Perfect ramen, thermodynamics applied to pots & pans, & the glory of frozen food
Instructions for perfect ramen:
1. Fill pot with 3 inches of water & start heating it.
2. While waiting for it to boil, open the ramen packets and carefully remove the noodles and sauce packets but do NOT put them in the water yet.
3. After the water has reached a RAGING boil, put both noodle blocks in at the same time, one on top of the other. As soon as possible, flip the stack. Do not reduce heat yet.
4. As soon as the water reaches a RAGING boil again and the noodle blocks soften, remove the pot from the heat and place it on a different burner.
5. While waiting 15 seconds for it to cool a little bit & finish cooking, open both seasoning packets. At the end of the 15 seconds, pour both into the water at the same time and stir immediately.
6. Once the seasoning is dissolved uniformly, let the noodles sit for another 15 seconds to absorb the flavor.
7. Using a fork to restrain the noodles, pour almost all the liquid down the drain.
8. Transfer the noodles to a bowl and enjoy!
Obvious design goals for pots & pans on a gas stove:
1. Unlike an electric stove, there is very little contact surface, so a large fraction of the energy is transferred in the form of electromagnetic radiaton. This makes it important to have an outer bottom surface that is nearly black both in visible and infrared wavelengths. Polished metal mirror finishes on the bottom dramatically reduce efficiency.
2. The bottom of the pot/pan should be made of a good conductor such as copper or aluminum. If they can make a multiple-pound solid copper heatsink for $50 then they can do pots and pans like that for a reasonable price also.
3. However, the outer surface of the upper part of the side of the pot/pan should be fairly well insulated to avoid wasting heat.
4. The pan shouldn't be too heavy, since you'll be wasting energy heating up the pan itself in addition to the food inside it.
I got a cute little pan (just large enough to fit one burger) that follows all of these criteria, and it's pretty amazing. I can set the burner one and a half notches lower and get the same effect as if I was using a larger pan.
Frozen Food:
Freezing eliminates the need for preservatives, and preserves food more thoroughly than refrigeration (or worse, sitting out in the aisle at room temperature with everybody touching it), while it is not necessarily the case that a longer period of time elapses between the production of the food and your purchase. The cold slows down all chemical reactions and preserves the nutritional value of the food without the need for any questionable additives.
Some people complain that frozen food tastes bad, but most of the real problem is microwaving. Most frozen food ends up getting microwaved, and microwaves make everything taste shitty. If you take decent quality frozen vegetables or meats and prepare them properly on a stove instead of a microwave, they'll taste great.
Another quality-reducing factor that freezing itself gets unfairly blamed for is cooking things twice. Any time something gets cooked before being frozen and then gets cooked again afterwards, it won't taste as good as if it was just frozen raw and cooked once.
And don't even get me started on fozen meals. They're an abomination and a public health hazard due to all the crap that gets put in them, but that's nothing inherent to freezing food.
10 Comments
direpickleRamen nutrition and ingredients label.
BoneRemakeWith the very first instruction you gave I find a fault.
1. Fill pot with 3 inches of water & start heating it.
what if my pot is 14 inches in diameter ? or I am using a 9x9inch Pyrex or a 4 cup Pyrex measuring cup... You cannot blanket statement a liquid measurement like that when you are going to be adding a rationed seasoning or thickening agent or anything of the sort. if you are using the water just to boil the noodles then it doesn't matter and you could say " fill your pot with 90 liters of water and boil the cup of noodles for one minute, drain and add sauce "
I'm Jes sayin'
jwray^ Obviously you need water deep enough to cover the noodles, regardless of the width of the vessel, but ideally the vessel shouldn't be any wider than necessary because you'd be wasting energy heating up additional water and diluting the flavor.
The ramen ingredients are actually pretty harmless if you look them up.
Worse is all the uncooked chicken in frozen meals which doesn't get cooked properly in the microwave.
