The Cost of Precision: A Lesson in Quality Control
You'd pay a fortune to have something measured so precisely, but is it worth it? If you had a machine that was made to measure those things and then you can put this sample into your machine see what results you get compare the two results and then you would know if your machine is operating accurately. So it doesn't mean that the materials are pure, it doesn't mean that they're any cleaner than stuff you get at the shops. It doesn't mean that the chocolate doesn't have bugs in it. If you think about how chocolate is made, it's growing outside, it's fermented outside, it's dried outside, the chances of one of those little cocoa beans not having a bug inside it are very, very slim.
And because they then go on to be roasted, it's seen as it's not going to do any harm if it actually had a bug in one of those and it just goes into the chocolate, sounds gross I know, but think about the impracticality of cutting open every single one of the cocoa beans that go into making chocolate to check for bugs. You just can't do it. So this chocolate is just as likely to have bugs in it as the chocolate that you buy from the shops.
The NIST, on the other hand, also gives you the breakdown of what's in it, tells you the information as to where it was sourced. We can see with the egg powder for example that this was sourced from a commercial manufacturer of egg powder. All that the NIST did is blend it up and the reason they blend the big 10 kilo sample that they brought up is to make sure it's homogeneous, it's the same through the whole sample so that if you get this bit you're getting the same as the person who got this bit of it.
So they basically just bought it from a manufacturer blended it up to make sure it's homogeneous and put it into little packets. So you've paid a fortune for something that you could have just bought at the shops because without using those measurements for standardizing equipment, it really was just a waste of money.
The Chocolate: A 100% Cocoa Bean Delight
But wait, there's more! The chocolate in question is a 100% cocoa bean chocolate, which means normal dark chocolate that you'd buy at the store even the really dark stuff is only 80% cocoa beans and 20% sugar. This is a 100% cocoa bean chocolate, zero percent added sugar, and that tastes... well... Ugh! It's super bitter.
So that would explain why the cookie didn't taste very sweet or chocolatey. But we must remember that the NIST certificate also says that these samples of flour were bottled back in 2013, so it's 10-year-old flour! Hmm not what I would choose for baking a cookie but it does say right there on the packet not for human consumption intended for laboratory use only.
The Flour: A Laboratory-Grade Ingredient
But let's talk more about the heart and soul of the cookie, which is made from hard red spring wheat. This type of flour has quite a nutty bitter flavor and it's very high in protein, which is great for making breads that you want to have a particular flavor and you want all that gluten so it stretches but it's not what you would usually choose to bake cakes or cookies.
The NIST certificate also gives us some insight into the origin of this flour. It was bottled back in 2013, and we can see that it's intended for laboratory use only. If you're a baker looking to try your hand at creating these unique cookies, be aware that using such high-quality ingredients might require some experimentation with your recipes.
Conclusion: The Value of Precision
As we've seen today, precision is key when it comes to quality control. By investing in measuring equipment and standardizing procedures, manufacturers can ensure the accuracy of their products. But what does this mean for consumers? Should we be paying more money for our chocolate just because of the added precision?
The answer lies somewhere in between. While it's true that precise measurements are important, we shouldn't have to sacrifice taste or quality for the sake of it. And with 10-year-old flour being used in these cookies, it's clear that some manufacturers might not be prioritizing freshness as much as they should.
Ultimately, what matters most is transparency and honesty from manufacturers. By giving us a breakdown of their ingredients and sourcing, we can make informed decisions about the products we choose to buy. And who knows? Maybe one day we'll see cookies made with fresh flour, and that's when precision will really pay off.
