Simple tools like this are not to be underestimated. This random egg boil time calculator is solely responsible for me having perfectly boiled eggs the past few years: https://www.omnicalculator.com/food/eggs
(the main three variables that dramatically alter boil time are soft vs hard boiled, starting temp [e.g. refrigerated vs room temp], and egg weight)
Neat, although it's buggy in Fahrenheit. It opens for me in Fahrenheit, maybe based on my browser's locale or geoip. The page opens with initial temperature 4; selecting fridge changes it to 4; selecting room temp changes it to 21. Those numbers make much more sense in Celsius! And indeed if I change the scale to Celsius, it uses those same numbers, now representing very different temperatures.
This makes a significant difference: with a US L egg at sea level, soft boil time is 8 minutes 27 seconds from the fridge in Fahrenheit, 6 minutes 58 seconds in Celsius. In my experience, the right answer is 6 minutes even, though opinions about runniness vary...
(Sending a note about this to feedback@omnicalculator.com)
edit: also, it says US L egg = 60 g? That's not right, unless maybe they're counting the shell, which they shouldn't. 50 g is about right and what cronometer.com says. cronometer also says 56 g = extra large, 63 g = jumbo.
Not sure if it's just me, but that calculator doesn't seem right given the formula it's supposed to be based off of. Someone else can check my work[0], but the only assumption I made was for K in the calculator (lambda in the linked paper). Since the paper[1] mentioned yolks were 1/3rd of an egg, I used a lambda value of 28.3
The number I got for a 60 gram egg starting at 4.4degC at sea level reaching soft-boiled temps was 5m17s. Compared to the website saying 6m58s. That's a pretty big error somewhere.
First time encountering WolframAlpha public web interface; a combination of programming language and LLM [1], if I understand correctly!?
> The Wolfram Language natural language processing functionality is a combination of rule-based and machine learning language models, including LLMs. It builds on top of advanced text mining and string manipulation capabilities and is integrated with a large visualization suite and extensive built-in linguistic data.
Also appreciate the question/prompt/command (!?) being encoded in the url.
FWIW, the base features of WolframAlpha significantly predates the present LLM craze, and there has not been any major leaps in its capabilities recently, apart from the addition of dedicated "LLM_xxx" functions.
I remember using it as a student back around 2010 and it worked the same then. Actually I think the free tier used to be better before they introduced the "pro" version with subscription fee.
I make it all the time. Here's my recipe, it's foolproof.
- 1 gallon whole milk, 1 liter heavy cream.
- Heat to 180F while stirring
- Add half a cup of vinegar and stir thoroughly for a minute or two
Then you just wait until it's cooled enough to pick up and pour through some cloth. After that I salt, add garlic, chopped herb, anything will do.
One tip I can offer is to jar it up before it gets cold so it is easier to get in the jar without air pockets. Lasts in the fridge for a few weeks, freezes fine.
Look up how to do mozzarella on Youtube (first result is a decent introduction).
After you do a batch the milk will still contain a lot of stuff.
You can then add 20% of this quantity of milk to that, and re-heat to make ricotta (which literally means re-cooked).
(Of course you can make ricotta directly from milk. On the other hand, not adding back some milk makes it difficult to get a good result.)
Look up a basic mozzarella making kit if you need the tools, but basically some cheese cloth and a thermometer are the only thing you might not have in a standard kitchen.
The most complicated might be to get some real milk (raw) for best results; if you don't, depending on the pasteurization process you might need to fortify the milk with calcium chloride.
I've eaten a lot of Italian industrial ricotta and the home-made stuff is just entirely on another level.
An improvement might be to make milk type the first choice, and limit the cheese options based on milk type selection. Or maybe just combine both into a single selection with milk type option groups.
