Food: Bread Baking

I've always been interested in making homemade bread---I tend to be a "starch" kind of guy, as I need some type of carbohydrates in my meals, which tends to be rice the majority of times, but pasta, bread, and potatoes are pretty good too.  Luckily I still have a high metabolism, so I'm still pretty scrawny.

However, baking bread is kind of intimidating.  Baking in general is kind of a mysterious art.  It's the one type of cooking where you really can't deviate from the recipe at all.  I've used my mom's bread machine before, and while it works, it makes typical "bread machine" bread.  At work, we had an instrument consultant stop by who recommended The Bread Baker's Apprentice by Peter Reinhart.  It's a pretty good book going over the history of bread and filled with lots of recipes, but it makes baking sound even more intimidating.  You need a dense baking stone to maintain a high temperature.  You need to keep a pan of water in the oven and mist the walls in the beginning to make sure you get good caramelization and browning of the crust.  There are different flours and different yeasts.  This sounded like a lot more work than I thought.  We tried looking for baking stones, but they tended to be pretty expensive.  We even tried looking for rough cut quarry stones from local hardware stores as a replacement (they're only a couple of bucks rather than a hundred), but they were all out.

When my friends Luke and Jenny visited, they let me know of this easy bread recipe from Mark Bittman at the New York Times.  There's even a Youtube video demonstrating the procedure.  Apparently it's so easy that even "a 4-year-old could master it".  All you need is flour, salt, instant yeast, and water.  You also let the bread do a slow fermentation and rise over 18 hours.  The real trick here is that you bake the bread in a cast iron dutch oven---the cast iron helps retain the heat so you don't need a separate baking stone.  Plus, you leave the pot covered for part of the baking time---as a result, the water from the dough is trapped and creates a high humidity environment that helps form the crust.  It's pretty ingenious.  Is there anything cast iron can't do?

So we gave the recipe a spin.  It's very strange.  The dough is very wet and almost slimy and it's not like any other dough that I've made before.  But since you slow ferment it, you don't need to do any kneading.  And it works.  After about a day, you pretty much just throw the dough ball into a preheated cast iron pot and bake it.  Afterwards, you just pop out a classic loaf of bread.  The crust is crackly and has a nice, golden brown color.  The interior is nice and soft.  It's almost like a loaf of artisan bread.  And it really is easy enough that a four-year-old could do it.  We made an oyster chowder to go with it and dipped the bread in...mmm...delicious...

We've already made it again.  This recipe is only for a typical white bread, so now we're interested in looking at other variations.  Now that we know you can use a dutch oven, it might be worth looking at that bread book again...

NYC Visit

Last week my old friend Luke and Jenny came up to visit.  As Jersey is...well...Jersey, we made our way to New York City several times.  It wasn't really the best weather to go out sightseeing and we ended up walking around in the cold and rain.  Still, I think we all had fun and it was good to get out of the house.

The first night had tickets to the Broadway show American Idiot.  It was a little strange to see Green Day songs being performed with kicks and dances on stage.  Plus, I mostly remember Green Day from Dookie, so I haven't really listened to their later, more serious stuff.  I would have guessed there would have been other rock operas to adapt to Broadway first (hmm, how about Pink Floyd?).  Anyway, it was pretty good.  It did feel like it was trying to be the new Rent, i.e. the new hip rock and roll Broadway show about disaffected youth.  The director made a decision to cut out most of the dialog and let the songs carry the show, which I'm not sure was the best idea.  The result is a plot that is a little harder to follow and more free-form, and while that may have been the intent, it made it a little harder to connect the characters on a personal level.  Especially when their lives started falling apart.  Instead, it was 90 minutes of being blasted with teenage angst.  With rock music.  And choreographed dance scenes.  Which isn't bad, per se, but I think it was a missed opportunity.

We also got tickets earlier in the day to do one of those tourist-y water cruises around the city.  It's a little cheesy, but it's still a pretty cool way to see the different parts of the city.  The boat goes around Manhattan and then closes in on Liberty Island before returning.  The weather was bad and it gave the city almost an oppressive feel with the clouds hunkering down over the skyline.

Random: Whitrolled

This amazingly incredible and incredibly amazing news has been making the Internet rounds: the Meg Whitman campaign, running for governor of California, has been trying to look tech savvy and using Twitter (she was the former CEO of Ebay after all).  Her campaign tried to tweet a link to an online endorsement from the San Diego Sheriff's Association, but instead made a typo...

