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NINEs latest start-up collaboration project features world champion Paolo Robertos product line of pasta and pasta sauces. "We are honoured to be a part of the launch of these new great products. Thanks to BillerudKorsnäs and Chesapeake for collaborating with us in creating a new premium packaging solution."

 

 

Designed By: NINE, Sweden

via

 

 

If an anime with Nintendo characters existed, the powerful opening theme of Attack on Titan series would be a perfect cover song for it.

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Here's your heartening motorsports story of the day. One driver sees another driver rolled off the track and is pinned under his car. The first driver pulls over, leaps out of his car, and goes to rescue his competitor.

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If you decide to play certain free-to-play MMO-style games on the PlayStation 4 you may not need to have a PlayStation Plus subscription. According to Sony Online Entertainment, publishers of those games can decide whether or not they will make Plus a requirement. SOE is developing two of its current properties for play on PS4 - PlanetSide 2 and DC Universe Online - and both of them do not need a Plus membership in order to play.

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via http://cogigoc.tumblr.com/post/47445399990/i-grew-up-watching-tmnt-and-doing-doodles-about

VP Joe Biden and the NSA once had a “disconnect” when it came to electronic information monitoring.

As a US Senator from Delaware, Biden was not a fan of the NSA secret surveillance program that has been more fully revealed by whistleblower/leaker Edward Snowden who is currently hiding out in Hong Kong.

In fact, both he and then-Senator Barack Obama voted against extending the Patriot Act’s wiretap provisions. Both lawmakers were strong foes of Bush administration initiatives including but not limited to electronic surveillance.

Many detractors of President George W. Bush regular accused him of assaulting civil liberties and shredding the Constitution and other highly charged words to that effect. According to new Gallup poll, Bush is now more popular than Obama, ironically enough.

Both the current president and vice president now fully support the NSA “dragnet” program of spying on the phone calls and internet content of American citizens. Some opponents of what is happening now have likened the current, massive NSA snooping operation as the Bush policy on steroids.

Back in 2006 (see embed below), Biden took a dim view of government data mining with Bush in the White House: “I don’t have to listen to phone calls to know what you’re doing. If I know every single phone call you made, I’m able to determine every single person you talked to. I can get a pattern about your life that is very, very intrusive. And the real question here is what do they do with this information that they collect that does not have anything to do with Al Qaeda … And we’re going to trust the president and vice president of the United States that they’re doing the right thing, don’t count me in on that.”

The ACLU has filed what is likely one of many lawsuits against the Obama administration to challenge the constitutionality of the NSA surveillance program. Such lawsuits are in part premised on alleged violations of the 4th Amendment that prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures.

According to Politico, even members of the president’s own party have become uneasy with these ongoing scandals: ” ‘Trust me’ is President Barack Obama’s preferred mode of action in times of crisis … But that message is an increasingly hard sell for Obama in his second term, following revelations that the man who once railed against the Bush administration over civil liberties abuses has himself surreptitiously quarterbacked the greatest expansion of electronic surveillance in U.S. history. Obama’s call for trust, patience and near blanket secrecy is increasingly falling on deaf ears in his own party, spurring a backlash among Democrats who say it’s time for the “most transparent president in history” to provide the American people with a comprehensive explanation of a secret program that dragnets most phone records and much of the Internet.”

Does it surprise you that both Obama and Biden have adopted a far different view of electronic surveillance since their days in the US Senate?

Vintage Joe Biden On NSA: ‘I Don’t Trust A Spying President’ [Video] is a post from: The Inquisitr

[hooplaha]

A new product called Smart Cargo for iPad is designed to make tablet owners' lives just a little bit easier. It's designed to attach directly to Apple's Smart Cover and provide storage for accessories like headphones, cables and a stylus... Continue Reading Smart Cargo adds a bit of storage to an iPad Smart Cover

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In an alternate universe, instead of being utterly obsessed with Tangled and The Jungle Book, my daughter would be repeatedly watching Louis the Bear and Reynard. Here are the stories behind those two movies and 16 more that didn't quite make the cut.

If some of them sound intriguing, well, there’s still hope. Other Disney projects that were eventually pulled out of development hell include Wreck-It Ralph (originally Joe Jump) and Frozen, an adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen.

1. Louis the Bear

For those of us who adored Louis Prima’s role as King Louie in The Jungle Book, here’s something to be sad about: Disney had a whole film planned that would feature Prima’s distinctive voice. Louis would have provided the voice of a bear (pictured above) who escaped from a zoo, aided by a couple of mice. If this sounds familiar, it’s because the concept was later turned into The Rescuers in the years after Walt Disney died and Prima was diagnosed with a brain tumor.

2. Army Ants

In 1988, Disney was considering a movie called Army Ants, the tale of a pacifist worker ant stuck in a militarized colony.

