Random thoughts and questions

You should learn some actual interesting math then.

Sorry, I'm feeling contrary this evening.

If you're telling me linear algebra, fuck that shiiiiiit

or anything else past calc 3 really

I'm right there with you on linear algebra, but most of the good stuff isn't usually taught until after Calc III. That's not to say that it can't be taught before then, because it totally can, it just generally isn't (sadly). For instance, the basics of abstract algebra or point-set topology should be pretty easy for most people to pick up, and they go some really neat places.

And not that you asked, but Courant and Robbins's What is Mathematics? is an absolutely phenomenal book that anyone with even a vague interest in mathematics should own. After all, how many books can boast a blurb from Einstein?

I'm more of a pragmatist when it comes to math. My favorite math book is my Engineering Econ textbook from college. I've considered buying it again because I lost my copy during one of my moves.

So using the word "feels" in place of "feelings" - is that a thing the kids are doing these days? I only ask because STOP IT RIGHT THIS INSTANT.

And get off my... (sigh) you know the rest.

Well, see, there's "all of my feelings" and "allamyfeelzomg".

They're quite different and ...

... fuck it, no, I can't devil's advocate this.

Toasting little mini-bagels whole, that get stuck and don't pop up far enough to grab when "done".

Try to manually pop mini-bagels using handle, vainly trying to grab hot mini-bagels at apex, predictably fail many times. Switch to digging at them with fingers, succeeding only in rolling them around from one end of the slot to the other a few times before finally just sticking fingers in deeper and grabbing them.

Burnt fingers, and realization HOLY SHIT I DIDN'T UNPLUG FIRST.

Toasted little mini-bagels are delicious, but mini.

Solution: Make more!

Pop two more tasty mini-bagels into toaster. Throbbing pain and racing heart reminds me I don't want to repeat previous burninating, nor die of electrocution.

AHA! Solution! Cooking chopsticks sitting RIGHT THERE! Wooden material won't conduct and WILL keep tender fingers far far from red hot death wires!

Works great! A few moments later, I smell wood burning. First Thought: DUH Second Thought: Smoked Bagels would taste awesome. Third Thought: That's called burnt bagels, and you don't like those, DUMBASS.

Enjoyed second round of tasty mini-bagel gorge-fest.

Conclusion: I don't think I am operating my brain properly according to the rules of its Owners Manual.

EDIT: and before anyone asks, I only wish I could use the excuse that alcohol and/or recreational drugs were involved!

Try being a journalist...

I agree with this sentiment and I am not even old. Stop butchering the language and just fucking type sentences in english. You know who you are.

I really hate Tapatalk sometimes. It has this habit of occasionally ignoring spoiler tags, so in the message preview when I am scrolling through the list of recent posts, I was spoiled on Skyfall, despite RyanMM doing the right thing.

Oh well!

Yea, I just noticed that for the first time yesterday when I post I made, which utilized spoiler tags in order to keep the thing from being ten pages long, ended up being ten pages long on my phone.

I also noticed Tapatalk doesn't render strike-throughs.

Oh man, fuck Tapatalk. And sorry for the spoiler, Athryn. :(

Like I said, it's not your fault. I am sure I'll still enjoy the movie. :)

You will!

Just now, I signed the petition for Louisiana to secede from the Union. My thanks to whitehouse.gov for allowing Canadians to vote on their petitions.

Heh - a quick glance of the signatories indicates that the vast majority are from outside LA.

"We the people of the US and other countries do implore you, Louisiana, not to let the door hit you in the ass on the way out. See if Texas wants to go with you."

So I'm watching Aziz Ansari's stand-up special on Comedy Central, and he's talking about R. Kelly doing a song called "Echo" and then having to make a video explaining what an echo is, because his fans are dumbasses.

No way can this be true, I think to myself, but it took no time at all to google it up.

Best comment, from about 6 seconds before I got there: "now explane urinating on a teenager"

I love the Internet.

