Every day, billions of people perform vital, life sustaining chemistry right in their homes! Baking, frying, boiling, fermenting… all cooking is science, and the way it weaves into our lives and cultures makes it uniquely fascinating! Join us this week to learn why the heck there’s iodine in your salt, what happens if you forget where in the bog you buried your cask of meat, and why baking a cake at high elevations can be so frustrating!

Follow us on Twitter @SciShowTangents, where we’ll tweet out topics for upcoming episodes and you can ask the science couch questions!

And if you want to learn more about any of our main topics, check out these links:

[Truth or Fail]

Hartshorn salt:

https://www.thespruceeats.com/ammonium-carbonate-hartshorn-hirschhornsalz-1446913

https://library.ndsu.edu/grhc/foods/recipe/ammonia.html

Bog butter:

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/for-peat-s-safe-bog-butter-unearthed-with-turf-1.583009

https://www.nature.com/news/1998/040315/full/news040315-5.html

Turnspit: 

https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/05/13/311127237/turnspit-dogs-the-rise-and-fall-of-the-vernepator-cur

https://books.google.com/books?id=FVF_PhTjK7cC&pg=PA316#v=onepage&q&f=false

[Fact Off]

Iodine in salt:

https://www.nber.org/papers/w19233

Hank’s notes: https://docs.google.com/document/d/13t4UeMlNg5bH3v1HpkixBa_PYT6AB8NtCFqIBEw9XQk/edit?ts=5cbfd777

Graphene vegetable oil:

https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-have-turned-cheap-cooking-oil-into-a-material-200-times-stronger-than-steel

https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms14217

[Ask the Science Couch]

Cooking at high elevation:

https://www.exploratorium.edu/cooking/icooks/article-3-03.html

https://extension.colostate.edu/docs/pubs/foodnut/p41.pdf

https://www.exploratorium.edu/cooking/bread/bread_science.html

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6098858/

[Butt One More Thing]

Baby poop meat:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0309174013005263?via%3Dihub

https://www.livescience.com/43465-baby-poop-sausage-probiotic.html

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