3. Toots and the Upside Down House

Henry Selick directed James and the Giant Peach and The Nightmare Before Christmas, so you can see why he’d be interested in directing a stop-motion picture based on the Carol Hughes book Toots and the Upside Down House. Steven Soderbergh would provide the script. Then-Disney-owned Miramax ended up pulling the plug early on in the project.

4. Chanticleer

DejaView

Based on a tale by Edmond Rostand, author of Cyrano de Bergerac, Chanticleer was to be a barnyard tale about how a rooster with a strange name thought his crow caused the sun to rise. Fans of Rock-A-Doodle (you’re out there, right?) recognize this as part of the 1991 movie directed by Don Bluth, who not-so-coincidentally was working for Disney at the time one of the Chanticleer revivals was being discussed.

5. Reynard

There is, perhaps unknown to many of us, an old folk tale about a rascally fox named Reynard. Walt Disney considered making a movie about Reynard since at least 1937, but never could quite come to the terms with the fox’s ugly deeds. Unlike other harmless Disney scoundrels, the victims of Reynard’s pranks often perished. It was more than a little off-brand for Disney, but he kept trying to figure out how to make it work for nearly 40 years. At one point, they even considered merging the tales of Chanticleer and Reynard into one movie. Eventually, the sly fox was used as the inspiration for the title character in Robin Hood.

6. Where the Wild Things Are

In 1983, John Lasseter directed a 30-second film test of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, which Disney then owned the rights to. Universal acquired the rights in 2001, but you can still see part of the John Lasseter test and imagine what could have been:

7. Sonja Henie Fantasy

This proposal was possibly intended to be a short, part of a longer film with many little moving parts to it. The concept got far enough that the Olympic champ-turned-actress was featured in some early drawings with a polar bear. Though the movie was never made, an animated Sonja did make an appearance in a 1939 Disney short called “The Autograph Hound” (see 4:25):

8. Uncle Stiltskin

Remember the cartoon Teacher’s Pet? The husband and wife team behind it, Bill and Cheri Steinkellner, sold Uncle Stiltskin to Disney back in 2003. In it, Uncle Stiltskin tries to get a child by spinning straw into gold. It doesn’t work, and he ends up getting a feral orphan girl who was raised by wolves instead. (You can’t make this up, people.) It was in the works around the same time as The Princess and the Frog and Tangled, so what happened to it is anyone’s guess.

9. Newt

BleedingCool

In 2008, Disney/Pixar publicly announced Newt, a film about “what happens when the last remaining male and female blue-footed newts on the planet are forced together by science to save the species.” The reason it was abruptly canceled, it would seem, is that Rio—a tale about the last remaining blue Spix Macaws on the planet who are forced together to save the species—was scheduled for release around the same time.

10. Fraidy Cat

“In Fraidy Cat, a chubby housecat with frayed nerves is torn off his comfy couch and dropped smack dab in the middle of a Hitchcockian thriller when he is accused to a crime he didn’t commit,” Disney promotional materials once said. Yeah, I’d watch that. And the general consensus from inside the company is that the movie looked pretty good. Word has it that company execs lost confidence in the project, unsure that it would be commercially appealing. Longtime Disney animators Ron Clements and John Musker actually left the company over the demise of Fraidy Cat, but returned six months later.

11. My Peoples/A Few Good Ghosts 

Screenrush

This intriguing story was about a ghost and three kids who bring a pair of star-crossed lovers together. The ghost characters later changed to a team of folk art characters—and as odd as it sounds, I think it would have been kind of awesome. There was a folk art Abe Lincoln made out of an old scrub brush with spoons for ears. Hal Holbrook was signed to provide Lincoln’s voice. Angel, whose voice would be provided by Dolly Parton, was a discarded flour scoop. And Ms. Spinster, to be voiced by Lily Tomlin, had a head made from someone’s old wooden foot. After some change in management and a lot of change to the script, My Peoples got the axe in favor of Chicken Little in November 2003. Worst. Decision. Ever. 

12. Yellow Submarine

Look, I love Disney, but I’m also a big Beatles fan, and I find a remake of Yellow Submarine to be completely and utterly unnecessary. I’m therefore thankful that the plug got pulled on the Robert Zemeckis remake of the animated film. We have the colossal failure of Mars Needs Moms to thank for that one—when that movie flopped, eyebrows were raised about budget concerns, and the Sub was sunk.

13. The Gremlins

Barnes and Noble

Not the version with Gizmo and Co., but a version based on the Roald Dahl book of the same name. Back in the early 1940s, Disney had at least two screenplays written for this project before it was ultimately dropped. What did survive was a promotional book that would have tied in with the movie. Original copies of these—there are fewer than 5000 of them—fetch up to $300 on secondary markets.

14. Musicana

Intended to be a more worldly follow-up to Fantasia, Musicana would have included a mix of jazz, classical music, myths and modern art. Imagine a battle between an Ice God and a Sun Goddess and Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald in frog format. It’s said that Musicana was canned so that more money and effort could be funneled to Mickey’s Christmas Carol.

