I was making the young boy a PB & something sandwich today, and the Wonder
chem-bread that he insists on was a bit lyophilized.

"We need some --- loaf softener."

So I did what all the good sheeple of the world do nowadays, and scoured Google,
Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Target, Walmart, DoorDash, Amazon, and other
online merchants who have masked and gloved employees providing no-touch
packaged things for me to !!!BUY!!! ... in these troubled and turbulent times.

But I have found nothing.
Doe this marvel of modern science come in a box?   Like dryer sheets?
Is it a liquid?   Like fabric softener?
Is it some sort of digital technology?  A cross between a 3D printer and a
graphics filter?

Maybe it's a British product?   Boiled bread?  (Here in New England, we have
"brown bread" - in a can.)

I'm also concerned about spoilage and environmental impact.
"I smell something funny - oh, it's the 'bread fumes'. "
Are these dangerous?  Do you think those can etch the screen on my monitor?
Cause lung cancer?  Do Bread Fumes contain {gasp} GLUTEN??!

I'm hoping the "Marshmallow" Fluff adequately sealed in and neutralized the foul
vapours and made the harsh and nearly inedible crust most supple and sweet.

So please - we're trapped here in global quarantine, with nought but these tough
and dessicated slices to gnaw on unless I can Purchase Something Online!

Is there a link?  A Michelin Chef's club I can sign up for?  Some pre-chosen
meal-in-a-box service complete with recipe suggestions?

Time is running out....

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"Bald Eagle" <cre### [at] netscapenet> wrote:
> I was making the young boy a PB & something sandwich today, and the Wonder
> chem-bread that he insists on was a bit lyophilized.
>
> "We need some --- loaf softener."
>
> So I did what all the good sheeple of the world do nowadays, and scoured Google,
> Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Target, Walmart, DoorDash, Amazon, and other
> online merchants who have masked and gloved employees providing no-touch
> packaged things for me to !!!BUY!!! ... in these troubled and turbulent times.
>
> But I have found nothing.
> Doe this marvel of modern science come in a box?   Like dryer sheets?
> Is it a liquid?   Like fabric softener?
> Is it some sort of digital technology?  A cross between a 3D printer and a
> graphics filter?
>
> Maybe it's a British product?   Boiled bread?  (Here in New England, we have
> "brown bread" - in a can.)
>
> I'm also concerned about spoilage and environmental impact.
> "I smell something funny - oh, it's the 'bread fumes'. "
> Are these dangerous?  Do you think those can etch the screen on my monitor?
> Cause lung cancer?  Do Bread Fumes contain {gasp} GLUTEN??!
>
> I'm hoping the "Marshmallow" Fluff adequately sealed in and neutralized the foul
> vapours and made the harsh and nearly inedible crust most supple and sweet.
>
> So please - we're trapped here in global quarantine, with nought but these tough
> and dessicated slices to gnaw on unless I can Purchase Something Online!
>
> Is there a link?  A Michelin Chef's club I can sign up for?  Some pre-chosen
> meal-in-a-box service complete with recipe suggestions?
>
> Time is running out....

I am sorry if I misunderstood you because of fast reading non native language...
Couldn't you purchase pre-baked or even raw bread paste from the web interface
of the drive in / delivered home   of a big supermarket franchise?

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"Bald Eagle" <cre### [at] netscapenet> wrote:
> I was making the young boy a PB & something sandwich today, and the Wonder
> chem-bread that he insists on was a bit lyophilized.
>
> "We need some --- loaf softener."
>
> So I did what all the good sheeple of the world do nowadays, and scoured Google,
> Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Target, Walmart, DoorDash, Amazon, and other
> online merchants who have masked and gloved employees providing no-touch
> packaged things for me to !!!BUY!!! ... in these troubled and turbulent times.
>
> But I have found nothing.

Here, the supermarket doing that would be Carrefour ... but they probably do not
exist in your country :-/ ?

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"Mr" <mauriceraybaud [at] hotmail dot fr>> wrote:

> I am sorry if I misunderstood you because of fast reading non native language...

Maurice, my man - this was just a bit of hyperbole - wild exaggeration of the
seriousness of the "problem" and the importance of finding a "solution".

It was also triggered and inspired by his ridiculous suggestion of finding such
a thing (non-existant, as far as I know) as "loaf softener".

