Armchair Science with Ian: Smokey roasted flavors and ecology

Watson or Crick (of DNA fame, I believe it was Watson but won't look it up right now) was known to be an armchair scientist--he postulated ideas, made a few theories, wrote them down, and eventually others began to prove them empirically (even many decades later) without him having done any of the legwork for which the scientific community was known to hold in high esteem (and still does).

Culinary science questions come to mind frequently enough that I begin to answer them myself, and the answers are so sensible and sound to me that I'm almost convinced that I could pose them seriously to other people. Keep in mind that I'd be happy to write well researched essays about these questions. However, there are three issues:
1) I rarely have time to sit in an armchair, especially since I often commute between cities.
2) As a student, it's very likely that I'm already writing essays about something else for the certification of my educational degree. It's also very likely that those essays concern science, and require research to back up what I say to my professors and/or peers.
3) I've forgotten what the third issue was in the first place leaving me feeling even more exposed to academic criticism!

So I'll pose musings of varying length to whomever wishes to read here--without doing the detailed research...for now. But I have to admit that I do find some satisfaction in learning whether or not these ideas are true or at least partially correct, so someone please let me know.

Here's my most recent idea, with a story as backdrop to how it came forth:
Smokey Roasted Flavors and Prairie Ecology

wild carrot (Daucus carota) comes from Europe, likely escaped from someone's garden or field after being introduced into the U.S., and is commonly found in open spaces like prairies and fields. Keep an eye out for it around May if you're anywhere in Northeast United States.

At this time of year, most of these plants have finished with their flowers and gone to seed. The seeds are small, it quickly spreads, and appears intimidating to weed out when it gets really tall during the summer (especially because it attracts so many potentially upsettable Hymenopterae--insects like wasps, bees, and ants). At this time, most of the wild carrot has dried up and today I pulled lots of it out of my parents' vegetable garden (it had successfully dominated 1/3 of this garden), piled it up, and decided it would be reasonable to burn with the intention of scattering the ashes over the garden to help recharge the soil of its nutrients. Even though it dry and burned in a controlled space, I was still surprised that the wild carrot caught fire so quickly.

***

I later went inside to have a chicken soup, and added mesquite smoke. Somehow, we have neurons devoted to the pungent aroma and, important to this discussion, flavor of smoke. Some things taste better with the right amount of smoke. Why though? This brings us to the age old question of how and why we humans came to cook our food.

The earliest humans or their ancestors likely lived in African savanna habitat--prairies (mostly grass with a few trees scattered here and there).

I recall that many early peoples and even current day people will intentionally burn grasslands every few years (though perhaps for differing reasons now).

I think the first hominids to eat cooked food didn't cook their own food--it (wildebeest, whatever) was simply in a burning grassy area during a fire.

When did they start hunting? Is it more likely that they learned to use fires as traps? Or is it simpler to catch the meal and then cook?

Possibly later, humans learned to use fire for agricultural purposes, but for those who benefited from recognizing burned things by smell and the taste, perhaps there was something substantial to it. We can reason that cooking can sterilize foods, and by not getting sick from what you eat, you have the opportunity to live longer and proliferate future generations. Over millions of years (sorry, the archaeological clock in my mind is probably way off--I forget the evolutionary timeframe of human beings at the moment), inborn into most folks who could detect these scents and flavors had developed some liking to them. Perhaps because they were 1) good at detecting fires and could get away, survive, etc. 2) more likely to eat things that were almost guaranteed to be sterile and therefore capable of surviving and reproducing.


* * *
...Lessons learned from not completing this post: Write what's logical first, then give the story. Otherwise, you could lose both! Now that I'm revisiting this post, I think I've covered what I wanted to say, but I frankly don't remember if I captured the story telling and arguments I wanted to put forth as well as I had once planned.

Culinary research questions

I often think about combinations of food that many take for granted in every day contexts. Here are two combinations that linger at the forefront of my mind.

Cereal and milk:
Who, when, and how did someone think to combine grains with milk--especially considering that the milk comes from an entirely different species to begin with!

