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Carolyn Y. Johnson reports at the Boston Globe that a 16-person team at Harvard has solved one of the toughest problems in the field of food preparation: How to build a foolproof smoker that can repeatedly produce the perfect brisket, to be judged on texture, taste, and appearance. Tested by countless computer simulations of virtual brisket smoking, nearly two dozen weekend smoking sessions — often in snow or sub-zero temperatures — and 220 pounds of meat, the smoker is a rigorous, data-driven tool for making a feast. Making a perfectly smoked piece of meat may seem to be as far as you can get from an engineering conundrum, but engineering professor Kevin Kit Parker saw it as a problem that required a deep understanding of chemistry, heat transfer, materials science, prototyping, and solving problems. According to Parker, Barbecue has been a veritable Wild West in which pit masters build mishmash setups that incorporate garbage cans, cinder blocks, a giant rotisserie. “They are the biggest contraptions and pieces of junk you’ve ever seen,” says Parker. “Everyone had their own little mojo they brought to the problem.”
In the end, the secret was to precisely control the temperature both in the smoker and in the meat over the “low and slow” smoke. They had to keep the meat below 120 degrees long enough to let the enzymes in the meat break down the collagen and make it tender; they wanted the smoker’s shape to cause “cyclonic airflow,” meaning the smoke would circulate down toward the brisket. While the wood would burn at 700 degrees, the meat would gradually rise over a 15-hour period to about 190 degrees. The class settled on a material — ceramic — and a shape that resembles a cooling tower at a power plant. The design solved one of the big problems with the commercial smoker they used, by eliminating hot spots where the meat might cook too quickly and dry out. They built an app that would allow cooks to monitor the conditions inside the smoker and share their experiences through social media. How to measure success? "They look for perfectly cooked brisket to take on a mahogany hue," says Johnson. "When sliced, there should be a slightly pink section around the edge, called the smoke ring. The meat must be tender, but not falling apart." “They’ve gone from basic science," says Patrick Connolly, chief strategy officer for Williams-Sonoma, who plans to bring the design back to the company’s leaders, "to really understanding how you optimize for flavor and texture."
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 09 2015, @12:41PM
I was looking at the SoylentNews story queue today, and noticed that there's a submission that should never make its way onto the front page of this site.
It's entitled "Taxpayers to Pay For Drug Raid that Blew Up Baby's Face". Even before reading the submitter's name, I knew that it was submitted by our resident leftist, gewg_.
To give it a fair shake, I actually read the summary. Like I suspected, it was utter shit from top to bottom, not meant to provide insight to the readers here, but rather just to incite people.
It's a stunning example of how little journalistic integrity gewg_ exhibits. The submission fails to link to any reputable news source, but rather links to some little-known, obviously-biased websites with their own anti-police agendas to push.
We clearly need some way to flag submissions as being total, unmitigated shit, like that submission clearly is. There's only one place where a submission as obviously biased as that one should end up, and that's out of the SoylentNews queue as quickly as possible. Throw shit like that into the garbage!
(Score: 5, Insightful) by janrinok on Saturday May 09 2015, @01:37PM
I'm not quite sure why you feel that you should be able to control what others wish to say - but being 'leftist' isn't a crime and it rather depends on where you feel the centre is. For example, in the US they think that they have a right wing and a left wing party, whereas from the European viewpoint both parties are very much on the right hand side of the spectrum.
Secondly, we have a system of editorial checks which, while not perfect, have managed to ensure that we cover the entire spectrum when the submitter has something useful to say, or we simply delete the story if he or she hasn't. The story you are referring to has been in the queue for at least 3 days and has not yet made it to the front page which suggests to me that the editors who have read it have not felt that they could make a decent story out of it. However, another one might and so it will stay in the queue until we have all had a look at it and, if it is not good enough, it will simple disappear.
Although you may dislike gewg_ he does submit a good number of stories and many of them are suitable for the front page. They may not reflect your own views, but they are entirely valid and worthy of discussion. Of course, if you feel that there are too many stories that do not meet with your satisfaction then the solution is, as always, very simple. Submit stories that you believe are deserving of a place on the front page and we will do the rest.
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 09 2015, @01:43PM
I don't care if gewg_ wants to submit shitty summaries. I would never want to take that away from him.
But let's face it, that's a bad submission no matter how you look at it. It's biased. The sources it cites lack repute. It's poorly written. It's not here to inform people or even to get them to think, but it's just here to push his extremist agenda.
I hope that the editors do the correct thing, and throw his sub-par, shitty submission away. It's garbage, and doesn't deserve to be in the queue, never mind on the front page of this site.
(Score: 5, Informative) by janrinok on Saturday May 09 2015, @02:12PM
We don't just look at the submission as received. We are prepared to rewrite stories that are simply not good enough - otherwise the single URL link and one liners that we sometimes receive would never ever reach the front page, despite them sometimes being interesting and informative. We also do a search for other sources and check the facts of the story. The sources given are not all mainline news media but that doesn't mean that they are wrong. One of the links is to the findings of Grand Jury which was tasked with investigating the police action. The findings are less than complimentary regarding the police handling of this matter. I would say that a Grand Jury document is a fairly reputable source, and one which we should be able to trust.
The facts of the case are pretty much as they have been written. The taxpayer is having to pay a substantial sum of money to compensate for mistakes made by a police force. They didn't 'know' that there was a child in the house. Were there toys in the yard? Did they check with local records? Was anyone claiming benefits that would indicate that there was a child at that address? I don't know, but none of these would have compromised the police's mission.
The man they were looking for didn't live at that address, nor was he found there, nor was any evidence of criminal wrongdoing found - why did the police decide that a heavily armed team should throw a stun grenade into the house? Where did they get their intelligence from and who checked it? Again I don't know. We did cover the earlier story - as linked in the submission - and the fact that the police are not being held to account in this matter is worth investigating. I'm just not convinced that we should be the ones doing that job, but the story itself shouldn't be ignored simply because what we have received is not ready for the front page. Another editor might see a different angle on this story, or do you think we shouldn't ask difficult questions?
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday May 09 2015, @01:56PM
The issue of police brutality is a serious one. Nobody is doubting that.
The problem with gewg_'s submissions on the topic is that he always refers to questionable sources that just don't look like they can be trusted. Many times they're outfits with a very obvious bias with respect to what's being reported on.
If he could provide legitimate references to sources who are independent, or who at least try to remain as objective as they practically can, then his submissions would be okay. But he never does this.
The way the Michael Brown incident was reported here is a great example of how gewg_-style submissions are very harmful. At first that incident was allegedly all about "police brutality", but it quickly became obvious that it was anything but that. Michael Brown physically attacked a store clerk just prior to physically attacking Officer Wilson. Officer Wilson very reasonably defended himself against a violent, close-range attacker who tried to take his service pistol. It was clearly not a case of "police brutality". Yet the reporting here was atrocious, and incorrectly suggested that it was.
We can't properly discuss police brutality here if we keep getting these rottenly low-quality submissions from gewg_. We need to focus on the facts, not on his emotionally-charged rage-mongering.
(Score: 3, Informative) by GungnirSniper on Sunday May 10 2015, @02:50AM
SoylentNews is a user-driven discussion, not a reporting site. Opinions are going to be part of the submissions and stories that are run. Feel free to provide your own stories if you are unhappy with the ones The Mighty Gewg is providing, but it seems like he's providing a noticeable percent of the stories received.
Tips for better submissions to help our site grow. [soylentnews.org]