Year: 2003

Cook’s Illustrated on Pepper Mills

Ashley Bischoff5 Comments

I’ve come to the conclusion that my pepper mill (or is it “pepper grinder”?) just isn’t cutting it: to get even dusting of pepper on my omelettes, I need to grind for what seems to be ten seconds or more. On top of that, the only size-setting appears to be “medium”, and there isn’t a means of adjusting that.

So, I had my mind made up to go shopping for a new pepper mill. I was about to trek off to Bed Bath & Beyond one afternoon to check out their wares, but I decided to check Cook’s Illustrated’s opinion first. For those not aware, Cook’s Illustrated is an advertising-free cooking magazine that prides itself on finding the best possible recipe for a dish (they’ll often go through dozens of variations before accepting the final version). And, in addition to recipes, they also test kitchen tools (they’re a bit like Consumer Reports that way).

Though watching their tv show, America’s Test Kitchen (on PBS), I’ve seen them test items such as oven thermometers and bread pans. So, I had a hunch that they may have tested pepper mills as well. A quick search on Google showed that to be the case. In episode 253 of their show, they indeed tested pepper mills.

Their tests were surprisingly thorough, including tests of capacity, grind quality, grind speed, ease of filling, and ease of use. And, though America’s Test Kitchen often finds that the more inexpensive components can perform as well as some of the more expensive versions, that wasn’t the case this time.

Reading over the show’s summary, they really loved the Unicorn Magnum Plus:

More than half of the mills tested did their jobs well, but the Unicorn Magnum Plus was the superstar. Its grind quality is exemplary, its output astounding, and its capacity huge. If that weren’t enough, it’s also easy to fill and comfortable to use. At $45, however, this mill was one of the two most expensive in the test (the second-place EHI Peppermate was $40). […]

I wasn’t expecting to see a $40-mill at the top. And, though I was hoping to find it for less online, it was consistently around that price when I checked at Froogle. Luckily, America’s Test Kitchen also commented on some more moderately priced mills: “If your budget is a bit more restricted, we recommend both the Oxo Grind It ($19.99) and the Zyliss Large Pepper Mill ($27.50).”

So, I’ve already decided on buying a new mill. But, I need to figure out just how much properly-ground pepper is worth to me. It has crossed my mind that I could save 50% on the mill by going for the Oxo over the Unicorn Magnum. On the other hand, maybe $40 isn’t that bad for a pepper mill if it’s the last mill I need to buy.

Update / 10-9-2003: I’ve ordered the Magnum Plus Pepper Mill from Cooking.com. Not only do they have one of the lowest prices on the web ($41.95), but I also found a 20% off coupon for Cooking.com at Dealcoupon.com which didn’t hurt either (that coupon expires 10-31-2003). I’ve also ordered a 2 lb bag of tellicherry black peppercorns from Penzys.

I actually wasn’t even aware of the various varieties of black peppercorns until I read this thread on eGullet about tellicherry black peppercorns — one forum member enthusiastically described them as having a “distinctive black pepper taste, fruity if that is possible, pungent but with flavor, not heat” (ooh!). If you’re shopping for a pepper mill or peppercorns, I also found this thread very informative — it actually links to several related threads on pepper mills and peppercorns.

Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music

Ashley Bischoff1 Comment

Josh passes along Ishkur’s Guide to Electronic Music, an electronic music family tree. In this Flash-driven app, Ishkur illustrates the origins and derivations of what appears to be every electronic music sub-genre.

Looking over the genres — which could make for an amusing afternoon in itself — I was surprised to find genres that I didn’t even knew existed (“Psytekk”, anyone?). And, likewise, I wasn’t aware that Eurodance and Eurobeat were separate genres (the former is the parent genre of the latter).

One of the more amusing entries is for the catch-all genre “Not Trance”:

Let it be said that electronic music NEVER learns how to “leave the audience wanting more”. Instead, like a spoiled, immature little child, it shamelessly and greedily exploits any whiff of success it sees, to cartoonish extremes. Somehow, a mutant form of trance evolved from Epic evolved from Anthem drenched itself in the “should’ve been put to rest years ago” one-trick breakdown-build-anthem formula and senselessly driven it to new, insane levels of asinine. […]

OS9-style Window Management in OSX

Ashley Bischoff1 Comment

I don’t have a PowerBook yet, but I'm already collecting URLs for useful Mac software for when I get one ;). One such utility that looks interesting is the plainly-named Classic Window Management — it’s a freeware app that sets OSX to use OS9-style bring-to-front rules for application windows.

Classic Window Management gives you the option to have windows in Mac OS X behave like they did in Mac OS 9, where all of an application's windows stayed grouped together. So when you click on one window, all windows belonging to that application come to the front. […]

If that still doesn't make sense, just check out the site — the illustrations there should clarify things. Of course, not having a Mac, I can’t say that I’ve tried this app, but it can't be that bad if both Zeldman and Eric Meyer like it ;).

CSS Based Rollovers

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JavaScript rollovers have been around almost as long as JavaScript itself (and they’re still useful, in many ways). However, I’ve recently discovered some CSS-based rollovers with a built-in preloader (via Zeldman.com).

The idea is that the documentation is in the source code, and that the reader figures things out from there. Really, the technique is not too hard to understand, once you see what he’s doing. Basically, each <img> is surrounded with an <a href=“…”> (just like normal). However, each link’s background-image is set to the desired rollover state.

Of course, with the image completely covering the background, the rollover state isn’t seen. But, the author then specified visibility:hidden for the hover-state of the images. So: the user rolls over an image, the image becomes hidden, and the background (the rollover state) is seen.

And, because the rollover-images aren’t hidden elements (but merely covered up), they’re loaded with the rest of the page — and so there’s no lag when they’re swapped-in (or, rather, unveiled). An elegant approach, I think.

Turkey Bacon

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It seemed like it was only last week when Mike and I made some Elvis sandwiches. When I went shopping prior to that round of sandwiches, I bought both regular bacon and turkey bacon as well (the “60% Less Fat” tagline intrigued me).

To get the full Elvis-experience, we used the regular bacon that time. But, of course, that meant that we still had the turkey bacon for more sandwiches some other time. And, over the weekend, we decided to make another batch.

When first opening the turkey bacon package, we both noticed that it had an aroma similar to baloney. This was obviously a baconized product not coming from a natural bacon-producing animal as the package noted that the white stripes contained white meat, while the dark stripes contained dark meat (as opposed to the white stripes being just fat).

So, we were a little creeped out by this bacon masquerade, but we decided to push on. The tacon — as we took to calling it — cooked more like meat strips than actual bacon. Because the white strips were actually meat and not fat, the bacon didn’t shink much in its cooking cycle; and there was hardly any liquid fat in the pan afterwards.

Though the tacon may have been baloney-esque at the beginning, it was surprisingly bacon-like after cooking. It had a pleasant crunch (though not as crispy as bacon) and was more-or-less bacony (not bad for 60%-less-fat!). Of course, after we cooked the bacon, we proceeded to assemble and grill the sandwiches themselves.

In all, we made four sandwiches (two each) and I was curious whether they would stand up to the real-bacon versions. They were good sandwiches — surprisingly tasty — but they didn’t quite match up to those first sandwiches that we made with bacon. It wasn’t that the bacon-flavor was that bad, but it just didn't have the intensity of real bacon.

The tacon turned out better than I expected. But, I probably wouldn’t buy it again. Sure, it had less fat, but an Elvis sandwich is something that I wouldn’t eat very often anyway. And, if I’m going to have a bad-for-me sandwich, it may as well taste great :).