Tomorrow is a day for iconic cooking. Turkey. Stuffing. And of course, cranberry sauce. At a dinner a few years ago, a friend produced an odd silver implement and asked the gathered group of foodies just what we all thought it might be. Would you believe a jellied cranberry server - just the right size, she pointed out, to cut the canned jelly! Turns out that serving pieces for jellied sauces, like tomatoes and cranberries pre-date the Ocean Spray cans, but it was a fun puzzle regardless.
For me, the whole question of canned or homemade sauce is moot, since I prefer cranberry relish. I make it by running a bag of cranberries and a whole orange through the food processor, then adding sugar to taste. Since it's best made ahead, so the flavors can blend, I made a batch yesterday afternoon when I went home for lunch between office hours. Straight from the food processor the relish is whitish, dry and pretty bitter. Stir in the sugar and not only does it become sweet, but a ruby syrup begins to appear.
This is a (literally) beautiful example of osmosis in action. The high concentration of sugar outside the cell walls of the finely chopped orange and cranberry mixture encourages the water within the cells to pass through the cell membrane to bring the concentrations inside and out into equilibrium. The sugar and cellular contents are too big to cross the membrane, so the best the poor cells can do is to dump their water out creating that lovely syrup. The process intensifies the flavors of the berry and orange bits as well, since they are essentially "dried".
After a day of cooking and now kitchen scrubbing, my fingers are wrinkled. [This is an osmotic process as well, in this case, the water is crossing the cell membranes into my cells, causing the out layer of skin to get larger, and wrinkle.] Or perhaps, not! As David Bradley points out in the comments to this post, the wrinkling of the skin on your fingers after prolonged immersion in water is not particularly well understood. My reading of the literature suggests that osmosis plays at most a small role.
- Home
- Angry by Choice
- Catalogue of Organisms
- Chinleana
- Doc Madhattan
- Games with Words
- Genomics, Medicine, and Pseudoscience
- History of Geology
- Moss Plants and More
- Pleiotropy
- Plektix
- RRResearch
- Skeptic Wonder
- The Culture of Chemistry
- The Curious Wavefunction
- The Phytophactor
- The View from a Microbiologist
- Variety of Life
Field of Science
-
-
-
Political pollsters are pretending they know what's happening. They don't.1 month ago in Genomics, Medicine, and Pseudoscience
-
-
Course Corrections6 months ago in Angry by Choice
-
-
The Site is Dead, Long Live the Site2 years ago in Catalogue of Organisms
-
The Site is Dead, Long Live the Site2 years ago in Variety of Life
-
Does mathematics carry human biases?4 years ago in PLEKTIX
-
-
-
-
A New Placodont from the Late Triassic of China5 years ago in Chinleana
-
Posted: July 22, 2018 at 03:03PM6 years ago in Field Notes
-
Bryophyte Herbarium Survey7 years ago in Moss Plants and More
-
Harnessing innate immunity to cure HIV8 years ago in Rule of 6ix
-
WE MOVED!8 years ago in Games with Words
-
-
-
-
post doc job opportunity on ribosome biochemistry!9 years ago in Protein Evolution and Other Musings
-
Growing the kidney: re-blogged from Science Bitez9 years ago in The View from a Microbiologist
-
Blogging Microbes- Communicating Microbiology to Netizens10 years ago in Memoirs of a Defective Brain
-
-
-
The Lure of the Obscure? Guest Post by Frank Stahl12 years ago in Sex, Genes & Evolution
-
-
Lab Rat Moving House13 years ago in Life of a Lab Rat
-
Goodbye FoS, thanks for all the laughs13 years ago in Disease Prone
-
-
Slideshow of NASA's Stardust-NExT Mission Comet Tempel 1 Flyby13 years ago in The Large Picture Blog
-
in The Biology Files
The Who, What, When, Where and Why of Chemistry
Chemistry is not a world unto itself. It is woven firmly into the fabric of the rest of the world, and various fields, from literature to archeology, thread their way through the chemist's text.
Weird Words of Science: stochastic
I'm teaching a graduate course in mathematical modeling of natural processes. Many math modeling techniques rely on the random numbers and are more generally known as stochastic algorithms. A simple example is numerical integration. We used numerical integration techniques to the value of pi by (virtually) throwing darts at a circular target embedded in square (figure). The ratio of hits inside the circle to the total hits is pi/4. Stochastic comes from the Greek stochastikos "to take a guess", which itself derives from stochos - "target", so the target image above is apt.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)