15. The Prince and the Pig

Would you have watched a movie about a little boy and his pet pig and the trials and tribulations they encountered on their journey to ... steal the moon?! Disney thought you would, way back in 2003. And then they thought you wouldn’t, so after paying author Rian Johnson a reported sum in the mid-six figures, they scrapped The Prince and the Pig.

16. Hiawatha

You might remember the Silly Symphony “Little Hiawatha,” based on the Longfellow poem. Disney wanted to make a full-length film about adult Hiawatha, with more of an impressionistic feel to it. The closest it got to being made was in the mid-1940s, when concept art was produced and highly praised by the powers that be. They later decided that the movie would end up being another Fantasia—too “highbrow” to be appealing to mass audiences—and stopped production on Hiawatha in 1949 so they could focus on Cinderella and Peter Pan instead.

17. Don Quixote 

Back in 1940, the studio was thinking hard about making an artistic version—think Fantasia—of the Cervantes classic. It got pushed back until 1946, when it was briefly revived again as a short that would be part of a larger project. That didn’t work out either, but the Quixote quandary was brought up one more time in 1951. The solution this time was to produce the movie with very simple, flat animation. No dice. But fear not, Cervantes fans (or maybe you should fear): It was just announced in December that Johnny Depp will be producing a modern re-imagining of the tale for Disney.

18. The Rainbow Road to Oz

Though Disney’s Oz the Great and Powerful came out earlier this year, they’ve been trying to seal that deal since the 1930s. Prior to the success of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Walt Disney tried to acquire the rights to several children’s literature titles. Sometimes he was successful—Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan—and, sometimes, as in the case of The Wizard of Oz, he was not. MGM ended up buying the rights in 1937 for $75,000. After Baum’s widow died in 1953, Disney was able to purchase the rights to 11 of the 14 other books in the Oz series, however. A live-action movie was planned, featuring Annette Funicello as Princess Ozma and the rest of the Mouseketeers in supporting roles. They even went so far as to preview The Rainbow Road to Oz on TV:

We don’t officially know why the project stalled out, but the speculation is that Disney simply found himself preoccupied with Disneyland projects and the upcoming release of Sleeping Beauty.

Stay tuned next week for a handful of sequels that got 86ed—thankfully so, for the most part.

Primary image courtesy of The FW.

How many times have you made a Skype call where you picked up your computer and walked it around to show your caller something?

The problem is, your buddy is utterly dependent on you to move around.

Cisco and iRobot have solved that problem with a new robo-boss that will be available in 2014. It lets the person on the other end control their whereabouts and it uses some pretty cool autonomous and sensor tech to do it, Youssef Saleh, an iRobot VP, told us. 

Just outfit the robot with a schematic of the building in the robot's iPad app. Tap the place you want to go and it rolls there on its own, avoiding objects and other people. No joystick steering required, Saleh says.

The companies wouldn't announce pricing, but iRobot charges $4,000 to $6,000 for a similar Robo doctor unit designed for hospitals. We expect this unit to cost about the same.

Meet the iRobot Ava 500 for enterprises.

The robot uses iRobot’s autonomous navigation to drive and avoid people, objects.

It integrates with Cisco TelePresence and can post instant messages and presence info.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

The Wii U will be one year old by Christmas 2013. How is it possible that Nintendo was unable to produce an entirely new iteration of its Mario, Zelda, Mario Kart and Super Smash Bros. franchises within the first year of the console’s life cycle? Nintendo has known for a long time that it will have to face the big debuts of the new Xbox and PlayStation boxes around the 2013 Christmas season. It is inconceivable the company can be so deluded or arrogant that it thinks it can coast along without a major new revival of any of its big franchises until 2014. Nintendo is doing its very best Miss Havisham imitation, sitting by a mouldering wedding cake and dreaming of

As action cameras get smaller and smaller, we're able to mount them almost anywhere to capture unique first-person footage of adventures we as humans have never experienced. And if you've ever stared at a bird in the sky—imagining what it would be like to fly without a machine—this amazing footage of a falcon stalking a mountain bike rider will leave you wishing you could trade your arms for a set of wings.

And who knew extreme cyclists and birds of prey were born enemies?

It's time for another round of The Food Lab. Got a suggestion for an upcoming topic? Email Kenji here, and he'll do his best to answer your queries in a future post. Become a fan of The Food Lab on Facebook or follow it on Twitter for play-by-plays on future kitchen tests and recipe experiments.

[Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]

I dread the summer. I truly do. It's not that I don't like the weather (who doesn't like sunshine in the day and breezy decks in the evening?). It's not the hordes of school kids roaming the streets with abandon. And it's certainly not the food—extra sweet corn, ripe tomatoes, and every meal cooked on the grill? Yes please!

