Jeff Potter's Blog, page 5

Announcing "Awesome Food" – part of The Awesome Foundation

The Awesome Foundation now has a new chapter—Awesome Food—of which I'm a trustee. Details in the below press release!

Awesome Food now accepting applications for$1,000 microgrants


July 20th, 2011

Awesome Food, a chapter of the worldwide Awesome Foundation, officially launched on Wednesday, July 20 and is now accepting grant applications from around the world to further food awesomeness in the universe. Visit awesomefood.net to learn more and apply at awesomefood.net/apply. The first round for application deadline is end-of-day, Friday, August 5th.

Each month, Awesome Food will give one applicant $1,000 to help pull off an awesome idea involving food. The ideas must relate to food in some form, and the definition will be more inclusive than exclusive. Examples could include educating the public about DIY-farming, creating an ad-hoc eatery in a subway car, or recording videos of immigrants' recipes.

Anyone is eligible to apply: For profit, non-profit, individuals, companies, schools, adults, children. The $1,000 grants are not be loans or investments. They are not expected to be paid back. They are no-strings attached grants. The Awesome Foundation has a FAQ on how the grants work.

Awesome Food follows the Awesome Foundation model, which creates an independent and self-funded board of trustees who dedicate their time and resources to give out genius microgrants. The current list of Awesome Food trustees and advisors include:

Alaina Browne of Serious Eats — New York, NY

Barry A. Martin of Hypenotic — Toronto, Canada

Christine Liu — Boston, Masschusetts

Dan Barber of Blue Hill Farms — New York, New York

Food52 (Amanda Hesser and Merrill Stubbs) — New York, New York

Foodspotting Team — San Francisco, California

James Cronin of Paul A Young Fine Chocolates — London, UK

Jeff Potter, author of Cooking with Geeks — Los Angeles, California.

Jennifer 8. Lee, journalist and author

Josh Simon of Function Drinks — Los Angeles, California

Kamal Rashid Nuri of Truly Living Well — Atlanta, Georgia

Rolando Robledo of Clover Food Lab — Boston, Massachusetts

Eric Silverstein of Peached Tortilla — Austin, Texas

Jade Applegate *Chapter Dean — Walking across the country

Meredith Blumenstock *Chapter Dean — Boston, Massachusetts

Awesome Food will join the global network of Awesome Foundations, which recently received a six-figure grant fromKnight Foundation to support its activities. The Awesome Foundation originally started in Boston in 2009 and has since grown to be a worldwide network of people with nearly 20 chapters in cities across the world, including San Francisco, New York City, Ottawa, London, Berlin, Sydney, Zurich, among numerous other places. Projects funded have included a giant hammock in Boston, tram sessions in Melbourne, and a fab lab in Washington DC. In addition, the Awesome Foundation recently established the Institute of Higher Awesome Studies as a non-profit.

Awesome Food focuses on helping the world realize awesome ideas to further food and culture. "We're not entirely sure what ideas we'll get—that's part of the fun of this!" said Jeff Potter, author of Cooking for Geeks. "But we'll know awesomeness when we see it. I'm excited to see what ideas we receive, and can't wait to see what ideas we can help turn into reality."

Follow Awesome Food at twitter.com/awesomefood and facebook.com/awesomefood.

Questions? Contact us.

How I Made a 500 Pound Monster Donut on Food Network's Monster Kitchen

Yes, that's a monster donut being hoisted around by a crane…There are some things in life one never expects to do, and one of them is making a giant donut for a TV show pilot for Food Network. This is the story of how I ended up doing exactly that. (Television, as I've written before, is a very, very weird place.)

Last fall, while on book tour for my book Cooking for Geeks, I received a call from a casting agent who was looking for a "food science geek" to appear in a TV pilot for "a network that deals with food" (*cough* Food Network *cough*). They were creating a show about two chefs who get into crazy bets with each other and calling it Monster Kitchen. Upon accepting the challenge, each chef would head back to their respective kitchens and, with the help of a pastry chef and a food geek, attempt to pull off the challenge.

It's a fun spin on a reality TV competition with the potential of getting a MythBusters / Food Detectives-like angle on what's happening scientifically. The exciting bit for me is to get people to think scientifically in the kitchen. Not sure how to make a giant donut? Break it down: can you make a one foot donut? What works at that scale, and what fails?

After some quick online reading—yes, a baked donut can still qualify as a donut; there are two types of donuts: yeast donuts and cake donuts—I came up with a plan. We'd make a mold in the shape of a donut, mix up the donut batter in a cement mixer, bake it in an industrial powder-coating oven, then fry it in a dumpster. Then fill it with Chef Eric Greenspan's egg-cream custard. And glaze it. And top it off with Greenspan's "pièce de résistance": chocolate-dipped bacon as the extra-large sprinkles. Yum!

