The Ultimate Preservation Technique

A few days ago, I came across this article about invented a technique invented by some Swedish graduate students for turning fruits and vegetables into powder. That's right, powder. They call it FoPo. 

The point of the the new product is to have shelf-stable (they supposedly keep for up to two years), easily shippable food that can be sent to disaster sites, thus improving the diets of people attempting to recover from disasters. According to the article, the fruit powders at least taste a lot like the original fruit and can be mixed with other foods for eating.

I'm not sure exactly how adding powdered fruit to an emergency diet helps refugees, though powdered vegetables might provide nutrients that would not otherwise be available.   Then again, adding different flavors to a bland emergency diet might be enough of a benefit in itself, especially if the product is not expensive to make.  

Powdered emergency foods (think pemmican) have been available since prehistoric times, but this is the first effort I've heard about that adds produce to the powdered repertoire.  It will be interesting to see whether the new powders will become a part of emergency foodstuffs everywhere or fall by the wayside on practicality grounds.

A Pilgrim's Picnic Basket

This month, I have been traveling and doing non-food related things away from home (such as learning sword and polearm fighting techniques with these wonderful people). As a result, I haven't been engaging in food experiments, or blogging about food.

I did find a little time to surf the Internet, though, and I found a very interesting article on preparing foods that can be safely carried without refrigeration and eaten while traveling. The article, called "A Pilgrim's Picnic Basket," can be found here. I commend it to the attention of anyone who has considered the question of what medieval people ate when they did not have access to other people or a fire.

I expect to continue to have little time for blogging or cooking for the next two weeks, but that should change later in August.  See you again then!

Early Refrigeration

I had known for a while that certain ancient peoples, supposedly including the Persians and Romans, used preserved ice in the summer for cooling drinks (for the wealthy) and making special treats, but I'd always assumed that this was a some time thing, depending upon weather conditions and how carefully you tended your cave or storage cellar or whatever.

Yakhchāl, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Recently, I learned that the technology used for this purpose at least by the Persians (I don't know what the Romans did) was much more sophisticated than a cave or pit, and was quite effective. The Persians built structures called yakhchāl for the purpose of keeping ice and perishable foods. Yakhchāl literally means "ice pit," but what the Persians did was more sophisticated than a hole dug in the ground to store ice. This article explains how they were built and how they worked. The spiral tracks channel water from evaporation and melt water to the bottom where it can refreeze at night, when the desert is cold.  Often, the yakhchāl was adjoined by a separate structure that directed windflow over the ice, chilling the chamber.  The main building material for the yakhchāl--mud.

A truly elegant solution to the problem of keeping foods cold--solved with Bronze Age technology.