No. It's one thing that seems to happen every single year about the same time: the hordes of "X tips for perfect steak!" articles that crowd the internet, packed with misinformation, old wives' tales, and outdated knowledge that, in some cases, has been outright disproven for decades.

Whenever I see these articles, I get the irrepressible, uncontrollable urge to scream at people Wait! Stop! This is all wrong! I know your steak will probably still come out just fine if you follow these tips, and perhaps these myths have been perpetuated for as long as they have, because people are happy with "good enough" and don't really need "perfect" or "better," and if it ain't broke don't fix it, right? But for chrissake how can someone sit idly by and watch the spreading of misinformationamirite?!

A relevant XKCD comic comes to mind*:

*Doesn't a relevant XKCD comic always come to mind?

I'm not generally a negative person, and my normal reaction to seeing misinformation spread through the internet is to simply try and dilute it by spreading some verity and beauty—I've produced more than my share of articles about how to grill steaks (baked up and backed up by real science and research, no less!) in the name of truth and pageviews, and if you want to take a look at those, you can scroll on down to the bottom of this article for some links.

But today, I'm fighting back for once. We're going to put to rest seven of the most stubborn myths about grilling steaks, and hopefully come out the other end as better—or at the very least, slightly less frustrated—people.

For the record, pretty much all of these tips apply to pan-seared steaks and roasts as well.

Myth #1: "You should let a thick steak rest at room temperature before you cook it."

The Theory: You want your meat to cook evenly from edge to center. Therefore, the closer it is to its final eating temperature, the more evenly it will cook. Letting it sit on the counter for 20 to 30 minutes will bring the steak up to room temperature—a good 20 to 25°F closer to your final serving temperature. In addition, the warmer meat will brown better because you don't need to waste energy from the pan to take the chill off of its surface.

The Reality: Let's break this down one issue at a time. First, the internal temperature. While it's true that slowly bringing a steak up to its final serving temperature will promote more even cooking, the reality is that letting it rest at room temperature accomplishes almost nothing.

To test this, I pulled a single 15-ounce New York strip steak out of the refrigerator, cut it in half, placed half back in the fridge, and the other half on a ceramic plate on the counter. The steak started at 38°F and the ambient air in my kitchen was at 70°F. I then took temperature readings of its core every ten minutes.

After the first 20 minutes—the time that many chefs and books will recommend you let a steak rest at room temperature—the center of the steak had risen to a whopping 39.8°F. Not even a full two degrees. So I let it go longer. 30 minutes. 50 minutes. 1 hour and 20 minutes. After 1 hour and 50 minutes, the steak was up to 49.6°F in the center. Still colder than the cold water comes out of my tap in the summer, and only about 13% closer to its target temperature of a medium-rare 130°F than the steak in the fridge.

You can increase the rate at which it warms by placing it on a highly conductive metal, like aluminum,* but even so, it'd take you at least an hour or so to get up to room temperature—an hour that would be better spent by, say, actively warming your steak sous-vide style in a beer cooler.

*protip: thaw frozen meat in an aluminum skillet to cut your thaw time in half!

After two hours, I decided I'd reached the limit of what is practical, and had gone far beyond what any book or chef recommends, so I cooked the two steaks side by side. For the sake of this test, I cooked them directly over hot coals until seared, then shifted them over to the cool side to finish.* Not only did they come up to their final temperature at nearly the same time (I was aiming for 130°F), but they also showed the same relative evenness of cooking, and they both seared at the same rate.

*Normally I'd start them on the cool side and finish them on the hot like in this recipe, but that method would have obscured the results of this test.

The cooking rate makes sense—after all, the room temperature-rested steak was barely any warmer on the inside than the fridged-steak, but what about the searing? The outer layer of the rested steak must be warm enough to make a difference, right?

Here's the issue: Steak can't brown until most of the moisture has evaporated from the layers of meat closest to the surface, and it takes a hell of a lot of energy to evaporate moisture. To put it in perspective. It takes five times more energy to convert a single gram of water into steam than it does to raise the temperature of that water all the way from ice cold to boiling hot. So when searing a steak, the vast majority of energy that goes into it is used to evaporate moisture from its surface layers. Next to that energy requirement, a 20, 30, or even 40 degree difference in the temperature of the surface of the meat is a piddling affair.

The Takeaway: Don't bother letting your steaks rest at room temperature. Rather, dry them very thoroughly on paper towels before searing. Or better yet, salt them and let them rest uncovered on a rack in the fridge for a night or two, so that their surface moisture can evaporate. You'll get much more efficient browning that way.

Myth #2: "Sear your meat over high heat to lock in juices."

The Theory: Searing the surface of a cut piece of meat will precipitate the formation of an impenetrable barrier, allowing your meat to retain more juices as it cooks.

