The picture above shows a Yemeni sesame oil seller working at an oil mill in Hajjah Province, Yemen, Jan. 19, 2020

Sesame oil is a cooking oil made from sesame seeds that's popular in Asian cooking.

The most popular species of sesame, Sesamum indicum, is considered one of the oldest oilseed crops to have been domesticated and cultivated by humans. It is grown in fields, reaching heights of up to 1.5 m. Sesame flowers may have different colors, such as white, blue, or purple, and a single plant can yield approximately 80 seeds rich in unsaturated fatty acids.

There are a few varieties made with pressed plain seeds or toasted seeds, and they are used in different ways in Chinese, Japanese, South Indian, and Middle Eastern cuisine. Light sesame oil is typically used as a neutral cooking oil, while toasted sesame oil is used as a flavoring in sauces, soups, and other dishes.

Toasted sesame oil is also known as dark, black, or Asian sesame oil. The light brown to dark reddish-brown oil is made with toasted sesame seeds and has a strong aroma and flavor. A little goes a long way; sesame oil is often used as a finishing oil, adding nutty, toasty flavor to a hot or cold dish.

Typically, the darker the toasted sesame oil, the stronger the flavor. Light sesame oil, also called white or plain sesame oil, is light in color. It's made using raw sesame seeds, resulting in high-heat, low-flavor oil.

Cold-pressed sesame oil is made without the use of heat or chemicals. It's prized for its purity and can be found in health food stores. Blended oils are also available, combining toasted sesame oil with other oils. The result is a cheaper option with a less intense flavor.

Historically, sesame was cultivated more than 5000 years ago as a drought-tolerant crop which was able to grow where other crops failed. Sesame seeds were one of the first crops processed for oil as well as one of the earliest condiments. Sesame was cultivated during the Indus Valley civilization and was the main oil crop. It was probably exported to Mesopotamia around 2500 BCE. An was historically consumed in many socieites in Europe and Asia including Ancient Egypt where it was used as medicine, for cooking, for its fragrance and for lamp fuel.

Tanzania remains the largest producer of sesame oil (followed by Myanmar/Burma, China, India, Japan, South Sudan, and Sudan) and also dominates the global consumption of this product . The market for sesame oil is mainly located in Asia and the Middle East, where the use of domestically-produced sesame oil has been a tradition for centuries.

Sesame oil is most popular in continental Asia, especially in East Asia and the South Indian states of Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, and Tamil Nadu, where its widespread use is similar to that of olive oil in the Mediterranean.

Here is a video from eater .com showing modern sesame oil in the ROK https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6yn7MCwzPg

And here is a video of tradtional oil production using a mill and oxen (CW: animal labor) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2xZXufObW8

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I saw the photos first: tan, straggly piles along the banks of an otherwise fertile stream. My mind went to worms, and then gnats. I once wrote an article about fungus gnats, the larvae of which sometimes form circles to travel. Was I looking at something like that? A natural phenomenon that covered the stream in thousands of brown, straw-like creatures?

Nope. I was looking at pasta.

Residents of Old Bridge, New Jersey were presented with a mystery this week: Who dumped mounds of pasta in the forest, all along the stream?

The saga began earlier in the week when resident Nina Jochnowitz alerted town officials to the bountiful mess after receiving a complaint from a neighbor. Reportedly, it was loose spaghetti, alphabet noodles, and elbow macaroni.

“There was literally 25 feet of pasta that had been dumped,” she told The New York Times.

...

i learned how to peel an orange last week and the algo is just popping off right now. legit life changing

nonyoutube link: https://piped.kavin.rocks/results?search_query=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DdCGS067s0zo

The food theme for my next DnD session is "food on a stick." Any bright ideas? I can't think of a single thing. Next step is fooling around on the internet until I find something that looks interesting, but I thought I'd ask you folks first. Only dietary restriction is one person is allergic to pumpkins, zucchini, etc.

Edit: I knew you guys would come through! I have so many great ideas to look up and think about now, thanks so much!

Which one?

Sliced bread from the store is fucking garbage compared to a real unsliced home-baked loaf, like what people made for thousands of years before bread making became industrialized. Fresh bread is just so much tastier. The home-baked loaf is also much much much cheaper and easy to bake, but the elites don’t want you to know this.

Real bread is good, folks.

At the grocery store I only see "MSG Free" labels on soy sauce, ramen, noodles, etc. but nothing for chips, burritos, burgers, etc.

I know there are people who dislike MSG, but the MSG scare was also racist scaremongering, and I wonder how many people think they dislike MSG because the media said Chinese food will kill them while gulping down a big mac and bag of doritos every day

I'm soon to be in Czechia for a few days and I'm assuming the provided food options "on site" will not allow for a vegan diet, so just wondering if any Czech comrade can answer my questions how the situation is in supermarkets.. I will be able to get groceries from a Lidl but probably don't want to cook fresh, so I'm looking for stuff I can eat cold or warm up on a grill or such. Unfortunately I don't speak the language, so how do I know what products are vegan? What labels are commonly used, V-Label? Does Lidl in Czechia generally carry vegan products? Can I look up online which products are available in a particular Lidl? Google won't show me the translation for the Lidl page for some reason, IDK. So yea, any tips or experience is much appreciated, thank you! Oh also if there's some kind of common vegan street food I should be looking out for that would be awesome too.

