Welcome to this week's edition of our Friday Quality Linkage column. Please enjoy this week’s collection of interesting and entertaining links. Brew a fresh cup of coffee, find a comfortable place, and relax.
Photo: Jessica Emily Marx, The New York Times
5 Sauces for the Modern Cook »
On The New York Times, chef and writer Samin Nosrat — whose cookbook, Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: The Four Elements of Good Cooking, comes out next April — writes about what she calls “the new mother sauces” (I've added the respective recipe links below for your convenience):
Five basic types of sauces appear over and over again on menus and in cookbooks that feature the kind of vegetable-heavy, flavor-dense food that cooks and eaters favor today: yogurt sauce, pepper sauce, herb sauce, tahini sauce and pesto. Master each one, and you’ll immediately have access to the dozens of variations that descend from them, too.
Think of them as the new mother sauces, an updated version of the five mother sauces of French cuisine — which, after a century of guiding chefs and cooks, deserve a promotion to mother superior status.
That pepper sauce is the first one on my list to make.
- If you're curious, the traditional mother sauces are béchamel (roux + dairy), velouté (roux + white stock), espagnole (roux + brown stock), tomato (roux + tomatoes, and hollandaise (egg yolks + clarified melted butter + acid (like lemon juice or white wine, not literal acid)).
Photo: Joe Pugliese, Wired
David Chang's Unified Theory of Deliciousness »
Speaking of cooking, let's have a little food theory, shall we?
In this Wired piece, chef and Momofuku founder David Chang writes about the patterns he's always noticing in dishes around the world — along with his own restaurant's most successful dishes — and how his years of cooking experience have led him to develop a "Unified Theory of Deliciousness":
To me this is what separates the good dishes from the truly slap-yourself-on-the-forehead ones. When you eat something amazing, you don’t just respond to the dish in front of you; you are almost always transported back to another moment in your life. It’s like that scene in Ratatouille when the critic eats a fancy version of the titular dish and gets whisked back to the elemental version of his childhood. The easiest way to accomplish this is just to cook something that people have eaten a million times. But it’s much more powerful to evoke those taste memories while cooking something that seems unfamiliar—to hold those base patterns constant while completely changing the context.
Shooting Cinematic iPhone Footage »
On his Digital Cinema Demystified blog, filmmaker Richard Lackey examines whether or not the iPhone is capable of producing truly cinematic footage. He was skeptical at first but wound up being blown away by the results (shown in the video above):
The results I am looking for:
- Sharp, detailed 1080p output in post.
- Minimal image compression artifacts.
- Good color and dynamic range, adequate shadow detail and unclipped highlights.
- Holds up to reasonable color correction and stylistic grading in post.
A few years ago these expectations would have been completely unrealistic for a phone camera. Now, however we have UHD 4K, high frame rates and a fast enough rolling shutter to put some professional cameras to shame. Now I’m a full on proponent of ultra high res, RAW formats and cameras, so lets keep this all in perspective… but even I was impressed.
- If you're also looking to shoot your own cinematic footage with an iPhone, take a look at the Beastgrip Pro camera rig system.
Artist's rendering: Southwest Research Institute
Io's Atmosphere Just Collapsed »
Maddie Stone, writing for Gizmodo, on the recent discovery that the atmosphere of Jupiter's moon Io collapses and repairs itself every day:
It turns out that every time Io is eclipsed by mighty Jupiter (which happens for about 2 hours a day), the surface temperature plummets and the moon’s sulfur dioxide (SO2)-rich atmosphere begins to deflate.
By the time Io is in full shadow, the atmosphere is like a punctured balloon, blanketing the moon’s surface in a thin coating of SO2 frost. As Io migrates back into the sun, this frost layer re-sublimates, and a new atmosphere develops.
The universe is a cool and weird place.
Image: /u/melonshade
Image: /u/melonshade
Tilt-Shifted van Gogh Paintings »
Inspired by a previous effort (Imgur album here), Reddit user "melonshade" applied a tilt-shift effect to a series of Vincent van Gogh paintings. The results are spectacular.
Direct link to that album here.
Photo credit: Unknown. I believe the source image may be here but the page won't load and none of the sites I've found using the image around the web provide any credit or link :\
Sorry, mystery photographer.
You're Not Meant to Do What You Love. You're Meant to Do What You're Good At. »
Brianna Wiest splashes some cold, hard reality on everyone's dreams:
People usually can’t differentiate what they really love and what they love the idea of.
[...]
You can choose what you love to do, simply by how you think of it and what you focus on. Everything is work. Everything is work. Everything is work. There are few jobs that are fundamentally “easier” than others, whether by virtue of manual labor or brain-power. There is only finding a job that suits you enough that the work doesn’t feel excruciating. There is only finding what you are skilled at, and then learning to be thankful.
While I don't wholly agree with her thesis, she does make a few points worth thinking about.
The way I see it though, life is too short and you only get one chance to experience it — plus the fact that each of us is merely a speck on a speck floating in a sea of infinite darkness (I'm fun at parties) — so you might as well do exactly whatever it is you love.
Don't Add Your 2 Cents »
Derek Sivers's advice for bosses who always contribute opinions to other people's work rather than letting them feel ownership over their ideas:
The boss’s opinion is no better than anyone else’s. But once you become the boss, unfortunately your opinion is dangerous because it’s not just one person’s opinion anymore — it’s a command! So adding your two cents can really hurt morale.
Got any suggestions for articles, videos, stories, photographs, and any other links you think we should be posting in our weekly Quality Linkage? Please do let us know on Twitter.