Working from home

Advantages of not being customer-facing. The snow got real this time.

My first Seattle snow

On museums

This weekend I went to the Seattle Art Museum (SAM) to see their exhibition of Edward Hopper. I don’t usually go to museums, but I like Hopper, and I thought I would give the SAM a fair shot. Fortunately, it was a small exhibition, and I was done quickly. I wandered around, and found some beautiful pieces. All in all, I was out in under 45 minutes, which, if you ask me, is the right amount of time for museums. Any longer, and my knees start to hurt. Museums are cruel, as are churches. I can walk five hours with a heavy backpack, I can run for an hour and a half, I can play two full games of basketball back to back, but I cannot stand still, or amble around a room at snail’s pace, for more than 40 minutes.

Aside from the physical discomfort, I view museums as a wasted space. When in museums, the art gets so banal for me, that I start admiring the architecture, the high ceilings, the well-kept parquet, the pastel colored walls. I imagine having a billiards table there, or a basketball court, or an astronomical observatory, or a ballroom. So many possibilities, and they get wasted in favor of having people shuffling around, trying to sound knowledgeable.

Not that I’m anti-art, far from it. I just prefer to experience it in a book, curled up in a comfortable sofa. I suppose I am a philistine.

Raw yogurt, at last

[Note: if you want instructions on making yogurt, without the story, go here]

Today I bring you one of those stories about the triumph of the human spirit that Hollywood is so fond of.

In my previous post on yogurt, I had described the whole process I used to make yogurt, and some of its limitations.
To sum it up:

• If I used ultra-pasteurized milk, I didn’t need to heat it before incubation, and the yogurt would have a uniform, custardy texture.
• If I used raw, or regularly pasteurized milk, and I didn’t scald it before incubation, the yogurt developed an uneven texture, and leaked whey, which gave it a bad taste.
• I had no way of controlling the incubation temperature.

You might have thought that, having found that ultra-pasteurized milk produced consistent results easily, I would have been satisfied and concluded my research. However, I am an obsessive fellow. My friend Tom once told me that all the computer programmers he knows have some form of OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder), and I think he had a point.

I consulted Harold McGee’s On Food and Cooking, that fabulous encyclopedia. There is a detailed description on dairy products and yogurt making. It explains that the scalding of the milk previous to incubation, denatures the milk proteins in such a way that they form a grid that traps the whey. I noted that the “official” scalding process uses higher temperatures, longer, than pasteurization. Why then the search for the best milk, and the least treated?

The scalding process is also time-consuming. It would usually take me over 30 minutes to heat the milk to a simmer, all the while stirring to avoid burning, then transfer to a steel bowl, and put that bowl in a bath of cold water to cool down the milk as quickly as possible. Aside from the waste of time, there were two problems with the scalding. One was that, however carefully I did it, however slowly I heated the milk, the yogurt came out uneven, with some parts runny, and some curdled. Another problem was the skin that forms on milk when it heats. Not my favorite sight.

McGee, again, had an explanation for the skin on hot milk, and a solution. The skin is a combination of cream, proteins and calcium, that solidifies on contact with air. To avoid its formation, just whisk the milk until you have a layer of froth at the top, which prevents contact with the air. Presto!

The problems remained that I hated the constant stirring to avoid burning the milk, and that even when I stirred, the milk was unevenly heated. Then I had an idea. Getting a cast iron skillet had improved my steaks by conducting the heat more slowly and cooking the meat more evenly, without burning. Perhaps I could find a cast iron pot to warm the milk in, and use low heat. This was promising. I went to City Kitchens, in downtown Seattle, found that cast iron pots do exist, and bought one. My first Le Creuset – which seems to be the Apple of kitchenware. I also bought a fluid thermometer with a clasp, to start taking out the guesswork from my process.

With the new knowledge and the new gear, I set out to make yogurt from raw, or regularly pasteurized, milk, by scalding the milk over low heat, and keeping it under 150 Fahrenheit (65 Celsius). Once I took some measurements and timings, I was able to leave the pot mostly unattended.
This was a step forward. The yogurt came out much more even, and with a milder texture. The milk skin problem was gone, and even the taste improved. Still, the yogurt leaked whey.

McGee had one last piece of information. According to his book, the incubation temperature plays a role on the texture of yogurt. The bacilli in yogurt thrive mainly in a range of temperatures: 90-110F, or 32-43C. On the hot end of the range, the fermentation is fastest, but it produces a coarse grid that leaks whey. On the cold end of the range, the fermentation is slowest, but it produces a finer texture that traps whey.

I had not tried this because my yogurt maker doesn’t have a temperature control. I looked around for other yogurt makers. Even the ones that have “gourmet” or “professional” in their name have no temperature control. Some people use ovens to make yogurt, and replace its light bulb with a 60W light to give out some heat, but I didn’t want to go that way. I did, however, run an experiment, and left a liter of raw milk fermenting overnight at room temperature (and it was cold by then). The resulting yogurt was very runny, but with no whey. Promising.

