The gyrations of a pointless and uncaring universe

Salt Fat Acid Heat Highlights
18 May, 2026
- cooking
- books
Some Diagrams
Salt
- No table salt. Kosher or sea salt. Diamond crystal the author Samin’s favorite. . Maldon and Fluer de Suel for textured topping post cooking
- Salting Guidelines. 1 percent salt by weight for meats, vegetables, and grains, and 2 percent salinity for water for blanching vegetables and pasta.
- Salt reduces bitterness (peanuts and beer!). Try salt with grapefruit juice
- “The larger, denser, or more sinewy the piece of meat, the earlier you should salt it. Oxtails, shanks, and short ribs can be seasoned a day or two in advance to allow salt time to do its work.” Seafood just season right before. Salting Calendar
- grains less salting than vegatbles.
- Mushrooms hold salt till they brown.
Fat
- Does it bind ingredients. Fat is main ingredient. Is it for texture or heating. Cooking ingredietn.
- Olive oil goes rancid 12 months after pressed. Smells like crayon/wax.
- Clarified butter excellent for high heat.
- Choose culturally appropriate fats. Wheel
- Nuetral oils are peanut, canolla and grapeseed.
- Preheat pan before adding oil/fat so fat doesn’t deteriote as much
- start or finish a steak or pork chop by turning on side to redner the fat off.
- Basics of any pan sauce “Place the pan back over the heat and add just enough liquid—water, stock, or wine—to coat the bottom. Using a wooden spoon, scrape any delicious crusty bits into the sauce and bring it to a boil. Then, for each serving, add 2 tablespoons of very cold butter into the pan and swirl over medium-high heat, letting the butter melt into the liquid. Don’t let the pan get so hot that the butter sizzles; as long as there is enough water in the sauce, you’ll be fine. Once you see the sauce begin to thicken, turn off the flame and let the butter finish melting over residual heat, but don’t stop swirling. Taste for salt and, if needed, add a squeeze of lemon or splash of wine. Spoon over the food and serve immediately.”
Acid
- Heavy Thanksgiving meal? White wine to gravy. Prunes with white wine in stuffing.
- Hates bottled citrus (but it’s so convenient!)
- Fun fact: “the acidity of oranges diminishes with an orchard’s increasing proximity to the equator”
- Acid holds some food togehter so you might want to make sure onions are cooked tender before adding tomatoes for example.
- A few secret drops of lemon juice will produce creamier, more tender scrambled eggs. (Cook them over low heat acording to Alex Toklas? What is this madness?)
- Like salt fish only need acid right before hand?
Heat
- dry food if you wan to brown: “Caramelization and the Maillard reaction—don’t begin until food reaches much higher temperatures. So, if water is present on the surface of a food, it can’t brown.”
- Because of steam Loose pack oven try for browning (zucchini peppers), tight back to prevent browning longer cooks of denser vegatables like artichokes
- confit is essentially poaching in fat instead of water. It is the French word for foods cooked slowly in fat at temperatures low enough to avoid browning. To confit duck lets season the legs, immerse them in rendered duck fat, and cook them gently until they are tender at the bone. You’ll know the temperature is right when the duck fat emits a bubble or two every few seconds.
- When making potato chips or fries, use starchy, older potatoes and rinse them of excess starches after slicing until the water runs clear. O
- Let all meats—except for the thinnest cuts—come to room temperature before you cook them. Pull meat out when you get home.
- Tough sinewy cuts are going to need longer. Brown before or at end.
- roasts carry over five to ten degrees Fahrenheit on average after they are removed from heat, and that some vegetables, such as asparagus, do too, as well as fish, shellfish, and custards.
- Sweet, bitter, and umami tastes are more intense and send stronger signals to the brain when food is warmer. As any college student can tell you, the same pint of beer, while delicious chilled, will be unpalatably bitter at room temperature.
- Wood chips on propane grill. Soak and drain chips. Put in disposable aluminuim baking pans and cover with foil then poke holes. Put on some burners and put baking pan over unlit ones. Start cooking once you get whisps of smoke.
- Chicken is cook when joice at the thight runs clear when pricked.
