14 ms·
2+1=4, by quinoa
- gus_massa 6y agoIt's an interesting observation. Can you add some close up photos of the quinoa grains before and after cooking? (With something that does not change of size, for scale.)
- efavdb 6y agothanks for your comment and suggestion. unfortunately we ate it all, but I'll try to add such a picture next time. The truth is that they aren't exactly spherical, but squished in on one side.
- hirundo 6y ago.2+.33=8, by popcorn
- lostlogin 6y agoIt’s winter here - I’m pretty sure that firewood bought by “thrown” volume uses the same maths. You stack it and it all vanished.
- PopeDotNinja 6y agoI wonder if the mass stays roughly the same.
- brianberns 6y agoIt loses a little mass due to water boiling off, but other than that the mass has to stay exactly the same (barring nuclear reactions, which typically don't make for good quinoa).
- LASR 6y agoI don't want to be extremely pedantic. But even regular chemical reactions change mass just as nuclear reactions. It's very small, but it's there. Any change in internal energy will cause a mass change, regardless of the specific fields that are affected.
- davrosthedalek 6y agoHot quinoa is slightly heavier than cold quinoa.
- gowld 6y agowhy?
- davrosthedalek 6y agoHeat is energy, so hot quinoa has more energy, which means more mass. All internal energy of a system contributes to its rest mass.
- JoeSmithson 6y agoI always liked this problem... What packs more efficiently in a barrel; tennis balls, marbles, or a mixture of tennis balls and marbles? It feels like the smaller marbles are denser but obviously they actually pack the same efficiency as the tennis balls or any other sphere, the mixture packs more efficiently.
- Kednicma 6y agoYes. I really like the metallurgy version: An alloy can be denser than pure elements.
- jld 6y agoI was just talking to a friend about how 1 part water plus 1 part ethanol becomes 1.92 parts solution. This raised a question for me that I have yet to research/answer. Maybe one of you knows... if the above solution is 50% ABV, what happens if I add one more part alcohol to the solution? Is it now 66.6% ABV? More? Less? How does ABV take into account the fact that this solution is packed together tighter than its constituent parts?
- tedunangst 6y agoThe wikipedia article has all the charts and formulas you need. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_by_volume https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_by_volume (To make the above solution 50% abv, btw, you need to keep adding water until it's 2 (liters, whatever) total volume.)
- tkeAmarktinClss 6y agoThank you for being the best of HN. The muderation might be awful, but the users are sharp. Learned something new, and I'm a chem grad.
- riffraff 6y agoThis is a common issue for people doing liquors at home: you mix 1l of alcohol which you used to extract some flavour with 1l of water and don't get back 2l.
- koolba 6y agoThis is why baking instructions are done with weight, not volume.
- djhaskin987 6y agoActually in the US they are still done by volume most of the time unless you're a fanatic or a foodie. All the recipes I've ever read uses use cups and teaspoons. I can see why it would help though.
- jameshart 6y agoPrecisely: this is why foodies and fanatics in the US, in spite of the dominant cultural preference for volumetric measure, prefer - like most of the rest of the world - to measure food by weight, this being a great example of how volumetric measurement can be misleading.
- tedunangst 6y agoDo recipes also say 200g of eggs, or just four eggs?
- alexchamberlain 6y agoIt depends. A normal recipe may say: 4 large eggs, where large is actually a regulated weight range. A baked recipe where the ratios are more important may ask you to weigh your eggs, then use that weight for the flour and sugar. Or... it may just say 4 eggs where it doesn’t really matter.
- hcheemskerk 6y ago>a regulated weight range Under a single region-bound regulatory body, making it useless internationally.
- brigandish 6y ago
- anonytrary 6y agoThe crux of this is that volume is not the same as mass.
- quickthrower2 6y agoThat’s what the black hole said!
- jonstaab 6y agoIs this another edition of "falsehoods programmers believe about quinoa"?
- arduinomancer 6y agoContrary to popular belief, some quinoas actually have no middle name
- eurasiantiger 6y agoI cooked some quinea and got what I started with.
- quickthrower2 6y agoSee whatcha did
- jibal 6y agoWillard be damned!
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- quickthrower2 6y agoMyth 2. It is pronounced "Qwin-oh-wa"
- Tainnor 6y agoIs quinoa partition tolerant?
