…let’s try that again. I promise it won’t take me two weeks this time. I have all the stuff on-hand now. I’d rather do this right before I move on. I can always start another project in the meantime, no?

Would you believe a woman from just outside Auckland happened to walk into my house this morning? She’s a horse trainer (which is why she’s in Kentucky) but she also happened to have some professional pastry experience. What are the odds? Her verdict on the vanilla slices: not authentic but delicious. Her idea in absence […]

Reader Glynis has early tomatoes and says she destroyed a few trying to oven roast them on an aluminum sheet pan. Her question: why does contact with aluminum ruin the taste of tomatoes? Love that one, Glynis! Aluminum is interesting stuff in that on the one hand it’s the most abundant metal in the Earth’s crust, but on the other it is found nowhere in nature in its pure, elemental state. The reason: because aluminum is extremely reactive.

Its reactivity is easily witnessed in the kitchen, say, when aluminum foil is used as a cover for a dish of leftovers. If the contents of the dish are wet enough to cause condensation on the foil, the result is a dark layer of aluminum oxide. However that’s child’s play compared to what happens to aluminum foil when it comes into contact with other metals like stainless steel, silver or iron in the presence of moisture. In those cases you get an electrolytic reaction that creates actual pits or even holes in the foil.

Reader Jenni asks whether a candy syrup is usable for anything else after it’s overcooked, i.e., once soft ball syrup is cooked to, say, firm ball syrup. The answer, Jenni, is that you can fix an overcooked candy syrup by simply adding more water to it. For there’s really no “cooking” going on in a candy syrup that contains only sugar and water. Proteins aren’t coagulating, starches aren’t gelling, fats aren’t breaking down, nothing like that is going on. Indeed when you boil a sugar syrup, as long as it’s below the caramelization temperature, only one thing happens: its water content goes down. Seen in that

Not being much of a fan of The Powerpuff Girls or My Little Pony (apologies to any bronies in the audience), I feed the girls on a steady diet of classic cartoons come Saturday morning. Looney Tunes primarily, though we also have a few mixed disks containing 20th century Saturday morning staples like Casper the Friendly Ghost, Felix the Cat etc.. If you’re going to watch cartoons, is my thinking, it might as well be the good stuff.

So asks reader Will, an engineer who’s evidently familiar with the story of pykrete. He’s referring to a story, almost certainly made up, about Churchill’s first, er…exposure to the material. It’s said that one day in early 1943 Lord Mountbatten showed up unexpectedly at Churchill’s country home carrying a mysterious box. Informed that the prime […]

…asks reader Jason. That’s an excellent question and I confess I don’t know the answer. I understand that different types of wood have different insulating properties once they’re pulped and frozen. What I do know is that the prototype pykrete ship that was made in Canada in the spring of 1943 stayed frozen all summer […]

Clients call, so I must get on a plane tomorrow. I’ll be back Friday assuming all goes according to plan!