• 4 Posts
  • 345 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 30th, 2023

help-circle


  • You don’t need a sous vide machine to do that, especially for something that only needs 30 minutes.

    Take a cooler, and fill it with water at the right temp. You can add boiling water or room temp water to adjust up or down. Depending on what you’re cooking, you can aim for a few degrees over to account for the temp of the food dropping the water temp. With 12 yolks, I don’t think it’s necessary. Then just stick your food in and close it up. Depending on how big your food is, how big/good your cooler is, you might want to check the temp a couple times throughout the cook.









  • That’s how it has been in the US. Now, though, if you already have a passport, you can renew online and take the picture yourself, and get it mailed directly to you.

    The thing that makes getting a passport slightly tricky to begin with in some circumstances is needing proper ID. In the US, there’s no generalized law saying that you have to have certain forms of ID. Most people use drivers licenses as ID, but obviously not everyone has one (by choice or as a consequence of drunk driving). There are a lot of people without ID, and there are ways to get ID, but they can be difficult for people without resources. A birth certificate is hard to get if you don’t have one already, especially if you don’t know where you were born.


  • That’s probably most similar to what we’d call “flaked corn”, but it’s not something that we see commonly in stores (in America, at least). It is somewhat similar to “corn flakes” which are different.

    It’s mainly used for brewing and distilling, and it’s made by taking dry corn, partially cooking it with water, putting it through a roller mill, and then drying it out.

    Reading about farinha de milho, it actually might be similar to “corn flakes”, though. It’s a breakfast cereal made by taking ground corn and cooking it in water, and then drying it out in little sheets. It is super common to use as an ingredient in things like fried chicken batter, or as a topping to things you want to be crispy.



  • For ground beef, especially, too many people try to chop it all up and get it “gray”. I don’t eat beef often, but when I do make ground beef, I basically treat it like making a hamburger: salt it immediately prior to placing in a hot pan, and don’t touch it until there is browned crust, and then try to flip it and get a crust on the other side. Only then will I break it up into little pieces. If you have too much meat to do that, you are better off getting a good sear on half of the meat, and tossing in the other half later, than trying to do all of it and basically just boiling the meat in juices.



  • They try really hard not to explain how the system works. It doesn’t mention it at all in this news story, or anywhere easy to find on their site. I crunched some numbers, and it seems like this device has about double the heat capacity for the mass than just plain water would have. That means it probably has to be a phase change material. All of the “smarts” and app control is nice, but at its core, it’s really simple concept. I think this kind of thing would sell better if instead of trying to make it sound high-tech, they just admitted it was a low tech solution that they’ve made user friendly.

    I did find this mention in the site q and a:

    Q: What is the storage medium made of?

    A: Proprietary mix of high-density, inert, non-toxic and low impact materials


  • I don’t understand why people like Facebook marketplace. It’s so transparently a way for them to just gather more shopping habits data on you, and it’s too easy for scammers to use. They act like having an account somehow makes it harder to scam.

    I would much rather support the website run by a skeleton crew that has no unnecessary features than get a few bucks more on FB marketplace. If I’m selling something that I’ve used, it’s cause I want to get rid of it, anyway.



  • A huge problem with the wine industry in America is that they’ve always tried to position themselves as a premium product with respect to other forms of alcohol. With respect to the information available to the consumer, the pricing seems to be random. Products that are aged understandably are going to cost more, and huge brands should be cheaper than small brands. Other than that, prices just seem to be set to correspond to whatever market segment they are targeting. A $20 bottle of wine may taste way better than a $15 bottle, but it could also be worse. There’s no indication of what could make the $20 bottle better than the $15 bottle other than the fact that it’s more expensive. Some brands put a little bit more info in, like the percentage of grapes, and sometimes they tell you where the grapes came from, but most consumers are just going to grab the cheaper bottle.

    Contrast this with beer, where you know higher abv=more ingredients=more expensive, aged beers are more expensive, and beers from smaller or foreign breweries are more expensive. Breweries often tell you the exact ingredients that went in, so you can get a decent idea of what a beer will taste like before ordering, and you can make an informed decision to buy slightly more expensive products.

    Wine is a little more tricky because there are fewer ingredients, and less processing, but they could absolutely give way more info. The wines that are good just try to market it as the magic of terroir in a bottle, rather than actually pointing out how and why they are better or taste different.