Monty Python would surely try it out on a stale baguette and find it
ineffective. :D

Equally ridiculous were the "bread fumes" - conjuring some mental image of a
cartoon mad-scientist inventing a new bread using "the serum" which proceeds to
smoke and fume like a slice of solidified concentrated nitric acid.

Perhaps you can suggest a fine French pastry chef who can prepare the young
Prince a soft, crustless delicacy - with a fine crumb -  as a base for his Royal
peanut butter & Fluff sandwich.  We can fly out from our secret island base in
the Pacific on our stolen Concord and be there within the hour - lest it its
ephemeral freshness be lost.

Quickly now, Sir! - for he weakens and withers before my eyes.

;)

But alas, I wax despondent.

"Ode to an inadequate slice of mass-market store-bought white bread that I
served to my poor oppressed son out of the erratically functioning refrigerator
one midsummer's morning...."

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> > I am sorry if I misunderstood you because of fast reading non native language...

I hope you can appreciate, in the context of today's lunch misadventure, I was
especially pleased to read your (unintentionally, but very timely and) amusing
"mis-translation" of DOUGH as "bread paste"  :D
As a chemist, I immediately imagined pouring some Downy "loaf softener" into the
other ingredients in the bread machine in order to produce something moist,
fluffy, and soft.  [* See below]
https://downy.com/en-us

It brings to mind the famous double-translation of Frederick Pohl's "The Wizards
of Pung's Corners", where flashy, over-complex military hardware proved useless
against farmers with shotguns. ("The Wizards of Pung's Corners" was freely
translated into Chinese and then freely translated back into English as "The
Wizard-Masters of Peng-Shi Angle" in the first edition of Pohlstars (1984)).

I also had occasion (misfortune?) to use a piece of laboratory software that
must have been hastily translated into English from --- multiple languages(?)
and still retained some items in two other languages, and some obvious gaffes.

And just to make this hyperbolic culinary odyssey complete, I will append a copy
(and sometimes-working link to) "Uncle" Al[an] Schwartz's excellent article
which I first read in (1994?) Chemical and Engineering News.
Caution:   Reading Uncle Al is not for the sensitive or faint of heart.

(*)

http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/mash.htm

MASHED POTATOES
My childhood was exacerbated by a home in which the concurrent consumption of
dairy and meat products would precipitate the inexhaustible wrath of the Old
Testament Hairy Thunderer, or so my parents claimed to believe. Reflection upon
two decades prior when eight million of their co-religionists were converted
into low grade fertilizer without a hint of divine snit should have given them a
clue. Culinary minefields were deftly skirted by the use of "instant" mashed
potatoes. That Mommy Dearest could induce jaw-cramping lumps in a powdery
substance devoting its heart and soul toward metamorphosis into a pool of
gelatinous sludge is ponderous evidence of her powers. When my sweetie, the love
of my life, bade me mash a pot full of boiled potatoes I was thrust out upon a
very long and very narrow cultural limb. The void yawning below me was
bottomless.
I am an organic chemist possessed of the very finest mind and trained within the
most rigorous of gustatory experiences - industrial petrochemistry. As I thrust
the masher within the pot and the beige lumps extruded into starchy dreadlocks,
my mind flew into furious cogitation. Would I be humbled by a side dish
conquered by Hibernians? Ha!

The substance of mashed potatoes preponderantly consists of discoidal insoluble
starch particles whose surfaces strongly interact with interstitial water, and
each other. That this is also the fine structure of library paste hints at the
disaster aborning. I thought of cold cream and grease and the phase inversion
phenomenon that interconverts them.

Consider a vessel filled with vegetable oil and water. Shake it heartily, set it
down, and watch the oil float to the top and the water sink to the bottom. If
you now add a very small percentage of long, thin molecules whose heads are
extremely soluble in water but not at all in oil, and whose long tails love oil
and hate water, an amazing transformation occurs when you again shake. The stuff
is called surfactant. Its long molecular tails bury themselves in the oil
droplets with heads left protruding into the water. It stabilizes the oil/water
compote at its interface to yield an emulsion of oil droplets floating in a
water continuum.

If the surfactant is lecithin in egg yolks, you have salad dressing. If you
really beat on it to disperse the oil droplets more finely, you have mayonnaise

mineral oil, the latter is called cold cream. If you beat it too long and have
too much oil there will be a phase inversion as the oil drops suddenly coalesce
into the continuous phase and the water appears as discrete droplets. In a pinch
and with lots of muscle you can convert cold cream into bearing grease.