- dheera 6y agoVolume isn't conserved; only mass is conserved in physics, so your final pot can't have greater mass than what you put in it; it can only have less, considering steam is given off. But volume? All bets are off. Even if it weren't a packing problem it's not obvious to me that a X mL single quinoa grain that absorbs Y mL water can occupy only X+Y mL. It could be much larger depending on the structure the resulting thing has. Separately, I've always had to put more water in than the quinoa boxes say.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jameshart 6y agoIndeed - plenty of cooking processes can produce gas bubbles that are trapped or escape leaving foam structures behind that take up considerably more space than the original material. Like bread, for example. The volume of flour and water you put into a dough is considerably less than the volume of the loaves you'll produce - and a significant amount of the water you put in will have gone by the time they're cooked (also you'll have lost some of the carbohydrates from the flour which has been turned into CO2 and ethanol by the yeast, a bunch of which will also cook out of the loaf).
- abiogenesis 6y agoExactly. This is also observable in baking, especially with yeast, where the end product is usually lighter because of the evaporation but larger.
- Doxin 6y ago> It's not obvious to me that a X mL single quinoa grain that absorbs Y mL water can occupy only X+Y mL. A pretty good example breaking that assumption would be popcorn. given some heat X mL popcorn + Y mL butter is going to end you up with a lot more than X+Y mL.
- ddlatham 6y agoThis reminds me of how the Continental Congress ended up appointing a Baker General to serve with Washington during the Revolutionary War. After the barrels had been transported by wagon out into the field and their contents distributed, soldiers devoid of ovens to make bread pooled their rations and made arrangements for those qualified bakers within their ranks to take the next step. They then went into the local community and used whatever cooking facilities were available, returning later to distribute one pound of bread for every pound of flour a soldier contributed. What they did not tell them was that for every 100 pounds of flour, some 130 one-pound loaves of bread could be produced simply because water was added. This allowed bakers to make a handsome thirty percent profit when they sold the extra loaves in the open market. For those soldiers deciding to keep their flour ration, they either transformed it into a very rough “fire cake” cooked in the coals of a nearby fire or traded it with the local country folk; many instances of straggling and plundering then ensued. There was clearly much room for improvement. https://allthingsliberty.com/2015/05/george-washingtons-baker-master/ https://allthingsliberty.com/2015/05/george-washingtons-bake...
- themodelplumber 6y agoQ: Is the author saying that the straggling & plundering happened because of the annoyance at eating fire cake? That part wasn't clear to me. And is fire cake not made with water?
- masklinn 6y ago> And is fire cake not made with water? It is, why?
- artsyca 6y agoFire cake is made with water so soldiers who went that route would get more than a pound of cake for their pound of flour.
- catalogia 6y agoI think the firecake eaters had perhaps 30% more calories available to them (assuming their firecakes were cooked adequately), so they might not have been the ones straggling. But if a soldier traded his flour to the locals for booze, that would be a different story.
- staycoolboy 6y agoThis is also a great of example of how really smart people with deep knowledge in one domain can totally fail real-world skills. Anyone who cooks a lot has a gut feel for how different foods increase in volume when baked (breads, like popovers), fried (crispy rice noodles), fluffed (rice) or sifted (macrons!), even if they don't understand packing volumes or programming... Experience actually does matter.
- k2enemy 6y agoI don't think the author was expressing surprise that quinoa expands in volume when cooked, but rather at the fun reason why this is the case.
- scotty79 6y agoI think OP approach is very interesting. It's not surprising that particles of food grow as they absorb water. What OP made me realize is that not only particles grow but gaps between them grow too which makes portion of food increase in volume even more.
- gowld 6y agoYou gave 4 examples, none of which correspond to the problem in the OP which OP didn't fail in any way.
- perl4ever 6y ago>This is also a great of example of how really smart people with deep knowledge in one domain can totally fail real-world skills. This is a common sentiment, but what I think isn't so common is to observe that the "real world" is a euphemism for domains where people do not share and preserve accurate information in an easily digestible fashion. It's not really more "real", it's defined in my opinion by being more hostile to copying as mis/disinformation protects social roles. My opinion is foremost in my mind from spending a lot of time practicing cooking rice, browning meat, and working on my car since "social distancing" has been a thing.
- bhntr3 6y agoIf you're curious enough to read a 900 page book containing very accurate information about the specific processes that occur when preparing most foods then On Food and Cooking by Harold McGee[0] is the book for you. It's not for everyone but I give you my guarantee as an internet stranger that you'll love it. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Food-Cooking-Science-Lore-Kitchen/dp/0684800012 https://www.amazon.com/Food-Cooking-Science-Lore-Kitchen/dp/...
- quickthrower2 6y agoMy guess before reading is the resulting chow has more air in it. Edit after reading: I think I am on the money. I don't think it is a completely sphere-packing phenomenon. Quinoa is fluffy when cooked, not soggy and laiden with completely with water. Packing might contribute but I am betting it's mostly air inside the Quinoa making that extra volume.