The Mold. We wanted the donut to look like, well, a donut. Sure, we could have gone to a quarter mile race track, created a oil trough around the entire peremiter, and piped in donut batter to make a donut that was a quarter mile circumfrence… and 1″ diameter. That'd be lame.

Our donut was going to be to proper scale: the hole in the middle should be roughly the same size as the height of the donut. The cross-section of the donut should be round (a circle), not a rectangle (that'd be a washer-shaped donut, not a torus-shaped donut.) That pretty quickly ruled out almost every other option: we'd have to create some sort of mold to hold to donut batter. (One other possibility: autoclave. Maybe if we go to series and have a re-match…)

But how to make a giant mold? One that was both heat-safe and food-safe? Silicone molds are often used in food, but the curing time alone would be too long for a few-day challenge. Plaster is used in molds for chocolate making; even better, they make plaster bandages, which are sheets or rolls of gauze coated with plaster powder. Wet, lay on surface that you want to make a mold of, and wait a few hours, and bingo: a hard cast that's heat safe. (Medical grade plaster bandages would even be theoretically food safe; we went for art grade and lined the mold with parchment paper to avoid direct contact; problem solved.)

We still needed a "positive," mold-making lingo for the item that provides the original form from which the mold is made. We could make the donut in parts and assemble it together, like a layered cake, but that somehow felt wrong. It should be one big donut, not a bunch of pieces glued together with frosting. Since donuts are torus shaped (see wikipedia's torus page), we'd need something that was a torus. We could make our own positive—even crumpling up aluminum foil into the rough shape—but making a five foot version would be tricky at best. Could we find something that was already torus shaped that was large enough? Tires. Intertubes. White-water rafting tubes. After an admittedly grueling phone and internet hunt (thanks Chris!), we found a tire tube that was just over 5′ in diameter. Bingo! We had material to make a true torus-shaped mold and something to fabricate the mold around.

To make your own mold: take your "positive," whether that's aluminum foil you've crumpled up into the shape of a donut or a small inflatable pool float, and cover with crisco. Cut your plaster bandages into strips, several feet in length; wet down, then wrap around the mold. Repeat until the entire tube is covered, at least four or five times. In the show, the mold was wrapped eight to ten times; that was just barely enough for that size. Allow to completely cure—ideally 24 to 48 hours—then cut the mold in half around the middle. I used an angle grinder (wear a dust mask and eye protection!). P.S.: Make sure your mold will fit in your oven before spending hours and hours of time making it!

Executive Producer Jonathan Karsch with my donut mold.

The Donut Batter. The other early decision we made was the type of donut batter: yeast donut, or cake batter donut? Yeast donuts taste better to me, personally, but given the size and scaling issues, would probably not rise properly and collapse under their own weight. We decided to use a cake donut batter so that we wouldn't have to worry about properly incubating and rising the yeast.

Here's the recipe Pastry Chef Amy Brown came up with (the standard recipe will make about a dozen regular, non-Monster sized donuts, around 3″ or 4″ diameter), plus my notes on the quantities needed for a 1′ and 5′ donut.

Mix dry ingredients together; mix wet ingredients together; combine. All measurements except for eggs are in grams. Yes, that's over 100kg—227 pounds!—of flour in the 5′ version.

Standard recipe
For a 1′ Donut
For a 5′ Donut


ap flour (g)
516
6192
103200


sugar (g)
238
2856
47600


baking soda (g)
3
36
600


baking powder (g
9
108
1800


salt (g)
3
36
600


nutmeg (g)
2
24
400


buttermilk (g)
192
2304
38400


butter (g)
64
768
12800


vanilla extract (g)
4
48
800


eggs
2
24
400


egg yolks
1
12
200

Pastry Chef Amy Brown making Monster Donut Batter

Baking & Frying. Now that we have the mold and recipe parts out of the way, the rest of it is "just" cooking it, right? Hahaha. Haha hah haa. I wish. Just bake until the inside reaches around 185°F, then fry in oil at around 350-375°F to get a nice outside. Ponder the following questions to get an idea of what's involved:

