7 ms·
The Physics of Fried Rice
- ruffyen 7y agoWhy in the hell is this considered...technical?
- wnevets 7y agoIf it is not, why would it matter? Hacker news always has non technical post on its front page.
- ruffyen 7y agoWhile that may be true this is a new level information i dont care about...
- jlisam13 7y agothen don't read it
- jvagner 7y ago...and if you can't stand to see it, "hide" it.
- mwfunk 7y agoIf you don't care about it, can you even imagine how much other people don't care about you not caring about it? Seriously. And if you think it's silly to point that out, you're the one posting in a thread about how you don't care about the thing that the thread is about.
- rstupek 7y agoApparently enough of us care about it to make it to the front page... go figure
- kevinlou 7y agoThat's perfectly fine if you don't care about it, but there are plenty of us that do.
- lacker 7y agoIt is physics. Have a look at their published physics paper, it's quite technical. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsif.2019.0622 https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rsif.2019.062...
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- jjeaff 7y agoI would hazzard a guess that quite a lot of engineers are into cooking because it can be a highly technical and scientific process that involves chemistry, physics, and engineering with delicious results. And the highly technical paper in this post attests to that.
- anonsivalley652 7y agoWhat the Discovery channel, I mean ArsTechnica, calls "science" shall not be questioned! ;) Also it has "Royal Society" in the paper so it has carte blanche to pick seemingly frivolous topics if they have merit. Furthermore, very good cooking is mostly scientific with some art. French Guy Cooking's Alex has more of a lab/workshop than a kitchen because he's so fanatical to improve the art and science of food.
- robbrown451 7y agoI personally find it pretty amazing that, as they mention, no one has succeeded in making a robot that can do it effectively. That is certainly a technical issue. It seems to me something that is highly automatable. The fact that it is something that physicists are studying and it is published on Ars Technica seems to me to be enough to justify it being technical enough for Hacker News (which generally doesn't have to be technical per se, but just intellectually interesting to technically oriented people)
- ilamont 7y agoThe mathematical model Hu and Ko developed isn't just a fun curiosity; it should also prove useful for industrial robotic designs. I recall seeing somewhere (maybe coverage of CES or another trade show) of automated machines for cooking Chinese dishes that traditionally had to be made by hand. I can't remember if it was for home or industrial use, and I don't remember if fried rice was one of the options. Fried rice is one of the hardest Chinese dishes to cook at home, especially if you don't have a high-temperature gas range and want to reduce the amount of oil in the recipe. Lots of scraping and hard pushing motions to break up the rice, not to mention the slicing/dicing required for prep. ETA: Found some articles and clips about the tech: https://www.scmp.com/tech/innovation/article/1808963/worlds-first-robot-kitchen-cooks-visitors-ces-asia-shanghai https://www.scmp.com/tech/innovation/article/1808963/worlds-... http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201805/17/WS5afd263fa3103f6866ee9050.html http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/201805/17/WS5afd263fa3103f686... https://www.digitaltrends.com/home/robot-cooking-machine/ https://www.digitaltrends.com/home/robot-cooking-machine/
- wincy 7y agoI started using lard and stopped wanting restaurant fried rice. Ingredients go a long way in taste. In fact, lard makes almost everything taste amazing.
- ilamont 7y agoWe render lard from bacon and chicken fat and refrigerate them in jars for later use. Both work nicely with Chinese dishes, and this reduces the need to buy cooking oil.
- protomyth 7y agoTrue, frybread (which uses lard) is really good but really not healthy for you.
- basch 7y agoThe only non sea creature derived animal product to make the list is Pork fat. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20180126-the-100-most-nutritious-foods https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20180126-the-100-most-nut...
- thaumasiotes 7y agoHuh. This whole thing appears to be about how the motion of the wok affects the fried rice. But at the only restaurant I've watched fried rice prepared at (a college cafeteria in Shanghai), it was done on a flat iron surface, teppanyaki-style. And that was considered the good cafeteria. "The physics of fried rice" seems to overestimate the scope of the study a bit.
- asutekku 7y agoI think “cafeteria” is the key word in here. They most likely do not have the time & resources to do it how they would do it in a high end restaurant.
- thaumasiotes 7y agoThat makes no sense; iron cooking counters everywhere and different chefs at different stands to prepare your food on demand are a much bigger investment of time and resources than preparing food in bulk in the back on a single stove/counter.
- thedance 7y agoThe comments of this article are where the meat lies. There’s no way anyone is flipping rice in a 1200-degree steel wok.
- rzmnzm 7y agoI usually cheat and use parboiled rice, it won't become a sad mush.
- Magi604 7y agoChicken Fried Rice used to be my favorite go-to Chinese restaurant dish, but too many places loaded up the dish with tons of rice and veggies and skimped hard on the chicken, presumably to save on meat costs.
- s_ngularity 7y agoYou should try a Vietnamese place if there’s one near by you. The ones around here at least don’t seem to skimp on the meat as much
- 0xff00ffee 7y agoOh god this brings back traumatic memories: When I was getting my degree in culinary arts at Bristol (Boston, MA) in the mid-80's I had "Professor Wong", not a professor but a chef who taught a segment on Chinese cuisine. I had to make ~5lbs of fried rice every day for two weeks and he would say in a thick over-emphasized (phony) chinese accent, "You burn rice, you fail!" every day -- with a big smile, of course, but meaning it. And holy HELL was I sore every day during that period. The industrial woks are very heavy and you do need to keep it in constant motion.
- pcurve 7y agoLol what a delightful story :)
- bilekas 7y agoWhen physics and food meet.. It's a dinner made in geometrical heaven, and shoulder pain evidently.
- zbaylin 7y agoHappy to see my school getting mentioned on HN. Dr. Hu has a TEDx talk called "Confessions of a Wasteful Scientist" (https://www.ted.com/talks/david_hu_confessions_of_a_wasteful_scientist https://www.ted.com/talks/david_hu_confessions_of_a_wasteful...) that talks a bit more about research he has done in this vein.
- bfung 7y agoGrandpa bfung said (paraphrased from translated Cantonese): “if your fried rice is the color of soy sauce, you’re doing it wrong - that’s the color of poop”. Just wanted to share some fried rice wisdom.
- Apofis 7y agoAll of a sudden I got super excited and wanted to go buy a wok, something I've wanted to do for a while, even started looking on Target... then I realized I have an electric range. I could get an outdoor propane stove, can't wait for it to get warmer.