... and instead linked to a Youtube video featuring a middle-aged cross dressing man in a pink tutu rocking out on a bass guitar to some J-pop.  He even has a fan set up to blow his hair around.  And if that's not enough, at one point he even flashes some panties and throws them on a bed.



While I wonder if this was deliberate to stir up publicity, I just don't think Whitman's core demographic would embrace a creepy cross-dressing Asian guy (although maybe he thinks Jerry Brown is soft on crime too).  I don't usually follow Twitter, this just made my day.  I could watch this every day to feel better. 

Food: It's Back!

I thought I should mention that the McDonald's close to our house had a sign advertising that "The McRib is Back!"  We had to check it out and see if the rumors were true.  Indeed they were---the McRib does exist!  Mmmm...it was everything it's cracked up to be...

Food: The Return of the King

Like a shooting star, the McRib is coming back for a rare national appearance in November!  After years of unsubstantiated sightings, it's like finally finding the real chupacabra, only more delicious (but maybe just as scary).  I guess we won't be needing the McRib Locator for a while.

The McRib mystery meat is pretty versatile...I remember seeing the same meat patty in a McDonalds in Hong Kong, although this time they slathered it with a hot black pepper sauce.  Mmmmm....

Simpsons Sweatshop

The Simpsons has been nearly unwatchable for over a decade, but from time to time they do pull out something sharp and relevant (on the other hand, I suppose it's easy to be critical after you've made your millions).  Here's the intro from this week's episode:

Edit:  It looks like Fox took down the Youtube link, but you can see the episode here on Hulu (at least you only need to watch the intro):

Chinese Peace

On Friday, the most relevant Nobel Prize (at least to the public) was awarded---the Peace Prize.  Each year, the Peace Prize tends to overshadow the rest of the laureates, typically since the scientific and literature prizes are carved from highly specialized niches while the Peace Prize winners tend to be in the public eye.   The scientific prizes are awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and tend to be well-vetted and rigorously selected.  On the other hand, the Peace Prize is awarded by a separate group, the Norwegian Nobel Committee.  Interestingly, this group is made up of only five people.  Moreover, since "Peace" is such a nebulous concept, with such a small group the selection tends to have specific political statements.  As a result, controversy over the Peace Prize selection tends to overshadow the other, more rigorously awarded Prizes---I've sadly heard many comments on how people don't trust any of the Nobel Prizes after last year's award to Barack Obama (arguably more of an anti-Bush rather than a pro-Obama award)

In any case, the Peace Prize this year was awarded to Liu Xiaobo, a Chinese dissident jailed for his activism for human rights in China.  It's a pretty safe and uncontroversial selection, although not surprisingly China has called the award an obscenity.  In fact, in many of the state-run Chinese newspapers there was virtually no mention of the news.  However, even more interestingly, when my wife asked her mainland Chinese coworkers about the news, Chinese people who had immigrated to the US for work, surprisingly they either had no comment or called the award "ridiculous".  Ridiculous.  Earlier this year when Google had their standoff against China over censorship, those same coworkers railed against Google for not obeying the law.

My wife and I both have family in Hong Kong and over the years it has become clear that there is a enormous cultural difference between Chinese people from mainland China and those from Hong Kong (or Taiwan).  There are obvious language differences---people in Hong Kong speak Cantonese rather than the official Mandarin dialect and they are essentially different languages.  Moreover, Hong Kong was controlled by the United Kingdom and was allowed to develop a freewheeling capitalist economy closer to the United States than to China.  Even since China reacquired Hong Kong in 1997, under global pressure it was kept as a "Special Administrative Region" and effectively allowed autonomy (one wonders why Tibet was not given this treatment).  In any case, Hong Kong Chinese tend to be more free spirited and entrepreneurial---chances are, most of the Chinese restaurants you've eaten at in the US were started by immigrants from Hong Kong.

