SciShow Tangents - Cooking

Episode Date: May 21, 2019

Every day, billions of people perform vital, life sustaining chemistry right in their homes! Baking, frying, boiling, fermenting… all cooking is science, and the way it weaves into our lives and cultures makes it uniquely fascinating! Join us this week to learn why the heck there’s iodine in your salt, what happens if you forget where in the bog you buried your cask of meat, and why baking a cake at high elevations can be so frustrating!Follow us on Twitter @SciShowTangents, where we’ll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes and you can ask the science couch questions!And if you want to learn more about any of our main topics, check out these links:[Truth or Fail]Hartshorn salt:https://www.thespruceeats.com/ammonium-carbonate-hartshorn-hirschhornsalz-1446913https://library.ndsu.edu/grhc/foods/recipe/ammonia.htmlBog butter:https://www.irishtimes.com/news/for-peat-s-safe-bog-butter-unearthed-with-turf-1.583009https://www.nature.com/news/1998/040315/full/news040315-5.htmlTurnspit: https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/05/13/311127237/turnspit-dogs-the-rise-and-fall-of-the-vernepator-curhttps://books.google.com/books?id=FVF_PhTjK7cC&pg=PA316#v=onepage&q&f=false[Fact Off]Iodine in salt:https://www.nber.org/papers/w19233Hank’s notes: https://docs.google.com/document/d/13t4UeMlNg5bH3v1HpkixBa_PYT6AB8NtCFqIBEw9XQk/edit?ts=5cbfd777Graphene vegetable oil:https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-have-turned-cheap-cooking-oil-into-a-material-200-times-stronger-than-steelhttps://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms14217[Ask the Science Couch]Cooking at high elevation:https://www.exploratorium.edu/cooking/icooks/article-3-03.htmlhttps://extension.colostate.edu/docs/pubs/foodnut/p41.pdfhttps://www.exploratorium.edu/cooking/bread/bread_science.htmlhttps://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6098858/[Butt One More Thing]Baby poop meat:https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0309174013005263?via%3Dihubhttps://www.livescience.com/43465-baby-poop-sausage-probiotic.html

Hello and welcome to SciShow Tangents, the lightly competitive knowledge showcase starring some of the geniuses that make the YouTube series SciShow happen. This week, as always, I am joined by Stefan Chin. Hello. How are you? Doing all right. That's great. What's your tagline?

Hot saucy. Sam Schultz is also here. Hello. What's your tagline? I'm wearing shoes and I don't like it. Yeah, it's getting warm now. Yeah, I can't just go around barefoot. I have to wear shoes.

Well, yeah, that's the rules. I stepped on a fishhook in my apartment the other day that I didn't put there. What the heck? Who put it there? I don't know. Whoever lived there beforehand, maybe? I vacuumed, though, but it impaled right in my foot. Oh, no. And then it got that fishhook thing on it.

Did somebody turn it really in? I don't know. Maybe or send a message. Like, sleep with the fishes. Ugh, I hate it. I have a bad ghost that I live with. Sari Riley is also here. Yeah, hello. With news from the bad ghost.

Other than that, you're doing okay? Yeah. What's your tagline? Garbage, but make it fashion. Yeah, that's how I feel about towels. And I'm Hank Green. Oh, we can't talk about that. And I'm absolutely overjoyed to be with all of you today to make SciShow Tangents.

And my tagline is, my baby went poop in the potty. I saw that on Twitter. Oh, grass. So every week here on SciShow Tangents, we get together with the goal to amaze and one-up and delight each other with science facts. We play for glory and we play to make each other happy. And we also play for the and we play to make each other happy and we also play for the win for Hank Bucks.

