Economy Size Geek

Some how in my upgrade to WP 2.5 I broke my RSS feed. I think I’ve fixed it now. I’ve probably lost all 10 readers :) (On a side bonus - Google has restored my own RSS reader account so now I can read blogs again - it was so depressing when I logged in an there where no subscriptions)

The uncooked steaks - from left to right Standard HEB HEB Prime Wagyu Akuashi Grass Fed along the bottom

What happens when you combine foodies with the scientific method - a taste off. In this case, we focused exclusively on meat - Ribeye steaks specifically.

I brought together 5 other friends to see - can you really tell the difference between very fancy steak and bog standard.

Basic overview - there were five kinds of steak. They were all ribeyes. They were all approximately the same weight (The largest being 14 oz - the grassfed was the smallest with 2 5oz steaks). There was a great variance in the thickness ( The thinest being the standard at about .5 in and the thickest being the prime at 1 inch)

The Kinds Of Meat

American Kobe Beef (Wagyu) This was sourced online from Allen Brothers. They don’t specifically talk about it on their site but it seems that the meat is most likely a hybrid of Japanese cattle and American Angus cows. This was the most expensive meat in the tasting at $92 per pound.

Heart Brand Beef - Akuashi Beef They make it very clear that their herd is completely pure breed Japanese cattle. The meat was sourced from Heart Braand Beef in Hardwood Texas. The meat was the second most expensive at $60 per pound. (I also got some stir fry and hot dogs from them that weren’t super expensive - my guess is that they focus on the steak cuts and are just trying to find a home for the rest of the cow).

HEB Prime 1 Select This is the top tier steak available at HEB. According to the store, only the top 2% of all U.S. Beef can carry the designation. It is also aged for a minimum of 14 days. It cost #13 per pound.

Grass Fed This from a cow that is pastured and raised purely on grass. My original source fell through so my brother brought over some meat from Bastrop Cattle Company I’m not sure what their price was, but I found a ranch in Granger that sold grass fed and finished beef for $13 per pound.

Standard Choice HEB This steak was just wrapped and available in the meat section of the grocery store. It was the only steak we tried that still had a bone attached. It was $8 per pound.

Preparation

To keep things fair, none of the guests knew which steak was which at any time. I handled all of the meat, and after I started chopping it up even I didn’t really know any more.

The Wagyu and Akuashi steaks were thawed in the fridge. All steaks were brought to room temperature. The steaks were all patted dry with paper towels. I then rubbed some salt and pepper into them and covered them in olive oil. That was it.

I fired the grill up. My infrared side got to about 875F. I got the center grates to 650F and I kept the third section at a lower temperature (Which I can’t remember). All the steaks were cooked to be medium rare (Though it erred more towards the rare side). I seared the normal steaks using the infrared and then cooked then for a few minutes on the middle grate. The Japanese steaks are more sensitive to heat so I cooked them on the lower temperature setting.

Judging

Each steak was cut into six portions. A toothpick of a different color was put into the steak to denote its identity. The key that mapped which steak was which color was kept in a different room and was not revealed until after the judging.

The steaks were judged on appearance, texture, beef flavor, and happiness. Each one was stack ranked from 1 to 5. Meaning a judge could only have a single steak with a 1 for each category. At the end we totaled up the score for each steak for each judge. The lowest score was considered the winner.

The Results

Conclusions

The judges had a hard time determining which was worse the Grass Fed or the HEB standard. This was likely caused by the fact that the Grass Fed cut was not very good.

The other thing we ran into was that the top two choices seemed to be between Prime and either Wagyu or Akuashi. In some cases, the judges had to just pick because they were very very close. You will also notice that each judge picked only one of the Japanese steaks. No one put them both as the top two.

The tasting could have been improved by getting cuts that more closely resembled each other in size and thickness. This may be the source of some inconsistency since each judge was only eating a small part of a larger steak it is possible that they didn’t get the best part of the steak. Another factor could have been aging. I do not think either of the Japanese steaks were aged in any way. I would love to take some time and compare aged Akuashi to aged Prime to see what impact it has on flavor.

This entire project started because I had Akuashi at Bohannon’s downtown. It was without a doubt the best steak I’ve ever eaten. The test we ran seems to show that the great meat itsn’t enough to replicate the experience. I’m not sure if that means aging, temperature of cooking or other additives.

At some point I’m going back to Bohannon’s to see if I can replicate the experience. In the mean time, I’m going back to buying HEB Prime as my default steak. It is seriously less expensive, easier to get (no shipping), and bite for bite gave the Japanese steaks a run for their money.

