"desert" news and stories

We saw a woman try to bake cookies in her car, with good success, yesterday. But the gold standard of "natural" cooking would be frying an egg on the sidewalk, though car engine cooking might be a close second. Many people say that this method works.

Egg whites coagulate between 144 and 149F and yolks need an even higher temperature, so the sidewalk would have to retain a significant amount of heat for the experiment to work. Black asphalt can be 10 degrees hotter than lighter pavement, so you may want to work in the street, to increase your odds of success.

There are any number of people who have attempted to fry an egg on the sidewalk, but the problem is that many people live in places where it doesn't get all that hot. The Alberta Egg Board says that the experiment will work when the temperature is over 35C/95F, but I couldn't find any evidence of that working for anyone. The two hottest videos I found were this one, where it reached 106F just outside of San Francisco recently, and a video in Arizona, where it was also 106F. Neither worked.

I don't know if I believe that this will work, but if you've ever tried it, let us know!

Chocolate bars designed to stand up to hot climates are nothing new. There's actually a Wikipedia page about the U.S. Military's attempts to create heat resistant sweets. However, Nigerian food scientists have apparently made some progress in creating non-melting chocolate, according to a recent LiveScience article. Cornstarch is apparently what keeps this new blend from melting. This new chocolate is also supposed to be a lot more pleasing to the palate than other earlier attempts, some of which tasted "little better than a boiled potato."

One of the other recent attempts at heat-resistant chocolate was the Desert Bar that was distributed to U.S. troops during Operations Desert Storm and Desert Shield. From what I've read, these bars were never released commercially, but I swear I remember Hershey selling some sort of non-melting chocolate bar in the 80s or 90s. Anybody else?

[Via Whitley Strieber's Unknown Country]

Joe over at Culinary in the Desert recently posted this pic of his vanilla oat cookies. I have to say that the black backdrop in this photo, as in many of his other food shots really adds a sense of singularity to the subject. It isn’t hard to imagine that these are the only cookies (or muffins) of their kind on earth. I usually favor shooting food with more context, but this really seems to draw a lot of emphasis to the texture of the subject, as opposed to the setting or the process behind the dish. Joe's Middle-Eastern dishes look pretty good, too.