Yummy fat

  A quick visit to the Oxford branch of the Swiss family Robinson filled my with huge amounts of pride. They have an allotment and grew French green beans. The beans were allowed to dry on the vine and we spent a relaxed morning chatting and shucking. It's the first time I've pulled haricot blanc from their shells. But let's talk fat.

  We love fat. Eating fat has the most sumptuous mouth feel as it coats the tongue and helps lubricate the transmission of the food into our bellies. Weirdly though, fat is pretty bland. It can be infused with flavour but let's say you accidentally put too much salt in something like a soup, adding olive oil will make it taste less salty. As fat coats our tongue, it blocks the taste receptors so we taste less. Think about that next time your hand slips while you're adding the white stuff.

Some beans, earlier.

  Going back to the crackers made of flour and water from yesterday; cram three of those in your mouth and it'll get glued shut before you can reach for a glass of water. Slather them with butter however and they will glide straight down your throat. Fortunately, some bright spark worked out that adding oil or butter to a flour paste meant incorporating the necessary lube and pastry was born. Yehaa!

  One function of fat in dishes therefore is adding a creamy richness, and we love it for that. It doesn't evaporate like water so it keeps dishes moist. Think of cake with a generous dose of butter for example. But there's more. Have you ever made chips by boiling potatoes in really hot water? Of course not because it never gets above a hundred degrees. Oil can get a lot hotter, so hot that when you plunge chopped potatoes in, the water in the spuds vaporises. That's what all the bubbling is when you fry stuff, it's the vaporised water escaping.

   I was searching my head for other examples and I realised that peanut butter is worth mentioning. Nuts and seeds are a great source of fat. In fact, most of the vegetable oils come from nuts and seeds of some sort. If you pick up a bottle of groundnut oil, it's basically peanut oil. Peanuts are about fifty percent fat. The rest is mainly protein and carbs and can be bought as protein rich, peanut flour. As creamy as peanut oil is, (don't drink it to test this out please), think of how cloying peanut butter is. I'm rolling my eyes at how odd my grey matter is that I find it interesting that peanut butter is peanut oil and peanut flour but it's obviously late and I'm rambling. (Go to bed. -Ed)

Kirk out

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