DailyDirt: How To Really Cook
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
Chemistry labs are usually pictured as a clean room environment with an array of colorful liquids sitting in weird glass containers — or sometimes as an RV racing through a desert with some crazy guy in a gas mask and dead drug dealers sliding around on the floor (a la Breaking Bad). But home kitchens are also a type of chemistry lab, and food science is getting more advanced as people with entirely too much free time (ahem, Nathan Myhrvold…) experiment with novel cooking techniques. Here are just a few links for budding home master chefs.
- If you want to grill a nice steak at home, don’t try to mimic how your favorite steakhouse does it. Steakhouses optimize for speed, but at home, you can take your time and get it just the way you like it. [url]
- Some fancy cooking techniques have been called “molecular gastronomy” to describe the intersection of food science and chemistry/physics. The definition of this field of study hasn’t quite been nailed down, but some chefs are starting to publish papers in scientific journals. [url]
- Harvard researchers and professional chefs are teaching an online course for haute cuisine techniques. This introductory course has no pre-requisites, and starts Oct 8th…. [url]
If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.
Filed Under: chefs, chemistry, cooking, edx, food, haute cuisine, molecular gastronomy, science, steak
Comments on “DailyDirt: How To Really Cook”
if only these people with so much free time, would come up with ways to end hunger or something more useful, instead of weird emulsions with alcohol
Re: Re:
We all suffer from something else.
The variety of interests and focuses is what maintains the equilibrium inside group systems.
If everybody focused on curing cancer we all die of something else by the millions.
If every cell in your body focused on only a few specific jobs we wouldn’t be here.
Re: Re:
I can only assume that you spend every waking moment of the day in altruistic efforts for the betterment of all life on earth.
I think it’s safe to say we can survive without an alcohol study or two.
We should have cures for all that shit, but we don’t because of greedy pharmaceutical companies locking down the technology to do so.
It’s far more profitable to treat rather than cure.
Cure – Each person treated will not have to pay for “insert problem & medication” ever again.
Treat – A lifetime paycheck and depending on the illness possibly medications they cannot live without. Stop treatment and die equals one hard pill to swallow. People will give up everything to get a few more days/months/years.
My aunt died of cancer in the 90’s, but not before her and her husband spent over 2.5 million dollars fighting it with prescriptions that ran over 30 grand per month.. They went bankrupt and when they could not afford the treatment they were dropped faster than the time it takes the NSA to violate your privacy.
Re: Re:
Sorry about your aunt, but is stories like yours that make me a believer that if you want things done you will have to do it yourself, if you can’t you will need to learn to live without it.
This is exactly why, I know how to make stents but I don’t have the knowledge to make a laser to cut them small enough, but I am getting there one step at a time.
You be surprised what you can learn on the internet.
http://www.nitinol.com/nitinol-university/nitinoluniversity/open-stent-design
I can make giant extents out of paper or aluminum cans, which I can use to see how they work, but I can’t make the tiny ones yet. My doctor gets surprised at the things I talk, I don’t think he expected me debate which iodine is better as a contrast agent for CT scans, which stents designs are coming up and things like that.
Learning is a good thing.
We didn’t had the internet in the 80’s but we have it now, lets make good use of this great tool.
There are places where people are thinking about modular healthcare beds, think of a school bus cut in slices, where each bed its is own room complete and can be joined with others, those things could be put everywhere, and it would be connected to the doctor via internet, if needed you go to the hospital and instead of waling your module just attaches to the doctor module, kind of like a drive through.
It will be shocking to incumbent healthcare providers if any of the wonderful crazy ideas circulating comes to fruition.
Certainly those things will not come from them, so please join a community lab in your local region or found one, in your case you may be interested in creating and helping out in on open biolabs/open biotechlabs somewhere.
https://www.facebook.com/OpenBioLabGraz?filter=3&_fb_noscript=1
http://opensourceecology.org/wiki/Biolab
http://bostonherald.com/business/technology/technology_news/2012/01/open_bio_lab_scopes_out_dna
http://www.openbiotech.com/
http://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/
http://publiclab.org/
Making lenses for microscopes.
http://microscopy-uk.org.uk/mag/artjan06/aalens2.html
You can make a difference, if you try.
The great thing about molecular cuisine is that they need lab grade hardware for the more complex stuff(e.g. temperature controlled pots), if it catches on this could create a market for equipment that would trully transform every kitchen into a full blown biolab.
Why that is important?
Everyone will be able to produce biotech stuff in their kitchen, networks of people would study what others find silly and find answers and ways to do stuff in ways that we can’t imagine today, it would be the equivalent of what open source did to software.
Food labs is great. While I knew a lot of this for steaks, try this surprising link for boiled eggs:
http://www.seriouseats.com/2009/10/the-food-lab-science-of-how-to-cook-perfect-boiled-eggs.html