The Reality: Searing produces no such barrier—liquid can still pass freely in and out of the surface of a seared steak. To prove this, I cooked two steaks to the exact same internal temperature (130°F). One steak I seared first over hot coals and finished over the cooler side of the grill. The second steak I started on the cooler side, let it come to about ten degrees below its final target temperature, then finished it by giving it a sear over the hot side of a grill. If there is any truth to the searing story, then the steak that was seared first should retain more moisture.

What I found is actually the exact opposite: the steak that is cooked gently first and finished with a sear will not only develop a deeper, darker crust (due to slightly drier outer layers—see Myth #1), but it also cooks more evenly from center to edge, thus limiting the amount of overcooked meat and producing a finished product that is juicier and more flavorful.

The Takeaway: When cooking thick steaks, start them on the cooler side of the grill and cook with the lid on until they reach about ten degrees below final serving temperature. Finish them off on the hot side of the grill for a great crust. For thinner steaks (about an inch or less), just cook them over the hot side the entire time—they'll be cooked to medium rare by the time a good crust has developed.

Myth #3: "Bone-in steak has more flavor than boneless."

The Theory: Bones contain flavorful compounds that get transfered to the meat around them as the steak cooks. Thus, cooking with the bone in will give you more flavor than with the bone out.

The Reality: This one always sounded crazy to me—bones have more flavor than meat? And what's pushing that flavor into the meat? And if there really is this strange free flavor exchange between the two, then wouldn't flavor from the meat also be traveling into the bone? Why is it a one-way street? And how the heck do large, flavorful molecules get forced into the fairly tough, impermeable, solid matrix of muscle anyway, especially if they're cooking and actively forcing stuff out of them?

Well it turns out that there actually is no exchange of flavor between the meat and the muscle, and it's quite easy to prove. All you have to do is this:

Cook some identical roasts or steaks. Cook one bone-in, cook one with the bone removed but tied back on, and cook a third with the bone removed and tied back on with a layer of impermeable aluminum foil in between. Then cut them all up and taste them (preferably with a large group of people in a blind setting). You'll find that they all taste pretty much identical.

There are, however, some advantages to cooking with the bone is. First off, it looks cool, and if there's one thing you want to do while grilling, it's look cool. Secondly, bone will act as an insulator, which means that the bits of meat butting right up against the bone will cook a little bit less than the rest of the steak. This fact may be the source of the old wives' tale in the first place—meat that is cooked less will be a little bit more succulent and juicy.

Finally, I personally find the tiny bits of connective tissue-rich meat, fat, and gristle stuck to the bone to be the tastiest part of the steak (and if you don't want your bone, pass it on over, I'll gnaw on it).

The Takeaway: Cook your steak with the bone in. There won't be any flavor exchange between meat and bone, but the other advantages a bone lends does make it worthwhile.

Myth #4: "Only flip your steak once!"

The Theory: EVERYBODY says this one, and they say it not just for steaks, but for burgers, lamb chops, pork chops, chicken breasts, you name it. And to be honest, I... I'm not sure what the theory behind it is. It's just something people are taught and do. Perhaps it's an extension of the "searing locks in juices" myth and the belief that one must form a tight seal on the first side so that they can then cook the second side without any juices leaking out the top. Perhaps it's the belief that a better crust can be formed by letting the meat sit longer on one side, or perhaps that the insides of the steak will cook more evenly. But...

The Reality: The reality is that multiple flipping will not only get your steak to cook faster—up to 30% faster!—but will actually cause it to cook more evenly, as well. This is because—as food scientist and writer Harold McGee has explained—by flipping frequently, the meat on any given side will neither heat up nor cool down significantly with each turn. If you imagine that you can flip your steak infinitely fast,* then you can see that what ends up happening is that you approximate cooking the steak simultaneously from both sides, but at a gentler pace. Gentler cooking = more even cooking.

*and we, for a moment, forget that physical properties such as air resistance, friction, and, oh, the speed of light exist.

While it's true that it takes a bit longer over the hot side of the grill to build up the same level of crust in a multi-flipper steak, the fact that it cooks more evenly means that you can cook over the hot side a bit longer, without the risk of burning the outside before the center cooks. You can also avoid creating a harsh temperature gradient inside the meat, as you would if you were to cook it entirely over the hot side without flipping.

What's more, as Russ Parson's noted in the LA Times, you'll also minimize the curling and cupping problems that can occur when fat and connective tissue shrinks faster than meat as it cooks.

There are two possible advantages to the single-flip method. The first is that if you like pretty grill marks, you won't get them with multi-flipping. The second is that multi-flipping can be a pain in the butt if you have a ton of meat on the grill.

The Takeaway: You don't have to flip your steaks multiple times, but if someone tells you that you're ruining your steak by flipping it over and over, you can assure them that science is on your side.

Myth #5: "Don't season your steak until after it's cooked!"

The Theory: Salting your meat early can dry it out and make it tough.

The Reality: A dry surface is a good thing for steak— that moisture has to go away for proper browning anyway, so the drier your steak is to begin with, the better it'll brown in the pan. Salting early can also help your meat maintain a bit more internal moisture in the long run.