When you think about it, it's quite a bizarre combination, and many of us eat it first thing in the morning. I hypothesize that it started with re-hydrating grain products to make them chewable again--as we might do with oatmeal or cream of wheat by adding hot water. Perhaps later as milk became more abundant the stuff was used in place of water. My next inquiry would be directed into wondering whether milk was safer than water during that time.

Ketchup--or perhaps just tomato and eggs:
I'm more interested in correlations here, one of my friends introduced me to the Catalina style of breakfast: rub a tomato onto toast, put some egg on the toast, add salt, and eat. I enjoyed it a lot. mmm...

I later realized that this was very similar to something that I've seen done (and have myself done) for many years--adding ketchup to eggs, eating it with toast (among other sides).

Clearly, an emerging theme of flavors can be found. But why tomatoes, toast, and eggs?

Eggs (especially the yellow of yolk) and wheat toast evokes an interesting sensation of taste. Tomatoes are known to contain glutamate, are also mildly sweet, and hydrating. Juice from a tomato, or to some extent even ketchup seems to balance out the dryness of toast. [H]mmm...

Dreams do come true!

Some of the best dreams are the ones that come true, and I'd like to recommend that culinary dreams are a great place to start. All you need are the right ingredients and a taste for what you want to eat when you wake up.

One morning I dreamed I had arrived late for a culinary competition taking place somewhere at a college culinary program's cafeteria/kitchen in the mid-west (maybe one of the Dakotas--sometimes I get a feel for where I am geographically in my dreams), but found that teams were to devise a blend of two usable existing components, propose the dish to the "master chef" (rather than master chief?) for approval and make a new dish of them.

My team was looking demoralized and frustrated, but there were a lot of fresh herbs and cheeses on our table.

A scoop of tabbouleh and pesto on French bread slices came to mind, and I got it approved by the master chef (even though it was a dream, I addressed her politely as master chef) and I set off to make it.

About 10 minutes later, I woke up, went straight to the kitchen, and took each container from the fridge (thank goodness for pre-made pesto and tabobouleh!).

Here's how I made it come to reality (using available ingredients in my fridge):

Crusty multigrain bread slices ~1-3/4" (close enough to eat)
each toasted with a 1/2 slice of swiss on top
&
About a teaspoon of pesto (whatever we've got in the fridge, it's salty thus my reserved use of pesto) mixed with a heaping scoop of tabbouleh until the masses were heterogeneous in appearance

As I was making my dream come true (in seeing if the combination would actually taste good) I realized in retrospect that I probably would have lost points for presentation and taste as it would literally be a slice of bread with a scoop of pesto and a scoop of tabbouleh on top of some cheese. So I decided I'd blend the two together.

I also had some eggs drizzled with Cholula to go with it.

Bah, craisins--try rose hips instead.

This weekend the Student Environmental Association went to Waterloo State Park for a cabin outing.

I like to point out that rose hips are edible, are high in vitamin C, and as such can help a fellow in preventing scurvy. As you may suspect, Michigan's largest state park in the lower peninsula has rose bushes (possibly wild) in its area, and I pointed them out to Duke and Amit.

However, I never ate the rose hips. Maybe in the past I tried some in the backyard from domestic roses and didn't fancy their flavor when I was younger. More likely it's because there's a bottle of Ester-C made from rose hips and other stuff in the medicine cabinet, and each pill has a horrible hay fiber texture with an unpleasantly semi sweet/sour medicine cabinet taste if you don't swallow them soon. That said, I don't take vitamin C pills frequently.

Anyhow, Amit and Duke were fascinated and decided to try it out despite my disclaimers and warnings (good for them!). Better still, they really enjoyed them and started eating all the ripe hips off of the bushes.

I finally decided to try them and realized they were indeed pleasant, like dry craisins (minus the coloring and high fructose corn syrup) with a hint of rose in the aftertaste. Mind you, this is early mid-winter in Michigan, so the hips were dehydrated, but they were certainly delicious.

I'd like to experiment with the native wild roses on the Estate grounds at UM-Dearborn next to see if they bear a similar taste.