Posts by BenWilson
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Hard News: Kitchen Hacks, in reply to Andrew Stevenson,
use a pressure cooker and you get another 103 kPa
Yup, that’s a whole different device, though. A lid on a pot does not a pressure cooker make. It’s just a whole lot more efficient than no lid, for an almost identical effect. Many times more efficient. The effect can often be better, too, since the higher average temperature in the pot cooks things that may not be covered by the liquid, as often happens with pasta – a piece that is sticking out of the water doesn’t cook at the end. But with the lid on, I’ve noticed this doesn’t happen.
Must try pressure cooking some day. Sounds exciting.
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Hard News: Kitchen Hacks, in reply to Ben Chapman,
Well, with the lid on, the pressure in the pot should increase, which will increase the boiling point above 100°C…
This is true, but the pots are venting so I don't think the pressure can rise much. The upper limit is presumably the pressure exerted downwards by the lid divided by its surface area. For a 400g lid with area of 255cm^2, I get a rise in 154Pa is enough to lift it, which is around 1.5% of one atmosphere. So maybe it can get to 101.5C if you crank it up full bore to the point that the column of steam coming out the vent is screaming and the lid begins to lift? At that point, for around a 5 fold increase in the wattage I'm pouring into it, I get a 1.5% temperature increase. So it's cooking the food maybe a tiny, tiny bit faster, and making a very large volume of steam.
Is my reasoning wrong there?
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2.1m by 7.4
The luxury! Just measured mine as 2.2m x 4.6m containing oven, stove, microwave, dishwasher, sink, fridge, pantry, all cupboards, bookshelves, drawers, 6 seater table and chairs. But it has an illusion of space when you're in it, strangely, on account of the window placement.
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Hard News: Kitchen Hacks, in reply to BenWilson,
Use a lid on every pot so that you can turn the temperature right down
To avoid the shame of being caught out by physicists, I actually mean you can turn the element right down, whilst maintaining the same high temperature. Boiling water is boiling water. It’s going to be 100C as long as there’s any liquid water in there. So there’s no advantage to something bubbling away at a massive rate on full bore, over something just bubbling away on low, unless your objective is to evaporate the water. Even then, you can do it with the lid on, turn it up a notch – the steam will force its way out. My lids all have directable vents, so you can point the steam at the splashback
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My pizza hacks. Breadmaker the dough. Use pre-ground garlic.
Other general hacks. Use digital scales where possible to reduce washing measuring implements. Try to convert every measurement in a recipe to a weight, apart from the very small ones, teaspoons are still needed for that. This involves a tiny bit of labour the first time on each recipe, by using the measurement given, and then noting the weight for next time.
Boil water in a kettle before putting it in a pot. Use a lid on every pot so that you can turn the temperature right down, and reduce the amount of water vapour in the house. Way, way more energy efficient - a rolling boil can be sustained on the lowest setting on my stove. Without a lid, it needs about 4 times as much heat, and you have to keep an eye on the water level.
Slow cooker is an excellent way of getting value out of cheap cuts of meat and time shifting the preparation so that when you're buggered at the end of the day, you've got a hot meal already waiting. Also has the advantage that serving time is not critical. The moment the kids enter "crying time", you can serve, a lot nicer than trying to cook with that going on .
Wash/rinse as you go. It's way easier to wash a hot pot or pan. Then put it back on the element to dry out, and prevent you accidentally touching the hot element, and to cool it down quicker. It's also nice when dinner is finished that there's only serving stuff to wash. I've got a particularly small kitchen, too, so I just need the space a lot of the time.
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Hard News: Kitchen Hacks, in reply to Tom Semmens,
Sounds like an interesting invention. Controlling the flow of oxygen to the charcoal is also a good way of changing the temperature, and exploiting the way different areas are different temperatures gives as much control as you need over how fast and hard the food is cooked.
You can make even a small amount of fuel insanely hot using a fan. I love this example
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Hard News: Kitchen Hacks, in reply to Chris Waugh,
Forced induction helps. Get an electric hand fan onto the primary lighting fuel. It will burn way hotter (and faster). Also, use meths rather than diesel, it's a much cleaner burn, no smoke. Be careful! The flame is often hard to see.
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Here is a good first person perspective on the game. The noise you hear is pretty much all I heard during the whole game. I can imagine if you have players on the side they’d have to yell really loud for you to hear them, though. The guy who got the goal at the end was lurking on the surface for most of the clip, which is how he was able to outsprint everyone to the other end.
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Field Theory: Part of the Game, in reply to Geoff Lealand,
I used to take my daughter to tournaments and it was always very noisy. But not much of a spectator sport.
Noisy? Really? What sort of noise? The signal thingo?
I played it once. It's certainly engaging when you're in there, but nothing to look at. Very strange sport, most of it involved scrabbling around in a moiling pack, because you can't pass the ball very far and it's extremely difficult to protect a puck when players can come at it from all directions, and the mask limits your field of view and you can't hear anything. The whole aspect of gauging when to breathe was interesting, and the fatigue was quite different to any other sport because it was driven by oxygen deprivation rather than muscular overload. I'd swum quite long distances underwater before (with fins on I recall doing 4 laps of the Teps underwater once, so 100 meters) but it's a whole different thing when you're dashing. It's quite easy to run someone down from the surface, unless they just go for absolute broke, after which they will be shattered, might need 30 seconds to recover from a 20 second oxygen deprived sprint.
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Hard News: The United States of Surveillance?, in reply to linger,
Heh, very good. The post event interviews were a bit short, though, and no one cried. At least one guy should have got stage fright. Then they could do a post production interview of him talking up how excited he was beforehand (which they'd show beforehand), and then one afterward saying how crushed he was, possibly getting some man-hugs and then walking off into the distance, and then perhaps a couple of people psychoanalyzing them behind their back, one supportive and disappointed, the other brutal
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