Check out this old, slightly outdated video for a closer look at exactly what happens.

In the past, I've said that it's better to season your meat either immediately before you cook it, or at least 45 minutes ahead of time, so that the briny liquid drawn out by the salt has time to get reabsorbed and your steak won't dry out. I've since changed my tune a bit on the reasoning as to why you should wait, but not on the fact that you should wait the 45 minutes.

I now know that dryness is not an issue—you want the outer layers of your steak to dry out in order to brown properly. The issue is the seasoning itself. If you want to cook your steak while the brine is still beaded on the surface, you've got to wipe it away with a paper towel, blotting away much of the salt in the process. Instead, wait for that brine to be reabsorbed (and preferably for the salt to work its way even deeper into the meat) and you'll end up with steak that's more deeply seasoned and flavorful.

Salting your steak after it cooks is not a great idea. You end up with a surface layer of salt that comes across as, well, very salty, leaving blander meat underneath. You're better off salting well before cooking and then serving the steak with a chunky sea salt like Maldon or Fleur de Sel at the table, which can add texture to the meat without dissolving on contact, the way table or kosher salt does.

The Takeaway: You can get away with salting just before cooking, but for best results, salt at least 45 minutes—and up to a couple of days—in advance, letting your steak rest on a rack in the fridge so that its surface can dry and the salt can be absorbed into the meat. Serve the steak with crunchy sea salt at the table.

"Don't use a fork to turn your steak."

The Theory: Poking a steak with a fork will cause it to leak valuable juices.

The Reality: This one is true... to a degree. A degree so small that it can't possibly be detected by the human mouth. The whole myth here is that people seem to think that a steak is like a water balloon; That is can be "popped," releasing juices. This is not actually the case.

Really, a steak is like a series of very very very very very very thin water balloons, all packed tightly into bundles. Poke your steak with a fork and a few of those balloons may indeed pop, but most will simply be pushed out of the way. It's like filling up an olympic-sized swimming pool with water balloons then throwing a needle into it. You may pop a a couple, but you'll hardly notice that they're gone.

It's by this very principle that a jaccard meat tenderizer works—it pokes a steak with dozens of thin prongs, pulling apart some of its muscle fibrils without actually rupturing too many of them.

The Takeaway: Go ahead and use that fork if your tongs or spatula are in the dishwasher. None of your guests will taste the difference.

"If you cut it open to check doneness, it will lose all its juices."

The Theory: Similar to the fork theory, people say that by cutting a steak open, you lose valuable juices.

The Reality: Again, the amount of juice lost by a single slit-and-peek is completely inconsequential in comparison to the whole piece of meat. If you are careful and slit it in a very inconspicuous way, nobody will notice that you've done anything at all. That said, it's not always easy to tell how done a steak is by cutting into it—carryover cooking can be hard to account for visually, and peering into a steak over a grill is not easy, especially if the grill is as hot as it should be.

The Takeaway: Use the slice-and-peek doneness check only as a last resort if you don't have a thermometer handy. It won't affect the final quality of your meat, but it is difficult to gauge correctly.

"Use the "poke test" to check if your steak is done."

The Theory: A seasoned cook can tell how well-done a steak is by poking it with their finger. If it's rare, it should feel like the fleshy part of your hand at the base of your thumb when you touch your thumb to your index finger. Medium is if you touch it to your middle finger. Well-done is if you touch it to your ring finger. Capice?

The Reality: There are so many uncontrolled variables in this assay that it boggles the mind that anyone would think it's at all accurate. First off, not all hands are created equal. My thumb is squishier than my wife's thumb. Should I gauge my steaks doneness based on hers or mine? Or perhaps some Harry Potter-esque universal constant will make her steak conform to the rheological properties of her hand, and mine conform to mine.*

*Can you imagine how fun that'd be at a cook-out? Hey Jeff, would you mind coming over here for a second so I can poke your thumb? Yeah, I'm just checking if your steak is done. Oh, and bring Molly over for a good thumb-poking while you're at it, I think I might have overcooked hers. Yeesh!

Then we get to the meat itself. Thick steaks don't compress the same way as thin steaks. Fatty steaks don't compress the same way as lean steaks. Tenderloins don't compress like ribeyes. You get the picture. More than once I've seen a macho grill cook take an unfamiliar cut of meat, apply the poke test, and come out completely off the mark when the steak is sliced.*

*This usually happens when they are dealing with, say, an ultra-expensive, highly marbled true kobe steak for the first time, which has completely different compression properties than its leaner counterparts. The result is ruined steaks and ruined egos.

Truth is, if you work in a restaurant where you are cooking very similar cuts of meat on a regular basis, then you will eventually develop the ability to tell their doneness by poking. Throw some irregularity into that mix, and that ability quickly disappears.

