Four tips in under 3 minutes. The first tip is about how to improve the taste of bitter coffee. The second tip is about how to ripen green bananas quicker. The third is how to soften that hard cookie. And finally, learn how to get rid of the rust on that cast-iron skillet you left out without scrubbing forever. Another quick and fun video from the American Chemical Society. We added a tip in the text below the video on keeping produce fresher for a longer time.
Of course coffee gets bitter if it's left on the heating element too long. But if it comes out bitter just after you made it, it's because the water was too hot. A way to correct bitter taste is to add a pinch of salt. Since one of the big problems with the American diet is too much salt we think a better solution would be to use water that's a little bit cooler to brew your coffee. But sometimes that's not an option and this can improve the coffee's taste. Just be sure you limit the salt as much as possible.
The second tip is how to ripen green bananas quickly. And we love bananas. A great way to speed up their ripening is to put them in a brown bag with ripe tomatoes. As fruits and vegetables ripen they put out a gas called ethylene. Ethylene causes them to ripen even quicker. Ethylene collects in the brown bag and can double the speed of ripening of the bananas.
Something not mentioned in the video is a way to keep your produce fresher longer. This is also based on what ethylene does to fruits and vegetables. It works just the opposite of placing the fruits and vegetables in a brown bag. Shaped like a little blue apple, it absorbs ethylene so the fruits and vegetables don't ripen as quickly. Put it in your food container or crisper and the produce will last much longer – up to three times as long as they would otherwise. And you can just put the inner packet in a house plant or outdoor plant as fertilizer when it is full after 3 months. If interested, find it here at Amazon.
The third tip is how to save cookies that dried out and got hard. Just put the cookies in a plastic Ziploc bag with a fresh piece of bread. The cookies will absorb the moisture given off by the bread and soften up.
The final tip is how to get rust off the cast-iron skillet you left out overnight without scrubbing for hours. Pour some Coca-Cola on it and let it sit for a bit. Coca-Cola has phosphoric acid in it. The acid is in the drink to add a little tartness to counter the sweetness of so much sugar. But the phosphoric acid is strong enough to react with the rust and produce ferric phosphate. You can then just wipe off the ferric phosphate.
If You Are Looking For Food Tables
If you're looking for tables of high potassium foods, including the amount of potassium they have, you can click on the List of Posts tab at the top of the page. Look for the food group that your food would be included in and look for the word “table” in the link. Clicking on that link should take you to the post that has the table you're interested in.