I’ve spent a lot of time lately trying to sort through the large boxes of stuff that I’ve accumulated in preparation for the arrival of our baby.

In some cases, that has meant throwing stuff away that I’m not sure why I had it in the first place. In other cases, it had meant giving away pounds and pounds of electronics that although useful I don’t have room for any more (for example - I had 5 VCRs).

In the process I found an old answering machine tape

I had just signed a bunch of paper work that would change the course of my life. It would take another year before I could convince my brother to come down and work with me. Almost ten years later, it turns out to have been a great decision for both of us.

I’m not positive - but I don’t think I managed to call him back. Things were busy with the starting of a new company and the new years holiday. 8 days later his joke would become something much more serious.

Details From Marine Corps Reserve Officers Association

I saw an article about Zoomii on Ars Technica today.

It is strange to get a view of Amazon that is so simple and yet shows how different the online vs book store experience really is. Most of the time I end of up at Amazon looking for something pretty specific. For example, I hear a cool interview on NPR and then go get the book. That sort of thing.

From time to time I find unusual stuff because someone who bought the book bought something else, and then I’m off down the rabbit hole. It is interesting that until I was looking at the Sci Fi section on Zoomii I didn’t realize how much I liked just looking at all the covers and seeing what is out there. (Notably it looks like Torchwood books are here stateside now :) I’m still waiting for series 3).

Now if only they could instantly teleport the books to my house…

i finshed photo shoot for my alumni magazine. We ended up recruiting mini to hold a flash. just another day in accounting

I have been working on a larger post about oil, but it isn’t coming together the way I want it to. So in the interim, I figured I’d share a little piece of history I learned last week.

I was listening to a Russian scholar on NPR. He was asked if Reagan deserved all the credit he has gotten for defeating the Soviets. The scholar said absolutely! The surprising part was how he explained that.

I’m a child of the cold war, I lived in Russia, and spent a lot of time studying its history (though like all history it tended to ignore the most recent stuff). So I assumed that what he meant was - Reagan built up an amazing army and stock pile of weapons. The Soviets were forced to do the same to keep themselves “safe”. The process of spending all that money on guns with little left over for butter (economics reference for 2 points) was the main reason for their down fall - right?

Well this guy had a different answer. He said that Reagan sent top people to Saudi Arabia. This was shortly after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. The Americans knew that the Saudis were unhappy about the invasion, so the Americans suggested a course of action to the Saudis.

Basically, the way the Soviet government was able to buy stuff from other countries was all funded by natural resources. Russia is flush with them - it is the advantage of being such an unbelievable land mass. The big funding source was - you already know where this is going right - oil. So the Americans convinced the Saudis to pump out a lot more oil. This would depress the price and cut the Soviets off from being able to fund anything let alone a war that wasn’t going well. Sure the US would benefit in the process from the cheap oil, but that was just a side effect/bonus.

That is apparently exactly what they did. The scholar said that documents have recently come to light showing where Gorbachev was telling the Politburo - “The treasury is empty”.

First of all - this is just an interesting story in and of itself - but here is the question:

If the Soviets, who were flush with oil, were destroyed by cheap oil - Will the US economy, which doesn’t have any where enough oil, be destroyed by expensive oil?

Ok so I have a VoIP phone. I moved to a new provider from Vonage about 8 months ago. In the process of porting my number over I ended up with two phone numbers. The one I ported is my real number, but the VoIP account came with an original number that I never used.

We started getting really strange calls on that unused number almost immediately. At first, I was forwarding it on to random restaurants (By random I mean local Pappa John’s) mostly because I was annoyed at the constant calls in the middle of the night.

I stopped that and just forwarded everything to voicemail. Since I needed to troubleshoot a login problem today on the phone, I checked the box. 46 messages! Most of them last about 5 seconds, but a couple of them were longer. I don’t know why I find them amusing, but I figured someone else might as well.

The lost daughter

Did she just say Possum Kingdom?

Where do I send that contract?

As a note - these are not the absolute originals - I removed all the last names and phone numbers used in the message. I’d hate for these people to get a bunch of random Internet phone calls - since I know exactly how annoying that is :)

Enjoying a pad thai at thai siam. i got 3 of 4 stars and i’m tearing up right now just sampling it while it cools down.So awesome!

Found a classic indy pinball -playfield looked terrible but the flippers where in great condition