What have you been eating, drinking, and cooking?

First, What's Eating Dan? videos from America's Test Kitchen are must-watches for the aspiring home chef. He really breaks down cooking techniques and principles. Today's recommendation is The Science of Ginger: Why and How it Burns and Its Impact on Cooking. Interesting tidbits:

• The compound gingerol fits in our spicy-detecting receptors but not perfectly, which produces a mild spicy sensation that's less intense than capsaicin from peppers.
• In dried ginger, gingerol loses its water molecule and becomes another compound, shogaol, which fits in those receptors better, producing a more intense spiciness (but still less than capsaicin).
• When you cook ginger, some of the gingerol breaks down to zingerone which fits in those same receptors more poorly than the original gingerol, producing an even less intense spiciness!

So, in short, how you prepare ginger fundamentally changes its properties!

Anyway, I have a confession: I love fancy bougie salads from Mixt, Sweetgreens, and their verdant ilk. But what I don't love is shelling out $20+ a salad.

So I've been working on making my own salad clones! I've been working on cloning Mixt's Mandarin salad: spring greens, chopped romaine lettuce, candied pecans, sesame, julienned carrots, all dressed with a miso-ginger sauce, and topped with juicy mandarin orange slices and warm sliced chicken. I've done two iterations and it's about 70% as good as Mixt's. A few more iterations and it'll get there. 😉