Aleric
@Aleric@lemmy.world
- Comment on CFCs 8 months ago:
Citation: Rectally Sourced Science.
- Comment on What can we do when something is too vast to provide representative examples for? 8 months ago:
I appreciate the sentiment, but I don’t even know if I have a soul. I’ll probably find out in the next thirty years.
I worry about the capacity for the religious to engage in active critical thinking, something that is necessary for a thriving, functional society but needs to be -at least temporarily- suspended to be religious, but I’m generally not going to debate theists over that point because it’s disrespectful of their beliefs. It’s also completely fruitless and frustrating to engage in debates with someone whose arguments aren’t grounded in observable, testable phenomena. They’ll always “win” because they can make up whatever they want.
Anyhow, we largely leave you alone, please leave us alone too. We’d appreciate it. With that being said, feel free to go in Galilee guns blazing on any atheists who give you shit.
- Comment on What can we do when something is too vast to provide representative examples for? 8 months ago:
LOL. Why would you care to debate atheists? Assuming you follow an Abrahamic religion, you have your bipolar sky wizard with his bizarre, inconsistent mythos, while we have standards of evidence for what we believe.
While we do poke fun at the religious, most of us ultimately don’t care what you believe. We do care about the batshit actions taken by the ostensibly religious to enforce their personal beliefs on others, presented in the guise of religion.
- Comment on Not hiding it 8 months ago:
The difference is they choose whichever context lets them play the victim.
- Comment on Not hiding it 8 months ago:
I hate to break it to you, but the ongoing Palestinian genocide puts the Israelis on par with Nazis. Feel free to pretend otherwise, but they both were/are a group justifying killing another group based on their religion/ethnicity with the underlying true purpose of taking their land and possessions while consolidating political power.
- Comment on Anime pfps rise up 8 months ago:
Fucking tsundere.
- Comment on Headlines be like 10 months ago:
Because they were brainwashed into believing they’re somehow valuable and a good investment that retains its value, despite them actually being neither of those.
- Comment on To prevent mashed potatoes from being gummy, boil the potatoes whole. 10 months ago:
Great question. Osmosis will be minimal when the total concentration of solutes in the potato’s cells matches the total concentration of solutes outside of the potato’s cells.
The problem here is twofold. First, the solute concentration in the potato is quite high as it’s low moisture and is comprised of starches, sugars, minerals, and other cell contents, so you need a ton of salt in the water to match the total concentration. Second, even if the solute concentrations are equal, making your boiling water an isotonic solution, you still have to deal with simple diffusion. The cooking process is blowing up cell walls, so some starch is going to migrate out while salt moves in to take its place. By mass, you don’t need to add much salt to a potato to make it unpalatable. You’d probably be alright with a whole potato but cut up potato pieces would end up really salty.
- Comment on To prevent mashed potatoes from being gummy, boil the potatoes whole. 10 months ago:
Unless you’re salting so heavily that the end product is inedible, it shouldn’t make a big difference. You’d need a pretty high salt concentration to make the water isotonic or hypertonic when compared to the potato.
- Comment on To prevent mashed potatoes from being gummy, boil the potatoes whole. 10 months ago:
Ahhh, the old “I offended someone on the Internet when I made fun of them, so I made fun of them again then blamed them for all it when they said something”.
At first I figured you were just being an asshole. It happens, people have bad days or phrase things poorly. Then you proved you weren’t just being an asshole - you actually ARE an asshole.
- Comment on To prevent mashed potatoes from being gummy, boil the potatoes whole. 10 months ago:
I now see my mistake: I made a post that addresses a problem that you’ve never had and failed to remember that the world is no greater than your experience. I clearly am the worst kind of person and deserve your criticism.
My thanks also for your public service of mocking people trying to be helpful or educational on the Internet. You truly exemplify how actions taken by those in anonymity speak volumes of their character.
- Comment on To prevent mashed potatoes from being gummy, boil the potatoes whole. 10 months ago:
Imagine being such a pathetic person that, presumably as an adult, you think it’s cool to mock people on the Internet.
- Comment on To prevent mashed potatoes from being gummy, boil the potatoes whole. 10 months ago:
Aww, thanks! It’s by far the most Lemmy thing I’ve ever done.
- Comment on To prevent mashed potatoes from being gummy, boil the potatoes whole. 10 months ago:
We cater to our strengths now. I cook and organize, she cleans.
- Comment on To prevent mashed potatoes from being gummy, boil the potatoes whole. 10 months ago:
I never thought I’d open such a can of potato tuberworms. To be fair, I also overthink potatoes and just about damn near everything else too.
- Comment on To prevent mashed potatoes from being gummy, boil the potatoes whole. 10 months ago:
Just to preface, I’m actively trying to not be the “well, ackshally” guy. I’m just really passionate about potatoes and potato education. Really just science education but potatoes are science, dammit.
The part you quoted, when in the context of the rest of the post, describes how boiling them whole specifically allows you to leave them in the pot without them getting soggy. You can leave them in there for an extended length of time as the amount of water they’ll absorb relative to their total volume is minimal due to the low surface area to volume ratio, plus the intact skin severely reduces the rate of water absorption.
Here’s where the well ackshally avoidance part is important. I have an MSc in botany, so I took a lot of plant physiology courses, plus I wrote a paper about this as a “fuck you” response to a stupid assignment by an asshole professor. The following is a crash course on potato science, no one is under no obligation to read it.
