The Science Geek Kitchen

It’s the first weekend of what we would call the beginning of late Fall in this territory. The glimpse of the mostly denuded trees, and the past two days’ drizzle has snuffed out the fizzle for anything more adventurous that I may have had in mind. I’m definitely done with dealing with cooking projects for a while. The freezer is full now, and I ran out of containers. I’m starting to putter about with the chore of packing away some my summer apparel and utilities. I get to see just how well the hammock frame I built in spring optimally tucks away with a minimum of space consumed in a closet once it’s disassembled. I’m also mulling over a design in my head for simple collapsible wood crib that I can construct for storing a larger stash of fire wood with the remaining scraps of short planks I have left over from that last project; reclaiming more space given my deck’s limited girth. I’ll be (at least I hope I’ll be) a lot more active this winter than I was for the last one. Given the observations I was making through my depressing infirmity and forced idleness and confinement through last winter, I thought I should do some planning on improving my home’s interior. The hammock project was an eye-opener as to how I essentially doubled my sleeping space with minimalism and modular component fabrication. Unlocking and freeing up space while making the most out of storage is a theme that has become a real mindworm for me.

I watched a bit of a “tiny home” marathon the other day on HGTV; studying the brilliant means and methods some people are using to get the maximum benefit out of a minimal space. That fuelled me with a bit of inspiration as well, and reminded me that I’m still ultimately the master my little realm, and that I’m fortunate enough to have the space that I do, such as it is. My office and kitchen are the biggest targets when it comes to wanting to create effective usage of storage and space, each room with their own different respective issues. I’m concentrating on my kitchen first, as it is that place of the two rooms in my dwelling that is used most and has the greatest play with possibly conserving energy. I also think ahead to the future in terms of what will change socially and environmentally for this region, and how one should prepare for that. I speculate the following things:

·         Population growing faster than the infrastructure is to support it. Resource drains or taking things offline to rectify the problems may be more frequent.

·         Water becoming scarcer, as the city expands, or if droughts become more frequent, and more advisories to conserve water are more likely to happen. Water utility bills go up.

·         Energy costs in general going up, that is if we don’t make a better effort to exploit solar and other alternative energy sources.

·         More costs for waste disposal as our landfill areas become overtaxed. More costs for disposal, waste quotas, and then subsequent penalties for excessive household refuse.

To cope with dealing with those things in the future, it is best to practice and get into the habit of preparing for them now.

Overall, the trend of today in this city, as elsewhere, is having new houses being built with fewer people living in them, and having ever more expansive kitchens where people are generally doing less and less cooking in them. Some people who think they know me would guess that a big kitchen is one thing that I would dream for and covet, but to be honest it isn’t. It may impress others, but not me. It’s a pathetic irony and a stunning inefficacy and burden for me to see: all this wasted space just to be used for mostly just opening tins of soup, making sandwiches, or using a counter to throw take out containers on, because no one seems to have actual time to do real cooking anymore. They are elsewise too busy trying to build and secure a high paying career to pay a sky-high mortgage, which includes this feature kitchen that only serves to be a white elephant. I reflect back on the days of watching my Mom do the crazy amount and output of cooking and food processing that she did in our simple little  kitchen when we lived on the farm: one that was spatially about as big as mine is, if not relatively smaller. I suppose it served as a good example as how to manage my own. In the past few years, in terms of my culinary talent, I have been growing in both skill and desire for more daring experiments on the wild and radical side of food and prep techniques. I now feel a stronger need to set up a proper kitchen space that logically reflects that. Mentally, I’ve been putting a wrecking ball through it, and trying to figure out how to make things ideal from the floor up.

The elements of time and energy constraints for single occupants are also the variables in the equation of my idea of a perfect and efficient kitchen space that are often overlooked by architects and designers. Being reduced to the sole manpower of a single occupant doubles or triples maintenance and cleaning time and labour. Having a larger kitchen space is senseless; keeping a smaller, efficient, better organized one is an absolute must. The only sound reason for needing to have the kitchen size that I do have is the fact that I do a lot of home brewing. Unfortunately, the processing and storage of large quantities of liquids/alcohol consumes relatively a lot of space. I also have some stranger things that most other single men wouldn’t think of getting, like pickling jars and canning pots. I do the best I can with what I have, but I’m not exempting myself from trying to learn more about things that I could do to improve. I have a lot established already. To watch me operate my dwelling’s kitchen, my methods most look pretty eccentric or radical compared to most other average bachelors’ homes. No matter how radical it seems, my method in my BACHELOR kitchen (as mentioned in an earlier post, about another episode of kitchen space reclamation) most certainly edges toward the practical and scientific for the sake of all dimensions of time/space/energy/cost efficiency. Here is what I mean:  

