Category Archives: Kitchen Art & Science

Breville Juicers: A Kitchen Must Have

Fruit and vegetable juices are the healthiest refreshing drinks for everybody. People around the world are getting conscious with their health and the easiest way to have a nutritious and healthy drink is to have a juicing machine.

If you are interested in looking for the very best juicer offered in the market today, you should consider Breville Juicers and their many models available in all appliance stores. All their juicers have very strong motors and large food chutes. Fruits and vegetables are extracted fast and easy and the refreshing juices come out in just 5 seconds. Breville juicers feature high-speed motors to customize juicing speed for any particular fruit or veggies. They reduce your time in cutting and slicing fruits as the wide chutes can accommodate whole fruits and vegetables. They do the whole process of peeling, cutting, and extracting, so that not even a small amount of juice is wasted. In some of their featured model juicers have overload protection to alert you when the juicer is getting overload. This is a protection to insure the juicer’s non-stop operation and longer life.

Breville fruit and orange juicers are so simple and easy to clean. The parts are safe to dismantle and reassemble after washing. A cleaning brush is provided in all Breville juicer models so all food traps are eliminated. Recipe books are included in the box to give you juice ideas and on how to make use of the extracted pulps. They can still be mixed in your other cooking like soups, cakes, and cookies.

People are very particular with their food intake and everybody knows that fruits and vegetables are a must-have for our daily consumption. Take the best juicers that would make you satisfied for having one. Choose among the simple yet elegant models of Breville Juicers. They promise durable and excellent juicing performance.

Make Fresh And Healthy Nut Butter With Your Blender

A speed blender is undoubtedly the most versatile kitchen appliance that you will ever buy. Heck if it was down to the two most versatile things that you could find in a kitchen, then the spoon and the blender would probably end up in a tie with the kind of things that you can do with them. Today’s blender can do everything (and more) that yesteryear’s food processor could do. With Blendtec’s ‘Will it blend?’ series of internet videos showed that many things were possible.

Blendtec’s series involved putting popular consumer electronics inside one of their most powerful high speed blender and then giving it a spin to see if it would ‘blend’! Most of the times with disastrous results; for the iPod or cellphone that was in the blender that is.

As far as making soup in a blender is concerned, let me assure you it is all very possible. I can say it with assurance as I’ve used my own Vita Mix 1300 TurboBlend 4500 to whip up a quick batch of soup on more than one occasion. Just take hot water, add your vegetables to it and then sprinkle in a dash of salt and pepper and blend–piping hot soup is ready for your consumption.

While the above was all a testament to the immense power that these blenders wield, the recipe for making peanut butter is quite a simple task. Simply toss in about two cups of roasted peanuts, add a little peanut oil (half a teaspoon should do), add some sugar to taste and give it a few whirs. If you like your peanut butter crunchy, then you can add a few peanuts in after that and use the pulse mode on your blender or a low power setting until you get the consistency you are seeking.

Yogurt with probiotics

There is no question that yogurt is good for you. However, you should know what is in this dairy product that you consume. This nutritious treat that dates back to centuries ago is rich in potassium and calcium, low in sugar and fat and contains natural microorganisms that are beneficial to the digestive system. Known as probiotics, these live active cultures are simply good bacteria.

Dannon, the Paris-based food company behind Activia®, one of the familiar names in yogurt, notes in its official website that probiotics, as defined by the World Health Organization is “a living microorganism that, when administered in adequate amounts, confers a health benefit on its host”.

Sounds good, right? But before anything else though, let me ask you these two questions: what is considered an “adequate amount” of probiotics? And, what are the benefits of yogurt with probiotics?

Activia® is a yummy low-fat yogurt that contains friendly bacteria. The key ingredient is DN-173010 which has been claimed with a trademark status by Dannon, being indicated in its US labels as Bifidus regularis. As part of a healthy lifestyle, the same site recommends consumption of 4 oz Activia® daily for a couple of weeks, the adequate amount and period in order to start experiencing its positive effects on the digestive system. These benefits include regular bowel movement and the relief of constipation and diarrhea, among others. Apart from this, additional benefits are ridding the body of toxins and maintaining good health.

So what is this Bifidus regularis exactly? This name is coined by Dannon and it varies in the different countries where the product is available. More important to note, however, is that this bacterial strain is a sub-species of Bifidobacterium animalis which is found in the large intestines of mammals, including humans. It is considered an effective probiotic since it is able to withstand the gastric juices in the digestive tract from the stomach down to the small intestines, until it reaches the large intestines where it works its magic.

On an interestingly related note, in his March 2008 article on individual probiotic bacteria, Matthew Hogg discussed a study conducted at Finland’s National Public Health Institute. In this research it indicated that probiotic bacteria, when used singly are more effective in boosting the immune system as opposed to when several strains are used in combination.

So the next time you grab a yogurt, enjoy but do read the label. Make sure that it is one which contains high-quality probiotic to make it a tasty yet nutritious respite.

Lactococcus is here to stay!

There was a great story recently on National Public Radio about the Wisconsin state legislature passing a bill to name the first state microbe: Lactococcus lactis.

States commonly have a state flower, animal, bird, song, even a state dance, but this is thought to be the first time that a state has named an official microbe.

Lactococcus are cocci bacterium, which means that the individual bacterial cells have a circular shape. Cocci bacteria species can be solitary or they can cluster together. If they group, they can form chains like little pearl necklaces or bunches like grapes. Lactococcus groups in pairs and short chains.

This bacterium has been important in human culture because it thrives on milk sugars (lactose), using the sugar as energy and producing a waste product of lactic acid. Normally this might be a bad thing, but some prehistoric culinary genius discovered that not all was lost if her milk was spoiled by this bug.

By producing lactic acid as part of its digestive activities, the pH of the milk was lowered (becoming more acidic) which causes the milk proteins to curdle, or clump together, thus separating the curd from the whey (the part of the milk that stays liquid). A similar result can be obtained by adding other acids to the milk, such as stomach acid, and it may be that the first curdling was done when milk was stored in a bag made of an animal stomach.

However it happens, separating the solids out of the milk is almost always the first step in the production of cheese. From this step different ingredients are added to make the wide variety of cheeses that we enjoy today.

So it makes since that the Wisconsin legislature recognized the importance of this little “bug” to their state’s economy. In fact, as pointed out by Elio Schaechter of the microbe blog Small Things Considered, we could live without the state animals, but we really could not live our lives without the microbes.

NPR invites people to auggest other appropriate state microbes. You can put your vote in at NPR (include microbe in the subject line of your email). Leave your vote here too. Which microbe is most important to your region?