Tag Archives: food

AI Whitewashing

Yesterday, I asked:

Here’s a question, O Internet:

If I buy full-fat milk and dilute it 50/50 with water, do I effectively have semi-skimmed milk, or is there something more sophisticated about the skimming process?

And if I then dilute it again, do I get skimmed milk… for one quarter of the price?

Now, the quick answer, as I understand it, is ‘no’: milk contains a variety of nutrients, and several of these are water-soluble.  So the process of ‘skimming’ to reduce the fat content doesn’t dilute these nutrients in the way that you would by just adding water: you still get them at approximately the same concentration when you buy semi-skimmed or skimmed milk.

But I learned a couple of interesting different things from asking!

The first thing is this wonderful diagram, found and posted in the comments by Spencer:

Thumbnail of 'Milk products' flowchart

(click for full size)

It looks like something explaining the petrochemical industry, but much, much more yummy.

His comment: “I wonder how many of these I can have with my breakfast today?”

And the second thing is that, as well as beginning “Here’s a question, O Internet”, I could have asked “Here’s a question, O Artificial Intelligence”.  

My friend Keshav did that, submitting my question verbatim to Perplexity, a system I hadn’t previously tried.  Here’s the rather good result (and here as a screenshot in case that live link goes away).

I then went on to ask “Which nutrients in milk are water-soluble?”, and it told me, with good citations, with the comment that “maintaining adequate levels of these water-soluble vitamins in breast milk is important for the health and development of the breastfed infant”.  So I asked a follow-up question:  “Is this different in cows’ milk?”, and again, got a useful, detailed response with references for all the facts.

This stuff really is getting better… at least until the Internet is completely overrun by AI spam and the AIs have to start citing themselves.  But for now,  I think Perplexity is worth exploring further.

Thanks to Spencer, Keshav and other respondents!

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Whitewashing?

Here’s a question, O Internet:

If I buy full-fat milk and dilute it 50/50 with water, do I effectively have semi-skimmed milk, or is there something more sophisticated about the skimming process?

And if I then dilute it again, do I get skimmed milk… for one quarter of the price?

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Live together in perfect harmony…

I’m fond of both milk and dark chocolate. Milk chocolate is yummy kiddy comfort food. Dark chocolate is more sophisticated, more bitter, more ‘adult’. It’s also less likely to melt at inconvenient times, so helping you preserve that more sophisticated appearance.

But the problem, I find, is that dark chocolate often has too little taste. Even the better brands can be hard, waxy, slightly bitter slabs that don’t actually give much enjoyment, especially when you get to the higher-cocoa-content variants. More ‘fix’ than ‘fun’. Espresso vs latte. (But espresso, I think, has more flavour. Certainly more variety of flavour.)

And so I often think back nostalgically to the days of my youth, when Marks & Spencer sold what was, in my mind, the perfect Swiss chocolate bar.

It was a simple bar of dark chocolate, with a milk chocolate centre.

Bitter and yet sweet. Soft and yet crunchy. Non-melty, and yet easy to bite. Sophisticated and yet yummy. Yin and yet yang.

It seems so obvious: the ‘flat white’ of chocolate. And, as is generally the case with M&S food, it was very good. It could certainly have turned its nose up at anything made Mr Cadbury, and as for Mr Hershey… well, let’s not go there.

Now, we didn’t have anything as smart as an M&S Food store in the little town where I grew up, so this was a special treat which occasionally appeared after my mother returned from shopping in a larger metropolis. Perhaps its rarity, combined with rosy nostalgia, has elevated it to an unwarranted state of perfection in my mind… but there was no doubt it was pretty good!

And yet, at about the time when I graduated from having chocolate bought for me to buying it myself… they stopped selling it! I don’t know why. Perhaps it was marketing: are most customers actually purists who demand either black or white? Or perhaps there were manufacturing challenges of which I am unaware. Not only did Marks and Spencer stop selling it, I haven’t really seen its equivalent anywhere else in the intervening decades.

But if anybody out there knows of a good combination of high-quality dark and milk chocolate, I’d like to return to my childhood, so please let me know…

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Christmas Stocking

Like many of you, no doubt, we’ve been stocking up on the necessary goods to tide us over the Christmas period.  

However, Rose tested positive for Covid yesterday, so our most important stocks now look like this:

A collection of lateral flow tests

Rose isn’t suffering much, and we were planning a fairly quiet Christmas anyway, so it’s not a bad time for it to happen!

I’m still showing negative, so am being sent out promptly to do any shopping before that dreaded second pink line appears on my tests too. And that means that I am in full control of the purchasing of the brandy cream which you might have spotted in the top right of my picture. Ho ho ho!