Especially now that we're giving score week to week. One of us at least is playing to win. Yeah. I'm playing, I don't know, last episode when

Sari lost, I felt like there was a flash of rage. Yeah. I just don't want to be last. I've been last in every single score

that we've done, which I guess is only the past couple weeks. You aren't last anymore though.'t want to be last. I've been last in every single score that we've done, which I guess is only the past couple of weeks. You aren't last anymore, though. I'm solidly last, which means that I'm now going to change my goal. I'm playing to lose, which means I'm doing very well. Okay, well, that's one way to handle it. So we do everything we can to stay on topic here at Tangents,

but if you go on a tangent, as we might do talking about fishhooks and such, then we'll dock you a Hank book if we don't like it. But we all have to agree that that is the course of action we want to take. Now, as always, we're going to introduce this week's topic with the traditional science poem. I have to sing again. You have to sing? I do. I have to. Okay.

Okay. So this science poem is to the tune of La Dona Immobile. I don't know how to say it. You don't even know what the song's called. Or the Italian chef song. Oh, okay. Obviously everybody knows the Italian chef song. Yeah, I see what's happening. You ready?

Oh, nobody look at me. When you are cooking food, you are a science dude. As you fry up the steak, Denatured proteins are what you make Cheeses are milk proteins Coagulated in big machines Dough rises from gases From tiny yeast asses All this food is made from

Both art and science And it's all kind of gross If you think about it too much Our topic is cooking So you did the Italian chef song And it's all kind of gross if you think about it too much. Our topic is cooking. So you did the Italian chef song. Do you know anything about that song? Is that actually about cooking?

No. No. It's from a play about like a duke, and it's apparently a very sad play. But that's all I know about it. Pavarotti was in the movie version. And he sings it very jauntily, but I think something bad happens to him later. I just want to do a shout out to yeast. Don't have butts.

I know, but it was too funny. I thought of it in the shower today and I couldn't not. Just because you fart doesn't mean you have a butt. Sometimes you just fart out your membrane. Wait. Is that still a fart? Can we define farts? Before we define cooking, let's define farts.

Yeah, I feel like you have a stronger opinion about farts than I do. Well, so I think that it has to not be a fart. Because if a yeast expelling gas through its cell membrane is a fart, then so is like any gas being expelled from any part of anybody. Then a burp would be a fart. Then talking would be a fart. Ooh. I'm on. I'm on for it.

I'm on for it. Then maybe some people will talk less. Not me. I love farting. So what's cooking, Sari? It's like a very vague, broad definition. It seems like any sort of preparing food for consumption, but usually with heat is what we consider cooking. I feel like you've got to cook with heat.

You can't cook a salad. Can't cook a salad. Can you cook sushi? You can. You can, but there's some uncooked. But if it's not, then it's not cooked. What's denatured mean? Oh, so proteins have shapes that they like in order to function, they need to be in that particular shape.

Denaturing a protein is basically unshaping it, applying enough heat that like all the energy comes into it and like its shape gets unshaped. Okay. Yeah. So when you like cook an egg, that's denaturing the proteins. And so then they unfold, stop being egg proteins and then kind of like glom together in different ways. And that's when the white gets all milky. Well, Sari this week is going to be doing... It's when one of our panelists prepares three science facts for our education and enjoyment, but only one of those facts is real.

And the rest of us have to try and guess which is the real fact. If we get it right, we get a Hank Buck. If we don't, Sari gets the Hank Buck. I'm very excited to hear what you have prepared for us. In the 16th century in Europe, there was a breed of dog that was essential to every large kitchen because it was particularly good at helping humans with one task. Number one, hunting adult male red deer. Besides the meat, cooks specifically needed their ground-up antlers, known as Hartshorn salt or ammonium chloride, as a leavening agent to help light, crispy baked goods rise

because baking powder wasn't used yet. Number two. So this is all this one dog fact. Yes. So there's a breed of dog specifically for one of these three things. I feel like his name must be a clue or else we

would know this dog's name. Yeah, what's the D-I? I can't give it to you. Is it still a thing? No, it's extinct now. Oh, it's an extinct breed of dog. Yeah, so it's specifically good for these large European kitchens. Now we don't need it. Okay. Number two, digging into peat bogs to store food and find buried food. Because peat bogs are relatively cold and oxygen poor, people used to use them as a sort of fridge before and after cooking. And so the dog was there to dig out and hide the thing. Yeah, and also find it afterward, like remember a location or to sniff it out. Nowadays, we've found some of this bog butter. It's a waxy substance in wooden containers,

sometimes dairy-based and sometimes meat-based. Or number three, running on a wheel in the kitchen to provide mechanical energy. Because when cooks were roasting meat over a fire, they would often skewer it on a spit and need to keep that spit turning for hours and hours and hours so that the meat would roast evenly. And you don't want to pay like a child to do that work. Do you have to pay them to do other work? Yeah. You think they're paying the children? Or don't pay the children.

Yeah. Yes, they're paying it in spit meat. So there is a kitchen dog and it's good for one of three things. Hunting deer for getting a leavening agent

with an ammonium chloride. Number two, digging into peat bogs and hiding weird bog butter packages. Or three, running on a wheel to turn a spit. Tell me more about bog butter. Oh, I love bog butter. It is usually found in European bogs where we assume that people in

the past lost track of where they put it, but they're in big like wooden storage containers and it's just like this waxy substance i think partially it's actually butter like made from dairy that people use because butter was a precious like fairly precious and fairly valuable material because it could be used in cooking it could also be used as a substance for trade but there's also some animal-based waxy bog butter and i think that's just due to like the decomposition of meats over a really long time. It becomes this like waxy, fatty substance. I think human corpses also turn into like wax-ish stuff. I've heard of that.

Yeah. It sounds like a real thing at the very least, whether or not a dog was important for digging up and not doing its job because apparently some of it got lost. And then we've got baking powder deer and the dogs were there for hunting those. Yeah, because it was called heart-sworn salt or ammonium chloride, and it works as a leavening agent. But then you also get the deer, I imagine. Yeah, you get the meat of the deer also.

So you can make a whole meal with bread and meat and stuff. So what do you guys think? I mean, dogs helping with hunting is still a thing. I feel like that happens. Sure, sure. So that one makes sense to me. Hamster wheel. I don't know.

Hamsters run on wheels. But do dogs run on wheels? You just got to put the rotating meat in front of the dog and then it'll walk toward it. How would you train the dog to not go eat the meat? Maybe it's like caged up in the wheel. Like you can't get out of the wheel. Why would I walk? I just lay down.

You just stand there. Well, you're a good boy. I'm not going to say more. I think I know which one it is. Alright, well then you tell me which one it is. I'm going with the dog running on the wheel one. Wheel dog. Yes. I think I've seen a medieval image of said dog.

Oh no. Alright. I'm going to go with wheel dog. I also think I know what it is. And I'm also going to go with wheel dog. Oh, no. All right. I'm going to go with wheel dog. I also think I know what it is. And I'm also going to go with wheel dog. We're all going with wheel dog. I'm so bad at this game. It's wheel dog. Tell me about the wheel dog, Sari.

Yeah, the wheel dog. It's called a turn spit, a kitchen dog, a cooking dog, or a vernapatter. I couldn't find a pronunciation for that, but it's something Latin for wheel running or something like that. They were these like small stout dogs. They look kind of like a dachshund to me, but they were bred mostly for poor people in kitchens. They got their tails cut off, which is why they were cur-tailed, which is where the cur came from. And they were hoisted up into a wheel on the wall, like next to the fireplace,

far enough from the heat so they wouldn't like pass out from the heat, and so they were kind of trapped there. So they weren't caged up there just too high to get down? Yeah. They had to be like small enough that you could lift them up there. Yeah, they were very small and stout, and then they just like, they ran, and the spit turned. Sometimes they would throw in a hot coal behind it to make

it run, which is really sad. But yeah, they were just like seen as kitchen utensils. And they worked six days a week, I think, to like roast meat. And then on Sundays, they would be brought to church to warm their owner's feet. So like everybody had one of these dogs? Most kitchens did, yeah, in the 16th century. Before the dogs, apparently, it was a little boy. This article described it as the lowliest person in the kitchen, which was often a small boy who would stand behind a bale of wet hay for protection from the heat and then turn the iron spit for hours and hours,

which sounds absolutely miserable. Yeah. Then boys turned into dogs, and then turned the iron spit for hours and hours, which sounds absolutely miserable. Yeah. Then boys turned into dogs, and then dogs turned into machines called clock jacks by like 1850 or 1900 when we finally, I don't know, came up with a mechanical way to do this that didn't involve a living being. And then we were like, that dog isn't cute enough.

We're not going to keep it around i think they were selectively bred to be really stout so they also had weird genetic mutations in there too where they had to be heavy enough to like push this wheel around yeah they weren't super healthy in the same way that like pugs are not the healthiest and there were some ethic i feel like there were ethical issues where once people started caring about animals as pets, then they also were like, what are you doing with this dog making it run on a wheel for hours and hours and hours?

And then we extincted their entire breed. Yeah. So bog butter is real. I know bog butter is real. Bog butter is real. I love bog butter. So did they forget where their butter was and they didn't have a dog to help them? Yeah, I think they did forget a lot where they put stuff.

Oh, boy. And just left it down there in the peat bogs. And now people who are digging out peat are like, what is this container that's 150 pounds? I don't know. They pull it out and there's butter inside. And then they actually did use deer antlers as ammonium chloride before baking powder was a thing. I've heard about this recently and I heard it makes really stinky bread. Because of the ammonia in it. Yeah.

So that was used mostly, like red deer, as far as I know, live in around Germany. And so Hirschhorn salz is what it was called as a leavener. And so they would just like use the antlers. But you typically used it to bake thin things or things that you wanted to rise but then dried out like crackers or drier pastries because the ammonia is so potent.

If you had it fresh, it would be not good. Yeah, it would probably be bad. Sari, great fact. Sorry that we completely denied you because apparently we all knew somewhere deep in our heads about these funny dogs. But you will have many more opportunities

to win points in other episodes. And next, it's time for the fact-off where you'll get to award a point. But first, a word from our sponsors. Now get ready for the Fact Off!

Two of our panelists have brought science facts to present to the others in an attempt to blow their minds. And the presentees each have a Hank Buck to award to the fact they like the most. It's me versus Stefan. And we're going to decide who goes first by, of course, who was the most recent person to actually cook a thing. What did you cook recently, Stefan? On Saturday?

Oh, I win. I made veggie pasta. Does it count if I just cooked an egg? Because you call that cooking an egg. That's cooking. Yeah. Even though I didn't like, it was like butter and an egg, but still, it's cooking. You put heat there and you changed an egg and then you ate it.

Yeah, I changed an egg just this morning for my son. So I guess I go first, which is why I'm going to talk to you about the most common ingredient in cooking. Actually, second most common, depending on how you count. What do you think the most common ingredient in cooking? Actually, second most common, depending on how you count. What do you think the most common ingredient in cooking is? Water is actually the first most common ingredient in cooking. But the second one, universally, pretty much.

Potato. Oil? Closer with oil in that it's not what you would think of as food. Salt? Salt is the correct answer. Every recipe has salt in it. Like you might be making cookies, bread, pasta, anything. You are including salt in this,

which is why we have in the US and in lots of other places in the world used salt as a way to make public health better by putting iodine in it. Why, my panel of geniuses, do we put iodine in salt? Because of deficiencies.

Because of iodine deficiencies. Which cause? Anybody? Is it called goiter? Goiters is the correct answer. How do you know so much stuff? I'm a genius, didn't you hear? So a goiter is an enlargement of your thyroid gland, and it happens because your thyroid produces a hormone that is called thyroxin, which requires iodine to be produced. And if you don't have enough, your thyroid gets all freaked out and it tries to work really hard to produce more thyroxine from less and less iodine. So that is the reason why

we are all told that we have iodized salt. It turns out that there's a couple of complexities to this. One, for much of America, you don't need iodized salt because you get iodine from the food that you eat normally. This is especially true if you live close to the coasts or if you live somewhere that was fairly recently covered in ocean. But there is what public health experts called the goiter belt, which is a very large area in the U.S., that is completely iodine depleted in the soil. So when you grow a plant there, there's no iodine in the U.S. that is completely iodine depleted in the soil. So when you grow a plant there, there's no iodine in the plant. We here in Missoula, Montana are in the goiter belt. Oh. And so we do need iodized salt for sure.

Now, the weird thing about iodized salt, and this happened in the 1920s when we identified this problem, is that there were two unexpected circumstances that came out of iodizing salt that I had no idea about, despite the fact that I knew all about this goiter thing. First, when the government started putting iodine in salt or like asking Morton's salt to do it, a recent study calculated that the average IQ of America went up by 3.5 points. And in the areas where it was a substantial, like there was already a substantial iodine deficiency, there was even greater increase than that. And in the affected areas, incomes rose by 11%. Because it turns out that the most common result

of iodine deficiency isn't goiters, it's developmental disabilities. And iodine deficiency today still affects 2 billion people and is the most common cause of preventable developmental disorders. Now, the last unintended consequence of putting a bunch of iodine in people's salt is that people who had gotten used to not having any iodine suddenly got a lot of it.

And that resulted in an overproduction of thyroxin because their goiters were already so good at producing thyroxin from tiny amounts of iodine and it killed them. Oh, geez. So a bunch of people died, particularly older people who had lived their whole lives with iodine deficiencies. of people died, particularly older people who had lived their whole lives with iodine deficiencies. So overall, iodizing salt was really good, a little bit bad. And the public health consequences were kind of surprising. And we didn't really know what we were doing. And it turned out good. And also, we should probably be putting iodine in everybody's salt everywhere. And we are in a lot of places, but there are still a lot of places where iodine deficiency is a real thing. Right. That's what I was going to ask. The rest of the world maybe doesn't do this as much or? The rest of the developed world does it.

Okay. And there's lots of places where it isn't as much of a problem because crops grow in soil that has lots of iodine in it. Right. You don't need lots. You need a very small amount. So that has some iodine in it, but it does affect a lot of people. And in places where salt isn't used, things like soy sauce or fish sauce are the way that we get salt into our food. In the case of fish sauce, it already has iodine in it, so that's fine. But in the case of some other sources of salt, you don't get the iodine along with it that you would get from salt that was just made from the ocean. Because if you just make salt from the ocean, you get iodine. It's in there.

But if you make salt industrially by only having sodium chloride, you don't get the iodine. So is this deficiency something that popped up with modern humans as we started growing a bunch of stuff and moving out to different parts of the world where we're not necessarily? I don't know. I think that iodine deficiencies occurred all over the place throughout human history but like

it depends on where you were and how you were getting your salt because people have always required sodium chloride

like we cannot survive without salt which is why we like the taste of it. Where are they getting all this iodine from? I think they get it from roughly the same places

where they get salt. So there's like potassium iodide and other iodine salts that are in seawater and there are in salt deposits. Stefan. So the most widely used oil in cooking is vegetable

oil. Whatever that means. Buy from the grocery store, you buy vegetable oil, but the only ingredient most of the time is soybean oil. Sometimes they mix it with other things. But I think most of what we use it for is in like potato plants and like snack factories and stuff like that, fast food restaurants. It's not like the vegetable oil you buy. In any case, there's another way you can use this oil. A team of scientists in Australia has developed a process that heats the soybean oil and some nickel foil and it produces graphene sheets, which I guess it's kind of it's a little bit of a stretch of our previous definition of cooking.

You know, as a non-chemist, like thinking about graphene, it like seems like this really hard thing to make. Like graphite that's in your pencils, just like stacks of graphene. make. Like graphite that's in your pencil is just like stacks of graphene. The like common thing is like if you just take tape and like stick it to the graphite and then peel it off, you have like really thin layers of what could end up parts of that will be graphene. So it's fairly easy to make, but it's hard to make in like large sheets. And these people haven't figured out the large sheets parts of it. But this process is a lot cheaper because it just uses this really cheap oil and also doesn't require purified gases in compressed conditions. So they have a quote here. It's the first time that the synthesis of graphene film has been demonstrated in an ambient air environment without compressed gases.

But is it in ambient air or is it in the oil? ambient air or is it in the oil? They stick the oil and the nickel foil in a tube and they heat the tube for like 30 minutes to like 1500 degrees Fahrenheit. As it's heating, the oil vaporizes and breaks down into all kinds of different things. And so the carbon

molecules, I guess they dissolve into the nickel, which is weird as it gets hot. But then as it cools, it like comes back out of the nickel and crystallizes on the surface in a sheet. That's basically it. It's just a cheap way to make graphene. Out of food.

Out of food stuff. What do you do with graphene? Even if you don't have large sheets of it, you can just take the flakes and mix it into other materials. And it pumps up their properties. So they use it for running shoe soles sometimes. And it makes them more durable. Does it smell like food when they do it? Is it like popcorn in there?

Ooh, that I don't know. That's a make or break question for me. My guess is that you wouldn't want the gas in the tube to be cycled into the air that you're breathing. Yeah. It would probably be really gross smelling because you're heating it up so much that it's vapor. I don't know. All right. smelling because you're heating it up so much that it's vapor. I don't know.

Alright, so novel technique for the development of graphene using soybean oil or the entire United States got bumped up by 3.5% by 3.5 IQ points because we put iodine in salt. I think I gotta give mine to Hank

because this is referred to actual ingestion of items. It is the most common cooking ingredient in stefan's defense my fact is not really about cooking it is about an ingredient and so is stefan's oh no maybe i'll throw it in the trash i'm gonna put it in the compost bin no you're not oh you look too sad now okay, you can have it. Did you do it? I'm going to throw mine in the trash. Oh, my God.

I want to do it. I just want to be original. You should. Mary's composting her Hank book. I'm composting because none of these facts are actually about cooking. They're about cooking ingredients. Yours was about a dog. Yeah. A dog who cooks food.

I did. This is a total tangent, but I found out about a thing called perpetual stew in like medieval inns. They would just have a pot going all the time. And it's like whatever came in that day, they'd throw it in the pot and just like keep refilling it. This disgusts me. This whole idea of like perpetual stew. I think that sounds great. But apparently like just getting all that flavor that sounds great. But apparently like

just getting all that flavor mixing going on. Yeah. I guess if you're diluting it enough then it shouldn't go bad. Also if you're always keeping it hot

it's always boiling. I just know there's one chunk of meat in there at the bottom that's been there for 10 months. Yeah but if there was meat at the bottom

wouldn't it just like get hard and gross? Would it actually grow bacteria? No it would keep boiling and yeah it would like get hard and gross? Would it actually grow bacteria? No, it would just keep boiling. Yeah. It would not get bacteria. I feel like then.

Well, this, I mean, it's how sourdough works. Like every piece of sourdough has a little bit from like the original sourdough. That's true. However long ago. Now I'm also disgusted by sourdough. And it's the same way with the lemonade in my fridge. I just, every time it starts running low, I just put a little more sugar water and more lemon juice in it. So I don't know how old the lemonade at the very bottom is.

That one's, I don't like. That's like, after it's been too long, and I can't remember the last time I washed my water bottle, it's like, oh, it's time to wash this, because I've, like, put my mouth all over it. It's been out there. Yeah, you put your finger inside and it's like that's

slippery yeah is that what happens to your lemonade container I don't know I haven't checked don't just let it

be I think you should just keep drinking it you'll be fine yeah if you're fine now you're just developing your own gut bacteria and

like Oren and Catherine also have the same ones it'll be like super powered by this lemonade our lemonade gut hmm well I think we

should all lose a point. We haven't lost one in a good while. Yeah. I think this is a good episode. Like all around in

the circle. It doesn't seem like anybody's blameless in this. This episode was a complete wash. This is a wild episode.

Yeah. So negative one to everybody. And that leaves us with a final score of Sari with negative one point. Stupid. Stefan with zero.

