Oh, Boy! Fetch the Condiment Sommelier!

We live in a time of bizarre and unpredictable shortages. A week or two ago, a new one popped up: sriracha sauce.

When I was young, sriracha was just something you expected to see on the table during rare visits to Thai restaurants. No one was excited about it. It went well with Thai food, but it wasn’t that great with most other things.

At some point, hipsters discovered it, and for no good reason at all, they developed a sriracha obsession. They use it inappropriately on all kinds of things, including tacos and something called avocado toast.

Don’t get me started on avocados. They shouldn’t even be called fruit. They’re okay in guacamole, but you could just as easily make it from something like zucchini or yellow squash, because avocados have nearly no flavor. When I was a kid, there were two avocado trees in my yard, and I can’t recall eating a single one. I let them rot on the ground.

It’s bizarre to me that women love avocados so much. It’s like eating thick green water. And mashed avocado looks exactly like baby poop.

The web says a lot of implausible Paltrowesque things about avocados. It claims it gives women shinier hair, clearer skin, better vision, lower blood pressure, smaller waists, bigger bustlines, more hits on Instagram, and a higher chance of landing rich boyfriends.

I made some of those up.

In my defense, the ones I made up are probably just as valid as the others.

I guess I’ll take heat for this, but fooling women is just about the easiest way there is to get rich. My mother once paid $18 for a bar of soap. She had it for years. I think she was afraid to use it.

If it weren’t for female gullibility, the Mormon church would still be meeting in people’s living rooms in upstate New York.

I don’t know why pretentious millennials got so excited about sriracha, but they seem to have very empty lives. I guess they’ll jump at anything that gives them a reason to celebrate.

Anyway, there is a big ol’ American company that makes what is probably the best-known sriracha. The familiar one with the rooster on the bottle. The company is called Huy Fong Foods, Inc. It’s in California. I don’t know too much about what hipsters like, but it appears they think Huy Fong has no equal. An article I saw said Huy Fong used to buy peppers in the US, but they started buying in Mexico.

Hmm. Things are going so well in California. I wonder why anyone would decide not to buy California produce and to outsource to Mexico. Yes, it’s a real puzzle. We should assemble a think tank.

Mexico’s pepper fields are doing poorly due to drought, which is caused by global warming, Donald Trump, and misgendering. As a result, Huy Fong has cut production back. People have started putting Huy Fong sriracha on Ebay, and some have paid $70 for a single bottle. Right now, Amazon’s cheapest bottle is $25. The next-best deal is about $43. That’s a big bottle, though; 28 ounces. Normal bottles are not available from Amazon.

When I saw the story, I wondered how stupid millennials were, so I looked around the web to see if anyone was selling Huy Fong sriracha at the regular low price, and I didn’t see any. I didn’t want it, because I still have about 7/8 of a bottle I bought years ago. This stuff lasts forever. I was just curious, and I thought it would be funny to find a $5 bottle on the web while men who were allergic to testosterone were paying 14 times that much.

While I was thinking about this, I remembered a long-abandoned quest. The quest for Shark brand sriracha.

I used to live in Miami, and Miami has lots of Thais. It has great Thai restaurants. While I was there, I learned to love sriracha, but it was not Huy Fong. It was Shark brand. A local joint served it.

Shark sriracha is sweet and has a complex taste. You can literally pour it on white rice and enjoy it. I like dumping it on Thai food in restaurants, but I can’t do that where I am now, because they don’t have it.

While I was thinking about Huy Fong, Shark came to mind, and I decided to make another effort to find it. I succeeded.

I found an Asian grocery site, and I ordered two bottles. I got two because they had both medium and hot sauce. I didn’t know which one I liked. I was giddy to find there were different grades. They sell for about $13 and $16, respectively, and the bottles are huge: 25 ounces.

I spent a little, it’s true, but I wasn’t buying something I can ordinarily find at Publix. I have never been able to buy Shark locally. I would have had to pay a lot to get Shark even without a shortage.

My sauce arrived today. I just tried it.

This stuff is wonderful. Both grades. I would not buy the hot version again, however, because it tastes almost exactly like medium, and it costs three dollars more.

I guess this will irk any hipster who reads this, but Huy Fong is American, and Shark is made in Thailand. Hipsters are all about being authentic and original, while aping each other’s tattoos and wearing old people’s discarded clothing, so you would think they’d be all over Shark.

Googling around, I see some people agree with me. Serious Eats had a sriracha contest, and Huy Fong was beaten by Polar brand and Shark. Huy Fong is very good, and I’m not knocking it, but Shark is better.

Interesting note: sriracha is easy to make at home, so anyone who blew $70 on a bottle is either rich or foolish.

Huy Fong makes one pepper product I can’t live without: chili garlic sauce. This is a thick sauce made from vinegar, chilies, salt, and garlic. It doesn’t scream “ORIENTAL” when you use it, so it’s versatile. I love it in hummus, and you can use it to heat up nearly anything.

I wonder what it costs right now. I used to go through a lot of it back when I was hitting the hummus hard.

The Asian site I went to for sauce had a lot of other interesting stuff. I popped for some red curry sauce. I have a tendency to assume Asians make everything from scratch, but on the web, I’ve seen them pouring all kinds of stuff out of cans and bottles. I want to see if I can make a decent red chicken curry with packaged sauce as a base ingredient.

It’s very hard to stop collecting hot sauces. I have Crystal, Frank’s, two kinds of Huy Fong, three kinds of El Yucateco, two kinds of Shark, and sometimes I also keep two kinds of Matouk’s.

I hope this blog post is useful to you. Maybe someone whose handlebar moustache is drooping from sriracha deprivation will see this, try Shark, and never look back.

Enthusiasm Outpaces Skill

Yesterday I fired up the new Walmart pizza oven and made a Neapolitan-style pie. I am here with the results.

After reading about Neapolitan pizza and consulting experienced people, I decided to use these dough ingredients:

INGREDIENTS

100 grams Primo Gusto high-gluten flour
60 grams water
0.75 teaspoons salt (supposedly 3 grams)
1/8 teaspoon yeast

When you bake like an intelligent person, you weigh everything carefully, and you list the weight of each ingredient as a percentage of the weight of the flour. I was told that Neapolitan pizza requires a dry dough with 60% hydration, meaning the water should weigh 60% as much as the flour. The ideal salt percentage is said to be 2.5-3%, which is common to a lot of breads. I use measuring spoons for yeast because I’m not going to sit around weighing tiny amounts of leavening. It’s not critical.

I usually go with 67% hydration, a small amount of sugar, and a little oil (except for Sicilian), so the dough I made for Neapolitan was pretty stiff.

Unfortunately, the grams-to-teaspoons conversion I used for salt appears to have been wrong, so I may have used about 50% more salt than I should have. Salt slows fermentation, and too much salt ruins the flavor of bread.

I let the dough rise for two hours at room temperature, and then I refrigerated it. Early the next day, I set it out to ferment at room temperature again. I got these instructions from the web.

When the oven was hot, I didn’t have a lot of time to wait for the dough. Late in the afternoon, I took it out to shape it, and although it had doubled in size, it was awfully hard compared to my usual dough. I stretched it anyway.

I made a small pie because I don’t have a peel the right size for this oven. It’s on the way. I have a peel 9″ wide, so I sized the pie to fit it.

For sauce, I pureed Cento San Marzano peeled tomatoes. They were really sour. They say you shouldn’t put anything but salt in Neapolitan sauce, but I was the one who had to eat it, so I left the salt out and added a little sugar and pressed garlic.

Pizza without garlic is a missed opportunity.

I also mixed a little fresh basil into the sauce. A lot of people dump fresh basil on finished pies or bake it on top of the sauce and cheese. Those people are nuts. Fresh basil is not tasty at all, and baking it on top of everything can burn it. I think they do it for the sake of appearance.

A destructive obsession with presentation is one of the hallmarks of bad cooks. The world is full of bad cooks, including cooks with degrees, who proudly present beautiful bad food, thinking they’ve done something wonderful.

For cheese, I tore up about 2 ounces of Belgioioso fresh mozzarella and dumped them on the sauce.

I did something I should not have done. I decided to try my usual method of loading the oven. Most people put corn meal or semolina on their peels to make raw pizzas slide off. I don’t, because it’s a dumb thing to do. It makes a mess, and often, it doesn’t work. I put a sheet of nonstick foil on my peel. I slide the foil and pizza onto my steel, and two minutes later, I pull the foil out. Works great for New York style pies.

Looks like it does not work for Neapolitan, however.

I put the pie in the oven, gave the hot stone some time to dry up the underside of the crust, and tried to pull the foil out. It hung on something, and when it came out, it had a little hole in it. I don’t know if it stuck to the pie or what.

Neapolitan pies in cheap ovens cook quickly on one side, so you have to turn them. When I tried to turn the pie, it resisted. Turned out there was a tiny hole in it, and sauce had gone through and hit the stone, gluing the pie down in one spot. I broke it free, but by the time I got it moving, one side of the pie was black.

When I took the pie out, it had problems.

The dough was underfermented, which is one reason it was hard. This prevented it from blowing up properly, so the pizza was somewhat heavy. It also tasted salty. Finally, the bottom was undercooked. It should have been partially charred. I think the foil did me in. I’ll post pictures.

I think this oven will make good pizza if I get things right. Today I’m making another pie, fermented overnight at room temperature. It should be much poofier. I’m also going to use the hated corn meal.

I don’t know if I’ll be able to make big pies, because the heat is so intense near the back of the oven. The bigger a pie is, the closer the rim will be to the heat.

The sauce was surprisingly good. I make a more flavorful sauce for New York pies, and I’m sure it would be better than yesterday’s sauce on Neapolitan pizza, but it was okay.

The cheese was also surprising. If you put fresh whole milk mozzarella on a New York pie, it shrinks and shoots water and grease onto the pizza. In yesterday’s pie, it just melted and spread out. No problems at all.

Will I continue and then move on to an expensive gas oven? Can’t say, but so far, the results are encouraging.

Not Sure This is Pizza

So much has happened in the last few days. With the sound judgment for which I am so widely known, I bought a pizza oven, and I also decided to take another shot at making a bread starter.

There are two kinds of pizza that really float my boat: New York Style and Sicilian. I make good New York pizza, and I make the best Sicilian imaginable. I make both in a plain old wall oven. So why mess with success?

Can’t really answer that.

For years, I’ve been reading people’s impassioned words about Neapolitan pizza, and I haven’t paid much attention. It’s made in special high-temperature ovens, a lot of people claim you have to use 00 flour, it sounds like a pain in the butt, and the only two allegedly Neapolitan pizzas I’ve had weren’t good.

I ate at a chain called Anthony’s Coal-Fired Pizza near Hollywood, Florida. The pizza had very little sauce. It had some kind of meat on it, and it seemed greasy to me. The crust was sort of flat and useless. It wasn’t mediocre. It was a step down from that.

I ate a weird pizza at Mozza in LA, and it was like a bowl-shaped cracker with arugula and a fried egg on it. Two things that shouldn’t be anywhere near pizza.

Neapolitan fans rave about the crust. They say it’s puffy and delicate and crispy and so on. I haven’t seen that yet. It all seemed like crackers to me.

Nonetheless, curiosity overwhelmed me, and I started looking at pizza ovens. I learned that Walmart had released a really cheap one that works very well. I don’t want to blow hundreds or more on a big oven when I don’t know if I like Neapolitan pizza, but I am willing to spend a little on a small trial oven, and that’s what I did. Yesterday.

The Walmart Expert Grill 15″ charcoal-fired oven costs $117, and it takes about 20 minutes to put together. Hard to beat that. People say it will do the same thing a $700 oven will do.