Mainland Chinese, in my experience, generally tend to be more focused on hierarchy and status stretching from millenna under imperial rule.  Don't rock the boat.  Do what you're told.  The sad thing is, I think the reason that human rights and freedom won't come soon in China is because most people in China just don't care.  Don't question the government.  Put the State before you---what's good for the State is good for you.  Criticizing the government over human rights only criticizes the people of China.  Even mainland Chinese immigrants in the United States, taking advantage of a free capitalist economy and arguably vastly more successful then the majority of Chinese back home, don't care.  In fact, my wife's department is headed by a hierarchy of mainland Chinese women (dubbed the Purse Gang) who run the shop as a tightly as a politburo.

Of course, this is a slightly exaggerated viewpoint and there are exceptions like Liu Xiaobo and the Dalai Lama, but I fear that change will be slow.  Is China ready for freedom?  Beyond that, sadly I think that the motivation for the Western world to encourage change is stuck in a symbiotic addiction to cheap goods provided by cheap labor in China, cheap labor predicated upon the same human rights abuse that we're protesting...

Science: Nobel Results

It looks like this was a pretty good year for chemistry, at least with respect to Nobel Prizes.  Long overdue, the 2010 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was given to Heck, Negishi, and Suzuki for palladium-catalyzed cross coupling reaction for work that was developed in the 1970s.  Specifically, they developed the chemical reactions appropriately but rather obviously named Heck reaction, Negishi coupling, and Suzuki coupling (chemists tend to be narcissists---one of the great honors of synthetic chemistry is to have a chemical reaction named after you).  Sadly for Lisa Simpson, her guess was in the right area of chemistry but the wrong name---Sonogashira and Kumada are other early pioneers in the field, but the impact of their research has been less felt and the Nobel rule of three left them out.

What's exciting is that this year the Prize was actually given to research in chemistry itself rather than being bumped by something in physics or biology.  It's personally exciting to me since my graduate and post-doctoral research was in a similar field, focusing on developing new catalysts for chemical reactions.  It's been a good string of wins catalysis---it seems like every 5 years or so, the Nobel Prize is given to an advancement in some area of catalysis.  Knowles, Noyori, and Sharpless won the 2001 Prize for asymmetric catalysis and Chauvin, Schrock and Grubbs won the 2005 Prize for olefin metathesis.

Why this is so cool is that chemistry is essentially the science of molecules and synthetic chemistry is the science of making molecules.  Making molecules can be pretty hard, but catalysts can make our lives much easier.  Catalysts are small amounts of a specific molecule that can direct and transform other molecules into new ones.  The kicker is that the catalyst can run this reaction thousands if not millions of times, so you only need a small amount of a catalyst to generate a large amount of your product.  Generally, the most powerful catalysts tend to be molecules containing precious metals like palladium, rhodium, or ruthenium (for example, this is why you have rhodium in your catalytic converters---the rhodium can capture and transform the emissions from your exhaust).  For this year's Prize, palladium is the catalyst used to connect carbon-carbon bonds together to form more complicated structures.  The reactions developed by Heck, Negishi, and Suzuki generally follow the same mechanism with slightly different starting reagents.  What's incredible about these reactions is that they're extremely robust---they're clean reactions that make few unwanted side-products and you can run these reactions to make products on the ton-scale, which has been used to make molecules from complex pharmaceuticals to materials and even polymers.

Sadly, while this is pretty exciting news for chemists everywhere, there's been barely a mention in the mainstream press.  I guess it is a pretty esoteric topic to effectively communicate to non-chemists.   Metathesis, which won in 2005, at least had a catchy dance movie in the press release that all the prime time news shows played.  Still, this is a Nobel that's long been expected and well-deserved.

In another coup for chemistry, arguably the 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of graphene would have been suitable for the chemistry prize as well.  Graphene is essentially a single molecular layer of graphite, one of the allotropes of carbon (the others being diamond and fullerenes/buckeyballs).  It's similar to an extended chain of fused benzenes---and just like benzene, there are pairs of electrons in high energy p orbitals (unlike diamond, where the electrons are in more stable orbitals resulting in a very stable structure).  Since the rings are fused together, the electrons are delocalized and can flow, resulting in some interesting electrical and thermal conductivity properties.  What's exciting is that this could potentially play a role in developing new materials and replacing older metal-based conductors.  Fun fact:  if you take a sheet of graphene and roll it up, you get a carbon nanotube, which also have very interesting new material properties since you can now think about directing electrical current in a specific direction on the nano-scale.

