>... my wife's sourdough starter living on the counter and getting fed when she remembers. The app reminds her; she ignores the app; the starter survives anyway because sourdough is remarkably forgiving.
That's so great about sourdough starter, you don't have to babysit it at all. We'll, that is, once I figured out that I should ignore the "hydration hydration hydration" and "add blah percentage water and 1.618034 grams of flour" advice. Instead, I just add lots (yes, that's a measure, like pinch and scoop) of fresh flour to my starter and just add water until it's a gooey sticky mess. Leave it alone and it'll do its thing.
tip: tape a kitchen brush and "paint it" thick (have to stick your tongue out as far as you can when you say the ˈθ sound, i do not make the rules) on parchment paper. put it in oven, and turn on the oven light. Wait till it dries. Collect the dry flakes and store in dark, airtight jar. Keeps 'forever'-ish. Take it anywhere, and to re-awaken, just rehydrate and feed. 2-3 days and baaam! you got your progenitor starter's baby in a jar.
This is also a typical approach from the chefs I know: they don't care about precision in most recipes (eg. dishes like soups, or pasta, or salads...), but then sometimes there are dishes where precision is absolutely crucial, and baking is one place where precision is really important.
With sourdough, if you don't measure, you may still get good results, but you will have to babysit the dough and try to figure out when it's ready by checking frequently. Some people can afford it time-wise, and to some this would be prohibitively inconvenient.
I build a fully automated ‘hand sanitizer factory’ back in the summer of 2020 out of boredom and a feeling that it could actually be useful at some point. It doesn’t exactly rot but some of the challenges are similar.
I found a really nice modular architecture in esp32 flashed with tasmota for all of the sensors and switching, they would talk via MQTT over Wi-Fi to a raspberry pi running node-red. It was responsible for all of the data integration, flows, process automation and dashboards.
Just made it super easy to add/remove features without rewiring things and allowed me to replace the esp32’s very easily.
Not my kind of thing but still a highly enjoyable read. I love a tale of a software engineer who has gone down a rabbit-hole so deeply that they've come out the other side. And who doesn't like data?
You're correct, but when the worst the ChatGPTisms get is turns of phrases like "LeetCode youth finally paid off: turns out all those "rebalance a binary search tree" problems were preparing me for salami, not FAANG interviews." or "Designing software for things that rot means optimising for variance, memory, and timing–not perfection. It turns out the hardest part of software isn't keeping things alive. It's knowing when to let them age.", then I'm inclined to forgive it compared to how many far more egregious offenders are at the top of HN these days. This is a rather mild use of ChatGPT for copyediting, and at least I feel like I can trust OP to factcheck everything and not put in any confabulations.
> Could I have added blockchain for tamper-proofing? Sure. Am I going to give people that idea? Absolutely not.
I appreciate the restraint. :P Besides, embedding a lie into a ledger doesn't make it true, it just makes it slightly harder to escape accountability that might not exist anyway.
> "Slightly more sour than batch #3" beats pH to three decimals.
Yeah, while the "human tongue" sensor and support package might not be standardized, it's still far more powerful than anything we can build in a factory.
We just need to control for cases where its processing-unit automatically incorporates data we want to exclude, like "how expensive was that sample."
My professor in college said he designed grain silo software control algos to prevent mold but maximize water retention (weight) in corn.
Apparently when you're in the bulk business, selling water is a good business, but if you lose x% of your water in your corn you're out an equivalent portion of your revenue.
If the corn goes moldy, you may be out more. Hence the optimization.
Great read! I'm sure expensive enterprise tooling exists for busy kitchens to manage safety protocols (or not?), so it is very cool to see high quality tooling for this kind of thing out in the open. After watching so many Chubby Emu videos, I'm definitely scared straight.
> Let's say, you're curing coppa and on day 12 humidity drops to 68% for six hours because you forgot to refill the reservoir.
Two float switches, a latching relay, a cold water line, a valve, and a valve actuator can automate reservoir filling. An HOA switch and leak detection would be nice additions to the automatic reservoir filling, low and high water alarms too. That’s how a boiler feedwater tank works. Might be tricky to fit the float switches in a small humidifier tank, though.
It’s a bit more work to set up than temp and humidity sensing/control but you might as well automate it all once you start.
I wish. No-fault evictions aren't a thing in Scotland, but I'd still struggle to explain the whole "I plumbed a cold line for salami" thing to the landlord.
You can go even simpler if you have a bigger reservoir. Automatic trough fillers where a float mechanically shuts off a valve fed from a garden hose are like $20 at a farm supply store.