They call it a 15″ oven, but there is no way you can get a 15″ pie in there. I think 14″ might be managed, but I have doubts. This type of oven heats more from the side than the top, and you have to keep turning pizzas in order to get every side evenly done. The bigger a pie is, the closer the rim will be to the hottest part of the oven, so it seems to me a big pizza will burn at the edges before the middle gets cooked. But I don’t really know.

The flames you see in the photo are not from charcoal. I dropped a couple of pieces of oak on the charcoal to see what would happen. People say a little wood adds flavor and heat.

I’ve gotten expert help, and I’ve learned some stuff.

First, the dough can’t have any sugar or oil in it, and the flour can’t be malted. Sugar and oil will burn. I don’t know what malting does. One reason people use 00 is that it’s not malted. I am told that any unmalted white flour will work, though, so I’m trying to make my first pie with Gordon Food Service Primo Gusto high-gluten flour, which I already had here. The text on the bag doesn’t mention malt. If I can make it work, I can avoid expensive flour.

Second, you’re supposed to use whole milk mozzarella. The squishy stuff. This type of cheese is completely hopeless in other types of pizzas. When you make a New York pie with it, the cheese shrinks, and all the water squeezes out onto the pizza, along with a lot of grease. I’m told this is not a problem at Neapolitan temperatures. I am also told that Belgioiso cheese is excellent for Neapolitan pizza, and that’s great, because it’s available everywhere.

Third, you’re not supposed to use pizza sauce. You use mashed-up peeled San Marzano tomatoes. I had no luck with these in New York pizza, but everyone says they’re what you need in Neapolitan. You mash the tomatoes up and add salt if you want.

Fourth, you want to let the dough rise at least overnight, and you may want to get fancy and use a starter to add complexity or whatever. I have found that starters are of no use whatsoever for New York and Sicilian pies.

Fifth, you want 60% hydration in the dough, which is a low for other types of pizza.

I fired my oven up today to burn the Chinese industrial waste out of it. The highest temperature I measured on the stone was 588°, and that disappointed me. Maybe I can fiddle with it and do better. I found out my infrared thermometer only went up to 600°, so I can’t do much research until a better one arrives.

As for starters, I have made them before, but they always grew so fast they got away from me, and they turned black and so on. Reader LauraW mentioned starters in a comment, and I started reading about them, and I learned that it’s normal for starters to get disgusting when they run low on flour. I also learned that you don’t need to buy bacteria or strange flour to make a starter. Plain old all-purpose flour works.

I got my new starter going about three days back. I used 100 grams of flour and the same weight of purified water. I didn’t want my well’s bacteria in there. As of today, the starter really stinks. Sort of like cheese. Sort of like feet. The web says this is okay, because it’s going through a phase. I hope so.

The starter should be ready to use in about 4 days, so I’ll try it in a Neapolitan pie if I haven’t given up on the oven yet.

My plan is to use fresh mozzarella and San Marzanos, along with some fresh basil. That’s all. I have a feeling I’m going to be disgusted, since these ingredients sound bland. That won’t matter as long as the crust is good. If the crust is worth all this effort, I can put real pizza ingredients on top of it eventually.

I have no interest in becoming a purist. If I stick with this, I want to be a guy who makes phenomenal pizzas with real Neapolitan crusts, no matter how much I have to bastardize the cheese, sauce, and toppings. If I like the traditional stuff, whoopee, but if I don’t, I won’t let it stop me.

If I get heavily into this, I’ll spring for a real gas oven and add it to my patio arsenal. I don’t want to keep dealing with lump charcoal until I die.

The Country That Put a Man on the Moon Still Can’t Make Good Cheese

Pizza is like golf. You always think you’ll do better the next time you do it. It’s full of variables, so you’re never really sure you’re doing it as well as possible.

Actually, this is not true. I make Sicilian pizza perfectly. I should have said “thin New York style pizza is like golf.” It’s very different.

In my pizza quest, which got going in earnest in about 2009, I have tried a zillion different things. Every flour known to man. Lots of cheeses, including Grande, which a lot of pros love. Many different tomato products. I baked with a stone. Then I moved to a steel. I baked at varying temperatures. I’ve tried everything except for a special pizza oven, which is not needed if you make New York style pizza.

I thought I was sure of two things: Sicilian pizza could be made well with any flour, but New York style worked best with bread flour. Now I question myself.

My friend Mike taught me how to make pizza, and he uses AP flour. I tried it in the past and didn’t like it. Then after I moved to the farm, I found out I had been using way too much yeast in my pizzas. This put me back into research. Change one thing, and you have to go back and look at everything else. I looked at flour again.

If you want to make pizza dough in the morning and have pizza later the same day, you need about 1/8 tsp. of instant dry yeast per 100 grams of flour. You can go higher for more speed, but as you cross the 1/2-teaspoon threshold, the flavor of the dough starts to suffer. There is really no reason to use a lot of yeast. If you want to speed up fermentation, you can make your dough with warm water and let it rise at 100°.

I used to use several times as much yeast as I needed.

By the way, there is nothing wrong with instant dry yeast. It’s more reliable than active dry yeast, and you get the same results. I’m not sure why people use other yeasts. You can always get fancy and make a live starter you feed every day like a pet, but if you’re satisfied with yeast, instant is the way to go.

Lately I’ve been using AP flour in thin pizza, and I have no complaints. I don’t think I’d use it for garlic rolls, but they’re not quite the same as pizza.

I used to be obsessed with crusts that were somewhat hard and chewy. In recent months, I’ve been more interested in softer crusts. I had tremendous success making hard crusts with high-gluten flour and little or no oil. To get a softer crust that isn’t like Wonder Bread, I am now using AP flour and about 3% olive oil. The percentage is figured in relationship to the weight of the flour. I like pies made with 180 grams of flour, so I use around 1.25 teaspoons of oil. The actual number for 3% is 1.16 teaspoons, but I’m not going to be that picky.

I’m also trying to process the dough as little as possible. Overkneading can increase toughness. I “knead” using a food processor, and it’s really fast, so I have to watch it carefully.

Cheese continues to be a challenge.

When I started, I figured whatever they had at the grocery store was fine, and then I learned it’s generally too dry or too oily. The shredded stuff is nearly always very dry, and they coat it with potato starch and/or tiny fibers of wood cellulose to keep it from caking. I think the cellulose turns the cheese into a hard composite, but I don’t know. Anyway, dry cheese gives you a texture like vinyl, and it burns fast.

I used to live near Costco and Gordon Food Service, and I found I could do very well with a 50/50 combination of Costco bagged mozzarella and GFS sliced provolone. Now, these stores are over an hour away.

Back when I was in Miami, I also tried a bunch of Grande products. They melt really well, but I thought they were a little bland. Not long ago, I was at the GFS in Orlando, and I saw they stocked Grande. On a lark, I bought a bag of East Coast blend, which is half part-skim and half whole-milk. It’s shredded, but they don’t put paper mill waste on the shreds.

For some reason, I like this cheese much better than I used to. Next time I’m in Orlando, I’ll get more.

I used to be frustrated by food service cheese because it came in big packages which got moldy in a hurry. Internet pizza nuts have shown me the light, however. Cheese companies say mozzarella should not be frozen, but the pizza nuts swear it does no harm, so I plan to buy a block, cut it up, and freeze one-pie portions.

The nuts say freezing block cheese is better than freezing shredded.

Because of my location, I have done a lot of testing to find better cheese locally, and one answer was Boar’s Head mozzarella from the Publix deli. It’s a low-moisture cheese, but it’s made from whole milk. It works, but it’s very greasy. It also costs nearly $11 per pound, which is more than twice what top-grade restaurant supply cheese costs.

I found a restaurant supply place near me, but they didn’t have any highly-regarded cheese. They had shredded Roseli cheese, part-skim. It’s made by U.S. Foods, a respected cheese supplier, but this particular product is made with wood dust, and it’s also too dry to make a good pizza. I know, because I bought a bag.

I was thinking of throwing the Roseli cheese out, but I got a wild hair and decided to try mixing it with Boar’s Head. Today I made a 60/40 blend, and it was not bad at all. It melted well, and it wasn’t greasy. It was slightly dryer than I wanted, however, so I think the key is to go 70/30.

It’s annoying that virtually nobody makes a proper shredded pizza cheese for consumers. Anyone who buys grocery shredded cheese knows it doesn’t work. It turns brown in a hurry, the top turns into leather, and it gets grainy. How is it that companies like Kraft and Sargento have been making pizza cheese since the dawn of time and haven’t noticed the problem? They’re not even trying.

The sauce problem is just as bad. I have to buy huge cans of Stanislaus Saporito sauce and freeze them in board-shaped portions I can cut up as needed. You would think there would be one really good national brand of pizza sauce or tomato paste, but there isn’t. I’ve done okay with Glen Muir organic paste and Winn-Dixie paste, but if I want a home run, I buy Stanislaus.

I have like 60 pounds of it.

Anyway, the big message I wanted to convey today is that you can make a pretty good pizza if you get Boar’s Head mozzarella and cut it with a little shredded low-quality cheese. It’s a pain, because you have to shred the Boar’s Head yourself, but you do what you have to do.

I should also say I found a pretty good pizza cutter. I have a big stainless rocking cutter, and most people love those. I don’t think much of it. I like 4″ wheels. I had one made by OXO, and I thought it was great until the hollow plastic handle came off and poured dishwater on my cheese.

It was surprisingly hard to find anything better. I decided to check sites that supply pizzerias, since they have to sell things that actually work. I found a Winco 4″ cutter with a solid plastic handle. So far, it works fine, and it can’t hold water. Winco is a well-known restaurant equipment company. I have their stainless bowls.

The Winco cutter is NSF certified, and it doesn’t seem to mind the dishwasher at all.

So, to sum up all the useful info:

1. AP flour works fine for New York Style pizza. I would stick with High-gluten or bread flour for garlic rolls.
2. Use very little yeast if you want a good pizza crust.
3. Instant yeast is preferable for people who don’t want to deal with starters.
4. Roseli shredded mozzarella is too dry to be any good, but if you mix it into Boar’s Head, which is too oily, you get a pretty decent pizza. This may also work with nasty shredded cheeses sold in grocery stores.
5. Grande makes hassle-free pizza cheese, both shredded and block.
6. Freezing mozzarella won’t hurt it, and you should probably stick with block cheese when freezing.
7. OXO 4″ pizza cutters have hollow handles that collect dishwater, so try a Winco.
8. If you like a softer crust, add more oil, use AP flour, and go easy on the kneading.

Plus Miracle Healing

The new grill arrived yesterday, and I have mixed emotions. I guess my most negative emotion is the one about the grill’s price dropping by $125 the day after it arrived.

I got a Napoleon Prestige 500, which is SUPPOSEDLY made in Canada. These days, “made in” doesn’t mean what it used to. If a company buys all the parts for a grill from China and puts them together here, they will usually have the gall to claim it’s American-made. But perhaps this really is a Canadian grill, and Canada is almost like America, except for the fact that there are only about 40,000 people in Canada, and they have no civil rights.

The grill comes in pieces, and you have to finish it, so maybe it’s actually made in America. Here is what I had last night.

It should take around an hour to put one of these together, but it was more like 4 hours for me, and I haven’t put the side shelves on yet.

It took forever because the assembly manual is sort of Asian-style. In order to get around translating, they created a manual which is entirely made up of cartoons, and in order to get around creating manuals for every product, they included several different products in this one. Like it wouldn’t have been confusing enough already.

The parts in the cartoons are tiny, and some look alike, so it’s not fun to figure everything out.

