A really great artists on the history of Japanese whisky, with pictures.
Category: Food
Food, restaurants, meals, drinks, cooking, places to eat
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Instant coffee, how does it work
Apparently, instant coffee is a technological marvel.
Creating instant coffee required developing techniques to extract the soluble molecules in coffee from the insoluble plant matter without destroying the fragile compounds that make coffee worth drinking.
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Lunar hummus
Chickpeas grown in moon dirt may bring us lunar hummus.
Chickpeas of a variety called “Myles” were raised in a climate-controlled growth chamber at Texas A&M University. Seeds were coated with beneficial fungi and planted in a mix of the simulated lunar soil, made by Florida-based company Space Resource Technologies, and a nutrient-rich substance called vermicompost produced when earthworms break down organic waste.
Harvestable chickpeas grew in soil mixtures of up to 75% lunar simulant. As the percentage of simulated moon soil – known as regolith – increased, the number of harvestable chickpeas decreased, though the size of the chickpeas remained stable. Seeds planted in 100% lunar simulant failed to produce flowers and seeds, experiencing early death.
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Red roof Pizza Hut locations
Red roof Pizza Hut locations taste like nostalgia, and a cure for the DoorDash blues. What’s crazy, is that even the corporation that owns Pizza Hut doesn’t even know how many of these locations still exist.
Once a common sight across the country, these old-school, low-slung buildings had largely disappeared as the restaurant chain modernized its stores and focused on takeout. Mr. Pujol, a journalist who documents retro American highway culture, says he “freaked out,” and swerved into the parking lot.
He had not discovered an abandoned relic from the Reagan era. As a plaque near the door explained, this restaurant in Tunkhannock, Pa., was a Pizza Hut Classic. The interior design and menu had been painstakingly engineered to replicate the Pizza Huts of the 1980s and ’90s, when families and friends settled into red-vinyl booths on a Friday night to eat deep-dish pan pizza and drink Pepsi from red plastic cups.
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Inside the Great British Bake Off
During the next couple of months, I inched closer to the show. I cleared interviews with home economists who quizzed me on the finer points of baking technique—how to tell when a meringue was done cooking, or how to get a thin, shattering crust on a loaf of bread. Next were screen tests, a first date with the camera. Toward the end, in-person baking trials. These days, it’s not until the thousands of applicants have been whittled to a final hundred that anyone even tastes the bakes. “The best amateur bakers in the country” is the line, although I get the sense that even the producers don’t fully buy this. Throughout the process, we were encouraged to practice, to fill in the gaps in our knowledge, to get up to speed with things outside the amateur repertoire of biscuits and cakes. If any of us were truly skilled at baking, it was often because we had sought out “Bake Off,” not the other way around.
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The perfect grocery store shopping list app does not exist
Planning a grocery shopping list seems like a thing technology could solve. But the complex the needs of meal ingredients, family budgets, how grocery stores are set up differently everywhere… It’s a recipe for insanity.
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Sam Adams has a new beer that’s so strong it’s illegal in 15 states
Sam Adams has a new beer that’s so strong it’s illegal in 15 states.
Utopias — the white whale of the brewer’s lineup — is back for 2025 and it’s stronger than ever. Released every other year, the 2025 Utopias clocks in with a jaw-dropping 30% ABV, higher than most liqueurs and as much as some rums. Despite that high number, it’s still a beer. And that’s where the sales issues come in.
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Taco Bell 50K marathon
In Denver, someone figured out a 50 km loop that stops at 10 Taco Bells. Naturally, you would create an ultra marathon involving eating Taco Bell menu items.