Before we can figure out how to improve our end results, it’s important to understand exactly what’s going on when an onion browns. First, the onions begin by sweating. As they slowly heat up, moisture from their interior (they are roughly 75% water by weight) begins to evaporate, forcing its way out of the onion’s cells, and causing them to rupture in the process. This breakdown of the cells is what causes onions to soften during the initial stages of cooking.
Maybe it’s because I have an oddly intense interest in croissants, but I found this 10-minute video about how to make them fascinating. Watch at least until the 1 kg sheet of butter is placed on the dough to be folded over several times.
Spoiler: they turn out great, which was unexpected because so often croissants are more bready and dry than flakey and moist, even in France. (thx, aaron)
Let the design team be the design experts. Your job is to be the business expert. Ask them how their design solutions meet your business goals. If you trust your design team, and they can explain how their recommendations map to those goals, you’re fine. If you neither trust them, nor can they defend their choices it’s time to get a new design team.
This should be printed out and nailed into the forehead of every designer and their clients a la Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses, you know, for easy reference.
I don’t want to have to explain to your parents why you didn’t graduate, so I went to the Dean and I made a deal. The deal is you can either wait it out and hope that we don’t identify you, or you can identify yourself to your lab instructor and you can complete the rest of the course and the grade you get in the course is the grade you earned in the course.
3. Don’t over-edit. You will often estrange an author by too elaborate a revision, and furthermore, take away from the magazine the variety of style that keeps it fresh.
7. A sound editor never has a three-months’ full supply in his cupboard. When you over-buy, you narrow your future choice.
If you’ve got a Mac, the “droid” sound that Android phones make — yep, the one from the commercials — can be produced in the following manner:
1. Open Terminal.app
2. Type say -v “Cellos” “droid” at the prompt
3. Experiment: say -v “Cellos” “droid. sucks.”
4. Or say -v “Cellos” “droid want to be iphone when droid grow up”
5. And finally, say “i am trying to unlock the mysteries of the universe, like how the big bang happened and where all the lost socks go after being in the dryer that really makes me mad”
Over at Serious Eats, Kenji Lopez-Alt assures us that while you can’t make restaurant-quality Neapolitan pizza at home, you can come damn close. Best thing is, his technique doesn’t involve lining your oven with bricks and is actually as easy as making regular pizza at home.
After cooking for around a minute and a half, the bottom crust achieved the perfect degree of char-even better than what I was getting on the stone. Interestingly enough, the pan was actually cooler than the stone I was using, maxing out at around 450 degrees. So how does a 450 degree pan brown better and faster than a 550 degree stone? It’s a matter of heat capacity and density.
The heat capacity of a material is directly related to the amount of energy that a given mass of material holds at a given temperature. Even though stone has almost twice the heat capacity than steel (.2 kcal/kg C vs. .1 kcal/kg C), it loses in two ways: it is far less dense than steel, and it has a much lower rate of heat conduction than steel. The pizza cooking in a skillet is not just getting energy from the pan-it’s getting energy from the burner below the pan as it gets rapidly conducted through the metal.
It’s a clear demonstration of how when cooking foods, what matters it the amount of energy transferred, not just the temperature you cook at. The two are often directly related, but not always.
I have said it before but will repeat: I love Kenji’s nerdiness about the science combined with the ability to come up with the solution that’s easiest for non-nerds to appreciate and implement. It is a rare and wonderful thing to observe.
If you are at first lonely, be patient. If you’ve not been alone much, or if when you were, you weren’t okay with it, then just wait. You’ll find it’s fine to be alone once you’re embracing it.
We could start with the acceptable places, the bathroom, the coffee shop, the library. Where you can stall and read the paper, where you can get your caffeine fix and sit and stay there. Where you can browse the stacks and smell the books. You’re not supposed to talk much anyway so it’s safe there.
14. I don’t care if the restaurant is pouring Chateau Latour into Minnie Mouse mugs, don’t walk into a restaurant carrying your own wine glasses. It’s more pretentious than wearing a monocle and spats.