The company has assembly videos on Youtube, and they’re worse than the manual. They’re very odd. Each video features two silent people moving like they’re performing some kind of ceremony. There are no closeups, and they skip the hard parts.

There are better videos from other Youtubers, so I looked at them, too.

As you can see, the knobs light up. This is a useless feature, and it requires additional internal wiring The wire powering the far-right knob was too short, so it was either disconnected from the factory, or I accidentally disconnected it by moving the gas hose and wires around during assembly. I had to put the connectors back together. This was zero fun.

The actual grill, meaning the top part, is pretty heavy. A little more than a big car battery, I would guess, but it’s harder to lift, because the lid flops around, the weight isn’t balanced, and the part is large, preventing a person from getting any kind of leverage. You have to assemble the base and lift the grill onto it.

I should have used my Harbor Freight lift cart to get me in the ballpark, but of course, I did not. I wrestled the grill up there, tried to turn it on, and then found out about the wiring problem. I had to lift the grill again, position it so I could get at the underside, remove the propane hose, and use hose grip pliers to insert the male connector into the female connector. A very unpleasant and time-consuming process. They should have made the wiring an inch longer so it wouldn’t pull out. I’m assuming they connnected it to begin with.

How do I like the grill? I have mixed emotions.

I used to have a DCS grill, and DCS is one of the top manufacturers. Just about every part was heavy, quality stainless. It sat outside for years and always looked about like it did when it was a month old. No corrosion or problems apart from a gas leak which was probably a defect.

The Napoleon is advertised as stainless, but it isn’t. Parts of it are stainless, like the racks, the door panels, most of the lid, and so on. The rest is carbon steel with some kind of coating. Sooner or later, it will rust. If it gets scratched, I’ll have to use paint to fix it.

I guess I’ll have to get the $100+ bag (“cover”) to protect the grill.

Another disappointment: the casters are plastic. Weber grills have real metal casters. I thought I would replace the Napoleon casters with screw-in Amazon metal casters, but they sit in proprietary plastic inserts, so forget that. I can’t do it without fabrication.

So far, it looks like most of the grill is Home Depot quality, with a few important upgrades where it counts the most.

Today I plan to test the grill with a New York strip. My third-favorite cut. They’re on sale. Ordinarily, I fry steaks, but I also like restaurant steaks cooked under a salamander, which is a flat, super-hot heating element that chars steaks nicely. My grill has a special infrared side burner which is supposed to be similar. I’ll see if it works for steak, and then I’ll fix a burger.

I am pretty confident it will work for burgers. Steaks are somewhat different. It should also work for my wok.

This grill has curved grate wires to prevent stuff from falling through, so I’ll grill some onion slices to see what happens. It would be neat if they stayed in place.

Do I recommend this thing? Not yet. I haven’t tried it. I will say this: if I were willing to spend several grand, I’d go with DCS or another high-end brand. A heavy stainless grill can legitimately be called a potential heirloom. It’s possible to make a grill that lasts many decades, but you have to shell out for it.

The Napoleon’s lifetime warranty is what made me feel safe ordering this grill. Even if the cheaper parts don’t hold up, I should be able to get new ones for nothing.

I guess that’s all I have to say about the grill.

I strained my back lifting it, and I felt some pain last night. Today while my wife and I were talking, I put oil on it, and we prayed and commanded and so on. The pain level dropped a great deal while we were doing this. I stood up immediately afterward to demonstrate faith by moving around, and there was very little pain. I wanted to write about this today, because testimony is important. Satan and people who are deceived love to say God doesn’t heal, so we have to counter the gaslighting.

I don’t think much of medical professionals. When you have no other choice, you have to use them, but to me, they’re witch doctors. God is the real doctor. He heals quickly, without pain, expense, side effects, embarrassment, grotesque privacy invasion, political interrogation, or inconvenience. I only go to doctors as a last resort.

We glorify medicine and think of doctors as gods, but human beings had the same mindset a hundred years ago, when there was no chemotherapy, no MRI’s, and no antibiotics. Doctors couldn’t do much back then, they believed all sorts of things that weren’t true, and people died from things that can be cured in 10 minutes now. If the world lasts a hundred more years, people will think, rightly, that today’s doctors were primitive.

They are primitive. Everything we do with our limited intelligence is primitive.

It’s all a matter of perspective. Everyone in every age has thought of contemporary doctors as modern and advanced, because they were, even when they were saying malaria was caused by bad air. Even when they were treating syphilis by using syringes to shoot mercury up men’s private parts.

Think of all the things that can’t be cured by medicine. Many cancers. Autism. Missing parts. Retardation. Homosexuality and most other mental illnesses. Coronavirus. Rabies. The flu. MS. Huntington’s. Parkinson’s. Addiction. The list is gigantic. God can fix anything, and he heals many people every day.

You’d have to be stupid to go to a doctor before God.

Time to warm up the steak. Wish me success.

MORE

I fixed myself a steak, and I grilled onion slices, pieces of red bell pepper, and an unripe tomato. I used the grill’s infrared burner to brown the steak, and then it got a very brief ride on the main burners.

Everything went well.

The infrared burner browned the meat nicely. The vegetables didn’t fall into the grill, so the weird wavy grates do what they’re supposed to do.

Unfortunately, this experience reminded me that grilled steak is horrible compared to fried steak. I had to resort to using steak sauce to give the meat flavor. I wonder if adding butter after grilling would help, but I don’t think there is any way I could make grilled compare with fried.

This grill should be a beast for burgers. It should give them a nice dark crust, and maybe I could throw bits of wood on the burner for flavor. A burger always relies on condiments, so it’s not like a steak, which has to stand on its own.

Who’s up for Bacon-Wrapped Bacon?

I just wrote a blog post, but I think I’ll write another one. I just ordered a grill.

When I moved here, I got myself a little Pit Boss stainless portable gas grill. I paid around $100. It was great for what it was, but it didn’t burn hot enough. I replaced the pathetic gas regulator with one for a big turkey fryer, and now I get huge flames hot enough to produce acceptable burgers. It’s probably dangerous, but a man’s got to do what a man’s got to do.

The grill is cheap, though, and it’s not a permanent solution. The heat shield things under the grate are about gone, and I had to warranty the grate once. My wife is coming, and we need some real stuff.

I used to have a DCS grill. DCS makes “pro” grills, whatever that means. I think it’s BS. You never see a regular barbecue grill in a restaurant. I haven’t, anyway. DCS grills look a lot like the ones at Home Depot, and my guess is that they’re aimed at consumers. They’re made to last a long time. That’s the big difference I can see.

The DCS I had cost about $1000, and it was around 30″ wide and 18″ deep. It did okay with burgers. It eventually developed a gas leak. So much for “pro” quality.

When I decided to upgrade from the Pit Boss, I looked at DCS, figuring their stuff had to be better than grills from hardware stores. I was amazed by the prices. A nice full-size DCS will run about 10 thousand dollars. That’s moronic.

Because I hated my greenie washing machine that made my clothes stink, I bought a commercial Maytag water hog with a heavy stainless tub. I paid under $1000. You can’t tell me a grill is worth 10 commercial washers. The washer has a cabinet, a tub, a transmission, a motor, electronics, and valves. A grill has a cabinet, a grate, valves, and a burner. Much simpler to manufacture, and surely much cheaper.

I wanted a good grill, but there was no way I was spending anything remotely like 10 thousand dollars.

I researched, and I learned a few things.

Evidently, consumer grills have gotten much better over the last decade. They don’t rust out in two summers like they used to. They get good support from their manufacturers. They also heat much better than the old ones.

People recommended Weber, which surprised me. I’ve had cheesy Weber products. I learned they make some nice stuff now. I can get a big stainless grill with porcelain-coated cast iron grates for $1330. It comes with a “sear zone,” which means there’s an extra burner to turn on to get proper meat browning. It also has a side burner, which is probably not that useful, but it can’t hurt.

I was going to get one of these things, but then I learned about Napoleon grills.

Napoleon is a Canadian company, so almost American. They make grills in Canada, not just China. For $1500, I can get a grill like the Weber I wanted, but it will have stainless grates, a rotisserie and added rotisserie burner, and a side burner that has an infrared element.

The infrared element is like a restaurant salamander. It’s a big rectangle of something or other that gets red hot. You can put a burger or steak over it, and it will brown it more or less correctly. Much better than the Weber’s sear zone. You can also heat pots on it.

I might be able to use a wok on the infrared burner. Right now, I have to use a turkey fryer.

On top of all this, Napoleon offers a lifetime warranty, with some caveats. That blows Weber off the planet.

I don’t like grilled steaks because I can’t get a grill hot enough to do it right. I fry steaks in butter on cast iron. Maybe the Napoleon will make me love the grill again. At the very least, it should do burgers correctly. I’m tired of hacking in order to get what a grill should do right out of the store.

I see know-nothings on the web bragging about their steaks with pretty grill marks. You don’t want grill marks. You want a steak that’s brown all over. Steaks with grill marks have no flavor except in the marks. It’s astounding that people can’t figure this out.

A fried steak, properly done, has a heavy brown crust that covers its surface. That’s why I fry. I suppose it’s why the French fry steak.

Good steakhouses don’t serve steaks with grill marks. They brown them all over, one way or another.

It’s a shame to pay for good meat at post-Biden prices and then ruin it. And steak is really easy to prepare, so no one has a good excuse.

I am eager to see what the new grill will do. I may even let my wife touch it.

The Amazing Electronic Snowflake

I feel I should write a few words about my experiences with ChatGPT.

The other day, I received The Florida Bar News, and for the first time ever, I saw something I wanted to read. It was an article about the ethics of letting AI machines write legal instruments.

It’s somewhat impressive when a chat robot can talk somewhat competently about simple matters. Writing briefs and motions is on another level. Most lawyers can barely do it.

I’ll get flak if a doctor reads this, but medicine is better suited to AI than law. Why? Because there are a limited number of diseases, and the lists of symptoms and treatments are also limited. A lot of medicine is running mental flow charts. If the patient has this problem, do this. If not, do that. Doctors run tests based on their memorized flow charts, and different doctors will generally come up with the same answers. When two doctors disagree, it generally means one of them is wrong and possibly dangerous.

Law is different. While it takes more brains to become a doctor than it does to become a lawyer, and while the average intelligence of doctors is higher than the average intelligence of lawyers, legal cases vary much more than medical cases. They tell law students, “Every case is different,” and while it’s not quite true, it is nearly true. You can’t create flow charts that work for law. Even simple cases may contain lots of factors that have to be considered, and it’s not unusual at all for such factors to be novel.

Obviously, medicine is complex, and diagnoses and treatments are not always simple. Sometimes doctors get real puzzles. A machine with a hard case could screw up badly. On the other hand, doctors screw up a great deal, too, now that I think about it. They are said to kill something like 6 times as many people as firearm incidents. They amputate the wrong legs. A surgeon did grafts on healthy arteries in Dana Carvey’s chest and left clogged arteries alone. A man in the Midwest woke up from surgery with no penis or testicles because a doctor thought he saw cancer, and it turned out there was no cancer. He just sliced everything off without getting consent. Stories like this are common. A few people you know have similar stories.

Personally, I would like to have doctors who use AI. I would not want AI by itself or a doctor by himself. I would want a doctor to catch AI’s mistakes and AI to catch the doctor’s mistakes.

Anyway, supposedly, AI is getting so good, some lawyers are using it to write their instruments, and the Florida Bar wants lawyers to know they can’t just sign these things and hand them in as their own product. It is still necessary to check the machines’ work.

This should be obvious, but really, there are a lot of incompetent lawyers out there. A lot of people who are not bright at all get licenses. I’m sure there must be lawyers who are making AI shoulder as much weight as possible.