It’s not overcooking itself that causes soggy taters. When you cook a potato, the starch absorbs water and swells. When you cook a whole potato, the amount of water available is rather limited as potatoes are low moisture tubers, so the starch can only absorb as much water as is available in the tater itself. When boiled whole, the periderm (skin) maintains the structure of the potato, keeping it from breaking apart, and limits the amount of water that can be absorbed into the pith, the starchy interior. The latter is actually one of the primary natural functions of the skin. The total moisture content of a boiled whole potato is shockingly close to its raw state. Don’t believe me? Weigh a few whole taters using a decent scale, boil them for an hour, then weigh them again. It’ll be damn near the same. That’s one of the perks of cooking them my way - I can add more milk and butter without them getting soggy.
When you cut potatoes up, the starch can maximally swell as it has practically unlimited access to water, plus vastly more surface area, increasing the rate of water absorbtion. Since the skin no longer maintains the shape of the potato, small fissures appear as the structure of the pith begins to degrade. These further increase the surface area, consequently increasing water absorbtion even more, which further increases pith degradation. It’s this excessive water absorption by starch that leads to a gluey consistency and being cut up facilitates absorbtion through these mechanisms. This is also why wax potatoes are more resistant to falling apart than floury potatoes when boiled, as the starch content of a wax potato is much lower. Side note: I actually prefer a 1:1 ratio of wax to floury potatoes in my mash.
A way to test and verify is to boil up some spuds using your preferred method and mash them as normal, but add a fair bit more than normal of hot water, milk, or another primarily water based liquid, i.e., not cream or butter. You’ll end up with a gluey tater paste.
- Comment on To prevent mashed potatoes from being gummy, boil the potatoes whole. 10 months ago:
To be totally transparent, I never had gummy mash until my wife and I got together. She used to boil her potatoes, let them sit in the hot water until closer to dinner, then whip them with beaters. She’s from Ireland, I joke that the potato blight was a failed preemptive strike to prevent her from ever touching a potato.
- Comment on To prevent mashed potatoes from being gummy, boil the potatoes whole. 10 months ago:
I think the only SMH worthy shit here is you being needlessly critical and condescending. Take your bad attitude out on someone else.
SMH
- Submitted 10 months ago to youshouldknow@lemmy.world | 74 comments
- Comment on Hyperloop One to Shut Down After Failing to Reinvent Transit 10 months ago:
So just a continuation of the motor vehicle industry sabotaging public transportation so people have to buy more vehicles.
Capitalist ‘innovation’ at its finest!
- Comment on Hyperloop One to Shut Down After Failing to Reinvent Transit 10 months ago:
I saw it not coming at Hyperloop speeds!
- Comment on I wish someone would flush already... 11 months ago:
What I think is nuts is how many people see all this and still don’t get it. For example, my neighbor is a conservative voter and he still LOVES Elon. He sees Elon as intelligent, industrious, and successful simply because he has lots of money. He doesn’t care that Elon has repeatedly shown that he basically just won the millionaire’s lottery and used his familial apartheid riches to make more money but way more than your average millionaire might, more than anything because of luck. Nope.
- Comment on I wish someone would flush already... 11 months ago:
I mean, Elon is there already. Do you need him twice?
/s
- Comment on Google Promises Unlimited Cloud Storage; Then Cancels Plan; Then Tells Journalist His Life’s Work Will Be Deleted Without Enough Time To Transfer The Data 11 months ago:
Here’s the article. It’s because he booked under a false name a few times. He had unlimited flights for himself and a companion, it’s beyond me why he didn’t do everything in his power to not give American Airlines a reason to void his ticket.
- Comment on Etsy lays off 225 workers after ‘essentially flat’ sales, says CEO | Business 11 months ago:
It’s entirely possible they don’t have either of those things. It’s a pretty new website, I only learned about it awhile back thanks to Lemmy.
- Comment on Etsy lays off 225 workers after ‘essentially flat’ sales, says CEO | Business 11 months ago:
There is but I can’t remember the name. I actually read about it here on Lemmy. It was run by sellers and new sellers could get in on running the site by buying in or selling a certain amount of things. Searching for it online yields a seemingly endless list of bullshit articles
reporting onpromoting Amazon Handmade, so I’m not having any luck. Maybe someone else will read this and remember. - Comment on Ifixit gives fairphone 5 a 10/10 on repairability and maintanence 11 months ago:
Hitting the dirt and dog food goal really is the biggest factor for case replacement in my house.
- Comment on How Reddit Crushed the Internet's Largest Protest 11 months ago:
I was just on Reddit for the first time in awhile and all of my old subs, which are mostly niche interests, aren’t doing too well. There are far fewer quality posts and lots of spam. I was getting Facebook vibes.
- Comment on If Creators Suing AI Companies Over Copyright Win, It Will Further Entrench Big Tech 11 months ago:
Watching you leap hard to the left to completely miss the point, followed by insulting the OP because you didn’t understand their post, is just the height of Internet buffoonery.
- Comment on Back in my day 11 months ago:
I had the same issue with Barney. I got the chicken pox at 16. The older you are, the sicker chicken pox tends to make you. I was super sick, to where I was hallucinating at one point.
A couple of days in, I probably should have been at the hospital, so of course my mom was leaving me at home by myself to go to work. She turned the TV on and just left without checking the channel. It was PBS and some sort of Barney programming block was on. Hours of Barney. Hours. The TV’s remote was long broken and I was too sick to walk, so I just watched that singing, dancing purple fuck.
On the bright side, I can do a great Barney impression. I sometimes do it randomly when I tell my wife I love her.