pumpkinstrokemarrow

One such food is bread, a commodity on which I am fast becoming a barrack room lawyer. I have learned that one of the ways to get a good rise is to make a very wet dough, with the side effect that the finished bread has more water in it than it might otherwise. Also that one of the ingredients of the white English bread which I like is plenty of water and fast power kneading. With the same side effect. And then there are the evil food processors who simply want to make bread with as high a water content as can be managed as the combination of high water content and sell by weight translates into high profit margins. It seems quite likely that some of these processors use a blend of natural & organic additives carefully selected for the property of having both a declared innocuous & permitted function and an undeclared water take up & retention function.

It is also true that very dry bread is neither very palatable nor easy on the dentures. Bread needs to be a bit moist.

Another such food is sausage and I remember hearing on the radio, many years ago, about a butchers' trade show featuring a stand for a mincing machine which was guaranteed to increase the amount of water which could be packed into a sausage. The trick being to get the water in in such a way that it does not ooze out again while still in the shop. That might put the punters off.

Another trick, confined in Europe I think to the British Isles, is to include rusk in the recipe. Which sounds as if it might also help with water retention. Now it might well be that the proper English sausage that we know and love needs to have rusk in it. But it is also the case that a sausage made with lots of rusk and water is going to cost less to make than otherwise. To the point where baked beans sold with added sausage were, when I last looked, dearer than just baked beans.

Moving onto meat proper, I was impressed by a fact sheet, turned up by Google, from the US Department of Agriculture, to be found at http://www.fsis.usda.gov/factsheets/Water_in_Meats/index.asp - which struck me as a sensible overview of the whole subject. The Department does not appear to be wholly in the hands of the food processors. One fact therein relevant here being that meat is about three quarters water - and that if you drive too much of it out the result is not edible. But we do have the same conflict of interest that we had with bread: water is good and necessary but more water also means more profit.

And lastly there was the great formaldehyde scandal. It seems that if you treat your hay with formaldehyde your beef will hold a great deal more water, water which is only released during cooking. The result of which is that your roast beef is more boiled than roast and in any case ends up a good deal smaller than when you bought it.

A little more work with Google reveals that there is a huge literature out there on the subject of treating hay and silage with things like formaldehyde. Growing good cow is a very big business. As far as I can make out - a lot of the stuff turned up by Google being very technical - the idea of the formaldehyde is that it slows down the microbiological decay of silage leaving more grub in the silage for the cows. So you get more bang for your buck from the silage, which more seems entirely reasonable. But maybe the formaldehyde flavoured silage results in cows with more water, in which case we are back with conflict of interest.

Quite a lot of the technical stuff appeared to be for sale. You got an abstract for free but to get more you had to pay, which is not unreasonable. Someone has to pay to get the work done. But one of the more accessible things came from the New Zealand Journal of Agricultural Research, via Google Books, where the drill seems to be that you can read the thing on screen but you cannot print it off. At least, you can print but you have to print all 300 pages or so of the whole number of the journal, not just the 10 pages or so that you want. Maybe I need some extra tuition in the use of the print button.

As ever, the whole business more complicated than might be deduced from reading 'Orgo Food Weekly' (from the Poundbury Press, in the land of the Royal Grocer, by appointment to himself).

See: http://books.google.com/books?id=snHnP1twEPgC&pg=PA233&lpg=PA233&dq=formaldehyde+make+silage&source=bl&ots=FrCB-89ePB&sig=lb4qSx56fJ6SRh_sD2ZP8WmApIA&hl=en&ei=QDCUTfisApmAhAe26bXfCA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CCIQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=formaldehyde%20make%20silage&f=false