I was mashing and mashing more and more desperately as the glutinous mess
filling the pot more and more closely resembled spackling compound. Solvent
parameters and surface energies flooded my brain as I desperately sought to
discern a mechanism by which those naughty starch particles could be separated
in space to create a smooth glide between tongue and palate, not forgetting to
throw in some suitably stabilized and unctuous goop to ameliorate gagging. I
suspected that a squirt of dishwashing liquid followed by a shot of WD-40 was
not a satisfactory answer.

Protein, that was the ticket! Hydrophilic and hydrophobic amino acid residues
can create regions of protein separated in space, some of which adore water,
some of which crave oil. What would Mother NEVER put into mashed potatoes? Milk
products! I thought about all those jolly casein molecules imprisoning
microscopic butterfat globules and my heart beat just a little bit faster.

Would I sneak some milk into this rapidly stiffening mess? Nah, too watery. I
needed high concentrations of active materials. Butter? Nah, butter is
confiscated by Federal decree from all dairy farms to protect the citizens of
these great United States from becoming innocent victims of arteriosclerosis and
thereby committing suicide by eating it. Butter is stockpiled for government
officials' dining only. Margarine? Nah, too greasy and with trans-fatty acids
precipitating arteriosclerosis. Either way, phase inversion had put the wrong
component as the continuous phase. What was between milk and margarine? Sour
cream!

I snuck a dollop of sour cream into the mashed mess and before my widening eyes
the crumbly dreadlocks of mortified starch disintegrated into satiny velvet
swirls. Little starch particles had their invidious machinations thwarted by
molecular layers of protein encapsulation and miniature emulsified oil ball
bearings. It was probably not even toxic. I threw in another white plop for good
measure, added a crushed garlic clove, stirred vigorously, and presented the
final result to She Who Rules the Kitchen - and it was good.

It WAS good! Twenty years of schooling and another fifteen in research had
marshaled their dreadful power to bring forth the quintessential pot of mashed
potatoes. I will start the patent search on Monday (including a squirt of
dishwashing liquid followed by a shot of WD-40, hoping that the patent examiner
had never eaten at my mother's table).

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Op 27/06/2020 om 19:45 schreef Bald Eagle:
> I was making the young boy a PB & something sandwich today, and the Wonder
> chem-bread that he insists on was a bit lyophilized.
> 
> "We need some --- loaf softener."
> 
[snip]
> 
> Time is running out....
> 
> 

No reason for panic my friend. Do you have an oven? If not, a cooking 
range? Just toast the damn thing for a couple of minutes and they feel 
(and smell) freshly backed by the local top chef! :-)

Caveat: Of course, I do not guarantee the results when applied to 
[quote] the Wonder chem-bread [/quote]. I wont take responsibility if it 
explodes in your face.

-- 
Thomas

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"Bald Eagle" <cre### [at] netscapenet> wrote:
> "Mr" <mauriceraybaud [at] hotmail dot fr>> wrote:
>
> > I am sorry if I misunderstood you because of fast reading non native language...
>
> Maurice, my man - this was just a bit of hyperbole - wild exaggeration of the
> seriousness of the "problem" and the importance of finding a "solution".

Sorry , But I'm with your son on this, I am french, and bread is no joking mater
!  :-P

> a thing (non-existant, as far as I know) as "loaf softener".

On the contrary, most industrial bakeries add chemicals to accelerate the
raising of dough

The secret to a well aerated inner center with big holes (allowing for a really
crunchy crust that your son is not ready to value yet :-) ) Is simply to give it
time to raise and not add these chemicals, even an industrial paste bought and
left 24 /48 hours in the fridge until it fully occupies its packaging before
cooking tastes soo much better!
This time / profitability issue is so badly ingrained in collective mind these
days that even many traditional bakeries here provide by default such
"accelerated" breads, unless you are aware of the issue and explicitly ask for

is just 20 cents more expensive but well worth it.

>
> Monty Python would surely try it out on a stale baguette and find it
> ineffective. :D

They would definitely try to debake an overly baked bread :-)
and would as well sell it raw if you asked "une baguette, pas trop cuite" !

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ok for POV-Ray Off topic, but all those conten are boring and invasive, there
are a lot of network where the people can waste his time

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