I'm still aggressively pursuing my dream of achieving the perfect pop, that is, the bag of microwave popcorn that yields 100% edible product with no wasted kernels. The search for the perfect pop has been long and much harder than I thought it would be. In this attempt, you can see by my analysis that I fell well short of my goal.
Figure 1: This bag yielded a satisfying volume of edible product. As you can see from this image, the substance that resulted from heating the bag in the microwave is both enticing and copious. Will this bag be the perfect pop? When I eat to the bottom of this, will I find that there are no unpopped kernels of popcorn left over?
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Figure 2: In this establishing shot you can see that there does remain a disappointingly large number of unpopped kernels.
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Figure 3: This is a view of the bag at high magnification. The brown ovoid masses that you see prominently represent unpopped kernels of popcorn. I realize that this image is a little bit too busy to be meaningful but I present it here so that you can see the raw data that I had to work with in my analysis.
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Figure 4: This image represents the same data presented above in Figure 3, but here it has been subject to graphical analysis which has revealed several key features which would otherwise have been lost to the naked eye. This analysis shows that there were 20 kernels of unpopped popcorn left over after I ate the edible yield. The unpopped kernels displayed in this analysis are marked with red circles. The analysis also reveals the presence of something else in this image, which I found startling. This careful analysis reveals that there was, in fact, edible popcorn substance remaining in this bag even after I had given the bag up for finished. If you study the output from this analysis, you can see the edible product marked by small green circles. Comparative optical quantitative techniques show that the largest of the uneaten edible fragments is nearly as large as an unpopped popcorn kernel. Finally, the graphical analysis that I undertook also reveals the presence of a substance far more sinister and disturbing than either of the two upon which I have previously commented. Marked with blue circles, even a person unaccustomed to the analysis of popcorn kernels can see that what we have here, are half-poppers. Half-poppers are the worst. What these are, are kernels that did pop, but didn't pop all the way. These are the kernels that start to look good to you when you get to the bottom of the bag, and your show is still on, and you don't feel like getting up for something else. These are the ones that you start to believe are edible, and they'll get you every time because they aren't. They'll hurt your teeth and they don't taste good, and I would much rather have kernels that just didn't pop at all than these half-poppers. I actually think we could demoralize Al Qaeda right out of existence if we all collected our half poppers, and then we invited the terrorists over for a movie, and maybe some beer or whatever, and then when we made popcorn we slipped our half-poppers into their bags without telling them. After that, they'd go back to their caves saying, "Man, that place is a dump. Why do we even bother? Their popcorn over there sucks."
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I'm on a quest to achieve the perfect pop. The perfect pop is when you make a bag of microwave popcorn and two things happen: 1) there is not a single kernel of corn left un-popped and 2) the popcorn isn't scorched at all.
This attempt came pretty close. The popcorn wasn't burned, and as you can see from the detailed graphical analysis in Figure 2 below, there were only 4 kernels of corn left un-popped.
Figure 1: This was a decent bag of popcorn. Not a lot of kernels left and no burned corn.
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Figure 2: This is a graphical analysis of the extent to which kernels were left un-popped in this bag of popcorn.
Enlarge Photo Labels: food, images, weird
Merry Christmas!
Figure 1: This gingerbread man has a sweater and a belt.
Enlarge Photo Labels: food, images, weird
I like to eat bagels. Salt bagels are my favorite. In Tucson we are lucky to have a few different bagel places. In El Paso we just had the one. It was a good place, but it was the only place in town which made me nervous. Also, they weren't open on Sundays, which is kind of ironic.
Anyway, we've got at least one independent place here, and we have two chains. There are two
Einstein Brothers and ten or so
Bruegger's Bagels. Of all of those,
Bruegger's is my favorite mostly for two reasons:
- The bagels taste the best to me.
- They have salt bagels.
A few weeks ago, all of a sudden the Bruegger's on
Sunrise and Swan started using the wrong salt on their bagels. Instead of using pretzel salt, they were using kosher salt. That disgusted me.
I ate it like that for maybe two weeks, and then one day I was in the Bruegger's on
River and Stone and I saw a guy working there wearing a tie. He looked like a high-ranking official of some sort, so I figured it might just be the time to say something, even though the problem I was having wasn't with the River and Stone Bruegger's at all.
I told the tie-wearing guy about my problem. He said they didn't use kosher salt, even at Sunrise and Swan. He said they always use pretzel salt. I said I knew for a fact they weren't using pretzel salt at Sunrise and Swan. I just ate a bagel there, and it didn't have the right kind of salt on it. He said maybe they ran out for that one day and used the wrong salt. I told him the problem had been going on for two weeks.
The official's attitude was kind of annoying. His communication to me was more trying to convince me that they weren't doing what I said they were, even though I knew they were.
It was a while before I went to Bruegger's again after that. Not because of the marginally unhelpful official, just because I didn't go for a week. When I went again, I went to the Sunrise and Swan location. When I got my bagel, I noticed that they started using the right kind of salt again. At least for the most part. There was actually a mixture of the right kind of salt and the wrong kind.
Figure 1: In this photo you can see that Bruegger's has started using the right kind of salt again on their salt bagel. The larger white opaque granules are the pretzel salt. The smaller translucent amorphous granules are the kosher salt. For about two weeks, the salt bagels were covered with the translucent kosher salt rather than with the pretzel salt.
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Figure 2: Can you see the clusters of kosher salt mixed in?
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Figure 3: In this photo I've tagged the pretzel salt with green, since it's what's supposed to be there, and the kosher salt with red because it is not supposed be there. I wondered if the translucent salt was maybe an artifact of some salt dissolving on the surface of the bagel and then re-crystallizing. I though that was unlikely, and a more likely explanation was that the person who salts the bagels does so from a large shaker. I imagined that he filled the large shaker from an even larger box of salt. My theory was that for two weeks the bagel maker had kosher salt in his shaker, and then when he got the regular pretzel salt in, he just poured the pretzel salt into the shaker on top of the kosher salt, and so the two became mixed. If the translucent salt is an artifact of dissolving and re-crystallizing, the ratio of red dots to green dots in the photo above should stay relatively constant from day to day. If the issue is that there was still some kosher salt kicking around in the shaker, then the ratio of red dots to green dots should diminish over time.
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Figure 4: More examples of inappropriate salt on my bagel. The black sphere is nothing. It's just a poppy seed. Not a mouse turd or anything like that.
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Figure 5: By now you should be able to pick out for yourself which are the good salts and which are the bad.
Enlarge Photo Labels: food, images, serious