Most hard pressed cheeses (think comté, beaufort, gruyère, gouda) are around 10L/kg, Parmigiano reggiano is more like 15L/kg, so I think the app underestimate it, unless by Parmesan you mean not the real deal
Obviously dryer cheeses are more dense and require more milk per kg as they age
The cheese choice is severly lacking :)
The milk type choice is nice, as Cow's milk contains more water compared to goat or sheep's
I can find lots of cheeses that are like American "Swiss" cheese here in Germany. I think that what happened was when Swiss immigrants moved to e.g. New Glarus, WI, and started making the cheeses their parents made, and then when people said hey this is good what is it, the Swiss-Americans said it was cheese like they made back in Switzerland, so Swiss cheese. :)
I would like to see the calculation for sour milk / Acid-set cheese, especially German variety Harzer. Among countless kinds of cheese, despite strongly polarizing due to its taste and smell, it has some "super food" features: Harzer contains very little fat (less than 1%) but extremely high protein (usually around 30%).
Super useful website! One of my dreams / unrealized projects is to make my own wheel of parmesan. One day...
But I take offense at "Swiss cheese"... are we talking Gruyere? Emmental? Appenzeller? Raclette? Tilsiter? Sbrinz? Or one of the many other delicious cheeses we have in Switzerland?
Paneer would be an excellent one to add because it's easy to make and doesn't even require rennet, just some sort of acid (citric acid carefully added has given me the best results)
Human milk is low in protein, high in lactose and has a very low ratio of casein (the curd) to whey. Closest is probably horse (mare), but human is significantly higher in fat so probably tastes better.
Fun fact: humans are the only species that drinks milk directly from other species. We're also the only species which drinks milk past infancy. Don't worry, though, it's "normal, natural and necessary".
The fact that we tend to lose the ability to digest milk past infancy suggests that this isn't but is rather something that we have relatively recently started to do (perhaps less than 10,000 years ago, apparently and in Europe) and are still adapting to it, which is quite interesting.
Some years ago, I decided to make cheese as a hobby. Got a starter kit, bought an extra fridge and so on.
Turns out making cheese is -really- easy. Milk, rennet, culture, time.
Making -specific kind of cheese- though is hard. Recipes are very precise (so you need things like good pH measurers).
The biggest problem for me was the waiting time. I'm into software - fix, recompile, run, repeat. Whereas 'leave for 3 months, 6 months, a year, and see if you got it right' was too slow of a feedback loop.
These days I only make soft-cheeses, take a week or less, and only in tiny batches (and irregularly).
Overall learning the process was fun, and a cool thing to do, but if you want good cheese, well, find a good cheese store :)
I think this advice is mostly correct based on my experience taking a cheesemaking class last year. They had all kinds of dedicated mini-fridges scattered around their house
Having said that, they introduced me to this handy site where they said folks can get any missing equipment and the calcium chloride additive for store milk: https://cheesemaking.com/collections/beginner
Then, speaking of the raw milk, because I know quite a few folks are in the Bay Area, they said - and I confirmed - they sell raw milk at the Oakland farmer's market on Saturday https://www.agriculturalinstitute.org/grand-lake Regrettably I don't recall the name of the vendor, and of course have no idea if they're present every Saturday
There is a vendor in Auburn CA, which is actually a thrift shop for Kids Stuff (its an upscale area - so hand-me-down stuff from higher income, single kids)....
However, in the back they have a little shop for Raw Milk Single Cow.
So you can subscribe and its super limited quantity, but they provide whole raw milk sourced from a single cow.
Super amazing - and the plug that forms on the top is amazing creme.
-
Another option is to make friends with whomever you can to learn where high-end products are sourced at MIchelin restaurants, I have someone very close to me who was at french laundry for years and their vendors (aside from certain veggies grown in the garden across the street) were from very particular vendors - such as their lamb which comes only from one specific farm.
The point being that you should find out who high-end restaurants source from and seek them out directly.
(most of the crab sold in San Francisco restaurants was sold by Royal Hawaiian Seafood, but the public could only purchase from them for one hour on a tuesday between 12pm and 1pm - but you get the same live crab that SF charges $65+ for, for $5...)
A rule of thumb is 10% cheese, 90% whey. So it takes a lot of milk to make say 1kg of cheese. And if you're waiting a year 1kg gets eaten pretty quickly.
The size of your fridge (and the cost of running it) dictates the size of your pipeline.
If an error is discovered, and that error was consistent through the pipeline, that's an expensive error. (Its all usually edible, but if you're trying to make say cheddar and it's not cheddar, then you have a lot of something else...)