Steam and Pressure – For making flavourful concentrated broths in a fraction of the time instead of conventional boiling and reduction, nothing beats a pressure cooker. I love this thing. It’s great for small scale canning also, using a tenth of the water volume and less than a quarter of the time to sterilize and seal jars compared to conventional boiling immersion method. I’m surprised that, despite the more modern built-in safety features that they are now crafted with, there are a few professional chefs out there who are still too chicken shit to use these things. They do require a bit of close-up monitoring, hard to do in a busy and distraction loaded commercial kitchen I guess, I’ll give them that. Mine cooks at a pressure of 10 atmospheres before bleeding out steam, equating to

So far, I’ve been lucky and
 nothing has yet went KABOOM!!!

about 100 metres under water below sea level at 16.5 degrees Celsius (coincidentally, my preferred room temperature).  It scores big with me for the factors of reduced time, hence reduced kilowatt hours, and ultimately good if you are genuinely concerned about conserving/rationing water (see further below about emergency preparedness). I always thought that in terms of giving true aid to people in third world countries, education and technology is sometimes better than straight up food and healthcare. I think of the scene of the Nepal earthquakes in the recent past as an example. In such impoverished high altitude zones with inclement climates and scarce growth, in like the Andes or Himalayas, where you have to burn more fuel for reaching adequate cooking temperatures using water at those altitudes, aide should entail air dropping pressure cookers to these remote places. The problem in such regions sometimes isn’t a question of a shortage of food, but a scarcity of wood or other sufficient combustible material for cooking and preserving it properly (to prevent disease), which leads to wastages and then the consequential shortages. Another problem is difficulty to access to water if there is no convenient infrastructure to get it directed to homes. Using less water, and less time to boil it, means less energy to use. Less cooking time plus wasting less water means less trekking to get a sufficient amount of it. Children are often used for such tasks, hauling water and collecting sticks and animal dung to burn for fuel, and if the labour of subsistence and toiling for essentials becomes greater than time for schooling, these kids are becoming more deprived of an education. Having a simple pressure cooker in such households could help limit all that. Just a theory of mine. 

The quintessential wok with bamboo steamers. A good ploy for
maximizing verticle space while reducing the work of
four burners into one Depending on what I steam, my trick is to
collect the drippings, and cook Ramen or Udon noodle soup
 in the wok's water while I steam the other goodies above it.  

Chinese (Asian) Practices and Methods – I don’t mean to specifically stereotype the Chinese, or to stigmatize them; I am referring to any of the kitchen practices of the people of the Far East Asian nations living in modernity (South Korea, Japan, Singapore, etc.) who live with the stresses of over-population, and yet can produce amazing things with limited space and resources. I just assume that the Chinese, the ones with the largest population, who have historically endured more adversities involving invasions and war, famine, and more recently, shortages/rationing wrought by the Maoist regime and overcrowded urban living, have had a longer time and a lot of practice in adapting, and even prospering with such restrictions than anyone else of that region. Learning from the solutions they have created to endure such ordeals seems rather relevant. In Korea, a typical “large” kitchen is probably runs between a half and a third of the size of mine. And then there is Japan: a place where they invented capsule hotels, and have formed and grown cubic watermelons* for ease of shipping and storage. In places like the Shinjuku district in Tokyo, there are entire sushi and cocktail bars squeezed into spots that are less than the size of my kitchen and dining area combined. Going that small is a bit ludicrous and nothing to really aspire to, but therein are the lessons of reducing the need for more single-purpose small appliances for food prep, exploiting more vertical space on one cooking spot (like with the steamer), learning few more of their fancy cutting tricks with my BSFCC (big sharp fuckin’ Chinese cleaver) and using overall less of energy and space. Using all that with current surface area of the counter that I have makes for a more comfortable and effective theatre of operation. 
 

It looks like a collection of
parasitic round worm
specimens from a high school
biology lab, but it's actually
shredded parsnips pickled in
lime, ginger, and garlic

Incubation Environment- I have already expounded enough on how fermenting and pickling at home is for the greater good in stopping needless waste. My kitchen is a fermentation kitchen, meaning that I have to make it easy to sanitize and control the temperature accordingly to make my critters in the carboys, crocks, and jars do their job happily. A cluttered kitchen with hard to clean surface areas is a no-no. There is to be a minimal of any decorative things in here, because all they do is collect dust and thus the kind of crap that would risk contaminating and infecting my living cultures. The larger the kitchen space, the harder it is to be able to prevent this. The kitchen garbage containment is purposely left small, so that it is taken out more frequently to prevent the invasion of mold and fry fruits.

