The reason "lye" means "Bath" in its oldest form is not simply because of warmth; lye mixed with fats or oils begins a process called saponification, in which a surfactant solution - bathing soap! - forms, when exposed to water.
In the past soaps were very expensive and everyday people would use wood ash to clean their hands. Simply rub some on your hands with water and then rinse. So direct connection of basic ash and bathing, even before the invention of soaps.
lutefisk is not conserved with lye, it is conserved by simple cold air drying (stockfish). The stockfish is then rehydrated in a lye-solution a few days before consumption. The lye increases water uptake, and also breaks down some proteins. Its easier to eat, chew, and digest compared to plain water rehydration. A more likely origin story is "a stockfish storage building fire", followed by "rain", followed by "food shortage".
A lot of "local specialties" can be explained by "we had a food shortage a couple hundred years ago and then in better years we got nostalgic for the taste"
Something terrible happened a while back and we were forced to eat things that we wouldn't normally. It didn't kill us or make us too sick so we looked into it more once things got better. Also that wierdo over there liked it.
Fun fact: The only English weekday name that isn't from the Norse languages is Saturday, which is “lørdag”/“lördag” in Danish/Norwegian and Swedish, meaning “bath day” from “lud” -> “lye”. Also: Potassium, the element, gets its name from Germanic pot+ash, but in the Germanic languages it's “Kalium” from Arabic Al Qali, which also gives English “alkaline”.
Hey Adam, at around 2:05 you were mentioning flowering and fruiting trees but were showing clips of Ginkgo trees, which are ancient gymnosperms that do not produce flowers or fruit. Ginkgo biloba is the only living species in the Ginkgophyta division; all other species have died off. Maybe you could do a video on these plants because they are fascinating.
Thank you, I didn't know that. Fascinating how the origins of words trickle down through the centuries. I really appreciate these types of background info. 👍
In traditional Chahta cooking, our version of salt-and-pepper is hetok--powdered ash made from shelled bean pods. I have heard that people would occasionally add different types of wood ash to their cooking (eg, cedar/juniper), but hetok dominated to the point it sometimes replaced salt as a seasoning (it supplies many minerals salt would also, but has the advantage of being much more common than salt in the SE of Turtle Island). We cultivated beans before we did corn, so I'm fairly confident using bean ash as a seasoning predates making hominy with ashes. It's possible that folks noticed corn was better if it was seasoned well with hetok when cooking & began experimenting toward hominy from there. I also wanted to point out that ancient varieties of grain all across the globe were commonly roasted before grinding to make both grinding and digestion easier, in addition to imparting flavour. The easiest way to roast grain when you're using ceramic pots to cook is by putting live coals in with the grain, thereby seasoning them with white ash in the process of roasting. (I think this is the most likely route hominy was discovered by--someone got too much ash in their roast corn or accidentally left a pot roasting in the rain and wound up blessed by hominy). One thing I've learned preparing traditional dishes in pre-modern ways is that the elements of cooking or preparation impart flavour and texture that is missing in traditional dishes made the modern way. I think cooking food with a base or adding bases as seasonings weren't really accidental discoveries, but intentional practices that made food more interesting as refinements in cooking equipments and methods meant the cooking environment imparted less and less flavour itself to the final product. Sort of like how after millennia of trying to keep bugs out of food, Western society is beginning to bring them back in a controlled way to increase nutrition & spice up the diet!
Basic water could have also occured by people using rocks to actually heat the water. WAY back in the day, before metal pots, placing heated rocks in a fire (that could have picked up ash as well) were placed in a vessel of water (that might not have been able to sit in a fire) to heat the water to a boil. You can actually place hot rocks in an animal skin with out damaging the skin too much, and actually bring the water to a simmer or slight boil.
Mongolians still cook with hot rocks today even though they have giant metal woks and pots that are mostly used for cooking inside of the yurt. The rocks aren't generally used for boiling water but they everything inside quite well so adding water to your animal skin would effectively be the same thing and make a tasty broth too.
You can actually cook in an animal skin pot over fire, without burning the animal skin, thanks to the heat transfer to the water. (though you'd singe off any fur on the outside). But you can use hot rocks to boil water in for example banana leaves, which would probably be too fragile to put over fire.
