No fixed plans. Not intent upon arriving.
But as a rule, stick to kosher salt and you’re pretty much good to go for all your salting needs. And again, it’s not the salt on the kitchen counter that’s the problem in the American diet. It’s the hidden sodium in all the canned, boxed, and fast food we can’t keep our hands off of. Most people, if they eat fresh food, they can season it all they like with salt.
(Via ruhlman.com.)
“Fred Brooks in The Mythical Man-Month quotes: never take two chronometers to sea. Always take one or three. Meaning, if two chronometers contradict, how do you know which one is correct?”
— Wikipedia on Unit Testing
It seems I have another tip to add to the four I gave yesterday.
You see, in yesterday’s post, I said I was going to try my hand at cheese making. Gretchen and I bought ourselves a basic cheese-making kit for Christmas and tried a recipe today. It called for pasteurized milk. We only had raw milk, so we pasteurized it by heating it to 145 °F for 30 minutes. I used my Thermapen to measure the temperature. Gretchen noticed that the kit came with its own dial thermometer and I asked her if she would clip it on the pot so I would not drain the battery on mine. She did and it read — within our ability to tell — the same as the Thermapen. She went and fished around in the kitchen drawers. I asked her what she was doing as she pulled out our kitchen dial thermometer. ”Oh nothing,” she said nonchalantly and stuck it in the warm milk on the stove. It read 160 °F.
Hmmm…
Did I mention that this batch of beer — the one I described as “amazing” — is the first one I have made since I got the new thermometer?
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge
— Charles Darwin
I must be different from most people. I tried my hand at home brewing in the early nineties. I made one passable stout. I could not tell you what kind. After repeated failures I gave up. I tried again in the spring of 2008. My first attempts were still awful, but there were enough people that talked about making good beer that I figured it must be possible. I kept reading about people that made one batch of beer and were hooked because it was so good! I could not understand what I was doing wrong. Everybody made it seem so easy.
I must have crossed some threshold with this last batch. I would not say I did anything different from before. I would not say I did everything perfectly. Still, this beer is amazing. I guess I have been suffering from the Dunning–Kruger effect. I thought I knew what I was doing. Clearly I did not.
Some people are lucky. I have to work at it. When I learned to cook, I am sure I was the same way, but I cooked all day every day and got paid to do it. I climbed that learning curve quick enough that I did not know it was there. Apparently at the rate I brew — about once a month — it takes me about two and a half years to get the basics down.
Here are a few things I have learned along the way.
Now I am going to branch out. Cheeses and cured meats are next.