On Food and Cooking

Adapted from G. Campbell Platt, Fermented Foods of the World — A Dictionary and Guide (London: Butte ...

amount of salt at a cool room temperature; it’s allowed to become quite tart and develops a remarkabl ...

cucumbers have become relatively hard to find. All cucumber pickles start with thin- skinned varieties that ...

pickles, which are soaked in vinegar and salt but not pasteurized. They are kept refrigerated from the moment ...

Qualities Tart, aromatic Strong flavor, crunchy, tingly Common problems in home-pickled cucumbers include cheesy ...

Roman times, the soaking water was often supplemented with alkaline wood ashes, which cut the d ...

but this results in a different kind of fermentation. Nutrients for the microbes in the brine diffuse very ...

to leach out and break down oleuropein, and the addition of an iron solution and dissolved oxygen to react ...

were preserved for some weeks in seawater or a 5 to 10% brine while they were shipped from Asia ...

chloride ions in salt, so it takes a larger mass of sugar to do the same job of preserving. The usual ...

earliest sugar preserves were probably fruit pieces immersed in syrupy honey (the Greek term for qui ...

flavor of the fruit. The Arab world was using cane sugar by the Middle Ages, and brought it to Europe in the ...

into the released cell fluids and any added water. They can’t simply re-form their gel for a c ...

scientists have found that the optimal conditions for pectin gelation are a pH between 2.8 and 3.5 — about t ...

concentrate the other ingredients. The boiling is continued until the temperature of the mix reaches 217–221ºF/103–1 ...

to get firmer for some days or weeks. Two kinds of pectin gels. Left: In ordinary fruit preserves, the ...

damages the pectin. Failures can sometimes be rescued by the addition of a commercial liquid pectin preparation and ...

candies and other confections. Food chemists have developed several different versions of pectin for special ...

and pectins. Candying can be a tedious process because it takes time for sugar to diffuse from ...

isolated in hermetically sealed containers. The heat deactivates plant enzymes and destroys harmful microbes, and ...