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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

It started with soup. Two colleagues were eating carrot and coriander. One liked theirs scalding hot. The other lukewarm. Why the difference in preference? And is there an objective optimal temperature for eating soup? I decided to investigate.

Partly the temperature at which food is served and consumed is governed by health and safety. Guidelines stipulate that hot food should be cooked to a core temperature of 75ºC and kept at 63ºC or above to prevent bacteria. But putting that aside, how does temperature affect flavour?

Nigella Lawson extols the virtue of tepid (carrying the “memory of heat”, as she puts it)

“Flavour is taste and smell,” says Dr Arielle Johnson, author of Flavorama: A Guide to Unlocking the Art and Science of Flavour (HarperCollins). “Regarding smell, heat makes flavour molecules more volatile. This increases the amount of molecules in the air and therefore aroma, which intensifies flavour. For maximum impact you want to release the aromas as close to eating as possible. That’s why you add lemon juice to a sauce at the end of cooking. Taste and smell reinforce each other, so the lemon in a dish tastes brighter when it also smells of lemon.”

“As for taste,” she continues, “at low and high temperatures, our taste perception is dampened. Warm foods around body temperature have the most taste. One important exception is spiciness: the higher the temperature, the spicier something tastes.”

Taste sensitivity is a factor too: where are you on the scale from super-tasters to hypo-tasters? “If you’re a super-taster, you might prefer very hot or cold food,” says Johnson, as tastes at extreme temperatures are muted. “The sweet spot for a hypo-taster might be warm.”

Pastry chefs, mindful of how cold temperatures dull flavour, amp up the sugar in ice cream. By the same principle, Johnson finds fermented fish overwhelming at room temperature but delicious cold: “If there’s a strong food you’d like to enjoy more, eat it cool,” she advises.

Part of the pleasure of piping-hot ramen is how flavour changes as it cools: rich in aroma when hot, burgeoning taste as it cools. Slurping helps cool the broth and push aroma molecules into your nose to bolster flavour.

Nigella Lawson extols the virtue of tepid (carrying the “memory of heat” as she puts it) for dishes like her nutmeg-scented custard tart. Nik Sharma urges warm for his cherry black-pepper cake because the higher temperature intensifies its spiciness. For most Chinese cooks, piping-hot remains the standard for everything from hot and sour soup to dumplings.

Piping-hot is a fixation among an older generation who grew up anxious about food poisoning

Piping-hot is also a fixation among an older generation who grew up without central heating and get anxious about food poisoning. Meat is requested well done for that reason. Anything pink is practically a death wish. The obsession with eating off hot plates surely springs from the same place. It chimes with a slightly old-fashioned way of dining from a time when chafing dishes were routine. As Johnson explains, heated plates are only necessary for foods that cool off rapidly and turn lacklustre. “Don’t heat your plates for really hot stews because they’re better cooling down,” she says.

Texture also plays a role. “If ramen gets even a bit cold, the broth starts to congeal and become sticky in the mouth. You taste the fat too much,” says Tim Anderson, whose latest book Hokkaido (Quadrille) celebrates a region renowned for its ramen. With ice cream, the opposite happens. As the fat liquifies and becomes silky on your palate, you experience what food scientist Harold McGee calls “the birth of creaminess”. Special mention goes to hot and cold combinations like apple pie and ice cream, where each bite delivers a variety of temperature, aroma and taste.

One key learning from Tom Jackson’s book Cool Pasta: Reinventing the Pasta Salad (Hardie Grant) is how temperature affects the qualities of pasta. The higher the temperature, the more readily it absorbs liquid or oil. Depending on its size and shape, this determines whether you need to rinse the cooked pasta (to drop its temperature and remove excess starch) before dressing it.

Often, though, personal taste trumps good sense. I like cold pasta despite Jackson’s warnings against it. Cold pizza and cold bolognese offer comparable pleasures, not least in the umami sweetness of chilled cooked tomatoes. There’s also shameless pleasure in eating at the fridge door, when it’s just you and the food and instant gratification.

Of course, the temperature at which we eat food can also be a matter of habit and convenience. Anderson may be a ramen aficionado, but when eating packet ramen at home he prefers his warm rather than scalding so he can hoover it up faster. “I’m hungry and in a hurry,” he says. There’s a lot to be said, too, for his ritual of pairing steaming-hot tomato soup with a grilled cheese sandwich: “I dip the sandwich in the soup and by the time I’ve eaten most of it, the soup is cool enough to slurp,” he says. The second law of thermodynamics put to excellent use. 

