[Sca-cooks] OT/OOP NYT Article on Math Formula For the Perfect Bacon Sandwich...

Phil Troy / G. Tacitus Adamantius adamantius1 at verizon.net
Wed Apr 11 03:32:36 PDT 2007


 From this morning's New York Times...

> April 11, 2007
> LONDON JOURNAL
> The Perfect Bacon Sandwich Decoded: Crisp and Crunchy
>
> By ALAN COWELL
> LONDON, April 10 — Should it be slithery or scrunchy, glutinous or  
> grilled? The answer, British scientists say, may be divined by a  
> formula: N = C + {fb(cm) · fb(tc)} + fb(Ts) + fc · ta.
>
> That is the scientific answer to the question: what makes the  
> perfect bacon sandwich?
>
> And, no, it is not April 1.
>
> Researchers at Leeds University spent more than 1,000 hours testing  
> 700 variants on the traditional bacon sandwich, which many Britons  
> refer to as a bacon butty (eschewing the term sandwich, said to  
> have been coined to honor the fourth Earl of Sandwich’s habit of  
> eating meat between slices of bread around 1762).
>
> For Britons, butties come in a variety of guises — chip butties  
> (French fries between slices of bread), crisp butties (ditto with  
> potato chips) or even sugar butties, which are self-explanatory.  
> None are viewed as especially healthful.
>
> There are some finer points in the language, if not the cuisine. A  
> sandwich containing sausages, for instance, is likely to be  
> referred as a sausage sarnie, while sausages served with mashed  
> potatoes are called bangers and mash.
>
> There is no easy explanation for this.
>
> Even the bacon butty, though alliterative, is sometimes  
> etymologically challenged, as in a recent posting on the Web site  
> of The Yorkshire Post relating to the study at Leeds University.
>
> “Perhaps another few minutes on research would have told them that  
> a butty is a slice of buttered bread with a topping; a bacon sarnie  
> is what they are describing,” said a contributor who signed himself  
> Joey Pica.
>
> But Graham Clayton, who led the research, said the endeavor had  
> been an earnest attempt, commissioned by the Danish Bacon and Food  
> Council, the British subsidiary of a Danish pig producers’  
> organization, to determine what degree of crispiness and  
> crunchiness made the perfect sandwich.
>
> The company’s announcement of the research last Sunday made no  
> reference to other criteria like cholesterol, carbohydrates or  
> other dietary attributes of the perfect butty. Chloe Joint, a  
> spokeswoman for Danish Bacon’s public relations company, Porter  
> Novelli, declined to say how much the study cost.
>
> The research combined four types of cooking, using grills, pans and  
> ovens, three kinds of oil and four types of bacon — smoked,  
> unsmoked, streaky and thick cut — to establish the preferences of  
> 50 tasters in such matters as the butty’s tactile and aural  
> crunchiness. The study also considered a broad range of condiments  
> (like ketchup and brown sauce) and spreads.
>
> It concluded that the best bacon butties were made with crisply  
> grilled, not-too-fat bacon between thick slices of white bread.
>
> Eureka!
>
> “We often think that it’s the taste and smell of bacon that  
> consumers find most attractive,” Dr. Clayton said in a news  
> release. “But our research proves that texture and sound is just,  
> if not more, important.”
>
> In a telephone interview, he also acknowledged that tasters made  
> comments about fat. “If there was too much fat from the cooking  
> process, that was a turnoff for people,” he said. Leathery bacon  
> was a no-no, too, he added.
>
> “We are programmed to avoid leathery food as old and not very  
> good,” he said. That wisdom does not seem to prevail, however,  
> among some of the more basic vendors of bacon butties at roadside  
> halts or cafes known generically as greasy spoons to denote their  
> customary modes of cooking and hygiene.
>
> In the experiment, some of the tasters sampled between four and six  
> bacon sandwiches a day for three or four days.
>
> And so the formula evolved to establish the amount of force in the  
> bite, expressed in newtons, and the level of noise, expressed in  
> decibels, to make the perfect crunch.
>
> Ideally, Danish Bacon said, 0.4 newtons should be applied to crunch  
> the sandwich, creating 0.5 decibels of noise. The formula uses  
> these values: N = force in newtons; fb is the function of the bacon  
> type; fc is the function of the condiment or filling effect; Ts is  
> the serving temperature; tc is cooking time; ta is the time taken  
> to insert the condiment or filling; cm is the cooking method and C  
> represents the breaking strain in newtons of uncooked bacon.
>
> “It’s not a hoax,” Dr. Clayton said, acknowledging that, a few days  
> ago — on April 1, to be precise — it might have been taken as one.






"S'ils n'ont pas de pain, vous fait-on dire, qu'ils  mangent de la  
brioche!" / "If there's no bread, you have to say, let them eat cake!"
     -- attributed to an unnamed noblewoman by Jean-Jacques Rousseau,  
"Confessions", 1782

"Why don't they get new jobs if they're unhappy -- or go on Prozac?"
     -- Susan Sheybani, assistant to Bush campaign spokesman Terry  
Holt, 07/29/04






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