That doesn't get you such nice videos though, and you won't have to travel to exotic places, and 'molten lava' is so much more sexy than an air boosted forge.
For those interested in a practical method to cook steak with a perfect char + medium rare inside (no lava required), check out immersion cooking (aka sous vide). You can cook a steak edge to edge to exactly your desired doneness, cool it down, then char the outside with a hot skillet or open flame.
This is the only way to cook meat. (Aside from special purpose stuff.) I thought I'd end up using my sous vide maybe once per month and I probably use it three times per week. It's perfect for fish, pork, duck, and of course steak. The best thing is that you can cook chef cuts (like hangar and such) that would otherwise be really tricky to get right.
I generally finish in a cast iron skillet, and haven't seen any need to cool the meat off before the transfer. That's usually a good idea if you aren't going to sear right away, as it prevents bacteria growth from going into overdrive, but isn't strictly necessary to cooking if you're doing everything at once. Then again, I'm not an expert.
I really want to get a good torch though, since skillets are a lousy way to finish bone-in meat since the meat contracts away from the bone.
The Benzomatic takes a long time to develop a good sear. It's fun but not terribly effective in my experience. I should point out that I'm using it with the Searzall.
I've found that the Alton Brown steak method works remarkably well for me. 2 minutes each side in a cast iron skillet over high, and 2 minutes each side in a 400 degree oven on the same skillet. Let rest for 5 minutes after.
Turns out as a nice medium rare, with lots of juices and a great flavor.
This is how we did it in cooking school. In fancy steak houses, they have a broiler with specific heat settings for each steak row and standardized steak thickness (always done at 20min mark). The black and blues are put between two cast iron skillets that were upside down on gas burners set on high.
I do some amateur blacksmithing, and I find the forge to make an excellent steak grill. I live in a wooded area, and use home-made charcoal to forge with instead of coal. With the blower running, the coals can become hot enough to melt steel - then it's simply a matter of turning off the blower (nobody wants ash on their steak), setting the grill grate on the forge, and cooking some meat! I don't generally go for the rare to medium rare, though.
A fireman's shovel in the firebox of a steam locomotive also works well.
Don't do it whilst moving though! When a coal fired locomotive is in full flight, the draft though the firebars (the grate at the bottom of the firebox) is strong enough that the entire fire rises up and floats on a bed of air. Stick a steak in that and it will get sucked though the boiler tubes and out the chimney.
The only method I am familiar with is the method used at Plimouth Plantation - a giant pile of wood buried under earth, tended round the clock for two days.
Isn't "molten lava" redundant? When lava is no longer molten, we just call it "rock".
Anyway, I wonder how the flavor changes with the type of rock that is molten. The article mentions 1.1 billion year old basalt. Why that particular type of rock? Did it just happen to be around? Is basalt easier to melt? Is it easier or safer to handle once molten, or easier to clean up afterward? What would happen if you tried to melt a different type of rock such as granite or marble? Would they produce toxic gases?
Re "molten lava": it's an idiom, probably one to do with "lava" being a surprising word to throw at people in a non-geological context, one they'll suffer a cache miss on. Leading up with "molten" primes them so that they can process "lava" in real time; otherwise they might not "hear" you, and will likely ask you to repeat yourself while their neurons finish firing. (See also, the end of http://lesswrong.com/lw/o1/entropy_and_short_codes/)
"I was walking down Oxford Street and I saw a fellow wearing chaps" implies he's just dressed like an idiot, whereas: "I was walking through King's Cross and I saw somebody wearing assless chaps" implies you're on Oxford St.
It's going to be a major feat of engineering to design a pump for molten lava. That would have been a much bigger technical achievement than roasting a steak with an exotic heat source.
> It's going to be a major feat of engineering to design a pump for molten lava.
I thought you could at least have some kind of primitive rotating water-wheel-like mechanism and a circular flow with the pot integrated along the way.
> Water has a density of 1000 kg/m3 and a viscosity of 0.00089 Pascal-seconds.
> Lava has a density of 3100 kg/m3 and a viscosity of 100-1000 Pascal-seconds.
> most of the red-hot lava pictures in movies [are] likely basaltic lava at ~1,100 to 1,200°C (for comparison, your oven on broil is ~275°C)
The general lesson here is that meat is much less dense than rock (astounding, I know) and that the more possible it is to penetrate a lava flow, the more likely that lava flow is to incinerate you just for being nearby. A steak that you managed to submerge in lava would most likely go through some combination of burning to a crisp and exploding (as any water within it rapidly vaporized).