I should see what can be done with juniper. I have lots of invasive juniper shrubs and trees. Gave a friend a few pounds of berries once so he could try making gin.
It smelled amazing, but tasted like ass, unfortunately.
This is fucking awesome. I've recently built my own curing chamber and modified a humidifier so it didn't need a button press ;), and am taking delivery of some jowls on the weekend and have been getting all the software infrastructure set up for the monitoring of it's temp/humidity (grafana, prometheus, alerting, etc).
Given that my grandfather used to cure his own in a cabinet in his root cellar with NO automation it feels a little overkilly but I'm glad to see someone else is overkilling at an even more extreme level than me and is making their work public.
Root cellars are far more stable than a ground-floor garage in my case: steady temperature throughout the year, low airflow. Some wooden cabinets are also superior to modern chambers, i.e cedar acts like a humidity buffer, which is why miso makers still swear by cedar koji boxes.
To call it a wooden cabinet might be a wee bit generous. Actually a broken wardrobe he probably found on the side of the road with broken hinges on one of the doors so he nailed it shut. :lol:
>... my wife's sourdough starter living on the counter and getting fed when she remembers. The app reminds her; she ignores the app; the starter survives anyway because sourdough is remarkably forgiving.
That's so great about sourdough starter, you don't have to babysit it at all. We'll, that is, once I figured out that I should ignore the "hydration hydration hydration" and "add blah percentage water and 1.618034 grams of flour" advice. Instead, I just add lots (yes, that's a measure, like pinch and scoop) of fresh flour to my starter and just add water until it's a gooey sticky mess. Leave it alone and it'll do its thing.
tip: tape a kitchen brush and "paint it" thick (have to stick your tongue out as far as you can when you say the ˈθ sound, i do not make the rules) on parchment paper. put it in oven, and turn on the oven light. Wait till it dries. Collect the dry flakes and store in dark, airtight jar. Keeps 'forever'-ish. Take it anywhere, and to re-awaken, just rehydrate and feed. 2-3 days and baaam! you got your progenitor starter's baby in a jar.
No constant feeding and wasted flour.
The point of measuring is reproducibility. If you want to get the same result repeatedly the easiest way is to measure.
Obviously people have been making sourdough for a very long time; you don't have to measure.
Absolutely.
This is also a typical approach from the chefs I know: they don't care about precision in most recipes (eg. dishes like soups, or pasta, or salads...), but then sometimes there are dishes where precision is absolutely crucial, and baking is one place where precision is really important.
With sourdough, if you don't measure, you may still get good results, but you will have to babysit the dough and try to figure out when it's ready by checking frequently. Some people can afford it time-wise, and to some this would be prohibitively inconvenient.
.. also nice to give it a little drop of honey now and then, especially if your kitchen (or wherever you store it) is a bit on the cool side.
I build a fully automated ‘hand sanitizer factory’ back in the summer of 2020 out of boredom and a feeling that it could actually be useful at some point. It doesn’t exactly rot but some of the challenges are similar.
I found a really nice modular architecture in esp32 flashed with tasmota for all of the sensors and switching, they would talk via MQTT over Wi-Fi to a raspberry pi running node-red. It was responsible for all of the data integration, flows, process automation and dashboards.
Just made it super easy to add/remove features without rewiring things and allowed me to replace the esp32’s very easily.
Not my kind of thing but still a highly enjoyable read. I love a tale of a software engineer who has gone down a rabbit-hole so deeply that they've come out the other side. And who doesn't like data?
And he's got a great way with words as well.
Unfortunately it smells of ChatGPT at points.
You're correct, but when the worst the ChatGPTisms get is turns of phrases like "LeetCode youth finally paid off: turns out all those "rebalance a binary search tree" problems were preparing me for salami, not FAANG interviews." or "Designing software for things that rot means optimising for variance, memory, and timing–not perfection. It turns out the hardest part of software isn't keeping things alive. It's knowing when to let them age.", then I'm inclined to forgive it compared to how many far more egregious offenders are at the top of HN these days. This is a rather mild use of ChatGPT for copyediting, and at least I feel like I can trust OP to factcheck everything and not put in any confabulations.
You're absolutely right!
> Could I have added blockchain for tamper-proofing? Sure. Am I going to give people that idea? Absolutely not.
I appreciate the restraint. :P Besides, embedding a lie into a ledger doesn't make it true, it just makes it slightly harder to escape accountability that might not exist anyway.
> "Slightly more sour than batch #3" beats pH to three decimals.
