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Read More »I thought making ice-cream was pretty easy, but it seems that if you really want to get it right you have to take courses at the Gelato University, in Bologna, Italy.
Ice-cream making was one of the last thing I would have imagined required attending a university, but in reality thousands of students from all over the world study the art of making quality ice-cream at the Carpigiani Gelato University, in Bologna., every year. Gelato lovers, and entrepreneurs who want to learn the secrets of making great ice-cream and take it back to their homelands pay around €800 ($1,138) for a week of courses and accommodation at a nearby hotel. They attend technical lectures on traditional gelato-making techniques by veteran ice-cream makers, and take part in practical courses where they learn to use the world famous Carpigiani gelato machines.
Believe it or not, the Carpigiani Gelato University has been around for a long time, and as more people around the globe fall in love with the Italian gelato, it gets more students with each passing year. In 2011, the number of students has gone from 9,000 to 12,000 and for the first time in history, the number of foreign tourists has surpassed that of Italians.
Akane Niikura, 10, has passed the Sake Institute of Japan’s expert test even though she’s 10 years too young to even taste the traditional rice wine.
Akane was already considered a child prodigy in Japan, for her cooking skills, but now that she’s an official sake expert, her notoriety is expected to grow even more. Although it will be around 10 years before she is allowed to taste sake, the 10-year-old connoisseur can already tell what dish will complement a certain variety of sake, simply by smelling it and observing the way it clings to the glass. Her small nose proved so accurate an instrument that the Sake Institute of Japan had to acknowledge Akane Niikura as a sake expert, after she passed their tests without drinking a drop of rice wine.
As the daughter of a sake bar owner, Akane was always around different types of rice wines from various regions of Japan, and in time managed to tell them apart and learn what foods they best go with. After school, this amazing fourth-grader helps her mom in the bar by recommending sake to customers. Most of them seem pleased with her choices and that’s when the little girl feels happiest. When she grows up, she wants to be a sake bar owner, just like her mother.
As consumers turn to micro-products, the “mini” trend seems to affect all areas of our lives. We keep seeing ever-smaller telephones, computers, cars, and apparently fruits are no exception.
While they might look genetically-engineered, Pepquinos come from an ancient wild plant in South America, and are 100% natural. They are just 3-cm-long and 2 cm in diameter, but apart from their size, they look just like regular watermelons. But only on the outside, because once sliced, the juicy green flesh of a cucumber is revealed. They also have the crisp fresh taste of cucumbers and usually served in luxury restaurants, as appetizers, in summer salads, stir fried and even as a sorbet.
The rare Pepquinos were discovered and brought to Europe in 1987, by a Dutch company that later began producing them and selling seeds. They’ve only recently started cultivating them in the US and Asia, but their popularity in foodie communities is growing rapidly. The growth cycle of the Pepquinos plant is between 60 and 85 days, and a single string yields 60 to 100 fruit.
Peter Lardong, from Berlin, Germany, was the first man to produce a playable chocolate record that could be listened to and eaten once you got bored with it.
67-year-old Lardong invented his world famous chocolate records after he was fired from a local brewery. He tried using cheese, butter, beer, cola and sausages as materials for his unusual records, but none of them worked very well, but chocolate was a whole other matter. He uses cocoa, cocoa butter and lecithin to make his special chocolate, heats it in on the stove and pours it in specially made silicone molds. Once the disk is hard enough to be played, you can play it up to twelve times, and then it. I’m not sure you’ll be able to use the record player’s stylus after playing a chocolate record, but hey, at least you’ll have listened to the sweetest music on Earth.
Apparently, the chocolate record isn’t the only brilliant thing Peter Lardong has invented, in fact he’s been a regular at Berlin’s Patent Office for the last 30 years.
The last “world’s largest hamburger” weighed a massive 590 pounds, but that didn’t stop Brett Enright from blowing it right out of the water with an even bigger calorie bomb.
Enright, CEO of Juicys traveling barbecue catering service, first thought about attempting to make the world’s largest hamburger last December, while on vacation. He looked up the Guinness Record for the world’s biggest burger, and after a talk with Nick Nicora, co-owner of Ovation Food Services, he decided to try and beat it, at this year’s Alameda County Fair.
On July 2, at 5 am, Brett and his helpers started working on their fast-food monster, by preparing 600 pounds of meat, which they expected would shrink to 400 pounds, after cooking. Then they molded 340 pounds of dough into two buns, which after baking were covered with 50 pounds of cheese, 20 pounds of onions, 30 pounds of lettuce, 13 pounds of pickles and 20 pounds of mustard and ketchup (10 of each). The burger itself was cooked on a giant, mobile barbecue called The Outlaw Grill. This mean contraption spends most of the year on the road, traveling from NASCAR events to concerts and fairs, cooking up a storm wherever it goes. This huge burger was its biggest challenge yet.
It may not be the first of its kind in the world, but it is the first ice-cream truck for dogs in America, and pooches in the L.A. area have already grown to love it.
Patrick Guilfoyle, the man behind Phydough, came up with the idea of an ice-cream truck for dogs after seeing most dog-food manufacturers thought more about profit than the dogs eating their products. He wanted to bake wholesome, preservative-free cookies for dogs, and by combining his wish with the popular “gourmet truck” trend that’s sweeping the nation, he came up with Phydough – an ice-cream truck offering all kinds of delicious cookies and ice-cream for pooches.
According to the official site, Phydough uses only the finest organic ingredients bought from quality grocers like Whole Foods and local farmers’ markets, so while prices may seem a bit steep, you can rest assured your puppy is eating healthy. A scoop of ice-cream costs around $2.50, and you’ll have to spend $16 for 12 flavored cookies, but your dog will love you more for it.
