The Atlantic has a nice video of Spam production in the 1960s, complete with the retro-sounding narrator we all love. Spam is a famous and efficient use of pork, since every part of the pig can be turned into food—”everything about the hog except the squeal”.
One surprising aspect of the video is the cooking process—the food is canned and labeled before cooking, which is done in an impressively tall tower.
This article over from The Burger Lab is a reverse engineering of McD’s french fries: How to Make Perfect Thin and Crisp French Fries. Summary:
- Blanche fries in boiling water (optionally enhanced with vinegar)
- Fry the fries once
- Freeze the fries (promotes release of starch)
- Fry again
I’m more than a week late to write about this article in The Atlantic: The McRib: Enjoy Your Symptom
The main idea of that is:
The McRib is like Holbein’s skull [in The Ambassadors]: we experience it as (quasi-)foodstuff, as marketing campaign, as cult object, as Internet meme, but those experiences don’t sufficiently explain it. To understand McRib fully, we have to look at the sandwich askew.
[…]
We know that we do not know the composition of the McNugget or McRib or McWhatever, but we do not know precisely what it is that we do not know. Nevertheless, we desire such products not in spite of the fact that we do not know it, but because we don’t.
The article almost says outright what I think about this type of food: this type of food is an illusion that communicates traditional feelings of what food “is,” but transcends food itself to create wholly new and previously unimagined forms and, in doing so, pushes our vision of what food “is” without requiring us to question our beliefs. This is, in essence, the reification of an abstract idea of food, carried out to the near perfection that only automated production on a massive scale can achieve. This food is more haute couture (this is not the best term, but it is used by the abovementioned article in The Atlantic) than the one-off hand-crafted dessert you will find in a Michelin-star restaurant, and this is not a contradiction but a result of its commonness.
And that the McRib was given such a name, despite never having had bones, is perhaps the greatest irony. That we simply accept the name while it is plainly not ribs is either a testament to the greatness of the illusion, or a sign that they don’t even have to try.
(If you didn’t see it already, the McRib is very much like the hot dogs from an earlier post on this blog. They’re both “blendy” foods.
Of course, the previous post didn’t have the only hot-dog making-of video on the net! Here’s a completely different production line producing the same thing:
(Skipped the boring non-food-processing parts.) The shot of racks and racks of hot-dog links was really something to see.
Randomly found this very cool video about the production of hot dogs! Hot dogs are what I could call a “blendy” food—take all the ingredients, blend it together, and package it up! And in many ways, hot dogs are similar to hamburger patties and other blendy meat products, except that the packaging is quite interesting. The video has some good footage of packaging the hot dogs in cellulose and then twisting them into links.
Really, that hot-dog-link-making machine was super sweet.
It’s a quite tasty and efficient use of the trimmings from the usual butchering process. Beef Products Inc’s lean beef product is a similar example. Not all of our food has to be in the original shape that it had when it was cut out of the animal!
Following up on the last post is a couple more YouTube videos of potato harvests, although they’re less focused on the processing that happens after harvesting.
And sweet potatoes. Interesting that the video reports that they’re one of the more profitable crops.
A friend pointed out to me one of the automated processes for peeling potatoes: steam peeling. In the steam peeling process, potatoes are put in a steam vessel and the pressure is rapidly dropped, exploding the peels off the potatoes.
GMF Gouda’s website has some information on their steam peeling machines—12–40 tonnes/hour isn’t a bad rate—and Final Cut Foods has taken advantage of the whole Internet thing to post a video of their potato processing on YouTube. Note that steam peeling isn’t completely effective, and a second peeling step is needed to get the potatoes completely peeled.
For those wanting to try this at home, you can steam potatoes and dunk them in cold water for a similar effect.
I was pointed to an older article from fresnobee.com about a new system that uses compressed air instead of water to peel fruits.
The gist is that traditional fruit-processing plants peel fruit by halving them (removing the pit or seeds in the process), and then washing them in lye which loosens up the skin. The skin is then blasted off with compressed water.
Professor Gour Choudhury’s innovation is that compressed air can be used instead, which would save an enormous amount of water. Obviously, you still need to wash off the lye with water, but a lot less would be needed. Expect only more innovations to come out of Fresno State once their $20 million agricultural research center kicks into gear!
Last month, Beef Products Inc., a company whose existence I had not known about until now, was brought to my attention. Apparently, they are one of the biggest distributors of lean beef product in the United States! Their website is worth checking out, especially because they have a very cool description of their process (They’ve changed the page since, but here’s an archived copy).
As a quick summary, they take beef trimmings (extra beef from the main butchering process) and put it through several machines. The first one, completely automatically, takes out the sinew, cartilage, and other not-so-yummy parts of beef out of the trimmings. Next, through temperature and centrifugal force (i.e. spinning it quickly), they can separate the fat from the lean meat, making the meat even healthier!
Then, to ensure that the product is safe, they put the beef through a “pH enhancement process” that they unfortunately don’t describe in much more detail, but here’s their description:
Ammonium hydroxide is a natural constituent of meat, GRAS (Generally Regarded As Safe) approved by the FDA, and used in other foods such as baked goods, cheeses, gelatins, and puddings. In two independent process validation studies conducted by Iowa State University and National Food Laboratory, Inc., the BPI process eliminated all E.coliO157:H7 in the inoculated product, as well as producing significant reductions of Salmonella and Listeria monocytogenes. The pH enhanced product is marketed as BPI® Boneless Lean Beef Trimmings. BPI® Boneless Lean Beef Trimmings are approved for unrestricted use in ground beef and hamburger with no labeling restrictions other than beef.
Finally, they have what they call a “Roller Press Freezer” that quickly freezes the beef and prepares it for cutting into 60-pound blocks. I personally want to check out that “Roller Press Freezer”—I think it would be really neat to see big, perfect cuboids of beef rolling off the assembly line.
Reading over their high tech process really gives you a sense of how far we’ve come in food production. Just think about how much beef could be wasted if it wasn’t for companies like BPI coming up with innovative ways of utilizing every last scrap. And, according to them, “BPI products are being utilized by most of the QSR (Quick Service Restaurant) chains, HRI (Hotel, Restaurant, Institution) suppliers, and food service suppliers.” You’ve probably eaten quite a bit of beef from this company without ever knowing it!
The Wall Street Journal has written a fabulous piece on fry-oil scavengers who drive grease-powered cars. While grease as fuel seems like an attractive alternative to expensive gasoline, I thought the passage on some of their competitors was especially interesting:
The big boys in the grease market are middlemen known as “renderers.” They buy used grease, clean it up and resell it at the market price. Some goes to cattle lots, which feed the grease to cows to fatten them up. Some goes to makers of biodiesel, which generally doesn’t gum up engines as much as straight grease does, especially when it’s cold outside.
That’s amazing! I’d never think to use thrown-out frying oil from restaurants as a great boost for fattening up cattle. That grease would probably make the beef taste even better too!
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