Riddled with questions



So now, what does brazed beef taste like?

It's interesting to note that some foreign languages do not constrict themselves with the technically sophisticated notions of where soldering ends and where brazing starts. Soft solder, silver solder, we do mix it all up most brazenly. I do wish we'd simply make a distinction between the methods of joining materials by whether the two bodies are either melted together or not. But we don't. Oh well.

Back to our pots, brazing and soldering both do not involve reaching the melting temperature of the base stock - in this way they are entirely similar to what we'd get by simply applying some good old hot melt mucilage glue to our steel ribs. No different at all... except for strength and application temperature.

Mmmm, braised ribs sounds pretty delicious.

I'd be surprised to think that the industrial attachment of barrels and ribs would involve only one type of soft (hard, insert whatever choice you want) solder or brazing compound. Putting so many parts together, one after the other, must involve a discriminate selection of various glues that melt in decreasing order of temperature so that the first two parts attached don't get unglued on the last bit of bonding. Thus, stick-on the locking lugs with the highest strength stuff, then spot the ends of the barrels together, then move on to the ribs, and so on and hopefully the lugs won't fall off in the process. It's not easy and it takes immense skill and expertise while the tasteful results look effortless.

Mmmm, expertise

You know what tastes delicious too? it's bacon fried in a tinned copper pot. Tight temperature play makes for tin that sticks strongly to the copper base and bacon that sticks - ever so slightly - to the tin. It's tricky, go too hot, the tin pearls off the pan. And with success, the results is a marvelously uniform browning of the bacon strips produced with total effortlessness. This cannot be achieved in modern non-stick griddle surfaces but it's not braised bacon either, for thicker items to fry, the copper and tin scheme does not work at all. Plain steel and cast iron take it further up a notch in temperature.

Frying, sauteing, braising, roasting, grilling, brazing, welding and soldering... It's all about temperature control.

It's all about temperature control.

And for shooting the bacon...