Monday, March 28, 2011

No Knead Bread

New York Times no-knead bread, crackling out of the oven, with birds in the background.



You can get the awesome recipe here. This should be in everyone's cooking repertoire, no question. Hopefully this link will continue working even after NYT starts its digital subscriptions. If it doesn't, comment this blog and I'll reproduce it here until they come up with a student subscription plan.
Good start to the quarter...

Addendum: I've added my own version of this recipe. 

Friday, March 11, 2011

Bubble and Squeak

It's just around St. Patrick's day, and cabbage consumption is on the rise. Seeing it around the grocery store made me think of Bubble and Squeak - a cabbage potato recipe with a fantastic name. Actually the name is motivated by the sound the dish makes as it cooks.

It's perfect for the end of Winter. My mom made it for my brother and me all the time as a quick meal. So I made it again tonight. It's surprisingly tasty, for such a simple recipe.
Bubble and Squeak!
Ingredients
+ Potatoes, a few medium ones
+ Cabbage, a large head, or two small ones, chopped up
+ Salt
+ Olive Oil
Preperation
Boil cabbage and potatoes for twenty minutes. Drain, and throw it all on a hot pan with olive oil. Sprinkle a decent amount of salt and let it brown a little, stirring occasionally. You can choose to add sausage or other meat of some sort, but it's pretty good by itself! Pairs well with cold weather and potato famines.

Monday, March 7, 2011

On Food and Bias | Wine, Foie Gras, and skin.

Today in my advanced physics lab, professor Kirkby discussed the importance of unbiased data analysis. In particular, he talked about how scientists can use a chi-squared test as a way to objectively assess the validity of one's error bars. That got me thinking about bias in the food industry.

Just last weekend, I went wine tasting in the Santa Cruz mountains, as part of a visit to Palo Alto. I was surprised by how reasonable the tasting was. Picchetti (above) winery offered 5 1oz tastes for only $5 dollars. The cheapest bottle of table wine was $21, but the price of tasting is refunded if you buy anything.

Our host - pictured above, teaching us how to taste wine - described the history of wine in California. In particular, he recounted a 1976 wine competition later known as The Judgement of Paris. It was one of the first blind-wine-tasting competitions in which California wines were invited - before that, France was neck-deep in its own pride to take them seriously (as a French citizen, I can say this). Beyond anyone's expectations, the American wines snagged first place in a significant number of categories. The results and ensuing controversy/embarrassment sparked and fueled the wine industry in California.

Though there is no doubt that Californian wines have merit, it's interesting to note that the results of the competition were disputed for a few years. Sure - these were motivated by nationalist interests, but they were not mathematically unfounded. Specifically, the Judgement of Paris competition only had about 10 judges with no common grading rubric. The resulting scores for each wine had huge deviations among the tasters. In the end, only two of the average wine scores could be identified as statistically significantly successful. In other words, the other wines were statistically indistinguishable (their error bars overlapped).

Since, the controversy has calmed, and the Judgement ultimately improved the quality (and quantity) of wine in both Europe and America. (Cool fact: Forbidden Wine is wine produced in Islamic countries, where alcohol is not religiously allowed. For example, Morroco makes about 40,000 bottles of wine a year. The majority is not exported).

It seems unbelievably appropriate, now, to bring up another French-California food topic that has recently grown in controversy! That's right - Foie Gras - literally "fatty liver" in French - is pureed liver of duck or goose. The fowl are force fed, and animal rights activists recently successfully introduced a law in California banning the production and sale of foie gras. (I wont go into this today, but I think the process is no less cruel that the conditions subjected to all other conventionally raised cattle. Stay tuned for a post about a field trip to witness cattle butchering and gutting.)

Akin to wine tasting, a recent study asked the question: Is it Foie Gras or Dog Food? The study gave 18 people 5 different pureed meats, only one of which was dog food. Only three subjects successfully identified the dog food. The report concludes "People cannot distinguish dog food from pâté intended for human consumption". Hell, what subset of the population eats foie gras (or dog food for that matter) often enough to readily remember its taste?!

I take issue with the study on several levels, but one this is clear from all these above examples: taste is an incredibly liquid, subjective sense. Consider how much smell plays an affect on taste, especially in a small kitchen:
My kitchen is tiny. When I cook something, my nose is inundated with everything we boil and broil. (Above, Ari, Mike and Jake are making a Poor Shepard's Pie). By the time we sit down, the receptors in my nose have been saturated by the ubiquitous smell of my food, which ends up tasting bland as a result.

