201–207 of 207 posts
When I first read this a question jumped out at me: Wait, Neanderthals were able to render fat? That requires boiling, and doesn't boiling require pottery? This led me down a bit of a rabbit-hole. It turns out that no, you don't need pottery to boil things, because you can do it just fine in combustible materials like animal hide or birch bark... so long as you keep the water level consistently high enough, because t…
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In high school science class we boiled water using standard printer paper: fold a sheet into a box, put it on a stand over a bunsen burner, fill it with water, turn up the bunsen burner. Not only does it not burn but it retains more of its structural integrity.
It's a classic survival tip when lost in the wild: Fold your map into a box and cook whatever food-like things you've found before eating. Why you're lost when you have a map is a different question.
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It's a common mistake. Just this weekend I followed a recipe from a well known cooking website for beef stroganoff that said to brown the beef in batches together with batches of onion. That's not a good idea, the onion will release liquid which prevents the beef from browning and once that cooks off the heat required to brown the meat will burn the onion. So I cooked the beef and onion separately instead. The onion…
I watched a cook (America’s Test Kitchen?) where they explored different ways of thinking of heat management in pasta. The unbelievable one that worked: boil water, add pasta, turn off heat. The water retains the heat and will still penetrate the pasta. I have never actually tried it myself, but it makes sense.
This is the first time in the wild I've seen an image credited to an artist that is clearly AI made (with some minor detail like smoke added to the foreground). You can tell it's AI by the details of the bone and piles of wood.
It doesn't make them not an artist. There are lots of VFX professionals on LinkedIn having a total field day with AI tools and posting mind-blowing stuff. Somehow it hasn't reached the rest of social media yet. On that last point: AI is going to propel individual artists ahead of big Hollywood studios. They won't need studio capital anymore, and they'll be able to retain all the upside themselves.
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I watched a cook (America’s Test Kitchen?) where they explored different ways of thinking of heat management in pasta. The unbelievable one that worked: boil water, add pasta, turn off heat. The water retains the heat and will still penetrate the pasta. I have never actually tried it myself, but it makes sense.
You can also steep dry pasta in room temperature water to prepare it.
I now want to give this a try, but am pretty skeptical of the outcome.
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Getting somewhat off-topic and maybe it's more evident to other people, but for me understanding this energy transfer was eye-opening for my cooking abilities! Like, my mushrooms aren't going to actually cook as I want as long as they render water because the water is cooling the pan down. Obvious in retrospect, never really fully realised it. Also means I can blast the heat up to get rid of this water faster, it's n…
I’ve heard it said by a very science oriented chef that ‘all cooking is moisture management’.