Tasteologie The Perennial Plate | Adventurous and Sustainable Eating Mexico Cooks! Piure: the world's strangest seafood? I've spent the last 10 days in Chile - hence the lack of recent posts. Most of my time was spent visiting wineries but I also found time to visit the Central Market in Santiago which I remembered from my last visit sports some of the weirdest seafood I've ever come across. This coral-like substance is called Piure. I've been looking for more information about it but it basically tastes something like a sea-urchin though much less delicate in flavour. They extract the flesh then serve it with onions and a good squeeze of lemon, both necessary to disguise the slightly bitter, soapy taste. There are other unfamiliar fish: pink clams called machas which the contestants in the World's Best Sommelier contest had to match with red wine (almost impossible) . . . Congrio or conger eel which is a popular basis for the very tasty Chilean seafood stews . . . Some very spooky octopus . . . And abalone, a much prized Chilean speciality, shown here boiled with mayonnaise
La Cocina de Leslie Caramelization: new science, new possibilities - Curious Cook For me, the epitome of stovetop alchemy is making caramel from table sugar. You start with refined sucrose, pure crystalline sweetness, put it in a pan by itself, and turn on the heat. When the sugar rises above 320°F/160°C, the solid crystals begin to melt together into a colorless syrup. Then another 10 or 20 degrees above that, the syrup begins to turn brown, emits a rich, mouth-watering aroma, and adds tart and savory and bitter to its original sweetness. That's the magic of cooking front and center: from one odorless, colorless, simply sweet molecule, heat creates hundreds of different molecules, some aromatic and some tasty and some colored. How does heat turn sugar into caramel? That's what I've thought for many years, along with most cooks and confectioners and carbohydrate chemists: heat melts sugar, and then begins to break it apart and create the delicious mixture we call caramel. And we've all been wrong. It turns out that, strictly speaking, sugar doesn't actually melt.
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