Sometimes, a little bit of information doesn’t merit a full entry here. If you find an interesting link, tidbit, or have a one-line observation, just post to Twitter with #catfud in the tweet, and it will show up at the top of the left sidebar! Works for everyone on twitter, not just the regular posters, too!

To save space, it will only show the latest 5 tweets. However, if you click on ‘#catfud’ at the top of the tweet-list, it will take you to a search for every #catfud tweet posted, so you can see if you’ve missed anything.

Back in January my brother passed on this little nugget of culinary WTF: Deep-fried Dyer’s burgers in Memphis. The secret is the 90-year-old grease.

No, really. They claim to have been using the same batch of grease for 90 years. When they moved from their original location, they took the grease with them. They lock it up every night to keep it safe. O_o I can feel my arteries hardening just thinking about it! My brother, of course, is equal parts disgusted and fascinated, and finally decided that he can’t die without trying one of these.

The reason I bring this up here, though, is because this is a blog of food and geekery, and posting about this in my personal blog produced this marvelously geeky exchange between a friend and my husband:

No, they haven’t:

a) the woks have finite volume.
b) every time they fry a burger, grease gets added to the woks.
c) therefore, every N burgers or so, they’ll have to dump some grease out of the wok. If you somehow tag all the grease molecules with a big letter G right now, the current concentration of G’s will be X moles/liter. Tomorrow the G concentration will be [[some number < 1] * X] moles/liter.
d) Exponentials are a bitch.

The contents of the woks will effectively completely turn over in a very short time period. If you believe their marketing ploy, it follows that you have never actually been able to wash any of your dishes, ever.

For the record, i *like* their marketing ploy. I just don’t *believe* it.

Santiago: It doesn’t change the fact that they retain X mol/L rather than completely dumping the batch.

Also, the woks may have finite volume, but storage vats have a larger finite volume allowing minimal dumping from the wok.

Now, the question is what is that “some number”. For them to say that they have the same grease molucules from 1912, that retention has to be approximately 99.85% (based on the notion that X^(365.25*97) >= 1/(6.02×10e23)

Phil: Let’s do a back-o-the-envelope calculation here. I looked up the composition of beef tallow, a decent approximation of what’s in the grease. It’s the following pile of fatty acids:

3% myristic acid (c16h32o2, mol wt. 228)
24% palmitic acid (c18h36o2, mol wt. 256)
19% stearic acid (c18h36o2, mol wt 284)
43% oleic acid (c18h34o2, mol wt. 282)
3% linoleic acid (omega 3) (c18h32o2, mol wt 280)
1% alpha linoleic acid (omega 6) (c18h30o2, mol wt 278)

So, taking BofE liberties, burger grease has molecular weight 255. It’s got density roughly .9, and that wok looks like it’s about 10 liters in volume. So there’s 9000 grams of vitamin G in there, or about 36 moles of vitamin G. Thats 2.12×10^25 bits of yummy G goodness, or converting to log base 2, 2.12 x 2^83, or 1.06×2^84.

I converted to log base 2 for a reason. I called Dyer’s and talked to the line cook. (the manager wasn’t there). He couldn’t tell me how many burgers they go through in a day, but was able to tell me they’re 3oz patties. That’s 85 grams a piece. Guesstimating that cooking a burger loses 10-20 percent of its weight to grease, every thousand burgers produces a wok full of grease, or a wok dilution factor of 2.

84 dilutions gets you to where you can start expecting that there are *no* more original grease molecules left. At 500 burgers/day, that’s 162 days. At 1000, it’s 84 days. 90 years is 32,850 days.

As you said, external storage would increase the dilution time. At the 500 burger/day level, they’d need a 2000 liter grease storage tank to have a chance at still having a single molecule of 1912 grease left.

Santiago: Now I’m curious as to what storage tanks they use, since 2000L is right out for a restaurant. If we know the size, we can determine how many dilutions occurred after 1912 to predict the last date in which 1912 grease was present in the wok.

Come to think of it, the video mentioned filtration of the new grease. Wouldn’t the wok dilution factor be slightly lower as a result?

Have you lusted after Hosea’s ‘Bacon is a Vegetable’ shirt on Top Chef this season? Making Hosea cooler than most, the shirt is actually from Diesel Sweeties, and you can buy it here, if you’re so inclined…

Ever read one of those recipes that just makes you go, ‘I have to try that. Not because it’s good or bad, but because it simply has to be tried.’ You won’t be disappointed if it sucks, because that’s really not why you’re trying it. This is one of those recipes. I’m mostly sticking it here so I remember where it is!

It’s from an older article I found on the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s site, which has several other ‘gourmet’ pb&j recipes, if this one isn’t to your taste.

If you’re here because of my ad on Skyrates, I am Stephanie, administrator of this website, and you’ll know me better as Thespian. So Welcome!

Also, a plug now; I learned about Skyrates from a webzine called Suburban Conspiracy, a bi-weekly thing with a great forum to go with. I have a column in this month’s Geek Kitchen series, on my Moroccan Peanut Stew. Anyone who is interested in casual geeking should check the site out.