If You See Black Spots on Your Fries, This Is What It Is

August 2024 · 6 minute read

Good food should never go to waste, and KitKat manufacturers stick to this rule. It was spotted once that messed up KitKats ended up in a large blue bin. Then they go through a “reworking” process.

The candy is first combined with cocoa liquor, then some sugar is added there. And in the end, the manufacturer gets the paste that’s used to glue the waffles inside each KitKat bar. So the KitKat filling is made of messed up KitKats.

Rhubarb stalks are safe to eat, while its leaves are kinda toxic because of the oxalic acid they contain. This fact is pretty boring, but what if I tell you that you can literally hear it grow? This guy grows so fast that the buds crack open and you can hear a specific sound. Some people even claim they hear the rhubarbs creaking constantly during the growing season.

If you think corn kernels are only yellow, prepare to be surprised. There’s rainbow corn. It’s not the gift of nature, but rather selective breeding. This type of corn is called glass gem corn for a reason — first off, the kernel indeed looks like it’s made of glass.

And as for gems — the jewel-colored ears do look like precious stones. Each kernel is unique. This kind of corn was selected over many years by Carl Barnes, a part-Cherokee farmer and breeder from Oklahoma. People who made popcorn with this corn claim the popcorn is colorful too!

Worcestershire sauce wasn’t invented deliberately. Back in the 1830s Lord Sandys came back home to England from India. India is famous for its delicacies, but Lord especially loved one sauce. He went to a drugstore where he asked two chemists, John Lea and William Perrins to prepare something similar for him. They prepared a whole batch and intended to sell it, but the veggie and fish odor was so unpleasant that they decided to keep the batch in the cellar for some time.

Soon after, they forgot about those barrels with sauce. Obviously, the sauce got fermented. The chemists only rediscovered the batch two years later. These guys must have been adventurous eaters, since they tried it — and it was mellow!

Hey, look at those french fries! Yeah, some of them have a few unusual black spots on them. If you’re a fast-food lover, you’ve probably seen it at least once. It’s not anything bad, and it doesn’t mean these fries are not suitable for eating. These are just so-called pockets of sugar.

The reason why they appear is simple. If the french fries are stored in the refrigerator, the starch they contain turns into sugar. When the cook gets them out of the fridge and starts deep-frying, the high temperature makes the sugar on the outside cook before the inside is fully cooked. So, basically, these are just extra-caramelized spots. The downside here is that those sugars can leave a burnt taste.

Carrots have their sugar trick too. They’re way sweeter in winter! Thing is, carrots developed a kind of physiological response to stop ice crystal formations. Those formations can damage the carrot, and increasing the sugar content helps prevent it.

If you ever see duck sauce, just a piece of information for you: it has nothing to do with ducks. It’s really sweet to taste, and the main ingredient is fruit stones. Plum, peaches, and apricots provide the best stones.

To spice it all up, it’s necessary to add sugar, vinegar, ginger, and chili peppers. Sweetness and spices are mixed together making this sauce a perfect condiment for all sorts of spring rolls and many other fried and salty dishes.

It’s hard to believe it, but the cheese puffs we all love used to be rubbish in the 1930s! One day, Edward Wilson noticed that some corn got squeezed out of one of the machines at a factory that produced flaked food for animals and formed ribbons. Those ribbons seemed curious, so Edward decided to take them home and season them. He also noticed that the puffy corn hardened if it was exposed to air. The experiment turned out to be a success, so it was later developed into a world-famous snack.

What’s in common between peanut butter and an engagement ring? Both of them contain diamonds. A scientist from Germany learned how to turn peanut butter into diamonds. He extracted the oxygen from CO2. He got the carbon and then put it under intense pressure. In the end, he got real diamonds. Sounds easy, but it’s not.

He took ordinary peanut butter and pressurized it with powerful machinery. The pressure was 1.3 million times higher than the air around us! Then he heated it all to temperatures that can be found 500 miles below the Earth’s surface. Technically, the scientist stimulated the way crystalline structures are formed in the Earth’s lower mantle. So, if you already grabbed a jar of PB to turn it into diamonds, grab some jello and bread too: a sandwich is the only thing you can do without special equipment.

One more tricky question for y’all! What contains more protein: a steak or broccoli? The answer is broccoli. There’s a teeny tiny detail though: it contains more protein per calorie than meat. So, 100 calories of broccoli will give you more protein than 100 calories of meat. Another bonus is that broccoli doesn’t have trans fats and cholesterol.

The last riddle here, promise! So, what’s more energizing — an apple or a cup of coffee? Sorry, coffee fans, apples are as good as your favorite drink.

So the next time you feel you’re low on energy, try to grab an apple instead of double espresso. Apples are rich in minerals, vitamin C, carbohydrates, and fiber, so they will give you as much energy as coffee can give. Probably even more.

People still don’t know exactly how potato chips were invented. But one legend claims they were invented in 1853 by a chef at a luxurious Saratoga Springs, NY restaurant. People loved French Fries there, but one customer wasn’t satisfied with their quality and complained they were too thick. George Crum, the chef of that restaurant, had to cook thinner French fries. The picky client wasn’t satisfied once again.

The chef got really mad at him, no surprise — it was the third time he cooked the same dish for that client. So he deliberately made those fries paper-thin. Batches were so thin that it was impossible to eat them with cutlery. Surprisingly, the finicky eater finally loved the dish. The recipe soon got viral, and potato chips appeared in all the American grocery stores. The only thing changed: it was intended as a hot dish but turned into a fast snack in the end.

Fancy a fruit salad? If you ever want to grow all the ingredients for it, you don’t really need separate trees. All you need is a multi-grafted tree. It can have different varieties of the same fruit or completely different types of fruits. It’s possible to grow up to 6 different fruits on one tree.

The Caesar salad has nothing to do with Ancient Rome and Julius Caesar. This salad is Mexican, and its story started in Tijuana. It was invented by accident by Restaurateur Chef Caesar Cardini.

One day, he simply almost ran out of food, but it was in the middle of a large celebration. All he could do was throw a bunch of random ingredients and present them as a salad. The unique dish had a huge success and spread all over the world. There’s one thing that’s not unique about this salad today.

Many supermarkets offer their version of Caesar salad with a white mayo-based dressing. Originally the dressing was yellow, and it had a whole range of ingredients. To cook it, you need to mix minced garlic, anchovies, and a raw egg first. Then you’ll need to add some olive oil. The last part intends the lime juice, Worcestershire sauce, Dijon mustard, and sure thing salt and pepper to the taste. Voilà!

Even if you think sprouted garlic isn’t suitable for eating, it’s not really so. The only problem you may have is that sprouted garlic tastes harsher.

So, you don’t wanna add it to salads, including the original Caesar dressing. But I guess you won’t even notice its harshness if you add it while cooking.

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