Seth's Blog

Toni Rivard, a Dallas dessert caterer, makes one of the best chocolate-chip cookies in America, according to Forbes Traveller. She ages her cookie dough about three days. She says it improves the texture. I wonder if it improves the flavor, too:

Rivard’s secret? “I like to age my cookie dough and feel that it
makes for a better texture in cookies.” As a result, the aptly-named
“OMG!” [which is what customers have actually said when they taste one] chocolate chip cookies at Crème de la Cookie are soft and chewy with a deep rich flavor.  

Fermenting cookie dough should certainly improve the flavor, although chocolate already supplies a lot of complexity. My experience has been that cooking delicious stuff became a lot easier when I started using fermentation to help (e.g., miso soup instead of soups flavored without fermented ingredients).

Thanks to David Archer.

• Berkshire Encyclopedia of China. Interview with the publisher.
• Self-experimentation and panic attacks
• Simon Singh sued by National Chiropractic Association
• Nassim Taleb testifies to Congress. Interview with Taleb.

Thanks to Dave Lull.

Commenting on an earlier post, Jack Rusher reports:

Like Anonymous, I’m an MMA [Mixed Martial Arts] enthusiast. My experience with 3 T/day of flaxseed oil have been more or less identical to his. Before: high doses of NSAIDs [non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs] just to survive training, constant soreness and fatigue, etc. After: no joint pain at all, complete discontinuation of NSAIDs, lower frequency and severity of injury.
Dental results: my hygienist made strong comments regarding the improvement of my gums on my first post-flax visit, attributing it to changes in my oral care behavior . . . of which there were none.

In the comments, Timothy Beneke wrote:

My experience with a friend who had unexplained stomach pain was instructive. She saw 6 “experts”, 3 who worked for fixed salaries at institutions (Kaiser, Stanford, etc.) and 3 who were in the marketplace getting paid based on what they brought in each year. The three who were on fixed salaries were professionally cordial, and openly admitted that they could not say with confidence what was causing her pain. The three who were not on fixed salaries were very touchy-feely and charming and spoke with complete confidence about the cause.

Wow. This reminds me of my surgeon, Eileen Consorti, telling me that the operation she recommended would help me, that there was evidence for this, and then — when I couldn’t find any evidence — telling me she would find it and never doing so. She would have gotten thousands of dollars for that operation. It also reminds me of my dermatologist prescribing a medicine that didn’t work and, until I did an experiment that showed it didn’t work, having no idea it didn’t work. He got paid in any case.

Two New Zealand teenagers humbled GlaxoSmithKline, one of the world’s biggest food companies:

Their school science experiment found that [GlaxoSmithKline's] ready-to-drink Ribena contained almost no trace of vitamin C.

Students Anna Devathasan and Jenny Suo tested the blackcurrant cordial against rival brands to test their hypothesis that cheaper brands were less healthy.

Instead, their tests found that the Ribena contained a tiny amount of vitamin C, while another brand’s orange juice drink contained almost four times more. . . .

GSK said the girls had tested the wrong product, and it was concentrated syrup which had four times the vitamin C of oranges. But when the commerce commission investigated, it found that although blackcurrants have more vitamin C than oranges, the same was not true of Ribena. It also said ready-to-drink Ribena contained no detectable level of vitamin C.

The students used iodine titration to determine Vitamin C levels. Why had the students managed to see something important that the food giant overlooked? My guess is that an unusual processing step (e.g., high storage temperature) destroyed the Vitamin C and those who knew about the anomaly didn’t want to consider the possibility that it had done damage. The possibility that someone outside the company might notice didn’t occur to them. Just as those who mislabel fish in New York restaurants and markets never realized that two students could uncover their deception. I found that the omega-3 in a Chinese brand of flaxseed oil was probably destroyed before it got to me.