A moment of small genius spotted at a friend’s house:

It’s a magnet from a disemboweled hard drive, mounted right underneath a bottle opener. Snags the bottle cap like a charm.

While deeply held feelings about string theory (”Genius!” “Total Bunk!”) may sometimes drive us apart, all of us can certainly get behind the theory that chocolate is a net good. However, in spite of its appeal as a tasty eatable (with or without bacon), it’s actually a bit of a pain to work with. If you’ve ever tried to use chocolate in its melted form, you’ve probably discovered that chocolate has a number of peculiarities that frequently thwart your best culinary efforts. For example, if your melted chocolate becomes contaminated with an errant drop of water, the chocolate siezes up. If you try to reharden chocolate that’s been melted (say, in making chocolate covered strawberries), you’re frequently left with a matte finish and crumbly texture that in no way resembles the dark glossy chocolate you began with.

The reasons for this should be familiar to any solid state physicist (or at least, they were to the one who made my wedding cake and first clued me in). Cocoa butter, one of the dominant ingredients in chocolate, contains several triglycerides that lock into a crystal form when cooled. However, there is not just one form that the triglycerides can lock into, but six of them (β(I) through β(VI)). Each successive form is more stable and has a higher melting point. Almost all commercial chocolate is in the β(V) form — from what I can tell, you only get to sample β(VI) in the afterlife, if you’ve been very, very good. When chocolate goes all wrong, it is usually a failure of the melted and cooled chocolate to recrystallize into the β(V) state. Similar problems can affect commercial chocolate suppliers as well, leading to chocolate that develops that unsightly chalky film we associate with old chocolate. Even previously stable β(V) chocolate can wind up with the same unsightly film after temperature fluctuations break down the crystal structure, or melt and reharden a thin layer on the surface. Given the commercial implications, there’s been some solid technical work on the structure of the magical β(V) form, which has been studied with x-ray diffraction using synchrotron radiation (more technical data here).

Given the above, when cooking with chocolate, one’s goal is to coax the cooled chocolate back into the β(V) form if one wants the end product to look glossy, be solid at room temperature, and have a nice crisp snap when bitten. The traditional mechanism for this is known as tempering (video here). Traditional tempering involves carefully controlling the temperature of the chocolate as it cools, so that the chocolate favors the preferred crystalline state. However, there is a vastly simpler mechanism, namely, seeding the crystal. If you take a lump of unmelted commercial chocolate, toss it into your bowl of melted chocolate, and stir for a bit, you’ll melt the new lump while cooling the melted chocolate. The cooling chocolate will then prefer the same crystal structure as the melting lump, such that when it hardens completely, you’ll find it in the luscious β(V) state.

PS. I can verify that the above works exactly as advertised. Last weekend I made the wedding cake above for the same solid state physicist who made mine a decade ago. (The cake was alternately described as looking like the Heatmiser’s hair, Mordor, and Garrett Lisi’s E₈ symmetry group, so you can imagine it was a pretty techie crowd). Making the thin chocolate sheets from which I cut the decorations, I got huge swaths of perfectly glossy chocolate. Occasionally, though, there’d be a small section with a matte surface, that was clearly a different crystalline form. Science. It works, bitches.

In case anyone is wondering what to get me for Presidents’ Day, I’d be interested in a nice bottle of 1947 Cheval Blanc. Not necessarily a whole case, or even a magnum; an ordinary bottle would be fine. In Slate, Mike Steinberger explains:

[T]he ‘47 Cheval I drank that night now ranks as the greatest wine of my life, a title I doubt it will relinquish. The moment I lifted the glass to my nose and took in that sweet, spicy, arresting perfume, my notion of excellence in wine, and my understanding of what wine was capable of, was instantly transformed—I could almost hear the scales recalibrating in my head. The ‘47 was the warmest, richest, most decadent wine I’d ever encountered. Even more striking than its opulence was its freshness. The flavors were redolent of stewed fruits and dead flowers, yet the wine tasted alive; it bristled with energy and purpose. The ’47s signature flaws—the residual sugar and volatile acidity—were readily apparent, but it was just as Lurton had said: In this wine, the flaws inexplicably became virtues….

I realized that it was silly even to try to place the ‘47 in the context of other wines; it defied comparison, a point underscored when I tasted another legend, the 1945 Château Latour, later that night (yeah, it was a nice evening). The Latour was stunning—probably the second-best wine I’ve ever had—but it at least fell within my frame of reference: It was a classically proportioned Bordeaux that just happened to be achingly good. The ‘47 Cheval, by contrast, was an otherworldly wine—a claret from another planet. And it was amazing.

What is the sound of scales recalibrating? I’d like to find out.

