavours – Blue cheese shares 73 flavour compounds with chocolate. But Asian food works in the opposite way, Asian recipes seek out the contrast in flavours making Asian cuisine distinctly different to European dishes.

If you like food pairing then you will love foodpairing.com. Here you can find interesting food pairs that can help take your personal cooking to new levels. For example, who knew that oysters and Kiwi fruit made a good combination?

Why are Chillies Hot?

There is science behind why chillies are hot and our new favourite youtube scientist, powerm1985, eats an incredibly hot scotch bonnett and while his mouth and brain melts he attempts to explain the science behind what is happening.

Before we get to the video here’s a brief explanation – basically the chilli molecule capsaicinoid is picked up by the same receptor we use to taste vanilla. But the capsaicinoid tricks the neurons in the taste receptor sending a signal to the brain saying something is on fire. So the brain increases the heart rate, starts you sweating and increases endorphins etc. Interestingly, capsaicinoid is not water soluble which is why drinking water does nothing to reduce the burning sensation.

Now there’s an evolutionary reason for this. Birds are not affected by chillis at all. They can eat chillis all day long and not be affected by the heat. Only mammals feel the heat. A theory for this is mammals have teeth and tend to grind/destroy seeds – which is not very good if you’re a plant trying to spread yourself around. Birds, however, don’t have teeth and thus the seeds pass through the bird coming out intact. We could extend this explanation out further by suggesting humans may hate the burning sensation but we LOVE the endorphins our brain releases after eating them. So in a funny way, chillis have ensured their survival by creating something humans like and want to cultivate which works out well for both species – I’m not a scientist but it is an elegant explanation as to why we haven’t rid the earth of chilli plants if we found them so disagreeable.

Here’s the video with a scientist on fire trying to explain it all to you:

How language affects how we see colour

You’d think we all see and perceive colours the same – after all, blue is blue right? This fascinating clip from a BBC documentary shows how language affects the way we understand colour.
Quite amazing:

Know your tropical fruit

Here’s a great video that explains the relationships, tastes and peeling tips for a wide variety of Asian tropical fruits:

Can’t wait to visit the Or Kor Tor market on our next tagalong food tour of Thailand to buy some.

Sugar – A startling new truth

Back in 2009 Dr. Robert Lustig gave a lecture called: ‘Sugar, the bitter truth’ this was posted to youtube a year later and was a scientifically heavy 1.5 hour long video that you’d think not many people would sit through. But this video went viral gaining over 1,000,000 viewers. Packed with amazing research and biochemistry Dr. Lustig argued that a calorie is not a calorie.

In short, your body handles 120 calories in two slices of white bread very differently to 120 calories in a can of soft drink or beer. Dr. Lustig’s particular area of expertise is childhood obesity. Back in the 70s it was argued that our high fat diets were making us fatter which has been the prevailing wisdom for the past 30 years – but what everyone had overlooked that our diets were much higher in sugar – particularly fructose.
To cut a long lecture very short, the body uses up glucose very efficiently (sugar found in bread etc.), but turns most of the calories found in fructose and glucose into fat. The big problem is high fructose corn syrup which is found in just about everything. Basically, he argues, if you cut out the fructose you’ll cut out the fat which is why the Atkins and Japanese diets work so well – they’re very low in sugars. There’s more to the lecture than ‘fat’ – he demonstrates how sugar/fructose create problems like diabetes, hypertension etc. all diseases that have also increased since the 70s.

You can watch this fascinating video below but I’ve also linked directly the biochemsitry and interesting part here.

Cave of Forgotten Dreams

In 1994 a group of three speleologists discovered something incredible in a cave in France that was last visited by humans nearly 30,000 years ago. The walls of the cave are covered in fantastic and perfectly preserved paintings of animals with amazing artistic detail. The walls contain pictures of around 13 different species with some animals never seen before in ice age paintings – including lions, panthers and rhinos. There are remnants of bones and arguably the world’s oldest prefectly preserved foot prints.

German documentary maker, Werner Herzog, was given special permission to film in the caves with huge restrictions. The gases in the cave are toxic so he and his crew were only allowed to stay for a few hours at a time. They had to wear special suits and were confined to a two foot wide path. Herzog had a custom designed 3D camera made to better bring to cinemas the feel of the drawings and the cave. He was only allowed a crew of three people and they had to use special LED which gave off no heat.

The documentary is receiving rave reviews and you can see a trailer for it below:

Cave of Forgotten Dreams from Nate Calloway on Vimeo.

Water hitting a hot pan in slow motion

Water boils at 100 ° c right? But what happens when a water droplet hits an extremely hot pan – say at 190° ? Shot at 3000 fps, this video shows a water droplet skipping across the pan. In fact, the water droplet can last for some time because as it hits the pan, a small layer of vapour comes between the pan and droplet, effectively protecting it from evaporation.

At temperatures lower than 195 ° the water disappears with a hiss.

Why the other line moves faster

If you’ve ever been stuck in a queue wondering why all the other lines move faster – an engineer has the answer and surprisingly the theory starts with ye olde telephone switchboards:

The world mapped by population

Here’s what the world would look like if it the population of each nation correlated to the physical land size.

Australia moves to Spain- Pakistan’s population correlates to Australia’s physical size on the map. Indonesia takes up the size of China while China’s population correlates to the size of Russia.

Here’s the large version of the population map.

Quickly peel an egg

Why waste time with an intro, let’s get to it: