Perhaps i'm geeking this out too much, but I guess it depends on ingress-vs-egress and drawdown....but...doesn't including nearly spoiling food risk the whole stew going bad in a few days? Or do the constant simmer prevent that?
Food goes bad when either there are microbes growing in it (you get sick from infection), or there have been microbes growing and those microbes have left behind toxins (you get poisoned).
Nothing can remain alive in a boiling pot of stew, the few things that can survive have very specialized habitats. So the only things you have to worry about are non-living poisons: toxins and prions. Since these by definition cannot reproduce, it’s only a problem if the food was spoiled before it went in the stew.
The chance of encountering a toxin goes to 100% as more and more food is added, but it will be dilute, no different to consuming food just before it goes bad.
But spores are in a state of dormancy, so if you never stop boiling the broth, then spores never grow into anything. The most dangerous thing would probably be to boil the broth in stops in starts
That is amazing! So basically you trick the bacteria into exiting their spore/dormant phase before you hit them again with another boil.
It seems risky because if you ever let the spores divide at all then you introduce further variation and a selection process into the mix, which could be disastrous.
I've heard from a friend of a friend that mycologists soak their grow mediums for a day or two to give spores a chance to germinate before pressure-cooking the whole thing. But said friend never called it Tyndallization. That's the thing I learned today!
I don't know. I'm not sure the historians fully know. This concept might even be apocryphal to an extent. What I have learned is that the concept evolved (like so much cooking does) from what I described into a "it's actually now a recipe that people prepare once."
Something else I learned is that back in the day, people had different expectations for food quality. We would regularly eat rancid meat (many BBQ sauces were specifically built to hide/safen up rancid meat). And maybe while the concept was "it's always going", there were practical things we like to exclude from oral/written tradition, such as "well... actually we purge it once a week otherwise it goes completely bad." Who knows!
> well... actually we purge it once a week otherwise it goes completely bad
I know that when I cook stews I often end up with a lot of food bits stuck and eventually burned at the bottom and sides of the pot. I can imagine keeping it going by pouring the stew contents to another pot so that I could clean the first pot though. Without doing that... those stuck & burned bits will certainly add "flavor" to the stew.
> ...those stuck & burned bits will certainly add "flavor" to the stew.
Cooking fuel from wood was expensive to procure, so if I were making such a stew I'd cook it low and slow to conserve precious wood, so maybe they "cooked" over coals back then.
If I were to do this today, I'd top off with lots of water before bedtime so there won't be burnt bits in the morning. Maybe try to seal the lid edge with dough that can be used as bread in the morning to sop up the stew (might need to do 2-3 batches of such bread to make the supply of it last through the day).
I'd also likely use a rocket stove, a pot heat exchanger [1], and hot water pipes on the inside and outside of the rocket stove exhaust port to extract out as much working heat as possible.
> Without doing that... those stuck & burned bits will certainly add "flavor" to the stew.
Pretty sure you're joking, but very likely they will. A limited amount of little charred bits taste quite good, and unless there's serious issues with heating or composition, it's not like it's going to overwhelm the rest of the flavors.
>...We would regularly eat rancid meat (many BBQ sauces were specifically built to hide/safen up rancid meat)
I think the idea that spices were used to cover the taste of rancid meat is generally considered to be a myth.
>...One myth needs busting here. Contrary to what you may have read, sauces were not invented to cover the smell and taste of spoiled meat. Spoiled meat tends to make people sick or dead, so, although covering it with a sauce might make it more palatable, people who used this strategy probably tried it only once.
An influential source that promoted this idea was a 1939 book by J.C. Drummond. Those as this review of the book shows, Drummond provided little evidence for his assertions and made errors like misinterpreting the meaning of words like “greene”:
I'm not defending the sauces and spices hypothesis, but in times of scarcity (how most of our ancestors lived most of the time), starvation kills more people than spoiled food, and people ate a lot of spoiled food. Who knows how many it killed, but the survivors were the ones that ate it and made it.
To add to this, the ones that survive outside that range are typically anaerobic and can't survive being exposed to air, so that makes it even less likely to be a vector for food poisoning
I'm not sure there's anything in the intersection of: "grows in boiling water" , "exists outside of the deep sea or other exotic places" , "hurts humans" and "is at _all_ common".
Before refrigeration people were a lot less picky about what was considered spoiled food. One of my grandmothers would never look at the dates, but just trusted her eyes, nose and tongue as to whether something was fit for consumption or not, regardless of how much it was past the 'best before' date.
Back in my dumpster diving days, I discovered how useful the sense of smell can be. Surprisingly, using it to detect bad food also changed the way I enjoyed good food. It became very pleasurable to eat fresh food!
It works most of the time, but not always, traditions around food are important. Rice is particularly insidious, rice grains carry Bacillus cereus spores that germinate after cooking. The trouble is that that particular bug grows at fridge temperatures and generates a heat-stable exotoxin. Any prepared rice older than 24 hours has the potential to give you really roaring diarrhea, even if it doesn't taste off.
Wait so even if rice goes directly from the cooker to the refrigerator, it should be eaten within 24 hours? I break this rule all the time, no diarrhea yet
Food poisoning from improper handling of rice is sufficiently common to have inspired studies on the risk. Here's one that's thorough from an age when public health still mattered: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2130471/. The meat is on p. 440 - 10^5 - 10^8 colony-forming units is danger territory. Note - it's not the bacteria themselves that cause symptoms, it's an exotoxin that sends people to the bathroom, don't kid yourself into believing you "have immunity" or something.
It's really a mystery why the government is so incautious with the matter, food poisoning in the very young and elderly is life-threatening. If you are young and healthy you'll survive, but for 48 hours it's a beastly experience that you are better off without. My theory is institutional capture by business interests, after CDC shortened COVID isolation guidelines upon the insistence of the airline industry no one should ever believe a word from them ever again. Imagine people went off rice - it's big business in Arkansas!
