tel jetson

this likely applies to other fruit preserves, too, but quince paste (or your preferred regional name/variant) is what I make big batches of.

long story short: big batches require big, wide pots.

I’ve been making quince paste for years. close to twenty at this point. the volume has slowly been increasing as my quince trees have become more numerous and matured. no problem. turned out great for years. until I had enough quince that I started trying larger batches to use them up in a timely fashion. not huge batches, mind you. initially in the vicinity of six to eight pounds of fruit. this year it’s been ten to twelve pounds.

I started having trouble getting the paste to set up. authors of internet recipes generally advise their readers whose paste doesn’t set to return it to a pot and reduce it some more. or to put it in an oven or dehydrator for long hours at low temperatures. I tried those options, which sort of worked. I often ended up with something closer to fruit leather: nearly black, varying degrees of chewy. pretty tasty, but not what I actually wanted.

so I spent some time trying to learn more about pectin. I asked friends and family, but nobody had any ideas I hadn’t already tried. looked around the internet and read, in at least 18 barely different ways, what anybody who ever made any kind of jam or jelly already knows: that three things were important to get right—sugar, pH, water content. I briefly explored getting a kitchen pH meter (which I may still do at some point), but only got as far as adding a lot of citrus juice to see if lower pH would do the trick. tasted nice, but didn’t help anything set.

I found some suggestions that unripe quinces might have more pectin, so I tried using unripe quinces. no go.

I reverted to the sickly sweet 1:1 fruit:sugar ratio. no help.

I tried using a pressure cooker to get the fruit soft enough without adding much water to keep water content low. when that didn’t work, I tried baking. ended up having to add water to get it to puree. and still no set.

I read a couple jam set failure troubleshooting guides that included warnings not to scale up recipes, but there wasn’t much information about why. that got me thinking, though. I had been filling my pots nearly full of quince puree. I was minimizing the ratio of free surface area to volume, which substantially increased the amount of time it took to evaporate an adequate fraction of water. not quite an answer yet, but getting closer.

it occurred to me that heat might also be a factor, so I looked into that. I didn’t have a whole lot of luck on that count, which I suspect is at least partly due to the wild proliferation of AI generated garbage websites. I did finally find one mention that heat does degrade pectin starting around 212°F and accelerating at higher temperatures. so my hours of simmering to evaporate water from deep pots of puree may have been enough to destroy a lot of the copious pectin I started with.

at this point, a friend suggested that I revert to a small batch to test my theory. instead, I bought a shallow 15-quart brazing pan from the local restaurant supply place, which gives a whole lot more free surface area to evaporate more quickly. very much an impulse purchase, and it cost more than I care to reflect on.

but it worked! only took an hour and a half or so to reduce instead of six. set up as soon as it cooled off, maybe two hours. got a nice translucent orange color instead of something that resembled congealed blood. great texture. cut the sugar down a fair amount, so it tastes the way I like and tempers fears of dental caries and insulin disorders.

I can think of at least one alternative way to solve my problem without the brazing pan. simmering un-puréed quince in a little water with the sugar already added instead of simmering after it’s already puréed would likely work in one of the smaller and deeper pots I already had.

I’ve been making marmalade whenever I use any citrus for something else. either just the rind if I ate the fruit (mostly grapefruit recently) or the whole fruit minus the juice if I only needed the juice for some other recipe or project (lemons, limes, various oranges).

can’t say I follow a recipe. slice up the rinds/fruit as finely as I’m motivated to at the time, soak in water overnight, then add some sugar and simmer until it seems about right. then into a jar or two. it’s been a pretty forgiving process so far.

I’ve added fennel and/or caraway seeds to a few batches and liked the results. leaving the seeds whole turned out better to my taste than grinding them. tried some coriander seeds, too, but that flavor seemed to be lost. it’s either too similar to the citrus itself or I didn’t use enough.

I’ve also been making large batches of the original marmalade, quince paste/quince cheese/cotognata /dulce de membrillo/birsalmasajt/codonyat/&c/and cetera. some quince trees I’ve shamefully neglected are coming into heavy production in spite of me, and I haven’t found another way to use them up in a hurry.

paul wheaton wrote:I had huge hopes that we would embrace the scenario I laid out, and then explore permaculture solutions.  

With a humble home and a huge garden ...

  - maybe it doesn't matter if you lose your job

  - maybe you have a MASSIVE advantage

  - maybe all this stuff becomes interesting rather than scary

  - is better than living in the city with a lot of money ...  which will drain away

  - maybe you can share your bounty with friends

ah. clearly I misunderstood the assignment.

I might add

- more connections with more people, weighted towards those nearby by not excluding those far away. include people you have large and even irreconcilable differences with.

- a humble home and big garden are great options in cities, too.

- many states and counties have ag and forest designations that can greatly reduce property taxes. investigate what’s involved.

- be more concerned with whether you’ve been generous enough than whether you’ve been taken advantage of.

