I’ve been making a lot of bread recently, because I had a lot of flour. So I’ve been trying a lot of different recipes in the bread machine. I’ve also become really addicted to watching TED talks; and I actually enjoy spending 7-15 minutes watching their daily new talk; I’ve been watching a lot of things that I might not seek out in an attempt to , and frequently, I find a lot of value for 15 minutes commitment.

So, those two things overlapped, and the other day I found myself watching this lovely talk by artisian breadmaker Peter Reinhart, done at Taste3 2008.

Anyone who’s attended the Boston Vegetarian Food Festival in recent years knows how Insanely! Crowded! it gets, often to the point of barely being able to move around the room. It’s not for the agoraphobic or faint of heart. The overcrowding had gotten so severe that some people had recommended either moving to a different venue or charging admission, each of which presented some serious issues.

Well, I just received some excellent news in email. This year the BVFF is going to be TWO days instead of just one! So, not only will there be twice the opportunity to check out this great festival, but the whole thing remains completely free to attend.

Good on ya, BVFF! Looking forward to showing up later this year…with my omnivorous husband, who has come to enjoy it as much as I do.

First there was the Bacon and Cheese Roll. Then the Bacon Explosion swept the nation, and even the New York Times wrote about it.

Now there’s the Vegetable Explosion. Unlike the approximately-50-bazillion-calorie Bacon Explosion, this actually looks good for you, if not quite as picturesque as either of the other two. It sounds pretty tasty as well, but I think I would want the outside to be more browned and maybe a little bit crispy. Brushing with a bit of melted butter might take care of that.

If Stephanie and Ny have another bacon party, I’m going to bring one of these.

In Thailand, Vegetarians Find a Place at the Table: “Participants in Phuket’s annual Festival of the Nine Emperor Gods follow a strict set of moral guidelines during its course, refraining from drinking alcohol, fibbing, killing, gossiping and, among other things, eating meat. Yet if the festival is known at all outside the region, it is for this small detail: In English, it is usually called the Phuket Vegetarian Festival…The festival is a wildly syncretic melee, combining elements of Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, Hinduism and the traditions of Ming Dynasty secret societies. During the nine-day festival, which honors the North Star at the start of the ninth lunar month, usually in October, household gods are brought to the city’s elaborate Chinese temples.”

Even though Buddhism is common throughout much of Asia, it can be difficult to find truly vegetarian cuisine. I knew that asking for Buddhist-style vegetarian food in Japan would be one way to find what I wanted, but even so I found that my preferences were considered quaint by some. It wasn’t easy for me in Indonesia, either, even though it’s the home of tempeh, which I love. In both cases, I often adhered to a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy regarding the presence of things like fish-based ingredients. At least stealth fish won’t make me sick the way stealth mammal will.

So, though I’d love to visit more of mainland Asia, I’m well aware that animal ingredients are difficult to avoid. This makes the existence of a vegetarian festival in Thailand all the more squeeworthy. Go ahead and read about all those dishes the author describes and tell me that they don’t sound amazing, even if you’re a diehard meat lover. Follow that up with a vegetarian cooking class in Chiang Mai and it would be a vegetarian foodie vacation to die for.

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?