Whole Family Nutrition

Chemistry comes in handy in the kitchen!

I made some Indian Chili with Avocado tonight.  I love the recipe.  Isaac wanted some right after it was made, but it was still very hot.  So what did I do?

I added ice cubes of course!  But cooling with ice creates a problem: it waters down your food as it melts.

Science Lesson

If there’s one thing I’ve learned while studying free radicals and natural products in a laboratory, it’s that a standard freezer has a temperature of -20ºC.  But (and this is important) ice begins to melt at 0ºC.

So what?  Well, that means that you have 20 degrees of cooling power in an ice cube before it starts to melt!  Isn’t that amazing?!

Real-world Application

I put my neurons to work on Isaac’s quandary.  Because I care about the little guy, I didn’t want his chili to be watery, so I added six ice cubes immediately out of the freezer, stirred madly for ten seconds, then scooped the cubes into the sink.  They were a little melted around the edges, but were not that much smaller.  The magic?  His chili was the perfect temperature, but it wasn’t watery!  I put those extra 20 degrees of cooling power to work.

The bottom line for cooling without watering down

The bottom line is this: when you have hot soup, stew, or chili you want to cool down without watering down, add a lot of ice cubes, stir them in quickly, and then discard them just after they start to melt.  This way you get maximum cooling power with minimum wateriness.  Oh, and it helps if you have a lot of ice cubes on hand.

I should teach this concept to Isaac.  Naahh…It’s his bed time.  Maybe he’ll read this some day.