@@michaelfujii2765 I was waiting for him to bring this up in the video. I wonder how many debates about cooking with or without putting rocks in your soup it took for the lye-factor to be isolated in some cases.
I cook chick peas for hummus with Sodium Carbonate (Na2CO3) because it breaks down the skin much better than Sodium Bicarbonate (probably because it's a stronger base). We (Syrians and probably other Arab countries too) also make an absolutely amazing dish called "fatteh b zait" in which one mixes "old" olive oil, water, and sodium carbonate to make a milk-like base for the dish, you throw in bits of old bread, cooked chick peas, and as much cumin as you have, and you've got yourself a dish that would put a horse to bed for 3 days.
While we’re leaving criticisms: the pre-symbol superscript is for atomic mass, the pre-symbol subscript is for atomic number, which is already implied by the symbol, which is why it is so rarely seen.
There's a Brazilian recipe for a sweet pumpkin preserve that nowadays uses a lime water solution to make the pumpkin pieces crunchy in the outside and gooey on the inside. My grandma says it used to be made with a water and ashes solution before. I think lime just became an easier replacement as we migrated from fire stoves to gas stoves. Nice use for something most people nowadays consider pretty useless.
Lutefisk (lye-fish) is made from dried fish (tørrfisk), the lut (here lut=lye meaning any basic solution) process is therefore not done to preserve the fish, but to give consistency and taste. Dry fish is very hard and making it into a more edible form takes time and effort. And as you noted with the potato slices lye makes the process of softening things up faster and easier, so "wetting" the fish could become much faster. This adds a taste so usually you would cook the fish in fresh water afterwards, but if you didn't you got lutefisk
As a southerner I am surprised you didn't mention hominy, the second best fried southern food from a paper cup. The college I went to had fried okra and hominy served in large paper cups in the cafeteria, perfect to make it through the next class.
He actually did cover it, but didn't mention it by name--when he discussed processing corn with alkali. Hominy is what you have if you do the lye treatment, remove the hull, then don't grind the result into a tortilla! I'm not sure why he used whole kernel sweet corn in his video, though, rather than some type of field corn. Convenience, perhaps. Whole field corn isn't usually something you can pick up with the rest of your groceries on your regular grocery run. I grow my own, so I do have it. I don't nixtamalize, as it's a lot of work and I have a diverse diet that carries no risk of pellagra.
IIRC there is lore Lutefisk came about from a fish drying hut catching fire in the winter, where the fish soaked in the ash laden melt water and was still there months later. This is apocryphal at best, but a fun little idea.
the vitamin c thing is cart before the horse. our frugivorous ancestors were already mainly eating fruit. producing enzymes that you dont use is costly, so when a mutation appeared that eliminated our vitamin c producing enzymes, it was advantageous and it proliferated. the reason we like sour food is because fruits are sour, and our ancestors mainly ate fruit!
Rocks were used as a way to heat a non-fireproof container of water without having it over a fire. Get the rocks really really hot in the fire then put them in the water. Enough rocks will easily boil the water and cook things for a while.
You mentioned you might be talking about lye from minerals in another video but I'd like to hazard a guess now. Hot rocks / pot-boilers have been used to heat stews and such (as you have already covered in another video) prior to the widespread use of firesafe vessels. I think people would have noticed similar benefits to those found in this video when cooking with rocks with particularly alkaline minerals.
Please do a video about Matcha. I've been drinking it for years and would love to hear your takes on the taste and, potentially overblown, health benefits. Your research deep-dive videos are some of my favorites. Thanks!
I really appreciate your anthropological approach to food. When I used to take anthro classes I was focused on the relationship between food and culture, and you're helping me scratch that itch again. Thanks!
Not surprising given that the nixtamalization of corn (treating dried corn kernels with lye) moved from Native American societies in Mexico to Native American societies in what became the American South. Hominy grits are more nutritive than those made from plain ground corn (hominy grits are better than polenta)
What's this "used to be" shit. I live in lowcountry South Carolina and they are still very popular here. 🤔🤓🍻 I'm speaking mostly about the hominy grits even though I personally also like whole kernel hominy, which isn't as popular nowadays. 🤔🍻
The energy this thumbnail exudes is too powerful. A giant ern of at what seems like at first glance mud and dirty water with "BASED FOOD" on top, it's just too good, it radiates Gigachad energy.
