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1·9 days agoWhat kind of workshop are you running? I’ve been intrigued by direct solar applications since learning about this place on this low tech mag article.
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2023/08/direct-solar-power-off-grid-without-batteries/
1·9 days agoTo be honest, I don’t think I’ve ever measured vanilla, it goes right in the bowl, lol. Small quantities are often easier by volume, though, for sure.
Diameter of pots is big, too. You get way more evaporation with a wider pot.
Ounces suck because they are used as a weight and a volume, and I can’t ever be sure which one a particular recipe is using.
I think a major one is to try to avoid trusting in unfounded precision.
If you want to make lemonade like a chemist, you don’t just weigh out some lemon juice and add it to water and sugar. You measure sugar and citric acid content of the batch of lemon juice, then calculate how much water will dilute it to the right pH, and how much sugar will bring it to your desired osmolarity. In reality, no one is going to do that unless they run a business and need a completely repeatable. If you get lazy and just weigh out the same mass of stuff with a new batch of lemon juice, you could be way off. Better to just make it and taste it then adjust. Fruits, vegetables, and meats are not consistent products, so you can’t treat them as such.
If i were to be writing recipes for cooking, I would have fruits/vegetables/meats/eggs listed by quantity, not mass (e.g., 1 onion, 1 egg), but i would include a rough mass to account for regional variations in size (maybe your carrots are twice the size of mine). Spices i would not give amounts for because they are always to taste. At most, I would give ratios (e.g. 50% thyme, 25% oregano). Lots of people have old, preground spices, so they will need to use much more than someone using whole spices freshly ground. I think salt could be given as a percentage of total mass of other ingredients, but desired salinity is a wide range, so i would have to aim low and let people adjust upward.
Baking is a little different, and I really like cookbooks that use bakers percentages, however, they don’t work well for ingredients like egg that I would want to use in discrete increments. For anything with flour, I would specify brand and/or protein level. A European trying to follow an American bread recipe will likely end up disappointed because European flour usually has lower protein (growing conditions are different), which will result in different outcomes.
I will say in defense of teaspoons, most home cooks have scales that have a 1 gram resolution, though accuracy is questionable if you are only measuring a few grams or less. Teaspoons (and their smaller fractions) are going to be more accurate for those ingredients. Personally, I just have a second, smaller scale with greater resolution.
Seconding the national center for home food preservation document.
One thing that I like experimenting with that i have to search for every time is the time/temperature curves for pasteurization of different foods. Every “knows” you are supposed to cook chicken (and most “prepared foods”) to 165 °F according to the FDA/USDA. What most people don’t know is that that temperature is what your food needs to hit for 1 second to have the proper reduction of bacteria (e.g., 7-log for chicken, which is a really high bar). You get the same reduction with 15 seconds at 160 °F or an hour at a little over 135 °F. You can easily do that with a sous vide bath.
It’s really cool for people who are immunocomprimised or pregnant because you can cook a steak to medium rare, but hold temp for a couple hours, and it’s just as safe as if you cooked it to way hotter and ruined the meat. You can also do runny egg yolks.
Here’s the first link that came up when I looked for it, but I’m sure you could find the actual government publication.
https://blog.thermoworks.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/RTE_Poultry_Tables.pdf
Why would you want anything by volume? Mass is so much easier. 50 ml of honey is way more annoying to get into a recipe than dumping it right into whatever container the rest of the ingredients are in while it’s sat on a scale.
1st thing to do is to figure out what you need to power. Solar panels are way cheaper than charging and storage. Try to decide how much on-demand power during the dark part of the day you really need. If you can do most of what you need during the sunny part of the day, you can directly power stuff with no need for batteries. It may be that for your use case, you are better off buying 4 times as many solar panels, but no batteries.
Batteries account for 80-90% of total costs and energy invested in an off-grid solar system
https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2023/12/how-to-build-a-small-solar-power-system/
Yeah, i would definitely look at LIFEPO4. People just have the name recognition of “lithium” so they don’t really understand the differences between that and lithium ion, and so from what I saw last time I checked, the price was not really different, even though LIFEPO4 lasts longer and is safer.
I think it depends on the type of tourist attraction. In places like beach towns, “locals” are usually people who happened to have enough money to buy a vacation house, and decided to make it permanent. Or think of ski towns where the cost of living is so expensive that everyone who actually works there commutes in from another hour away or lives in their car or a jam packed seasonal rental. Basically anywhere that tourism is the only industry, a lot of decent people will be priced out.
Seriously, it’s been a while since I’ve been to a Walmart, but I bet there’s plenty of decent options even there. Everywhere has Ghirardelli, at least
he had used gender-neutral names to the point where it was never clear, but also didn’t matter anyway.
He almost does that. He uses a lot of made-up scifi names that aren’t obviously gendered, but then point out that the character is male.
He does get a lot better over time, though.
Yeah, I think he actually admitted that he didn’t really know any women when he first started writing until he met and then married his wife, so he avoided writing them. It is weird though cause his writing style (from what ive read) is not very character focused, anyway, so a lot of his male characters could easily just be declared female and no one would spot the difference.
Multiple people recommended it to me and wanted my opinion of it, but all I could say was “I’m glad you enjoyed it”.
I like a lot of what ive read from him, and he had a lot of views that were ahead of his time (on social issues as well as scientific), but he absolutely could not write women. You could read full length books of his without a single named female character.
the book you HAVE to read to understand why Americans from the flyover states like Trump and why they would vote for him.
It sorta does that, but indirectly, I guess? To me, it was all about what’s not in the book. It was marketed as being written from the perspective of “omniscient narrator explaining why those people are the way they are”, but really it’s more “unreliable narrator explains his worldview”.
I read it probably around the same time as you, and it really just made me angry more than anything because basically the whole thesis is “poor people are poor because they are dumb”.
The fact that Purdue pharma made a pill that they claimed would last for 12 hours, when it was more like half that, so people had to either take them way more frequently (or take way bigger doses at 12 hours), and then proceeded to sell them to towns in Appalachia by the hundreds per capita is never mentioned.
There’s a whole bunch of structural problems that he just breezes by that he probably should recognize (cause I do think he’s probably intelligent), but your average person from the region may not. Basically, it’s just propaganda.
It’s fun irony to try to have a bunch of angsty teens read a book about an angsty teen. I bet it would come across very different to read it as an adult.
The key is to never use measuring cups, stick to the scale for everything. Using recipes made with mass is the best way to do it, but if you are trying to adapt a volume based recipe, look at the serving size on the food package; it should be given in volume and mass. For example my king arthur brand 00 pizza flour serving size is 1/4 cup (30 g).