And that's exactly what it is: liquid stone that can be poured at room temperature. And if you add some rebar the compound material can have some pretty good tensile properties too.
Ugly -> taste, Rough -> you can have concrete with arbitrary levels of polish all the way up to shiny smooth if you finish it right, crumbling is a property common to all crystalline materials including all the stones found in nature, with the exception of some precious stones with incredible hardness.
That's why stones tend to be round, erosion gets the better of them over time. Concrete takes a long time to really set (depending on the thickness of the pour: up to centuries!) but can be used relatively quickly after the pouring in a load bearing construction.
And even if you don't particularly like the material, in the end it is what you can make out of it that is ugly or beautiful (Compare a bunker with say the CN Tower in Toronto or the Sydney Opera).
For the general use case of 'poured stone' concrete does quite well.
51 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 114 ms ] threadhttp://www.dolphinbayhilo.com/cook.html
http://rebuildingcivilization.com/content/how-hot-can-you-ge...
(apologies for the link source)
That doesn't get you such nice videos though, and you won't have to travel to exotic places, and 'molten lava' is so much more sexy than an air boosted forge.
I generally finish in a cast iron skillet, and haven't seen any need to cool the meat off before the transfer. That's usually a good idea if you aren't going to sear right away, as it prevents bacteria growth from going into overdrive, but isn't strictly necessary to cooking if you're doing everything at once. Then again, I'm not an expert.
I really want to get a good torch though, since skillets are a lousy way to finish bone-in meat since the meat contracts away from the bone.
If you want to do the torch thing, you should look into the "searzall" attachment.
One in return: I've found that vacuum sealing meat when it's somewhat frozen helps maintain its shape.
Turns out as a nice medium rare, with lots of juices and a great flavor.
Don't do it whilst moving though! When a coal fired locomotive is in full flight, the draft though the firebars (the grate at the bottom of the firebox) is strong enough that the entire fire rises up and floats on a bed of air. Stick a steak in that and it will get sucked though the boiler tubes and out the chimney.
The only method I am familiar with is the method used at Plimouth Plantation - a giant pile of wood buried under earth, tended round the clock for two days.
http://blog.medellitin.com/2010/08/sous-vide-historical-note...
Anyway, I wonder how the flavor changes with the type of rock that is molten. The article mentions 1.1 billion year old basalt. Why that particular type of rock? Did it just happen to be around? Is basalt easier to melt? Is it easier or safer to handle once molten, or easier to clean up afterward? What would happen if you tried to melt a different type of rock such as granite or marble? Would they produce toxic gases?
http://www.amazon.com/The-Sense-Style-Thinking-Persons/dp/06...
I thought you could at least have some kind of primitive rotating water-wheel-like mechanism and a circular flow with the pot integrated along the way.
If there's a sweet spot between time to solidify, thickness of steak, and not burned to a gristle all the way through, it would be a great meal.
There's a series of articles in wired discussing basically this question:
http://www.wired.com/2011/12/the-right-and-wrong-way-to-die-...
http://www.wired.com/2012/01/can-you-walk-on-lava-falling-in...
From the first:
> Water has a density of 1000 kg/m3 and a viscosity of 0.00089 Pascal-seconds.
> Lava has a density of 3100 kg/m3 and a viscosity of 100-1000 Pascal-seconds.
> most of the red-hot lava pictures in movies [are] likely basaltic lava at ~1,100 to 1,200°C (for comparison, your oven on broil is ~275°C)
The general lesson here is that meat is much less dense than rock (astounding, I know) and that the more possible it is to penetrate a lava flow, the more likely that lava flow is to incinerate you just for being nearby. A steak that you managed to submerge in lava would most likely go through some combination of burning to a crisp and exploding (as any water within it rapidly vaporized).
Like 3d printing but with stone. I guess the next years will figure this years and we'll go all neoclassical with granite statues, pylons and stuff.
And that's exactly what it is: liquid stone that can be poured at room temperature. And if you add some rebar the compound material can have some pretty good tensile properties too.
That's why stones tend to be round, erosion gets the better of them over time. Concrete takes a long time to really set (depending on the thickness of the pour: up to centuries!) but can be used relatively quickly after the pouring in a load bearing construction.
And even if you don't particularly like the material, in the end it is what you can make out of it that is ugly or beautiful (Compare a bunker with say the CN Tower in Toronto or the Sydney Opera).
For the general use case of 'poured stone' concrete does quite well.