Science: Nobel Madness

It's Nobel season this week, the biggest popularity contest for scientists everywhere (although sadly there is no swimsuit competition).  And just like other popularity contests, the selection criteria are opaque and seem to be at the whim of the judging body.  There are many arcane rules that surrounding the Prize---for example, the Prize cannot be awarded to the deceased, which can bias the Prize away from research where one of the leading scientists has passed away.  Another strange rule is that each Prize can only be split between a maximum of three winners, which can reduce adult scientists to name calling if they're left out.  The most recent case of this was the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry awarded for the discovery of green fluorescent protein (GFP).  Three scientists were awarded the Prize, but the actual person who discovered the gene for the protein was left out and now drives a bus (although maybe not in that order).  However, probably the most egregious consequence of those rules was the exclusion of Rosalind Franklin, the woman who solved the crystal structure of DNA.  The Nobel Prize for the discovery of DNA was awarded in 1962 to Crick, Watson, and Wilkins, who failed to acknowledge her work in any meaningful way.

Sadly, out of all of the prizes, Chemistry is kind of like the leftover bucket.  Often, since there is no prize in Biology, it tends to spill over and displace more suitable Chemistry winners.  Other times, research in Physics will creep into the Chemistry Prize as well.  As a result, each year chemists worldwide hope for a prize in "real" chemistry.  Similarly, there is no Nobel Prize in mathematics, although this can sometimes be shoehorned into the Prize in Economics (itself a relatively recent addition). 

Still, it's also starting to seem like except for the Peace Prize, Nobel Prizes are something that only scientists care about---the Nobel Prize in Medicine was awarded today for the invention of in vitro fertilization and the news is buried in most online news sites (although I wonder if this is due to general disinterest in science or residual controversy over "test tube babies"---on the other hand, CNN.com doesn't even have a section devoted to Science).  However, it's the one week where nerds can act like jocks and fill out their own "Nobel Madness" prediction brackets---who will win this year?  I wonder if even Vegas gets in on the action.  Surprisingly, even The Simpsons got in on this.  I used to be a huge Simpsons fan, but the show has definitely gone downhill and has been virtually unwatchable for nearly a decade.  Still, I happened to catch an episode this season which Lisa and the rest of the nerds showcased their Nobel predictions---and surprisingly, the predictions are actual known chemists with relatively reasonable chances.  It looks like the writers on the Simpsons have actually done their homework instead of just using a throwaway gag.

Season 22, Episode 1: Simpsons Nobel Predictions

Zare and Moerner did work on single molecule laser spectroscopy, Feringa has done work in many different fields but is probably most famous for his molecular machine work, and Sonogashira is one of the big founders palladium-catalyzed cross coupling.   If it was up to me, I would pick Sonogashira, Suzuki, and Heck for cross coupling as I'm partial to synthetic chemistry (methods to make new molecules), although this is a case where the rules are biased against it---Stille, one of the big cross coupling pioneers, passed away in 1989.

Blackout

We got hit with remnants of Tropical Storm Nicole last week up here in the Northeast (in a case of science meeting the obvious, by the time we experienced it, Tropical Storm Nicole was no longer considered Tropical).  It rained pretty heavily for most of week.  Luckily our area was relatively fine although there were some areas close by that suffered from flash flooding.  Although this weekend was beautiful, it looks like it's going to be another wet week.

At one point during the storm, just as we were settling in to cook dinner, the power flickered and then went out.  It's kind of surreal how much ambient noise modern nature surrounds us with.  There was no television or music.  The hum of the air purifier, the random computer fans, and even the refrigerator were silenced.  The only thing left was a slight ringing of the ears---sometimes the loudest thing can be the lack of noise.  The house was completely dark with only trace ambient light filtering in through the windows.  The power to the entire neighborhood was out.  We could see the tell-tale frantic movement of flashlights from some of the other units in our complex while others revealed the steady calm of candlelight.  Some remained dark. 

The rain had calmed so we took the opportunity to go outside.  It was dark and calm outside and surprisingly quiet---we were alone as everyone else stayed huddled indoors.  All of the lights were out and only moonlight diffused by the clouds lit the way.  The air was clean from the fresh rain.  It ended up being a long, peaceful walk and we could just leave all the modern distractions behind.  By the time we came back, the power flickered back on to welcome us to a warm and cozy home.