That tannery is a subsidiary of red wing boots, so I bet it’s really high quality. I’ve had stuff made from leather that looks like/sounds like that. I think it’s just completely full-grain that hasn’t been pre-“broken in”, so it feels really stiff compared to a lot of cheaper products that beat it up ahead of time so it looks right out of the box. It’s should take on a really nice patina.

Good news on the waterbottle pockets, though. Too many companies put them on bags assuming we are all still carrying around tiny bottles

I like to add basically a chai spice mix. I’m a snob when it comes to chai, so I’ll mortar/pestle up spices to use for chai, and I’ll often do enough at once for multiple batches (even though it’s best completely fresh). It goes really well in oats. If you want the lazier version, “pumpkin spice” mix in the US is basically a chai spice mix.

For savory oats, I treat it like congee. There’s a lot of ways to make it, but you can either take it in a western direction (chicken stock, bacon, fried eggs, etc) or more Asian (dashi/miso stock, soy sauce, sesame, ramen egg, etc.).

There are 2 types of non-enzymatic browning: caramelization and maillard.

Caramelization is done by breaking sugar down, which then actually recombines into bigger molecules. I think it would happen with all sugars. If you do this with sucrose, it has to first break into glucose and fructose. This is done faster at a low pH, which is why if you’ve ever had to make invert syrup (which is just sucrose broken down), you add some kind of acid before heating it up. My assumption is that starting with glucose/fructose, caramelization will be faster, and not pH sensitive like when using sucrose.

The maillard reaction is the combination of sugar with amino acids. It takes place faster at higher pH (which is why you use lye or baking soda to make pretzels). It only works with certain types of sugar, though (glucose, fructose, galactose, lactose, maltose, et al.). Sucrose alone technically won’t do it, but if you are heating sucrose, you’ll be creating at least some glucose/fructose that can do it. Basically, you should get way more maillard reactions with the monosaccharides.

Basically, if you are baking with them, you may need to adjust recipes a little to prevent over browning.

Also, the monosaccharides absorb more moisture from the air, so they will stay moist longer, which is why some recipes tell you to use honey or invert syrup in recipes. It could be a good thing in some recipes, but a bad thing in others.

Two things I’d like to know:

How is the leather quality?

Can the side pockets fit modern waterbottles (nalgene/hydroflask/etc)?

You can buy plain glucose (dextrose) and fructose. Glucose isn’t quite as sweet as sucrose, but fructose is sweeter. I’d bet you could mix 2 parts dextrose to one part fructose and use it as a drop in in recipes that call for sucrose. It may affect browning and resulting moisture of any baked goods, but it’s worth experimenting with.

https://old.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/snppah/what_are_florida_ounces/

I’m surprised it’s that low. In the US, at least, men drive ~60% more than women (which is also the real reason that car insurance costs more for men).

What kind of workshop are you running? I’ve been intrigued by direct solar applications since learning about this place on this low tech mag article.

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2023/08/direct-solar-power-off-grid-without-batteries/

To be honest, I don’t think I’ve ever measured vanilla, it goes right in the bowl, lol. Small quantities are often easier by volume, though, for sure.

Diameter of pots is big, too. You get way more evaporation with a wider pot.

Ounces suck because they are used as a weight and a volume, and I can’t ever be sure which one a particular recipe is using.

I think a major one is to try to avoid trusting in unfounded precision.

If you want to make lemonade like a chemist, you don’t just weigh out some lemon juice and add it to water and sugar. You measure sugar and citric acid content of the batch of lemon juice, then calculate how much water will dilute it to the right pH, and how much sugar will bring it to your desired osmolarity. In reality, no one is going to do that unless they run a business and need a completely repeatable. If you get lazy and just weigh out the same mass of stuff with a new batch of lemon juice, you could be way off. Better to just make it and taste it then adjust. Fruits, vegetables, and meats are not consistent products, so you can’t treat them as such.