@ajesh34

THOUSANDS of households across the UK will be able to claim free cash or vouchers to help tackle the soaring cost of living this winter.

From October 1, households will be able to get fresh help from a new pot of government funding under the Household Support Scheme.

The government has released £421 million which will be distributed between councils and then dished out to vulnerable residents over the colder season.

The pot of cash will be available from October this year until March next year.

This comes as the current scheme closes today, September 30, after the latest round of £421 million was used to help struggling households across the country.

The portion of funding each council gets is based on the size of the population, catchment area, and need.

This time Birmingham will receive the greatest share for instance, worth £12.8million.

Receiving the second largest share will be Kent, with £11million, and Lancashire will get £9.7million.

Not every council will receive as much funding as this.

The Isle of Scilly will receive the least amount of cash, worth £11,130.

The City of London will also be allocated £63,080, and Rutland £157,371.

Councils which have higher numbers of vulnerable households will get more cash based on demand.

Tower Hamlets, for example, is the most deprived area in London, and will get £3million.

How the cash gets distributed will be decided by each council, so what you can get will vary depending where you live.

Around £79million is estimated to be provided to the devolved governments in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland for them to decide how best to support their citizens.

What is the Household Support Fund?

The Household Support Fund was introduced in October 2021 by The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) to support households most in need.

The funding is distributed between councils, and they are then responsible for dishing out the cash on an application basis.

For example, Birmingham City Council have announced they will hand out free £200 cost of living payments to help its residents cope this winter, as one of its approaches to the fresh fund.

How do I apply?

In order to be eligible for help, you usually have to be in receipt of a council tax reduction or show proof of being in financial difficulty.

Each council has a different application process – so you’ll have to ask your local authority or find out via your council’s website.

Not all councils have decided how they will distribute the cash yet, so you may have to wait to get all the information.

To find out how to contact your local authority, use the gov.uk authority tool checker.

In the last round of funding, some residents received their share automatically, while others had to apply.

For example, Haringey London Council is issuing automatic payments to eligible residents, as well as a support fund which can be applied to.

It is also issuing payments to schools, which means they can distribute free school vouchers.

In previous years, other authorities have offered cost of living vouchers – such as Coventry City Council.

This has included a Community Supermarket scheme, where all Coventry residents could pay £5 weekly and receive a basket of food worth up to £25.

Residents of Effingham, near Guildford, have been able to claim up to £300 free cash to help with the cost of living crisis.

Surrey council previously poured £300,000 into food banks, where photo ID and proof of address is required, but no referral needed.

While some schemes, such as the Surrey Crisis Fund, which can offer up to £100 to those immediately in need, are reserved for those who also rely on other means-tested benefits.

What else can we expect from the new government?

The Household Support Fund was introduced by the Conservative government in 2021.

This year, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Liz Kendall MP, said:

“We have invested an extra half a billion pounds in the Household Support Fund to give struggling families and the poorest pensioners the help they need this winter.

“As local authorities across England deliver this lifeline support to help households with the costs of feeding children and heating homes, we are continuing our work to fix the foundations of our country, grow the economy and deliver opportunities for people to get work and get on in work, so everyone feels better off.”

The Labour government is set to announce a new scheme which they have named The Child Poverty Taskforce.

The information for this will not be published until Spring 2025, however the government have promised to regularly engage with people, communities, and organisations to help shape the strategy.

What other help can I get?

Many energy companies are offering help to those struggling to pay their bills this winter – especially pensioners, as their Winter Fuel Payments are set to be slashed.

This comes as Rachel Reeves announced a £22bn black hole in public spending, making a controversial cut to winter allowances for pensioners not receiving universal credit or any other means-tested benefit.

Follwing the announcement, Octopus Energy has introduced a new scheme, offering pensioners discretionary credit of between £50 and £200.

As well as this, Scottish Power’s Hardship Fund has handed out more than £60 million to all struggling customers.

Help is available if you receive from a long list of benefit schemes, including Income Related Employment and Support Allowance or Income Based Jobseeker’s allowance. 

You may also be eligible if you are facing circumstances impacting your earnings, such as illness. 

Another company offering help is Utilita – which offers grants to customers to help clear or minimise energy debt.

The scheme operates through Utilita Giving, which is the company’s charity partner. 

Utilita Giving also partners with other charities such as IncomeMax, which helps customers make sure they are claiming what they are entitled to, and Let’s Talk, which provides replacement white goods.

Meanwhile, Utility warehouse offers payments of up to £140 to customers about to go in debt, or are currently indebted. 

The team has helped 6,000 customers increase their combined disposable income in the last year by £9 million. 