How do you mix almost a hundred gallons of donut batter? (Cement mixer. Turns out to work amazingly well. Like, perfect. We used a new one; nice and clean.)
How many BTUs, and how long will it take, to heat a container of oil from room temp to ~375°F, if the container is 7′ x 2′ x 2′? Assume no wind; assume open-faced top. (Around ~300k BTU and somewhere around four to eight hours. Interestingly, a lot of heat is lost through the piers holding up the container. I designed the container for a million BTU of burners, which would've gotten us up to temperature in under two hours and addressed any potential heat-loss from wind.)
How can I make long-led thermocouples for determining the internal temperature of a donut, where by long led, I mean 20′? (Tim and the wonderful folks over at ThermoWorks put together a set for me; there wasn't time for me to build my own.)
What magnitude earthquake can a container of oil survive, when the container is raised up on four rows of concrete building blocks? (A friend, who's a structural engineer studying earthquakes, told me it wasn't pretty; almost any rumbling could have knocked it over. We had legs welded on.)
What can be done to make plaster cure faster? (Hold it in an oven around 120°F. Even doing that, this one bit me in the ass; there just wasn't time to properly layer up and cure both sides of the mold, leaving one side of the donut exposed.)

And the one question I failed to get someone to calculate for me?

Given batter for a five foot donut—~8,000 square inches of surface area and ~40,000 cubic inches of volume—how long will it take the dough to rise from  80°F to 185°F in an oven at 300°F with moderate air circulation? (300°F: hot enough to set the inside of the donut; cool enough to prevent the outside from browning too much.)

It's this last question that in hindsight should have been really obvious to ask. I figured with redundant probe theremometers (there's a phrase I never thought I'd write), I wouldn't have to take any guesses as to when the donut was done and that I could just pull it out when ready: internal temperature above 180°F, ideally around 185°F.

We put it into the oven around 7 PM. My guess was that it would take around 6 hours at 300°F. 6 hours in, the probe thermometers showed the donut still had another ~40°F to rise, so I cranked up the temperature on the oven. It ended up taking double that—just over 12 hours—to get the donut cooked. Just before 7 am the center of the donut hit 180°F. We called it done and drove straight back to the kitchen to make it there by the 8 am call time. (I can now include myself and my producer, Chris, in the rare set of people who can truthfully say they stayed up all night watching a donut rise.)

I was beyond delighted when we pulled off the mold and tasted the donut. It was incredible. Moist. Delicious. Transfer to the crane to hoist into the dumpster (which we had sandblasted—so it was clean steel that was then oiled down… just like a super-large Chinese wok), fry, and then decorate. At least, that was the plan. There was just one tiny little hole in the idea… but for now, you'll have to watch the show to learn what happened!

Eric Greenspan, Jeff Potter, and Amy Brown with our test donut on Monster Kitchen.

How I Made a Monster Donut on Food Network's Monster Kitchen

Yes, that's a monster donut being hoisted around by a crane…There are some things in life one never expects to do, and one of them is making a giant donut for a TV show pilot for Food Network. This is the story of how I ended up doing exactly that. (Television, as I've written before, is a very, very weird place.)

Last fall, while on book tour for my book Cooking for Geeks, I received a call from a casting agent who was looking for a "food science geek" to appear in a TV pilot for "a network that deals with food" (*cough* Food Network *cough*). They were creating a show about two chefs who get into crazy bets with each other and calling it Monster Kitchen. Upon accepting the challenge, each chef would head back to their respective kitchens and, with the help of a pastry chef and a food geek, attempt to pull off the challenge.

It's a fun spin on a reality TV competition with the potential of getting a MythBusters / Food Detectives-like angle on what's happening scientifically. The exciting bit for me is to get people to think scientifically in the kitchen. Not sure how to make a giant donut? Break it down: can you make a one foot donut? What works at that scale, and what fails?

After some quick online reading—yes, a baked donut can still qualify as a donut; there are two types of donuts: yeast donuts and cake donuts—I came up with a plan. We'd make a mold in the shape of a donut, mix up the donut batter in a cement mixer, bake it in an industrial powder-coating oven, then fry it in a dumpster. Then fill it with Chef Eric Greenspan's egg-cream custard. And glaze it. And top it off with Greenspan's "pièce de résistance": chocolate-dipped bacon as the extra-large sprinkles. Yum!

The Mold. We wanted the donut to look like, well, a donut. Sure, we could have gone to a quarter mile race track, created a oil trough around the entire peremiter, and piped in donut batter to make a donut that was a quarter mile circumfrence… and 1″ diameter. That'd be lame.

Our donut was going to be to proper scale: the hole in the middle should be roughly the same size as the height of the donut. The cross-section of the donut should be round (a circle), not a rectangle (that'd be a washer-shaped donut, not a torus-shaped donut.) That pretty quickly ruled out almost every other option: we'd have to create some sort of mold to hold to donut batter. (One other possibility: autoclave. Maybe if we go to series and have a re-match…)

But how to make a giant mold? One that was both heat-safe and food-safe? Silicone molds are often used in food, but the curing time alone would be too long for a few-day challenge. Plaster is used in molds for chocolate making; even better, they make plaster bandages, which are sheets or rolls of gauze coated with plaster powder. Wet, lay on surface that you want to make a mold of, and wait a few hours, and bingo: a hard cast that's heat safe. (Medical grade plaster bandages would even be theoretically food safe; we went for art grade and lined the mold with parchment paper to avoid direct contact; problem solved.)