The Takeaway: There's only one 100% reliable way that I know of to guarantee that your meat will be perfectly cooked every single time, and that's by using this piece of equipment here:

[Photograph: ThermoWorks]

An accurate instant-read thermometer like the Thermapen by Thermoworks. Get one. It's a little pricey, but you will quickly make back that money by never overcooking another piece of expensive meat again, no matter how big it is, how fatty it is, or how squishy your thumb is.

And with that, I can finally come to bed, dear.

Further Reading

• The Food Lab: How to Grill a Steak, a Complete Guide
• The Food Lab's Guide to Inexpensive Steak for the Grill: 5 Cuts You Should Know
• The Food Lab: How to Pan Sear a Steak, a Complete Guide
• The Food Lab's Complete Guide to Dry-Aging Beef at Home
• The Food Lab: More Tips For Perfect Steaks
• The Food Lab: How To Grill a Gigantic Rib-Eye Steak

About the author: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt is the Chief Creative Officer of Serious Eats where he likes to explore the science of home cooking in his weekly column The Food Lab. You can follow him at @thefoodlab on Twitter, or at The Food Lab on Facebook.

Recipes!

• Dry-Aged, Sous-Vide, Torched-and-Seared Bone-in Ribeyes (AKA The Ultimate Steak)
• Butter-Basted Pan-Seared Thick-Cut Steaks
• The Food Lab's Perfect Grilled Ribeye Steaks
• Perfect Pan Seared Steaks

Here we see a high school idiot apparently try and clear his friend's car, only to smack into the windshield, flip, and then land on his feet.

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Now that things have settled down, and the fallout between Microsoft and Sony’s press conferences are sifting to a murky haze – let’s take a look at some other announcements from two of the industries leading developers. Ubisoft and Electronic Arts hosted their events on Monday and treated fans to an array of new titles, much anticipated sequels, and a lot of cars going left. I kid, but the push for racing games from every conference yesterday shows what a strong market there is for the new age of racers.

We’ve already seen what Forza had to offer from the first Xbox One announcement a few weeks past, but EA pushed hard their Need For Speed franchise announcing Rivals. The cars look alright, with a slightly futuristic take, but some of the lighting effects make me feel this will look just as good on the 360 or PS3. You’re spending a lot of time running from the cops (and dodging airstrikes from helicopters) but it had great pacing without feeling like I needed to drive through a crowd of hookers every time I wanted to make a get-a-way. After the demo, Breaking Bad star Aaron Paul took the stage to talk about Disney’s upcoming Need For Speed movie. As a fan of over the top car movies like Fast and Furious, and being a huge fan of Paul’s work – this is a no brainer for me to go out and see. It looks fun.

Ubisoft got in on the cops versus cars action with The Crew. The graphics are slick, almost enough to rival Forza. I hope some of the shots in the trailer are actual in-game action, because that would just bring a whole new level to these street racing games in terms of angles and play. I couldn’t tell if I was watching a new Mazda commercial or a video game trailer, which in my world is a good thing. Either way, this is a game to play if you live for speed.

For me, the top three titles announced at the developers’ conferences were the long awaited sequel (or prequel as it may end up being) to Mirrors Edge, Star Wars Battlefront 3, and Dragon Age: Inquisition. Mirrors Edge 2 is in the very early development stages, and producer Sara Jansson asked fans to be patient. The game will arrive “when it’s ready.” Footage showed the protagonist, Faith, getting her iconic tattoos interspersed with some game play shots. It looks pretty true to the original title which will keep fans happy.

Star Wars Battlefront was such a tease! Thirty seconds from the first person perspective on an icy planet (Hoth? Gotta be Hoth!) while you dodge debris and the foot of an AT-AT stomping down near you. It was enough to leave me screaming! Hope to see more of this from EA this week.

Now RPG fans, this one is for you. EA and Bioware dropped the trailer for the next installment in their Dragon Age series. In game footage is just beautiful, with the depth of character and scenery we’ve come to expect from this series. The icing on it all? Narrated by what sounds like Claudia Black, Morrigan from the previous games – and a nice shot of her at the very end. While we didn’t get a Mass Effect nugget from this presser, I’m happy to see Bioware going all out for their flagship fantasy game. The downside is we wont see this until 2014.

We saw a lot of sports titles from EA, which is to be expected. As always, they look more and more like watching a live game. EA brought rapper Drake to introduce the next installments of NBA Live 14, Madden 25, and Fifa ’14. With the Ignite engine running these games, they’re going to be fancy and fun.

We had seen some footage of Battlefield 4 earlier in the day, but now EA is touting the multiplayer capabilities of the game. Throughout E3 they will be running a 64-player beatdown, with leaders running 5-person squads. If you’re into real time battlefield action, this is the game for you!

Other titles to look forward to from EA include a TF2-like version of Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare which will launch of Xbox One before it hits the PS4. We also saw more footage from Titanfall, the Xbox console exclusive. Still looks like this is one of the top games to come out of Monday.

