I recently ran three unusual split tests:
1) Marinating peaches in red vs white wine;
2) Frozen vs dried roses; and
3) Fried vs baked pastry.
This post is part of my ongoing efforts to optimize my delicious rate and to promote advanced SEO thinking.
Clarification: This post isn’t teaching a specific SEO technique, rather it illustrates lateral thinking, which is a core part of advanced SEO. Lateral thinking takes inspiration from any souce- in one’s field or beyond it- and seeks to apply the ideas elsewhere, or in a new way. In this case, I took split testing and applied it to cooking. If you’re looking for a post sharing some delicious food ideas, read on. Otherwise, you’ve just gotten the SEO value in this post, and may want to read something else. [added 1:10 PM PDT 10/15 at request of author – Editor]
Let’s get to the food, shall we?
I mentioned the the delicious rate. This is the percentage of eaters who try the food and then ask for more. It’s partly qualitative, partly quantitative, and entirely made-up. What I didn’t make up is the split tests; have a look at the following pics.
Test 1: Marinating Peaches in White Wine vs Red Wine
For this test, I was curious to see what the effect of leaving peaches in wine would be. Would the wine just go sour in the fridge out of its bottle? Would the wine chemicals and peach react well, badly, or would nothing even happen?
Experiment description, aka recipe:
We cut the peaches into bite sized chunks – the more you cut food finely, the more flavor is released, in general – and put them into two glasses that were wide-open at the top. Wine experts say that the more air in your wine, the more the flavour is released; but being wine newbs, we have no idea how much difference this would have made.
Then we left this in the fridge for a few days.
It goes without saying that we controlled our independent variable and took peaches all from the same batch, bought at Jerusalem’s open air market, Shuk Mahane Yehuda.
Results
As it turns out, both white wine and red wine will absorb the peach flavour to a noticeable and pleasant degree.
The resulting wines still retain their original flavour, but are enhanced with peach flavour. Since the white wine flavour is less strong, the peach flavour was more noticeable there.
The red becomes less appropriate for pairing with red meat, but more plausible in my brain to pairing with fish. Perhaps a nice chunky salmon or grilled tuna steaks.
The white you can continue having with whatever you’d have paired it with before and enjoy it as a dessert wine even if it wasn’t previously.
Interestingly, the flavour exchange went both ways: the peaches also absorbed flavour from the wine and became alcoholized. Here’s what they looked like:
You can see the fruit that was in the red wine really changed colour drastically and looks like a beet.
The other one became quite a strong yellow from its original beige, though the overall difference was less noticeable.
I asked my friend Adam to drink and he enjoyed the wine as well, though he didn’t get to try the peaches because we ate them by the time he came over!
Test 2: What Preserved Best – Frozen Rose or Dried Rose?
In this experiment, the goal was to evaluate what difference it made to the preservation of a rose if you froze it or left it out to dry.
On the left is the dried rose and on the right is the frozen rose. I think both leaves are from the frozen rose, though I don’t remember well. In any case, it wasn’t long before the dried-rose’s leaves were no longer photographable, because just a little pressure crumbled them to green dust. (A post in itself: How to Manufacture PageR, err Green Pixie Dust…)
In the above shot you get a side-by-side closeup of the resulting rose heads. The left hand one shrunk noticeably and became darker, as a result of losing its water. The one on the right clearly remained healthier and even its scent’s traces faintly remained.
To similar effect, you can see that the roses’ stalks preserved very differently. The freezer-preserved rose maintained its original size while the dried one became noticeably thinner, lighter-colored and more fragile.
In sum, the choice between preserving roses (or flowers) by drying or freezing depends on what you want the final appearance to be. It’s plausible that you could freeze roses for a few weeks, take them out of the freezer, put them in water and enjoy them as if they were fresh. The dried appearance, however, has its own unique beauty as a recollection of past delight.
Test 3: What Crackles Better – Baked Pastry or Fried Pastry?
That’s a trick question! The answer depends on what dough you use.
Filo dough will crackle quite nicely after simple baking, for example. I imagine that its brittle nature probably does not lend itself well to frying, though I admit never having tried.
In this experiment, my wife and I prepared Shavuot Cheese+Mint Pastelles.
The lovely little triangles are a combination of cottage cheese, mashed-hardboiled egg (never thought I’d eat any!), and finely chopped mint leaves bundled into Moroccan cigar dough. (Moroccan cigars are mince-meat pastries rolled into a cylinder shape, then fried.) You cut the dough into long, narrow rectangles and put a little bit of filling in the middle then fold them over themselves into a triangle.
Here’s yours truly doing the folding:
For people who’ve rolled their own… sushi, you’ll know that it’s essential to roll tightly to get a good finished Shavuot Pastelle.
Here’s what the pastelles look like when they’re done being folded. Pro tip: Note the flour! That’s to avoid it getting all sticky.
Once the triangles are ready, put lots of oil into a very small pot/pan and get deep-frying! The point of a small-diameter pot (preferable to a pan) is to minimize how much oil you need.
You’ll probably have to change/replace the oil as it gets absorbed super fast and bits of filling seep out and burn, turning the oil black.
Once that’s done, you get finished Shavuot Pastelles that looks golden brown as so:
You’ll want to have paper towels handy to absorb the oil…
Anyways, this was all fine and good (and yuuuuuuuuuuuummy!), but what about the split test? Well, you can imagine that these things aren’t exactly health food, and besides which, you can’t have too many. Why not? You’re limited because you eat them with honey, and that’s easy to overdo.
So the result was that we had leftover pastelles, and here’s where the split-testing for delicious rate optimization comes into play. How do you reheat pastries that have gone soft since the original frying? Do you put them in the oven or back on the stove-top?
A delicious few pastelles awaiting an unknown fate at the end of my honey-drenched gullet. “Pick me, pick me!”
Well, we ran the a/b test and, um, we can’t publish the results. We kinda-maybe-perhaps… ate the losing combination … and the winning combination… and peer-review being the critical-thinking, challenging (and tastebud-less) institution it is…
Suffice to say, refry leftover Shavuot pastelles.
Summary for My Fellow ADHD Webheads
+ Wine + peaches = goooood
+ Frozen roses stay longer, like annoying Uncle Bob
+ Shavuot Pastelles + Honey = fried delicious
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