Aging canned food

Food scientist extraordinaire Harold McGee explains that you can age certain canned goods to positive effect.

There must be many such minor treasures forgotten in kitchen cabinets and basements and emergency stashes all over the country. My own supply still being fairly young, I consulted the eminent Sacramento grocer Darrell Corti, who very kindly shared a few items from his storeroom. I compared a new can of French sardines in olive oil with 2000 and 1997 millésimes. The brands were different, and so were the size and color of the fish and the quality of the olive oils. That said, the young sardines were firm and dry and mild; the older vintages were fragile to the point of falling apart, soft and rich in the mouth, and fishier in a good way. A 2007 (70th anniversary) can of Spam was also softer than the 2012 (75th), less bouncy and less immediately and stingingly salty, though the aromas were pretty much the same. Some Corti Brothers mincemeat aged for a year under a cap of suet was delicious, its spices and alcohols seamlessly integrated. A five-year-old tin of French goose foie gras: no complaints. Two vintages of Corti Brothers bergamot marmalade: the older noticeably darker in color and surprisingly reminiscent of Moroccan preserved lemons. And 3-year-old Cougar Gold—still moist and not as sharp as open-aged cheddars—was deeper in color and flavor than the yearling version, with a touch of caramel and the crunchy crystals that are the hallmark of hard aged Goudas.

...

I’ve found that braising cans change the flavors and textures within, but unpredictably so. It doesn’t seem to do much for sardines, but tuna in water loses its beefiness and becomes more pleasantly fishy and also a little bitter, while tuna in oil somehow gets more meaty and less fishy. Like its aged version, can-braised Spam takes on a softness that’s especially nice when you fry the surface to a crunchy crust.

I don’t recommend cooking foods in the can as a routine thing. Cans have various linings that may gradually release unwanted chemicals into foods, and this process will also accelerate at high temperatures. But it’s a way to explore how canned foods are capable of developing.
 

Amazing. Coming soon to a pop-up restaurant near you: a vertical tasting of 1988-1993 canned Spam. Excuse my while I go sous-vide a can of Chicken of the Sea.

[via The Browser]

In decline

Things I did not realize were in decline:

• Soda sales: “Coca-Cola’s carbonated sodas fell 2 percent in the U.S. last year, according to Beverage Digest, the ninth straight year of decline. Diet Coke tumbled especially hard, dropping 7 percent, almost entirely the result of the growing unpopularity of aspartame amid persistent rumors that it’s a health risk.”
• Ramen consumption in Japan: “Both the number of bowls sold and the number of restaurants selling ramen in Japan have steadily declined in recent years, according to figures from the Shinyokohama Ramen Museum.”
• Car theft: “The most important factor is a technological advance: engine immobilizer systems, adopted by manufacturers in the late 1990s and early 2000s. These make it essentially impossible to start a car without the ignition key, which contains a microchip uniquely programmed by the dealer to match the car. Criminals generally have not been able to circumvent the technology or make counterfeit keys.”

Flexbility or stability, pick one

From a story on the rise of sharing economy jobs through services like TaskRabbit, Uber, Lyft:

Labor activists say gig enterprises may also end up disempowering workers, degrading their access to fair employment conditions.

“These are not jobs, jobs that have any future, jobs that have the possibility of upgrading; this is contingent, arbitrary work,” says Stanley Aronowitz, director of the Center for the Study of Culture, Technology and Work at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. “It might as well be called wage slavery in which all the cards are held, mediated by technology, by the employer, whether it is the intermediary company or the customer.”

(Disclosure: For two weeks in the summer of 1988, I had a gig as the au pair for Professor Aronowitz’s daughter, then a toddler.)
 

That final parenthetical is, not ironic, but hilarious?

Borrowed palettes

A forum of 'code golfers'—programmers who create and solve creative programming puzzles for kicks—are using code to break classic art works down to their base pixels, then rebuild them to look like other classic artworks. The resulting images show us, for example, what Grant Wood's American Gothic would look like if painted in the bright oranges and blacks Edvard Munch used in The Scream, or what the Mona Lisa would look like if DaVinci had run out of all his paints, save for the colors in Van Gogh's Starry Night. Take, for example, Mona Lisa morphing into the Wood's classic.

View fullsize

(via thecreatorsproject)

More examples at the originating Code Golf thread.

Has Jeff Koons recreated one of these classic paintings as a massive mosaic of emoji yet? The smiling pile of poop emoji offers a dark brown for your palette, and there is no shortage of yellows with all those smiley faces.

Extracting audio from video information

This story is a bit old, but it was orphaned in one of my browser tabs. This is some grade-A sci-fi hocus pocus:

Researchers at MIT, Microsoft, and Adobe have developed an algorithm that can reconstruct an audio signal by analyzing minute vibrations of objects depicted in video. In one set of experiments, they were able to recover intelligible speech from the vibrations of a potato-chip bag photographed from 15 feet away through soundproof glass.

In other experiments, they extracted useful audio signals from videos of aluminum foil, the surface of a glass of water, and even the leaves of a potted plant.

...

In the experiments reported in the Siggraph paper, the researchers also measured the mechanical properties of the objects they were filming and determined that the motions they were measuring were about a tenth of micrometer. That corresponds to five thousandths of a pixel in a close-up image, but from the change of a single pixel’s color value over time, it’s possible to infer motions smaller than a pixel.

Suppose, for instance, that an image has a clear boundary between two regions: Everything on one side of the boundary is blue; everything on the other is red. But at the boundary itself, the camera’s sensor receives both red and blue light, so it averages them out to produce purple. If, over successive frames of video, the blue region encroaches into the red region — even less than the width of a pixel — the purple will grow slightly bluer. That color shift contains information about the degree of encroachment.
 

In recent years, researchers have developed methods for detecting heart rate of people purely through video, using small fluctuations in the color of their skin.

What will happen when we are naked to computer vision? What if we can no longer hide when our heart starts racing, our skin flushes, or our hand quivers ever so subtly? We always thought we'd be the one administering the Voight-Kampff test to cull the replicants from the humans, but maybe it's the reverse that arrives first. Machines just sitting their motionless, staring at us, and seeing everything.