Some of your favorite foods or tastes actually come from accidents
Coca-Cola that was used to treat illness
American veteran John Pemberton likes to make up his own medicine to relieve pain. One day in 1886, in order to treat his headache, he mixed some materials into a kind of “potion”, and accidentally mixed syrup and soda water into the syrup.
The carbon dioxide gas produced by the soda water made it taste delicious and delicious. Refreshing, and then he brought the “headache potion” he developed to the pharmacy to try it out for customers. He didn’t expect the potion to be popular ever since.
After years of formula improvement, it no longer possesses the original medicinal effect, but has turned into a world-renowned beverage-Coca-Cola.
Unhygienic sweet
One day in 1879, Constantine Falberg, a researcher at a university in the United States, finished his work in the laboratory and hurried back home. Due to fatigue, he grabbed food with his hands without washing his hands and ate them.
As a result, the unsweetened food had obvious sweetness, and then he also tasted sweetness on the napkins and water glasses he had touched. He realized that the source of the sweetness might be the experimental product on his hand.
He ran back to the laboratory excitedly and found that the sweetness came from the white solid extracted from coal tar, which was later named “saccharin”.
Because of its convenient production and low price, saccharin became a food additive to replace sucrose and was added to foods such as cakes, beverages, cans, etc.
However, people later discovered that it had certain health risks and gradually reduced its use.
Angry Chef’s Potato Chips
One day in 1853, a difficult customer came to a restaurant in the United States. He returned the fried potatoes carefully made by the chef for various reasons.
The picky customer angered the chef George Krum, and George decided to teach the bad customer a lesson, so he sliced the potatoes as thinly as possible to the point where a fork can’t be inserted, then fried them at high temperature and thinly sliced them.
The potato chips are fully in contact with the oil, dehydrated quickly at high temperature, and become very crispy after cooling. Unexpectedly, this customer is very satisfied, and this potato chip produced out of anger has become one of the most popular foods in more than 100 years.
Fresh taste in kelp
In 1908, kikumiao Ikeda, a chemistry professor at the University of Tokyo, Japan, was having dinner with his family. He found that the soup cooked that day was very delicious.
He asked his wife what to do, but his wife said it was just ordinary ingredients cooked with water, nothing special.
But Ikeda wanted to find out. He stirred it with a spoon and found that there were more kelp in the soup than usual, so he brought kelp into the laboratory for repeated research, and finally found sodium glutamate in kelp.
It is this substance that greatly improves the freshness of food. This is the monosodium glutamate we use every day, an important condiment in cooking.
Popcorn for divination
The popcorn here is not the common popcorn with corn as raw material, but the popcorn with glutinous rice as raw material.
As early as the Song Dynasty in China, when the Spring Festival came, people would use glutinous rice popcorn and stir fry the glutinous rice in a pot filled with fine sand.
On the one hand, the fine sand heats the glutinous rice uniformly, and on the other hand, it can play a role of sealing and pressurizing. The glutinous rice expands rapidly under high temperature and pressure, and it becomes a fluffy and crispy rice flower.
People will use the grain and shape of the rice flower to fortune the New Year’s lucky. What is certain is that regardless of the result of the divination, the crispy flavor of rice flower attracted the people of the Song Dynasty at that time, and after years of evolution, it has become our favorite snack today.
Comments