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Olive oil is a liquid fat obtained from olives (the fruit of Olea europaea; family Oleaceae), a traditional tree crop of the Mediterranean Basin, produced by pressing whole olives and extracting the oil. It is commonly used in cooking: for frying foods or as a salad dressing. It can be found in some cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, soaps, and fuels for traditional oil lamps. It also has additional uses in some religions. The olive is one of three core food plants in Mediterranean cuisine; the other two are wheat and grapes.

Spain accounts for almost half of global olive oil production; other major producers are Portugal, Italy, Tunisia, Greece, Morocco and Turkey. Per capita consumption is highest in Greece, followed by Italy and Spain. Olive oil has long been a common ingredient in Mediterranean cuisine, including ancient Greek and Roman cuisine.

In countries that adhere to the standards of the International Olive Council :

Extra virgin olive oil is the highest grade of virgin olive oil derived by cold mechanical extraction without use of solvents or refining methods.It contains no more than 0.8% free acidity, and is judged to have a superior taste, having some fruitiness and no defined sensory defects.

Virgin olive oil is a lesser grade of virgin oil, with free acidity of up to 2.0%, and is judged to have a good taste, but may include some sensory defects.

Refined olive oil is virgin oil that has been refined using charcoal and other chemical and physical filters, methods which do not alter the glyceridic structure. It has a free acidity, expressed as oleic acid, of not more than 0.3 grams per 100 grams (0.3%) . Oils labeled as Pure olive oil or Olive oil are primarily refined olive oil, with a small addition of virgin for taste.

Olive pomace oil is refined pomace olive oil, often blended with some virgin oil. It is fit for consumption, but may not be described simply as olive oil. It also has a high smoke point, and thus is widely used in restaurants as well as home cooking in some countries.

In the summer of 1941 Italians and Italian Americans interned in Fort Missoula Montana were said to have rioted when officials switched their provided cooking fat from olive oil to beef suet (rightly so)

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RIP to a legend, pour one out for em

Yeah, I know it's fr*nch bread, BUT in my defense I used a soviet recipe. :meow-knit

Pupusa (from pipil pupusawa) is the Spanish pronunciation of popotlax, a conjugation of the words in the Nahuatl language; popotl meaning big, stuffed, bulging, and tlaxkalli or tortilla. It is a thick handmade corn tortilla (made using masa de maíz, a corn flour dough used in American cuisine that is filled with one or more of the following ingredients: cheese (usually a fresh cheese very common in certain American countries called quesillo), chicharrón, ayote, refried beans or cheese with loroco. There is also pupusa scrambled with mixed ingredients, such as cheese, beans, chicharrón or bacon.

Origin Nahuat was the language of the Pipils, a pre-Columbian settlement in the central and western part of El Salvador known as the Señorío de Cuzcatlán.

Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, was one of the religious who came to America; in one of his texts in 1570, he tells about the existence of a cooked dough meal, which was mixed with meat and beans. On the other hand, a publication of the National Museum of Anthropology Dr. David J. Guzmán affirms that pupusas were a fundamental part of the diet of pre-Columbian settlements in Ahuachapán, presumably Quichés who had migrated from Guatemala. At the beginning of the 19th century, Santiago I. Barberena on page 231 of his book "Quicheismo de folclore americano".

History

Pupusas are the most widespread typical food in El Salvador probably because of the tradition instituted from generation to generation. Although its origin is not known for certain, anthropological studies indicate that it was born in Central American territories, especially in western El Salvador.

• Within the framework of the CAFTA negotiations, Honduran claims regarding the geographical origin of pupusas came to light, since in that country it is also a privileged dish, although not so popular.

• The origin of the conflict, which involved more public opinion than the government, was the negotiation of products of origin; if El Salvador patented pupusas, it would be the only country that could export this product free of tariffs to the United States, which would give it a competitive advantage over the rest of the contracting countries of the agreement.

Ingredients

• Dough: There are two types of dough, corn and rice. Rice pupusas originated in Olocuilta, and became popular in the 1980s when the highway leading to El Salvador's International Airport was built. Also popular in Nahuizalco are pupusas made of yucca dough.

• Fillings: originally, in the 1930s-40s, they were filled with beans or cheese, and later, with chicharrón. Even so, pupusas are a recipe in constant change; the technique has been innovated and the ingredients have diversified. Common fillings today are: loroco flower, cochinito, or pitos, chipilín leaves or hierba mora, all of them aromatic plants from El Salvador, spinach, ayote, which is a variety of squash, ham, chicken or beef, fish, shrimp, mushrooms, garlic, jalapeño peppers, or even chorizo, pepperoni or salami. The fillings also depend on the region, as for example pupusa stuffed with papelillo is typical of the Oriente.

Pupusa is one of the symbols of Salvadoran culinary identity. It is consumed by all social classes throughout the country for breakfast, lunch or dinner. Going to a pupusería for dinner is a social act in this country. Each pupusa has an approximate nutritional value of 350 calories, so a couple of them constitute a meal time for an average person. In this sense, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) considers that it is an essential part of the basic Salvadoran diet, being an adequate means of food because of its low cost. In 2004, within the framework of the "International Year of Rice", pupusas were recognized worldwide as a popular food.

On the other hand, considering that El Salvador is one of the Latin American countries that contributes most immigrants to the United States, it is logical to find pupusas outside the national borders. Immigrants take the dish as part of the effort to maintain the culture even outside the country, which is why they continue to prepare and consume pupusas.

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