The food lab better home cooking through science ( PDFDrive ) 24

grocery.
•Aquafina:lessthan10ppm
•Dasani:approximately40ppm
•Tapwater:approximately60ppm
•Rochetta:177ppm
•SanBenedetto:252ppm
•Evian:370ppm
Itransferredallthewaterstocleanbottlesmarkedsimply
withnumbers,makingsuretonotewhichwaterwasineach
bottle.Thatway,whenIdroppedthebottlesoffatMotorino
—which I did without actually seeing Mathieu, lest I
unknowingly reveal any information, like Hans and his
trainer—Mathieuwouldhavenoideawhathewasworking
with.
Normally I systematically ignore the advice of my better
half, a PhD student in cryptography (that’s the study of
encryption,notthestudyoftombs),butthistime,Ishutup
andlistenedtoherforachange.Shesuggestedthatinorder
tofurtherdecreasebiasand,moreimportantly,toallowme
to participate in the tasting as well, she—an unbiased third
party—should rearrange the numbered caps on all the
bottles, taking note of which caps were moved to which
bottles.
The result: three levels of encryption involving three
different keys, none of which were useful on their own.
Neither myself, my wife, my tasters, nor our talented chef
would know which pizza was made with which water until
afterthetasting,whenmywifewouldrevealhowthebottle


caps were switched, Mathieu would reveal which bottle of

water was used to make each dough, and I would reveal
whichnumbercorrespondedtowhichbrand.
KeytoaGoodTasting#2:IntroduceaControl
The concept of a control is a simple one, but one that is
often overlooked. The idea is that you need to include at
least one sample in your tasting for which the answer is
already known. That way, you can be sure that the
experiment went according to plan and that your other
resultsarereliable.Inthecaseofadouble-blindexperiment
like this one, it means doubling up on at least one of your
samples.Iftheresultsforbotharethesame,thenyouhavea
pretty strong case that the experiment went according to
plan.
In this case, I doubled up on both tap water and Evian,
making a total of eight water samples. If the testing
procedures were sound, and our palates were as fine-tuned
as I believed them to be, the crusts made with the same
water should be ranked very close to each other in the
tasting.
KeytoaGoodTasting#3:KnowWhatYouAreAsking
(IsolateVariables)
In Douglas Adams’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a
teamofscientistsbuildsasupercomputerthatisfinallyable
to answer the Big Question: the Answer to Life, the
Universe, and Everything.The ultimate irony is that when
they’re finally given the answer—forty-two—they realize
thattheyneverreallyknewexactlywhattheywereaskingin