Hello

It has been a funny week, with temperatures up in brain-scrambling territory. If this issue is late, which it may well be, that’s because I spent yesterday morning in the cool of a cinema enjoying a glorious restoration of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times. If you can, I highly recommend it.

Breaking Down Fungi Waste

Thinking of fungi as things that turn inedible waste into food comes easily. Thinking about the waste inherent in their production is harder. I’m grateful to a recent article in Offrange magazine for shining a light on mushroom waste, including the fact that every tonne of harvested mushrooms is accompanied by five tonnes of waste.

Turns out most commercial growers discard the blocks of inoculated substrate after harvesting just one flush of fungi; the blocks are capable of several flushes, but returns diminish. Now some farmers have discovered that the substrate is as good as, or better than, conventional compost. That’s the obvious use; the article details stranger things, like cellulose nanocrystals, pigments, and packaging. Some growers even give away the blocks of spent substrate to people who may coax another flush or two from them and who are ultimately responsible for disposing of the substrate any way they choose, most often to the soil in their gardens.

Ingredients and Identity

For me, bamboo shoots have always been only the pale vegetal slices that emerged from a tin when I needed to gussy up a Vesta chow mein back in the day. There is, of course, a lot more to them than that, as revealed by a fascinating article in Goya magazine, Eating the Landscape: Bamboo and North-East Indian Identity.

A somewhat similar point of view informs an essay in Edge Effects, a magazine perpetrated by graduate students at the Center for Culture, History, and Environment at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Tatsiana Shchurko wrote Tuberous Entanglements and the Potato Empire prompted by memories of her grandmother’s life in southern Belarus. My understanding of potatoes exceeds that of bamboo shoots, so the enjoyment I derived from this essay was of a different order to that provided by the other.

Percolator Porn

How La Marzocco Perfected the Espresso Machine is another article that contains a fantastic amount of information about a topic I know next to nothing about. The detail that goes into a consistent espresso is overwhelming. For instance, moistening the ground coffee puck with water before the entry of the high pressure hot water apparently makes all the difference in the final cup. But the amount of water to use at this stage depends crucially on the amount of coffee in the puck. It’s not something a barista can easily judge. So the latest La Marzocco machines have “a sensor inside the brew head that measures resistance from the coffee puck in real time and uses a proprietary algorithm to detect when each puck has reached saturation point”. And then the article casually drops that they make domestic machines too. I’ll manage without.

So, presumably, will the boffins at the University of New South Wales Sydney. Maybe you saw reports that they had come up with an entirely new way of making espresso unveiled. Room temperature water plus ultrasonic energy equals perfect coffee and a saving of 75% in energy. It does seem amazing at first, but on second thoughts, energy is energy and that’s what you really need to get the good stuff out of the coffee grounds. According to the press release the target market is not the neighbourhood bar but the companies making things from coffee, who might welcome the energy savings. The bar’s patrons, however, might not be willing to wait the three minutes for an ultrasonic cup when a machine, by La Marzocco or not, takes less than 30 seconds. As for a home version, how soon before somebody reports great coffee from an ultrasonic jewellery cleaner?

An Abundance of Peppers

Best, last. Notes from the Road, a remarkable website of travel writing, has updated Chili Peppers of the World. It now illustrates 176 different peppers, hand drawn by Erik Gauger, along with history, botany, tasting notes, and, in many cases, links to an entry in the accompanying Hot Sauces of the World.

I could spend days just on those two pages and years on the site as a whole.

Take care

p.s. Made it, with minutes to spare.