Absurdly Optimized | Science-Driven Product Reviews
Cooking
Your hand mixer starts too fast
A coarse egg-white foam destroys itself from the inside: gas diffuses out of the small bubbles and into the large ones until the foam weeps and collapses. The spec that prevents this is not the one printed on the box.
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Cooking
How far your dinner sits from the fire
Every charcoal grill is really one argument: how far the food sits from the coals. Here is the heat-transfer physics of that distance, and what it says about the grill you should actually own.
Recipes
Absurdly optimized meat slabs
The science of perfectly cooked meat: protein denaturation cascades, salt diffusion, time-temperature pasteurization, and an interactive calculator that computes sous vide or reverse sear timing, salt quantities, and searing protocols for any cut.
Health
How to trick yourself into exercising
Your friends got fit the month they strapped on a smartwatch, and it was not the step count that did it. Here is the behavioral science of why gamified exercise sticks, the on-wrist-maps problem nobody explains, and what happened when I tried to buy my way fit.
Most viewed
The perfect French fry
My girlfriend suggested we make steak frites. I said sure, how hard can fries…
The absurdly optimized pancake
I have been making pancakes for twenty-five years. It was the first food I…
Most denim is woven in the wrong direction
I wore Levi’s 501s for years. They are the canonical jean, the one against…
How to trick yourself into exercising
Every fit person I know got that way the same month they put on…
Absurdly optimized meat slabs
The first time I grilled a whole chicken for friends, I spatchcocked it, set…
Your hand mixer starts too fast
I had the same hand mixer for twelve years. It worked, in the sense…
The Romagna roasted potato
I was at a restaurant in Romagna, Italy when I tasted the most absurdly…
Your ceiling fan is a waste of electricity
For the past twenty-two years I have used the same wire fan I bought…
Fine merino is a consumable
For several years I wore merino T-shirts almost every day: Icebreaker, sometimes Smartwool. They…
Making your bedroom steamier
Noise. This is a bedroom appliance. It runs while you sleep, every night, for…
Recipes
Absurdly optimized meat slabs
The difference between a juicy steak and a dry one is 6 degrees Celsius. Between 60 and 66, actin denatures, muscle fibers clamp shut, and moisture loss doubles. Most grilling advice ignores this. We did the thermodynamics, then built a calculator.
The Romagna roasted potato
Yukon Gold potatoes soaked overnight in salted water, seared in a skillet with olive oil, rosemary, and garlic, then roasted at 210C. The science behind the traditional Romagna technique.
The absurdly optimized pancake
The science of perfect pancakes: leavening chemistry, acid-base stoichiometry, whey protein structure, and an interactive calculator that computes optimal ratios from your available ingredients.
The Kyoto glazed salmon
The food science behind Kyoto’s saikyo-yaki tradition: how koji preloads miso with Maillard substrates, why fish proteins denature ten degrees lower than beef, and the one step every Japanese recipe includes that Western cooks omit.
The perfect French fry
Kennebec potatoes in beef tallow, double-fried at 150C then 190C. We tested 5 varieties, studied the chemistry, and traced the technique from Paris to Brussels.
All Recipes articles
Home
Making your bedroom steamier
Ultrasonic humidifiers aerosolize bacteria directly into your lungs. I evaluated 19 humidifiers on mineral dispersion, bacterial risk, and the thermodynamics of why boiling is the only safe vaporization method.
Using science to plunge your toilet
Fifteen plungers, four design families, one standardized clog. The seal geometry and fluid mechanics that decide which design clears a toilet in two strokes, which ones take eleven, and which ones only redecorate the floor.
Towel absorbency, quantified
We tested 17 bath towels on wicking speed, GSM, and durability. The Abyss Super Pile won. Plus: what hotels actually use vs. what they sell you.
Reflectance, flatness, and the geometry of seeing yourself
We analyzed reflection physics, surface flatness, and distortion mechanisms across 10 mirrors. The minimum mirror height to see your full body is exactly half your height, provable by ray tracing.
Your ceiling fan is a waste of electricity
Window fans and room circulators solve fundamentally different problems. We tested airflow, noise, motor type, bearing longevity, and cleaning access across 16 fans to find the best of each.
All Home articles
Cooking
How far your dinner sits from the fire
A charcoal grill is an airflow machine wrapped around a single distance. I worked out the inverse-square physics of searing, surveyed the whole field, and found that most grills make you solve the wrong problem with a shovel.
The curve...