>... my wife's sourdough starter living on the counter and getting fed when she remembers. The app reminds her; she ignores the app; the starter survives anyway because sourdough is remarkably forgiving.
That's so great about sourdough starter, you don't have to babysit it at all. We'll, that is, once I figured out that I should ignore the "hydration hydration hydration" and "add blah percentage water and 1.618034 grams of flour" advice. Instead, I just add lots (yes, that's a measure, like pinch and scoop) of fresh flour to my starter and just add water until it's a gooey sticky mess. Leave it alone and it'll do its thing.
tip: take a kitchen brush and "paint it" thick (have to stick your tongue out as far as you can when you say the ˈθ sound, i do not make the rules) on parchment paper. put it in oven, and turn on the oven light. Wait till it dries. Collect the dry flakes and store in dark, airtight jar. Keeps 'forever'-ish. Take it anywhere, and to re-awaken, just rehydrate and feed. 2-3 days and baaam! you got your progenitor starter's baby in a jar.
This is also a typical approach from the chefs I know: they don't care about precision in most recipes (eg. dishes like soups, or pasta, or salads...), but then sometimes there are dishes where precision is absolutely crucial, and baking is one place where precision is really important.
With sourdough, if you don't measure, you may still get good results, but you will have to babysit the dough and try to figure out when it's ready by checking frequently. Some people can afford it time-wise, and to some this would be prohibitively inconvenient.
Not my kind of thing but still a highly enjoyable read. I love a tale of a software engineer who has gone down a rabbit-hole so deeply that they've come out the other side. And who doesn't like data?
> Let's say, you're curing coppa and on day 12 humidity drops to 68% for six hours because you forgot to refill the reservoir.
Two float switches, a latching relay, a cold water line, a valve, and a valve actuator can automate reservoir filling. An HOA switch and leak detection would be nice additions to the automatic reservoir filling, low and high water alarms too. That’s how a boiler feedwater tank works. Might be tricky to fit the float switches in a small humidifier tank, though.
It’s a bit more work to set up than temp and humidity sensing/control but you might as well automate it all once you start.
I wish. No-fault evictions aren't a thing in Scotland, but I'd still struggle to explain the whole "I plumbed a cold line for salami" thing to the landlord.
You can go even simpler if you have a bigger reservoir. Automatic trough fillers where a float mechanically shuts off a valve fed from a garden hose are like $20 at a farm supply store.
> Could I have added blockchain for tamper-proofing? Sure. Am I going to give people that idea? Absolutely not.
I appreciate the restraint. :P Besides, embedding a lie into a ledger doesn't make it true, it just makes it slightly harder to escape accountability that might not exist anyway.
> "Slightly more sour than batch #3" beats pH to three decimals.
Yeah, while the "human tongue" sensor and support package might not be standardized, it's still far more powerful than anything we can build in a factory.
We just need to control for cases where its processing-unit automatically incorporates data we want to exclude, like "how expensive was that sample."
I build a fully automated ‘hand sanitizer factory’ back in the summer of 2020 out of boredom and a feeling that it could actually be useful at some point. It doesn’t exactly rot but some of the challenges are similar.
I found a really nice modular architecture in esp32 flashed with tasmota for all of the sensors and switching, they would talk via MQTT over Wi-Fi to a raspberry pi running node-red. It was responsible for all of the data integration, flows, process automation and dashboards.
Just made it super easy to add/remove features without rewiring things and allowed me to replace the esp32’s very easily.
Great read! I'm sure expensive enterprise tooling exists for busy kitchens to manage safety protocols (or not?), so it is very cool to see high quality tooling for this kind of thing out in the open. After watching so many Chubby Emu videos, I'm definitely scared straight.
My professor in college said he designed grain silo software control algos to prevent mold but maximize water retention (weight) in corn.
Apparently when you're in the bulk business, selling water is a good business, but if you lose x% of your water in your corn you're out an equivalent portion of your revenue.
If the corn goes moldy, you may be out more. Hence the optimization.
Readit News
That's so great about sourdough starter, you don't have to babysit it at all. We'll, that is, once I figured out that I should ignore the "hydration hydration hydration" and "add blah percentage water and 1.618034 grams of flour" advice. Instead, I just add lots (yes, that's a measure, like pinch and scoop) of fresh flour to my starter and just add water until it's a gooey sticky mess. Leave it alone and it'll do its thing.
No constant feeding and wasted flour.
(edit:terrible spellingaringage)
Obviously people have been making sourdough for a very long time; you don't have to measure.
This is also a typical approach from the chefs I know: they don't care about precision in most recipes (eg. dishes like soups, or pasta, or salads...), but then sometimes there are dishes where precision is absolutely crucial, and baking is one place where precision is really important.
With sourdough, if you don't measure, you may still get good results, but you will have to babysit the dough and try to figure out when it's ready by checking frequently. Some people can afford it time-wise, and to some this would be prohibitively inconvenient.
Two float switches, a latching relay, a cold water line, a valve, and a valve actuator can automate reservoir filling. An HOA switch and leak detection would be nice additions to the automatic reservoir filling, low and high water alarms too. That’s how a boiler feedwater tank works. Might be tricky to fit the float switches in a small humidifier tank, though.
It’s a bit more work to set up than temp and humidity sensing/control but you might as well automate it all once you start.
Very cool project, I bet the salami is delicious too!
or a push-fit splitter under the sink could be revertable and/or unnoticed
yeah like sibling said, its all in the phrasing (I imagine)
I appreciate the restraint. :P Besides, embedding a lie into a ledger doesn't make it true, it just makes it slightly harder to escape accountability that might not exist anyway.
> "Slightly more sour than batch #3" beats pH to three decimals.
Yeah, while the "human tongue" sensor and support package might not be standardized, it's still far more powerful than anything we can build in a factory.
We just need to control for cases where its processing-unit automatically incorporates data we want to exclude, like "how expensive was that sample."
I found a really nice modular architecture in esp32 flashed with tasmota for all of the sensors and switching, they would talk via MQTT over Wi-Fi to a raspberry pi running node-red. It was responsible for all of the data integration, flows, process automation and dashboards.
Just made it super easy to add/remove features without rewiring things and allowed me to replace the esp32’s very easily.
Off-topic, but the syntax highlighting is a little difficult to read on light mode: https://pasteboard.co/5dXcQjgcHIqu.png
Apparently when you're in the bulk business, selling water is a good business, but if you lose x% of your water in your corn you're out an equivalent portion of your revenue.
If the corn goes moldy, you may be out more. Hence the optimization.