We still needed a "positive," mold-making lingo for the item that provides the original form from which the mold is made. We could make the donut in parts and assemble it together, like a layered cake, but that somehow felt wrong. It should be one big donut, not a bunch of pieces glued together with frosting. Since donuts are torus shaped (see wikipedia's torus page), we'd need something that was a torus. We could make our own positive—even crumpling up aluminum foil into the rough shape—but making a five foot version would be tricky at best. Could we find something that was already torus shaped that was large enough? Tires. Intertubes. White-water rafting tubes. After an admittedly grueling phone and internet hunt (thanks Chris!), we found a tire tube that was just over 5′ in diameter. Bingo! We had material to make a true torus-shaped mold and something to fabricate the mold around.

To make your own mold: take your "positive," whether that's aluminum foil you've crumpled up into the shape of a donut or a small inflatable pool float, and cover with crisco. Cut your plaster bandages into strips, several feet in length; wet down, then wrap around the mold. Repeat until the entire tube is covered, at least four or five times. In the show, the mold was wrapped eight to ten times; that was just barely enough for that size. Allow to completely cure—ideally 24 to 48 hours—then cut the mold in half around the middle. I used an angle grinder (wear a dust mask and eye protection!). P.S.: Make sure your mold will fit in your oven before spending hours and hours of time making it!

Executive Producer Jonathan Karsch with my donut mold.

The Donut Batter. The other early decision we made was the type of donut batter: yeast donut, or cake batter donut? Yeast donuts taste better to me, personally, but given the size and scaling issues, would probably not rise properly and collapse under their own weight. We decided to use a cake donut batter so that we wouldn't have to worry about properly incubating and rising the yeast.

Here's the recipe Pastry Chef Amy Brown came up with (the standard recipe will make about a dozen regular, non-Monster sized donuts, around 3″ or 4″ diameter), plus my notes on the quantities needed for a 1′ and 5′ donut.

Mix dry ingredients together; mix wet ingredients together; combine. All measurements except for eggs are in grams. Yes, that's over 100kg—227 pounds!—of flour in the 5′ version.

Standard recipe
For a 1′ Donut
For a 5′ Donut


ap flour (g)
516
6192
103200


sugar (g)
238
2856
47600


baking soda (g)
3
36
600


baking powder (g
9
108
1800


salt (g)
3
36
600


nutmeg (g)
2
24
400


buttermilk (g)
192
2304
38400


butter (g)
64
768
12800


vanilla extract (g)
4
48
800


eggs
2
24
400


egg yolks
1
12
200

Pastry Chef Amy Brown making Monster Donut Batter

Baking & Frying. Now that we have the mold and recipe parts out of the way, the rest of it is "just" cooking it, right? Hahaha. Haha hah haa. I wish. Just bake until the inside reaches around 185°F, then fry in oil at around 350-375°F to get a nice outside. Ponder the following questions to get an idea of what's involved:

How do you mix almost a hundred gallons of donut batter? (Cement mixer. Turns out to work amazingly well. Like, perfect. We used a new one; nice and clean.)
How many BTUs, and how long will it take, to heat a container of oil from room temp to ~375°F, if the container is 7′ x 2′ x 2′? Assume no wind; assume open-faced top. (Around ~300k BTU and somewhere around four to eight hours. Interestingly, a lot of heat is lost through the piers holding up the container. I designed the container for a million BTU of burners, which would've gotten us up to temperature in under two hours and addressed any potential heat-loss from wind.)
How can I make long-led thermocouples for determining the internal temperature of a donut, where by long led, I mean 20′? (Tim and the wonderful folks over at ThermoWorks put together a set for me; there wasn't time for me to build my own.)
What magnitude earthquake can a container of oil survive, when the container is raised up on four rows of concrete building blocks? (A friend, who's a structural engineer studying earthquakes, told me it wasn't pretty; almost any rumbling could have knocked it over. We had legs welded on.)
What can be done to make plaster cure faster? (Hold it in an oven around 120°F. Even doing that, this one bit me in the ass; there just wasn't time to properly layer up and cure both sides of the mold, leaving one side of the donut exposed.)

And the one question I failed to get someone to calculate for me?

