Steve Gisselbrecht

I know I've posted this before but it happened again today and I think it bears repeating. If you're out and about and you see what looks like a group with one person taking a picture of the other members of the group in front of some landmark or pretty view, stop and say, "Do you want one all together?" They can just say no if they don't want to or if you've misread the situation (at least once I've offerred and it turned out the person taking the picture had done the same thing!) but it costs basically nothing and you can give people something they really want to have with practically no time or effort.

@rzeta0@c.im @emilymbender@dair-community.social You are literally responding to her post without responding to what she posted. The post in no way suggests that no one should reply. What it SAYS is that if you reply to someone, you should check whether you're explaining something they already know. You are mansplaining your right to mansplain.

So since we are stunned to find ourselves with some funding to do research, we are now looking to actually hire postdocs! If you're looking for a postdoc in transcriptional regulation and you want to work in a VERY wetlab/computation hybrid environment, check us out! https://thebrain.bwh.harvard.edu/positions.html

Okay, gonna actually put on clothes and leave the house!

The world is shit in a lot of ways but there's pesto.

Which is just as well because the typical processing involves splitting the pods open and spreading the mixture of pulp and seeds out in the sun. Within the aforementioned 10° of the equator, the pulp rots almost instantly, which is actually a crucial part of the process. Chocolate is a fermented food, and this step develops chemicals that contribute to the taste of the final product. After fermentation, the seeds (which of course are cocoa beans), in their shells, are washed and dried and bagged up for shipping. This is the state in which they are distributed to chocolate-makers around the world. The international unit of cocoa bean sales is apparently the 50-kilo sack. That is how companies that make chocolate buy them. For home chocolate-makers (yes, it's a thing), there is at least one company that buys them and breaks them up and sells them on by the pound. They are chocolatealchemy.com and if you get to the end and think "I wanna do that!" they are your source. (2/9)

In the broadest of generalities, forastero beans have more of the bass-heavy, "chocolatey" notes and take a longer, hotter roast, but they tend to be somewhat "flat" or uncomplicated, with very little finish or development of the flavor on the palate. The vast plantations of west Africa that produce most of the world's cocoa beans (even though the species are native to central America) are planted in forastero monoculture and that's what most of the mass-market commercial chocolate you've ever had uses. Criollo are lighter, fruity beans with all kinds of top notes and complexity, but typically too tangy for my tastes on their own, and lack the deep richness that we associate with chocolate. These are the beans that will burn to gross if you look at them funny. Some trinitarios manage to achieve a desirable balance of these characteristics, but much of the art of chocolate-making is in blending different beans to balance each other's weaknesses. (4/9)

The next step is to roast the beans. On a large scale, this is typically done in a drum roaster, heating and agitating, similar to those used for coffee, although the temperature profile is quite different. I myself roast them in the oven, on an insulated pan, stirring every five minutes. Also like coffee, there are many different varieties of cocoa bean. There are two major species, which produce beans called "criollo" and "forastero," but they hybridize freely, so there is a vast range of "trinitario" beans with more or less character from one parent or the other. Then of course there's terroire, and the same strain will produce different beans in different soils or different years. The roast has to be sensitive to these differences; the same conditions that will leave one bean variety underroasted and tasting, well, *bean-y* will leave a different variety badly burnt, acrid and nasty. (3/9)

By hand, this means spreading it out and scraping it up, over and over, on a polished stone slab while it cools. As the desirable crystals form, it takes on a dull, claylike consistency for which the professional term is "mush." Of course there are computer-controlled machines to do this at scale. The mush can be added back to a larger pool of melted chocolate, and as long as it's not hot enough to melt the seed crystals, this produces a pool of "tempered" chocolate that can be poured into bar molds or decorative molds, or kept warm and agitated while things are dipped in it to make filled chocolates. White chocolate is cocoa butter with sugar and vanilla and milk powder, but without any of the actual cocoa. As long as it's made with actual cocoa butter, it shares the melting/tempering/setting properties of actual chocolate, although the thermal profiles are a little different. (9/9)

@GayDeceiver@mstdn.social There is, I was shocked but then not surprised to learn, a whole Facebook community of people whose adult children have completely cut off contact with them, where they all sit around telling each other how blameless they are and how evil and selfish their children are.

