Maple Bacon Bagels - but vegan as there is no Bacon - just @Deliciou ! (@NLi10)

 

Christmas is a magical time, where many things occur - including an increased susceptibility to the adverts that pop up in the Scrabble game my family play.  One of these things was from Australian Dragons Den and is a powder that makes anything taste like Bacon.  This is a perfect joke sister present - but the postage etc was much more reasonable if you got two.  So I got the Maple Bacon variety where as she got the original bacon.

In the video advert, people on the street tip the dust onto something - then eat it - and go - bacon!  I figured it wouldn't really be like that, but as I do like seasonings I figured it would at least compete with the Little Chef maple bacon pancakes breakfast I miss from our road trips.

At home I'd tend to use bagels instead

No MSG? Why not - it's proven that the colours in the food were the problem and MSG is great!  

It is suitable for vegans though which is fascinating.  I've long held that the best part of bacon is fried salt - which is vegan in theory - so I wonder what they use.

Sugar, salt & garlic?  Fine by me! As I suspected, this is not copying British bacon, but the more American style crispy streaky stuff. Not a problem for me!

It also said a serving size was 1g - much more than I'd used on my pre-review trials.  So here we have an approximate g.  The Gino D'Acampo scales are terrible for small measures like this - but it's close enough.

We toast the thin American-Style bagels.

We butter our control bagels (science) and conclude that they are decent.  Not as good as my usual brand, but we are in a pandemic afterall!

And on the other bagel we blend the bacon dust into the spread!

At this point its easy to get the maple syrup smell, and realise just how similar this stuff is to brick dust.  You really don't want to breath this in - and getting it on your hands means they will smell like maple for a good while.

It doesn't look like bacon, but with the increased amount from measuring out, and the realistic setting for the bacon this does work surprisingly well.  I'm not sure a blind taste test would lead English people to bacon as the first choice due to the sweetness of the maple - but on bagels & pancakes like bacon and syrup should be this works.  

I'm not sure it's cost effective, and I don't think it's something I'll finish without deliberate effort (at least 65 servings here!), but I'm certainly going to be using it as an ingredient in lunches and other things to see just how versatile this flavour powder is.

Part 2 is here! - and is Milkshakes?!

Part 3 is Here - and is Pancakes!

Space Food - Freeze Dried Neapolitan Ice-cream @astro_foods [by @NLi10]

Merry Christmas!  Although I don't suppose many of you are reading this on Christmas Day itself that is when this will upload itself.

For me writing this it's Christmas Eve (or Boxing Day Eve Eve if you are comedically inclined) and I'm trying out something I've been saving for a special occasion.  When we were at the Leicester Space Centre Steam-Punk weekend we picked up three things.  The first (strawberry Chocolate) was a little disappointing, the second (Freeze Dried Space Apples) was a tiny portion but fantastic.  Here we have the astronauts dessert - freeze dried neapolitan ice cream.  I chose this as it'd have three flavours instead of the just one that the ice-cream sandwich option promised.

The first thing to note that it's all very well packed.  While it's crumbled with me carrying it from place to place the inner bag has kept the chunks in the right places.  It looks like those alphabet sweets that I love (powdery hard candy) but also like a block of ice cream.  Maybe it has an air of fudge or nougat to the appearance too.  Only it's hard, dry and room temperature.

It's hard to describe just how odd room temperature solid ice cream is.  It's a whole new confectionary.  It's sweet, but not too sweet, and it's very crumbly but becomes almost chewy once you bite it.  I guess it's re-absorbing the moisture as you chew.

The first flavour is the red, which is a strawberry milkshake kind of affair.  It tastes authentic and once you get over the lack of cold sensation is pretty nice.  It's almost a honeycomb texture with the flavour of ice cream instead of sugar.

The middle white stripe is a strong vanilla and as you can eat bits of just one colour (harder with real ice-cream) it's more noticeable in the mix.  It's the least potent of the three but still rather moreish.

The chocolate is also pretty good, while it's not freeze dried Ben & Jerry's it's certainly a good quality ice cream to start with before the science happened.  I think that I expected it to be a stronger chocolate, but the creaminess works in its favour.

When choosing desserts I'd always choose apple over ice-cream (heck - or both together) and here is no exception, but the portion size here makes it easier to recommend.  I know that the UK prices of these are more than the company sells them for in the USA but even then the 'experience value' for this is much higher.

If this was available as a small bag of cubes of the three flavours it would be very popular (this actually exists - see the end).  The portion you get here is almost too much - for one person in one sitting anyway.  It's perfect for sharing though so I'll pack up any that survive and take it with me to my family Christmas dinner which I'll probably be having as the post uploads.

Hope you have had a merry christmas too - and if you got any odd food related presents you want to mention to us then feel free to mention them in the comments or find us on Facebook to say.

Find more by this company at www.astronautfoods.com - including the ice cream drops that I just described above - must be a common idea!  In a big resealable tube these are more of a sharing size thing or for watching space films or wandering around a museum.