I would like to see Adam do a video on hand-pulled noodles and noodle elasticity. In particular, the effect that penghui has on dough and any potential substitutes (e.g. nutritional yeast as in Tim Chin's SeriousEats article).
Fun fact: in the italian wikipedia page of lye (liscivia in italian) cooking is never mentioned. Instead it refers to its use in cleaning and in manifacturing soap (which I think may be where the connection to bathing in the origin of the word may come from, not in human baths but in cleaning clothes)
I tried cooking my dried chickpeas with a teaspoon of baking soda and O MY GOD! The difference is astonishing. The end result feels much more like a purée
I don't know if you'll ever see this Adam but I want to thank you so much for everything you have taught me that has made me 10x the chef I was. So much content on RU-vid is for the looks and misinformation (such as not touching a steak once its in the pan or you'll ruin the sear) you only provide good advice and most importantly the science behind it. So once again thank you so much! I'll always be a fan.
The German word for lye, Lauge, is still used in the generic sense. It can refer to any type of alkaline solution (NaOH is specifically called Natronlauge, where Natron is also the word for baking soda and related to Natrium, the element with the symbol Na, which for some reason is called sodium in English), but it can also refer to soapy water, although this use is becoming more rare nowadays
@@rolandplumer4648 What exactly is it that you think is used instead? Soap, by definition, is created by the saponification of fats, which is accomplished by reacting it with various metal salts, the choice depending on the desired qualities in the finished soap. Sodium hydroxide (lye) creates hard soaps ideal for bar soaps; potassium hydroxide creates softer soaps good for liquid soaps. Now, it’s certainly true that almost all _liquid_ hand soaps, dish liquids, shampoos, etc. today aren’t soaps at all but are liquid surfactant products. But bar soaps are still very much actual soaps. Soaps, especially lithium soap, are also commonly used as thickeners in lubricants.
It was probably impossible to cook food in water without getting potash in it before the invention of metal pots. One food, regularly cooked in a way that can't avoid the change, eventually becomes recognized as better.
@@eReBeLe "ceramic pots also had lids" And before that? People cooked in fires even before they had pottery. One method was to form leaves into a vessel (think broad thick tropical) to boil water right in the fire.
@@Blackmark52 you are the one who said metal pots. Your point about a food being recognised as better because people are used to it is pretty weak, considering that ceramic has been a thing in the Mediterranean world for the last ten thousand years. I suspect there must be some other reason underneath. It is also worth pointing that cooking in lye isn't really a thing in a lot of cultures (I'm italian and I had to search for it because I never heard of it, and in the italian wikipedia page for it cooking is never mentioned, it's not something we do at all) PS ceramic on its own has been around for closer to 20ky, I was referring to ceramic pots and dishes specifically)
@@beniaminorocchi "you are the one who said metal pots" Yes, I was talking about before metal pots because Adam used a metal pot. But the idea holds true for any pot. The use of lye may go back a long way, and one idea of how it started is as I described.
@@Blackmark52 you make a claim and draw your conclusions. Your claim is 8ish thousand years off target (at least for temperate Eurasia). I strongly suspect that there is something more to it, especially considering that in the same places where lye isn't used for cooking, it was widely used as a cleaning agent and for making soap (a reason that immediately comes to mind is that the high pH could be useful for food preservation in tropical and subtropical environments)
@@f.d.6667 Natto is perfectly okey, so is Lutefisk. If we are going to talk foul Scandinaivain foods Swedish Surströmming and Norwegian Rakfisk definitely are worse.
NOTE: it's generally considered the best idea to take blood samples like the ones illustrated in this video from the *side* of the finger you use least -- usually your ring finger. It's much less annoying to type, for example, when you've avoided the *pad* of your finger for that stick.
Well he also misleads people about testosterone and normal aging so I would not rely too much on this guy for medical advice in any case. (To say nothing about being a professional chef who cooks himself up disgusting meals because he apparently believes it is "bodybuilding food" and there's some magical benefit to it.) I like him but you have to know what to defer to people on and what not to.
