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Foods and Cooking.
Here we are again as seen in this ABC News story:
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/story?id=4259036&page=1
A while back I wrote a detailed story about this potential danger from bisphenyl A (or bisphenol A):
https://shuttersparks.net/bisphenyl-bpa-should-we-be-worried/
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Back in 1963, my Aunt Annie, who was at that time 90 years old, gave me a recipe she had gotten from her mother for an unusual cake she learned to make as a child in Germany. She called it Kriegskuchen, which translates as “War Cake”. It was called this because it’s easy to make and does not require butter, or eggs, or oil, which are in short supply during a war. For those of you on a low-calorie or low-fat diet, or for those with an egg allergy, this is just what you were looking for.
My mother made this cake often during the year all through the 1960’s and 70’s, and especially around Christmas. The flavor of the standard recipe is Christmas-like, but the recipe is flexible. I’ve continued the tradition for many years, and experimented a lot with variations on the original recipe. Around Christmas I bake and ship these cakes in various flavors to my friends and kids. I thought I’d share it here.
All of these cakes are baked in a standard bread pan. The recipe I got from my aunt was in grams but my mother converted it all to more convenient units.
Original Recipe:
2 cups flour
3/4 cup cocoa (Hersheys)
3/4 cup sugar
2-1/2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp ground cloves
1/2 cup raisins, currants, or diced dried apricots soaked in water for 12 to 24 hours until they swell up.
1-1/4 cup milk (measure precisely)
Whisk together all the dry ingredients. Then add the milk and mix with a spatula until everything is wetted. The batter is thick and pasty so it takes some effort to fold and mix. The moisture content of flour varies so sometimes you need to add a tiny bit more milk. There should be no dry flour or cocoa visible. Then scoop it all into a greased breadpan and bake at 350F for one hour. Remove from oven and allow to rest for five minutes. Turn out on a cake rack to cool off.
Next, we can get creative and have some fun with this cake. If you want a super chocolaty cake add one cup of chocolate chips to the original recipe, or add one cup of peanut butter chips, or 50/50. Adding a teaspoon of vanilla changes the taste. Omitting or reducing the cloves changes the taste.
Or, we can substitute other fruits for the currants/raisins. Elsewhere in my blog you will find a recipe for candied orange peel. Candied orange peel combined with the chocolate makes a heavenly flavor. If you really want to go crazy add candied orange peel and chocolate chips. Wow.
Or, we can omit the cocoa. For this variation, omit the cocoa, reduce the milk to one cup, and be sure to add one or one and a half teaspoons of vanilla. You can add just about any candied fruit you like. About one cup does the job. My son-in-law’s favorite is a version made with candied pineapple and no cocoa. For this, I purchase cans of small diced pineapple wedges and I candy them the same way as the orange peel recipe elsewhere in my blog.
Have fun with this low-cal, non-fat cake. Depending upon the ingredients, calorie count for the whole cake varies from 1,400 to 1,800 calories except for the super chocolaty chip version above that comes in around 2,900 calories.
Making candied orange peel is easy once you learn what to watch for. Expect a couple of spoiled batches where you undercook or burn the product, but after that it’s straightforward.
The number of oranges to use is hard to specify. I eat two oranges a day and save the peel. Since I want as many long 1/4 to 3/8 inch wide strips that are 2 inches long, I cut the oranges in half and juice them or quarter them and carve out the inside (and eat it). Then I wash the peels under running water, and scrape as much of the meat off as I can and then toss the peels into a sealed plastic bin I have in the refrigerator. The sealed bin has a small amount of water on the bottom to keep them hydrated, otherwise the refrigerator will dry them out and they’ll shrivel.
When I have “enough”, I get the cutting board and start slicing as many long pieces as I can and I dice up the odd pieces, and continue until I have enough to fill a small 16 cm stainless saucepan about 3/4 full (but not more).
Next, the peels optionally get boiled in the saucepan. Boiling them like I describe here will reduce the flavor and remove bitterness. It will also help to hydrate any peels that have dried and thinned. You can skip the boiling steps here for a stronger orange flavor. If I’m going to use the peels for baking I skip the boiling to get a stronger flavor. To boil the peels, fill the saucepan with water, and boil for 10 minutes or more, dump them into a strainer and hit them with cold water. Then back in the pot to boil again for 10 minutes or so, dump and rinse with cold water.