I had a plan for dinner, I even set some lentils soaking in the fridge before I went to work, but as I was driving home it was just so strikingly beautiful out, such a PERFECT evening, that I got home and said, Hey, let's walk into Harvard Square and eat outside instead. We had a beautiful walk and held hands and saw some shirtless runners, went to Felipe's and it was DELICIOUS exactly the same as every other time we've gone there, and I have a cheesecake for later. (Cherry frangipane.) It's a stressful time but there's still a lot to enjoy in this world. And tomorrow the lentils will be well and truly soaked.

@johncoxon@wandering.shop I think often of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone and how great it's been for wildlife. I find it very sobering that the mere presence of people is worse for the ecosystem than a nuclear disaster (and, like, WAY worse), but at least that place exists and it's doing its things.

The nibs can now be processed a couple of different ways. One option is to heat them and press them for oil, like olives or sunflower seeds. The oil solidifies at room temperature and that's cocoa butter, which has a lot of desirable properties for cosmetics, or can be added back to the chocolate-making process. Finely grinding the remaining "cake" of pressed out solids yields cocoa powder. Alternatively, you can simply grind up the nibs whole, and then you have "cocoa liquor," aka unsweetened chocolate. To make chocolate bars, this is mixed with sugar, optionally milk powder (for milk chocolate), usually vanilla, and usually some lecithin. Lecithin is a fraction purified from different oily foods that acts like a biological detergent and helps emulsify mixtures of fats with things (like sugar) that prefer to dissolve in water. It helps with the texture and stability of the finished product. Even with finely ground sugar and cacao, this mixture is grittier than "chocolate." (6/9)

When I get a new variety, I will do test-roasts, taking samples at defined timepoints, to see if they have a sweet spot, when it is, and what it's like. I grind them with sugar to a coarse powder and then I can do blending experiments to decide on a recipe. Once you have your beans roasted, it's time to separate them from their shells. The shell is fibrous and has relatively little chocolate flavor, so it will weaken the finished product unless removed. The large-scale way to do that is to crack the beans into a mixture of bean pieces (if you buy "cacao nibs" that's what these are) and shell pieces. Then they are separated by density using moving air, an ancient agricultural practice called "winnowing," although now performed with complicated fan-driven machinery. The shell pieces can be composted or used for mulch. They also, since they have a faint chocolate flavor/scent and no fat content, get used to flavor things like chocolate beer or chocolate tea. (5/9)

Once you're happy that what you have is good melted chocolate, the final step is tempering. Chocolate is a suspension of finely ground flavorful things in cocoa butter. And cocoa butter is, chemically, a complex mixture of different fats. It can take on various crystal structures, depending on things like the exact cooling profile, agitation, the presence of seed crystals, etc. And these structures can have very different properties in terms of mouthfeel, stability, melting temperature, etc. If you just let melted chocolate set back up again, it won't be nice. The default crystal structure that the cocoa butter adopts will get soft and sticky at even moderately warm room temperature, and has a gummy feeling when chewed. It will also develop grey, powdery bloom very quickly, and turn chalky over time. So instead, you cool it *past* its normal freezing point, but with continuous agitation. At another, lower freezing point, it starts to form better crystals. (8/9)

So the penultimate step is called "conching." The chocolate mixture is put in a machine that fundamentally reproduces the action of a mortar and pestle, and continuously ground for hours or, in some of the finest high-end chocolates, days. Industrial conchers (or "melangeurs") are typically the size of a small bus, but for home use it's possible to buy a machine originally designed for making dosa batter that works as a concher. A bowl with a stone base has a central spindle with stone rollers. The bowl turns, the rollers roll IN a pool of chocolate, continuously crushing the chocolate in front of them until the entire mixture reaches the texture you want. During this process, the whole thing outgasses. It gives up moisture, especially at the beginning, and also there are various smells that come off that really aren't lovely. (Remember, fermented food. Some notes are, I'm sorry, reminiscent of urine.) These are nice things NOT to have in the finished chocolate. (7/9)