BoneRemakesunshine and rainbows make people smile.
peggedbeamy kids and i eat a mostly raw diet. i'm also insanely busy and i don't have a lot of time for food prep during the week. and honestly after work and school and the kids stuff, i often dont even feel like putting a lot of work into dinner.
i also noticed i was throwing out an exorbitant amount of fruits and veggies every week because we just didnt get around to eating them all.
this is something excellent we've started doing, that makes our diets healthier and saves a ton of time and money.
every saturday we go to the farmers market and stock up on our produce and raw nuts and seeds etc. then we spend sunday chopping all our veggies and fruits. we portion out what we think we will eat for the week and put them into small tupperware containers. now all i have to do at dinner time is (or when the kids want a snack) is open a few tupperware containers! done! the nuts and seeds get seperated out into individual serving size baggies (that we recycle week to week) and put into the snack drawer. they keep for a long time and we go through them quickly anyhow. but again, easy access for snacks or to throw on top of our salads.
for the excess fruits and veggies (what we know we wont eat in a week) they get portioned out into individual serving sizes, vacuumed sealed and put in the freezer. frozen grapes and strawberries make excellent snacks, but there are lot of things i just dont think taste good after theyve been frozen and thawed ... so instead of eating them whole i will throw them into my juicer or make a smoothie out of them and it works out perfectly. ill also make sauces and dressings and jams out of my thawed out produce from time to time.
it's healthy, saves me a ton of time and we don't waste even 1/4 as much as we used to.
peggedbeai've also been thinking about investing in a dehydrator this year and making my own trail mix out the apples and berries and bananas that are "soon to go bad". has anyone ever used a dehydrator before? what do you think?
marinarabuy a rice cooker. cook yer rice and it shuts off into "warm mode"
BoneRemake>> ^marinara:
buy a rice cooker. cook yer rice and it shuts off into "warm mode"
Or use a pot you already own, use your brain which you supposedly have operating.. and use each in a sort of symbiotic relationship, to.. measure out water, boil water, add rice,cover rice,reduce heat,time 20 (or so minutes) and save yourself 60 dollars, all the while feeling neat-o for not needing a machine to cook rice.. what next, a pasta boiler ?
BoneRemake>> ^peggedbea:
i've also been thinking about investing in a dehydrator this year and making my own trail mix out the apples and berries and bananas that are "soon to go bad". has anyone ever used a dehydrator before? what do you think?
They are worth the money, IF you use them. If you only plan to make a couple batches of trail mix, then it will not be worth the money spent, If you are asking for a comparison of models I cannot help you, I am only giving personal experience, and that is using it for as you said " using up degrading fruit" but it is also a preservative means, honestly , if you can find a use for it, then they are worth the 60 or so dollars spent, but if it is just for a couple novelty dried fruit trail mix expenditures, then no, it is not worth the money.
They are excellent for storing over produced fruit/vegetables from warm months, herbs especially, you just have to have a means to make it worth the money spent, and usually with herbs, within two seasons you can justify it easily.
peggedbeaomg i didn't even think about herbs!!! that would be amazing to dry and store my own herbs and not have to buy that expensive shit at the grocery store.
yeah so, my family and i are on very limited budget and eat about 75-85% of our food raw and unprocessed (because it's completely awesome). so i'm very interested in ways to get the most out of my produce. also, i might be trail mixes #1 fan and my son is dried fruits #1 fan. like, if there was a competitive eating competition for trail mix, i'd totally compete in that. i eat some sort of trail mix at least once a day. i think we'd use it a lot. unless it was difficult to work or the dried fruits/veggies/herbs tasted bad or didn't consistently come out right.
in your experience was the end result adequate quality? was the process user friendly?
>> ^BoneRemake:
>> ^peggedbea:
i've also been thinking about investing in a dehydrator this year and making my own trail mix out the apples and berries and bananas that are "soon to go bad". has anyone ever used a dehydrator before? what do you think?
They are worth the money, IF you use them. If you only plan to make a couple batches of trail mix, then it will not be worth the money spent, If you are asking for a comparison of models I cannot help you, I am only giving personal experience, and that is using it for as you said " using up degrading fruit" but it is also a preservative means, honestly , if you can find a use for it, then they are worth the 60 or so dollars spent, but if it is just for a couple novelty dried fruit trail mix expenditures, then no, it is not worth the money.
They are excellent for storing over produced fruit/vegetables from warm months, herbs especially, you just have to have a means to make it worth the money spent, and usually with herbs, within two seasons you can justify it easily.
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