Ask Allie!
Ask Allie is our food-related advice column, where you can ask all your fermenting, cooking, baking, and pantry-related questions to get digestible answers! No question about food is off limits!
Most of you will receive an emailed reply prior to your question hitting the blog, since I frequently think you need a more immediate answer. You should anticipate 1-2 weeks between submitting your question and its appearance on blog. Although emailed replies normally take between 1-3 days, it can take up to a week.
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Why do you always spell “woah” wrong in your articles? It’s spelled “whoa,” and seeing you not know this undermines your credibility to me.
— A few of you
First: you guys can email these questions directly to me if you have them; I will not be offended or upset! The only reason I know some of you are emailing about this is because Sabrina tells me when they come in. I opted against addressing this formally until enough of you had commented to her for me to see you really do need an answer on this question. Interestingly, the ACLU has been criticized enough about spelling it woah that they asked Merriam-Webster on Twitter.
I don’t misspell it, although I am coming to understand that this hurts the hearts of some of you to see how I really do spell it. As an exclamation, whoa/woah/other-variants has its roots in Middle English, and was spelled originally ho. This later became hoa, and also who, whoo, woa, woh, and lots of other variants, since you don’t start to see spelling normalized in English until Johnson’s Dictionary is first written (it still takes more time after that, too, but that’s where it got started). The word, in all of these variants, isn’t used for horses until the 19th-century, sadly, but rather only as an attention grabber. I’m glad it changed to include horses, because Westerns really would be less exciting without the ability to hear a big whoa! shouted as the chase begins!
Woah as its own spelling is first attested in literature in the 18th-century, in a 1790 work called Merry Companion that I personally have never seen a copy of. In England, you see about 50/50 on the spelling of this word, whereas in America it’s upwards of 30% favoring woah, mostly from members of Gen Z. Interestingly, though, this infiltration of the spelling in contemporary America actually stemmed from us Gen Xers in the 80s and early 90s.
In 2016, Oxford English Dictionaries threw in the towel and did include it, which does make it a formal, official spelling, even if Webster’s isn’t down to include it quite yet. I get why some of y’all still aren’t cool with this, as I personally take exception to irregardless making its way into the dictionary. I hate that a lot, though its inclusion in the dictionary has forced me to stop correcting people who use it.
For me personally, I favor woah over whoa because it’s reflective of how I actually enunciate, in addition to the mechanics of the typing itself feeling more natural. I also remember my Canadian mother spelling it this way, though it’s possible I remember incorrectly. When I asked my sister, she didn’t remember but did tell me she spells it as whoh, a different archaic spelling! She said she spells it that way because her autocorrect says so. Ross, who is a Texan, spells it whoa but pronounces the h. He also pronounces the h in why, what, when, and who. It’s bizarre for me to listen to because it sounds Old and Middle English-y to me.
So there you have it: this is why I spell whoa as woah.
Hello. This question is about yogurt and kefir. I'm seriously lactose intolerant. Does it matter whether I add lactase drops to the milk before its cultured or after its cultured? Since lactose is digested by the organisms in kefir and yogurt, there is much less lactose remaining in cultured dairy, but I still have a problem with the lactose in yogurt and kefir. If I add the lactase drops after it's cultured, it would save money since the lactose drops are fairly expensive. I haven't been able to find an answer to this by searching the internet.
I'd appreciate any help with this issue. Thanks.
— Ida
Yep, add it first. Lots of people use so-called lactose-free milk to culture their yogurt and kefir, and this works because the milk has lactase added to it rather than lactose removed. If that cultures fine (and it does), then all you’re doing by adding the drops is replicating the process that happens at the milk “factories.”
Do you have a Youtube channel?
— Don
We do not. We have discussed it, but currently we are a two-woman circus in two different states, so we just don’t have the staff currently to cover all that we currently do while managing all the intricacies of operating a YouTube channel. We hope one day, as our company grows, to be able to run a YouTube channel with regularly scheduled content.
