Flavourful Saskatoon, January 27, 2020

Local Happenings 
Attend a free public screening of the food waste documentary Just Eat It from 1:45-3 pm, Jan. 31. Registration is required.

An article entitled food bank users deserve luxuries as well as lentils – just like everyone else made me think. I normally make a cash donation so the Saskatoon Food Bank & Learning Centre can purchase what is most needed, but if I do contribute an item, it’s usually something very practical like pasta. Maybe next time it will be chocolate bars.

Food for Thought 
Nature Food is a new online magazine publishing research, reviews, and comments on aspects of food production, processing, distribution, and consumption that impact human and planetary health. There’s a strong UK slant to the articles and many are very research-oriented. The article I enjoyed the most in the first edition was the evolving history of pie and mash shops in the UK.

A research experiment asked participants to rate oat biscuits on appearance alone. Participants thought the biscuits with a rough texture would be healthier, but they preferred the smooth-textured ones that they thought looked tastier. “A sweet item, such as a biscuit, benefits from having an appearance as being less healthy as that increases the perception of tastiness and increases the likelihood of purchase. To guide healthier purchasing decisions, food producers can therefore look to use non-healthy looking, smoother textures to overcome this perception that healthy is not tasty.”

There’s a lot Canada can learn from other countries about reducing packaging waste. In the UK, a sturdy, recyclable cardboard sleeve means the plastic yogurt container can be much thinner than yogurt containers in Canada. Tesco, a large UK supermarket chain, is stopping sale of plastic-wrapped multipacks; they will be replaced with permanent multi-buy deals on individual tins. I’ve been shopping at a small local store in Appledore, Devon, and am so pleased to be able to buy individual pears (grown in the UK) . So many supermarkets insist on shrink wrapping or bagging fruits and vegetables.

Recipes 
What’s the secret of the perfect espresso? A group of mathematician broke the process down into mathematical equations, determining that it all depended on the grind – fine enough that it dissolved well in water but not so fine that it clogged up the machine. "Most people in the coffee industry are using fine-grind settings and lots of coffee beans to get a mix of bitterness and sour acidity that is unpredictable and irreproducible . . . . It sounds counterintuitive, but experiments and modeling suggest that efficient, reproducible shots can be accessed by simply using less coffee and grinding it more coarsely." However, as Daryl Grunau, Vector Coffee Company, reminded me, espresso is both art and science. It’s the barista who chooses the temperature, the pressure, and the beans.

Flavourful Saskatoon is a weekly Monday feature. I also post articles about food that is good, clean and fair; travel; and books. You may also enjoy EcoFriendly Sask profiling Saskatchewan nature/environmental initiatives and events. 

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