Emergency Rations – If you truly have any scientific/rational mind at all, then you should always be grounded in the reality that some natural disaster at some time has the potential of popping up at any given moment, depriving you of the conveniences that you are commonly used to. Keeping, at the very least, four days of worth of canned food and hydrating fluid around the place for God-only-knows-what kind of shit-storm you may have to deal with (thinking of a worst case scenario of a really bad long weekend when emergency services might be delayed: from a Friday to a Monday). It’s rare that any severe weather related impacts last beyond that. In my region around my home, things like mega-lightning storms, or possibly a tornado, or an ice storm/blizzard, or super-cold snap that knocks out the power, creates water line breaks, and makes it too fierce to navigate outside safely are the most likely weather scenarios that could keep me homebound and stranded. A good measure is having food around that is pre-processed, nutritious, and doesn’t require power to cook it, or some means available that allows you to cook and boil water without electricity, like using a portable butane burner/camping stove (with extra gas canisters) like I have. The water reserve system I have is unique and practical (hint, it doesn’t require me being stupid and buying and storing bottled water, and involves stuff that I can recycle at home for no money), but I’ll elaborate on that another time when it becomes topical.

Nesting Bowls – In a smaller kitchen, my adage of “If it don’t nest, it don’t pass the test” applies.
This ten bowl set here has a collective total capacity of 14 litres (depending on what’s in it, flour/dough can pile up; liquid doesn’t). It all tucks away within a 0.005 m³ space. Packing things within things, like a set of Russian matryoshka dolls, is my more favoured way of organizing and freeing space.

Inert Energy Food Storage – I always have dried foods or canned foods around and keep them in reasonable plenitude. Pantry space for that is always important. They can not only serve as emergency rations, but the other nice feature about them is that they don’t need any more power to keep them preserved, unlike relying on a fridge or freezer. Dehydrated food is shrunk and thus economizes on space. Jars are reusable. Buying bulk food to fill them is cheaper, reduces packaging, and is ultimately better for the planet. 

Ferro-Magnetic Induction –This latest little acquisition of mine is the new boss in town out of all my

 

small appliances: a portable induction cooktop. It’s a misnomer to call it a burner, because it itself emits no heat. The only heat on the surface of the cooker is that which is absorbed from the cooking pot. It can bring a litre of water to a full boil up to eight minutes faster than the highest setting on my conventional electric coil burner on the stove top, with less power! It’s even faster at boiling water than my electric kettle. I’ll have more precise digital temperature control when heating stuff in a range below boiling for culturing. It’s perfect of singles like me who only are only cooking with one pot or pan anyway. To put it bluntly, my electric range is a piece of shit in comparison, and microwave ovens never heat evenly. I’m curious to see how many kWh will be peeled of my next utility bill as I use this thing more frequently instead of my regular stove. It’s easier to clean, greener, super-efficient, safer to use with safeguard technology programmed in it, and plus it’s just cool to say that I can cook with freakin’ magnetism. No self-respecting science geek gourmand should be without one. However, because it functions with magnetic fields, it only works with iron or stainless steel cookware. See next point.

Iron (or Stainless Steel) –I will keep only cast iron or stainless steel in my kitchen, and avoid the fancy-schmancy pots and pans with non-stick coatings as much as I can. When those coatings chip, flake, or get scraped off because SOME ASSHOLE WAS USING A METAL UTENSIL ON THEM!!!!!, destroying the surface and thus depleting it of its purpose**, they obviously get into our food, and they are proving to be toxic compounds. More and more studies are suggesting that these “state-of-the-art” pan-coating chemicals are linked with things like certain cancers and creating obesogens: compounds that trigger cellular metabolisms to produce more adipose tissue. I’m more prone to being genetically predisposed to obesity as it is, and I need no extra help from that shit. Once the coating is gone, they are useless and need to be scrapped, therefore wasteful, adding another toxic thing into a landfill. A good cast iron or stainless steel pot or pan will last longer than I will if treated and seasoned right. In general, it’s probably a good idea just to avoid space age coatings, plus plastics all together for stirring and serving utensils too. If you wouldn’t eat a cheap plastic spoon for fear of it being somehow toxic to you, then you shouldn’t be dipping and gradually dissolving bits of it into your hot food while it cooks. There are already warnings about microwaving food in plastic containers. A metal spoon/ladle or spatula will last longer many times longer with only a slightly higher relative cost. Wood or bamboo are other options too if one is into cheap and renewable.

**Nothing screams out attention to detail for conserving and efficiently using space than using science to take a thing that naturally grows round and making it square.

**-You know who you are, person(s) at work (no names mentioned)!