Next comes the candying step. Put 2 to 2-1/2 cups of sugar in the saucepan and 1 cup of water, bring it to a boil and dissolve all the sugar. Be careful from here on because the sugar syrup will be at 240 degrees F. Treat it with respect because it WILL hurt you–think napalm. Gently add the peels to the boiling syrup, bring back to a boil, then reduce to medium heat and cook them in the syrup (uncovered). I’ve seen recipes that say to cook for 20 minutes. Forget that. It takes 40 to 45 minutes of cooking. The whole time it will be merrily bubbling and foaming. Stir occasionally to make sure nothing is sticking or burning. When you get to around 40 minutes, you’ll notice the amount of liquid is getting less and less and now is where you really have to pay attention. You want the peels to get that “glassy” candied look–not all the way through, but you want to see the flesh start to get glassy. Some people say to boil until all the syrup is gone. If you do that, you’ll burn the peels. There’s a fine line where they are “just right” and it always seems to come at around 45 minutes.
While it’s cooking, I put out sheets of waxed or parchment paper. When the decision point comes, dump the contents of the pot into a metal screen strainer (remember it’s at 240F which will melt some plastics) and let it drain for a minute. Then spoon them out onto the waxed paper and as quickly as you can spread them out so they are touching each other as little as possible. When they cool they will stick together. It’s pretty easy to unstick them from the paper but not from each other. Then let them cool off and dry for a while, an hour or two, and then you can use them or cover with another sheet of waxed paper. You can stack several batches on top of each other and store them like this for several days.
Finally, you can sprinkle them with flour and mix them into a cake. You can dip the long ones in melted chocolate (just like strawberries). You can coat them with powdered sugar, use then to garnish ice cream, whatever.
To try this out I’d recommend starting with four oranges worth of peel. The thickness of orange peels varies a lot so it’s hard to say how many oranges you need. Thick skinned oranges are great for this application. Oranges with very thin skins are not good choices for candying. You can also do this with grapefruit skins for a very different flavor.
For me, candied orange peel is one of the greatest flavors on earth, and it’s extra fun to make because you are using what would otherwise be garbage plus about 20 cents worth of sugar. However, it is labor and time intensive.
I promised my daughter and some friends to write about what I have learned about bisphenyl A (BPA) and I will keep it as brief as I can and still include everything I know. I learned this via Dr. Jane Adams who is a neurotoxicologist at the National Institutes of Health, (NIH).
Back in the mid-90’s, Dr. Adams noticed that it seemed like a lot of urine samples coming into NIH were contaminated with bisphenyl A. So they did a quick study and found that 97 percent of the urine samples coming in, from all ages of people, were contaminated with what were, to her, alarming concentrations of BPA. What is BPA? The chemical bisphenyl A was first synthesized by a German scientist in the 1890s. No use was found for it until the 1930s when it was discovered that BPA made a dandy artificial estrogen. It was used for that for a few years until they discovered DES (diethylstilbestrol) in the late 1930s and BPA was no longer used for estrogen replacement.
Most of you are probably too young to remember what happened with DES. I remember DES and I also remember when the thalidomide nightmare hit. I remember as a 10 year old, reading through LIFE magazine and being totally creeped out by the teratogenic effects of thalidomide. (Teratogenic means “monster making”). Women who were given DES and women who were given thalidomide started giving birth to monsters instead of babies. LIFE Magazine had big black and white photos that I will never forget.
Okay, so when DES was developed in the late 1930s they stopped using BPA for estrogen replacement. Then during WW II and at the dawn of the modern age of plastics and polymers, it was discovered that BPA makes a terrific polymer material. And it truly is terrific, having really no equal still today. You know this plastic as polycarbonate and its trade name Lexan. Polycarbonate is best known as the “bulletproof plastic”, and it is exactly that. It’s not perfectly transparent or even as clear as acrylic but it is clear enough to see through okay if made well, and yes, this is the stuff you may have seen in the TV ads in the 70’s where a guy stands there and empties a .357 magnum at a window made of Lexan. When he shoots at an angle the bullets just bounce off. When he shoots straight on, the bullet gets stuck in the plastic but does not penetrate. Well that demonstration is real, not a trick. Years ago I had a go at a little demonstration at a security show where they had a window made of 1/8th thick Lexan and you were given a 3 pound ball-peen hammer to do your best to break it. People were swinging on that thing all day for three days and nothing happened. The hammer was provided with a wrist strap that they insisted be used because the hammer would bounce back with as much force as you applied! Not expecting this, people would often lose the hammer and they didn’t want a hammer flying across the convention floor.