Given batter for a five foot donut—~8,000 square inches of surface area and ~40,000 cubic inches of volume—how long will it take the dough to rise from  80°F to 185°F in an oven at 300°F with moderate air circulation? (300°F: hot enough to set the inside of the donut; cool enough to prevent the outside from browning too much.)

It's this last question that in hindsight should have been really obvious to ask. I figured with redundant probe theremometers (there's a phrase I never thought I'd write), I wouldn't have to take any guesses as to when the donut was done and that I could just pull it out when ready: internal temperature above 180°F, ideally around 185°F.

We put it into the oven around 7 PM. My guess was that it would take around 6 hours at 300°F. 6 hours in, the probe thermometers showed the donut still had another ~40°F to rise, so I cranked up the temperature on the oven. It ended up taking double that—just over 12 hours—to get the donut cooked. Just before 7 am the center of the donut hit 180°F. We called it done and drove straight back to the kitchen to make it there by the 8 am call time. (I can now include myself and my producer, Chris, in the rare set of people who can truthfully say they stayed up all night watching a donut rise.)

I was beyond delighted when we pulled off the mold and tasted the donut. It was incredible. Moist. Delicious. Transfer to the crane to hoist into the dumpster (which we had sandblasted—so it was clean steel that was then oiled down… just like a super-large Chinese wok), fry, and then decorate. At least, that was the plan. There was just one tiny little hole in the idea… but for now, you'll have to watch the show to learn what happened!

Eric Greenspan, Jeff Potter, and Amy Brown with our test donut on Monster Kitchen.

How I Made a Five Foot Donut on Food Network's Monster Kitchen

Yes, that's a monster donut being hoisted around by a crane…There are some things in life one never expects to do, and one of them is making a giant donut for a TV show pilot. This is the story of how I ended up doing exactly that.

Television, as I've written before, is a very, very weird world.

While on book tour last fall, I received a call from a casting agent who was looking for a "food geek" to appear in a TV pilot for "a network that deals with food" (*cough* Food Network *cough*). They were creating a show about two chefs that get into crazy bets with each other, called Monster Kitchen. Upon accepting the challenge, each chef would head back to their respective kitchens and, with the help of a pastry chef and a food geek, attempt to pull off the challenge.

It's a fun spin on a reality TV competition with the potential of getting a MythBusters / Food Detectives-like angle on what's happening scientifically. The exciting bit for me is to get people to think scientifically in the kitchen. Not sure how to make a giant donut? Break it down: can you make a one foot donut? What works at that scale, and what fails?

After some quick online reading—yes, a baked donut can still qualify as a donut; there are two types of donuts: yeast donuts and cake donuts—I came up with a plan. We'd make a mold in the shape of a donut, mix up the donut batter in a cement mixer, bake it in an industrial powder-coating oven, then fry it in a dumpster. Then glaze it. And add chocolate-dipped bacon as extra-large sprinkles. Yum!

The Mold. We wanted the donut to look like, well, a donut. Sure, we could have gone to a quarter mile race track, created a oil trough around the entire peremiter, and piped in donut batter to make a donut that was a quarter mile circumfrence… and 1″ diameter. That'd be lame. Our donut was going to be to proper scale: the hole in the middle should be roughly the same size as the height of the donut. The cross-section of the donut should be round (a circle), not a rectangle (that'd be a washer-shaped donut, not a torus-shaped donut.) That pretty quickly ruled out almost every other option: we'd have to create some sort of mold to hold to donut batter. (One other option: autoclave. Maybe if we go to series and have a re-match…)

But how to make the mold? One that was both heat-safe and food-safe? Silicone molds are often used in food, but the cure time alone would be too long for a few-day challenge. Plaster is used in molds for chocolate making; even better, they make plaster bandages, which are sheets or rolls of gauze coated with plaster powder. Wet, lay on surface that you want to make a mold of, and wait a few hours, and bingo: a hard cast that's heat safe. (Medical grade plaster bandages would even be theoretically food safe; we went for art grade and lined the mold with parchment paper to avoid direct contact; problem solved.)

We still needed a "positive," mold-making lingo for the item that provides the original form from which the mold is made. Donuts; they're torus shaped. We could make our own positive—even crumpling up aluminum foil into the rough shape—but making a five foot version would be tricky. Could we find something that was already torus shaped? Tires. Intertubes. White-water rafting tubes. After an admittedly grueling phone and internet hunt (thanks Chris!), we found a tire tube that was just over 5′ in diameter. Bingo! We had material to make a true torus-shaped mold and something to fabricate the mold around.

