cdh

This is quite a trip down memory lane! I miss lots of people who just don't drop by any more... Lucy from France was always fun to read, as was Abra who rearranged her life to go to France... But then again, I probably went a year between posts there during periods as well, and I was dropping in to read regularly. Perhaps the allure and ?income of blogging redirected some folks creative endeavors away from here...

Raised beds and good fencing are the investments to be making now.

Best advice I could give is to limit your compost contribution to coffee grounds until you get moved in at the beach... get a home depot bucket and lid, dump the coffee grounds in there. Take to beach, add to pile of leaves and such like. Won't be stinky. Will add nitrogen. If you're adventurous, you could get a culture of the oyster mushroom spawn that likes to eat coffee grounds and get an edible mushroom patch going in your bucket, which you could then dump onto the compost heap after you harvest the mushrooms.

The compost you really want is mostly rotten leaves and grass clippings. The stinky kitchen stuff should not be anywhere near the majority of the mass. The idea of keeping the stuff from your sink strainer does not have much merit. Most municipalities have compost piles made of the roadside leaves collected... Look into that as your starter compost source... and then build a 3-sided enclosure that you can rake/blow lawn leaves into in the fall as your onsite compost source. Chucking your stinky sink strainer stuff into that won't hurt it... but also won't be the majority of the stuff composting.

Do any of the cocktail writers of the times mention the stuff? I've got both of the Charles Baker Gentlemen's Companion books on the shelf and they cover the 40s... Trader Vic would cover the 50's, right? Who else might be worth checking out for any mentions of the stuff?

60's? Is sour mix the Son of Tang? Space age astronaut margaritas?

Any idea who the inventor of the powdered stuff was? I can imagine that the whole "wave of the future" Jetsons kind of marketing could have swayed a bunch of bar managers (and the fact that it is quicker and cheaper than juicing real fruit didn't hurt). If the inventor was one of the big consumer products companies, then I think we can safely attribute it to their marketing department. But I have no idea where it came from...

Sadly not the case. See http://www.sculpture.org/documents/scmag05/may_05/webspecs/grant.shtml

Fine question. I've not found a better English explanation of the court ruling. I really don't understand the implications to photographers, unless in Germany it is infringement to photograph a sculpture protected by copyright. If the composition on the plate is protectable, it is more like a sculpture than anything else... if sculptures are protected from photographers, then it makes some sense. I do wonder how they deal with the artist's "moral rights" to prevent destruction or defacement of a sculpture in an edible medium.

It is a pity that FatGuy did not live to see the day that a country did adopt his culinary copyright ideas. Looks like Germany has done it. http://petapixel.com/2015/08/14/photos-of-your-meal-could-be-copyright-infringement-in-germany/ I still think it is wrongheaded and counterproductive... but there it is.

Been here since January of '03...

The ISI issue is the bottle size matching thing, just like the sodastream. With carbonator caps or other such things, you can pick smaller bottles, or squeeze the air out and make sure that the headspace is almost all CO2. Dunno what size ISI you've got, but I'd wager you've seen better results when the chamber is mostly full, and worse results when more air than liquid is in there.

Yup. Colder liquids can dissolve more CO2, so get it as cold as you can without freezing it. Make sure your bottle matches the amount of liquid you want to refizz... you'll not get good results with 4 oz of liquid at the bottom of a 32oz bottle that is already full of air. Get the air out or get a smaller bottle. Dunno if you can do that with a SodaStream... I can with my CO2 tank and standard carbonator cap that screws onto the usual size bottle opening...

Dunno about that. The carbonator charges aim to add an 8g charge to a liter of water for middle of the road fizzyness. 8g is about 1/3 of an ounce, so not a vanishingly small amount. My guess is that you might get 10-14g out of tonic. Easier to go by weight than by volume of balloon, I think.

All of this is a variation on the historical challenge problem "Weigh the smoke from my cigar"... whose solution is to weigh the cigar, incinerate it, and weigh the ash. Subtract.

Hmmm... I've not noticed that behavior, but I'll trust your observant eye and believe that is the case. Most reasonable explanation is that the bottlers put more gas into tonic than seltzer, etc, so it takes a longer time for it to leave. There are probably quantitative tests that could be done to prove this hypothesis-- get accurate scale and weigh bottles of tonic and seltzer while fully carbonated, then unscrew the caps and see how many grams of gas left... or maybe pH... more CO2 in solution ==> more carbonic acid... but the tonic recipe already has citric in it, so I have no ideas how that would affect a comparative measurement and what it would tell you vis a vis seltzer... which should start somewhat below 7 due to carbonic and be a solid 7 when flat...

It is certainly possible. Put the flat stuff in the fridge to get cold, hit it with CO2 and shake the heck out of it. Put it back in the fridge to settle down and you'll have re-fizzed your flat stuff.

yeah

No harm in leaving them in longer. Though since you're shooting for less than 130F, you can't just toss it in and leave it. 130+ is getting into bacteria killing range. 129 might still be in the bacteria growing zone.

Hope that some of these questions actually get answered. The comments thread at Kickstarter indicates that somebody over there thought to post this thread here... hope the same person goes back over there and prods for answers.

One thing I'm not clear on is whether this thing automatically disperses the alginate into the proposed-sphere-solution, or if the hard work of figuring out and measuring down to the .1g just how much alginate to add is still in the user's domain. If this is just a squirt bottle attached to a fan, it is significantly less compelling.

looks cool!

So he doesn't like induction, and needs to pop its bubble. Good luck with that, but you're sorta kicking it while it is already down. What market share does it have anyway that incites such a desire to knock it down a few notches? You'd prefer to just ban it and never have to worry about the scourge of induction again?

Thanks for the snippet...

hmmmm... understanding the methodology of the test might be helpful in figuring out what that table is telling us. My PDF reader won't let me get off of page 1 of that linked file...