- learn and share skills. don’t need to reinvent the wheel here: if there are community centers, art centers, clubs, religious groups, granges close by, you may as well make good use of them.

- share stuff.

Dan Robinson wrote:
Here's the problem:

Achieving these AGI goals requires massive amounts of energy (electricity) to run data centers and train algorithms, not to mention an enormous supply of computer chips, such as GPUs, etc. The amount of energy needed to accomplish these nefarious goals is NOT yet available.

Then there is the side issue of cooling, where massive amounts of water are diverted to cool the data centers.

The current U.S. electrical grid cannot handle the load. Data centers are already driving up electricity costs for customers in various locations around the country. Natural gas is also being diverted to power these data centers, not to mention almost defunct coal-fired facilities being brought back online.

There is a lot of talk and research into nuclear energy and micro-nuclear reactors to supply the required energy. But it takes a lot of time and money to build this out, not to mention potential regulatory issues.

Dan’s laying out some of the many reasons generative AI companies lose money every time their products are used, even and especially the paid products. even if there were plenty of electricity and cooling to supply these things, each new and (dubiously) improved iteration requires more hardware that’s more expensive (and rapidly degraded) and more electricity to train and run and loses more money with each use than the previous iteration. this trend could reverse, but I haven’t seen any evidence that it will.

if you lose money on every sale, can you make it up in volume?

we could get into some technical reasons LLMs are such power hogs, but the main idea is that they’re inelegant inefficient tools that use brute computational force to make crude statistical models. their resemblance to intelligence as most would define it is superficial at best.

my most salient personal experience with AI is that the proliferation of this stuff has made looking for information and tools on the internet very much more frustrating and unlikely to succeed. I suppose creating a less appealing internet does lead to some salutary outcomes.

bringing it back to the college degree question: making big decisions by trying to game out where this all leads and when doesn’t strike me as a great idea. AI is only the latest excuse for big layoffs. there were other excuses prior and there will be new excuses after. whether a degree (or other formal education) is the right move for a person will depend on a whole lot of things that are particular to that person and their time and place. I certainly wouldn’t put much or any faith in what strangers on the internet predict a robot will be able to do.

get your priorities and values straight with yourself, be honest and realistic about what motivates you and what you’re capable of, observe what’s going on in the world and your community, carefully examine the assumptions you’ve adopted or inherited, and give figuring out where you want to fit in all that a try. you might get it wrong. try again. any or all of the above might change. no problem. small incremental actions while you’re figuring these things out are often better than big and irrevocable ones from my point of view, but sometimes a big dramatic move is the right one. whatever the case, don’t go to college (or reject it) because that’s expected of you. at the same time, don’t buck expectations just for the hell of it.

making choices and adopting habits that lower the stakes of failure seem prudent whatever life a person pursues. to me that means avoiding debt. it means growing (and preparing and EATING) a lot of food. minimizing the energy I consume. maximizing my interdependence with my close community. doing what I can myself or with the help of friends instead of paying someone else. giving current events some attention but not too much. for the time being it also means keeping a square job (that requires a degree and license) to, among other things, support my aging parents and hedge against the unpredictable.

but enough prattling. prattling is kinda fun, though. I guess I’m a prattler. blame it on my time in college.

I’ll set aside my thoughts about whether (and how) generative AI will be as transformative as some hope and others fear and assume for the sake of argument that it will be around to some degree going forward.

for better or worse, the stuff uses a truly staggering amount of electricity. data centers, server farms, cloud computing, crypto, and cetera were all plenty power intensive before gen AI made a real splash, but things seem to have passed an inflection point where ideas that would previously have been outlandish are now taken seriously and even carried out. decommissioned nukes being recommissioned. retirement of uneconomical coal plants delayed or reversed. net-zero goals and policies watered down or abandoned entirely. nuclear fusion discussed with straight faces.

there are political and cultural factors involved that aren’t useful to discuss here (but that I don’t want to minimize the significance of). regardless, the demand for electricity is increasing rapidly and that increase is plausibly predicted to accelerate. however things shake out mid- to long-term, this could present a possible career path and guide a reasonably prudent course of study.

that could mean many different things to different people. study electrical engineering. nuclear engineering. mechanical engineering. civil or environmental engineering. lineman apprenticeships. home energy efficiency consulting and contracting. niche home-scale alternative energy design. leading workshops on adopting low-energy lifestyles. making art or tools out of scrapped electric clothes dryers. a great many other options and variations on these.

not all of those routes involve formal education. for those that do, the amount and cost could vary from getting paid while receiving it to requiring loans that could remain a burden for decades. for myself, I was comfortable taking on a modest amount of debt to get a couple of degrees. on the order of $10k (USD). I worked a variety of jobs and internships while I got an undergraduate degree and I got paid for a masters degree. I got a handful of small scholarships. I had decades of practice living cheaply (and happily) by the time I decided to get those degrees. all of these things helped me avoid more loans.

