Thank you for your kind words. If it was a foodie post I would have included all the other pictures I took of actually making the food.
I'll stick with my comment that I'm a terrible cook. I'm just a good food scientist 😎
I love taking raw ingredients like corn kernels, wheat kernels, sugar beet, soya bean etc and turning them into something edible like corn bread, cookies, muffins, pancakes, soy milk, yogurt, or alcohol.
I also love taking vegetables and salt and making things like KimChi, Sauerkraut, and pickles. Or drying them to make stuff like moringa/cassava/spinach green powder. Or fruits into jams, jellies or candied fruit
However, making tasty dinners that look nice... Food that the family looks forward to eating.
I can only dream 😓
Now you make wish I had studied food science instead or microbiology.
Cooking is looking interesting and having to know more about what we eat will be really good.
Next time include pictures or let me have them in DM, I don't mind eating Canadian food or learning a cheap new recipe. 🤓
Your kidding, right? A lot of food science IS microbiology!
Let's take making Sake (Japanese alcohol). Start with cooked rice. Lots of starch but no sugars. Innoculate with fungus to break down the starches into sugars. Great. Now you ferment with brewers yeast to convert those sugars to alcohol.
Want to preserve food? It is all about either (a) making an environment inhospitable to bacteria or (b) preventing harmful bacteria from growing by growing beneficial bacteria.
Examples:
Pickling. Take a vegetable and add to a high salt liquid. With the high concentrations of salt most bacteria can't grow. However lactobacillus can grow which turns sugars in the vegetables into acetic acid. Low pH and high salt content... Vegetables stay safe to eat at room temperature for a long time.
Making jam and jelly? Add fruits and sugar together. Heat at high temperature (boiling) for long enough to kill any bacteria that would be in the mixture. Ensure the sugar concentration is strongly hypertonic to discourage bacteria growth. Fruits stay safe to eat at room temperature for a long time.
Yogurts? Again, make a suitable growing substrate for lactobacillus to grow. Think mid 35C or so. Innoculate the substrate (usually milk or soya milk) with lactobacillus and they will grow, produce lactic acid and reduce the pH of the substrate. The acid also tends to coagulate the proteins in the substrate leading to a dense product.
Need to preserve vegetables but no salt? Well, bacteria can't grow without water. Blow warm air over a vegetables and the water content in the vegetables drops to almost nothing. No water = No bacteria growth.
I'd argue that microbiology is one of the key components in keeping food safe and keeping it from spoiling.
I'm just guessing you weren't taught its practical uses in University.
Of course where things get really interesting is when you start looking at things like promoting wild yeasts to ferment starches in bread to make sourdough breads. Or one of my personal favorites...Looking at microbacteria that can break NAG / NAM in woody materials to give sugars which can then be purified to provide food grade alcohols. Ohh... or how about things like culturing Spirulina as a food source.
Ahh... but I'm getting distracted. I just wanted to say that Microbiology is an integral part of foods, at least in my opinion.