Posts tagged cooking

“A Chinese office lady has risen to internet stardom in China for making viral videos documenting her novel yet bizarre ways of…

food, cooking, improvisation, china, pancakes, popcorn, CPU, Little Ye in the Office

video link

“A Chinese office lady has risen to internet stardom in China for making viral videos documenting her novel yet bizarre ways of preparing meals at her workplace. In each video, Little Ye improvises her meal preparation equipment using things commonly found around the office.”

(via http://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/2078368/no-more-sad-desk-lunch-chinese-woman-shows-how-fry-food-cpu-grill )

The Best Kitchen Gadget of the 1600s Was a Small, Short-Legged Dog

automation, cooking, history, food, animals, domestication

For hundreds of years the now-extinct turnspit dog, also called Canis Vertigus (“dizzy dog”), vernepator cur, kitchen dog and turn-tyke, was specially bred just to turn a roasting mechanism for meat. And weirdly, this animal was a high-tech fixture for the professional and home cook from the 16th century until the mid-1800s. Turnspit dogs came in a variety of colors and were heavy-set, often with heterochromatic eyes. They were short enough to fit into a wooden wheel contraption that was connected to ropes or chains, which turned the giant turkey or ham on a spit for the master of the house.

via http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-best-kitchen-gadget-of-the–1600s-was-a-small-shortlegged-dog

A Plea for Culinary Modernism

food, cooking, history, local, slow food, fast food, ethics, globalism, industrialisation, labour

Culinary Luddites are right, though, about two important things. We need to know how to prepare good food, and we need a culinary ethos. As far as good food goes, they’ve done us all a service by teaching us to how to use the bounty delivered to us (ironically) by the global economy. Their culinary ethos, though, is another matter. Were we able to turn back the clock, as they urge, most of us would be toiling all day in the fields or the kitchen; many of us would be starving. Nostalgia is not what we need. What we need is an ethos that comes to terms with contemporary, industrialized food, not one that dismisses it, an ethos that opens choices for everyone, not one that closes them for many so that a few may enjoy their labor, and an ethos that does not prejudge, but decides case by case when natural is preferable to processed, fresh to preserved, old to new, slow to fast, artisanal to industrial.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/05/slow-food-artisanal-natural-preservatives/

How Food Stole the Avant-Garde: Letter From Copenhagen

food, art, MAD4, Noma, cooking, avant garde, the new black, culture, fashion

So here’s what I would say to my taxi driver if the meter weren’t running: The revolution begins at the kitchen table. The desires of the artist and the chef are not so different: to nourish humans and perhaps hold up the mirror to those who consume our products. Change the world. There will always be a new black. But that is because black is eternal. It’s what fashion wants to be. Let’s reduce “the new” to fashion. Let’s call black “culture.” Black is never the old black. It just can’t be. Black is always the black. In this sense, food is always the black. Art is always the black. What is cooking? What is the avant-garde?

http://hyperallergic.com/148589/how-food-stole-the-avant-garde-letter-from-copenhagen/

Cryptoforestry: Food pairing / gastronomy with a telescope

food pairing, food, cryptoforestry, open sauces, data, cooking, geography, gastronomy

The number of foodpairs a recipe generates increases exponentially with the number of ingredients. A typical cookbook (and the ones we use here are all modest one) yields anywhere between 700 and 2500 pairs, the number of connections when comparing three books is large and a really meaningful way to visualize a foodpair comparison we have not yet found. Instead we have turned to using the Jaccard Index, a simple formula for comparing similarity in datasets. If two book are absolutely similar (a book compared with itself) the index is 1, if the books are completely dissimilar the index is 0. So how higher the number how greater the similarity.

http://cryptoforest.blogspot.nl/2014/07/food-pairing-gastronomy-with-telescope.html

A Work in Progress: Notes on Food, Cooking and Creativity

Noma, René Redzepi, books, food, cooking, work in progress

Like the restaurant on which it is based, A Work in Progress is unconventional with a mix of both high and lowbrow elements. It is packaged as a plain looking three-volume set that is bound together by a rubber band. Unwrapping the package, you will discover in ascending size, Snap Shots, a pocket sized book of candid photos taken at Noma; René Redzepi Journal, a plain paperback designed to look like a composition notebook set in typewriter font; and finally the end product, Noma Recipes, a hardback book with beautifully photographed dishes—each one a presentational masterpiece—that were created during the 12-month journaling period.

http://nyjournalofbooks.com/review/work-progress-notes-food-cooking-and-creativity

Vegan Ortolan

recipe, vegetarian, vegan, edible, cooking, food, vegan ortolan, ortolan

The traditional preparation of the ortolan bird in France demands that they are captured alive, force-fed, drowned in Armagnac and eaten whole. Although it is illegal to prepare and eat, the dish retains a forbidden attraction for some adventurous eaters. What better way to challenge the skills of a chef than to create a vegan recipe which simulates the experience of crunching through the skin, guts and bones of a small bird, without using any animal products? This dish is intended to be consumed in the traditional way — with a large napkin covering the head and the face — to keep the flavours in, and to hide one’s shame from God.

http://www.sciencegallery.com/edible/taste/vegan-ortolan