Cooking For Engineers

[Guest]

Greetings, all--I'm new here. Great site!

I'll jump in with a question about something that puzzled my spouse and me recently.

I purchased a brand of cereal new to us. Not one of the major, well-known brand names; more of a natural-foods company. Whole grain, no preservatives, organic, etc.

First time my spouse tried a bowl, he howled in surprise--"OMG, these raisins are like rocks!"

I checked them out myself--the ones I picked out from among the dry cereal flakes didn't seem stale or hard. I figured my housemate was exaggerating, overreacting...

But then I fixed a bowl for myself, and began chewing my first spoonful of cereal and milk. Ow! I had to agree--the raisins were rock-hard.

It seems that the contact with the milk was turning the raisins from chewy to quite hard. I would have guessed that contact with a liquid would soften, not harden, a raisin. I wondered if the liquid's temperature was the cause? (And this is all non-dairy milk, btw.)

But we've never encountered this with other raisins in cereals... I started wondering if other raisins in the more conventional brands are treated in some way that keeps them from hardening upon contact with cold milk?

Any hypotheses?

[Newshound]

[oops, this raisin post is mine, sorry--I didn't realize I wasn't logged in.]