Somehow it became NSFW day here at kottke.org. So we’re rolling with it, in the hay. Here’s the Tron version of the Kama Sutra. It is so very NSFW even though everyone stays fully clothed in glowing blue garments.
The beer-like way of serving champagne was found to impact its concentration of dissolved CO2 significantly less. Moreover, the higher the champagne temperature is, the higher its loss of dissolved CO2 during the pouring process, which finally constitutes the first analytical proof that low temperatures prolong the drink’s chill and helps it to retain its effervescence during the pouring process.
If you are filming a Girls Gone Wild video or are in the late stages of a wedding reception, pouring champagne directly into a person’s mouth is also an effective bubble-preservation technique. (via @matthiasrascher)
According to the In-N-Out nutrition guideline, replacing the Spread with ketchup results in a decrease of 80 calories per sandwich. I know that ketchup has about 15 calories per tablespoon, so If we estimate that an average sandwich has about 2 tablespoons of sauce on it (that’s the amount that’s inside a single packet), then we can calculate that the Spread has got about 55 calories per tablespoon (110 calories in two tablespoons of Spread minus 30 calories in 2 tablespoons of ketchup = 80 calories difference in the sandwich). With me so far?
It just so happens that relish has about the same caloric density as ketchup (15 calories per tablespoon), and that mayonnaise has a caloric density of 80 calories per tablespoon. Using all of this information and a bit of 7th grade algebra, I was able to quickly calculate that the composition of the Spread is roughly 62 percent mayo, and 38 percent ketchup/relish blend.
A two part (one, two) series on using psychological techniques to improve your creativity.
Interviews with 22 Nobel Laureates in physiology, chemistry, medicine and physics as well as Pulitzer Prize winning writers and other artists has found a surprising similarity in their creative processes (Rothenberg, 1996).
Called ‘Janusian thinking’ after the many-faced Roman god Janus, it involves conceiving of multiple simultaneous opposites. Integrative ideas emerge from juxtapositions, which are usually not obvious in the final product, theory or artwork.
Physicist Niels Bohr may have used Janusian thinking to conceive the principle of complementarity in quantum theory (that light can be analysed as either a wave or a particle, but never simultaneously as both).
1. Keep them too busy to think.
2. Keep them tired.
3. Keep them emotionally involved.
4. Reward intermittently.
Then the author provides a number of techniques you can use to achieve those goals. Like:
Keep real rewards distant. The rewards in “Things will be better when…” are usually nonrewards — things will go back to being what they should be when the magical thing happens. Real rewards — happiness, prosperity, career advancement, a new house, children — are far in the distance. They look like they’re on the schedule, but there’s nothing in the To Do column. For example, everything will be better when we move to our own house in the country… but there’s nothing in savings for the house, no plan to save, no house picked out, not even a region of the country settled upon.
Can’t get enough of the Leidenfrost effect? I know! Me either! In addition to helping with nonstick cooking, the L. effect also allows you to stick your hand into an 850° pot of molten lead without injury.
Skip to 1:55 for the good stuff. Bananas! Absolutely bananas! Oh, and this also works for liquid nitrogen as well. (thx, kyle)
This blog post and accompanying videos show you how to preheat your frying pan to the precise temperature at which your food won’t stick. It involves waiting until a small splash of water in the pan forms a single mercury-like ball that floats (literally!) around the pan. Too hot and the water will disperse into smaller balls; too cold and it’ll just boil off instantly.
The water “hovering” over the stainless steel pan like mercury happens due to the phenomenon known as the Leidenfrost effect. You can read more about it on wikipedia, but the basic idea is this: at a certain temperature known as the Leidenfrost point (roughly around 320F for water, but varying with surface and pressure), when the water droplet hits the hot pan, the bottom part of the water vaporizes immediately on contact. The resulting gas actually suspends the water above it and creates a pocket of water vapor that slows further heat transfer between the pan and the water. Thus it evaporates more slowly than it would at lower temperatures. At the proper temperature, a similar effect happens with the food you place in the pan, preventing the food from sticking.
