Cooking Issues

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Shakegraph2

July 24th, 2009 · No Comments ·

The shaky lines are the actual bits of data from the thermocouple. They go up and down as the drink was shaken. The smooth lines are Excel’s 6th order polynomial curve-fit to the thermocouple data (whoa). Crazy Monkey is me, so named because I shook as hard as I could. I shook so hard that by the end of the shaking I couldn’t move my arms and had to jump up and down to keep going. Notice that even going crazy monkey, all of our final temperatures are about the same, regardless of shaking style and regardless of type of ice. Also notice that the smaller ice is marginally faster than the Kold-Draft, but not by much (that makes sense because it has more surface area). In fact, with the exception of Alex’s first shake (which was the first shake of the day so it might be an anomaly), all the shakes had almost leveled out by 12 seconds. After that we only gained a degree or two of cooling. A degree ain’t no big deal. So much for big ice being “colder.” If anything, the reverse is true. So much for needing to shake really hard. You just need to shake “hard enough.” We don’t know what the minimum “hard enough” is, but we know that a normal bartender’s shake is hard enough.

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