If i were to be writing recipes for cooking, I would have fruits/vegetables/meats/eggs listed by quantity, not mass (e.g., 1 onion, 1 egg), but i would include a rough mass to account for regional variations in size (maybe your carrots are twice the size of mine). Spices i would not give amounts for because they are always to taste. At most, I would give ratios (e.g. 50% thyme, 25% oregano). Lots of people have old, preground spices, so they will need to use much more than someone using whole spices freshly ground. I think salt could be given as a percentage of total mass of other ingredients, but desired salinity is a wide range, so i would have to aim low and let people adjust upward.

Baking is a little different, and I really like cookbooks that use bakers percentages, however, they don’t work well for ingredients like egg that I would want to use in discrete increments. For anything with flour, I would specify brand and/or protein level. A European trying to follow an American bread recipe will likely end up disappointed because European flour usually has lower protein (growing conditions are different), which will result in different outcomes.

I will say in defense of teaspoons, most home cooks have scales that have a 1 gram resolution, though accuracy is questionable if you are only measuring a few grams or less. Teaspoons (and their smaller fractions) are going to be more accurate for those ingredients. Personally, I just have a second, smaller scale with greater resolution.

Seconding the national center for home food preservation document.

One thing that I like experimenting with that i have to search for every time is the time/temperature curves for pasteurization of different foods. Every “knows” you are supposed to cook chicken (and most “prepared foods”) to 165 °F according to the FDA/USDA. What most people don’t know is that that temperature is what your food needs to hit for 1 second to have the proper reduction of bacteria (e.g., 7-log for chicken, which is a really high bar). You get the same reduction with 15 seconds at 160 °F or an hour at a little over 135 °F. You can easily do that with a sous vide bath.

It’s really cool for people who are immunocomprimised or pregnant because you can cook a steak to medium rare, but hold temp for a couple hours, and it’s just as safe as if you cooked it to way hotter and ruined the meat. You can also do runny egg yolks.

Here’s the first link that came up when I looked for it, but I’m sure you could find the actual government publication.

https://blog.thermoworks.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/RTE_Poultry_Tables.pdf

Why would you want anything by volume? Mass is so much easier. 50 ml of honey is way more annoying to get into a recipe than dumping it right into whatever container the rest of the ingredients are in while it’s sat on a scale.

1st thing to do is to figure out what you need to power. Solar panels are way cheaper than charging and storage. Try to decide how much on-demand power during the dark part of the day you really need. If you can do most of what you need during the sunny part of the day, you can directly power stuff with no need for batteries. It may be that for your use case, you are better off buying 4 times as many solar panels, but no batteries.

Batteries account for 80-90% of total costs and energy invested in an off-grid solar system

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2023/12/how-to-build-a-small-solar-power-system/

Yeah, i would definitely look at LIFEPO4. People just have the name recognition of “lithium” so they don’t really understand the differences between that and lithium ion, and so from what I saw last time I checked, the price was not really different, even though LIFEPO4 lasts longer and is safer.

I go right out of the hot tap cause it’s better than letting it go down the drain when I wait for the shower to heat up.

A little paintbrush is perfect for doing this. Some people like using a spray bottle, but ive found it doesn’t knock them off as reliably

My front loading clothes washer. It frequently doesn’t drain right. If you create a fault tree on what causes that, you can have:

• Faulty water level sensor
• Clogged water level sensor hose
• Clogged filter
• Clog around the heating element
• Broken check valve
• Faulty pump
• Clog between drum and liner
• Faulty control board

The pump can clearly be heard running when the water levels are too high, so I know the sensor, sensor hose, controls, check valve, and pump are all functioning. Sometimes, the pump runs for way longer than you’d think necessary, with only a small trickle of water coming out little bit by bit. This indicates to me that there is a clog upstream from the pump. Multiple times, I have squeezed myself back behind the washer to take the back off and access the filter (which should be accessible from the front). I’ve found no clog there. Ive taken out the heating element to check for clogs around it, and found nothing there. Ive shown a bright light from inside the drum to highlight any potential clogs between it and the drum, and seen nothing there. Despite all of that, the problem remains, and when I manually spin the drum with nothing inside, I can hear what sounds like stuff moving around inside.

I assume it must be ghosts or something at this point.

I have a camp stove that I got for really cheap because someone returned it because the igniter didn’t work. The spark gap was too high, so all I had to do was poke the wire over a little, and it works perfectly now.