Monday, July 28, 2008

Night Thoughts

So Last night I was thinking before I went to sleep. (I do this a lot and find that time passes very quickly.) I was thinking about pickles and how on earth they get there color. Is it from the skins of the cucumber, the spices? Or is it because they put die in them...
here are some interesting things I found out today:
Pickles take on a vivid green color in the presence of high concentrations of copper. Some old pickle recipes call for heating the pickling solution in a copper kettle or for adding copper pennies or a "blue stone" (copper sulfate) to impart a bright green color. (This way can be poisonous!)
Because the chlorophyll present in the cucumbers is green to the human eye receptors. During the brining process to turn the cucumbers into pickles, the chloroplasts in the chlorophyll go through a chemical reaction making the entire pickle green. That's the scientific explanation.
And some places add green die :)

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