What surprising food facts have you only discovered recently?

[Meetmeunderthemoonlight]

Well I never!

For tonight's dinner I made salad, wholemeal pasta, tuna and dh made boiled eggs to go with it. Dh peeled the eggs and I watched him doing so as we chatted away (stay with me here) anyway, we sat down eating and chatting I looked down and my eggs had vibrant blue spots!!!!! Dh Googled and apparently red cabbage (was in the salad) can turn eggs blue!

This was all new to me at the grand old age of 45. Any fun facts you recently found out?

Edited to say it can be any fact. The title is mumsnet Ai

You can eat cashew fruit, @10UsernamesNotAvailableTryAnotherOne. It's a pleasant flavour with (imo) a weird texture.

The toxic part is the outer shell of the nut, which can give a nasty blistering rash if you handle it. The nuts have to be roasted to neutralise the poison.

I thought they grew on trees too until I saw few pineapples growing in someone's garden! 😂

Awesome! Cashews are weird! I never had the fruit. Ever since I found out how cashews grow I have always wanted to try it's fruit, but I couldn't find any for sale in Australia (at least my state). ☹️

Wild figs and some commercial types of figs are pollinated by tiny wasps, which can die inside the fruit. An enzyme breaks down the wasps, so there are no traces by the time the fig is eaten.

That 12 packets of Walkers Oven Baked crisps in one day has not, in fact, exceeded my calorie, fat or salt allowance! This was such an irrational thing to do, it would probably be better to have found my binge had been really bad for me. Because I've still got the craving, but need to leave room for actual food instead 😳

This has just made life so much clearer. I can no longer eat kale due to digestive issues, I have a really strong almost instant reaction to it. But I love and can eat broccoli by the ton load. I could not for the life of me figure out why I can eat broccoli but not tenderstem broccoli, I presumed it was just a different shape! This has been a lightbulb moment! Thank you.

On this note be careful of mushrooms raw in general. Various of the edible ones - not just shiitake - have a mild poison effect that needs denaturing in a cooking process. I found out to my severe cost one weekend

This is bollocks

THANK YOU FOR THIS! I made a carrot cake and brought it into work. A colleague asked me what the green bits were. I was confused. She was horrified. Nobody ate any of it 🥲

I have been baffled for years!

That unripe aubergines look exactly like eggs. I always thought the American “eggplant” was a weird name then you look at them and think - oh, fair enough…

bell peppers are all the same plant there just left on longer so there green,yellow then red depending on time left

All couscous is pasta though. Not just the giant stuff.

Like black, green, white and oolong tea — just different levels of oxidation.

Edited to add: matcha too

Yeah I found this one out a couple of years ago - crushed garlic, herbs and lemon on top of salmon fillets baked in the oven - it came out freaky blue green! That’s when I googled!

Also I had read somewhere that adding a tiny pinch of bicarbonate of soda to frying onions will help caramelise them much more quickly. It does… but if you add more than a very very tiny pinch it overdoes it, breaks them down far far too much and you get greenish slime. Not to be recommended.

I always wondered why Americans said eggplant. Mystery solved.

There is an utterly fantastic TV show (BBC together with a US broadcaster, I think) about the year of a fig tree in Africa that shows the wasp pollination in great detail.

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How about celery is the perfect diet food as you use more calories eating it than you gain from it (allegedly).

You need to tell her about prunes.
😂

Paprika spice is dried red pepper skin

Not necessarily. They produce ripe fruit in different colours: red, yellow, orange etc, depending on the cultivated variety. Green peppers are just unripe ones, which is why they don't taste as sweet as the others when eaten raw.

It's not the usual kale actually. It's a mixture between broccoli and Gai Lan which is sometimes referred to as Chinese Kale.

Fungi were previously classified as a branch of the plant kingdom. They got it wrong.

Incidentally, we humans share 50% of our DNA with daffodils.😂

It's semolina isn't it? Made from wheat but not actually a pasta.

'Forever chemicals'? What are those?

https://www.dwi.gov.uk/pfas-and-forever-chemicals/

per-and poly fluoroalkyl substances