How to Pass the Salt While Social Distancing

Teapots pour. Laptops slide. Apples roll. Ping pong balls hover. Mushrooms and carrots rotate into place. An amazing amount of intricate food-themed contraptions come together to Pass the Salt in this collaboration between quirky Rube Goldberg machine creator Joseph’s Machines and chain reaction YouTuber Sprice Machines.

How did the screen-linked machine come together? A lot of fails and adjustments. Joseph Herscher notes, “That mushroom was so annoying because it was drying up and kept changing how it rolled the longer it took to film. Took about 10 takes.”

After you’ve watched the video above, check out Sprice’s Secrets Revealed video. It goes behind the scenes with how the chain reactions were created, including fails, LEGO wheels for laptops and heavy, hacked apples. 

LEGOs Waffle and Coffee Stop-Motion Video

Created with 3,200 photos, YouTuber Bebop cooks up some LEGO waffles and coffee in this stop-motion cooking short film.

Have you ever put melted cheese on your waffles? Or is that butter? Also: Don’t eat your LEGO.

OSU Master Gardener Program's Vegetable Gardening Course is FREE

A lot of folks are suddenly interested in learning how to grow their own food. So, through the end of April, Oregon State's Master Gardener Program is making OSU's online Vegetable Gardening course FREE.

Sign up HERE

Kitchen Gadgets Improved by Design Experience Expert - Epicurious & Dan Formosa

Just how effective is the Slap Chop? Can it be improved? Design and usability expert Dan Formosa takes a look at some common kitchen gadgets, rates them, and attempts to improve their designs.

I really enjoyed watching this with an eye to the accessibility of everyday products. Many of the "unitaskers" Alton Brown is against were designed to make specific tasks easier for disabled people.

*TODO explain how oil test is similar to keyboard testing I do.*

Debunking 5 Minute Crafts - Ann Reardon

Ann Reardon exposes the dangerous fake-news of food and craft videos.

Fancy Sprinkles, Ridiculous and Amazing

A Sampling of Sprinkles

I Scream

Big Vegan Birthday

Animal Crackers

Banana Split

Birthday Balloon

Little Prince

Hop Scotch

Comic Book

Splendid

String Bikini

Firecracker

Grinchmas

Pony Party Purple

Hip-Hop Produces Funky Cheese/Music Affects Aging Cheese Flavor - Smithsonian

From the Smithsonian Magazine:

The creation of good cheese involves a complex dance between milk and bacteria. In a quite literal sense, playing the right tune while this dance unfolds changes the final product’s taste, a new study shows. Denis Balibouse and Cecile Mantovani at Reuters report that hip-hop, for example, gave the cheese an especially funky flavor, while cheese that rocked out to Led Zeppelin or relaxed with Mozart had milder zests.

Read the rest of the article HERE.

Milk Bar's Cake Truffles - Washington Post

How does the team at the award-winning bakery Milk Bar make their delicious cake truffles? Milk Bar founder Christina Tosi demonstrates how you can make them at home with her strawberry-lemon cake truffles recipe. And she makes it look easy: Cake + binder + scooping + coating + crumbs.

Tosi says kids especially enjoy making these, although it can be a great group activity for parties of any age. Fun also means letting yourself be free to try whatever flavor and ingredient combinations you want. “Get creative with what’s in your pantry,” Tosi says.

Need some inspiration? Here are a few ideas to get you going.

• chocolate cake + kirsch + dark chocolate + freeze-dried cherries

• chocolate cake + peanut butter thinned with milk + dark chocolate + ground peanut butter cereal (e.g. Panda Puffs)

• vanilla cake + lemon juice + white chocolate + pistachios

• vanilla cake + caramel sauce + white chocolate + graham crackers

How Do They Do It? Making Rock Candy - Discovery UK

How are hard candies created with messages written within their cores? See how this sugary treat, called ‘rock candy’ in the UK, is poured, pulled, assembled, rolled, stretched, hardened, and cut into pieces in this Discovery UK visit to Spun Candy in London. It’s a clip from the series How Do They Do It?

The magic of this ‘conversation candy’ is in the formation of the large candy letters, the proofreading of the assembled words, and the careful hand-stretching of the warm candy “so that the letters shrink from 3 centimeters tall to just one millimeter.”

How is Victorian Nectar Drop Candy Made?

…and why are lemon drops, cough drops, and fruit drops all called drops?

In this video by Tallahassee, Florida’s Lofty Pursuits artisanal candy makers, we get an up close look at how their restored candy equipment, circa 1848, made (and makes) Victorian era nectar candy drops. Watch the hot sugar roll through the pairs of brass drop rollers into sheets of molded candies…

And the ‘drop’ name? Wait until you see how the candies are separated.

