To improve my homemade bread, I built a DIY proofing box using an Arduino Uno as the microcontroller, and a string of Christmas lights as the heat source.
Using Arduino for Better Homemade Bread
The Home-Made Yogurt Routine
My plastic container bin used to be loaded with 1-quart yogurt containers, and I felt packaging guilt whenever buying a new tub, even when it was local and organic. I knew that it wasn’t too hard to make yogurt at home — I had mental images of electric yogurt makers from the 1970s — but […]
A Less Successful Use of Arduino in Bread Making
The light-bulb-based dough chamber that I posted about a few months ago was a good design and worked well. However, it requires an input of electricity to provide the heat (i.e., to run the light bulb), while there is already an appliance in my kitchen that offers “free” heat: my oven. My old oven (a […]
Using Arduino in Bread Making at Home
“Let rise at room temperature” is a common instruction in bread recipes, with “room temperature” being around 70 °F (21.1 °C). For reasons that include San Francisco’s famous fog, this temperature can be hard to find in my apartment in Berkeley, California, and so my bread dough sometimes rises far too slowly. One day, I […]
How Much of an Orange is Edible?
(Updated, 3/15/17: new chart) For the last few months, I have been weighing oranges before and after peeling to see what fraction of the orange is edible (by weight). I had done similar work previously to measure the edible percentage of avocados, finding that Haas avocados are roughly 70% edible by weight across a span of 125 […]
Using an Arduino-based system in kitchen projects
The Arduino-based system in action during yogurt making (an annotated photo at Flickr) Sometimes DIY is more about the journey than saving money, more about what you learn than what you save. This was certainly the case for me when I built a system to monitor temperature in my kitchen. A few of my kitchen […]
The Weigh Everything Project
When I make a 2-layer cake, a batch of dough that makes 2 loaves, or anything else that requires even division (like last night’s Tofu-Tofu Burgers from Elizabeth Andoh’s Kansha), I often have a moment of regret when I reach the division point. “I wish I knew the weight of the bowl I’m using,” I […]
Another No Knead Bread
When Mark Bittman wrote about Jim Leahy’s “no knead bread” in the New York Times in 2006, it caused a frenzy in the blogosphere, leading to hundreds of posts about attempts to make the bread. I tried it myself and deemed it to be bimbo-esque: beautiful but shallow. I recently started baking another kind of […]
Slow-roasting tomatoes in a solar oven
In the last few weeks I have been making many batches of slow-roasted tomatoes. These are tomatoes — typically Roma, San Marzano, or another sauce-friendly tomato — that have been sliced, tossed with olive oil, salt and pepper, and then roasted on a cookie sheet at 250 to 300 F for several hours. The slow […]
Let the sunshine cook your dinner — building a solar oven at Ethicurean
I recently built a solar oven out of easily obtainable materials like cardboard boxes, aluminum foil, and Elmer’s glue. I posted a story about how I built the oven and how they work over at Ethicurean. Check it out…