On Food and Cooking

desiccation doesn’t cause cooking and compaction of the tissue, relatively thick pieces can be dried ...

grains), and similar products keep uncooked for many months. Useful Impurities: Nitrates and Nitrites S ...

smaller doses of pure nitrite. This is now the rule except in the production of traditional dry-cured ...

Wurstvergiftung, or sausage disease (botulus is Latin for sausage). Nitrite apparently inhibits important bacteria ...

them off clean with a sponge and rub them with oil. Then hang them in smoke for two days, and on ...

200 parts per million (0.02%) in the United States, and is usually well below this limit. Sublime Hams The many ...

contributes to their appearance and texture. High salt concentrations cause the normally tightly bunched ...

impurities, but not enough to affect ham color. Recently, Japanese scientists found that the stable red ...

months may convert a third or more of the meat protein to flavor molecules. The concentration of mouth-fillin ...

continue to be popular even in the age of refrigeration, when salting is no longer essential. ...

pork pieces are tumbled with salt to draw out the muscle protein myosin, which forms a sticky laye ...

complexity (p. 448). It contains many hundreds of compounds, some of which kill or inhibit the growth of ...

enclosure as the wood, and therefore cooks while it’s smoked. This will give it a more or le ...

humidity of the air also makes a difference; smoke vapors are deposited most efficiently onto moist ...

and drying meat scraps to preserve them. When salted scraps are squeezed together, microbe-laden surfaces ...

Mediterranean. Italian salami and Spanish and Portuguese chorizos are 25–35% water, contain more than 4% salt ...

reaches 1%, the pH 4.5–5. High-temperature fermentation tends to produce volatile acids (acetic, bu ...

fat generated by enzymes from both the microbes and the meat. Confits In ancient times, cooks from central As ...

maize production made it economical to force-feed fowl and generate the necessary fat. In the age of canning ...

salt, by storage temperatures below 40ºF/4ºC, and by the addition of nitrate or nitrite to the salt. Most mo ...