Milk that has started to spoil may no longer be drinkable, but you can still use it up in cooking and baking without much to-do.

You might want to note, however, that milk tends to become more acidic as it ages. This normally isn’t too much of a concern to our stomachs, but if you’re using it for baking, you might want to fight off the acid using a pinch of baking soda.

If you’re using it to make any breads with yeast, I suggest tossing a pinch of baking soda in with your warm milk before measuring and adding the yeast. That gives the baking soda a few seconds to work its magic, and the yeast won’t be ‘injured’ by the shock of an acid bath. And with older milk, you might want to consider adding a little more sugar or honey than the original recipe calls for when proofing the yeast.

You might even be able to extend the life of a carton of milk by adding a pinch of baking soda a few days after purchase… by restoring the pH of the milk to its more alkaline state, you can help to ward off hungry bacteria that need a lower pH to thrive.

Of course, this won’t save that 2-month old carton of milk that mysteriously emerges from behind the orange juice and under the lettuce in the back of your fridge… but hopefully it will give you a way to use it up before then!

—- random facts for food geeks —

The optimum pH for the growth of yeast is right around 7… and fresh milk usually comes with a pH around 6.7. But spoilt milk can get down to pH 4.4, making for some very unhappy yeasties.

More milky geekery can be found at:

http://www.ilri.org/InfoServ/Webpub/Fulldocs/ILCA_Manual4/Milkchemistry.htm

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Yes, folks, when I looked up, it was our good friend Vince of infomercial and prostitute battery fame – you know, the spiky-haired guy with the power leave women almost speechless, able to say nothing but “ShamWow.”

And yes, my friends, I admit – the ShamWow guy left me speechless when I watched this commercial for the first time.

Not only does he have the ability to leave women saying only “ShamWow,” but we’re “all gonna love his nuts”… and he can do it with just one finger too. And not just that… he’s “gonna make America skinny – one slap at a time.”

Yup, I was speechless for three whole days pondering what was either sheer brillance on the part of the SlapChop marketing team, or the sheer luck they had if they hired him before his arrest.

And today, while poking through the blog of fellow okonomiyaki snob Cooking With Sean, one of my new favorite foodie blogs, I came across this. And I really… just… I…

Nope, there’s nothing more I can say.

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But most of the time, we don’t even know what’s in our food, let alone where it came from… so when there’s a peanut recall, even if we toss any peanut butter we have in our cupboards, we might not think to look at the labels on our salad dressing, frozen pad thai, or even our pet food.

I suppose this is, in large part, a consequence of our convenience-based society, the ridiculously large scale that food is produced on today… but at this point, it is a wholly unnecessary one. Today, the technology at our disposal that could allow us to know where our food comes from – be it the myriad ingredients from sources currently unbeknownst to us, or purchased from the weekend farmer’s market. The main roadblock preventing this today is not that it is impossible to create a way to track our food back to the farm, or even that it would be too costly to implement a real-time tracking system accessible to consumers.

What I fear will prevent this from becoming reality is the very real fact that the manufacturers’ ability to keep us ignorant of where our food is sourced from helps them to maintain their profit line. Were we to know how our food is sourced, the degree of homogenization, and the risk at which that places us and the integrity of our food supply, demands would be made for changes that would be a real cost to the large-scale food producers of the nation. And so long as it is simply optional for food manufacturers to provide this information to the consumer, it won’t be done on a large enough scale to truly be useful… for it appears that trade secrets are more likely to be a concern than consumer safety. Still, there’s no reason we shouldn’t get started.

But I’ll get into that another day, I suppose.

More about the recalls:

• Pistachios and Peanuts: Far too many labels to list
• Spices from Union International Food Co./Uncle Chen & Lian How Labels
• Organic Eggs: Kirkland and Safeway O Organic Labels

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Sorry, I just couldn't wait long enough to take pictures.

Pupusas and gorditas are typically made from the commonly available Maseca brand masa harina (in the US, at least): decent for making tortillas for wrapping tacos, etc., but something is lacking when it’s the focus of the meal. It’s the Pan – the brand of cornmeal used to make the arepa that makes them the golden standard of stuffed masa snacks.

In most of the nation, arepas are difficult to come by, but in Miami, I found arepas all over – at Don Pan, at the corner bodega, and even in the freezer section at Publix. I found them for breakfast, lunch and dinner, stuffed with scrambled eggs, beans, bbq pork, roast pork, sweet corn… while there are some traditional recipes, it seems that when it comes to arepas, you might be able to make anything work, so long as you have the right masa.

Random Facts:

Pan doesn’t undergo nixtamalization, the process used to produce most masa harina. To make most masa, corn kernels are cooked and soaked in an alkaline solution (like limewater). This helps to loosen the hull from the kernel and breaks down the bits of cell walls that we can’t digest to make the nutrients in the corn more available. The hull is discarded, and only the germ (the meat of the kernel) is used to produce masa. This is typically a good thing, since it increases the levels of niacin, calcium, iron, copper and zinc that our bodies can use, as well as killing off some of the bacteria and fungi that might be hanging out as well. However, those chemical reactions also change the kinds of proteins in the masa, and get rid of the hull too – changing the taste and texture of the masa.

Sadly, though, San Francisco is a largely arepa-less city: the sole vendor I’ve discovered in these parts is a tiny place called “Mr Pollo,” just south of the 24th St. BART station in the Mission. And while the arepas made on that greasy grill behind the counter are cheap and delicious, they only have arepas con queso… and their hours tend to be fairly unpredicatble.

So imagine my glee when on my first visit to the brand new Duc Loi Supermarket at 18th and Mission, I finally tracked down some Pan (aka P.A.N. Harina de Maiz), the flour by which Edhy’s mom swore when making her arepas. In the aisles of the I jumped up and down, then squealed and did a little giggly dance, much to the amusement of the friends with whom I was shopping for fixin’s for that afternoon’s tamale-making party.

So, after a fairly steady tamale diet of for the next several days, I was kind of masa-ed out… but when I rolled past the cheese selection at La Palma Mexi-catessen I knew that the time for my arepas had come, so I picked up a small 12-ouncer of some melty Oaxacan mozzarella and headed home.

Note that this was my first attempt at arepa-making, and more are certainly to follow – same arepa-making time, same arepa-making channel.

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1. Eat truck and be happy.
2. #fail.