To make your own mold: take your "positive," whether that's aluminum foil you've crumpled up into the shape of a donut or a small inflatable pool float, and cover with crisco. Cut your plaster bandages into strips, several feet in length; wet down, then wrap around the mold. Repeat until the entire tube is covered, at least 4 or 5 times. In the show, the mold was wrapped 8 to 10 times; that was just barely enough for that size. Allow to completely cure—ideally 24 to 48 hours—then cut the mold in half around the middle. I used an angle grinder (wear a dust mask and eye protection!). Pro-tip: Make sure your mold will fit in your oven before spending hours and hours of time making it.

The Donut Batter. The other early decision we made was the type of donut batter: yeast donut, or cake batter donut? Yeast donuts taste better to me, personally, but given the size and scaling issues, would probably not rise properly and collapse under their own weight. We decided to use a cake donut batter so that we wouldn't have to worry about properly incubating and rising the yeast.

Here's the recipe Amy Brown came up with for making a single batch (this will make about a dozen "standard" sized donuts, around 3″ or 4″ diameter), plus my notes on the quantities needed for a 1′ and 5′ donut.

Mix dry ingredients together; mix wet ingredients together; combine. All measurements are in grams. Yes, that's over 100kg—227 pounds!—of flour in the 5′ version.

Standard recipe
For a 1′ Donut
For a 5′ Donut


ap flour (g)
516
6192
103200


sugar (g)
238
2856
47600


baking soda (g)
3
36
600


baking powder (g
9
108
1800


salt (g)
3
36
600


nutmeg (g)
2
24
400


buttermilk (g)
192
2304
38400


butter (g)
64
768
12800


vanilla extract (g)
4
48
800


eggs
2
24
400


egg yolks
1
12
200

Baking & Frying. Now that we have the mold and recipe parts out of the way, the rest of it is "just" cooking it, right? Hahaha. Haha hah haa. Right. Just bake until the inside reaches around 185°F, then fry in oil at around 350-375°F to get a nice outside. Ponder the following questions to get an idea of what's involved:

How do you mix almost a hundred gallons of donut batter? (Cement mixer. Turns out to work amazingly well. Like, perfect.)
How many BTUs, and how long will it take, to heat a container of oil from room temp to ~375°F, if the container is 7′ x 2′ x 2′? Assume no wind; assume open-faced top. (Around ~300k BTU and somewhere around four to eight hours. Interestingly, a lot of heat is lost through the piers holding up the container. I designed the container for a million BTU of burners, which would've gotten us up to temperature in under two hours and addressed any potential heat-loss from wind.)
How can I make long-led thermocouples for determining the internal temperature of a donut, where by long led, I mean 20′? (Tim and the wonderful folks over at ThermoWorks put together a set for me; there wasn't time for me to build my own.)
What magnitude earthquake can a container of oil survive, when the container is raised up on four rows of concrete building blocks? (A friend, who's a structural engineer studying earthquakes, told me it wasn't pretty; almost any rumbling could have knocked it over. We had legs welded on.)
What's can be done to make plaster cure faster? (Hold it in an oven around 120°F. Even doing that, this one bit me in the ass; there just wasn't time to properly layer up and cure both sides of the mold, leaving one side of the donut exposed.)

Executive Producer Jonathan Karsch with my donut mold.

And the one question I failed to anticipate?

Given batter for a five foot donut—~8,000 square inches of surface area and ~40,000 cubic inches of volume—how long will it take the dough to rise from  80°F to 185°F in an oven at 300°F with moderate air circulation? (300°F: hot enough to set the inside of the donut; cool enough to prevent the outside from browning too much.)

It's this last question that in hindsight should have been really obvious to ask. I figured with redundant probe theremometers (there's a phrase I never thought I'd write), I wouldn't have to take any guesses as to when the donut was done and that I could just pull it out when ready: internal temperature above 180°F, ideally around 185°F.

We put it into the oven around 7 PM. My guess was that it would take around 6 hours at 300°F. 6 hours in, the probe thermometers showed the donut still had another ~40°F to rise, so I cranked up the temperature on the oven. It ended up taking double that—just over 12 hours—to get the donut cooked. Just before 7 am the middle of the donut hit 180°F. We called it done and drove straight back to the kitchen to make it there by the 8 am call time. (I can now include myself and my producer, Chris, in the rare set of people who can truthfully say they stayed up all night watching a donut rise.)

I was beyond delighted when we pulled off the mold and tasted the donut. It was incredible. Moist. Delicious. Transfer to the crane to hoist into the dumpster (which we had sandblasted—so it was clean steel that was then oiled down… just like a super-large Chinese wok), fry, and then decorate. At least, that was the plan. There was just one tiny little hole in the idea… but for now, you'll have to watch the show to learn what happened!

