Mayonnaise: 20 parts oil: 1 part liquid: 1 part yolk
Hollandaise: 5 parts butter: 1 part liquid: 1 part yolk
Vinaigrette: 3 parts oil: 1 part vinegar
Rule of thumb: You probably don’t need as much yolk as you thought you did.
I like that he provides the simple ratios with some general advice up front and then includes some ideas about variations before throwing in a smattering of specific recipes that one could use. For my own part, most of these chapters could be cut down to two pages and then perhaps even then cut the book down to a single sheet for actual use in the kitchen.
Highlights, Quotes, & Marginalia
Part 4: Fat-Based Sauces
But what greatly helps the oil and water to remain separate is, among other things, a molecule in the yolk called lecithin, which, McGee explains, is part water soluble and part fat soluble.
Highlight (yellow) – Mayonnaise > Page 168
Added on Sunday, February 4, 2018
The traditional ratio, not by weight, is excellent and works beautifully: Hollandaise = 1 pound butter: 6 yolks. This ratio seems to have originated with Escoffier. Some cookbooks call for considerably less butter per yok, as little as 3 and some even closer to 2 to 1, but then you’re creeping into sabayon territory; whats more, I believe it’s a cook’s moral obligation to add more butter given the chance.
Highlight (yellow) – Hollandaise> Page 185
more butter given the chance! Reminiscent of the Paula Deen phrase: “Mo’e butta is mo’e betta.” Added on Sunday, February 4, 2018
In the days of home newspaper delivery this is just awesome. A dog so good at fetching newspapers, he collects them from the entire neighborhood! What a good belly laugh at the childishness of it all.
I like the idea of considering the traditional American hamburger as a special kind of sausage. This general abstraction appeals to the mathematician in me. It also encourages one to be geared toward the closer end of 70/30 meat/fat ratio when making hamburgers! Too often I’ve had people’s homemade burgers made with 92/8 ratios and they’re just dreadful. However, he does stop short and doesn’t encourage one to use pork fat in their burgers…
Highlights, Quotes, & Marginalia
Part 3: Meat: Sausage, Mousseline, and Other Meat-Related Ratios
There is no such thing as a good, lean sausage.
Highlight (yellow) – The Noble Sausage > Page 132
Added on Saturday, February 3, 2018
The fat of choice is pork back fat, […] it’s better for you than the more saturated fat from beef or lamb.
Highlight (yellow) – The Noble Sausage > Page 133
Added on Saturday, February 3, 2018
Indeed, the word sausage derives from the Latin for salt.
Highlight (yellow) – The Noble Sausage > Page 133
Added on Saturday, February 3, 2018
Never use iodized salt, which adds an acrid chemical flavor to food. Use kosher or sea salt only.
Highlight (yellow) – The Noble Sausage > Page 133
Added on Saturday, February 3, 2018
Morton’s kosher is the closest to an even volume-to-weight ratio (a cup of Morton’s weighs about 8 ounces).
Highlight (yellow) – The Noble Sausage > Page 133
Added on Saturday, February 3, 2018
Pork sausages should be cooked to 150 deg F before being removed from the heat, and poultry-based sausages should be cooked to 160 deg F.
Highlight (yellow) – The Noble Sausage > Page 134
Added on Saturday, February 3, 2018
I make sausage in 5-pound batches, since that’s the maximum that will fit in the 5- or 6-quart mixing bowl standard for most standing mixers;
Highlight (yellow) – The Noble Sausage > Page 135
Added on Saturday, February 3, 2018
[When making] Fry a bit-sized portion of the sausage and taste…
Highlight (yellow) – The Noble Sausage > Page 136
Added on Saturday, February 3, 2018
One secondary and salutary effect of a brine is that it can actually carry flavors into muscle, …
Highlight (yellow) – Brine > Page 154
For those watching closely, he’s made a pun on the word salutary whose Latin root is also the word for salt. Added on Saturday, February 3, 2018
Sodium nitrite, often simply referred to as pink salt (it’s dyed pink), is a curing salt that’s inexpensive and available from www.butcher-packer.com, which sells pink salt under the name DQ Cure.
Highlight (yellow) – Brine > Page 158
Oddly this line is repeated twice in the footnotes on opposite pages, but provides a useful link for ordering supplies for making Canadian bacon and Corned Beef Added on Saturday, February 3, 2018
Henry could have done far better here, but apparently his business acumen and concept of economics was just dreadful. Still in all, an entertaining chapter where everything that could go wrong in selling found bubblegum does. As always, Ramona steals the show for laughs with the gum in her hair.
The chapter title really gives it all away, so you see it all coming from a mile away, and yet somehow it’s still funny. I love how close the Grumbie’s last name is to the cognate word grumble.
