Hi Reader
I just flew back from Boston after wrapping the final few episodes of my show, Flavor Forward.
The smoke from the wildfires in Canada tinted the light this warm, hazy yellow, which made filming trickier than usual. The video team's fix was almost more interesting than the problem: they tinted the color of the light inside the studio to match the natural light outside, which I learned made it much easier to color correct later in editing.
It was a good reminder that while the show is about cooking, there's a whole group of people behind the scenes who spend days editing and fine tuning every single episode to get it right. People sourcing ingredients and making sure there are swaps ready so we can do multiple takes if we need to. People timing every stage of prep so the final dish looks exactly how it should, based on the recipe as tested and written.
And when you're watching eight or ten minutes of a show pass by seamlessly on television, it's easy to forget how much work, and how many people, went into making it look that easy.
So thank you to everyone at America's Test Kitchen behind this show. It would not exist without you.
Last Sunday, I baked a plum cake to take full advantage of stone-fruit season. The bright blood-red juices of the plum bled through the cake in the most glorious way, creating a river-like pattern that made it even more enticing to slice through. I knew the red stains would be where the fruity flavors lay.
Our obsession with food colors has been around for a long time. And right now, the food industry is fighting one of its hardest battles yet: finding a natural red that works.
Everyone assumes this fight is about Red 40, the synthetic dye getting all the regulatory attention. But according to Kalsec scientist Christina Cuddihy, in an interview with FoodNavigator, the real problem child isn't synthetic. It's carmine, the deep red pigment made from crushed cochineal insects: stable through heat, stable across a wide pH range, stable for months on the shelf. Nothing plant-based has matched it yet.
Here's why: the natural reds we do have, like black carrot, beetroot, and elderberry, get their color from anthocyanins, and anthocyanins are moody. They hold their red only in low-pH, acidic conditions. Push the pH higher, and they drift toward purple, then fade. Beetroot has its own problem: under high heat, it oxidizes and browns, which is exactly what you want in plant-based meat and exactly what you don't want in a cracker or a candy.
So my plum cake's dramatic red bleed wasn't a fluke. It was pH and acidity doing exactly what food scientists wish they could bottle and keep stable for a long time.
Funny enough, that's not so different from what the video team was doing in Boston: chasing the same true color under conditions working against them. Turns out whether it's wildfire smoke or a hot oven, getting color right is never as simple as it looks.
xx
Nik