At my local cheese shop there might be 10 varieties of cheddar. I can eat all of them but 1 or 2 are my personal favourites. Making something that matches one of those would take decades of experimenting.
Turns out, I like -eating- cheese, more than I like -making- it.
OTOH, whey can be turned into the delicious Norwegian "brunost" (literally "brown cheese") by just reducing it down until it caramellizes and then adding fresh cream in various amounts.
Especially if you have whey from goat milk, you get excellent brunost. Put it on waffles together with some strawberry jam, best thing in the world.
I think if one likes working in the kitchen they should try things like this. But, for me, certain things the trade-off of time/value isn't really worth it. For example, I can make croissants, but the time it takes to do them just isn't worth it to me when I can pick up some good ones when I am out. But, a French or Italian loaf, on the other hand, is really simple to do pretty good, so I just do those at home.
Homemade croissants are far superior to anything found at any store, due to having to sit out for some time. Same as sushi, I bought some otoro for fairly cheap, cooked some rice, and it was the best sushi I've had in my life.
Shepherds and sheepherders in my country make traditional kinds of cheese, which are very specific, with ease. They use their eyes and experience, they don't use lab glassware and they don't measure PH.
making a specific kind of cheese is mostly about replicating the traditional procedures and ambient conditions of the place that cheese originated.
"go to this specific valley in switzerland and spend 20 years immersing yourself in their cheesemaking tradition" is arguably a lot more difficult than following some specific procedures and measuring carefully.
Sure, but that's one specific type of cheese that they can make whereas they would have extreme difficulty making any of the other hundreds(?) of types of cheeses. If you want a specific type you're still going to need a recipe and the tools to follow it.
Pretty much all of the cheeses were invented long before pH meters were. The pH scale itself was invented only in the early 1900’s.
Technology is great for making a large amount of cheese that’s very similar. You don’t need it to make any specific type of cheese that’s over 100 yrs old though, and that’s nearly all of them.
And they are using very specific kinds of milk, and specific kinds of temperatures and specific environments and probably have specific kinds of bacterial and fungal cultures wafting on the breeze.
i have been looking into that too and faced the same problem.
where i live, cheese shops do not exist. european style cheese has to be imported and is way to expensive. local options are barely useful for pizza.
i learned how to make yoghurt (from my chinese wife, surprisingly) and a few times turned milk going bad into a cheese experiment that sometimes worked out.
now i am making kefir which turns out to be a lot easier than yoghurt because it works at room temperature, whereas yoghurt needs milk slightly heated.
> Overall learning the process was fun, and a cool thing to do, but if you want good cheese, well, find a good cheese store :)
Strongly seconded. Unless you have a full blown cheese cellar in which to store a hundred wheels and experiment over years, there's pretty much only one cheese that the average cook can make that would be cheaper and taste better than buying in a store (unless you're in Italy) and that would be burrata. Store bought burrata has a much bigger markup than other cheeses and the machine method they use to make it here in the US is inferior to the hand shredded version.
Don't forget the whey! If you're making burrata, you get ricotta for practically free. From there, if you're feeling fancy, you can make ricotta salata. Otherwise, put both into a divine lasagna.
Also, cheese curd is super easy. Ripening it into something fancy is a trick, but, poutine!
I would start with the Americanized version at Chipotle and move up from there :)
On a serious note, I'm not sure if you can use the usual quick mozzarella recipe [1] for burrata because the mozzarella might not be stretchy enough to form the shell or the mixture might be too acidic - I forgot what the issue was. You'll have to use the proper recipe [2] which is quite a bit more involved (I also recommend looking up videos of Italian cheesemongers making burrata for the technique, there are tricks to it). A sous vide recirculator comes in real handy.
Burrata is more about the flavor of the cream which combines very nicely with the texture of the cheese. Definitely recommend getting the cream from a proper dairy even if you don't get raw milk for the cheese. The stracciatella absorbs the cream which creates a unique and very rich flavor.
(the main three variables that dramatically alter boil time are soft vs hard boiled, starting temp [e.g. refrigerated vs room temp], and egg weight)