Certainly not the most entertaining chapter of the book. Davy thinking that ‘Taterpillars could have started with a ‘t’ was entertaining as was the description that Ramona was sure her father was the tooth fairy and she wanted to catch him in the act. The rest was just a set up for the final chapter which actually played better not having read this one prior to it.
Probably should have read chapter 7 first (in my out of order chapter hopping) as it did have a few references back to Ramona’s horrible day. Ramona has a terrific tantrum and refuses to go back to school. There’s an interesting perspective on child psychology I’m seeing in this reading compared to when I read this when I was probably 9 or 10. Ramona finally understands what “dawnzer” means.
The idea of using a worm as an engagement ring is just truly fantastic!
Then something on the sidewalk caught Ramona’s eye. It was a pink worm that still had some wiggle left in it. She picked it up and wound it around her finger as she looked toward Henry. “I’m going to marry you, Henry Huggins!” she called out.
I’m skipping around a bit in the plot since it’s not entirely linear…
I really appreciate the sophisticated philosophy of a kindergartner loosing her identity by wearing a mask. This idea was certainly something I find intriguing.
I’m pretty sure I read this book in my youth, but I’m finding that I honestly don’t recall any of the plot for some reason.
According to Pocket, I’m still in their top 5% of their readers/users despite the fact that I cut way back on using it this past year in strong deference to using other feed readers including one built into my website.
Apparently I read 678, 617 words in their app this year which according to them is the equivalent of reading 14 books. To ballpark things I think I read 5 times as much in other apps. Now I don’t feel quite as bad about my poor Goodreads numbers.
I’d read a portion of this in the past, but thought I’d circle back to it when I saw it sitting on the shelf at the library before the holidays. It naturally helps to have had lots of physics in the past, but this has a phenomenally clear and crisp presentation of just the basics in a way that is seldom if ever seen in actual physics textbooks.
Highlights, Quotes, & Marginalia
Lecture One: The Nature of Classical Physics
There is a very simple rule to tell when a diagram represents a deterministic reversible law. If every state has a single unique arrow leading into it, and a single arrow leading out of it, then it is a legal deterministic reversible law.
Highlight (yellow) – 1. The Nature of Classical Physics > Page 9
There’s naturally a much more sophisticated and subtle mathematical way of saying this. I feel like I’ve been constantly tempted to go back and look at more category theory, and this may be yet another motivator. Added on Wednesday, January 4, 2018 late evening
The rule that dynamical laws must be deterministic and reversible is so central to classical physics that we sometimes forget to mention it when teaching the subject. […] minus-first law [: …] undoubtedly the most fundamental of all physics laws–the conservation of information. The conservation of information is simply the rule that every state has one arrow in and one arrow out. It ensures that you never lose track of where you started.
Highlight (yellow) – 1. The Nature of Classical Physics > Page 9-10
This is very simply and naturally stated, but holds a lot of complexity. Again I’d like to come back and do some serious formalization of this and reframe it in a category theory frameork. Added on Wednesday, January 4, 2018 late evening
There is evan a zeroth law […]
Highlight (gray) – 1. The Nature of Classical Physics > Page 9
spelling should be even; I’m also noticing a lot of subtle typesetting issues within the physical production of the book that are driving me a bit crazy. Spaces where they don’t belong or text not having clear margins at the tops/bottoms of pages. I suspect the math and layout of diagrams and boxes in the text caused a lot of problems in their usual production flow. Added on Wednesday, January 4, 2018 late evening
Guide to highlight colors
Yellow–general highlights and highlights which don’t fit under another category below Orange–Vocabulary word; interesting and/or rare word Green–Reference to read Blue–Interesting Quote Gray–Typography Problem Red–Example to work through
I want to read 42 books in 2018.
I sometimes feel guilty about failing miserably at these based on the way GoodReads counts their books vis-a-vis finishing complete books, particularly when I’m often reading such dense technical books in which reading a page a day is a near Herculean task.
Thus, because I can have finer control of things on my own website, I’ll try to break things out on a more granular level.
I want to read (aka work my way through) 2-3 technical textbooks in 2018.
I want to read 10 non-fiction books in 2018.
I want to read 20 fiction books in 2018.
I want to read 10 juvenal fiction/literature books in 2018.
Ramon scribbles some black on the picture of her house to make it “interesting”. I knew immediately it was a fire and couldn’t help but laughing at the pending discussion… Oh, the creativity of the young!
A doll named Chevrolet is just awesome. Even better that her hair is in horrific shape because “It’s sort of green because I gave her a blue rinse.” Then it was washed with “Lots of things,” […] “Soap, shampoo, detergent, bubble bath. I tried Dutch Cleanser once, but it didn’t work.”