Ubisoft treated us to a whole different experience. I’ve been saying for years that companies need to hire professionals to run their conferences, and it looks like Ubisoft did just that! They brought comedian and gaming fiend Aisha Taylor to the stage to MC their show. If you’re fans of the FX series Archer, you’ll know her as the constant sweater dress wearing Lana Kane. Taylor was a great fit for Ubisoft, and she really got to show fans (and haters) how much she really gets into these games. The banter between her and Ubisoft execs and developers was worth watching the presser just for that! But anyways, on to the games.

Ubisoft opened with a new book by Tom Clancy. I mean wait, the next in the line of Splinter Cell games. Blacklist is just what you would expect from the series. Side note, I actually got into the Splinter Cell games because my mom is a huge Clancy reader. We talk about the books, and I always update her on my stats in game. I think she secretly wishes I was a mercenary spy on the hunt for terrorists. Seriously though, the game is great looking and a lot of the best features are back including Versus mode.

Next up was some really enchanting games, like the return of Raymen in Legends. Now with some 120 levels to conquer, this is gonna be a game to keep playing for months to come. We should see this one drop on Sept. 3^rd. Ubisoft surprised us with a free-to-play game titled The Mighty Quest For Epic Loot, a charming and fun game that is all about stealing from the people around you. It’s quirky and funny and the voice over reminds me of Brad Pitt’s Metro Man from Megamind.

A new Just Dance, a South Park title and more Watch Dogs footage rounded out the mid-section of the conference. Ubisoft ended with what looks to be their two biggest titles: Assassins Creed 4: I’m On A Boat Black Flag and a new Tom Clancy title. I’ve not played any of the AC titles, but in terms of visuals it looks just about as good (or bad, depending on your take on the series) as the predecessors. It has a very Pirates of the Caribbean feel with the opening sequence, and I secretly hope for a Lonely Island achievement. The difference with this one is I will actually pick it up. I don’t know if it’s because of my undying love of pirates or my progression as a gamer, but this title looks worthwhile.

The new Clancy game is not what you would expect, an open-world, online shooter titled The Division. Powered by the new Snow Drop engine, the game takes place three weeks after a massive pandemic hits New York City, during the Christmas holidays. One of the first things that popped for me was the menu features. It pops up on your wrist controller and really brings you into the game. You have a lot of good places for cover and sniper options, which even running solo will make good for most rogue types. If you want to take a break from your World of Warcraft styled and other fantasy MMOs, and I hesitate to call The Division an MMO, this is a great new experience for shooter game play.

With all the major press conferences out of the way by time of writing (still have to play catchup with Nintendo), it’s a matter of wait and see for game play and what other gems companies will surprise us with during the rest of E3!

America’s largest tobacco company announced plans today to start selling E-Cigarettes.

The Altria Group, the company that owns Philip Morris USA and sells Marlboro brand cigarettes, announced today that it was launching its own e-cigarettes line under the MarkTen brand.

Yahoo News reports that Altria is the last major tobacco company to enter the e-cigarette market. CEO Marty Barrington said that the company “spent a good deal of time studying the category and the business opportunity.”

According to CBS, several tobacco companies have seen their American customer base shrink as many smokers continue to quit. Nearly half of all smokers (about 45 million in America) try to quit each year and health campaigns have stopped many people in the United States from picking up the habit.

Market analyst Jack Russo said that E-Cigarettes will allow companies like Altria to grow their customer base in the United States. Altria can also appear like “the good guy” as E-Cigarettes are often used by people who are trying to quit smoking.

Russo said: “This industry is in decline, whether people want to admit it or not. (Altria can) look like the good guys for a change.”

Of course, that “good guy” image could be short-lived.

The FDA is expected to put down more regulations on E-cigarettes later this year and several people see the electronic nicotine devices as a gateway to real cigarettes.

E-cigarettes are battery-operated devices that give smokes a bit of nicotine without many of the chemicals found in regular cigarettes. It also provides a vapor to give people the feeling of smoking.

The e-cigarette market is still miniscule compared to the cigarette market but it is growing. CBS notes that there were only few thousand users in 2006 and but now the industry boasts several million users. Analysts estimate that sales could hit $1 billion this year.

The MarkTen e-cigarettes, which will feature “Four Draw” technology, will be available this August.

New E-Cigarettes Announced By Marlboro-Maker Altria is a post from: The Inquisitr

Tight package, anyone?

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French musician, comedian, blogger and ninja PV Nova takes Get Lucky by Daft Punk and Pharrell Williams through the history of music, with a version for every decade, from the 1920's to the 2020's.


PV NOVA

Tiffany looked forward to the annual Red Rocks Summer Solstice Folk Music and Omnispiritual Awareness Festival, so she could go nuts at the body-painting booth.

Photo taken by Bob Wick in Colorado’s Dominguez-Escalante National Conservation Area for Bureau of Land Management.

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