LetterRip

That makes sense. It seems like many home cooks doing stove top frying add too much food for the oil, resulting in the temp dropping too drastically and thus allowing oil to seep in and making the food greasy. So I was thinking by suggesting a block of metal for added thermal mass, this problem might be alleviated. (Obviously they could instead reduce the number of pieces cooked at one time and increase the oil temp as well).

IndyRob - the source of the thermal mass - whether it be a heavier pan, or by sitting your pan on a large hunk of metal as I suggested above - doesn't really matter much, so yes a vessel with thick iron walls will better maintain the 'thermal inertia'.

The standard recommendation for deep frying is a minimum of 1:10 food to oil/fat, to prevent the oil from cooling too much when the food to be fried is added. http://www.dgfett.de/material/optimum_frying.pdf I'm curious if drastically increasing the thermal mass of the cooking container can be used to reduce that requirement? Ie set your deep frying pan on a heavy steel block, then we can recharge the heat to the oil quite rapidly. Anyone done any experiments, or have any insight? Another question/thought - if we prewarm or precool the item to be fried. For the thermal mass question it should decrease it it we prewarm the food to be fried, but what impact will in have on flavor, same question of flavor effects on cooling the food before frying it. My thoughts are that preheating might reduce the moisture content slightly so slightly less moist. Another deep frying question/thought - anyone doing their cooling on a rack/elevation with circulating hot air to reduce oil absorption? I'm also curious if industrial cooking facilities use hot air blowers to blow off the oil of fried items before cooling them.

Looks like Cooks Illustrated investigated almost what you asked, unfortunately I don't have a subscription so can't find out what the results were. http://www.cooksillustrated.com/equipment/overview.asp?docid=17906

I think the synthsizer analogy is apt. To write a complete orchestral symphony and have it played beautifully one no longer needs an orchestra, just skill in the creation of the original scoring, about 3000$ worth of software and 1500$ worth of hardware. Now composers of great skill are no longer dependent on finding the significant funding needed to get their compositions played, and the additional skills of conducting and auditioning to get the music played correctly, or of finding a venue with good acoustics to get the sound to resonate correctly. It takes it from being a vast array of necessary skills and large amount of resources, to one dependent on much more limited resources and primarily the individuals skill.

What is interesting is that this almost exactly parallels the view artists had of computer animation, and early computer animators had of advances in computer animation tools. Technical tasks that took a long time to master were made faster, easier, or obsolete by technical advances. Now artists can know little or nothing about the technical side, and produce brilliant art work and animations. Instead of painstaking crafting of each polygon, you can sculpt in detail as if working with clay, then retopologize. Instead of painstaking placement of bones and careful weighting of each vertex so it bends right, you can autorig and autoweight in minutes. Instead of painstaking hand animation of facial expressions, you can get a facial motion capture rig and act out the animation. The tools are making artist more productive than ever, allowing new artists to start at a point that it took artists of the past 5 years to achieve. Asside from nastalgia though, today is far better. It allows artists to get to the 'art' part of art immediately instead of having to constantly fight technical limitations. One no longer has to be half technician/half artist, but instead can be pure artist.

I think you've stumped the book there, Renn -- but I'm also pretty sure that the answer is a flat "no," because the pigments in mottled beans like cranberry beans are water-soluble. ETA: Just checked McGee (485): yep, they are. Hmm I know some pigments can be stabilized during cooking by adding cream of tartar, http://www.ehow.com/about_5380504_cream-tartar-do.html Not sure if it works for the particular pigment of cranberry beans though.

I'm speculating here so my apologies if I'm completely wrong Two things I would try - distilled water - there was a thread somewhere on this site that mentioned using distilled water working for soaking old beans where distilled water would work to soften the bean whereas they would remain hard otherwise. Second thing I would try is adding some distilled vinegar - which is claimed to make rice fluffier. http://www.ehow.com/how_5589754_cook-rice-adding-vinegar-water.html I don't know enough about the structure of rice to know if the above are useful advice just some random thoughts. For pot size - hmm that would give differences in thermal mass, it would change the surface area of the water, neither of those would I expect to be significant factors for boiling rice. I can't imagine why it might be a factor (only reason it might be is if you dump a bunch of rice in and the water loses boil due to a pot with really low thermal mass. To counter this I would add salt to increase the boiling point, and put a lid on to increase the boiling point)

I'm a bit late to the conversation But another possibility you could have tried is vibration - never tried it for removing air bubbles from food - but it definitely works for concrete, composites, oil industry applications - not sure how small of bubbles and what viscosity of fluid it would work in though, nor the intensity of vibration you would need - a quick google search suggests vibration for removing air bubbles from chocolate Tom M. LetterRip