This is possibly the best kitchen tip I’ve ever heard. (thx, jim)
5. Give things names and remember Douglas Adams’ rule of capital letters. Capital letters make things important. For example, in The Tipping Point, Gladwell conjures up the following important concepts: The Law of the Few, The Stickiness Factor, and The Power of Context. In Outliers, there’s The Matthew Effect and The 10,000-Hour Rule.
And totally unrelated but related, here’s an awesome photo of a 14-year-old Gladwell running the 1500 meters. (thx, nick)
It involves finagling some uncooked frozen fries from a local McDonald’s under the ruse of a scavenger hunt. Kenji Lopez-Alt explains.
I’ve been literally giddy with the quality of the fries that have been coming out of my kitchen for the last two days. My wife won’t hear the end of it. Even my puppy is wondering why his owner keeps exclaiming “Holy s**t that’s good!” every half hour from the kitchen. I’ve cooked over 43 batches of fries in the last three days, and I’m happy to report that I’ve finally found a way to consistently reach crisp, golden Nirvana.
Here’s the full recipe/instructions. BTW, Kenji’s series of posts on Serious Eats is one of the best things going on the web right now (you might remember his sous-vide in a beer cooler hack). Passionate down-to-earth writing about cooking and food backed by some serious skills and scientific knowledge…it’s really fun to read.
Keep a food diary not of what you eat but what you experience. She says, “There’s a pretty big difference between eating and tasting.”
What she means is considering and taking note of the entire experience of tasting: The way the food feels in your mouth, what your beer smells like cold and if it’s different when it’s lukewarm, what you notice with the first piping-hot bite of sauce compared with the last chilled streaks you scrape up before the server takes the plate. Do you feel one sensation more than others as you chew, a citrusy tingle at first, followed by rush of sweet?
You will get caught, either by a US spy satellite (as in the case of North Korea), a disgruntled defector (as in the case of Iraq), or even an indigenous human rights group (as in the case of Iran). So what should you do if you get caught? First and foremost, do not overreact. Deny. Should the evidence become too powerful, then, change tack. Create a distraction. Argue that the uranium particles found in your country were purposely scattered by a hostile nation. Challenge the credibility of the information provided to the IAEA. Bring up Israel again.
With traditional cookery, when you are exposing your meat to temperatures much hotter than their final desired temperature (say, cooking a steak to 130°F in a 550°F skillet), timing is crucial. The center of your steak is getting hotter and hotter, and it’s your job as cook to take it off the flame at precisely the moment that it reaches the desired final temperature. Miss that precise moment, and dinner is ruined.
The beauty of sous-vide cooking is that since you are cooking your steak in a 130°F water bath to begin with, there is absolutely no chance your meat will ever get above that temperature. Guests are an hour late? No problem — leave the steaks in the water bath, and they’ll be exactly the same an hour later.
The Guardian asked a bunch of writers to share their tips for writing fiction. The responses appear in twoparts. Elmore Leonard:
Never use an adverb to modify the verb “said”… he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances “full of rape and adverbs”.
Here’s Philip Pullman’s response in full:
My main rule is to say no to things like this, which tempt me away from my proper work.
Flattery sells, so to further those positive emotions, he insists that sales associates compliment the customer’s own watch, even if it’s from a competitor.
A butcher’s advice on choosing a knife and how to wield it. On cutting yourself:
I am an expert. I have sliced off thumb tips and fingernails. I have shaved paper-thin wafers of my knuckle and buried a breaking/cimeter knife an inch and a half into my forearm. If it weren’t for the stainless steel chainmail “butcher bra” that Josh from Fleisher’s bought me for Christmas last year, I might not be alive to write this essay, having perhaps bled out from one of the many horrible chest wounds averted by its Mithril magic.
I’ve posted about hikaru dorodango a couple times before but they’re always worth another look. Dorodango start out as sloppy mud balls but through careful shaping and polishing with dirt and sand, they end up perfectly round and shiny. Here is a particularly beautiful and unusual example, made from some yellow soil in New Mexico:
That totally looks like leather! Here is a more traditional (and shiny!) example:
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