"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enWelcome to How To Cook That I'm Ann Reardon, in this episode we will be testing frying in salt, why the world's purest cookie didn't taste good. I don't want to swallow it no. And a bunch of other videos that you've sent in to me for debunking. I'm often asked with debunking how many videos do you have to try? How many recipes do you have to test to find the ones that are fake? And my answer is always I can usually just tell by watching the video. So for example this one that Caroline sent in ... I know this is not going to work it's going to make a mess in the microwave but I film it so that you can see what would happen if you actually followed the directions.And that's the case for most of the videos I get sent I can just look at them and know if they'll work or not but occasionally I get sent some that I've never seen that technique before and I therefore don't know if they'll work or not and they're the ones we're going to be testing today. Let's start with this one that is using salt to deep fry foods.Since watching this I've found out that this is a method that is used by street vendors in India to cook up things called fryums which are those particular snacks that you saw being cooked in the clip but I can't get those here so I'm curious as to whether this will work with anything else. I've got my salt in the pan and it's currently around 75 C it needs to get up to 180 C for frying. Now salt doesn't melt until it gets to 800 C so we're not going to overheat it or burn it here. Despite Having It On full heat for about 15 minutes it just will not go above 136 C on an induction stove top, so I'm going to have to move over to a gas stove top and then pretty quickly we got it up to 180. So let's chuck in some prawn crackers and see what happens they are hard to get under the salt obviously it doesn't just sink like when you throw it into oil. It seems to work best when you scoop salt from the bottom the stuff on the top is cooling down pretty quickly. Look at that they are puffing up it does work they do seem to burn pretty quickly so you can't just leave them in there it needs to be agitated the whole time now for a poppadum. Well it definitely does cook it this is really crispy now if we look closely at a prawn cracker that's been fried in oil it's really light and airy and by comparison the ones that I did in salt they're not as airy or big. I'm sure the street vendors could do a much better job of frying in salt and getting them to puff up properly than I did but the other question I have is what do they taste like? Regular prawn cracker is good...The other prawn cracker is also good.This one's better because it doesn't taste like it's been burnt.I think I prefer this one um this one just tastes a little bit smokier. This one's much more saltier than this one. Next we have a couple of different hacks for cooking eggs the first one bakes them in the oven. Instead of waiting to boil them put them in a cupcake pan you can make 12 at a time bake for 30 minutes on 325 and you're ready. Sounds simple and the next one is very similar but they're baking it in the airfryer. Go status wants to know is this legit and Terry wants to know will they explode well they're not going to explode because you're just heating them from the outside in just like when you're boiling it's sipped instead of using water you're using hot air to heat it up, so it's very different to in the microwave where the microwaves can get straight through to the middle and superheat that causing it to explode. But the question is is it going to work? Well let's test it out the ones in the oven said to bake them for 30 minutes I'll also boil some eggs normally these are called from the fridge and I'm going to leave them in the boiling water for 12 minutes and these ones are going into the airfryer and they said to do that for eight minutes. Once they were done I plunged them straight into cold water and then peeled them. This is the boiled egg and it looks like what you would expect and this is the one baked in the oven it seems to have a few scorch marks on it it was a bit harder to peel and the air pocket at the base seems quite large and this is the airfryer one that's definitely not cooked. An airfryer is essentially just a mini oven so it should be able to cook the eggs if you left it in there for longer but if you're going to do that why not just boil them because then you know you're going to get a good result without any scorch marks. Let's have a look at the inside this one looks like a boiled egg as you would expect and now this one that also looks good it's definitely cooked a little firmer but you could adjust that by turning the time down for a bit.Well they both taste exactly the same. Now for homemade cream. Stir butter and milk over medium heat blend the mixture and high speed for one minute let it cool in the fridge overnight we place our hand mixer for about 5 minutes to get perfectly with the cream. Technically if you get the proportions of this correct you would have the right components for cream after all if you keep whipping cream you make butter so it'll be interesting to see how good it is. Melt the unsalted butter cream is quite high in fat so it is a lot of butter to add to one cup of milk blend that up for one minute and refrigerate it overnight. Then whip it up the cost of this works out to about half the price of buying cream and it whips out pretty well not quite as stiff as the normal cream though, I'll show you them side by side and the normal cream is a bit paler and quite a bit firmer it's quite hard to see that on camera let me pipe it for you so you can see this is the normal whipped cream and you can see it's quite defined and this is the homemade one it's just a little bit looser and it doesn't hold its shape very well. It would be fine for some applications like maybe scones jam and cream or something like that but I definitely wouldn't use it anywhere that it was going to be piped or it needed to hold its shape like a mousse.That one tastes like cream and this one...tastes different I can't quite put my finger on it. Not bad eh no no. Next no does this actually work they're cutting the ends off asparagus and putting it in water like you would with cut flowers and then covering it in plastic and they do the same with the dill and rosemary but they don't cover those ones. Let's test it out I've got some asparagus here and some herbs and for each of these I'm going to store half of it in the way shown in the video and the other half in the way they were packaged at the shop so we can see which is better ... and one week later the asparagus stored in water looks much better it's just not as dried out as the other one. The dill in the shop packaging is horrible and not usable the other one is very dried out on top and the bottom is soggy and disgusting so dill obviously doesn't keep very well. The coriander in the water looks good it's great fresh the stems are not soggy at all and the one in the bag also looks great and fresh and not soggy at all. Moving on to the chives these ones are usable but they are quite limp they're not looking great you can see them bending there. By comparison the ones stored in the water are a lot better and fresher looking there holding their shape they're nice and firm there, so cutting off the ends and storing them in water like you would for cut