Food Uses
Lye is used to cure many types of food, such as lutefisk, black olives, canned mandarin oranges, hominy, lye rolls, century eggs, and pretzels. It is also used as a tenderizer in the crust of baked Cantonese moon cakes, and in lye-water "zongzi" (glutenous rice dumplings wrapped in bamboo leaves), in chewy southern Chinese noodles popular in Hong Kong and southern China, and in Japanese ramen. In the United States, food-grade lye must meet the requirements outlined in the Food Chemicals Codex (FCC), as prescribed by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Lower grades of lye are commonly used as drain openers and oven cleaners and should not be used for food preparation.
Read more about this topic: Lye
Famous quotes containing the word food:
“The female of the genus homo is economically dependent on the male. He is her food supply.”
—Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935)
“We can come up with a working definition of life, which is what we did for the Viking mission to Mars. We said we could think in terms of a large molecule made up of carbon compounds that can replicate, or make copies of itself, and metabolize food and energy. So that’s the thought: macrocolecule, metabolism, replication.”
—Cyril Ponnamperuma (b. 1923)