Eric Greenspan, Jeff Potter, and Amy Brown on Monster Kitchen

My Authors@Google Talk

I recently spoke about Cooking for Geeks at Google's Cambridge office, and they've posted a video of the talk on YouTube. If you'd like to hear me speak about food science and the kitchen, this if the video to watch. Enjoy!

Best Email EVER

Look what someone at my publisher sent me:

Subject: Very Important O'Reilly Questions

To: (Someone At My Publisher)

1. do you know the author of this book, about which i received a press release this morning: oreilly.com/catalog/9780596805890/

2. is he as cute in person as he is in his author photo?

3. is he single?

yes. that is what my life has come down to.

that is all.

I'm naturally speechless… so, will say nothing further on the matter.

Cooking for Geeks Party

I'm sitting in a café in sunny LA with the goofiest of grins on my face, because of an email I just received:

I received your book as a present from my 12-year-old brother for Christmas last year and it was perfect for me! After reading the book, I decided to take your preface to heart and share it with others. Except instead of passing your book on, I hosted a party based on the book. We started out with the taste and smell experiments (had some trouble with counting our taste buds), Then I had everyone bring three ingredients and we all had to make a dish based on those random items using tips from your book. And dessert was made on an antigriddle. Overall we had a blast! I just wanted to thank you for writing this book and show you our party:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LhSNQw3R8dQ



Oh, and we are all biomedical graduate students so we definitely qualify as geeks

-Taylor

How awesome is that? Another thing to add to my "list of things I never thought would happen." (Which has been growing at an alarming rate recently.) And Taylor, I couldn't possibly comment on how I feel about spam…

What It's Like Shooting For TV: 30-Second Chocolate Cake

I shot a segment showing me making this "30-Second Chocolate Cake" for The Cooking Channel's show Food(ography), with the "30 second" bit referring to how long it takes to cook, and possibly eat, but definitely not how long it took to do the shoot. I've had a number of requests for the recipe, which I'm including below, and figured I'd do a short little write-up about the shoot itself while I'm at it.

Shooting for TV is a lot of work. I've done live TV a couple of times (which has its own quirks), so shooting this segment was really insightful just in the contrasts from live TV alone. It was a 7 am call, actually started at 8 am, and shot until noon. That's four hours of on-location time for four minutes of final tape.



The shoot was a one-camera setup, meaning that only one camera was used for filming. This has the advantage that you can light for each angle appropriately and not worry about trying to get lighting glare out of a second angle simultaneously that you'd encounter in a two camera setup.

The disadvantage? You have to do everything twice to get coverage of the action from two angles. Make it three times: you want a master shoot (the wide angle shoot showing the whole scene), and then close-up shoots from, say, two angles. And these multiple angles are really important in editing. With a single angle, if you edit out a portion of the action, there's a jump, a distinct cut where it's really obvious to a viewer that "something was cut." People don't just suddenly move 4 inches to the left! But with two different angles? You can jump to a different angle at a different time and viewers see it as just changing angles.

Then there's consistency issues. Shooting in a two or three camera setup, one take, means that all the various footage will line up: four eggs on the counter? Then you'll have four eggs in A, B, and C rolls. But if you're using a single-camera setup and re-doing the entire thing three times, and one time you accidentally forget to replace an egg that you used during the sequence… whoops.

Another difference between live (or live-to-tape) and edited pieces like this one is, well, editing. (Live-to-tape is like live in that it's one-take, although it is sometimes lightly-edited. Think The Daily Show, where they might snip bits out to tighten it up, but the footage is never re-arranged or shown out-of-order.) Editing is the single most important thing on any non-live piece, period. It's magic. I don't understand very much about it. What I do understand is that, for this type of segment, one does various parts of a segment more than once so that the editor can pick and choose which takes they think look best together. (I spent twenty minutes putting a plate with the final cake down, slowly rotating it, and pulling my hand out of frame on a tight close-up shot. It's possible I just wasn't getting it, but I think they really wanted to make sure they had a good "beauty" shot of the cake.)

It's a strange process, and I have to say I honestly don't look at TV the same way after having done it. I now "see" so much more of the mechanical aspects of how these sorts of segments are put together. And editing still amazes me.

P.S. Sadly, I didn't get to meet Mo Rocca. This was filmed with a hired crew out of LA who shipped the tapes off to CBS for editing.

The Recipe for 30-Second Chocolate Cake

A note on cream whippers: Cream whippers are essentially DIY canned whipped cream, but allow you to put things other than whipping cream into the can. Also called iSi Whippers (iSi being the manufacture of the most popular cream whipper), they come in TWO varieties: a cheaper variety that has a very tight, restrictive nozzle that will pretty much only work with cream, and a more expensive version that allows for fine particulate to pass through the nozzle. YOU NEED THE MORE EXPENSIVE TYPE, unfortunately. Trying to do this with the cheaper version won't work; the nozzle will clog. Something like this iSi Creative Whip should be fine; just make sure it says something about "okay for espumas, foams, creams, soups, etc."