Now, I’ve always liked to consider myself something of a connoisseur of mince pies, and, in the absence of proper home-made ones, I have to say that those carrying Heston Blumenthal’s brand in Waitrose have been consistently good over the years. This year is no exception.  I wouldn’t know Herr Blumenthal (or any other celebrity chef) if I bumped into him in the street, but his pies, this year coming in a larger-than-usual format with a ‘lemon twist’ are decidedly tasty.  And they have an important characteristic for those who, like me, are the sole consumer in the household: they stand up rather well to being microwaved.  Herr B might be shocked at the suggestion, but you really can’t heat up an oven just to warm an individual mince pie.  Not two or three times per day. No, 15-20 secs on 600W is the only viable solution, unless, I guess, you have an always-on Aga.  Mmm.  I always thought there must be a raison-d’être for those, even in the modern age…  Perhaps for next Christmas…

Anyway, mince pies can, of course, be improved even further with a topping of brandy cream, and here too, Waitrose has come up trumps this year with their Courvoisier-infused extra-thick variety.  I’ve always considered brandy cream superior to brandy butter and I’m discovering that even their smallest pot is still sufficient to extend to a variety of other uses after the mince pies have been exhausted.  Porridge, for example, will certainly benefit from a dollop of it, alongside the brown sugar and blueberries.

But the thing that made me seriously consider starting a petition to Waitrose, asking them to stock it all year round and not just at Christmas, was a couple of evenings ago when I first tried it with hot chocolate. Oh my word! (as they would say down under).

Make yourself a proper hot chocolate (which means using hot milk – none of this water-based nonsense).  Use an electric blender or whisk to dissolve the chocolate beans, flakes or whatever — these are rather good — and then finish it off with a decent-sized floating island of extra thick brandy cream, before putting your feet up in front of Crooks Anonymous or Where Eagles Dare, and you can be sure of a jolly good evening.

Even if you do have Covid.

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House of the Future

Some people may consider my fondness for home automation to be a frivolous pursuit.

Well, let me tell you this…

Tonight, as I left the excellent Chinese take-away a few miles from my house, accompanied by this evening’s dinner, I was able to turn on the hotplate in the kitchen at home, so that by the time we got back, the plates were nice and warm and ready to hit the table.

Let nobody say humanity is not reaping the benefits of scientific progress…

A small section of the touch control panel in my kitchen.

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Redundant Yuletide Instructions?

Waitrose are, once again, selling mice pies under the ‘Heston’ brand. Apparently, this is something to do with a celebrity chef and has nothing to do with Ben Hur.

Anyway, they’re rather good, as you can see from the emptiness of the packet.

However, I couldn’t help feeling that since they were mince pies, and in particular ‘Night Before Christmas Mince Pies’, the label ‘Best before 14th January’ might be somewhat superfluous?

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Concerning Hobbits…

You can learn a lot from the wisdom of Hobbits.

I’ve discovered, for example, that it’s important not to neglect Second Breakfast, because to do so can lead to increased snacking between meals.

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Viticulture

I’m used to labels on bottles of wine telling me that I should expect a ‘hint of blackcurrant’ or ‘subtle aromas’.

But in Portugal recently I had a (very drinkable) wine from a vineyard whose marketing department had, perhaps, become a little over-excited.

It’s nice to know there are still jobs out there for people with Literature degrees, isn’t it?

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Zooming in the rain

On Wednesdays, there’s an interesting group of catering vans that collect at the far end of the West Cambridge campus, and I like to go there for lunch.

But it’s a bit of a distance, and the weather today was bad, so it was important to find the most appropriate method of transportation…

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Pavlovian Titillation

One of the reasons I am sometimes envious of design/media companies is that they can get away with names that, in other sectors, would cause people at least to snigger, if not positively guffaw.

Can you imagine a law firm, or a steel manufacturing plant, deciding to name itself The Marmalade? Even in the technology world that I tend to inhabit, where many companies, let’s face it, have some pretty silly names, I’m still impressed.

But you can get away with such names if you have other ways to make people take you seriously. And Seb Wills pointed me at this Fast Company post which suggests that The Marmalade may not find that too hard. The embedded video clip, showcasing some of their work, contains some very impressive sequences.

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The food is best from Budapest

Hungarian Mangalica Salami

This is, in my opinion, some of the finest salami yet created by mankind. I’m sure it’s the finest at my local Waitrose, anyway. It’s… well… creamy.

If you’re a salami enthusiast, ask yourself when you last described one as creamy. If it wasn’t recently, give this a try. Goes nicely with mozzarella in a salad.

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Autumn breakfast

The world is full of blackberries this morning, and they always taste better when picked straight from the bush. I’m sure this can be traced back to our hunter-gatherer roots somehow. But as an effect, or as the cause?

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