Snow-made ice-cream & LorAnn's Flavour Fountain (chocolate fudge) [by @NLi10]

Snow-made ice-cream & LorAnn's Flavour Fountain (chocolate fudge) [by @NLi10]

Regular readers will be familiar with my cool home-made Ice-cream via this review right here.  We didn't try out all the flavours at the same time, as that would be very indulgent (and we had a freezer full of Ben & Jerry's Core so - you know...).

Eventually the time was right - after weeks of just normal weather the UK had some Easter snow.  So being the scientifically minded SnackHead that I am I wondered what would happen if we used that as fuel instead of hard ice.

For a start it looks a lot prettier, but it's a pain to shove in.  I used slightly less salt - reasoning that there is less frozen water in snow than ice - and we shook away.

In the Ingredients slot we used these:

The flavour fountain stuff is basically industrial quality ice-cream flavouring and the stuff that most ice-cream parlours must buy.  Ours came with the Play & Freeze as part of the gift.  It turns out you only need half a teaspoon to one of these cream pots so it's going to last a while!  Luckily you can make lush milkshakes with them too so they won't go stale - phew!

We violently shook the ball for a bit, gave it a stir with the plastic spatula and then added more snow & salt.

It wasn't as frozen as it was last time, so we just presumed the snow hadn't been as powerful in its freezing effect and ate away.  I even added mini marshmallows to the top!

  

It turns out that this brand of marshmallows is the really sugary course textured ones that I don't actually like - so I bravely ate the ones I'd added and took the rest of the bag to work for other people. :(

I didn't let this spoil the enjoyment of the actual ice-cream though.  The flavour was surprisingly strong and more like the artifical choc you get in deserts than any choc chip flavour, but very nice.  The only decent photo of the ice-cream shown above was a bit melty, but it came out more solid than this originally!

Also when we went to have our 2nd portion the freeze action had carried on and this was much more similar to traditional ice-cream texture.  Yum!

I can't wait to start making proper ice-creams and sorbets with this if we ever get warm weather (I still have a Snowman outside!) but I'm sure I'll find a way to talk about it!

Cal-in+ Vitamin D yoghurt (Sainsburys) [by @NLi10]

Food science is great.  It can be pharmaceutical companies like Proctor & Gamble making things like  Pringles that are just far enough under the threshold for addiction that they are legal to sell as food, or Norman Baulag who genetically modified wheat so that it was more resistant and had higher yields saving an estimated billion lives in the process.  Science is fun, controversial and essential to us.

PR companies know this so occasionally a food stuff crops up that teeters on the border between science and fantasy.  My favourite example of this is Yakult and other friendly bacteria drinks that now can only claim to contain the bacteria and not that it will magically do things to you.  Having been involved in Public Health departments when this change happened was very interesting.  Hospitals still purchase friendly bacteria drinks though - it's incredibly useful for repopulating the gut after a bad case of 'the runs', or if you've been on long term antibiotics - but it seems this market wasn't enough for them and a lot of the less robust brands have vanished.

Now the pseudo-science has moved on to preventing 'bloating', a mythical condition which is hard to define or prove and that only women suffer which can be magically cured by expensive yogurts.  As this is also an odd area it seems that Yoplait have decided to help by creating a different brand of super yogurt that build on the need for calcium by adding Vitamin D.

The voucher to pick these up came with a lot of science style literature that was a little poorly put together!  It kind of has a scientific style, but misuses references (and these are hard to follow up but not impossible) and gives one or two too many dodgy statements for my liking.

Fact is that this is probably written by PR people and advertisers and wasn't supposed to be read by someone who spent a year combing through health journals for their Masters.  And surprisingly the science is sound - if you increase your intake of calcium and Vitamin D then you will be less likely to suffer fractures and broken bones that result from trauma (and in this icy weather that's no bad thing).  They even did a double blind clinical trial (although it seems they didn't publish which rings alarm bells) where the stated aims of the product were met.

Trouble is this is a bit of a luxury product, it's more expensive than most of the people who would benefit from this kind of intervention (lower income families, the elderly) would ordinarily pay for yogurts.  I guess this is part of the problem, and why it took me so long to find my review pots.

The yogurt itself is nice.  It's a smooth vanilla and has those little black dots that you find when a product actually uses vanilla and not just flavourings.  The pots are about the right size, and have a decent shelf life so you can get through your pack.  I'm just not sure it's an exciting enough product.  Sure enough - osteo problems are a big issue in Women's health and if you are aware that you have an existing problem then frankly you should hunt these out, but you may already be able to get the supplementary vitamins elsewhere in a more convenient (but less tasty) form.  

If you are worried about developing the issues these solve, or have a broken bone on the mend then again I'm not qualified to suggest the best course of action.  I guess these yogurts would help, at least from a psychological point of view.  As our bodies convert sunlight into vitamin D then during the summer just spend an hour in the garden each day, but when it's a bit cold for that maybe these could help.  maybe it's like Yakult - when the hospitals can prescribe it to the people that will benefit from it then it will be a good use of food science.

There is a wealth of information on http://www.calinplus.com, so you can make your own mind up.  A very tasty product, that feels like it should be very beneficial to the right people, but I'm not convinced that they will be the people who end up eating it.