This annoys me to no end. Why on Earth would anyone think that eating more alkaline foods would help with anything at all? I mean, the only thing I can think of is to treat indigestion. I've even read about what some people consider "alkaline" foods... Lemons were on that list. All of my wut? It's so stupid as well because homeostasis is a thing. The body can only function in a narrow pH range. And since you're eating it, the foods first become acidified by your stomach, since gastric enzymes work best in an acidic environment, and then all of that gets neutralized once in the duodenum and contacts alkaline pancreatic juice. Eating a ton of "alkaline" foods isn't going to change that. It's one of the most stupid fads I've heard of. It's up there with "detox" diets and eating cotton wool.
Another banger video with cool information I would've never cared about until I saw this. Your ability to find generally "uninteresting" topics very interesting is amazing.
There is a dessert in my home country (Turkey) made by using lye. It is Crispy pumpkin dessert, aka candied pumpkin. Its basically made by soaking pumpkin slices in some kind of lye water for a couple of hours and then rinsing thoughly and then boiling the pumpkin slices with sugar just as you make some kind of jam. I think lye prevents pumpkin slices getting mushy and keeps them crispy. I tried it once, it took me many hours to make, i even forgot the pot on the burner for some time however lye treated pumpkin didnt get mushy regardless of cooking time, if i had cooked regular non treated pumpkin as long it would have been like goo.
Do you mean lime? Like the powdery kind? I've made oranges and cherries into a similar dessert, if it's actually lye I would love to try preparing it as such.
I've always thought that one way someone might have introduced Alkali to their food could be that they accidentally dropped some food in some ash. or option b they purposely buried their food in the ash to cook it either one would probably do the trick
7:50 makes corn and grains easier to digest, deactivates mycotoxins and make niacin available. That's nixtamalization. 9:10 preservation. For olives, century eggs etc.
Excellent didactic video. Thank you. I was hoping you would segue way into how to use the concepts in our every day cooking. Well, maybe another video. Enjoy everything produce and I’m very grateful for the information you provide.
I literally JUST watched another YT video about why humans like spicy food, and it made me think, "Well then why do we enjoy sour foods? Do we get the same chemical rush from something tart as we do a good burn?" The Vitamin C thing does make total sense, and the timing was perfect! haha
There's also a lot of fruits that are sour-ish that are a good gateway drug for the stronger sour flavors. Plus, acid is a preservative. Lactofermentation results in vinegar being produced. Sour = Safe.
Ashes were (and still are sometimes) used as a substitute for salt in places without access to seawater or saltmines, or in times of economic hardship, so maybe that's another way people discovered the properties of bases.
Potassium salts have been a traditional replacement for standard salt. It's one of the reasons Celery is popular in landlocked Europe. It's a salt veggie.
You need potassium but its not a substitute for sodium in the body for many processes. It also takes different imo; Potassium nitrate at least tastes to me REALLY gross.
@@SlavicCelery Fair point, i dont think the flavour I tasted would work with much though. It was like that acrid taste at the back of your mouth when you eat tonnes of salt, but right from the get go on the tip. That could also just be the nitrate and not the potassium, idk.
@@OsirusHandle If you're far away from easy access to standard sodium chloride, the other versions of salt start to get really appealing. People forget that you used to only get salt, by the sea, salt flats, or natural salt deposits. Celery is one of the weird vegetables with a lot of salt in them. Both potassium and sodium varieties. But, in far from sea areas, adding various ashes to food to get some level of salt (typically a potassium salt and not a sodium salt) was not uncommon.
I bet the way people made basic water with rocks would be from heating up rocks in a fire and dropping them into a clay pot or large leaf to boil water for a soup/stew…. I think Adam did this in a video a while back.
Putting hot rocks in an pot to cook is also a method. Particularly when you don’t have metal pots. Can line a hole in the ground with hide and then put rocks from fire into water to boil. Or find a hollowed out rock, eg. from coastal erosion. Easier to bring hot / fire to pot rather than other way around. Cool episode. Thanks
Adam, look into Greek Cypriot cuisine: It will fit greatly in your style of cooking. Lots of potential when it comes to trying different types of cooking!