I’m off to the American Astronomical Meeting in Austin shortly, but had a few links and bullets to get out of my head before hitting the road.

• This post about Female Science Professor’s worst jobs was one of the most amusinghorrifying reads of my winter break. For example:
  

  One summer I worked in the kitchen of a restaurant that was run by a man with a really bad temper and questionable rules to increase worker efficiency. For example, he decided that it would save time if we removed burgers from the grill with our hands instead of using implements.

• LSST (The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope) is one of my fave current astro projects, and they just got a hefty influx of money from the Charles Simonyi Fund and from Bill Gates. LSST is a stumpy 8-m telescope that will scan the sky repeatedly with a wide-field camera, essentially making a deep, multi-color movie of the sky. The data stream is a software geek’s dream, with objects that appear and disappear, by changing brightness and/or position, and that have to be identifiable within a 30 petabyte database. The image below gives a taste of it, showing some RR Lyrae variable stars in the globular cluster M3.
  
• The AAS has arranged a private screening of Real Genius. I am stoked!
• I threw one of my kids a science-themed birthday recently (totally unprovoked on my part, I swear). We messed around with making “rockets” from film canisters, water, and Alka-Seltzer, looking through diffraction gratings, and turning red cabbage water different colors using acids and bases. And, in shades of Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters, I got to make a volcano cake:
  

The New York Times (via Marginal Revolution) reports on what I hope does become a trend: the diminution of the role of the entree in American restaurant cuisine. That is, what Americans call an entree, which is really the main course. The French, who apparently invented the concept of the main course (plat principal) (and who would think that something like that needed to be “invented”?), use the word “entree” to mean what you might guess, namely a starter. But Americans like to be different.

Anyway, apparently the concept of the main course dominated by a single large item is, in advanced food circles, losing ground to the increasing popularity of smaller plates. From the consumer’s point of view, it just makes perfect sense — isn’t it more fun to design your own dinner from a variety of options, than to have the kitchen make all those choices for you? And isn’t it more interesting to sample several different options, than to focus on a single oversized dish? Takami, my favorite new local restaurant, features not only small plates, but dishes from three different kitchens with different specialties (sushi, robata, and everything else). If you savor the meal as a multi-level sensory experience rather than a obligatory intake of calories, it’s definitely the way to go.

Small plates mean extra work for the restaurant, of course — customization on the consumer side works against standardization and economy of scale on the producer side. So I doubt that the trend will soon be penetrating to the Bennigans and Applebees of the world. I suspect the true food snobs wouldn’t have it any other way.

I thought Atrios was kidding, but no. Vosges Haut Chocolat has indeed come out with a bacon-flavored chocolate bar. I’m not sure if it qualifies as long-awaited, but it should have been.

From the description:

Bacon Exotic Candy Bar - New

Applewood smoked bacon + Alder smoked salt + deep milk chocolate

Deep milk chocolate coats your mouth and leads to the crunch of smoked bacon pieces. Surprise your mouth with the smoked salt and sweet milk chocolate combination.

Crisp, buttery, compulsively irresistible bacon and milk chocolate combination has long been a favorite of mine. I started playing with this combination at the tender age of six while eating chocolate chip pancakes drenched in maple syrup. Beside my chocolate-laden cakes laid three strips of fried bacon, just barely touching a sweet pool of maple syrup. Just a bite of the bacon was too salty and yearned for the sweet kiss of chocolate syrup. In retrospect, perhaps this was a turning point, for on that plate something magical happened: the beginnings of a combination so ethereal and delicious that it would haunt my thoughts until I found the medium to express it–chocolate.
–Katrina

Vosges is my favorite chocolatier (if you know what I mean). Not only do they blend excellent chocolate with a wide variety of exotic spices to create uniformly interesting and delicious combinations, but I stumbled upon them when they were just a tiny one-shop operation in Chicago, before their blossoming into international success. And a friend of mine once claimed that every type of food is enhanced by the addition of bacon, including ice cream. (Although I did manage to give her pause with my suggestion of bacon-flavored water.) So I’m thinking I’m going to have to give the new experiment a try. You only live once.

My temporary officemate runs down to the vending machine and buys a bag of gummi bears. He dumps them on the desk, sorts them by color, and then procedes to eat them in order of increasing bin size (i.e. the pile of 1 orange one, then the pile of 3 yellow ones, then the pile of 4 green ones, etc).

If I buy a bag of M&M’s, I sort them by color, then figure out a division that lets me arrange them in a triangle, with one color per horizontal row, but allowing colors to be repeated (i.e. it’s ok for 9 red M&M’s to show up as a row of 7, and then further up, a row of 2). I then eat off each diagonal, producing a progressively smaller triangle, but one that maintains the horizontal color structure till the tasty end.

