close

Subscriptions

josephdunphy

Last seen: 26 hours ago

Joseph is a guy from Chicago, Illinois, USA

Politically Moderate, Underemployed Jewish Applied Mathematician / Electrical Engineer tutoring all knowing freshmen in Mathematics. This profile, like most of the Web, is optimized for a screen resolution of 1024 x 768, and must be viewed in Internet Explorer. A more complete listing of posts, including archived ones, can be found on the introduction page for this site, and is backed up on this page at Googlegroups, with occasional commentary found on Stumbling into the Void on Tribe.

Please click on "list" to see this blog the way it was meant to be viewed. You can return to your ring here.

  • josephdunphys blog - StumbleUpon

    Rated Dec 14 2008 • 7 reviews • stumblers • stumbleupon.com






    Hi, again. I'm in the process of turning this profile into something that will be more of a blog. A recurring theme will be my attempts to build on what I've seen on some of the sites I've reviewed; what did I learn from visiting them, what subjects did they touch on, etc. You might have noticed the continued post format I was playing around with on the Draka and Steak Porn Video reviews; expect to see more of that, with some of the short, one-liner reviews moved into the spaces between the essays. What I'm trying to get away from is the idea of Stumbleupon as a bookmarking site, as I move toward making this into a site that one can simply sit down and feel comfortable reading; more like a magazine and less like a phonebook, or something like that.

    Comments about Stumbleupon related drama, past and present, can be found elsewhere, if you really want to read about that for some reason.




    Browser selection - Please pardon the imperious tone in my comments above, but Stumbleupon surprised us by changing the background color on our pages. In IE, my blog has a black background, and you can see the links. In Firefox and Chrome, the background is white, so you can't, unless you have logged into Stumbleupon, in which case you might see a black background even after you log out, again. Very silly. I can't imagine what they were thinking about, when they did this. It definitely damages the functionality of our pages, and causes a needless headache for visitors to SU.

    I regret any inconvenience, but would point out that this wasn't my idea or doing, and that unlike the SU staff, I have no say in it. If you'd like to know when this will be fixed, they're the ones to ask. I wouldn't have the faintest idea, myself.


  • Created Dec 14 2008 •






    Continuing my review of the "Steak Porn" video ...



    Aluminum releases its heat quickly, but the kind of aluminum cookware you're probably going to be able to buy on the budget most of use have to work with will not closely resemble the kind of professional quality kitchenware Ramsay is using. The aluminum one sees in a home kitchen are those thin walled utensils that are, as I said, good for cooking rice or vegetables, but will tend to toughen red meat when used for dry cooking heats (sautes as opposed to braises). On the other hand, if one is using cast iron and tries to slip the butter in as quickly as he did, one gets a quick reminder of why clarified butter is so popular as a cooking fat as one watches the milk solids in the butter burn.








    Free Image Hosting by LargeImageHost.com







    Did you notice the little burst of flame in the griddle at 0:53 as you watched the video? Notice that no brandy was present; that wasn't flambeeing, that was little brief burst of grease fire, because the cook oiled the grill instead of the artichokes, leaving the oil to overheat in a place where the evaporative cooling from the water released by the artichokes would not be able keep the oil's temperature down below the smoking point. What is interesting is not that we see the flame - one can see that beside any number of overvigorously shaken skillets (go to Little Joe's on Broadway in San Francisco at night, and you'll see that a lot), but that the burst took place inside the skillet, where food is taking on flavor, not outside, as a little pan juice and oil escaped into the flame.














    This video seems designed to send the message to the home cook "look at this beautiful thing you can do at home" (yes, Gordon, we all get to cut up our own meat) leaving the home cook to wonder what he did wrong when he can't get the results he hoped for, when the answer to that question is the use of special, professional grade equipment (seen but not mentioned in the video) is essential to getting the results, which probably look far better than they taste. Whether this ommission was due to Ramsey or the Youtube user who uploaded the segment, we can only guess, but one needn't guess as to why Ramsey is cutting his cooked meat diagonally across the grain at the end of the piece. It's a cheat.




    [ continued ]