[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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