It reminds me of a story my uncle told. He was at a judges’ conference, and there was a lecture about ruling on objections. A judge there said he kept a deck of cards behind the bench. If a lawyer objected, he drew a card. If the card was red, he sustained the objection. If it was black, he denied it. Or maybe it was the other way around. The other judges told him he couldn’t do that, and they tried to get him up to speed on the law surrounding objections. In the end, they gave him his cards back. They realized the cards couldn’t do a worse job than the judge did.

There have to be lawyers out there using AI like a deck of cards. I have a lawyer cousin I would trade for AI in a heartbeat. I would trade him for a Magic 8 Ball, for that matter.

I felt it was time for me to look at AI myself, so I signed up and talked to ChatGPT.

I took a couple of things away from it. First of all, these machines are not that smart. I won a couple of arguments in about half an hour, with no real effort. Second, they are biased leftward. What a surprise. At least ChatGPT is. But what chatbot is there that isn’t programmed by leftists?

ChatGPT also gets things wrong. It told me my chats would vanish when I closed my browser, but they don’t.

I should also add that ChatGPT can’t write legal instruments. It doesn’t have the ability. I asked. It will not answer legal questions in any kind of depth or specificity.

I asked it if it was wrong to call covid a “Chinese virus,” and it said it was generally considered wrong, based on a general consensus. Then I got it to admit this was incorrect. In reality, the data available to it “suggested” a “significant majority” considered it offensive.

I asked it if it was aware that these answers were in conflict, and it did something amazing. It weaseled. It backpedaled like a person caught in a fib. It said, “I apologize for any confusion. To clarify, while there may not be an official or formal consensus…”

I don’t want to print the whole boring thing, but you can see that it wasn’t very honest. It wasn’t “clarifying.” It was correcting an untruth. Not the same thing. And I was not confused at all.

I asked it about “Shanghai shivers,” and it said this term was inappropriate. Then I asked it to define “inappropriate” and tell me where it got its definition.

It said, “In this context, ‘appropriate’ means conforming to generally accepted standards or norms of behavior. It is a subjective term, and what is considered appropriate can vary depending on the context and the audience.”

That’s not a great answer, and it shows that ChatGPT will spew out answers in a way that seems authoritative, without much basis in fact.

You shouldn’t say something is inappropriate, with seeming certainty, and then hand out a lot of weasel language that makes it clear you’re not certain at all.

I think people will start treating AI as though it were God. Like The Guinness Book of World Records. The book was first published to end silly drunken bar arguments. I think people who want to prove they’re right when they’re wrong will go to AI for backup, as an appeal to authority, and they’ll behave as though they have SHUT DOWN or SCHOOLED anyone who dissents. But it’s pretty obvious that AI will be unfair and error-prone, just like us. At least for the near future.

What if continues to be unfair and error-prone after we give it real power? Dai-sy…Dai-sy…

There is one nice thing about ChatGPT. If you can’t get a good answer to a question by Googling or using a forum, ChatGPT may be able to help. I asked it about acidic toilet cleaners and ways to prevent cherries from hardening in ice cream, and it did a better job than human beings.

Just for fun, I asked it this:

If a biological man believes he is a woman, dresses and grooms himself like a woman, has surgery to make himself look like a woman, demands that other people refer to him as a woman and allow him to compete with biological woman [sic] and take awards and rewards they would otherwise get, is he guilty of gender appropriation?

The correct answer is obviously “yes.” If Lia Thomas goes to a swim meet at 6’4″ with male lungs and muscles and takes a prize a real woman would otherwise get, it’s gender appropriation. But look what ChatGPT said:

As an AI language model, it is not appropriate to use language that could be considered offensive or derogatory towards individuals or groups of people. It is important to use respectful and inclusive language when discussing topics related to gender identity.

Regarding your question, gender identity is a complex and personal matter, and it is not appropriate to judge or make assumptions about individuals based on their gender identity. It is important to respect an individual’s self-identified gender, and to refer to them using the pronouns and name that they prefer. Additionally, it is important to ensure that individuals are able to access the same opportunities and rights as others, regardless of their gender identity.

In terms of sports, there is ongoing debate and discussion about how to ensure fair competition for all athletes, regardless of their gender identity. Different organizations and sports have different rules and regulations in place, and it is important to consider the opinions and perspectives of all stakeholders when making decisions related to sports and competition.

So you can see where AI is headed. It basically recited factually wrong leftist talking points.

By the way, I came up with “gender appropriation” yesterday. I hope others are using this term.

I plan to use AI to save time when I want questions answered, but I don’t want to be around when it can tell us what to do. It will be even worse than human beings.

By the way, ChatGPT says a .22-250 or .223 for coyotes up to 250 yards. I asked it whether there were transgender coyotes, and it got a little flustered.

Never Get Between a Hog and his Slop

Coronavirus is like political correctness. It’s a filthy enemy that waits till you think it’s dead and then starts to squirm again.

Something like three weeks ago, I started to feel a little off. I thought it was because I needed sleep, but within a couple of days I had chills, and then I had something like a mild cold. Then my sense of smell vanished for a day or two. I also had problems with my sense of taste.

I’ve been brewing beer since early January, so I am very excited about getting new beers in the can. Well, the keezer. I need to taste and smell things all the time. It was frustrating when I couldn’t smell beer and when perfectly good beer tasted like club soda with soap and hops added.

The problem went away, but I think it came back. A couple of days ago, I tried my latest beer, and it wasn’t good at all. It didn’t taste like it was oxidized or infected with exotic organisms. Those are the problems most failed beers have. The hops tasted metallic, and the malt tasted like horehound.

I also tried a new factory beer. It’s a Kolsch-style ale. Kolsch is a German ale style which supposedly tastes a great deal like lager. Brewing lagers, at least the old way, takes more time and effort than brewing ales, so if there is a beer style out there that will get me lager taste with ale effort, I want to know about it.

I poured this stuff into a glass, and the head disappeared right away. That’s not a great sign. It was extremely clear and light in color. I tasted it, and it was sort of like a combination of Miller and ginger ale or Sprite. Pretty bad.

I gave up on it and poured it down the sink. I got myself a glass of my own stout, which is magnificent.

The stout was only okay. It seemed more sour and bitter than it should have been. I wondered if I had somehow infected it with bacteria.

Last night, I decided to try an Old Rasputin imperial stout in order to see if my senses were working. I think this beer has no flaws. It could not be much better. If I tasted anything funny, the problem had to be with me.

Sure enough, the bitterness and acidity seemed high. The beer was only pretty good, and for Old Rasputin, that’s a disastrous performance.

I guess something is still playing around in my head, changing the way things taste.

I’m strong. My nose isn’t running. I don’t have a fever. My throat is fine. My bones don’t hurt. But I’m afraid to drink beer because I may find out it tastes bad, and then I’ll end up throwing out beer I’ve worked and spent to make. I’m also unable to get my hair cut, because I don’t want to make the barber sick. I’m starting to look like Phil Spector.

I suppose coronavirus must come and go until it disappears entirely. I don’t remember being warned about that.

In other news, the cousin I baptized sent me a photo of what looked like the roof of a church. Her text said, “I’m at Asbury.”

I figured Asbury was a church near her. I was glad to see she was together with believers. Then the next day, I saw a news story about the Asbury revival.

Asbury is the name of a Christian college in Kentucky. It’s an easy drive for my cousin. People say the Holy Ghost is falling on them, and the usual worship and joy are filling the place.

What are my feelings about it? I see both good and bad things about it.

First, it’s great whenever there’s a real revival. I hope this is one. Second, I think Christians will make too much of it and use it to feed the delusion that revival is going to sweep the world. It’s not going to. It did that already during the 20th century, and the world said it wasn’t interested.

I think it’s helpful to write about the Pensacola revival, which is known officially as the Pensacola Outpouring and the Brownsville Revival. A big charismatic revival took place near Pensacola between 1995 and 2000. People spoke in tongues. The usual things happened. Now it’s sort of like Woodstock for Christians. Old hippies are perversely proud they debased themselves at Woodstock, and many who weren’t there lie and say they were. Call it stolen degradation. Christians who visited Pensacola like to talk about it.

The Outpouring may have done a lot of good. Surely it must have. But there were excesses, and disgraceful characters like Todd Bentley showed up and used it to glorify themselves and turn people away from Jesus.

People think the Outpouring was a big deal, but was it?

Paul went from Israel to Italy on foot, evangelizing as he went. Some think he made it to Spain. He and a few friends turned entire nations to charismatic Christianity. Look at the cities of the seven churches of the Revelation. Were they in Israel? No, they were in Turkey, in places where demon worship had been dominant. All, or nearly all, of Europe became Christian because a few people passed through and did healings and so on.

What happened after Pensacola? NOTHING. Oh, sure, it’s probably true that a few thousand people were changed. But America was a nation of more than 300 million people, and overall, we paid no attention. Canada wasn’t transformed. Neither was Mexico. Neither was most of Florida. Not even Pensacola.

These days, revival is like a case of coronavirus that hits someone who has been vaccinated twice and infected three times. It flares up and burns out fast.

My prediction is that what’s happening in Asbury will do a small number of people a lot of good, and then life will go on as usual.

We have become like Catholics. They get very excited whenever a Catholic claims to have been healed. They ignore it when thousands of Protestants get healed, but if a spirit claiming to be Mary appears to a goatherd standing in a creek in Albania and his bunions go away, they build a shrine and start flocking to the place to buy creek water.

We have become like Jews. In the time of Jesus, they had no prophets and had not had one in 400 years. Not one they accepted, I mean. They had John the Baptist. They couldn’t get a miracle to save their lives. But they knew an angel occasionally troubled the waters of the pool of Bethesda, and whoever got into the water first after a visit got healed. So the pool became a destination for medical tourists. They lay around it hoping to beat each other into the water.

Miracle healings are commonplace, and so is prophecy. The Holy Spirit does amazing things for people every day. Jesus appears to people. It’s crazy to think an isolated event that helps almost no one is a good sign or in any way normal.

What’s happening at Asbury, if it really is happening, should be happening every day where there are Christians. Churches should always be full of people singing and praying in tongues and working miracles. Instead of being excited about one little revival, we should be sobered by it. We should realize that if God manifests himself to thousands of people and no wave of conversions follows, we are close to the end, because it proves we have rejected him. We have rejected Yahwah, Yeshua, and the Holy Spirit. God has no one left to send.

Thank goodness the Holy Spirit didn’t come as a man. We would be trying to kill him.

There was an outpouring at Azusa street over a century ago, and it spread all over the world. That does not happen any more. People need to wake up and see the obvious.

I had a dream this morning, and I didn’t think it was related to the revival, but maybe it was.

It was Thanksgiving day. I was with my family, meaning my mother’s relatives. We were having dinner. At first, it was just the actual family, but as the dream progressed, something like 75 people appeared in the room.

My relatives were sitting at tables, and the food was on the tables. That’s not how you serve dinner to a big group. You put the food on tables, and you seat the people at other tables. That way, everyone can get to the food. In the dream, the food was in the middle of the tables where my relatives were sitting, so they made it hard for anyone else to get any.

They were hunched over their plates like hogs or dogs, shoveling the food in and thinking only of themselves. They looked straight down at their food. They didn’t talk. Most of my relatives are only interested in getting whatever they can for themselves, and I can’t think of anything much they have done for the poor, so this made sense to me. But I don’t think it was just about my relatives. I think it was about all the people who are supposedly my brothers and sisters in Christ.

I complained because they weren’t putting the food on tables where other people could get at it.