My kids, who I suspect inherited a geek-streak a mile wide, also sort multicolored candy into patterns and make up an algorithm for eating it.

The non-scientists who I have asked about this habit look at me like I’m nuts. (So do people who grew up in large families, because someone was bound to snarf the candy before they could take the time to develop this particular neurosis.)

So, is algorithmic consumption of multicolor candy a geek phenotype?

Upon moving to a new city, one naturally pokes around a bit to find interesting things to do that one’s previous location may not have offered. Los Angeles, of course, is the modern Mecca of novelty and experience, so one is faced with an impressive menu of possibilities. But this one struck me as particularly clever: Dining in the Dark, which is just what the title promises. The idea is to take a relatively standard restaurant experience, but to turn out all the lights, removing that pesky “visual” aspect provided by the ambient photons. You save a bundle on decor, and you can charge extra for the novelty! Genius.

So naturally we had to try. And on Saturday we did.

This little video comes from a local TV station that solved the “How do we do a story on TV about something that happens totally in the dark?” problem by bringing in an infrared camera. It’s not held at a standalone restaurant, but only happens on weekends in a conference room at the West Hollywood Hyatt. (Saving on decor, remember?) The waitstaff guide you to your table, which is decorated with a few rose petals but otherwise as uncluttered as possible. (”Bumping into stuff” is a big part of the dark experience, but you get used to it.) The staff is generally very helpful, and you are encouraged to shout for them if you need something at your table, or wish to be escorted away — I’m pretty sure that the restrooms were not themselves dark, although I didn’t check. You were, however, expected to be able to pour your own wine from its bottle to the glasses without soaking the table. I managed.

The idea, of course, is to offer a different angle on the process of eating and enjoying a meal with friends. Deprived of sight, your other senses rally to the task, and you are more sensitive to the sounds and tastes around you. And it’s certainly not impossible to get by; blind people do it all the time. Actual blind people, of course, don’t have the option of stepping back into sight once the meal is over, and there was a danger that the whole operation would seem like some sort of creepy “blindness tourism.” But I never got that sense; the waitstaff themselves are all blind or visually impaired, and if anything the experience gives you just a tiny bit of insight into what their lives must be like — or would be like, if they lived in a world in which great efforts were made to accommodate their sightlessness.

The menu itself was simple, and purposely so: by concentrating on a few basic and recognizable flavors, the chefs offer you the opportunity to disentangle all of the ingredients for yourself, without seeing directly what they are. And the food itself was none too shabby; I can vouch that the truffle-infused macaroni and cheese would have been a hit under any circumstances. True, there was occasionally a temptation to bypass the traditional knife and fork and use one’s fingers. It may even have occasionally happened that one would mistakenly push a morsel off of one’s plate, and rescue it from the table with one’s hands; happily, there were no witnesses, and I’m not saying anything.

The above video, while evocative, really gives the wrong idea by letting in the infrared cameras. The foremost lesson of the dark dining experience is that it is really, really dark. That might come as no shocking news, but it makes you realize how very rarely in this world we are really plunged all the way into complete darkness. We are usually always accompanied by streetlights, or the glowing face of an alarm clock, or the stars in the sky. True and absolute darkness is a different experience, and one worth trying. I love those photons, but I would definitely do it again.

Today is the last day left in the FDA’s public comment period regarding changes to the labeling rules for irradiated food. Given the other problems in the world, this may or may not have been on your radar screen, but if you eat meat it certainly should.

Imagine if there were a product, say a soft drink, that sickened upwards of 200,000 people every year, and killed thousands. How would the public react? Clearly there would be outrage on a truly massive scale, legislation, regulation, whatever it took to end the scourge. Just look at the outrage ensuing after the spinach crisis last year.

We have such a product in this country: meat. It is produced in conditions such that the main processing challenge in bringing it to market is simply keeping “filth” - the animals’ own excrement - from infecting the final product. The public has simply accepted the sickness and death as collateral damage, not a problem to be solved. Nothing must get in the way of the steady stream of 99 cent burgers!

The meat industry has a “solution” which I put in quotes because it may be worse than the problem itself: food irradiation. The minute most people hear that their hamburger is made from meat that was irradiated, they don’t want it. And if more read the label that is presently required (but proposed by the meat industry to be removed) then they might not buy it.

Food irradiation kills bacteria, but not all of them. The meat industry wants to irradiate food so as not to have to spend more money making meat processing safer at the slaughterhouse, which would raise the cost to consumers.

