DE: Halloween Free for all

[bjornwilde]

 [Leans up against 4th wall, all casual. Knocks over 4th walk.]

 

Oops.

Post in as yourself in Milliways (in costume since it's the day before Halloween), meet your pups, meet other pups, try out new pups, revisit old pups, start your own topic threads, whatever.

Comments

[camwyn]

Guh, that reminds me, I have to sit down and watch the lectures for that Harvard e-course I signed up for (it's on the intersection of science and cooking- right now I'm only on the introductory lectures but we're going to have homework like 'making cottage cheese' and 'demonstrating the properties of egg foam by making molten chocolate cake').

Preferably when I'm not at the office, though.

[fightingthecage]

You'll get to learn how to make your own cottage cheese?

I both want to know how to do this, and fear it.

[camwyn]

Oh, I've made cheese before- a couple of different varieties, mostly soft or semisoft. Haven't been able to do anything that requires a cheese press or cheddaring or aging, though. Cottage cheese should be fairly easy if I can get my hands on some rennet- I may have to order that online, alas.

[fightingthecage]

Speaking as someone who doesn't really like cheese, I have to say a) you're brave, and b) it sounds like a process where a lot of things can go wrong. Even though I know it's actually a fairly simple process! I just...yeah, fear.

Then again, maybe homemade cheese tastes better than store-bought, so sdlfjk. If I tried to make my own, I might dig it.

[fightingthecage]

Also, I love the fact that Harvard provides courses with 'make your own cheese' homework. That's awesome. :D

[camwyn]

I'm looking up the labs and homeworks now. Week 1: calibrate your oven.
Week 2: recreate Dave Arnold's perfect eggs OR make ricotta cheese (I may have misremembered this as the cottage cheese one now that I think about it) OR melt an ice cube in a cup of tea and measure the temperature of the mixture.
Week 3: use salt to lower the freezing point of an ice-water solution and then use this to make ice cream
Week 4: elasticity of foods; this will mostly involve things like calculating the toughness of pancakes
Week 5: diffusion in eggs and ceviche
Week 6: molten chocolate cake in the context of heat transfer
Week 7: viscosity and polymers as reflected in candy making

... you get the idea. Hell of a free online course.

[fightingthecage]

...dude. Screw Oxford. I wanna go to Harvard. If that's a free online course, imagine what they teach on campus. \o/

[camwyn]

Nah, cheesemaking isn't all that dangerous unless you're the kind of person who can get hurt boiling stuff on the stove in general. Making mozzarella can be something of an issue because you have to do a lot of kneading and stretching to get the texture and it's usually pretty hot when you do that, so it's best to use tongs, but for the most part it's not a real problem.

My mozzarella, ricotta, feta, and ricotta insalata have all turned out way more appealing than the store bought kinds. It helps to be able to control exactly what goes into them; there's no oil or dyes and I only put in as much salt as I like.

Fudge, now, that's something you have to be very careful with making. It involves boiling sugar in milk and bringing it up to 234 degrees F/112 degrees C. Worth it, though.

(I mmmmmay have a few things in common with my more do-it-up-yourself characters.)

[fightingthecage]

Lol, I was thinking more of dangerous in terms of food poisoning, but I can see how the physical making of it could be a problem too.

Fudge - oh God, I cannot even. I rarely make it because I don't like it that much - toffee, however, I love, and spent years getting it wrong because I could never be bothered to buy a sugar thermometer. Then I bought one, and have had no urge to make it since. Perhaps its appeal was the unpredictably of the results.

[camwyn]

Oh, right, that. Nah, food poisoning hasn't been an issue with the cheese making; it helps that I've only ever worked with pasteurized milk and even if I hadn't I'd be dealing with bringing the milk up to a fairly high temperature in order to get the process going. Might make raw milk cheese one day but that'd require a lot of rigamarole to get so it might not be worth it just yet.

I got lucky with the fudge and found a guy's site online that went through a fair amount of how-to that didn't require a thermometer, but I haven't made too many other candies. Turkish Delight, once, just to see what the heck was involved, and divinity once or twice, but that makes a mess.