Below is a sample of the best entries to the Perth Good Food and Wine Show Competition - I will contact the winners by email and arrange to get your tickets to you.
The Winners (First name or initials only) are:
- Laura
- Kelly
- Simone
- Raymond
Congratulations!
The winning facts were:
- "Coffee, after roasting, continues to release carbon dioxide for several days"
- "Natural enzyme processes during digestion in the human body produce a normal blood level of formaldehyde of around 2.5 parts per million"
- "There are five known tastes: sweetness, bitterness, sourness, saltiness, and umami. The fifth is the most recently recognized basic taste of glutamates and nucleotides."
- "Diacetyl, which is produced by fermentation bacteria during coffee processing, gives a rich, buttery aroma!"
The other wonderful new bits of knowledge obtained included:
- "Consumed coffee on a daily or almost daily basis had a lower risk of the most common type of liver cancer.."
- "It's hard to believe, but Decaffeinated coffee contains caffeine. Although Decaffeinated coffee is five times weaker than regular instant coffee, and three times weaker than Coke, it still contains some caffeine"
- "Did you know that coffee was discovered by goats? According to an African legend, coffee was first discovered and brewed in Africa in approximately 800 A.D. According to this legend, an Ethiopian goat-herder, named Kaldi, was frustrated because his goats kept him awake at night. He decided to find out what made them so lively, and discovered that they were eating red berries from a tree which grew in the area. He collected a number of these berries and took them to a local abbot who was reputed to be very wise. The abbot and his monks first roasted and then boiled the berries. They had unwittingly brewed the first coffee! They drank it, enjoyed the taste, and found when they drank it at night that they could pray all night long."
- "According to a study conducted in Switzerland by the Nestle Research Centre (recently published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry), coffee has four times the antioxidant content of green tea. Coffee also contains more antioxidants than cocoa, herb teas and red wine. Robusta beans have twice the antioxidants of Arabica beans (although the difference is reduced once they pass through the roasting process)."
- "A Polish study has found that the five-minute drinking of 15.0 g of cappuccino coffee increased the amount of saliva, decreased xerostomia, and improved the ability of speech! No more dry mouth!"
- "Bananas were noted by Arab traders as small, about the size of a man’s finger, and so called them banan, which means “fingertips” in Arabic. The banana plant is the world’s largest herb and is often mistaken for a tree, but it does not have a woody trunk or boughs."
- "There are about 400 species of oak, though only about 20 are used in making oak barrels. Of the trees that are used, only 5% is suitable for making high grade wine barrels. The average age of a French oak tree harvested for use in wine barrels is 170 years!"
- "If you yelled for 8 years, 7 months and 6 days, you would have produced enough sound energy to heat one cup of coffee."
And my personal favourite (but didn't make it out of the hat when I wanted it too!)
- "Sphenopalatine Ganglioneuralgia - Brain freeze, was invented in 1994 by 7-Eleven to explain the pain one feels when drinking a Slurpee too fast."
