No nutmeg?

I usually do use nutmeg. Doing something a little different this time with mustard seed and coriander.

Headed towards a cheese sauce with Gouda and Emmental

Hmmm... sounds fancy.

We shall see! I've been trying to slowly dial into the best mac & cheese recipe for a quick service application like a food truck or concession stand. Requirements include 1) doing it right... whatever that means, 2) Sort of made to order in that it's always consistent and perfect at time of service, and 3) Highlights the rest of the menu

I'm not a fan of the "bake it into one huge mac and cheese block" style

which seems to be the norm in those environments

I want noodles in a sauce, not a casserole made of noodles stuck together with cheese

@PrestonFitzgerald Have you tried the serious eats mac and cheese?

ooh all this food talk

I could go for some mac and cheese!

So could I... but we're back to the whole low carb thing.

We went somewhere last night for dinner that usually has good mac and cheese and they were out! So I couldn't get any for Ben.

oof I am not prepared to be low carb

I hate it. And I don't hate much. I made four bundt cakes a week ago in protest.

I would be fine with only small quantities of dessert (I don't like too much sweetness in one go anyway) but I like pasta and such.

Yeah, dessert isn't really a deal breaker... but I mean... crap... I can't even have carrots... let alone bread. Makes eating a lot more expensive when you can only eat meat or vegetables.

yeah that is rough :/

@Catija I'll have to check. I bet that was my starting point but I don't remember

There are a couple: Haven't tried this one: seriouseats.com/recipes/2017/01/…

Have tried this one but I think I did something wrong: seriouseats.com/recipes/2015/10/…

@Catija mine actually isn't quite like either of those. Will have to investigate :P

anybody here? @Catija?

@rumtscho hmm.

@Catija was this a "yes" hmm, or a "maybe" hmm, or something else?

@rumtscho any of the above ;) I'm heading back to work after lunch.

I see. I have news I wanted to share with a real human being, maybe even a short phone call, and wanted to ask if you would be available

nothing bad, I promise, just surprising (to me)

Yeah, call away.

saw this getting passed around: kickstarter.com/projects/258410750/…

Ooooh, fancy!

basically a heat mirror for the broiler?

my first thought was "too good to be true"

One must say, they know how to sell that product

they hit exactly my points of disbelief in their presentation

so it is smooth - maybe even a bit too smooth

I now cannot tell if this is really as great as they promise, or just vaporware

and of course, look at the prices

Ooooh heatflection technology.

eyeroll

I bet it would work. But so would sticking any kind of properly shaped hunk of steel, right?

These guys know marketing. The real deal, not the stuff that is still being taught to econ students in universities.

@Preston don't know about that, material science can be surprisingly tricky.

It depends on just how much tolerance that process has for the exact properties of the thing

Oh right. I don't have the power of heatflectionTM

:P

it could turn out that you can easily reflect back 50% of the power, but that you only get your 900 degrees if you reflect at least 90% of the power or something like that

That makes a lot of sense

I usually use a ceramic kamado style grill for pizza, but even that I don't usually dare to go higher than 700. You start to melt gaskets and stuff at those temps.

It would be super cool to be able to do it in the oven.

I use the normal oven and eat my pizza nonauthentic.

You lose the wood smoke flavor though

@rumtscho Gosh, I found that Kickstarter page absolutely horrible!

@Cerberus it goes onto the slightly-too-eager side, right?

Yeah. That video doesn't appeal to me at all. So infomercially. The music is annoying.

but I bet lots of people would fall for it.

Agreed

That, too. And the information density is super low per vertical cm.

ah, it has music? I don't currently have speakers attached :)

Haha music as well.

@Cerberus that is actually preferable for marketing.

I would be a bit sceptical, but, who knows; maybe it works to some degree?

@rumtscho Is it, really?

It makes me close the tab.

It's a typical 2010s trend.

Their backer rewards scheme is terrible

How to make websites cluttered and hard to navigate on purpose.

How to make information hard to find.

sputters on for a while

@Preston Hmm how much for the basic product?

I think that's a side effect of the "everything must be responsive and work on screens from televisions to watchfaces"

@Preston terrible for whom?

@Preston Ah, that may be part of it; however, it's easy to have a menu or navigation bar that is only displayed on big screens. Lots of popular Wordpress themes have that. And, on small screens, you get a hamburger menu instead.

For the backers. Kickstarter projects should offer tangible rewards. Things to excite people. Swag. This just offers a discount. Then they try to make it look like there are multiple backer levels but... they're all pretty similar

Hmm.

Too bad.

Could be. But the backer scheme is one of the reasons why I said they know their marketing. I'm pretty sure they will make a lot more money with that scheme than with a standard one.

doesn't know

I wouldn't back something that doesn't offer me something special. This is just a slight discount in return for a long term pre-order. You pay now and don't get your product for over half a year.

I'll wait until they're in Restaurant Depot or Walmart for 3/4 the price.

Heh.

That might be many years.

@Preston that's what I thought too. If this thing works, time will show. And then there will be good imitations.

