NireBryce

reality is the battlefield

the first line goes in Cohost embeds

🐥 I am not embroiled in any legal battle
🐦 other than battles that are legal 🎮

I speak to the universe and it speaks back, in it's own way.

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email: contact at breadthcharge dot net

I live on the northeast coast of the US.

'non-functional programmer'. 'far left'.

conceptual midwife.

https://cohost.org/NireBryce/post/4929459-here-s-my-five-minut

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bruno
@bruno

Moving to a new apartment soon means emptying my freezer and I gotta say, this curry is really good and must have been made by some kind of devastatingly attractive genius


bruno
@bruno

here's the deal: there doesn't appear to be much of a scientific reason why some food tastes better reheated the day after. gelatin-heavy stews benefit from allowing the gelatin to congeal and then melt again, texturally, but beyond that? no reason at all why a soup or a roux-thickened sauce like kare would improve the day after.

as far as anyone can tell the reason for this is perceptual. food just tastes better when you haven't been smelling it for half an hour while it cooks, the flavors are just more present because you're less acclimated to them. but that perceptual effect really amps up over the course of giving it enough time to just let them completely out of your mind.

which is to say, if you tend to cook food in larger batches and then freeze portions for later, it will seem better if you are actually letting these sit in the freezer for a week before breaking into them.


apocryphalmess
@apocryphalmess

IMO, food also tastes better when there is less of your own immediate effort involved. I feel like this is why food made by somebody else can taste better than if you made it yourself, why reheated leftovers sometimes taste better than they ought to, etc


NireBryce
@NireBryce

also some chemical reactions only happen over long times, or slower temperatures.


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in reply to @bruno's post:

My only struggle is that certain foods seem to get really bland or lose flavor from freezing them. If a pasta or rice gets a bit frozen from being at the top of my fridge, then it feels like it loses some flavor. Maybe this is because pasta and rice and such often have less intense flavors and scents than some foods.

I feel like a soup or roux or bouillon such are definitely some of the best candidates for freezing though. Idk what it is about more liquid-based foods that makes them seem to handle the freeze better though.

Yeah, carbs in general don't freeze well, but they're also quick and low effort to just cook fresh. I'll usually make a sauce base and freeze it and then defrost it to add to pasta, rather than freezing the pasta with the sauce. Like a basic marinara sauce freezes really well.

One of the key things is smell fatigue. Our noses are pretty good at starting to ignore consistent smells (like something that's been cooking for a little while). So when you bite into that food, your nose is ignoring a lot of flavorful compounds. But the next day, you're all reset and can add to the taste again.

in reply to @apocryphalmess's post: