Science says if you cut the crusts off your bread, you might be ruining it
French scientists recently undertook what sounds like the best experiment ever: trying to find out whether crusts are actually good. It’s not any weird investment in crusts that makes us excited about this experiment. It’s the fact that in order to learn more about bread, scientists ate a lot of bread.
Specifically, they "purchased and baked for themselves a lovely selection of forty baguettes and put the crusty loaves into some lab equipment to characterize all of their volatile compounds."
Characterizing compounds, whatever. What we’re taking away from this is that a bunch of scientists found an academic justification to eat a whole lot of bread. Probably on the company dime, too. And we really support them in this endeavor. Even better (or worse, when we consider that we weren’t invited), they had nine people eat the bread while hooked up to a special detector.
They basically found that bread texture really impacts how good it tastes, and used the detector to monitor what volatile compounds people exhaled while chewing.
So yeah, let’s get the most important part of this venture out of the way. A bunch of French people sat in a room with machinery hooked up to their nostrils eating bread, in pursuit of finding out what bread tastes the best and why. This is the most stereotypical, comical experiment in history, and we’d like to thank the universe for it.
They also found that “greater muscular activity” while chewing “appears to release greater amounts” of the volatile molecules.
More or less: the more you have to chew, the better it is, so stop cutting your crusts off like a child and ENJOY YOUR LIFE.
This has been a PSA from the French.
