Food

How Traditional French Butter Is Made In Brittany / Food Insider

Insider’s Claudia Romeo travelled to Brittany, France to meet with Jean-Yves Bordier, a butter artisan who brought back to France the 19th-century technique of malaxage, using a big wooden wheel to knead the butter. To Jean-Yves, the malaxage is a more romantic way to make butter. At his workshop, everything is churned, kneaded, and shaped by hand — via Youtube

Art, Food

Gingerbread Xenomorph / Caroline Eriksson

Norwegian artist Caroline Eriksson just finished an epic sculpture of the xenomorph queen from Alien, made of gingerbread. The sculpture is built over an iron structure, held together with sugar syrup. The gingerbread is baked and then bent over curved surfaces while still warm to achieve the proper shape for each piece. The finished product is quite edible, but if not eaten, it will retain its shape for months — via Neatorama

Food

Library Cake / Kathy Knaus

The combination of a good book and a slice of cake are arguably the height of decadence, as this amazing Library Cake by Kathy Knaus clearly illustrates. Featuring both the exterior entrance to the library and the book-filled interior, the cake functions as a surprisingly accurate diorama of a beautiful library — via Make:

Business, Food

Vegemite bought by Bega from US food giant Mondelez International

Vegemite is set to return to Australian ownership after dairy company Bega announced it would buy most of Mondelez International’s Australia and New Zealand grocery and cheese business.

Bega, in a note to the Australian Stock Exchange, said it would use bank debt to fund the $460 million acquisition.

The deal does not include Philadelphia products but will see Australian ownership of Kraft-branded products, including peanut butter, cheeses and mayonnaise — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Food

Ribbon Candy / Lofty Pursuits

Public displays of Confection use a very old ribbon candy machine to finally make some nice ribbon candy just before Christmas 2016. This batch was cherry, but they’ve made tutti frutti, and peppermint too. Lofty Pursuits makes candy on equipment made from the late 1800’s until the modern day. They concentrate on finding and restoring old candy equipment and re-learning the dying art of hard candy making — via Youtube

Food, Technology

Sundrop Farms pioneering solar-powered greenhouse to grow food without fresh water

A groundbreaking greenhouse that relies on sunlight and seawater to grow tomatoes officially opens next week, 300 kilometres north of Adelaide.

The company Sundrop Farms spent several years developing the idea at a pilot plant on the outskirts of Port Augusta, before building a commercial facility that is 100 times larger.

This is a very special project, head grower Adrian Simkins said.

The 20-hectare futuristic-looking facility includes a field of more than 23,000 mirrors that capture the sunlight and direct it to a central receiver at the top of a 127-metre power tower.

At its peak it produces 39 megawatts of thermal energy, which is used for electricity, heating and making water.

All the water used for irrigating the crops is piped from the Spencer Gulf and converted into fresh water using a thermal desalination unit.

Mr Simkins has spent more than two decades running tomato greenhouses in Europe and North America and says the desalinated water is first-class.

It’s almost the perfect water, he said.

You’re taking all the salt out of it, there’s no disease aspects, it’s very pure and then we’re able to enhance it with the nutrition that the plants require — via redwolf.newsvine.com

Food

How to make Chinese traditional Nanshan noodles

The kind of Chinese noodles exists for more than 300 years, but only 300 people know the process for how to make it. The character who still keep making this kind of noodles for 30 years, that become the master of Nanshan noodles — via Youtube

Food

Pounding Mochi with the Fastest Mochi Maker in Japan / Great Big Story

Mitsuo Nakatani is a mochi master, and to watch him do his work is a genuine thrill. Turning sticky rice into Japan’s traditional soft and chewy treat requires pounding, flipping and smashing the glutinous rice at high speeds in perfect coordination with a team. While visitors come to Nakatani’s mochi shop to taste the best, they stay to watch him make it — via Youtube

Food

Rainbow Roll Cake / Spoon University

The rainbow craze is crazy, but this recipe is amazing. With only two drops of quality dye, vibrant rainbow colours in yummy moist white cake can make anyone happy — via Youtube

Food, Wildlife

Candy Cats Dozing under a Candy Kotatsu / Caroline Ingalls

A kotatsu is a piece of furniture from Japan. It’s a table with a heater under the bottom and a blanket along the edges. You can sit at the table to warm yourself during chilly winter.

That’s what these cats doing. Caroline, a maker of candy cats, made these adorable and edible kittens — via Neatorama

Food

Candy Canes / How It’s Made

Candy canes are delicious holiday treats that comes in all shapes and sizes. See the carefully choreographed production process in this How It’s Made video — via Youtube

Food, Wildlife

Honey Fences

Edible Geography readers have perhaps heard of pollinator pathways, an initiative to thread together isolated pockets of green space into nectar-filled corridors, in order to give butterflies and bees easier passage across otherwise unfriendly urban expanses of concrete and asphalt. A recent article in British Airways’ High Life magazine about efforts to save Kenya’s last remaining elephants introduced me to an interesting twist on the concept of bee-based landscape design: honey fences.

Although the main threat to the elephants’ survival is ivory-market driven poaching, a significant number are also killed each year following altercations with local villagers. As Angela Carr-Hartley, director of the David Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, politely put it, These communities have mixed feelings about an elephant coming into their smallholdings overnight, as they can wreak havoc eating the crops.

Zoologist Lucy King came up with the honey fence solution, which takes advantage of the fact that elephants are terrified by the sound of bees. (The delicate skin inside their trunks is apparently particularly vulnerable to being stung.) King had read that elephants tend to avoid acacia trees, usually a favourite food, if bees have built a hive in the branches. Based on that initial insight, and after several years of behavioral experiments, including playing elephants the sound of disturbed bees from a hidden loudspeaker and filming their reaction, King developed the honey fence system: a series of hives, suspended at ten-metre intervals from a single wire threaded around wooden fence posts. If an elephant touches either a hive or the wire, all the bees along the fence line feel the disturbance and swarm out of their hives in an angry, buzzing cloud — via redwolf.newsvine.com