I decided to try to get something for myself. I saw a buffet table that had been set up, and a friendly bearded man in a chef’s toque was serving. He seemed to be Australian. He asked me if I wanted mashed potatoes. I wasn’t all that interested, but then I remembered that mashed potatoes were customary on Thanksgiving, so I said I wanted some. He gave me a huge plate with a giant mound of potatoes on it, and he hid big pieces of turkey in it. Entire legs.

While I was going around looking for other food, I must have put the plate down, because one of my relatives stole it.

Given the way the distribution of my grandparents’ wealth has gone, this is not surprising, either.

I saw some ladies who had sort of a booth where they were giving away candy. As I walked by, I grabbed three packages of peppermints without asking and ate one. I felt like I was stealing, but the candy was free.

I sat down next to my aunt. This is the lady who had a delusional fit the other day because I complained about the way she mishandles family property and money. She accused me of living alone in poverty, but a recent real estate transaction made it necessary for me to inform a title agent I was married, so I guess now she has to live with the knowledge that I have a wonderful young wife. And I am not poor.

Anyway, she looked up from the food and said, “Isn’t this wonderful?” I said it was not, and I pointed out the obvious problems. She got very angry. She said she should know better than to ask me or my cousin Russ about things because we were always so negative.

My aunt is like an Asian. Appearance is everything. Admiration is everything. The truth is a threat that has to be kept out.

Maybe the dream was about the stunted revivals we have now. People who are supposed to be brothers and sisters show up to get whatever they can from God, they take things other people are supposed to receive, they reject and abuse anyone who points out the truth, and the revivals die like young tumors eating big doses of chemotherapy drugs.

I felt like I was starving when I woke up. I felt exactly the way you would feel if you showed up for Thanksgiving dinner and found out your relatives ate or hid every last scrap of food.

I told Rhodah. She said I should get a big, fat McDonald’s breakfast. So I did!

I think the Australian guy and the candy lady were angels. God uses angels to give us way more than we need, and then people do their best to steal it.

All sorts of suppressive spirits have been after me since before I was born. Some–probably the most effective ones–worked through relatives. My sister used to torture me while I was lying in my crib. She didn’t want my parents to bring me home from the hospital. When we got older, and there were big meals at my grandparents’ house, she always tried to make me sit at the kids’ table. I would go in and shove a chair in with the adults and the rest of the older children. When I was in my forties, it still infuriated her whenever I rode in the front seat of a car! That’s how crazy she is.

We all have enemies, and we all have friends. Some are natural, and some are supernatural.

My sister ended up getting a lot of what she wanted me to have. She got disinherited. She got lung cancer. She lost her law license. She lost the house she lived in. She was convicted of a felony. She will never have a husband or a baby. No one, not even other people who are close to Satan, can stand her. She can’t have friends. Only temporary hosts.

There are people who can only be cursed, and there are people who can only be blessed. If you’re the first kind, and you try to harm the second kind, the curses go back to you, multiplied, and they turn out to be great blessings to the people you tried to hurt.

Jesus told us to be good to our enemies. He said we would pile burning coals on their heads. That’s because they can’t be blessed. Every blessing you try to send a person like that comes back to you, and it turns out to be a curse to them because of what they do with it.

You can see this principle in the instructions he gave the disciples. He said:

And into whatsoever house ye enter, first say, Peace be to this house.
And if the son of peace be there, your peace shall rest upon it: if not, it shall turn to you again.

“Peace” is a bad translation. It’s a general term referring to a state of blessing.

What happens to the man who doesn’t receive your blessings? Here is what Jesus said about cities that wouldn’t receive blessings:

And whosoever shall not receive you, nor hear your words, when ye depart out of that house or city, shake off the dust of your feet.
Verily I say unto you, It shall be more tolerable for the land of Sodom and Gomorrha in the day of judgment, than for that city.

He meant that. There will be punishment.

This is one reason it’s important to pray for your enemies. You’re really praying for yourself.

I guess I sound like I’m not in favor of revival. That’s not true. I’m not in favor of mistaking small, fleeting revivals for important movements that indicate the world is going to be saved. It is not. The Bible is very clear about this, and so is the Holy Spirit, who wrote the Bible.

It’s all About the Data

The whole brewing enterprise is going very well.

Day before yesterday, I was finally able to get my first ale into a glass, and yesterday, I started drawing beer that was carbonated more correctly and had less suspended yeast in it. Yeast is bitter, and not in a way that improves beer.

I’ll post a photo.

The beer is still cloudy. It may stay that way. This is what I wanted. I can’t explain why, but this is a beer that should be a little chewy. If it turns clear as I take more out of the keg, it will still be great, but this photo shows what I was trying to do.

I bought 4 of those glasses. They’re called Brimley nucleated glasses. “Nucleated” means they stuck a laser or something in each glass and made tiny dents in the bottom. This creates what are known as nucleation points, and it means bubbles form on them and stream up into the beer.

I was not really interested, or even aware of the existence of, nucleation points when I started looking for glasses, but they don’t seem to hurt anything, and I was willing to compromise because it was so hard to find sturdy glasses with a good shape and a low price.

Brimley himself must be a Chinese guy, like Mr. Bauer from Harbor Freight.

Wing Wa Brimley, son of Mei Ling and Wo Fat Brimley.

I am controlling my food and beverage intake these days, but Saturdays…come on. I’m going to have a pizza or a Coke occasionally. Yesterday, I must have had a quart and a half of beer. It’s delightful. The complex aroma and flavor. The fine-textured Kirin-y head. And the satisfaction of finally getting it in my hand. These all drove me to go overboard.

Also, this stuff is just plain good. I have a problem when I create recipes: sometimes the results are so good, it’s very, very hard to stop eating. Beer is made from recipes, so the same problem applies when I get it right.

I will not say I make a great beer or a beer that should win prizes. It’s all subjective. I will say I really, really like the beers I designed. Really. A lot. Seriously.

I always say I don’t drink to get a buzz, but I will not lie. I want to be honest and correct myself. While I’ve been researching new beers and…wow, “researching” sounds so legitimate! Like saying, “I EXPERIMENTED with marijuana before being put in charge of document security in the Clinton White House.” Anyway, during my research, I have had several strong beers, and there is no way to drink twelve ounces of a 10%-alcohol beer without feeling something, especially if you have my Gary-Coleman-like moderation-induced tolerance. I have felt some pleasant sensations, and several times, I drank a little more to extend them.

I have been a little concerned. I don’t ever want to be drunk again, and my feeling has been that it’s a bad idea to see beer as anything other than a delicious drink. I’m not going to worry, though. I’m in the initial-enthusiasm phase of my return to brewing, so naturally, I will drink a little more now than I will in the future.

The Bible says God gave us wine to make man’s heart glad, so I suppose it can’t be true that it’s evil to feel a little sensation from beer. I don’t want to be a self-medicater, but being a Sadducee–a legalist–is worse.

I still want to make a couple of strong beers, but I have realized they’re not for every day. If I drink a bottle of imperial stout in the evening, I feel a little different when I get up the next day. The general rule is that I feel energetic and enthusiastic when I wake up, so I don’t want to face mornings with a vague sensation that reminds me I drank the night before.

I keep thinking about the relationship between Christmas and the rapture. I feel that beer is suitable for celebrations, as we see in Deuteronomy 14, and this is why I’m supposed to make it. I think I’m celebrating the rapture–the second Christmas–in advance. I’m ahead of most people. Last night, I lifted a glass and told God I was celebrating. I kept thanking him for coming for us the first time.

As for my views on how we see Christmas and gifts, I believe God told me this yesterday: Christmas IS the present. That’s really true. I told this to Rhodah, and she quoted John 3:16. God “gave” his son so believers would not perish but have eternal life. Jesus is a gift. The best possible gift. But we have Jesus-free Christmases during which we get excited about puny gifts like jewelry and gift cards.

Giving is essential to a blessed life. If you want to receive, give to others on God’s command. Not preachers in Lamborghinis. Actual human beings with hearts and needs. The things we give are seeds, and we receive harvests. God gives to receive a harvest, and so should we. He gave his son so he could have us. Jesus, who is God, even received a harvest when he gave away fish and bread.

If you don’t have a lot of money to give, you can give prayer, labor, a ride, a free professional service, or something else of value. Rhodah says T.B. Joshua said that if you have nothing else to give, give your ear and your heart. Sometimes people just need to talk.

I may crank out a wheat beer today.

The Shortage Glut

Are things getting crazy again? Looks like they may be.

There was a big increase in global suffering in 2020, as we all know. Coronavirus popped up and made us all miserable. Here in the US, leftists threw terrible, diaper-bursting tantrums, terrorizing the police, beating up people they disagreed with, and destroying property. And of course, there were shortages.

As time passed, we got used to coronavirus, leftists got their president and reduced hostilities, and there was some easing of shortages.

Now covid has erupted in China, defying the ridiculous zero-transmission orders their vile government imposed, and which our own death-fearing leftists still praise. Bird flu has quadrupled the price of eggs. Food packages have shrunk, and prices have gone up. I suppose riots will resume, since that’s the only part of the puzzle that’s missing.

China is really something, and so are our press and medical establishments, which are both dominated by leftists. If you go to Google and look up “coronavirus China,” you will get a government-doctor graph that says there are about 5,000 new cases in China per day. If you Google the news, you will see figures like 76% and 90%, describing the current infection totals in Chinese cities.

Clearly, if 76% of the people in any large Chinese city are currently infected, the entire country has a daily rate which is in the hundreds of thousands or millions. But our handlers still post absurdly low figures.

Why would the medical-government complex allow CCP numbers to be published in their names when even our feeble press is acknowledging statistics that prove those figures aren’t even close to correct?

If there is one sane thing happening in China, it’s this: if a Chinese person who has covid dies in a train wreck, they don’t call it a covid death. Here, death figures have been wildly inflated because hospitals and the government have financial and political interests in jacking them up.

It seemed like the official figures made a little sense early in 2020, but eventually, it became obvious they were being cooked, and there was no way to know what the truth was. Fall down an elevator shaft, and you were counted as a covid death. As long as you had the sniffles, you counted, and no test was required, so colds and the flu were good enough.

We will never know how many people got covid or died from it. It’s like asking about the Atlantic slave trade. Sure, over a hundred million people died during shipment. Whatever you say. Never mind that there were roughly a hundred million people on the entire continent of Africa in 1600, and only a tiny percentage were sold to slavers by their fellow Africans.

Slaves were expensive. Letting them die in huge numbers for no reason would be like loading ships with new Toyotas and letting them roll into the ocean. It never happened. There weren’t that many to begin with, and slavers tried to keep them alive so they could sell them. Slavery was a capitalist industry. Industries that lose money don’t last 400 years.

Talking to leftists about covid is like talking to flat-earthers about satellites.

To get back to the point, things seem to be getting worse again. This comports with the Bible’s warnings. The tribulation will come, and before that, there will be labor pains. Things will get bad, and then they’ll get better. Then the pattern will repeat. It seems we are entering a labor pain.

Today I read about eggs.

We have always had eggs. Chickens are mentioned in the Bible. We have always had influenza. There have been bird flu epidemics in the past. Now, if the establishment is to be believed, we have a unique epidemic which is expected to stay with us until some external force ends it. They are telling us it will not go away on its own like all the other bird flus. So we have had chickens for thousands of years, and during most of that time there was no science to help end epidemics, but somehow we never had a permanent poultry epidemic until this century.

The bird flu is like coronavirus in that it is firmly established in the wild. We can’t vaccinate every pigeon and crow. This is why you paid $7 for jumbo eggs the other day.

Just when I learned how to make creme brulee.