So I know that technically you are supposed to boil the water first and then add the pasta. But over the years I've found that you can usually get away with putting in the pasta early.

Tonight my luck ran out. The pasta essentially began to disintegrate as the water warmed up. At the end I had mushy mess.

Luckily it was mac and cheese - just add more cheese and who cares what the pasta adds!

You're like my wife. She can't be bothered to add enough water (and her pasta glues together and she then tries to fix that by adding oil). I've given up explaining it to her...

But I always put the pasta in while the water's getting ready to boil.
And it comes out lovely~ D:

WHAT ARE YOU DOING WRONG GOSH

My mind is blown.

But then it wasn't:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/25/dining/25curi.html?pagewanted=all

It appears that the method works, but your pasta won't be as good and you have to stir it instead of just having it minding it's own business - all this just to save energy and water. I'm very green, but not if my pasta will be paying the price.

It actually does work very well. You can also use a third way, presoaking the pasta in cold salted water a while, then cooking in little fresh water. All three yield good, if slightly different results. I generally use the traditional method as well, except in specific cases.

I'm not sure that anyone looking to conserve energy or supplies should be looking at Italian cooking.

Also, obligatory comments about blanching, shocking and oiling.

I'm sure it works, but this:

And this:

Decided it for me. I'm not going to spend time to stir pasta, if the taste and texture i get is slightly worse, just so I can save some water. It's not like the traditional method is hard.

Never saw the difference myself. And each person experiences the world differently, so Ms. Bastianich might very well see a difference where I don't. Regarding the stirring - I usually go without. Doesn't seem to make difference. In the end, doesn't matter what each o us prefers. I was just posting to point out that 'the pasta needs to be boiled in lots of water or will get sticky' is not quite true. Just the beancounter in me - expect something similar when anyone talks about 'searing steaks to close the pores'.

Ah, but those two are not the same.
The searing thing has been disproven with actual science - so far we have you on one side and the guy, who's cheerleading the method and an actual Italian cook on the other. So it's your word against theirs, and so far I give theirs more weight.

It might be that you don't experience the difference or that it doesn't matter to you - but the Italian cook does, so perhaps the traditional methos isn't completely without merit. And again, it's easy to do, so I see no reason to change or experiment with my pasta.

Well, I could raise you a three-star cook if you like (Heston Blumenthal). But in the end why not just go with 'try it yourself' ? As for actual science - anyone with working knowledge on muscle structure will already cringe at the idea of 'pores' on the surface of a steak, which after all is a mostly a cut muscle. While it is entirely possible that there is a paper out there from someone doing an experiment to sufficient standards, I'd say that already the basic hypothesis fails the requirement for parsimony. Similar with the pasta. But again, I suggest trying it - to me that is 90% of the fun.

No, I still don't get the comparisson with steak.
And I'm not going to change my ways, if there's nothing gained (even if there might just be little lost).

But do link me to Heston's views on pasta cooking, I'm always interested in what he has to say about food.

---

I actually just remembered his Mac & Cheese recipe and looked it up on YouTube. Here he uses the method but says something like:

"Usually you want to get rid of the starch, but here we use only a little water to keep it, because it adds thickness to the sauce"
So for some special cases, the method has a benefit.

I hate to be "that guy," but I doubt you're (Hanzii) cooking with pasta made from scratch, so you are all ready working at a disadvantage, and I doubt you shock your pasta, so unless you're being ultra-conservative about cooking time estimates your pasta is cooking long past what you think it is, if you're even bothering to cook it to a specific level of firmness versus "when it's done," and it has all ready been blanched (edit: iirc, it might just be dried) if it is store bought, so... all these lay arguments revolving around the texture of one cooking process over another are pretty useless.

Cook it how you want, but let's not pretend here.

THIS IS SPARTA...of pasta.

Pasta made from scratch is goddamn delicious, though. There are awesome things about living with someone who loves cooking as much as I love video games.

I usually cook with fresh pasta and often pasta made from scratch with my own very hands, but thanks for being that guy.


