When you concoct a marinade for a meal, you often marinate your meat or whatever for a length of time – 30 minutes, a few hours, overnight. Why? Presumably to give the chemicals time to infiltrate the tissue being marinated. When you add salad dressing to your salad and let it sit in the...
Ever wonder why deciduous trees drop their leaves when the weather turns cooler and the region heads into autumn and winter? Ever wonder why the leaves change color, to brilliant hues of yellow, red, and orange, before they drop? These two events- color change and leaf drop- are separate events and separate mechanisms, but...
Most of us think that we taste with our tongues. We can detect five categories of taste: sweet, salty, sour, bitter and umami (meatiness). Right? Well….. There’s a whole lot more to taste than is on the tongue! You could say that most of us only know the “tip” of taste. Let’s dip into...
The importance of flavor. With the onset of fall weather, many of us turn to baking to heat up the kitchen and satisfy cravings for carbs. Who can resist the aroma of cinnamon bread or apple pie? What do you associate with baking? Cinnamon? Vanilla? Let’s dive into the biology of these two common...
Ah, the appetizing aromas in the kitchen as meals are prepared: baking bread, sizzling bacon, bubbling sauces. Then there are the scentless emissions: methane, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, benzene, nitrous oxide and nitrogen dioxide. The specialities of gas stoves. Needless pollutants. We’re not used to thinking about how toxic our indoor air might be...