To find out if you are eligible for any of these schemes, visit their websites and review the conditions of applying.

Via the website you will find information on how to apply – saving you huge amounts of cash this winter in just a few steps.

Do you have a money problem that needs sorting? Get in touch by emailing money-sm@news.co.uk.

Plus, you can join our Sun Money Chats and Tips Facebook group to share your tips and stories

Epic Games has accused Samsung of making it too difficult to download its massively popular video game Fortnite on certain mobile devices.

In a legal complaint it said it would file on Monday, it says people have to go through “21 steps” before they can play the game on a new Samsung product, including viewing security warning screens and changing settings.

Epic claims this means 50% of people who try to install the game on these devices give up before they complete the process.

It says this process takes 12 steps, rather than 21, for other Android phones and tablets.

Epic has blamed a Samsung feature called Auto Blocker for the issue, which is turned on by default on Samsung’s latest products.

The tool is intended to block “malicious activity” and prevent app installations from unauthorised sources.

But Epic claims Auto Blocker is affecting Fortnite downloads, and says that goes against competition laws.

Apps on Samsung or Google’s stores can be downloaded in just a couple of clicks, as the firms have already approved them.

But Fortnite must be downloaded from Epic’s own store – which triggers Samsung’s Auto Blocker feature to kick in with warnings about it.

Epic claims both Google and Samsung know Fortnite is a legitimate app, and so there should not be any warnings flagged.

That’s because it used to be available on Google Play – the official app store for Android-powered phones – and Samsung has even previously collaborated with it, running Fortnite competitions and creating digital skins for the game’s characters.

The BBC has approached Samsung and Google for comment.

Fortnite’s developer has previously taken Google and Apple to court over disagreements about the way the tech firms operate their app stores.

The game returned to EU-registered iPhones in August after Apple was ordered to open up its app marketplace, but it still can’t be played on iOS in the UK.

Epic boss Tim Sweeney said he was “very sad” to be initiating more legal action.

“The fight against Samsung… is new, and it really sucks,” he said.

“I did not think we would end up in this place.”

He claimed Epic would have “made a lot more money” had it chosen not to pursue its previous legal action, but said he wanted to create a “truly level playing field” for developers.

The game developer says it wants Samsung to introduce a process by which all legitimate third-party app developers can apply to be whitelisted from Auto Blocker but is has been unable to reach an agreement.

Fortnite was removed from Apple and Google’s app stores in 2020 after Epic introduced its own in-app payments system.

And the developer won a lengthy court battle against Google over app store dominance in December 2023, with a jury deciding that Google had been operating a monopoly.

Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Renewable energy sources are generating a record percentage of the world’s electricity. With nearly a third of the world’s total coming from cleaner sources, installations of wind and solar facilities are also growing at record rates.

The lack of power grids to support this rate of growth means that a large chunk of this electricity may start going to waste. A surge in power demand fuelled by artificial intelligence-related sectors could supercharge a buildout of the world’s transmission networks — and that will boost key suppliers of the kit needed.

Almost 3,700 gigawatts of new renewable capacity is expected to come online over the five years to 2028 around the world, according to the International Energy Agency. In Asia, companies are starting to invest heavily to get power grid infrastructure up to speed to meet this new capacity as demand from AI-related sectors offers the prospect of a quick pay-off.

Operating and training generative AI services is highly energy-intensive. AI data processing requires significantly more power than traditional data-centre activities. Some studies estimate that generative AI systems use about 33 times more energy than machines running task-specific software.

Justifying the investment decision to build out grids has become easier, given that near-guaranteed demand. Japan’s largest electric utility company, Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings, for example, will spend more than $3bn to build up its transmission infrastructure by financial year 2027 through its subsidiary Tepco Power Grid — tripling its level of investment.

This year, it launched a large-scale substation — its first in more than two decades — in Inzai, in the Chiba prefecture east of Tokyo. This coincides with the construction of several data centres in the area including by Google’ and Japanese IT group NEC.

A local beneficiary from the investment in power transmission and distribution networks is conglomerate Hitachi, whose power grids business makes hardware for electrical grids and load-dispatching systems. Recent earnings already reflect growing demand for power transmission solutions, with group net profit for the June quarter more than doubling to $1.2bn.

Shares of Hitachi are up 80 per cent this year, and trade at 26 times forward earnings — about triple the levels of two years ago. In the US alone, the grid connection backlog increased 30 per cent last year. As renewable energy capacity continues to grow, grid integration and energy storage solutions will become increasingly lucrative sectors.

june.yoon@ft.com