Finally, one of these studies comes up with information that will be of interest to absolutely everyone everywhere.
For generations, biscuit lovers everywhere have debated long and hard over which biscuit is the best for dunking in a cup of tea.
In an effort to settle the debate for good, scientists in the UK have conducted the most comprehensive study yet and come up with some interesting results, even though it might cause something of a (c)rumble amongst the tea-drinking community.
At this point you’re probably thinking, pffft, what do scientists know about drinking tea that I don’t but led by Dr Stuart Farrimond, founder of the science-oriented Guru Magazine, a team of researchers in a comprehensive study for biscuit giant McVitie’s found that the Rich Tea was officially the best biscuit for dunking.
And when we say comprehensive, we mean comprehensive. Having tested a range of biscuits including classics such as HobNobs and Digestives, of the plain and chocolate variety, Farrimond and his team came up with all sorts of interesting titbits, from the perfect angle at which you should dunk your biscuit (45 degrees), and the differences in the time it takes for a chocolate biscuit to start crumbling as opposed to a plain biscuit. That's right, they covered everything down to a tea.
According to the study,
documented in the Daily Mirror today, a Rich Tea biscuit dunked in a cuppa tea with a temperature of 72C – like we said, comprehensive – was still going strong after 20 seconds, compared to Chocolate Digestives (11 seconds), Digestives (5 seconds), Ginger Nuts (5 seconds) and the incredibly crumbly plain HobNobs.
Having conducted the study, Dr. Farrimond also recommended the introduction of a traffic light system to be published on biscuit packets in an effort to prevent said biscuits from falling into the cup of tea, or worse, moist crumbs making an absolute mess of your clothes when falling on the way from the cup to the tea-drinker’s mouth.
"Given the danger of a hot biscuit falling onto a clean shirt, there should be a ‘dunk-o-meter’ traffic light advisory system for all packets of cookies and biscuits,” Farrimond said.
"A red circle would indicate short dunk of under five seconds, amber would advise a five to ten second dip and green for longer."
While we think that everyone would agree with that suggestion, we’re not sure there would be universal agreement over the selection of the Rich Tea as the best dunker, even if the criteria in this case seems to be based solely on durability rather than anything else.
Feel free to add to the debate in the comments box below, but before that, have one more look at one of the best memes of all time and one we were never going to pass up the opportunity to put up under the circumstances...