Sam, you and I have tied for the lead with a total of a massive one point. Delightful. Was Sari one point ahead of me? Are we tied again? Yeah. You were negative to yourself. I did.

You know, nothing matters we're a speck of dust on a speck of dust in a speck of time and now it's time to ask the science couch at bear k walla asks why do you have to add extra flour to bake at high altitude because there's so

much less air no air no idea i've got nothing i have no idea for clarity i'm not a chemist okay yeah i was once decades ago a chemistry student extra flour i don't know like i honestly don't don't. I would think that you might need to add extra water because there's less water in the air at higher altitudes. More of it might evaporate, but I don't know why you need more flour. It's connected to that. So cooking is chemistry, and chemistry depends on factors like thermodynamics. And when you're at higher elevations, you have lower air pressure, and that affects a lot of things in the cooking process. Number one, water and other liquids evaporate faster and boil at lower temperatures

because there's less air pushing down so then they can like vaporize more easily. And so then whatever you're making, whatever you're cooking loses moisture. And so it could become dry. Sugar becomes more concentrated and things like that. Number two, leavening gases so like this carbon dioxide produced by yeast uh in breads and cakes expand more quickly because there's less air pressure air pressure pushing down on it so they like expand more and so things rise easily but they can also rise too much and in food science they call each little like gas pocket in bread a cell, which was extremely confusing for me as a biologist to read this paper and be like, and the cell walls burst.

And it's like, there are no cell walls in bread. This is not a plant. That's jokes for other biologists out there. Oh, I didn't even realize it was a joke. That's the thing about jokes you don't get, Sam. Me and every music joke. So when you're baking at high altitudes, you want to do things that will help with the integrity of the cells of your bread. And so you can lower the amounts of sugar and fat, which weaken the structure of it.

You can lower the amount of leavening agents like yeast, which can cause bursting. And then you can add more of things like eggs and sometimes flour, which strengthen something that you're baking. And I think with flour specifically, I was reading like some high altitude baking stuff. And they usually recommend adding more water before adding more flour because things get really dry. But I'm guessing if you add more flour, you want to add recommend adding more water before adding more flour because things get really dry. But I'm guessing if you add more flour, you want to add it with more water because that's how gluten forms. So flour contains proteins, glutenin and leudin.

And those two, like when water is mixed in, form gluten, which is like the stretchy stringy. I don't know. Some people are allergic to it, but it's like how bread gets a lot of its structure and like becomes like the gummy bread dough that you know. And so adding more flour will add more of that structure,

presumably like adding more gluten formation. And then you have more integrity. Yeah, integrity. Structural integrity. It's all about engineering. Yeah. If you want to ask

the Science Couch question, you can follow us on Twitter at SciShow Tangents, where we will tweet out the topics for upcoming episodes. Thank you at Ahappily, at MHenson98, and everybody else who tweeted

us your questions this week. If you like this show and you want to help us out, it's really easy to do that. You can leave us a review wherever you listen. You can also tweet about your favorite moment

from this episode. And finally, if you want to show your love for Tangents, you can just tell people about us. Thanks for joining us. I've been Hank Green. I've been Sari Reilly. I've been Stephen Chin. And I've been Sam Schultz your love for Tangents, you can just tell people about us. Thanks for joining us. I've been Hank Green. I've been Sari Reilly.

I've been Stefan Chin. And I've been Sam Schultz. SciShow Tangents is a co-production of Complexly and WNYC Studios. It's created by all of us and produced by Sam Schultz and Caitlin Hoffmeister. Our sound design is by Joseph Tuna-Medish. Our social media organizer is Victoria Bongiorno. And we couldn't make any of this stuff without our patrons on Patreon. Thank you.

And remember, the mind is not a vessel to be filled, but a fire to be lighted. But one more thing. Some cured meats, like salami, also have bacteria in them to ferment stuff and add flavor. In one study from 2014, scientists made a sausage called fouette with a bacteria strain isolated from human baby poop to try and make it a probiotic food. An article titled called it Pooperoni.