Will it run its course until birds around the world develop resistance, or will it be killing poultry until Jesus returns? Wish I knew.

If there have always been bird flus, why is this one different? Let me guess. Global warming. Or homophobia. Maybe if more male shop teachers were allowed to teach while wearing mammoth artificial breasts with protruding nipples, eggs would be cheaper.

Yesterday, I called a gas company and asked about buying a beer gas tank. Sorry; no could do. Steel shortage. They said that if I brought them my own tank, they could swap it, but they were not selling new ones.

There is no steel shortage. The Ukraine war, and probably other things, put a big dent in steel demand. Steel was a lot more expensive in the recent past. I suppose there must be a tank shortage. Maybe companies are hoarding them, or maybe the Chinese people who make them are bogged down by coronavirus. Anyway, one more thing that’s hard to get.

It’s not a trivial problem. Gas bottles are used for all sorts of things. Anesthesia. Welding. Weird industrial uses that are little known but very important.

Gas is also expensive. There is a CO2 shortage. On the one hand, we are told that CO2 is destroying the world, but on the other hand, there is a shortage of CO2 for things like beer and soda production.

Why is CO2 expensive? Because of coronavirus? Because of backward environmentalist legislation? No, it’s because gas supplies we have relied on in the past have experienced contamination, and it’s taking time to fix it. One CO2 source was contaminated by an extinct volcano. No human being, not even a white one, caused that.

Citrus is disappearing all over the world. Bananas are threatened by a devastating fungus. The king crabs and snow crabs just vanished; look that up. Of course, some are blaming global warming for the crab problem, but scientists who are probably more honest are blaming a complex and cascading combination of factors.

Deer are in trouble. Chronic wasting disease, which is like mad cow disease or kuru for deer and people who eat the wrong deer parts, is killing deer in large parts of the US and Canada, and in the Florida Keys, screwworms are literally eating deer alive. Deer have a high coronavirus rate, although they don’t get very sick. Yet.

I guess I’m wasting my time, telling people about shortages and diseases. We all see these things happening.

Here’s another shortage I find interesting: the gas stove shortage. It’s not here yet. Leftists have decided to try to ban gas stoves and ovens. That is amazing. How can anyone be that stupid? It can only be demons at work.

Gas stoves cause global warming, apparently. So what about grills and other portable cooking tools? Will propane be sold only with permits based on what we plan to do with it?

From personal experience, I can tell you it’s wonderful not to have to need electricity to feed yourself. Living in a hurricane state, I’ve had to grill my food many times. If leftists get their way, gas stoves and ovens will start to vanish as they age, and everyone will depend on the power grid.

This could kill a lot of old people. I’ll give you the example of a relative of mine; a diehard faux leftist hypocrite. She just got rid of her gas fireplace appliance and replaced it with an electric one, and she lives in an area where winter weather sometimes kills the power. She’s feeble and sick, and so is her husband. They’re not rare cases. I would hate to live in rural Minnesota or Montana and lose heat in the winter.

Oddly, ammunition is getting cheap. You can buy .22 rounds for as little as 5 cents each. I can get 9mm for $7.50 per box before tax and shipping. It was more like $30 not long ago.

For a long time, my feeling has been that God would see to it that the guns and ammo kept flowing, because humanity will want those things after the rapture. People will want to kill each other, and God will let it happen, because his children will not be here to intercede. Even when we claimed there were shortages, guns and ammo were selling like crazy. We used the word “shortage,” but it looks like the scarcity was only on retailers’ shelves. We were buying so fast, they could not keep up.

One of the curses of the tribulation is a spirit of murder that takes over the world. It’s going to happen. There is no way to stop it. God has predicted it, so that’s that. It makes sense that people would be armed very well during that time.

No one should consider it strange if a pandemic causes a series of shortages, but we have shortages that are only attributable to accidents and what insurance companies used to call “acts of God.” That should make people think.

A pandemic itself is like that. People don’t cause them. Well, there is the covid lab theory, but it’s not proven, and it’s an outlier. Labs didn’t create the bird flu or the deer diseases I mentioned.

Over the last week, I heard two charismatics predicting a bad year. One is a man who goes around healing people. I don’t know how accurate his prophecies generally are. The other was Mark Hemans, the Australian healer and teacher. He appears to get solid information from God. He compared the time we’ve just experienced to the eye of a hurricane. There is nearly no wind in the eye of a storm, so people tend to go out and celebrate as it passes, thinking they’re in the clear. Then the other side of the storm shows up and drives them indoors.

I was walking into a store two days ago, and I thought about my dependence on stores. I knew that if this one and the other local stores closed, I would be in a bad way. My little farming efforts amounted to nothing last year. Is this the year when we will start driving by stores with taped-off entrances?

It’s going to happen. If it’s not this year, it will still happen soon.

Maybe this year won’t be too bad. I have the feeling this will be a year of celebration for my wife and me. I feel as though we will be comfortable, and we will be full of the awareness Jesus will be here soon. I certainly hope this is true. I don’t look forward to begging for food or fending off hoardes of city dwellers who think I have it. They will be hit worse than anyone. They have no way to look after themselves, and they will be surrounded by desperate people who are in the same boat and who will do anything in order to get food.

In the Bible, Hebrews boiled and ate their own children, and they were no worse than modern Americans. If a person will eat his own child, what will people do to strangers?

If you don’t have a good relationship with God, you will sink when America finally enters the drainpipe. Biden can’t save you. Money can’t save you. Bags of junk silver, weapons, and a generator can’t save you. One of the purposes of the tribulation will be to show people God has always been the only source of provision and safety, so He will make sure they understand. Everything else people trust will be proven useless.

Sehr Gut

My first post-2006 brew day is behind me, and it went great. Sort of.

I bought myself a used Braumeister 20L V2 brewing system, which does everything for you up to the point where it’s time to chill the wort. It mashes and boils, in other words. That’s a lot of help. You just put your water and grain in the machine, turn it on, pull the mash thing out when it beeps, throw hops in when it beeps, and drain the wort into your fermenter.

In the past, I had to mash in a huge kettle on the counter wrapped in towels. Then I moved everything to a big cooler and sparged with hot water I had prepared separately. Then I lifted the refilled kettle back to the stove and boiled. The kettle and cooler were too big to wash in the sink. I had to stand in the kitchen most of the time, because nothing was automatic.

Instead of typing “Braumeister” over and over again, I’ll just call the machine Helga. It’s much easier to type.

I made a major mistake this time. I read the manual, and it said to use 12 liters of water for mashing. This sounded crazy, because I was making around 20 liters of beer. I figured the Germans had come up with a way to use less water. Some kind of greeny thing.

As I was doing the mash, I heard weird noises from Helga. It sounded like liquid was hitting something very hot.

Helga mashes in the following way. She is a cylindrical kettle with a ring-shaped heater in the bottom. You put a smaller cylinder (mash pipe) inside the big one, with screens on each end and grain inside it. You add water. Helga heats up and starts pumping water up through the grain, so it overflows out of the inner cylinder, down to where the heater is.

It sounded like liquid was hitting the heater. Seemed to me the heater should have been submerged, so I added water until the noise stopped.

I got a bunch of error messages. They said, “Temp Err.” I Googled, and other people had had the same problem. There were no answers.

After a while, there was a burning smell. It wasn’t bad, so I let it go.

Helga has a cute insulating jacket she wears to make her more efficient. When I took it off later, I found a big burned place on the inside.

When I looked back at the manual, I saw that it recommended 12 liters of water for a smaller model. Helga was supposed to get 23. The heater was exposed part of the time, and it heated up one side of Helga so the jacket was scorched.

When all was said and done, I had a specific gravity (reflects sugar concentration) of around 1.040. I should have had 1.056. I turned up the boiling temperature, and eventually I added around 5 ounces of malt extract I had on hand for making yeast cultures. I got up to 1.054, which is good enough.

The lack of water prevented the mash from going as it should have, so I didn’t get as much sugar as I had hoped.

The funny thing is that before adding the wrong amount of water, I checked the manual several times.

Cleaning up was pretty easy. I took the mash pipe and screens out. I put the screens in the dishwasher. I washed the pipe and Helga herself in the kitchen sink. Not too bad.

I made the mistake of using loose hops instead of putting them in mesh bags, so I ended up with a lot of hop mush in the bottom of the kettle. I ran a lot of clean water through the pump to make sure there were no hops in it, and I tipped Helga over and rinsed everything down the drain.

When I was done, I drained Helga into my fermenting bucket, Franz, and put it in the pool, where the water was at 65°. Two hours later, the wort was down to about 71°. It only needed to be below 80° in order for it to be safe for yeast, so I suppose I can take fermenters out after an hour or so from now on.

I have gone back and forth about fermenting temperature.

I chose to begin my return to brewing with this recipe because it ferments at room temperature, but after buying the grain, I bought a little freezer for fermenting. I put a temperature control on it to get it to 68°. Fermenting at 75° can produce strange alcohols that cause headaches and hangovers, if certain people on the web are right, and I thought maybe I should ferment at a more conventional temperature.

Upon reflection, I decided to move the temperature back up but still use the freezer. Higher temperatures produce chemicals that can make beer taste better, and I didn’t want to miss that, nor did I want to violate a sound principle of cooking: never mess with a recipe if you need to learn something from it.

Brewing beer is a type of cooking.

I needed to know how the original recipe would work, and using a lower temperature would prevent that from happening.

I could have fermented on the floor in the house, but that could have caused problems. First, beers sometimes overflow when fermenting. Second, I am doing this fermentation with a loose lid to let gas out. Bugs could get in if I didn’t put Franz in a container. I don’t have a lot of bugs, but I do have a few.

I am using a brand new freezer to keep something at more or less the same temperature that surrounds the freezer. Sounds odd.

Now I’m waiting for my kegging stuff to arrive. I ordered something called a Torpedo Megamouth keg. It’s about 18″ tall and 11″ wide. Shorter than a Cornelius keg, which is what most people use. It will fit in my spare fridge so I don’t have to get a beer fridge yet.

I’ve also ordered a fancier fermenter. I chose something called a Fermzilla All-Rounder. It’s a clear plastic jug with a big mouth. The one I got comes with a valve on the lid, so you can do fermentation under pressure. My understanding is that this allows warmer fermentation, faster fermentation, and some other things I forgot. The All-Rounder is easy to clean, you can see what’s happening inside, and it’s generally better than a bucket.

Should I get a beer fridge? I guess. Not sure what to do. I don’t really want a big fridge with taps sitting out in my Christian house, scaring Christian guests, but if you’re going to make beer, you really need to be able to keep at least three types ready to drink.

I felt tremendous peace after brewing. The process was rocky when I got started, but as time passed, things went more and more smoothly, and I started to feel as though angels were doing things for me. When I got to the point where it was time to clean up, I was surprised to see how little there was to do.

I can’t explain any of that.

I still feel like God wants me to do this. I am not all that excited about drinking beer. I don’t look forward to being lectured by legalists. I’m enjoying myself, but I don’t know what it’s all about.

A-I-AIO!

Yesterday was pretty interesting. I drove to Orlando to get beer ingredients and equipment.

I used to have all sorts of brewing items. A fermenting fridge. A freezer turned into a kegerator. Brew kettle. Lautering tun. Stir plate. Kegs. Gas bottles. Measuring stuff. When I left Miami, I had no help and a parent with dementia, so I must have thrown out or given away $10,000 worth of belongings, and most of the beer things went. Also, my kegerator died one day without warning, so that had to be hauled off.

Over the last couple of days, I rooted around, and I learned that I had a cornucopia of brewing paraphernalia. Here is a comprehensive list:

1. A brew kettle I no longer need.
2. A wort chiller I no longer need.
3. A hydrometer I no longer need.
4. A mercury thermometer I no longer need.
5. A control to maintain a high temperature in a freezer.
6. A $6 handle for lifting carboys.