And I have no problem with people cooking their pasta however they please. I have a problem with people saying that the method doesn't matter. You're not even saying that, just that in the case of my sucky pasta, it doesn't. But yes, with a lot of caveats the methods are totally interchangeable.

For whatever reason, I decided to see if my old fanfiction.net account was still there - and it is. And you know, the stories aren't half bad.

Well, ok, most of them weren't. I was 23 when I wrote them, after all.

Not online. The source I had in mind was his 'How to cook like Heston' series - in the Mac and Cheese recipes he treats pasta like Risotto, pointing out that it will not stick, but that the retained starch will help with the sauce later on. Looking through my books just now I can add that there are other instances (In search of perfection) where he uses the traditional method, so inconclusive. Looking into 'Modernist Cuisine', recipes therein use both, with no indication why. That book also points out that you should never, ever use dried pasta, and explains how to dry pasta. Herve This (in an old book, 'Molecular Gastronomy') does not talk a lot about the amount of water, but explains that the stickiness is a product of pasta quality (protein content, to be precise) - as I'd expect, frankly. In his old book 'On food and cooking' Harold McGee mentions that a lot of water should be used, but that protein content and water pH are important (again, as you would expect). He changes his mind from there to your link (2009), and in his most recent book then recommend the three method above. While he supposedly based this book an research (it is at least stated therein), he stupidly does not cite primary literature. Looking in the literature databases there are apparently a few thousand papers on pasta cooking (10300 hits, but did not check how many are false positive), but I cannot be bothered to look further.

To explain the 'non-parsimonious hypothesis' bit - pasta pretty much has a higher starch content than the surrounding water. Starch is the sticky stuff after quelling. But the amount of starch retained at the surface of the pasta will pretty much be the same after cooking, even with more volume surrounding it. While the relative starch content of the cooking water will go down, the influence on the relevant amount of starch, the amount on the pasta surface will at best be miniscule, if present at all. Therefore, assuming that the effect will nonetheless be important is not parsimonious.

edit: and given the time this exhausts my willingness to debate pasta cooking times online. Sorry, hate to run out like that, but again - cook however you like. Just please do not tell others that the traditional method is the only one that works.

No, in the future when making quick off the cuff remarks about pasta cooking in the "Random thoughts..."-thread, I shall henceforth remember to say "Please use the pasta cooking method that best fits your recipe". I'm so glad we cleared that up.

To be fair, I've made homemade pasta a total of thrice, and the orecchiette Aaron ate were not my finest attempt. Also, quelling? Rinsing off the starch? Technical knowledge is not something I associate with pasta. As long as it boils and doesn't turn to glop when I lift it out of the pot, that's pretty much all I need. :)

...I should get back into cooking. Most of this week, all I've felt like eating at all has been rice.

Edit: To clarify, it was not my intention to call into question yours or your wife's skills as cooks. I was intending to highlight the many ways in which people compromise convenience over quality, every single day, when it comes to preparing, cooking, serving and eating their pasta. I should have used a generic person as an example instead of you, Hanzii, but I figured you would realize I was just using you as a stand-in for John Q Everyman. If that contributed to any misunderstanding then I am sorry for not being more careful with constructing my points.

Though I hate to interfere with the epic amounts of misconstrued ouchies, you do understand that I wasn't insinuating that your pasta sucks, that you cook it wrong, that you can't taste the difference or that buying boxed pasta is wrong, yes? It is a fair assumption to operate under that a large majority of people do not prepare and cook pasta from scratch, that while you may, your wife may not, and that even if the both of you did, the majority of people, American and European, save, perhaps, actual Italians, do not.

I appreciate you acknowledging the fact that, all things considered, the minor taste or texture changes a different method might impart aren't as important as the fact that those alternate methods existing in the first place; I just wish you had not assumed what I or Farnsworth were saying before arriving at that conclusion. I certainly wasn't calling into question your skill, and if you'd take the time to re-read his posts, he certainly wasn't calling the two methods equal.