Fun with Science
Sooner or later, my beginner's luck in the kitchen was bound to run out, and sure enough this week has been characterized by culinary mishaps of Anne of Green Gables proportions. On Sunday, after Quaker Meeting, I decided to bake some bread, as I've been doing all summer. I tried a new recipe from my Mennonite cookbook- Easy French Bread. Disaster! The bread was solid, with none of the little bubbles one likes to see in bread. Also, even after twice the advised length of time in the oven, the bread was raw in the middle. (Presumably because it was a solid lump of undifferentiated goo.) It was inedible and had to be thrown away.
The following day, since I had the day off, I decided to try Easy French Bread again and to make up a batch of black bean soup to eat for lunches. I was very careful with the bread- I had identified several places where I might have gone wrong the day before- proofing the yeast too far in advance, not letting the water cool long enough, not preheating the oven adequately. The bread came out beautifully- my best to date. The soup, though... yesterday for lunch I heated up a bowl of it and took a sip. Vile! I almost spit it out. Seems I'd been a little too liberal with the vinegar.
But I'm no fool. I took high school Honors Chemistry. What's the opposite of sour? Bitter! Sour is acid; bitter is base. I'd simply neutralize the acid of the vinegar with, say, a tablespoon of baking soda, and my problem would be solved.
Um, yeah. We won't dwell on the mess or the horrible smell or the sinister, foaming concoction that looked like a witches' brew. Nor will we dwell on the fact that, despite all that, I tried it anyway, because I am a moron. Suffice it to say that this week it'll be peanut butter sandwiches for lunch, on my admirable Easy French Bread.
2 Comments:
Honey, the opposite of sour is sweet. You could have counteracted the vinegar with a little sugar, or honey, or perhaps some fruit juice.
I don't know what the opposite of bitter is. Happy, maybe.
I had a chemistry set once, most often used to create amazingly persistent smells in the basement or to cause test tubes to become packed with unextractable mixtures of chemicals that didn't interact in any explainable way, but it also came with a rocket, sort of like those water rockets we've all played with at one point or another, except it worked by pouring some vinegar into the body of it, followed by a charge of baking soda, wrapped in some tissue paper to delay the explosive interaction. You'd cap the end, set it upright, and the mixture, when the vinegar hit the baking soda, sent the rocket into the air. Not very high, but. Perhaps if I'd used soup. . . .
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