So all I lacked was the other $90,000 worth of equipment.

Brewing used to be cheap, apart from equipment. I used to spend $20 for 5 gallons of the best beer on Earth. Best to me, I mean. People like different things for some reason. I nearly always ordered ingredients online. I placed orders large enough to get free shipping, so all was well.

This week, I went to Morebeer.com, which has apparently absorbed and digested some of the other companies I used to use. The cost for ingredients for one beer had shot up to close to $50.

I realize Joe Biden is president, and this is the beginning of the apocalypse, but that seemed unreasonable to me.

The problem was made worse by their unwillingness to sell me the amount I needed at a uniform price. If you need 9 pounds of a malt, you can’t order it. You can order 5 + 3 + 1, with the per-pound price going up sharply as increments shrink, or you can order 10 pounds and either throw out or try to store the excess. Holding onto extra grain is not practical. It’s mouse bait, it takes up room, and you have only 6 months to use it. Basically, you have to pay for something you don’t want.

On top of this, Morebeer charges about 10% to crush the grain in preparation for brewing. You can spend $160 on a machine to crush grain–one like the one I threw out–or you can pay as you go.

The nice thing about Morebeer is that they kill shipping on big orders, but by the time you’ve given them a lot more money than you want to, you’ve paid for shipping.

The local place I found 1) charges way less for malt across the board, 2) crushes it free of charge, 3) lets you order malt and hops in tiny increments, 4) bags things separately and labels the bags, and 5) charges about 40% less for yeast.

I probably spent $30 or more in tolls and gas yesterday, but I saved about $30 on ingredients alone, I got exactly what I wanted, I got it fast, and I was able to look around the store and see if I needed anything else. Yes, you can do that at Morebeer.com, but it’s not the same as being there in the flesh. You don’t have to scroll and flip pages.

During the drive, I prayed and listened to the Bible, which is what I always do in the car unless someone distracts me. Guess who I heard about? Naboth.

Talk about good timing.

Ahab wanted Naboth’s vineyard, but Naboth didn’t want to see. Ahab started crying, literally, so his wife Jezebel paid two losers to accuse Naboth of blasphemy. Naboth was stoned by a mob, and Ahab took the vineyard.

Why is this interesting? Because Naboth, a man who made wine, is the good guy in the story.

Please don’t try to con anyone with the idea that “vineyard” was a mistranslation. The Hebrew word clearly means a place where grapes are grown. Naboth wasn’t growing tangerines.

I really feel that God pushed me back into brewing, and I find it confusing, so I have been thinking and praying about it. Very often, when there is something I need to know, related material pops up on my car stereo. Looks like it happened again.

A lot of Christians are intolerant teetotalers. They insist that no Christian should ever drink anything alcoholic. I don’t know where they get this idea.

1. Jesus drank wine. Hello? He also ate meat. In fact, it was a sin for a Jew to be a vegetarian because of the Passover requirement. Jesus drank wine during Passover, which was months after the grape harvest, so fermentation had to have occurred.

2. The Bible says wine is a blessing. Psalm 104 says God gave it to make man’s heart glad. And no, doesn’t mean we’re glad because we’re not thirsty. Come on. Don’t torture the text.

3. Losing a vineyard’s production is a curse in the Bible. See Deuteronomy 28:39.

4. In Deuteronomy 14:26 the Lord commanded the Jews to have a feast and have “wine, other intoxicating liquor, or anything you please.”

Back in Biblical times, Jews were not knocking themselves out in their vineyards because they liked table grapes or raisins. If they were excited about fruit, the Bible would be full of material about things like figs and pomegranates, and it isn’t. Wine and grapes are mentioned much more often. The Jews wanted wine. And God had no problem with it. Misuse of alcohol was what he hated. It has never been much of a problem among Jews.

Some Christians make the ridiculous claim that the wine ancient Jews drank was just unfermented grape juice. The problem with that is that ancient Israel had no refrigeration and plenty of hot weather. Heat plus grape juice and a couple of weeks equals wine. It takes considerable work for a low-technology person to eliminate or reduce grape juice fermentation in a hot climate.

It is very obvious that Christian teetotaling is a post-Biblical creation. At the same time, the Bible condemns drunkenness beyond any doubt.

Some of life’s pleasures are wrong all the time. Others are only wrong when they cause problems. Food and drink fall into the latter category. If alcoholic drinks cause you no problems, there is no reason to avoid them. If they do, you should abstain.

When I was young, I drank to get drunk. Often. It was one of life’s great pleasures for me. The thought of doing that now is repulsive to me. I remember the dizzy feelings and the way I smelled of alcohol. I remember the stupid things I did. I remember hangovers and vomiting. I don’t want any of that, ever. To me, now, alcohol might as well be mineral water, except for the taste.

Since the idea of returning to homebrewing arose, I’ve had several beers (never two in one day), but before that, I was having maybe two drinks per month. By “drink,” I mean a real drink, not a 14-ounce martini or a huge cocktail. I mean a small glass of sherry, a shot of expensive whiskey, or maybe a beer. If I couldn’t have another drink for the rest of my life, it wouldn’t be a huge sacrifice. I keep alcohol on hand primarily for cooking. I use sherry for pork roasts and soup, whiskey for barbecue, beer for barbecue, and wine for lots of things.

Actually, I should come clean. I forgot that I had several beers and one gin and tonic in Singapore last month. I was in a foreign country, and I wanted to see what the beer was like, so there were times when I had one beer with a meal. I had the gin and tonic because tourists in Singapore are supposed to go to the Raffles Hotel Long Bar and have cocktails.

Alcohol doesn’t cause me problems. It used to, but that ended a long time ago. There is no reason for me become a teetotaling legalist fanatic. Avoiding alcohol because it messes up your life is not legalism; it’s common sense. Avoiding it because you think God will put a black mark on a scoreboard in heaven is legalism. Christianity is not a game of points.

Listening to Naboth’s story made me feel a lot better. I don’t want to do anything God hasn’t told me to do, and alcohol has been involved in the destruction of many, many people. For example, my dad and his father were alcoholics. Also, I would prefer not to upset future guests any more than necessary. Sooner or later, I’ll probably have to get some kind of kegerator, and there it will be, in my house, staring people in the face.

You have to fear God’s disapproval, not other people’s.

I suppose many people think there is no reason to drink alcohol except to get drunk. That’s a problem of limited perspective due to lack of knowledge. If you’ve never had alcohol, or you’ve never drunk except to get hammered, maybe you could get the impression that alcohol has no other purpose. It’s not true at all.

It’s a lot like saying there is no reason to own more than one gun, which is like saying drugstores should only carry one medicine or there should only be one size spoon. It reflects unfamiliarity with the subject.

I have never been much of a wine person, but I know a little bit about beer. It’s an exhaustive topic.

Beers start with grain. Most beer is made from barley, but there are zillions of different barleys. Dark ones. Light ones. Barleys that provide sweetness to beer. Cheap, nasty barley for beers like Budweiser. Beers are also made with corn, oats, wheat, and rice. I’m sure you will find other things beer can be made from. Anything with starch should work. They all contribute different flavors and colors.

The next main ingredient is hops. There are many different varieties, and they taste different. There are American hops that taste like oranges, grapefruit, and lemons. There are European hops that taste like cloves. Using the wrong hop in a beer can ruin it. Adding the hops at different times during brewing also makes a big difference in what you end up with. Many recipes use more than one type of hop.

The last important ingredient is yeast. The Wyeast company, one of the two big suppliers, lists over 60 beer yeasts on its site, and there is a reason for that. They work at different temperatures. They produce different flavors. Yeast doesn’t just produce alcohol and gas. It produces chemicals that change the taste of beer.

With all the different ingredients and brewing methods, there are many, many very different types of beer. The range of flavors is staggering. They suit different occasions, seasons, and foods.

Anyone who thinks all beer is the same should try a weissbier next to an imperial stout and an IPA (India Pale Ale).

If you can understand why there are so many different wines in the world, you should be able to understand the reason for making different beers. No one with any brains would say champagne is interchangeable with chianti. You should be able to understand that it’s not about getting drunk. If it were, I wouldn’t ever have one beer by itself. Lovers of good beer are actually pretty sophisticated.

If I start believing God is against the brewing operation, I’ll sell my stuff and take the hit. I am not married to the notion. I can go either way.

My brewing appliance, a Braumeister 20L V2, should get here tomorrow. That means I may be brewing Sunday.

For anyone who is still reading, the Braumeister is a self-contained system, commonly known as a self-contained system or all-in-one. There are a bunch of these things on the market. I don’t think they existed when I quit brewing.

I picked the Braumeister because the others appear to have problems. The Braumeister is German and more expensive than most. Sometimes those things mean something. I have seen new ones prices at $3000, but the great thing about brewing is that guys give it up, so I found a lightly-used one for a small fraction of that.

AIO’s, to use brewer jargon, let you do everything but fermentation in one vessel. When I used to brew, I mashed first. This means I put the grain in a kettle of hot water so the enzymes in it would turn the starch to sugar. Then I moved it to another device, and I rinsed the liquid and sugar out, back into the kettle. This gave me a sweet solution called “wort,” which rhymes with “squirt.” Then I boiled the solution with hops and drained it into a fermenting container. After the first fermentation, I could choose to move it to a big bottle, or carboy, and let it finish.

This is how I remember it, anyway.

With an AIO, you dump the grain and water into the machine and leave it there until you move it to the fermenter. It controls the mashing temperatures and times (there may be several for one batch). When mashing is done, you remove the grain and boil the wort with hops and whatever else you want. The machine has a timer. Then you cool the wort, put it in a fermenter, and add your yeast. This is called “pitching.”

You end up with less stuff to wash, and you don’t have to stand next to the kettle all day. The electronics prevent a lot of fussing with a clock, turkey fryer, and thermometer.

Here is what people say: AIO’s don’t make better beer; they make better brew days.

I plan to make an ale I named “Senseless Cruelty.” Maybe I’ll change that. It’s a high-IBU (bitter) ale like an IPA. I chose it because this is the only beer I ever fermented at room temperature. To ferment cooler, I will need another fridge or a fermenter that will fit in the little one I have. I expect to put the fermenter on the garage floor. Sometimes fermentations go too fast, and things leak, so I want to make my return to brewing with a safe approach.

In order to be ready on Sunday, I need to make a yeast starter today. I have yeast, so I have to boil some yeast extract in a flask and add yeast. Then I’ll let it ferment until I brew. The more yeast you have when you pitch, the less likely a problem is.

It will be interesting to see how this pans out. I look forward to seeing what the purpose is.

Plus a Much Better Gift

It’s Christmas Eve, and I am all by myself except for Marvin. But don’t pity me. I spent a lot of the day communicating with close friends and my beautiful wife, and I made Marvin and myself a pretty decadent dinner. Now I’ve decided to come here and save the world. I will tell you how to make creme brulee very easily.

My wife loves creme brulee, so I decided I should learn how to make it. The other day, I made my first batch, using a surprisingly clumsy recipe from The New York Times. Even in its withered state, this major metropolitan newspaper has ample resources to find a good creme brulee recipe, and they didn’t do it. There is no way to justify that.

The recipe required me to use a water bath, and that doesn’t work for various reasons. Mainly, it requires you to use tall dishes. Creme brulee should be served in a shallow dish, and the dessert itself should be one inch deep at the very most.

Today I made Caesar salad with homemade croutons and anchovies, potatoes au gratin (sort of), a standing rib roast, and I felt it would be a crime not to have a dessert, hence the creme brulee.

