71–80 of 104 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I could never figure out why. Pasta cooking in boiling water has a tendency to over boil as the flour is very good at making stable foam that will rise in your pot. The oil acts as a anti-foaming agent[1] here[2]. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defoamer [2]: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/jctb.2804301...
Once it's at a boil, remove the lid. Problems (mostly) solved?
> But recipes, for all their precision and completeness, are poor teachers. They tell you what to do, but they rarely tell you why to do it. This drives me crazy about recipes e.g. adding vinegar to poaching water is recommended in lots of perfect poached eggs guides but few explain why (makes the whites firm even faster to prevent them from dispersing in the water). It's really 'teach a man to fish' kind of stuff, k…
That's why I loved cookings shows like Good Eats by Alton Brown or ones with Heston Blumenthal. They approach cooking from a more scientific approach in that they explain the why (and with Good Eats often a funny demonstration). And with the knowing why things are done, you can use that to experiment a bit more yourself.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My troop had a Heavy Cream Patrol which prided itself on making gourmet food in the backcountry. This usually meant carrying extra equipment, learning to cook well with both backpacking stoves and live fire (more than just boiling water), and spending extra time cooking at night. After hiking all day you are going to sit around the campfire anyway, why not make it a productive period? Plus there is nothing better tha…
I made Crème Brulee at a camporee with my Troop once. They still talk about it.
I have an idea on how I would do it but do you care to share your method?
“While cooking is for many a hobby, it is also a thing that nearly everyone has to do, usually when time is short.“ If only this wasn’t the case. This is always unpopular whenever I say it, but we no longer expect everyone to sew their own clothes or bake their own bread - why do we still demand that everyone cook for themselves (and, often, that they enjoy it too)? As this article demonstrates, the barrier for even…
I wonder if your dream of communal kitchens are somewhat hampered by urban layouts, at least here in the U.S. If every time you want to eat you have to hop in the car and drive a mile, it adds a strong point to the side of just finding something at home.
“While cooking is for many a hobby, it is also a thing that nearly everyone has to do, usually when time is short.“ If only this wasn’t the case. This is always unpopular whenever I say it, but we no longer expect everyone to sew their own clothes or bake their own bread - why do we still demand that everyone cook for themselves (and, often, that they enjoy it too)? As this article demonstrates, the barrier for even…
You can cook a meal of almost any kind in 30 minutes or less. Your comparison to sewing clothes is wrong cause it usually takes days, or many hours, to do such a thing. Baking bread? I do it almost every day...from scratch...no bread maker. >this is mainly motivated by the fact that I hate cooking And there you go. I would add that you lack cooking knowledge and ability. If you knew how, you wouldn't say such things.…
“While cooking is for many a hobby, it is also a thing that nearly everyone has to do, usually when time is short.“ If only this wasn’t the case. This is always unpopular whenever I say it, but we no longer expect everyone to sew their own clothes or bake their own bread - why do we still demand that everyone cook for themselves (and, often, that they enjoy it too)? As this article demonstrates, the barrier for even…
You can cook a meal of almost any kind in 30 minutes or less. Your comparison to sewing clothes is wrong cause it usually takes days, or many hours, to do such a thing. Baking bread? I do it almost every day...from scratch...no bread maker. >this is mainly motivated by the fact that I hate cooking And there you go. I would add that you lack cooking knowledge and ability. If you knew how, you wouldn't say such things.…
Yes, overall it's definitely going to pay off(even just after a month or two), but I think it's easy to forget there's still a decent barrier to starting. I ate a lot of burnt chicken when I first moved out. :P It took a while to afford the pots, the pans, and eventually the thermometer to fix that vs just eating the cheap banquet meals / boxed food.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can cook a meal of almost any kind in 30 minutes or less. Your comparison to sewing clothes is wrong cause it usually takes days, or many hours, to do such a thing. Baking bread? I do it almost every day...from scratch...no bread maker. >this is mainly motivated by the fact that I hate cooking And there you go. I would add that you lack cooking knowledge and ability. If you knew how, you wouldn't say such things.…
> You can cook a meal of almost any kind in 30 minutes or less. So the recipe magically chooses itself? So the food magically appears in your fridge? So the dishes magically wash themselves afterwards? So the left-over ingredients magically use themselves up? I really hate when people downplay the time cost involved in food preparation by focussing on only one step of the procedure.
Speaking for my experience: I go to the supermarket once a week, replenishing staples and looking for interesting (and cheap..) stuff. Then later in the week I know what's fresh in my fridge and what's stored the pantry and when I get hungry late afternoon my subconsciousness is thinking about possible meals while I do other stuff. Leftover ingredients go back in the fridge and the cycle of "What's available today?" continues. And I ignore the dishes for every other day or two, because I'm lazy.
There is most of the time just one or two steps, because there is a rhythm and practice and a cycle. One-time event cooking in a tabula rasa environment, yes, that's more complicated. But that's not daily life.
I spent too much of my life learning to do things by following rules, up to and including a PhD and an MBA. I've since learned to love learning by doing and diving in. Food is probably the best success in that area, combined with the observation that constraints breed creativity. My cooking gets high reviews (from friends, not critics http://joshuaspodek.com/food-world-reviews ) and has inspired my passion and podcas…
>I spent too much of my life learning to do things by following rules, up to and including a PhD and an MBA. I've since learned to love learning by doing and diving in. I'm really interested to know how you transitioned. I'm a recent graduate and I'm planning to pursue a graduate degree, and I'm overly concerned with rules, which provide structure but also seem to constrict my learning and work.
- Understand what the rules are, why they are in place, and to whom they matter. Some are there to keep you from hurting yourself, some to keep you from hurting those on your level or below, some to keep your advisor from abusing you, and a lot to make sure you act in the best interest of the University via minimizing its liability, etc. You don't need to follow all of them all the time, but have some real justification when you do go off course, don't call attention to it, and don't screw anyone else over.
- For your research, you need a dual-prong strategy of making sure you check off the boxes for others, i.e. actually doing what your advisor got funded to do (she is on the hook for this for most grants), on time and under budget as well; then, pour all the rest of your efforts into researching what you are interested in, with an eye towards building your skill sets for the future and learning how to learn alone. Read widely enough to know the range of options for a solution space and deeply enough to know what has actually been tried in your field, and not just what has succeeded. Teach yourself stuff that your advisors don't know. The payoff from a broad familiarity with programming, statistics and discrete mathematics is large, especially if they're under-utilized in your field, and these skills are widely transferable. Furthermore experimenting/exploration through computing is often super cheap and the cost of failure is low, unlike destructive analysis of your physical samples.
- Keep your datasets small enough that you can master them. In the natural sciences, many scientists just want more and more data but getting and maintaining data is labor-intensive and has a huge opportunity cost. You don't always learn a lot of transferable skills that way unless you want to be a lab tech forever. The major exception is when obtaining data is primarily observation and measurement, which are really important to building intuition and just noticing subtleties.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's why I loved cookings shows like Good Eats by Alton Brown or ones with Heston Blumenthal. They approach cooking from a more scientific approach in that they explain the why (and with Good Eats often a funny demonstration). And with the knowing why things are done, you can use that to experiment a bit more yourself.
I loved Good Eats and was devastated when they canceled it. Brown actually teaches the why to his recipes, not just the how and what. I probably built my cooking kits up from things he recommended and used during each show.
The idea of applying principles to cooking didn't work for me, even though it seemed like a reasonable approach to my 10 year old mind. I presume this happens to everyone to some extent, and that's why we have this recipe culture, we have it because it works.