Graphic Showbiz Logo

Advertisement

human hair

What don’t you know?

HMMMMM. The past week and a half hasn’t been the same. Emotion-stricken, grief-incised mental wounds have continued to gape painfully in our hearts and minds. Agh, Major Mahama, safe journey to the land of peace and eternal life. You are indeed a hero. Hmm.

I know it’s a bit late in the day, but let me still take this opportunity to wish well, all BECE candidates. You have done your bit, God will do the rest. Finish haaaaaaaaarrrrrd!

Let me try to spin the yarn of the day. My search for doughnut recipes have led me to a serious discovery. At a point, I wished I hadn’t researched at all. But all the same, it’s good I did.

Lately, Naa Atswei and Nii Friday’s apetite for ring doughnuts have increased. It was becoming a source of concern. Being a frugal me, I sat back and calculated how much I spent on that savoury each week and found I would be better off learning how to make the fried dough myself. Thanks to YouTube.

In fact, these days I frequent that site to learn loads and loads of good stuff. I have learnt to make ring doughnuts from that site. Ingredients given were simple: flour, nutmeg, yeast, eggs, milk, sugar, salt, margarine.

I must confess, the output of my first attempt felt more like ringed stone nuts – haaaaaaaard!!! Each hardened fried dough reminded me of a nick-name we gave a mate of mine at the secondary school – Stone T3t3.

Our seniors used to complain that he had a stone-face so they nicknamed him Stone. His surname was Tetteh. They chose to break the name into two – “Teh Teh” and pronounced it in a Ga accent (T3 T3). T3 literally translates as “stone” in Ga.

Oh my debut “Stone T3T3” doughnuts. Obodai and his children teased me so much, I almost wept. But well, I encouraged myself and gave another go at the experiment a week after.

This time around, I wanted to really leaven the dough (I needed softer rings) so I added more yeast than was needed and everything got bitter. Hm. My doughnut wahala!. I didn’t give up.

My third try was anything a Home Science Mistress could mark as 9/10. They turned out soft, tasty, crunchy and very appealing. The 32 pieces of large doughnuts didn’t last two days.

I know the more I practice making the doughnuts, the better I will become. I shall be an expert. To think that I spent only Ghc23 buying the ingredients! If I were buying the savouries from the shops I usually buy from, I would have paid Ghc64.

Meanwhile, mine are tastier than theirs. In fact, some of these caterers are reaping their profits off us in no small measure.

In the evening of yesterday, my ambitious self began to watch on YouTube and read from other sites, how to make bread rolls (dinner rolls). You see, from what I gathered from the doughnut experience, I fathomed that making the rolls wouldn’t be too different from the ringed nuts.

I was shocked at what I found from a few websites: that some ingredients used in bread preparation by some bakers were actually derived from human hair. I almost threw up at the thought.

Human hair, how? The articles explained that some bakers use amino acids (L-Cysteine) in their bread and these are made from hairs gathered from salons and the floors of barbering shops. I find it so ridiculous.

How?
As elucidated by them, those acids prolong the shelf-life of bread. To quote one of the articles, “the hair—mostly gathered from hair salons in China, it seems—is dissolved in acid and, through chemical isolation, the L-cysteine is isolated, packed up and shipped off to commercial bread producers”.
Agh, aaaaagh, aaaaaaagh. Someone should please tell me this isn’t true. May it not be that this infamous amino acid is owned by any baker in this country. Aww.

In fact, I am in a state of denial, trying to believe that the bread being referred to in those articles pertain to foreign bread only. But come to think of it, if any of those amino acids are being used by our local bakers then many are we who have eaten human hair extracts… eish!

What at all is it about bread and its preservation that makes some bakers go to all lengths to put humanlives at risk. Eh? Sometime ago, it was formalin. Yes, some bakers in this land turned themselves into what I call “bakery pathologists”, and were using formaldehyde to preserve bread to be eaten by humans. Did not some others use Potassium Bromate in their bread too?

Meanwhile, research had shown that Potassium Bromate had been found to promote the onset of tumours in the kidney and thyroid. How wicked can some humans be?

What else are we not eating from our shops, both great and small? Sometimes, in the name of profit-making, some caterers/bakers/cooks put all sorts of dangerous substances in their meals. How can we keep safe and secure from these powders and liquids? And who was it who added dye to palm oil?

Can I tie the knot on this yarn and not mention how Saccharin, an artificial sweetener, has been used in the production of some soft drinks? All sorts of dangerous diseases have been linked to this sweetener’s consumption.

Oh, sometimes living in a modern world is so difficult. What else are we consuming that we do not know? Is it the plastic rice that’s been found out or the synthetic cabbage made in China?

Don’t let me talk about the artificial eggs found on some markets now. Hm. What else aren’t we eating?

Writer’s email: [email protected]

Connect With Us : 0242202447 | 0551484843 | 0266361755 | 059 199 7513 |