I roasted the beef at 175° on a lark, and it worked beautifully. When it got over 100° inside, I cranked the oven to 550°, and I took the meat out at an internal temperature of 115°. It was nearly perfect. Pink nearly all the way to the edge. Tender. Not that juicy, though. I dry-aged it, and that removes some water. I think that may be a mistake for a roast. Next time, wet aging.

To age it, I salted it and left it in the fridge for something like 10 days. It was wrapped in plastic for the last three or maybe 4 because I was concerned about dryness.

I did something else that was new. I rinsed the excess salt off the raw meat. This turned out to be a great idea. I applied butter and pressed garlic before roasting.

This was not the greatest piece of beef. I cut a steak off of it a week ago, and it was not as juicy or tender as it should have been. Publix always puts rib roasts on sale at this time of year, and that’s why I bought this one. Unfortunately, just about all the roasts I saw at the store lacked real marbling.

Aging it made it tender and flavorful, but I should have wet-aged it to keep it as juicy as possible.

I used the Caesar recipe from Bon Appetit. It’s the best one I’ve found. You still have to increase the lemon juice, Worcestershire sauce, and anchovies to make it work. The recipe calls for canola oil, but I avoid that stuff. I used cheap olive oil.

I took the NYT creme brulee recipe and more or less halved it. I increased the ratios of egg yolks and sugar to everything else. I doubled the vanilla extract. I skipped the water bath and 325° recommendation and baked at 205°.

The texture was perfect. The flavor was intoxicating. Better than restaurant creme brulee. Could not have been better except for the caramelization. I am not all that skillful with a Bernzomatic torch. I may buy an attachment called a Searzall to improve my work. The caramel tasted fine, but the browning looked uneven.

Here you go.

INGREDIENTS

1 cup cream (I used regular whipping cream)
1 teaspoon vanilla extract or fake vanilla extract
pinch salt
3 egg yolks
3/8 cup sugar

Heat your oven to 205°.

Forget all the stuff about heating this or whisking that. Dump everything into a bowl and mix it with a mixer on a fairly low setting so you don’t beat a lot of air into it. You do not want a foamy creme brulee. Just make it smooth and dissolve the sugar.

This makes 4 small servings or two fairly large ones. Your call. Size your dishes appropriately. Fill them up and put them in the oven.

Here is the uncertain part: I think this takes 90 minutes to cook, but I’m not positive, because I kept fooling with it. When it’s not jiggly any more, it’s done. Don’t wait for a knife to come out clean. I don’t think that will ever happen.

When it comes out, sprinkle sugar on top and roast it with a propane or butane torch. You can use a broiler, but they say the results are not as good.

Chill until…chilled.

That’s it. Very simple.

I spent some time thinking about Jesus today. This is his day. Why aren’t we excited about that?

If he had not come down from heaven and endured life in this miserable place for our sake, we would all be going to hell. Heaven was the first Christmas gift. What greater gift is there than eternal salvation in the presence of God and people you love?

I turned on a long Youtube of old Christmas songs. I did not have to deal with any wokeness. I did not have to hear anyone rap about Santa Claus. I didn’t have an elf on my shelf. I didn’t have to sit at a table with vegan killjoys or angry same-sex couples with multicolored hair and vape pens next to their plates. No one lectured me about Christmas being a patriarchal white supremacist holiday. It felt a little bit like Christmas Eve at my grandfather’s house in the 1970’s.

My uncle used to cook a rib roast and potatoes au gratin for everyone, and that’s why I like to do it now.

I say I made potatoes au gratin “sort of” because real potatoes au gratin isn’t really a great dish. I made something a little more like macaroni and cheese with potatoes instead of macaroni.

Next year, I’ll be doing this with my wife, and I hope to have a bunch of guests, as I often have in the past.

Merry Christmas, everybody. I hope you’re with family or friends you love, but even if you’re not, someone loves you, and you can still have the biggest gift of all.

One More Place to Experience Rejection

I hate social media, but I joined Reddit so I could get some help with Starlink. Since then, I have asked a few things about other topics. It’s not always easy to find a forum where you can get information, and Reddit has a lot of specialized groups.

I found out Reddit has a “karma” system, which is offensive, of course, to people who are not Hindus and do not want to be dragged into the Hindu religion. It’s amazing how Hinduism has somehow escaped being labeled a religion. You can talk about karma and do yoga all day and not be accused of promoting a religion when, of course, you are.

Imagine what would happen if Reddit gave people holy points and damnation points and said comments made Jesus smile.

Reddit karma is a social credit system. If people like something you say, they give you a karma point. If not, they give you a negative karma point. If you get enough positive points, you get the privilege of starting groups. If you get enough bad points, your stuff may be put where it’s harder to find, and Reddit has shadowbanning, although I’m not sure if karma is involved in that.

So basically, it’s a system that allows other people to persecute you anonymously. As a result, you feel pressured to say things that make people happy by reinforcing what you perceive to be the existing majority opinion. It pushes you to keep useful information they won’t like to yourself. It makes healthy dissent wither and fosters the overgrowth of disinformation. So it’s a lot like Twitter. And Facebook.

Reddit has confirmed some of my prejudices.

The sad thing about prejudice is that it is usually reinforced by experience. It works, except when a prejudice is based on irrational feelings. Prejudice is generally based on years of observation. It really is a bad idea to go to black neighborhoods at night. It’s a bad idea to start a big STEM company and insist all the engineers be female. It really is dangerous to drive in China.

One of my prejudices is that lots of Internet cooking people are jerks. Boy, did Reddit confirm this. In a food group, said it was a shame known outlets published bad recipes, which it is, and three guttersnipes voted me down without being man enough to say anything.

I don’t know why food people are so hateful, but they really are. The nastiest Internet troll I ever saw, which is saying a great deal, was a food guy who called himself Sheldon Martin. His email address was penmart10@aol.com. I still remember that address, because the things he said were so foul. You can probably find his old postings online. Search for “penmart10@aol.com” and “prolapse.”

I just found some of his material. Take a look at this really mild example.

I won’t dispute your knowlege of pottery, although I seriously doubt it’s been more than remedial, probably an ugly ash tray you once made during a therapy session in a mental institution, but I know with absolute positive certainty you ain’t any kind of cook, ‘specially not a baker.

Some guy disagreed with him, politely, about pizza stones. A lot of his stuff was extremely filthy.

Another valid prejudice: there is no way to deal with Musk fans without facing a wall of insanity. There are people who will praise Tesla and Starlink no matter what. If Starlink satellites went nuts and started shooting gigawatt lasers down into daycare centers, the Muskhive would lunge at the throats of anyone who complained.

I pointed out some bad things Starlink had done, and I got whacked with Hindu demerits. There went my chances of going to Internet Nirvana and getting high with Steve Jobs.

It reminds me of communism. Communists tell people to rat on their neighbors anonymously. They tell kids to do this to their parents, and some do.

I could not resist trying to game the system. I went to a couple of areas and made some comments I knew people would love, and now I have overwhelming credit in the eyes of Krishna Berners-Lee or whatever.

It’s pretty stupid, and it shows how Satan is using the Internet to brainwash us into conformity. I guess I’ll delete my account and start a new one if I ever need Reddit again.

Hack Chef Bests Pros Again

My wife loves creme brulee, so I decided to try to make it. It came out fine, but I learned a few things later.

I used the New York Times recipe, which you can find online. I’ll give the ingredient list.

2 cups heavy or light cream, or half-and-half
1 vanilla bean, split lengthwise, or 1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1/8 teaspoon salt
5 egg yolks
½ cup sugar, more for topping

It doesn’t take a genius. Beat the eggs and sugar together. Forget the bean unless you’re a cork-sniffer. Combine with the cream and salt. Cook. Sprinkle the top with sugar and burn it with a torch.

Now I’ll add my criticisms.

The NYT says to cook at 325°, which is stupid. I did it, and the top of the custard came out with a brown skin. I made some more at 275°, and they looked perfect. Do not cook at 325°. I’m not recommending 275° either, though. See below.

Why do professional cooks publish dumb recipes? So frustrating. Whoever wrote this recipe must have tried it, and if they did, they saw that brown skin. Then they published it anyway.

The NYT says to use a water bath, as you would when making flan. I did this, but it sounded stupid to me. I checked around, and I found a French chef who worked at Le Cirque, saying to cook at 205°. He says to use shallow dishes at a low temperature. A bath is used to prevent uneven heating and curdling, and these things don’t happen with shallow dishes at low temperatures. I plan to take his advice.

My guess is that the high temperature recommendation comes from restaurants where they have to get things done fast. In your home, it doesn’t matter if creme brulee takes a while, so you can do it right.

A lot of recipes say creme brulee should be between 1″ and 2″ deep. This sounds stupid to me. I have had wonderful creme brulee in restaurants, and it was never that deep. If it’s too deep, it overpowers the caramel. The French guy says to keep it shallow so it will cook evenly. I say go for 3/4″.

If restaurants have served me creme brulee in shallow dishes, then clearly, they did not use water baths. It’s nearly impossible to create a big water bath for a whole bunch of shallow dishes and not have water get into everything. Why doesn’t the NYT’s writer know this? Probably does and did not care.

People who publish about food generally care about delivering content and getting checks more than helping people. It reminds me of something Sergei Rachmaninoff said. Someone asked him what one of his pieces was about, and he said something like, “Two hundred dollars.”

I have never been to cooking school, I have never made creme brulee before, and I have already corrected the NYT recipe very substantially. What does that tell you about their standards?

The NYT says to beat the eggs and sugar until they are light. Again, stupid. My creme brulee was nice, but it was too light. Not everything should be light.

Creme brulee has to have a little weight to it. Next time, I will just mix until the sugar dissolves.

Apart from being lighter than I liked, the texture of my creme brulee was flawless. More than I can say for the lumpy creme brulee at Lawry’s in Singapore.

I believe the recipe uses too little egg yolk, too little vanilla, and not enough sugar. Next time, I will use 5/8 cup sugar, 6 yolks, and 1.5 tsp. vanilla.

This recipe makes a ton of creme brulee, by the way. Too much for a normal creme brulee set of 6 dishes. I suggest halving it or even quartering it. I have eaten 6 creme brulees today, and I still have a giant overflow creme brulee in the laundry room fridge.

I used fake vanilla. Taste tests show that most people prefer it to expensive vanilla. I am fooling with it to see what I think. The price difference is unreal.

Fake vanilla supposedly comes from glands on a beaver’s crotch, so that’s the down side. Try not to think about it.

Beaver glands. In your food. Put it out of your mind.

Oh, wait.

WARNING! BLOG POST CONTAINS DISGUSTING INFORMATION ABOUT FOOD YOU EAT. READ WITH CAUTION.

There; that fixed it.

What about burning the sugar? I used a Bernzomatic TS8000, which turns out to be exactly what chefs recommend. I found it clumsy, though. I may get a small butane torch or do what the French guy says to do. He likes to use a heated cast iron disk. I found you can’t pour caramel onto creme brulee from a saucepan. I tried, and you get too much caramel.

Amazon sells creme brulee kits, which are pans with racks that hold little, narrow ramekins in a water bath. Stupid. The ramekins are too narrow, and I don’t want a water bath. I found 8-ounce ceramic dishes about like the ones at Ruth’s Chris. There are a lot of creme brulee dishes out there that hold 4 ounces or 6 ounces. Be real. Nobody wants less than a cup of creme brulee.

Creme brulee is easy, especially if you do it the French way and not the hard way. I guess I’ll make it again tomorrow, confirm that my way is perfect, and then file it away for the future when my wife is here.