Science in the Kitchen

During a relapse of my recurring MOOC-aholism, I indulged in a Harvard MOOC offered on edX called "Science and Cooking: From Haute Cuisine to Soft Matter Science."  The combination of science and cooking beckons to the molecular biologist and glutton that I am, at a deep and visceral level.  I'm sure that many molecular biologists will agree that after a long hard day of following recipes in the lab only to have your experiment fail, the most logical way to relax is to follow recipes at home and then eat your experiment.

My affair with this MOOC may have to end soon, if I am to follow my pledge to recover from MOOC-aholism and get my life back in order.  But I did do a bit of science in the kitchen today.

Watching Netflix's House of Cards, which featured Kevin Spacey's character eating almost religiously at a Southern BBQ ribs joint, made me crave Southern style ribs.  I remembered some delicious slow-cooked Southern ribs I learned to make from some friends of friends one Thanksgiving.  Here in relatively soul-less Sweden (food-wise), when you crave food from a certain region of the world, your best chance is to make it yourself.

Yesterday, I took to the Internet, hoping to find a new recipe for Southern-style ribs to try.  I found this recipe for slow-cooked Memphis ribs on finecooking.com, thawed the pork ribs we had in our freezer, and got cooking.  The recipe also includes directions for barbecue sauce.  I wasn't enthusiastic about making the barbecue sauce, because I don't like the taste of the "standard" barbecue sauce one normally gets at a restaurant.  But I thought "what the heck" and tried the recipe.  I was missing a few ingredients (the Worcestershire sauce and the tomato paste) and had to substitute red wine vinegar for the cider vinegar.  Also, I couldn't find hot chili powder in our spice shelves, but instead chanced upon an unlabeled bottle of a spice mixture that looked and smelled like it would pass for chili powder, so I used that instead.

The ribs turned out quite good, but the sauce wasn't just good, it was mouth-wateringly delicious.  My husband wanted to know what was in the sauce, and when I went through the ingredients, we came to the conclusion that the unlabeled jar of spices I had used was definitely not hot chili powder.  Instead, it was a mystery blend of spices someone (likely a family member, although I also suspected a friend who had recently been in Tennessee) gave us that my husband dumped in a jar.

We panicked as we realized we might never be able to duplicate the sauce once our jar of mystery blend ran out.

"Do you want to spend the rest of our lives regretting that we could never duplicate the sauce?" my husband asked.

"No, absolutely not."

Today, I decided to perform a kitchen experiment to see if we could deduce the ingredients in the mystery blend and thereby ensure unlimited future access to the heavenly barbecue sauce.   I made the sauce as I had done yesterday, leaving out the mystery blend that I'd used before.  Then I split the batch of sauce into two by moving half of the batch into another pan.  Then I added mystery blend to one of the pans, and added my own blend of ingredients (paprika, red pepper flakes, ground cumin, ground coriander seed, and cayenne pepper) that I guessed to the other pan.

My husband, blind to which pan contained the mystery blend and which contained my own concoction, performed a taste test. 

"The one on the right tastes a lot better," he said.

"A lot better?" 

"Yeah."

"You sure?" 

"Yeah, the one in the stainless steel pan."

"We're fucked."

He had chosen the one made with mystery blend.  I demanded he get on the phone with the relative he suspected of giving it to us.  We still do not have answers, as she cannot yet recall what it is.

As I'm a scientist, I think it is only fair to present critiques of this first experiment.

(1) The pans were different: one was cast-iron and one was stainless steel.  The sauces simmered for a while after I separated the batch into two, so the pans could have an influence on the taste.

(2) I did not add the final ingredient to the two difference sauces at exactly the same time, since I have only a pair of hands and am pretty slow in the kitchen.  So my concoction had less time to blend with the other ingredients in that sauce than the mystery blend did in its saucepan.

(3) The ratios of mystery blend to total sauce vs. my concoction to total sauce might have differed, as I may have not split the batch into two exactly equal portions, and there was likely quite a bit of error of my measuring the amount of mystery blend or my concoction to add.

That said, there was a definitive "bite" to the sauce with the mystery blend that was missing in the other sauce, so we think the most likely explanation is a missing ingredient in the mystery blend that we have not figured out yet.

However this story ends later (whether or not our relative will be able to recall what the mystery blend is), it was certainly fun to do a bit of science today.