Yeah, while the "human tongue" sensor and support package might not be standardized, it's still far more powerful than anything we can build in a factory.
We just need to control for cases where its processing-unit automatically incorporates data we want to exclude, like "how expensive was that sample."
My professor in college said he designed grain silo software control algos to prevent mold but maximize water retention (weight) in corn.
Apparently when you're in the bulk business, selling water is a good business, but if you lose x% of your water in your corn you're out an equivalent portion of your revenue.
If the corn goes moldy, you may be out more. Hence the optimization.
Great read! I'm sure expensive enterprise tooling exists for busy kitchens to manage safety protocols (or not?), so it is very cool to see high quality tooling for this kind of thing out in the open. After watching so many Chubby Emu videos, I'm definitely scared straight.
Off-topic, but the syntax highlighting is a little difficult to read on light mode: https://pasteboard.co/5dXcQjgcHIqu.png
Before clicking I thought this was going to be a philosophical piece about entropy.
I had the same expectation going in. But it was an interesting read.
Here's me hoping this was something for Factorio: Space Age...
Hahaha my exact thought.
Yes. I thought of Gleba too.
> Let's say, you're curing coppa and on day 12 humidity drops to 68% for six hours because you forgot to refill the reservoir.
Two float switches, a latching relay, a cold water line, a valve, and a valve actuator can automate reservoir filling. An HOA switch and leak detection would be nice additions to the automatic reservoir filling, low and high water alarms too. That’s how a boiler feedwater tank works. Might be tricky to fit the float switches in a small humidifier tank, though.
It’s a bit more work to set up than temp and humidity sensing/control but you might as well automate it all once you start.
I wish. No-fault evictions aren't a thing in Scotland, but I'd still struggle to explain the whole "I plumbed a cold line for salami" thing to the landlord.
You just need to phrase it correctly. Try "I plumbed a cold line for salami. Would you like some salami?"
Lol, that would be quite difficult to explain to the landlord, now it makes perfect sense why you didn’t do that :)
Very cool project, I bet the salami is delicious too!
'Who likes hiring plumbers? I took care of that FOR you'
yeah like sibling said, its all in the phrasing (I imagine)
you could run a hose from a tap without damage with something like e.g. https://www.diy.com/departments/nes-home-chrome-adapter-two-...
or a push-fit splitter under the sink could be revertable and/or unnoticed
You can go even simpler if you have a bigger reservoir. Automatic trough fillers where a float mechanically shuts off a valve fed from a garden hose are like $20 at a farm supply store.
Tangent: I see little pine cones in there, pine soda is interesting
I should see what can be done with juniper. I have lots of invasive juniper shrubs and trees. Gave a friend a few pounds of berries once so he could try making gin.
It smelled amazing, but tasted like ass, unfortunately.
Depends on juniper; I use Juniperus communis as a spice by drying it first, then adding it to sauerkraut, pickled mushrooms, and spirit infusions.
That being said, it’s toxic in larger amounts [1], so I wouldn’t use it raw; for spirits, I’d infuse and then distill.
There is also Juniperus sabina, which is very common as well (at least in the UK) and smells great, but it's outright poisonous [2].
--- [1]: https://www.webmd.com/vitamins/ai/ingredientmono-724/juniper [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juniperus_sabina#cite_ref-pfaf...
> It smelled amazing, but tasted like ass
Sounds like a successful gin recipe to me.
I believe it's mugolio, which is a sweet syrup
https://foragerchef.com/mugolio-pine-cone-syrup/
OP here. Indeed, I referred to the syrup, but I hope to eventually nail the pine soda as well (last few attempts tasted like Christmas tree rinse).
This is fucking awesome. I've recently built my own curing chamber and modified a humidifier so it didn't need a button press ;), and am taking delivery of some jowls on the weekend and have been getting all the software infrastructure set up for the monitoring of it's temp/humidity (grafana, prometheus, alerting, etc).
Given that my grandfather used to cure his own in a cabinet in his root cellar with NO automation it feels a little overkilly but I'm glad to see someone else is overkilling at an even more extreme level than me and is making their work public.
Root cellars are far more stable than a ground-floor garage in my case: steady temperature throughout the year, low airflow. Some wooden cabinets are also superior to modern chambers, i.e cedar acts like a humidity buffer, which is why miso makers still swear by cedar koji boxes.
Good luck with the jowls!
To call it a wooden cabinet might be a wee bit generous. Actually a broken wardrobe he probably found on the side of the road with broken hinges on one of the doors so he nailed it shut. :lol:
My kinda guy!