In a microwave-safe bowl, melt:

4 oz (113g) chocolate (bittersweet preferably)

Add and thoroughly whisk together:

4 large (240g) eggs
6 tablespoons (80g) sugar
3 tablespoons (25g) lour

Pass the mixture through a strainer to remove any lumps and to filter out the chalazaes (the little white strands that attach the yolk to the egg white.) Transfer to whipper and pressurize.

Spray mixture into a greased glass, ramekin, or whatever microwave-safe container you will cook it in, leaving at least the top third of the container empty. The irst time you do this, I recommend using a clear glass so that you can see the cake rise and fall as it cooks.

Microwave for 30 seconds or until the foam has set. Flip onto a plate and dust with powdered sugar.

For better-tasting results, try adding Nutella or Fluff: spray a thin layer of cake batter, drop a spoonful of illing into the center, and then spray more cake batter on top of and around the filling.

Know Anyone Looking for Food Science Interns?

Hello, Internet. I know it's been a while since I've posted much of, well … anything. I'm sorry. It's been a busy few months; I missed you too.

The book came out, and then ran out of stock, then came out again, then ran out again, then again and … well, someone said something about sixth print run recently. No, this does not mean I'm rich. I calculated my hourly salary the other day based on my royalties thus-far: $4.90 / hour.* If you're not familiar with the book world, this is actually higher than most authors are lucky to ever see. (I didn't do it for the money…)

What sales like this does mean is that I get a lot of emails from all over the world with random questions, comments, offers (multiple marriage proposals; don't ask), and suggestions. I love hearing from readers (usually); I love learning who's reading my book and understanding what they're thinking.

For most questions, I answer them by turning my stack of trusty literature (and occasionally, www.lmgtfy.com). But then there are questions like the one below where, frankly, I don't have the connections to give any good answer.

Getting to the point: does anyone have any recommendations for students looking for food science internships?

*My mom pointed out that I failed to account for expenses. With expenses factored in—direct out-of-pocket costs, like printing review copies—I'm currently at -$0.78 / hour. That is, I'm still in the red… sigh.

I'm a chemistry teacher in NYC. I read your book Cooking for Geeks and attended your talk, and almost concurrently, was approached by one of my top high school chemistry students about opportunities to work, volunteer, learn, or just do something in the field of food chemistry/molecular gastronomy this summer. I immediately wanted to write to you.

My student is smart, independent, and would be up for anything — even just being around this kind of work in a restaurant or lab setting would be interesting for her. The one stipulation is that she does not want to do a home-based project all alone, but, go out and be around people who are doing this sort of thing. She lives in NYC, but, could travel if necessary. She has a great, independent can-do attitude and the maturity of a college student.

Might you have any leads for how she could make something related to food chem/molec gastro part of her summer?

Looking for Food Science Internships?

Hello, Internet. I know it's been a while since I've posted much of, well … anything. I'm sorry. It's been a busy few months; I missed you too.

The book came out, and then ran out of stock, then came out again, then ran out again, then again and … well, someone said something about sixth print run recently. No, this does not mean I'm rich. I calculated my hourly salary the other day based on my royalties thus-far: $4.90 / hour. If you're not familiar with the book world, this is actually higher than most authors are lucky to ever see. (I didn't do it for the money…)

What sales like this does mean is that I get a lot of emails from all over the world with random questions, comments, offers (multiple marriage proposals; don't ask), and suggestions. I love hearing from readers (usually); I love learning who's reading my book and understanding what they're thinking.

For most questions, I answer them by turning my stack of trusty literature (and occasionally, www.lmgtfy.com). But then there are questions like the one below where, frankly, I don't have the connections to give any good answer.

Getting to the point: does anyone have any recommendations for students looking for food science internships?

I'm a chemistry teacher in NYC. I read your book Cooking for Geeks and attended your talk, and almost concurrently, was approached by one of my top high school chemistry students about opportunities to work, volunteer, learn, or just do something in the field of food chemistry/molecular gastronomy this summer. I immediately wanted to write to you.

My student is smart, independent, and would be up for anything — even just being around this kind of work in a restaurant or lab setting would be interesting for her. The one stipulation is that she does not want to do a home-based project all alone, but, go out and be around people who are doing this sort of thing. She lives in NYC, but, could travel if necessary. She has a great, independent can-do attitude and the maturity of a college student.

Might you have any leads for how she could make something related to food chem/molec gastro part of her summer?