The windows of the president’s car, some bank teller windows, the Popemobile windows, and all fighter plane canopies are made of Lexan. It takes a steel cored armor piercing bullet to get through Lexan. It’s still the toughest transparent plastic around. You also find it in industrial filter housings, vandal proof light fixtures in schools and prisons, and lots of other places. It’s really cool stuff. And in your daily life you encounter it in those 5 gallon water bottles you set on top of the water cooler, some baby bottles are made from it, and BPA is used to coat the inside of food cans. Polycarbonate (BPA) is a bit on the expensive side so it’s not used unless you really need it. Refillable water bottles and baby bottles are two examples where it’s a good choice. However, you also find bisphenyl A used as a plasticizer in certain uses of cheaper plastics like PVC. Mixed in with PVC, small quantities of BPA improves the feel and quality and makes PVC much “nicer”. So BPA is not everywhere but it is more common than just water bottles, baby bottles, and food cans. And, just because a plastic bottle or other object is marked PVC (in the little recycling triangle on the bottom) does not mean that it contains no BPA. It might contain BPA as a plasticizer and it might not.
That’s all fine and dandy except for one thing. Bisphenyl A leaches / dissolves into the water or food in small amounts and we consume it. This is the source of the BPA that Dr. Adams discovered in urine samples ranging from babies to the elderly. But is it dangerous? Well this is where it gets interesting and a little complicated so read carefully. The teratogenic effects of DES were discovered in rats long before the problem appeared in humans but it was argued that rats and humans are very different, and you cannot make direct comparisons. This is true, more or less. It turned out that to create monsters in humans, the concentration of DES had to be 1,000 times higher than the concentration that causes problems in rats.
DES and BPA both mimic estrogen in the human body and are capable of creating all sorts of problems besides monstrous babies including obesity, heart disease, cancer, mental problems, neural problems and who knows what else. Bisphenyl A creates problems in rats at a concentration even lower than DES. The concentrations of BPA found in humans today is over 1,000 times higher than the concentration of BPA needed to cause problems in rats. Does this mean anything? I don’t know. Nobody else knows either. No proven link to a problem has been found yet in humans but Dr. Adams is concerned because the parallels with DES are striking, to say the least, and the amount of BPA found in humans increases every year. We don’t know all the problems that can occur. It is possible that the epidemic of childhood obesity and unexplained precocious puberty is caused by BPA. It’s possible that BPA is causing mental problems that we have not tracked down to BPA yet. She argues that these chemicals that mimic estrogen are very dangerous things to play with and this one is in general distribution to the public. It’s even found in baby bottles and we really don’t know much about what it might be causing. NIH is just now assembling people to begin to study it, but for the moment it’s up to you to decide whether to be concerned or not. Nothing much is known except the above. The parallels with DES are creepy. You must make your own judgment.
Now if you couldn’t follow the point I’m making above, let me compress it down to a short story:
Around 1930 we developed a chemical which I’ll call Chemical A. Chemical A functions as a synthetic estrogen, an important hormone in humans . Chemical A is found to cause horrible birth defects in rats. Later, we discover the hard way that at a concentration 1,000 times higher it also causes horrible birth defects in humans. Chemical A is banned. Around 1930 we also develop Chemical B. Chemical B is very similar to Chemical A and also serves as a synthetic estrogen. Chemical B also causes horrible birth defects in rats. It turns out that a very useful plastic can be made with Chemical B. Chemical B is thus found all around us in our daily lives. We can’t avoid getting it into our bodies. The concentration of Chemical B in our bodies has now grown to about 1,000 times the concentration that causes birth defects in rats. Harmful effects in humans have not yet been shown. Should we be worried about Chemical B?
Edit: More info has come out that I wrote about in this blog post:
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