CookingItRight.com

Now the idea of the Fricktionless Scams has a new life in the Web 2.0 era: You write the code, users generate the content, advertisers pay the bills. Of course you then have to deal with the Greater Internet Fuckwad, spam and all the drama that an easy facsimile of anonymity brings. This last bit kind of raises the bar you have to leap over to create a web tool. What's more, you now need an smart phone app or three.

But still, with stories like that of Plenty of Fish, it's always tempting to dream of the easy money that would be Mine All Mine if only I could spend 3 months coding up a website that would run itself.

One market that for me hasn't been done right is cooking and recipes.

At one extreme you have cooking blogs. These are small well curated collections of recipes; often with first class food photography. Hooked on Heat is a good example: Excellent recipes, well written and you know they are going to work.

At the other extreme are shovelware sites like cooks.com and barnonedrinks.com. Cooks.com exists solely to place ads in front of you. The recipes are untried and unvetted, the formatting is painful, the site is useless to me. BarNoneDrinks is no where near as bad, and given that mixing up a cocktail takes all of 5 minutes, you won't loose out too badly if it turns out the recipe is a dud. But they have no way of searching for recipes that contain 2 specified ingredients, they have a lot of duplicate recipes and recipes that are basically what a few teens threw together from their father's liquor cabinet and yeah, bro, that's totally a Purple Panty Pooper! In other words, they lack curation.

In between the two are the lifestyle sections of magazines and cooking forums. Forums rely on the Googles to be able to find anything, you have to scan through all the threads to find out if the recipe is broken or not. And of course they all use Ultimate BBS which makes them a nightmare from a UI stand point.

From these examples, a list of what I want: curation or some form of vote or reputation mechanism that would rate a recipe, comments on the recipe and variations of the recipe. Slashdot's moderation system comes to mind, as does StackExchange where some uses can actually modify a question. As to variations, how about generating a table that would allow one to easily compare different related recipes. I mean, you'd be surprised by the variations I've found in the spice mix for pumpkin pie.

The one thing Barnonedrinks is good at is the fact that the ingredients are marked up. That is, they know that creme de menthe is an ingredient, not just some text. With this, you can do something like the Google Cookbook: cross index 3 ingredients you have on hand to find a recipe for supper.

But not only ingredients: techniques (creaming butter, kneading dough), quantities (is that a fluid ounce (30ml) or an ADP once (28g)? Do you want this recipe for 2 or 20 people? In metric or American customary units?), maybe even cooking style (Indian, South-Asian, Bengali and curry can all be inaccurately used as synonyms).

Ideally, one could also rearrange the recipe format. There's the One True Recipe format (a list of ingredients, followed by instructions), the Joy Of Cooking (ingredients are inline in bold with the instructions), and the one I'd like to see: a hybrid of the two (ingredients all in a list at the top, but grouped and linked to the relevant instructions.)

What's more, the instruction themselves could be brief (Cream the butter and sugar) or detailed (Bring the butter to room temp (don't melt!), beat it and the sugar in a mixer until it has a uniform consistency and light yellow texture. About X minutes. This is called creaming.)

These last 2 points (reformatting and instruction level) would mean a lot of markup is needed in a recipe. So my hypothetical CookingItRight.com would entail need a UI that made this a painless as possible.

Lastly you need a dictionary of ingredients and equivalents. What exactly is Chinese 5 spices? Is all wheat flour identical? Paprika is basically food colouring in the USA, but is smoky and spicy in Europe. Are prawns shrimps? Is a red pepper a capsicum?

Which brings us far far from our original goal: the Frictionless Scam.

Oh no you didn't

I made donuts.

I've been wanting to since this fall. I had some pumpkin baked, pulped and frozen, waiting for the right moment. Today, with Désirée home I thought "what a great activity to keep her occupied." Mixing up the batter together was fun, but I realised I didn't have enough oil so we headed down to the store to fetch it and she fell asleep in the stroller on the way home.

Which is just as well; hot oil and 2.5 year olds probably don't mix well.

The result: donuts which taste AWESOME! However, their texture is foul.

I blame 2 things: letting a batter containing baking powder wait on the counter for an hour. But mostly, my deep fryer. While it claims to up to 190C (~375F) during cooking I only highest I read was 135C (~275F) on my IR thermometer. So now we know why my fries take years to cook and are never crispy enough.

So, what should I do? Shell out $$$ to buy a new better deep fryer? Alton Brown claims none of them can get high enough temps. Fry in a pot on the stove and risk a spill and oil fire? While I am paranoid enough not to take my eyes off the pot, and my stoves hood and the granite counter top would probably prevent my house from burning down, I think I'll pass.

There is of course the third, geek option: modify the fryer. The problem is that the rheostat in it is sucktastic. Maybe I could add some resistance in series so that it would have a more favourable duty-cycle.

Or I could do what this guy did: short-circuit the controls in the fryer and use an external control, say a Lutron C-2000. What's more I could repurpose this for use with the heat plate, if ever end up building a smoker. The tech specs say "lights only, no appliances" but at 2000 watts, it should be more then enough to handle a fryer and would be WAY overrated for the hot plate, which is 600 watts according to my Killawatt.

Third option is of course a thermocouple, a relay and an Anduino.

Turns out a new fryer might be the cheapest option.

Now, about the title of this post. While googling I came across the KFC forum. It seems a bunch of people are obsessed about what Colonel Sander's original 11 herbs and spices were. Very few people knew. Until the Internet, a PR goof and many (I assume) test batches of chicken. And now everybody may know.

Obsession

I do this too often.

So I want to build an Ugly Drum Smoker. Why? So I can cook pulled pork and BBQ chicken the way it's done by the pros. Also, maybe make some smoked salmon. But something that big wouldn't get used that often, so maybe I should just make a small smoker in a flower pot.

For the flower pot's burner, I'd have to get a rheostat (expensive) or a stove-top-control-the-technical-name-of-I-don't-remember (cheap, but not very precise). But I'm the hacker born! Why not use a K-type thermocouple and an SSR and control the temperature precisely from a laptop. I already have the thermocouple and can get readings from my DMM. But plugging a thermocouple into a computer is expensive; most people who want to do it need 0.1 C precession and 24/7 reliability, so one channel over USB is about 60 $.

(On a side note, why is it that a thermometer that has an LCD output is cheap, but one that would send the temperature over USB or RS-232 so expensive? I've often dreamed of a universal 8-segment to computer converter.)

Ideally, would build a thermocouple interface with this PCB, a few parts and an Arduino board. Total of about 100$, but I get 4 ports so I could log ambiant temperature and meat temperature plus a few digitals output to control the SSR. I'd also get to play with an Arduino. However, it means I have to give up some of my precious Copious Spare Time.

But if I just wanted to save time, I could use a PIB controller, about 80 $ on eBay. No wasted time, but no computer logging and meat temp would have to be verified by eye on the DMM.

But wait a second! ALL I WANTED TO DO WAS COOK CHICKEN!

*sigh*