“Meat glue” sounds kind of awesome

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I know this story on Planet Green—all about the edible “meat glue” that holds together everything from imitation crab sticks and chicken nuggets to modernist chef cuisine—is supposed to make me freak out and only want to eat organic, whole foods from the farmer's market.

Trouble is: I kind of think meat glue sounds pretty cool. I like the fact that we've found new ways to use scraps and parts of meat that aren't sell-able on their own. That alone is nothing new. Humans have been doing that for centuries (See: sausage, soup stock). Transglutaminase—meat glue's real name—is just a newer tool. And it doesn't even sound particularly scary or gross. At least, not to this honest-with-herself omnivore.

Technically called thrombian, or transglutaminase (TG), it is an enzyme that food processors use to hold different kinds of meat together. TG is an enzyme that catalyzes covalent bonds between free amine groups in a protein, like lysine, and gamma-caroxminid groups, like glutamine. These bonds are pretty durable and resist degradation once the food has been formed.

Thrombian is made from pig or cow blood, though you’ll see it on labels, if at all, as “composite meat product.”

It's a naturally occurring enzyme, derived from animal blood. When you put it that way, it's easy to understand why the EU—which tends to be more stringent on rules about food additives than the United States—voted nearly unanimously in favor of allowing transglutaminase to be used in products sold in EU countries.

Personally, I’m with wrecksdart, who Submitterated this, in wondering where I can get transglutaminase, and what ridiculous foods I can make at home with it. Animal-shaped meatloaf pops, here I come.


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“Meat glue” sounds kind of awesome

Boxee Outlines The Upcoming Boxee Box Firmware Changes

Talk about timely. Boxee’s Avner Ronen just posted the worklist for the next Boxee Box firmware, which is schuduled to drop in May. Among other fixes the browser is getting a major update that seems to address many of my concerns. Also, Boxee Box support for the iPad app is coming. May can’t get here soon enough.

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Boxee Outlines The Upcoming Boxee Box Firmware Changes

World’s hottest pepper plants for sale

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Photo of bhut jolokia fruit by Matt Rudge. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

David sent me an ad for bhut jolokia pepper plants, which have a Scoville rating of slightly more than one million. They cost $16 including shipping.

Also known as the ghost pepper, or dorset naga, it is listed in the Guiness Book of World Records as the world’s hottest pepper.

To give you an idea of how hot this pepper is, here’s an excerpt from an article I wrote a long time ago called “The Cult of Capsaicin.”

Chileheads are hooked on high doses of capsaicin, gobbling up ultra-hot peppers and food smothered in blistering sauces like Cyanide DOA, Satan’s Blood, and Toxic Waste. This stuff is almost unimaginably hot. You have to taste some to understand. Try this: put a couple of drops of Tabasco Sauce on your tongue. Hot, right? Tabasco Sauce rates between 2,500 and 5,000 on the Scoville scale, the standard measurement system for chile pepper heat. Now try a drop of Mad Dog Inferno, a ridiculously hot sauce that clocks in at 90,000 Scoville units. As I chewed ice cubes and blinked away tears after touching a miniscule droplet of Mad Dog Inferno to my tongue from the tip of a toothpick, I knew I’d never make it as a chilehead.

That’s because I’m not a nontaster, explains Dave DeWitt, author of 30 books about chile peppers and spicy foods, including The Whole Chile Pepper Book and The Hot Sauce Bible. DeWitt is referring to a Yale surgeon’s study in the 1970s that identified three types of people: nontasters, medium tasters, and supertasters. Nontasters are born with as few as 11 taste buds per square centimeter of tongue, while supertasters can have as many as 1,100 taste buds crammed into the same area. Capsaicin has no taste, but taste buds not only sense flavor, they also transmit pain and temperature signals to the brain. That’s why nontasters can tolerate high doses of spice, says DeWitt, who considers chileheads to be on the far right side of the pepper bell curve. “In any movement you have your fringe element,” he says.

For a chilehead, 90,000 Scovilles is pabulum. Andy Barnhart, a recently retired chief scientist for a telecommunications company in Maryland, likes to dump habanero powder (400,000 Scovilles) on his ice cream “until it turns almost black.” But even that doesn’t turn Barnhart’s crank like it used to. “I’ve now gotten into Pure Cap; that is really hot stuff,” says Barnhart, 61. “I blend it with a little alcohol to preserve it and I put it in a bottle with an eyedropper and I carry it around with me.” (Pure Cap, a 570,000 Scoville unit extract, isn’t the same as pure capsaicin, which, at 16 million Scovilles, is as hot as it gets.) If Barnhart comes across a bowl of soup or a drink that doesn’t provide a sufficient jolt, he pulls out the eyedropper and gives it a squirt.

Ghost Pepper plants for sale


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World’s hottest pepper plants for sale

Inside the giant megawatt batteries that will power Russia’s Sochi Winter Olympic Games (video)

Clean and constant power is something that we take for granted here in the Americas. Sure, we’ve seen rolling blackouts in California before, and that outage in the Northeast back in 2003 was decidedly uncool, but those are the exception to the norm. Right now many Japanese citizens are dealing with power problems in the wake of the devastating tsunami, but in parts of Russia unreliable power is a decidedly reliable part of day-to-day life.

So, what’s going to happen when a couple-hundred-thousand fans from around the world swoop into Sochi in 2014, along with a flotilla of international media and all the world’s greatest athletes? The Winter Olympics will happen, and the power will flow. It has to, and it will thanks to that unassuming looking shipping container above. It’s being assembled at Ener1‘s facility outside of Indianapolis, and it’s actually a giant battery holding an amazing one megawatt-hour of power. That’s enough to juice 1,000 average homes for an hour, or to act as the mother of all UPS’s. Join us for a look inside and a video show how each of those packs is made.

Gallery: Ener1 factory tour

Continue reading Inside the giant megawatt batteries that will power Russia’s Sochi Winter Olympic Games (video)

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Inside the giant megawatt batteries that will power Russia’s Sochi Winter Olympic Games (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 30 Mar 2011 13:41:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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