- dmoy 6y agoTrivially, you can also just cook some rice on the stove, verify that rice is not spherical, and also verify that it gets significantly bigger. (Like 3x bigger per dry rice unit of volume, and you don't (usually) cook water:rice 2:1 for most rices)
- sitkack 6y agoWhom among us has not overflown a rice pot on the stove?
- sukilot 6y ago2:1 is quite common, because it's simple, despite being not great, especially as amount cooked increases. Rice isn't speherical, but it isn't a perfectly packed crystal either. Unless you think air fills up inside each grain, the volume from "air" is the packing volume.
- OscarCunningham 6y agoExcept that the sphere-packing calculation does actually account for all the additional volume, so if there was some air-absorption too then that must mean that cooked quinoa packs more efficiently than uncooked quinoa.
- ema 6y agoSquishy things should pack more efficiently since they can deform to better fill the voids left. Not sure if this makes a significant difference here though. It's only the weight of the grains above that would cause the deformation to happen and cooked quinoa is only stacked up a few inches max I presume.
- nutate 6y agogently triggered by someone having a PhD in stat mech and not having to do the grueling proofs of this sort of stuff that at least I did in materials science.
- reedlaw 6y agoWhen cooking rice a good rule of thumb is to use equal parts water and rice because a given volume of rice is able to absorb the same volume of water. I imagine the rice or quinoa is expanding as it cooks and absorbs water.
- kwelstr 6y agoFor most types of rice, you'll always use a ratio of 1 cup rice to 2 cups water. When the water is gone the rice is done. Some rice like arborio for risotto take even more.
- cyphar 6y agoA lot of people have strong views on the right ratio of water to rice (and I will admit this post is a bit hypocritical given how long it is), but ignore that while their ratio may work when cooking X cups of rice it often doesn't work when cooking 2X cups of rice. Meaning that such ratios don't fulfil their purpose as ratios, they're just an unscaleable recipe for a fixed amount of rice. For instance, I'm sure a ratio of 2:1 works fine for you if you're cooking 1 or 2 cups of rice, but if you're cooking 4 cups of rice are you going to add 8 cups of water? I hope not, because I can guarantee you will get porridge. Why? Because there are two processes going on which use the water you've added (absorption by the rice and evaporation). The vast majority of rice absorbs about the same volume of water when cooked properly, but you need some extra water to account for the evaporation while the water is hot for the dozen minutes it takes to cook rice. But the rate of evaporation isn't dependent on how much water or rice you have, it's the surface area exposed to the air (which is the same for most rice cooking vessels). So using a simple ratio is incorrect -- one of the processes depleting the water during cooking does not scale with the amount of water. In fact, your comment about risotto confirms this view through your own experience -- you have to add more water because a pan (which is what most risotto is cooked in) is wider than a pot and evaporates water more quickly (if you don't believe me, compare how long it takes to thicken sauces or evaporate a fixed amount of water between pots and pans). If you try cooking risotto rice the same way as normal rice you'll find it absorbs a similar (though possibly slightly more) amount of water. This is why most people from Asian households will tell you that they don't use ratios to calculate how much water they need. They fill up the water to the level of the rice and then add enough water such that when they put their index finger vertically and touch the rice the waterline reaches the last knuckle on their finger (about 2cm). If you something more like a ratio, it's about a 1:1 ratio plus an extra cup of water -- but the amount will somewhat depend on the diameter of your cooking vessel.
- tigerbelt 6y agoNo
- fredophile 6y agoThis seems reasonable if the final product also contains something else, like air, or the water is less efficiently packed inside the quinoa. It's easy to pack water less efficiently then it will normally be as a liquid. Freezing it into ice causes it to expand and have a lower density as well.
- Too 6y agoAnother similar food for thought: How does a car transform 1 l of gas into 3kg of emissions?
- known 6y agoArtificial Intelligence ?
- ajuc 6y agoI worked in a company making warehouse management systems. After deployment on production for a new customer storing cheeses we found a lot of bugs (the system would say there should be 10 kg of some cheese at particular location but there was only 9.7 kg etc.) Eventually we realized cheese is losing weight with time and we had to include that into all of our algorithms :)
- inakarmacoma 6y agoImagine a popcorn factory. Pre and post pop...
- pbhjpbhj 6y agoIt's everso slightly lighter after pop presumably (water content is lost), but a little oil would compensate that, presumably? I'm not sure what point you're making??
- 5Qn8mNbc2FNCiVV 6y agoVolume ^^
- joshdick 6y agoReminds me of the angel's share when you're aging whiskey: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/angel%27s%20share https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/angel%27s%20share
- andi999 6y agoBefore theoretically trying to explain it, why not test it experimentally first. It might be a misprint.
- amelius 6y agoThis experiment should have been done in an airtight container.