In another book, I found the suggestion of using a food dehydrator to incubate the yogurt. Food dehydrators have a temperature control that goes as low as 95F. This might be a solution, but I didn’t like the idea of getting another gizmo. Perhaps I could build an external temperature regulator, and control the yogurt maker with it. Or maybe such a regulator already existed. I looked and looked, but didn’t even know how such a device would be called.
Perhaps my colleagues from work would know of the existence of such a device. Sure enough, one, Jim, keeps a kegerator (a refrigerator for beer kegs) in the office. Beer has an optimal range of temperatures it should be kept at, so the kegerator is basically a mini-fridge, and a temperature regulator. Aha! I took a look at the regulator in Jim’s kegerator, jotted down the brand and model, and ordered one over the internet.

I got it on Monday, and was glad to find that I needed to build the cables to hook it up to the power outlet, and to the appliance it is supposed to control – the yogurt maker, in my case. A nice little hardware project, which I finished on Tuesday. I now have the most precise yogurt maker I could ask for. I stick a temperature probe on a cup with water, inside the yogurt maker. When the temperature exceeds 90F, the regulator shuts the yogurt maker down until the temperature goes down to 85F. Then it turns it on again.

I immediately put my new setup to the test: I made yogurt from raw milk, not heated at all, with the regulator’s thermostat set to 90F (32C). The resulting yogurt was fantastic. A very smooth texture, a little runny but with no leaked whey to be found. The raw milk I buy comes from Jersey cows, and so has more cream content than most milk (which comes primarily from Holstein cows). All in all, this raw yogurt has great potential.

I think this concludes my “engineering” investigation of the lore of yogurt, but who knows?

Grand Canyon, remastered

On Tuesday, when I got back from New York, a box was waiting for me at home with the rescans of my photos of the Grand Canyon, which I took in the summer of 2004, during a ten day hike along the Tonto trail. Perhaps my most difficult adventure to date.
Back in 2004, I asked the lab to scan my negatives to CD-ROM. Then, Guillermo, Elisabeth and I pooled all our photos together, filtered them, added narrative, and built a website for our journey.

Many things have changed since 2004. I now use a digital camera (another Canon EOS), and I use a GPS receiver to geo-locate the photos, so that the can be displayed on a map. I use a photo sharing website instead of building my own web albums. I upload full resolution photos to the photo site, and it takes care of generating different sizes to fit the web browser. The original size is always available.

My old web albums are starting to show their limitations. The Grand Canyon album uses 900×700 pixel images, which don’t take advantage of today’s screens. Also, the quality of the scans leaves much to be desired, when compared to the photos from my digital reflex camera. I had been looking for ways to rescan the negatives, and I read about several companies that would handle the rescanning cheaply, using high quality negative scanners. I chose one, ScanCafe, and sent them a test batch, and then all seven of my Grand Canyon film rolls (my favorite: Fuji Superia Reala 100 ISO). I’m happy with the results.

Here are a few comparisons. On the left are the old scans, on the right the new ones. You can click on the images to enlarge:

Several things are interesting to note. The new scans have much better color saturation. They have less contrast: the lights and the darks are more moderate. As a result, there appears to be less definition. However, the old scans’s higher contrast was attained at the cost of burning the clear tones, and blackening the dark tones. Also, the old scans had been sharpened, to give a greater feeling of resolution in the small image sizes of the day (the old scans were less than 2 megapixels, the new ones are over 11 megapixels). The sharpening results in more noise, particularly apparent in photos with craggy rocks or bushes.

To sum it up, I think the new scans are a big improvement. I’ve been pestering Elisabeth so that she, too, rescans her photos, and when she does, I will update the Grand Canyon album with the new images.
You can see the rescans of my Grand Canyon photos.
Also, you can see Guillermo’s original photos (from a digital camera).

Now I want to rescan all my film photos, and especially my New Zealand rolls. Dang, this photography business is absorbing!

Old friends, old town

Thank God for Thanksgiving. There are not enough vacations in American jobs, and not enough national holidays. The stretch from Thanksgiving to Christmas is the one time of the year when (some) jobs take themselves less seriously.

I spent the whole week of Thanksgiving in New York, which I hadn’t visited since moving out in February.
I don’t feel like a detailed account of all that happened during that week. There were good times with old friends. I got to stay in Lara and Andrew’s new house in Brooklyn, helped Lara prepare Thanksgiving dinner (her successful debut), went for a run with my team, went ice skating for the second time ever, caught up with Andrea. I’m not interested in the details, but here go a few photos:

New York is a funny place. I’ve seen people addicted to it. I’ve seen people be forced to leave before it was their time, and come back for visits at every possible occasion, looking for the lost paradise. This is not the case for me. Of course, I have a long history there – five intense years, and a small crowd of good friends. It was great to see them, I had missed them. But when I heard of their plans for next weekend, or of their life during the past months, I felt no envy, no nostalgia, no desire to prolong my visit. I just don’t live there any more.

As the week unfolded, and with the perspective I’ve gained from distance, I saw the things I like about this city: the dynamism, the people, the speed, the variety. I also saw the things that had always annoyed me: the smell, either non-existent, or garbage, the noise, the nervous people, the attitude that this is the best place in the world. I missed Seattle, not just because of the comfort of being in my own house. I missed the drive home over lake Washington, the smell of vegetation, the open sky, the sight of mountains, the free time, even the boredom.

I don’t have a crystal ball, but I don’t think I’ll move back to New York. It was a wonderful period, now I’m somewhere else.