flowers is a win for most of the herbs if you need to keep them for longer than a week then what I like to do is chop them up finely put them in a container and store them in the freezer then even a month and two months later if you need some you can just grab it out of the freezer and pop a spoonful of it into your recipe. Next so many of you sent me the video from the Nile Red channel of him trying to make their world's purest cookie. What if I use pure lab chemicals to make them in theory I should get some pure lab cookies, so are those better? I feel like those have to be better than regular cookies they have to be they're pure. And despite him thinking it would be better this was the result there's no there's nothing good about it it's it's not sweet it doesn't taste like coconut I don't even know how that's possible it's like there's no vanilla in there. Chocolate? I don't taste any chocolate how's that possible? It's the blandest thing I've ever tasted.So what went wrong? Well first up let's look at the recipe ... I had my grandmother put together a recipe. I baked his grandma's recipe just to test it out and here are the results: Hmm this is a good debunking choc chip cookies.It's all right it's a bit a bit oily feels a bit oily but it's okay. I don't mind, I'll go again. It tastes like a normal cookie this may be a little bit chewier and a little bit sweeter. The recipe is fine so that's not the problem so next you think about user error or not measuring it properly but I looked at all of that and it all seems okay he does melt the fat instead of just mixing it in but it shouldn't make that much of a difference it shouldn't kill the cookie and make it inedible. So then the next question of course is the ingredients most of the ingredients are just normal ingredients purchased at a lab scientific shop instead of just purchased at the store but there is one difference and that is with these three ingredients ... I've been waiting so long to open these up because it costs a lot of money these alone were over a thousand each. He's not lying about those prices this chocolate costs $1107. Oh it's all dark chocolate I guess it's all baking dark chocolate. And the egg powder is the same price at just over a thousand dollars. So you get a bunch of pouches and the last one wheat flour this is the heart and soul of the cookie. That little bottle of flour costs eight hundred and eighteen dollars so why are they so expensive? So all of these are standard reference materials and these aren't just like needlessly super expensive they are actually certified to be pure so that when you do any food production you have something to compare what you're doing to something that's pure to know how dirty your stuff is. So these have been certified to I guess have no bacteria no weird contaminants they are as pure as you can possibly get these ingredients. Aren't things that are on the shelf already supposed to be like pretty pure I'm pretty sure the average things that you can buy like chocolate and stuff they're literally allowed to have like bug parts in them like and other random junk. Oh man. And this is the major flaw in his quest for the purest cookie. The standard reference material or SRMs for short, sold by the NIST are not pure, that's not the purpose of them they're not totally free from dirt in fact they sell domestic sludge for $731 they're not free from contamination they sell urine that has arsenic in it for a thousand dollars if you'd like some of that! The reason they are so very very expensive is not because they're pure it's because they have been tested and retested and tested again so that they can tell you with absolute certainty exactly what amounts of different compounds or elements are in that product. For example this is is the certificate that comes with the powdered egg it tells you exactly how much is in there. Now the only reason why you would pay that much money to have something measured so precisely is if you also had a machine that was made to measure those things and then you can put this sample into your machine see what results you get compare the two results and then you would know if your machine is operating accurately. So it doesn't mean that the materials are pure it doesn't mean that they are any cleaner than stuff you get at the shops it doesn't mean that the chocolate doesn't have bug parts in it. If you think about how chocolate is made it's growing outside it's fermented outside it's dried outside the chances of one of those little cocoa beans not having a bug inside it are very very slim and because they then go on to be roasted it's seen as it's not going to do any harm if it actually had a bug in one of those and it just goes into the chocolate sounds gross I know but think about the impracticality of cutting open every single one of the cocoa beans that go into making chocolate to check for bugs you just can't do it. So this chocolate is just as likely to have bugs in it as the chocolate that you buy from the shops. Now interestingly the NIST as well as giving you the breakdown of what's in it tells you the information as to where it was sourced. So we can see with the egg powder for example that this was sourced from a commercial manufacturer of egg powder all that the NIST did is blend it up and the reason they blend the big 10 kilo sample that they brought up is to make sure it's homogeneous it's the same through the whole sample so that if you get this bit you're getting the same as the person who got this bit of it so that they can tell you exactly what's in it and the measurements are correct so they basically just bought it from a manufacturer blended it up to make sure it's homogenous and put it into little packets. So you've paid a fortune for something that you could have just bought at the shops because without using those measurements for standardizing equipment it really was just a waste of money. If we look at the chocolate interestingly enough it is a hundred percent cocoa bean chocolate, so normal dark chocolate that you'd buy at the store even the really dark stuff is 80% cocoa beans 20% sugar. This is a hundred percent cocoa beans zero percent added sugar and that tastes well...Ugh!It's super bitter. So that would explain why the cookie didn't taste very sweet or chocolatey. Now on to the wheat flour the heart and soul of the cookie as he says that is made from hard red spring wheat this type of flour has quite a nutty bitter flavour and it's very high in protein which is great for making breads that you want to have a particular flavour and you want all that gluten so it stretches but it's not what you would usually choose to bake cakes or cookies. The NIST certificate also says that these samples of flour were bottled back in 2013. So it's 10 year old flour! Hmm not what I would choose for baking a cookie but it does say right there on the packet not for human consumption intended for laboratory use only. If you see a clip that you want me to check out send it to me there is an email in the description below that you can use for that. With thanks to my patrons for your amazing support you guys are at absolutely wonderful and I really appreciate it. If you enjoyed this video make sure you like comment share and subscribe do all the things that tell the algorithm that they should show the video to more people. Make it a great week by being kind to others and I'll see you on Friday ❤️\n"
