It Figures: The numbers behind your dinner

Perfectly crisping bacon doesn’t take skill, it takes science. Spreading pizza toppings isn’t art, it’s “topping exposure percentage and topping distribution evenness” detected by computer vision. Chocolate mousse isn’t heaven, it’s a matrix “gelled by hydrocolloids in the continuous phase.”

That seemingly inimitable blend of flavor, texture, and aroma can be broken down into numbers and computations and you better not forget it.

8,000-10,000: years ago that man first milked animals.

237,928,359: the number of dairy cows mooing along today.

40-50: the percentage of air in ice cream.

117: The liters of milk consumed per capita in Finland in 2005. Also, the highest in the world that year.

3.7: the percentage of fat in cow’s milk

6-9: the percentage of fat in ice cream.

2.5: the percentage of fat in camel milk ice cream.

3: the number of flavors that camel milk ice cream comes in: strawberry, caramel, and chocolate.

170: the temperature in Celsius that sugar starts to caramelize.

210: the temperature in Celsius where sugar goes from being “dark caramel” to “black jack” AKA pure carbon.

14: the number of steps identified in the caramelization process.

1912: the year Louis Camille Maillard started studying non-enzymatic browning. This process, dubbed the Maillard reaction makes toast from bread.

60: the temperature (in Celsius) at which the starch granules in bread re-gelatinize, which makes stale bread less so.

1928: the year that Otto Frederick Rohwedder’s bread slicing machine was introduced to America.

80: the percentage of proteins in wheat that are gluten.

15: the age in days of Uruguayan white pan bread where it experiences a 50% consumer rejection rate due to “sensory variables” AKA funky smell.