For a long time, I would step outside for thirty seconds before eating to try and clear my nose. These days, I employ a neat trick I learned from a friend. I don't know how it works:

Smell your skin to reset your nose.

Saturday, March 5, 2011

Ring Road and Radians

Preface: I'm almost embarrassed to post up a math discussion of such a simple problem, but the answer is nonintuitive enough to be interesting. Please share your thoughts!

Today is something a little different: math. I'm sure some of you have already lost your appetite - but hang on for a second. This is sort of interesting.

TL;DR I math'd a graph for Anteaters who don't know whether to take inner or outer ring mall.

As I'm sure many people do, I always wonder if I'm walking to class via the most direct path. It's a matter of efficiency and elegance. It's also a matter of trying to get to class on time.

So in the midst of mentally minimizing my mileage at UC Irvine, I considered the two main paths that make up the campus.
If the above image is not clear, the campus is pretty much a donut (geographically, demographically). (I live right next to the star-trek library on the bottom left). In fact, it's two concentric circles, one slightly smaller than the other. One can more or less travel between the two circles. The idea can pretty much be distilled as in the following image:
Lets say you're at your computer science class on the south west side of campus, and you want to get some Peets coffee on the north of campus. Both points are on the outer circle, but you have full access to the inner circle. You want to get caffeinated as soon as possible, and you ask yourself: should I cut to the inner path (red), or travel on the circumference (orange)?

We can find the conditions for the paths to be equal by setting the last equation to zero. By inspection, we find that at two radians exactly, the paths are equal.

I arrived at this answer the first time I formulated this problem, but it seemed so strange for two reasons. Firstly, the functional is independent of radius. Secondly, my intuition thought that it was strange to find an integer value of radians.

I asked my friends to find my error, and it wasn't until Mitchell Hsing pointed out that math doesn't lie that I reconsidered the validity of this conclusion. Assume for a second that it's correct:
Absurd!! Regardless of the relative or absolute sizes of the circles, the two paths are always equal at an angular distance of two radians. If you know any reason why this should be intuitive, or why it isn't, add a comment!

Anyways, I since made a handy cheat sheet for UCI to help you decide whether you should take the inner or outer path. It's a little simplified, but I hope you enjoy it! You can download the full version here.


Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Bread Pudding Recipe (by popular demand)

Sadly, today marks the first time in two years that Lees - a Vietnamese sandwich shop by UCI, raises its prices by 5¢. The food isn't terribly good, but they make fresh baguettes from scratch, all day. For one dollar, they'll hand you a still-crackling crusty baguette that burns your hands. More importantly, for the same price, you can buy TWO baguettes from the day before.

Woah. I know what you're thinking - you're thinking: "I thought this guy pretended to have standards!" It's true, I do. But I promise that when I buy day old bread, it's for one reason only: bread pudding. There is no easier, cheaper way to fit protein and carbs into a dozen students at a potluck. It's pretty much impossible to mess this up.
I learned that a lot of American's think of it as Southern food, but it turns out people have been sneaking day old bread into desserts to serve to unsuspecting guests for centuries - well, really, ever since the invention of sliced bread! Much more historical details here.

This recipe pairs well with "A Sunny Day in Glasgow".

Bread Pudding Template Recipe
(ie. Be sure to deviate from this recipe)
Ingredients
+ baguette, or other bread, that's too stale to eat
+ a few cups milk
+ a few eggs (1 egg per cup of milk)
+ 1 cup sugar for every 4 cups milk)
+ dash of salt
+ deep casserole dish
Preperation
Preheat Oven to 350F/177C/450K
Slice the bread up into a few pieces, with a few inches of thickness each. Use a hacksaw or axe if it's too stale. Keep the bread in the casserole dish while whisking/mixing together eggs, milk, sugar & salt until combined. It should be a pale yellow color.
You'll have to mess with the amount of the mixture, since it'll depend on your bread density and amount. Generally, I make enough mixture to reach a third of the height of the bread. At that point, I squish the bread into the mixture to help it soak up the liquid. If your bread is too stale, leave it for an hour. Add your dried fruit now too (I like raisins best).
Shove it in the oven for 30 minutes, or until browning on top.
Serving
By itself, or Maple syrup or Ice cream. You can't go wrong.