Finally a DST proposal I can get behind. https://xkcd.com/3272/

Yes hello there is a new Wondermark and it is excellent. Who among us … https://wondermark.com/c/1589/

@iris@neuromatch.social Oh, I often wind up saying, "I hope it's clear that I'm not angry at you. I am angry, and I am trying not to take it out on you because you're just doing your job and you didn't put these policies (or systems or whatever) into place, but they're not okay and I'm angry at them."

@APBBlue@thepit.social My former coworker grew up in Tehran in the 80s and she did not like the flyover for the Red Sox home opener every year one bit, I'll tell you what.

Greetings from (still) hot, humid Georgia, on this, the occasion of my father-in-law’s hundredth birthday!

@jonny@neuromatch.social I have had pretty uniformly terrible experiences with the Frontiers family of publications.

I ran past a construction site yesterday and I was really enjoying the art that they were displaying on the fence-covering material, when it suddenly occurred to me that we didn't used to have that. It used to only ever be dark green plastic mesh, and now it often still is but it's also not infrequent to see pictures or screen-printed art on the mesh, just because some institution doing the construction has decided it's better public relations if what everyone has to look at here for the next couple of years isn't ugly. This is a small great change.

@dotjayne@tech.lgbt Oh, I sure am.

@LoganFive@beige.party A well-meaning adult once told me, "Don't wish your childhood away! These are the best years of your life!" Lol. A grim chuckle, to be sure, but lol.

@mullvadnet@mastodon.online @lostgen@det.social Money that goes to your company goes into the pocket of a man who supports Nazis. Whether you consider it your "mission" is irrelevant when that's what the money is doing.

@MCDuncanLab@mstdn.social Damn it, I enjoyed seeing him speak so much, I do not want to have to cancel him!

@ifixcoinops@retro.social This is how I feel about almost any instructional video or podcast. Transcribe it, maybe edit it a bit to clean up the grammar, and I'll consider reading it.

@socalgecko@woof.group A+ portmanteau, though.

@cykonot@mas.to It is so good! His "experimental" fiction is a little hit-or-miss for me, but his historical fiction is A+++.

@cykonot@mas.to Have you ever read Gore Vidal's "Creation"? A wickedly gossipy behind-the-throne tale of the Persian empire, and the main character is a fictional grandson of Zoroaster.

@iris@neuromatch.social We're all doing our best in a late capitalist wasteland. I mean, *we* are. Not everyone is, and just being polite to the person you're talking to goes a long way.

@rmd1023@infosec.exchange We spent yesterday with the family and he's still sharp as a tack! He speaks quite slowly, but he's following the conversation and when he has something to put in, it's not at all meandery or unrelated. I hope it's not infantilizing to observe that, but I've known a bunch of people who, when their voices got that slow and creaky, their contributions to the conversation were also getting pretty slow and creaky, and I'm just impressed that his are not.

@gairdeachas@mastodon.social IS IT HOT IN HERE?

@aphyr@woof.group Wow, that is a sentence right there!

@swizzlevixen@social.lol Ah yes, I too am an Elder Gay.

@sinvega@mas.to @stavvers@masto.ai This was stellar.

@futurebird@sauropods.win When people find out I study fruit flies, the first question probably 80% of them ask is how to get rid of them from their kitchen, and I have to sadly inform them that my day to day focus is much more on keeping them alive than killing them.

@aphyr@woof.group I'm so sorry for your loss.

@Danpiker@mathstodon.xyz This doesn't work on me (at all; I see no hint of an effect) but my particular flavor of colorblindness makes blue-purple one of the very hardest distinctions.

@rmd1023@infosec.exchange I would prefer not to.

@jonny@neuromatch.social It is such a great instrument. I'm ducking out of work early today to go see a cello and midi marimba chamber-pop duo.