Adam, will you do a video about culinary ash? This video kinda went through it but I believe it should be more explained. I believe it should have a big comeback or at least should be known to the general public. I had a theory that it could replace baking powder/baking soda to leaven bread. Also there's a rock in Mexico called Tequesquite that is a salt alkaline rock that supposedly leavens bread, help cooks beans and nopales. I don't know if you could use it for nixtamalizations but it is used after for making stuff like what Max from Tasting History.
👍🏻 Interesting! Also, a huge factor in why olives are processed in lye is probably the way they taste when unprocessed. Anyone who has ever tasted a fresh olive will agree that it _demands_ harsh treatment. So it's not surprising that diverse treatments from acid pickling, dry salt packing, and ultimately lye pickling all yield excellent results in making them palatable
Loved the video! I just did a presentation on the production of chocolate flavor compounds during roasting and I briefly covered some of the component reactions. One of the reasons the Millard reaction is accelerated by lye is due to the deprotonation of nitrogen in the strecker reaction, this reaction produces the aldehyde necessary to perform the Millard reaction. Lipid peroxidation also occurs more readily at a higher pH, but I'm not sure about the ramifications of that reaction, and I would love to hear more.
Rocks and other ground minerals making water basic makes sense to me... Unglazed pots/cooking vessels Rocks heated and dropped into a vessel of water to quickly bring it to a boil without directly heating the vessel itself I learned a lesson the hard way when I was tiling a bathroom over the course of a few weeks... Regularly clean the wet tile saw reservoir and put in clean water or risk the evaporation and the whirling saw blade concentrating the solution over time. I couldn't figure out why I kept getting a rash where tile saw water had splashed until a day or two later and that same water began causing burning/stinging sensations within a few second of contacting skin...
Ahhh yes yes, I may still eat based cookies, but I do NOT free base c'caine! Well... Dude I didn't know century eggs were prepared with lye. That explains when I first went to SE Asia, Singapore specifically, I tried a century egg for the first time and I did not like it lol i immediately got this chemical type of taste, and that caused my lips and tongue to tingle and feel slightly numb for a while after eating it, and I couldn't figure out why haha However I did eat scrambled century egg and it tasted like plain ol eggs... Or was it in an omelette? Idr exactly. Speaking of, there's a breakfast place there that has an entire menu of eggs, like eggs cooked 60 different ways or something (idr the exact info there either). But if anyone finds themselves going to Singapore, or in Singapore at the moment, check out that egg joint. I think it's also built like a loft if I remember correctly. Super neat building design, and _the_ best eggs bene ever 🤙🏻🥚
Adam you've hit such a quality spot doing videos on food chemistry and anthropology. Most of food RU-vid boils down (pun intended) to how to do something. Appreciate you for offering something more. Loving it
Soft pretzels and lye rolls from (southern) Germany are my favourite bread product. Add some (unsalted hay milk based) butter and I'm happy. Perfect snack.
I think there are two possibilities to how alkali rocks could have been discovered. The first is cookery or vessels made out of this rock that leached alkali into water stored in it. The second is the technique of hot-rock boiling, where you heat rocks over a fire then drop the hot rocks into water to boil it, that way you can boil water in non-fireproof containers like wooden pots or leaves or fragile pottery.
Great video, Adam! Thanks! In my country, some people cook beans or maize in a mixture of different salts, primarily carbonates, mined from a salt lake. Does the lye break down phytates and fibre?
Havent watched the video yet. It could help in breaking down but is mostly done for nutritional value (niacin convertion to free niacin/vitamin B3). Also the fiber glue is broken down but not necesarily the fiber itself). Regarding phytate (if you mean phytic acid in the form of phytin) is broken down by an acidic environment (and just cooking) but much less in a basic environment
Thank you! This question occurred to me one day when I was on the island Iraklion and walking down a road with olive trees on either side with nets under them, presumably for the olives that drop. I am not fond of olives, but this was Greece and the olives were fresh and being from Canada, this was novel. So I picked one up, brushed it off and tried to take a bite. Uh! The guy from California who was walking to the beach with me laughed and told me they need to be soaked in lye before you can eat them. I was astonished - how had anyone figured *that* out? And you have answered my question, 40 years later. Thanks!
I've always wondered why pretzels get coated with a lye solution, thinking that it might be toxic. Thanks for satisfying my one of my unanswered questions!