Al Jazeera Street Food World Tour

The Japanese have a word for it: kuidaore, "to eat oneself bankrupt." This has risen to some combination of tradition and aspiration in Osaka, Japan's second-largest city, a former merchant enclave once referred to as the country's "kitchen." You can see exactly what empties Osakan bank accounts on Al Jazeera English's series Street Food. Its episode on the city (part one, part two), embedded above, seeks out the stands that most efficiently cater to the citizenry's characteristic busyness, the source of the freshest sushi around, the barbecue counters of Koreatown, the poisonously-livered fugu fish, the ideally controversial dish that is whale meat, and a range of food writers and critics to lay down some culinary insight. The program finishes its journey with one visit to a culinary academy and another to the poorer side of this Japanese metropolis. Being a Japaneese metropolis with more poverty than most but also one a greater love of eating than most, Osaka has produced street food even among its street people.

There you have the basic form of a Street Food broadcast, each of which takes on a different world city, all of which operate under the theory that the best path into a culture runs through its alleys most dense with comestible commerce. In the episode just above (part one, part two), Montreal's meeting of English and French sensibilities, a slightly uneasy coexistence in the best of times, turns into an all-out ideological conflict on the subject of how to eat. One particularly important skirmish occurs over poutine, the French fry, cheese curd, and gravy dish essential to any investigation of Montreal cuisine. In the episode below (part one, part two), we see the elements of Spanish and Andean eating finally converging on the streets of Lima — aided, in a big way, by flavors brought in by the Peru's many immigrants from Asian. Admittedly, the convergence isn't complete, not will it be until Limeños not of native descent come to enjoy the city's most popular item of street food, with 65 million eaten every year: the guinea pig.

All episodes of Al Jazeera English's Street Food on YouTube:

• Beijing (part one, part two)
• Cairo (part one, part two)
• Fez (part one, part two)
• Jerusalem (part one, part two)
• Kingston (part one, part two)
• Lima (part one, part two)
• London (part one, part two)
• Montreal (part one, part two)
• Nairobi (part one, part two)
• New York (part one, part two)
• Osaka (part one, part two)
• Palermo (part one, part two)
• Zanzibar (part one, part two)

Hayao Miyazaki Shows Us How to Make Instant Ramen

Writer-Director Hayao Miyazaki is renowned for the gorgeousness of his feature length animations, and storylines that combine indigenous Japanese elements with supernatural whimsy. In a world of Disney princesses, let us give thanks for family entertainment in which an eccentric castle roams the countryside on chicken legs, a stink spirit wreaks havoc in a bathhouse, and a fur-lined cat bus transports passengers at top speed.

The first generation of American children to have grown up on Miyazki films - My Neighbor Totoro was released in the States in 1993 - has entered their college years. A portion of them will have eagerly sought out his latest offering, a semi-autobiographical tale directed by his son, Goro. Some will have felt themselves too mature for such fare. Being college students, both groups are likely to be horking down a fair amount of cheap packaged ramen noodles.

As evidenced above, Miyazaki has some pretty specific ideas on what to do with those. Preparing a late night workplace dinner for his Spirited Away team, the great director rivals Good Fellas' sliced garlic maven Paul Sorvino for culinary sang-froid. Stuffing ten blocks of the stuff into a single pot might get an ordinary mortal voted off of Top Chef, but aside from that Miyazaki's staff meal is an excellent, instant tutorial for those interested in souping up low budget, collegiate cuisine.

No Noodles Stop Motion Animation Video - Tyler Nicolson

No Noodles! Small creatures explore and inhabit an even smaller world. A short stop motion film by Tyler Nicolson, music by Chris Adriaanse.

Cookpad, the Largest Recipe Site in Japan, Launches New Site in English

Cookpad bills itself as having the "Best Japanese recipes from the largest cooking community in Japan." And that's not just your usual web site hyperbole. Established back in 1997, Cookpad houses 1.5 million recipes created by a base of 20 million users. And it's now a publicly-traded company on the Tokyo stock exchange. This week, Cookpad did everyone in the Anglophone world a favor by releasing an English-language version of its site. Right now, you can navigate your way through 1,500 recipes and find dishes like Udon with Thick Egg Soup, Very Delicious Stir-fried Tofu with Shimeji Mushrooms, and Pan-Fried Autumn Salmon with Ginger Sauce. And if you're patient, you'll soon find another 30,000 recipes added to the site. It's worth noting that all recipes are translated by humans, not computers, and the translators are apparently compensated for their efforts.

via The Next Web