probably most importantly, I had a strong community and network of support. some of that existed before I went to a university. some I built along with likeminded folks I met in school. all of it helped in one way or another. entirely independent of the support during school, my community is a tremendously important part of my life both before and after. from my point of view, the community a person joins/creates/cultivates/maintains/inherits/falls into/tolerates grudgingly is much more important for a person’s success (as I idiosyncratically define that) than their choice to get a degree or not. I don’t mean to suggest that the self-reliant/independent/hermit life isn’t a reasonable option, but I don’t personally have anything to offer a person of that persuasion.

like Christopher Weeks, I really liked college. the hodgepodge of classes I took at a community college in the years after high school (including at least botany, math, drama, history, literature, anthropology, photography, psychology, political science, and logic) was a whole lot of fun. very little of it was directly useful for the farming career I had at the time, but it was all useful in some degree for living a full life the way I wanted (and want) to.

later, at a state university, I kept up the same habit of taking interesting and edifying classes with no consideration of leveraging the experience into advancing a current or future career. in class and out, I met and learned from a wide variety of folks with a shocking (to me at the time) range of histories, ideologies, strengths, struggles, stories, and plans. I did that until my registration was blocked for having too many credits with no major, at which point I declared the least constrained major I could find to keep up the adventure a little longer. it meant using resources for school that I could have put toward other things that were important. this was in the mid oughts, so into the era of tuition increasing, but obviously not to the current extremes. never did get a degree from that school and never regretted any of it. would I recommend going deeply in debt to pursue a similar experience? I would not.

apart from the letters behind their name, the things a person gains from college are available via other, often cheaper, routes (with varying levels of effort involved depending on more variables than I care to try listing). college is hard to beat for getting them all in one place, though.

very few people ask for my advice about college, careers, or really anything at all (for good reasons, I’m sure). if anyone did, I wouldn’t advocate for or against a degree, at least not until I knew a fair amount about what’s important to them, what their current circumstances are, what they enjoy and find interesting, and how well they know themselves. in any event, I don’t think the choice has to be between college and the ideas paul included above. seems like a “why not both?” situation to me.

I don’t personally find the highest salary consideration the host mentioned to be very compelling, but I have some small sympathy for that point of view for the purpose of optimizing the balance of square job time and real life time when those two can’t or don’t overlap much. don’t see any of this changing much however the current shakeup around AI settles out.

I do want to briefly mention that there are still a number of places in the world where a college degree is either free or nearly so. as I understand it, it is also rather simpler to get by without a college degree in many or most of those places. there’s a lot to say about the wisdom and impact &c of such an arrangement, but it’s at the very least interesting to consider that there are other ways to handle post-secondary education. if one of those places appeals, immigration might be an option. just as likely it won’t be an option, I suppose.

thanks for coming to my self-indulgent ramble-thon. I hope you enjoy the rest of your day. don’t beat yourself up for expending so much of it reading my nonsense.

I most often make gnocchi out of them, generally with some squash and potato as well.

my parents make tasty pasta with chestnuts they smoke.

a good friend makes excellent cookies.

I’ve intended to make some chestnut whiskey, but haven’t gotten around to it yet.

can easily add an inert gas to a corny keg, too. nice.

about 15 years ago I picked up a couple used food-grade 55-gallon steel drums from a grocery store. they had been full of olive oil, so there was a substantial mess involved. the price was right, though.

the drums that I got had close heads with bungs, which I imagine is also not ideal for your purposes. I’ve gotten plenty of drums over the years with ring-clamped heads, though.

I’m guessing 55 gallons is bigger than you want, but I’ve seen not food-grade steel drums as small as 5 gallons, so maybe there are smaller food-grade options, too.

more natural options that I know of that handle moisture well: wool, cattail down, cork.

only really viable if you can harvest and process them yourself. or, in the case of cork, all the stacks of cash you have laying around are really starting to cramp your space. though I guess if you have a wine habit and a lot of time on your hands, that one could be “gathered,” too.

also lower R-values/depth than the more conventional options, so you would eat into your available space to get comparable insulation.

the cattail down and wool would need some sort of treatment to keep bugs out. cattail down would probably need something to address flammability, though the bug treatment might help with that, too.

I’m sure there are plenty of other equally or more impractical options. light clay and millet straw or russian olive woodchips? daikon charcoal in clamshell lime plaster? sky’s the limit, really.

post-mortem: possibly. I did take a few photos with pretty bad lighting, but may have lost track of them in the intervening years. I'll see what I can dig up.

rebuild: sort of. I've been slowly collecting material and planning the design for quite a while now. seems like I'm always short on something, though, whether that's time, money, knowledge... but I'll try to remember to take a photo of the bell a buddy helped me build out of a couple steel barrels soon. and I did recently pick up some material that I need to move forward so I'm hoping there's more progress soon.

for better or worse, a couple friends finished their (electric) saunas in the interim, so the urgency of getting mine in order declined. but I'll get there. probably not by the end of this year, but hopefully by the end of this winter.