- Gentle Heat cooking methods:
  - Simmering, Coddling, and Poaching
  - Steaming
  - Stewing and Braising
  - Confit
  - Sweating
  - Bain-marie
  - Low heat baking and dehydrating
  - SLow -roating grilling and smoking
- Intense Heat
  - Blanching, Boiling, and Reducing Sautéing
  - Pan-frying, and Shallow- and Deep-frying
  - Searing
  - Grilling and Broiling
  - High-heat Baking
  - Toasting
  - Roasting
- Boiling is for vegatables, grains and pasta. Simmer everything else.
- Pull noodes from water a minute early and let them finish cooking in sauce.
- braises involve larger pieces of meat—often on the bone—and minimal cooking liquid, while stews are made with smaller pieces of meat cooked with chunky vegetables,
- more water or stock to come up about a third or halfway up the meat—any more and you’ll be poaching rather than braising.
- While some chefs insist on chilling blanched vegetables in ice baths, I generally disagree.
- Whichever form of frying you’re undertaking, the temperature of the oil should be right around 365°F. (Just think, I wish I were eating fried food 365 days a year!
- When browning, frying, or searing, the first side of a food to be browned will always be the most beautiful, so lay food in a pan or on the grill with its presentation side down. For poultry, that means skin side down, for fish that means skin side up.
- When using convection, reduce the temperature by approximately 25°F or monitor foods with extra vigilance. (though she doens’t really believe in oven temps)
- Make 400°F your default temperature for roasting vegetables, but know that it will change based on the size of the vegetables,
- Start roasts in a hot oven (about 400° to 425°F) and then gradually decrease the temperature in 25°F increments
- rule of thumb for cooking a large roast is once its internal temperature hits 100°F, it’ll start climbing at a rate of about a degree a minute, if not faster. So if you’re aiming for medium-rare, around 118° to 120°F, then know that you’ve got about 15 minutes before it’s time to pull. Large roasts carry over about 15°F, while steaks and chops will carry over about 5°F, so account
Other
- Precede long-cooked, rich dishes with light, fresh-tasting ones.
- IF the greens look wilted, or the tomatoes don’t smell like much, head to the freezer section and choose from the produce hidden over there. Frozen fruits and vegetables are easy to forget about, but they tend to be harvested and flash-frozen at the peak of freshness.
- Read Paula Wolfert, James Beard, Marcella Hazan, and Jane Grigson. More
- Always use Italian or flat-leaf parsley
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Kitchen supplies
16 May, 2026
- cooking
Inpiried by Megan Mcardle
Things I actually own.
- All-Clad Pans. Great with induction stand up pretty well
- Weber Spirit 3. Cheapest weber grill and not gigantic. Same quality though as thousand dollar grills.
- Kyocera Ceramic knives. Stay sharp without sharpening! Thanks sister in law.
- Generic Olive oil bottle. Then you can buy the bulk good stuff at costco. Though maybe I should try Ceramic
- Grill basket Grilling vegatables is a pain.
- Graters Big and Small
- Nordic ware baking pans though I got mine at costco and they’re yellow?
- thermapen or generic are the steaks done?
Books I use.
In part I’m am building http://careme.cooking because I don’t want to lookup recipes I want them given to me based on my store. But these books give great general cooking guidance too:
- Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat also a netflix series
- Six Seasons.
Things I am considering
- Cheap meat slicer!
- Ramen Bowls
- Wine Glasses or rounder Need ones that go in dish washer, be thin like crystal and don’t break the bank. Costco hasn’t had our favorites in years now but I hear good things abotu zwiesel
- An actual knife shapener
Next up books
- Every Grain of rice
- Food Lab
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Thoughts the new coding
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- tech
- Most people never cared how the sausage was made.
- Are you reviewing your code? At what rate is debt growin.
- Microservices going to do much better than monoliths.
- Your codebase is the best example.
- Are we all just testers now.
- How should agents coordinate if we do actually parallize
- Is this all just being a luddite.
- Will the next gen models blow all these concerns away.
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- hiking
- photos
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- hiking
- photos
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