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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.

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  • 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.


  • Steak Porn / Cooking-RibEye Steak with Gordon Ramsey in 1...

    Created Dec 14 2008 •







    I immediately liked this video ... briefly ... before I took a closer look at it, and found it to be more showmanship than cooking. Consider the fact that the man puts the artichokes on a stovetop grill pan, which presumably will be raised to a high enough temperature for something akin to grilling to occur, and he has coated the pan with olive oil.












    Olive oil, as a cooking fat, isn't even recommended for anything resembling a stirfry because its smoking point is too low; those artichokes end up with an attractive deep brown color because they're coated in carbon from the broken down oil. More or less the same thing that happens when you season a cast iron pan, right? Would you really want to eat some of that seasoning? Which seems to be a recurring problem on this video. Consider the beginning, when he heats the olive oil the steak is cooked in until it is sizzling hot, producing this admittedly promisingly appetizingly dark initial searing of the meat






    Image hosted at Webshots







    Not bad for the one minute mark, but not where one wants to be, yet, which isn't a surprise; one has to work a little more to get meat to get brown and crisp surfaced in oil than one does with butter, a point which does not seem lost on Ramsay, who soon introduces a small stick of butter into the pan with the steak. Very soon, and that's where trouble arises with this concept.







    Image hosted at PiccDrop.com








    What sort of pan are we to use to make this? The pan Ramsay uses looks a little too bright to be cast iron, not quite bright enough to be stainless steel, so I'm going to guess that it's aluminum. Not bad for making rice or cooking vegetables, in fact quite excellent for either purpose, but is it really the thing to use for steak? For steak (and many other things as well), one wants something that will hold and distribute the heat evenly, hence the strange fascination many of us have with something as heavy, brittle and rustprone as cast iron. It's a pain to work with, but it gets the job done. It also has the virtue of being easily found and relatively inexpensive. The answer to our question is to be found in the thickness of the pan he uses - it's a nice, heavy professional use restaurant skillet, which is why he is able to get away with doing that step, and why you probably can't do the same in your own kitchen, if you try to follow what he has been doing.




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