Comment by messe

3 days ago

Excellent article. "Tradwife futurism" is a brilliant term.

I'm worried I'm going to burn a hole in my wallet searching for a pyroceram skillet that I'll end up using for a week and then forget about it.

I’m suddenly in desperate need of a pyroceram skillet too. I’d love to be able to make proper cheeseburgers with grilled onions one at a time without using a stove or grill.

On the other hand my brother in law got himself one of those smokers that burns wood pellets. I could buy one of those and eat nothing but smoked pork shoulder for the rest of my life.

  • Yeah, I now need a pyroceram skillet too!

    But as the solo meat-eater human in my apartment, I ended up buying a gas-canister camping grill to barbecue steaks on my terrace on weekends and then I reheat the rare steaks through the week in the microwave. They get the Maillard reaction and flavor, they get to the correct doneness point when blasted with RF later on.

    Cats get happy with the barbecuing, I also grill mushrooms and tofu for my wife and it’s very easy to clean afterwards.

    • Coleman stove. Mine lives in the back of my elderly Range Rover along with the recovery gear, a kettle, some dixies, and some basic staples (tea, coffee, aeropress, instant noodles). I've always got a few litres of drinking water, and in any case I live in Scotland where you're generally not terribly far from perfectly drinkable water that's just sitting right there on the ground often spilling majestically over rocks and waterfalls which are slippy as hell when you go to fill the dixies and which you will get to experience right up close, considerably closer than you intended.

      There is nothing like sitting on the tailgate up at a remote hilltop site on a pleasant spring day, drinking a cup of tea outside in the sunshine while you wait for the third attempt at a firmware recovery on a radio repeater to finish, contemplating chucking some sausages on for lunch.

      Except, possibly, sitting inside the transmitter shed has it gets buffeted by storm winds listening to the rain battering against the roof and drinking a nice hot cup of cocoa as you wait for the 17th attempt at a firmware recovery to finish.

      And if you run out of the expensive special magic Coleman fuel, it runs just as well on mogas so you can pop the inlet hose off the injector rail, scoosh some into the stove tank, and get right on back to cooking your dinner.

      Me? No, I'm going to be out on site all day long, I won't be in your Teams call. Tell you what, want to come with? It'll be good for you to see some of the hardware in use. Grab a steak or something to do for lunch.

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    • I do not care much about the Maillard flavor, so even when I was using a gas grill I was using the kind with indirect heating, where the grill is enclosed in a box that has one opening on the bottom, where you put the flame. The opening is laterally from the grill, not under it, and it has a wall separating the grill from the flame.

      With such a grill, the meat is cooked only by the hot air that comes from the flame without contact with something at higher temperatures, so the meat is browned only moderately at most.

      Nowadays, I can cook meat in a microwave oven in a way that makes it pretty much equivalent with the meat cooked using that kind of grill with indirect heating.

      I cut the meat in bite-sized pieces and I put them in a glass vessel covered by a glass lid, without adding water or anything else, except salt and seasonings spread on the meat.

      Then I cook the meat in the microwave oven, using a low power, e.g. 400 W, and long times, e.g. 20 to 25 minutes for chicken meat and around 30 minutes for turkey meat.

      I consider that meat cooked in this way has an optimum taste, but of course preferences vary.

  • >Pyroceram is a specialized,, white or slightly amber-tinted, opaque glass-ceramic developed by Corning in the 1950s, known for extreme thermal shock resistance and high-temperature tolerance up to 1292 ∘ F It has near-zero thermal expansion, making it ideal for cookware, cooktops, wood stove doors, and, historically, missile nosecones.

    Didn’t expect the missile nosecone.

    • Inbound anecdote.

      Dad worked for Corning; when they hired him, he bought a house one town over. It came with a Corning electric range in the kitchen. This was effectively four electrical resistance grids embedded in a giant sheet of pyroceram.

      Like an induction cooktop, there is no visible indication that the "burners" are "lit", unless you looked at the control panel off to the side.

      Somewhat like an induction cooktop, only certain cookware was compatible with it. Luckily, the primary requirement was "the bottom needs to be flat". You might be surprised at the number of pots which have concave bottoms... or develop them over time.

      UNlike an induction cooktop, it does get up to arbitrarily high blackbody temperatures.

      Pretty much every accident you can think of synthesizing from these conditions occurred. Nobody in my family would ever buy one. (I love lots of other Corning products.)

      Oh, and as for the easy-to-clean surface? Very true... as long as you ignore the case of scorched proteins. Anything else, you wait for everything to cool and then wipe it with a slightly soapy sponge, then mop with a damp cloth. I don't remember the night the grey scorchmark appeared, but it lasted about fifteen years. Then Dad sold the house.

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The skillet sounds cool but I'd rather not have to deal with a microwave door and control panel for searing stuff. I do, however, frequently use it in ways that others find unconventional:

- Cooking dry goods (quinoa, freekeh, couscous)

- Single-serving coffee mug surprises (omelettes, protein brownies)

- Low-carb cheese crisps (via parchment paper)

- Not-fried rice (day-old rice, light sesame oil, soy sauce, bits of egg, leftover veggies, random seasonings)

- Frozen breaded chicken (wrap really well in paper towels to absorb moisture, overshoot on time, unwrap as soon as they're out to avoid sticking - they come out like 66% as crispy as using a convection oven)

I do draw the line at pasta because the texture never seems quite right when you boil it in the microwave.

  • For pasta: you can make it fresh so it only needs 2-3 minutes to cook, boil water in the microwave, and cook the pasta itself in that heated water (ie, on the counter as it cools from boiling). Like making instant ramen, but fresh pasta — throw in a stock cube and you can serve in the bowl you cook the pasta in.

  •     > they come out like 66% as crispy as using a convection oven
    

    Can you throw them in an air fryer for the last few mins to achieve 100% crispiness but in much less time?

Very readable. Loved it. Perfect for the too online tech audience and brings magic of 70s/80s futurism with a nod to current AI and Cryptocurrency freaks with the use of "Maximalists". If you are a Gen X geek this is really fun read.

Amazon will be happy to sell you a less impressive, but also less "rare historical artifact" microwave browning dish for $20 or so.