I hope our IP system is not broken enough to let them patent a steel griddle for the next 30 years!

fwiw I'm sure they're trying to make a lot of money and it's not the cheapest way to get one ultimately, assuming it works well, but I suspect it does work reasonably well, heard about it at work

The biggest challenge of marketing that kind of product. You do the legwork to promote it, then some nameless shell company in China makes all the profit.

@rumtscho Well, ours probably isn't...

@Jefromi ah nice.

@Cerberus the world's is moving towards the American lead, sadly.

and when I say "make a lot of money" I don't necessarily mean profit; I'm sure it's pretty expensive to create something like this and get it actually made as an individual person so if you judge it by normal commercial price standards you're gonna be a ways off

@Preston not a problem if you already have your villa on the Bahamas by the time their first piece hits the shelves

@rumtscho It has moved some distance. But it's still far away, and the pace has been slacking. I think the tides have turned somewhat.

@rumtscho Haha I guess not.

stifled rant about global elites and new world orders

@Jefromi Interesting!

I hope so.

@Jefromi you are right, the production cost will be much more expensive for them. On the other hand, for something which we buy off the shelf, the actual production cost is frequently almost negligible

well, not for metal, that does cost something

for things like jeans or cornflakes, it can be about 1% of the price paid by the end customer

Yeah.

But, for sunflower oil, it's sometimes over 100%!

But usually it's a small percentage, the raw ingredients.

I didn't know about sunflower oil. Is it due to subsidies?

I think it's because supermarkets don't want their prices for basic food to fluctuate wildly.

Because customers hate that.

I have heard of the butter mountain on which the EU is supposed to be sitting, and farmers striking by throwing out milk

Heh.

Mmm butter mountain

That happens, but that doesn't drive up prices,

yes, I know

They only threw away what they couldn't sell, I believe.

well, it could be, for a small segment of the population

for example, I am now buying milk which costs 1.60 per liter

The butter mountain and the milk lake happened when farmers kept producing more because they got subsidised per kg/litre, even when they produced more than they could possibly sell. I believe subsidies are now lump sums.

most of that decision was made on the basis of the milk's quality - it is organic, not treated with too high a heat, very tasty

I see.

@Cerberus Similar to American farmers getting paid to NOT grow corn.

Hah.

How so?

but things like it being greener (because it is sold in reusable glass bottles instead of tetrapacks, because it is produced within 200 km of here instaed of being flown in from China) and knowledge that milk farmers are pretty badly paid are nice boni in justifying that decision to myself.

Haha milk flown in from China?

Well here they don't actually have to go through with producing the product for it to be destroyed. It's just figured based on the amount of farmland they own and could potentially use to farm. King Corn is a good doc about it

I didn't know that they changed the subsidy structure. If they did, then they are better than I would have expected of a bunch of politicians.

@rumtscho Absolutely!

@rumtscho Nobody was happy with the olive mountain and the milk lake!

@Cerberus yes, that's normal. The milk market is global nowadays, and the big brands get it from everywhere around the world.

@Preston does the corn at least get used to produce biofuel or something?

@rumtscho No it's not grown.

I've never heard of milk being imported into Europe! I thought that wouldn't be cost effective, and we produce so much ourselves.

I thought you just said that it gets grown, then "destroyed"

They artificially lower the supply.

@Preston In order to keep prices up?

@Cerberus it gets cost effective when you compare labor prices and so on apparently

@rumtscho No I said they don't have to go though with producing it in order to destroy it. They just skip those steps and don't grow it at all.

at least that's what I heard from a milk farmer who seems to know the market

Fascinating.

The milk thing is kind of boggling but really interesting to think about

I don't think it happens here, probably because we produce so much cheap milk ourselves.

@Cerberus Yeah. Corn is in pretty much all manufactured food in the US in some shape or another. So the prices are important. They screw around with it regularly.

she herself only produces small amounts of organic milk (actually hers is Demeter, which is more strict, but customers are willing to pay more) and mostly makes her own cheese and sells it on regional markets. So she does not deliver to the big guys, usually, but she is big enough (this is her family's main source of income) to keep abreast of the trends in farming.

I can only find lots of reports about how much milk China imports.

Nothing about exports.

Apparently, China is the world's largest importer of milk...

Honestly I try not to think about the globalization of food and the (about seven?) multinational companies that own almost all of the food supply. It freaks me right out.

Mmm you mean companies like Unilever and Ferrero?

@Cerberus Weird! There's that common "Factoid" that most east Asians are lactose intolerant.

I think they are only a link in the production chain—surely they don't own many farms?

@Preston Oh, well, I don't know: maybe they process the milk?

I think they are indeed intolerant.

But maybe not if you heat up the powdered milk, or I have no idea...

Ha! I just destroyed a user!

Tron style?

Congratulations!

The IS will welcome you now.

Now I can say Mwahaha and go to bed content, the way users think I do every day.

It's a bed of lies!

@Cerberus they could, part of the spam he posted was in Arabic script.

@rumtscho Yay!

I hope you sleep well.