The real problem, though, is how radiation kills bacteria. Often the irradiation is performed using an isotope of cobalt which emits gamma rays - very energetic photons, more energetic than x-rays, which are also used for this purpose. These photons travel a long way through most materials and lose their energy by knocking electrons off the atoms of the material. The emitted electrons have a great deal of energy and knock off other electrons, sometimes resulting in breaking up the molecules of the material. These molecular fragments are called radiolytic byproducts. The radiation does not just kill bacteria, but produces new molecules in the meat itself never encountered in nature, some of which may be harmful. We actually don’t know very much about this possibility.

We do know that for irradiated fats, long-chain carbon based molecules, the radiolytic byproducts include 2-ACB, a chemical shown to cause colon cancer in mice. But that is just one of potentially thousands of different radiolytic byproducts of irradtiation. In effect, we are performing an enormous, uncontrolled experiment on millions of human beings - us - for the sole purpose of saving the already heavily subsidized meat industry a few pennies on the dollar. The effects could be devastating, healthwise, or maybe not. Is it worth the risk?

Even more interesting is a study of the change in flavor of irradiated meat products. The irradiated meat was descibred as tasting like “wet dog” or “singed hair”. Yum.

Food irradiation is banned in Europe, largely due to the above concerns. At a minimum, the labelling requirements should stay in place. The meat industry has lobbied to change the label to say “cold pasteurized” or remove it altogether. But we ought to be considering an outright ban on this very questionable practice.

I am not a vegetarian, but I used to be for about eight years, partly for reasons like this. I buy organic meat now whenever possible, and avoid fast food. I want to know what I am getting, and the meat industry doesn’t want us to know! Why don’t we let an informed market decide this one?

Here is a link to the FDA proposed rule change and public comment info.

You know what’s a really big problem? The Farm Bill. The quintennial piece of legislation that steers billions of dollars into subsidies for farmers who mass-produce the raw materials of which junk food is made. Yeah, I know, not exactly a hot topic, nor our normal fare. But Michael Pollan in the Times lays out a devastating indictment of the current system, which encourages our economy to overproduce food that is incredibly bad for us, while busting the federal budget, ruining the environment, and hurting small farmers and developing countries to boot. (Via Marginal Revolution.)

Here is the basic econo-physics of the situation:

As a rule, processed foods are more “energy dense” than fresh foods: they contain less water and fiber but more added fat and sugar, which makes them both less filling and more fattening. These particular calories also happen to be the least healthful ones in the marketplace, which is why we call the foods that contain them “junk.” Drewnowski concluded that the rules of the food game in America are organized in such a way that if you are eating on a budget, the most rational economic strategy is to eat badly — and get fat.

This perverse state of affairs is not, as you might think, the inevitable result of the free market. Compared with a bunch of carrots, a package of Twinkies, to take one iconic processed foodlike substance as an example, is a highly complicated, high-tech piece of manufacture, involving no fewer than 39 ingredients, many themselves elaborately manufactured, as well as the packaging and a hefty marketing budget. So how can the supermarket possibly sell a pair of these synthetic cream-filled pseudocakes for less than a bunch of roots?

For the answer, you need look no farther than the farm bill. This resolutely unglamorous and head-hurtingly complicated piece of legislation, which comes around roughly every five years and is about to do so again, sets the rules for the American food system — indeed, to a considerable extent, for the world’s food system. Among other things, it determines which crops will be subsidized and which will not, and in the case of the carrot and the Twinkie, the farm bill as currently written offers a lot more support to the cake than to the root. Like most processed foods, the Twinkie is basically a clever arrangement of carbohydrates and fats teased out of corn, soybeans and wheat — three of the five commodity crops that the farm bill supports, to the tune of some $25 billion a year. (Rice and cotton are the others.) For the last several decades — indeed, for about as long as the American waistline has been ballooning — U.S. agricultural policy has been designed in such a way as to promote the overproduction of these five commodities, especially corn and soy.

I remember the moment it first dawned on me that Coke was significantly less expensive than orange juice. But making soda is a complicated chemical process, while oranges literally grow on trees! Of course, once you master that process, mass-producing the chemicals is fairly straightforward, while growing oranges requires a certain amount of patience. At the time I didn’t really appreciate the other aspect of the puzzle: we pay people to grow corn, which is turned into high-fructose corn syrup, which sweetens all of the processed food we find on our supermarket shelves.

Now, there does seem to be an obvious point missing in the article: the popularity of Twinkies over carrots cannot be put down solely to the greater density of calories per dollar. A lot of people like how Twinkies taste, deep-fried or not. But that doesn’t mean we should be actively subsidizing their production.

Pollan strikes an optimistic note at the end of his piece, suggesting that the importance of the Farm Bill may finally be percolating up to the national consciousness. (At least until the next time that a celebrity with fake boobs dies of a drug overdose.) It’s long been considered political suicide to even suggest messing with farm subsidies, especially with the Iowa caucuses playing such a large role in Presidential primaries. We’ll see if next year is any different.