Thore Sommer

THiS

A Kitchen Timer

I like having a dedicated timer in the kitchen. While you could easily use a phone, it's annoying to have to deal with it when your hands are wet or dirty. Pressing a button to start a timer is also much more convenient than fiddling with a phone.

THiS

Sourcing Ingredients: a fun Journey and Balancing Act

Moving to a new place also means finding new suppliers for different ingredients. This is always difficult because you got used to where to buy what, and the weekly routine, at least for me, is based on when and where I buy ingredients. However, it is also an opportunity to

THiS

An Attempt at the Fermented Potato Bread from Amass

Amass was a restaurant in Copenhagen that followed a zero waste approach and had some really creative dishes. Unfortunately, it closed in 2022, before I had the chance to go. Their fermented potato bread was one of their signature recipes and this is the story on how I tried to

THiS

Miso Cured Cream Cheese

While travelling in Akita, Japan, last year, I came across a combination of miso-cured cream cheese and iburigakko (dried, cured and smoked daikon). It's probably one my favourite new bar snacks and goes well with a beer. Unfortunately, the cream cheese (Frischkäse) that we normally have here in

THiS

A Story about Breakfast

While it would be great to have an elaborate dish for every meal, for practical reasons one of them needs to be simpler. Since I eat full meals at lunchtime and in the evening, breakfast is the one that gets simplified. This got me thinking: what is a good weekday

THiS

Shio-Koji Experiments: Eggs and Pork

After making the last batch of koji rice, I set some aside to make shio-koji. The recipe that I used is the following: * 90g fresh rice koji (used the white koji spores from fermentationculture.eu) * 13,6g salt * 200g water Kept it at room temperature for around 4 days and

THiS

Fridge Tetris

Sunday is usually the day I prepare at least 2-3 meals for the week, or at least parts of it. This means that there is going to be a collection of new containers entering my fridge. The problem? My fridge is quite small and already holds a decent amount of

THiS

Motorizing a Coffee Grinder on the Cheap

I may have decided to venture into the world of espresso, but grinding 7-20g by hand at this fine setting quickly becomes tiring. So what to do? I could buy a simple electric grinder for a few hundred euros, but I already have two hand grinders. So the second best

THiS

Making Mämmi the Easy Way

It was Easter a week ago, and continuing the series of Finnish foods, I decided to make some mämmi. For those unfamiliar, this is a traditional Easter dessert made mainly from rye malt and flour. Normally you do this in the oven for a long time. Though it wouldn'

THiS

Organizing Herbs & Spices

Like many people, I have run into the problem of where and how to store my herbs and spices. In the past I stored my spices in round brown glass bottles. Those are quite nice as they are cheap, you can see the current level without full exposure to sunlight

THiS

Getting Egg Timings Right

You've probably heard various guidelines for cooking the perfect soft boiled egg. Probably to put them in boiling water for about 7-8 minutes. The truth is, the time it takes is heavily influenced by the temperature and size of the egg. An M egg at room temperature might

THiS

Reverse Engineering a Cocktail

As cocktails are one of my hobbies, you get tasked to recreate a cocktail that someone had somewhere. The "easy" solution is normally to ask the bar what they are doing exactly. In my experience there is a good chance that they just give you the spec, though

THiS

(Un)intended Kitchen Items and Uses

I was in my kitchen and I caught the eye of the try square that I used earlier to divide the dough for biang biang noodles. Then I wondered what else there was in this kitchen that was not really common or used for a different purpose than originally intended.

THiS

How to find Spots in a new City

If you are slightly similar to me, you like also travel for food and like to explore it while travelling. Now the big question is how do you decide where to actually go? Over the years I accumulated a few tips and strategies that made this decision a bit simpler.

THiS

Organizing Cooking Ideas

Every week there is the same big question. What am I going to cook next week? As I really enjoy cooking, this makes it even more difficult: should I try something new, make some of my favorites or try to perfect a recipe/technique? There is also the factor of

THiS

Cocktail Egg White Replacement

While I enjoy a (whiskey) sour with an egg white, you then need to find a use for the yolks, cleanup gets harder and of course need some fresh eggs on hand. There are ready to buy egg white replacements, such as, Fee Brothers Foam, but it is easy to

THiS

Karjalanpiirakat

When I lived in Finland they were pretty much everywhere and good ones are really nice. Since they're not really common in other parts of the world, here's the recipe I've been making for a while now. Recipe I used the following recipe as

THiS

Archive your Online Recipes!

Here just a quick reminder to archive the online recipes or techniques that you are interested in. It now happened to me more than once, that websites just disappeared, videos were taken offline or recipes are now behind a paywall. Though most time you can still find a copy via

THiS

Franzbrötchen + Korvapuusti

So being from northern Germany Franzbrötchen are a staple here, but rarely you find good ones everywhere else. If you ever make a stop in Hamburg do yourself a favor and get one! Now when I was living in Finland you find something looking quite similar called korvapuusti, which is

THiS Featured

New Things Incoming

This blog exists basically since 2015 and it has been a while since I actually posted something. One of the reasons is that finding a topic to write about and then often when writing about food taking pictures that look fine on the internet takes more effort than it is

Linux

Bessere Audioqualität für Mikrofone mit PulseAudio, WebRTC und RNNoise

Update 2022: Die meisten Distributionen nutzen nun PipeWire oder sind dabei darauf umzustellen. Für PipeWire können einfach Filter Chains benutzt werden. Mein Audiosetup für die meisten Veranstaltungen ist ein 1€ Ansteckmikrofon mit einer 5€ USB-Soundkarte. Das man davon nicht das beste erwarten kann ist jedem klar, aber mit ein bisschen

Kurzreport

Kurzreport - Grafiz Vorlage für LaTeX

Letztens brauchte ich eine Vorlage für ein Grafiz und habe mir dann eine Vorlage dafür in LaTeX gebastelt. Diese will ich hiermit teilen.

Kurzreport

Kurzreport - Bilder für Google komprimieren

Hallo, man kann seine Seite bei Google auf Ladegeschwindigkeit prüfen lassen. Das kann man auf der PageSpeed Insights Seite testen lassen. Bei meiner Webseite waren besonders viele nicht komprimierte Bilder das Problem. Für PNGs schlägt Google folgendes vor: convert image.png -strip image_converted.png Und für JPGs: convert image.

Digital in der Schule

Musik - Vertonung von Gedichten in der Romantik

Hallo, Nachdem meine letzte Analyse [https://thson.de/2017/05/01/musikanalyse-auf-einer-burg-von-schumann/] um ein Werk von Joseph Eichendorf drehte, welches von Robert Schumann vertont wurde, ging es diesmal um das Thema Vertonungen im Allgemeinen in der Romantik und am Beispiel des Liederkreises op. 39 von Robert Schumann. Dieses Dokument ist

Linux

Sonos unter Linux #3 - Bibliothek aktualisieren

Hallo, ich habe mich so langsam damit abgefunden, dass ich nur mit meinem Smartphone das System aktualisieren kann, dennoch gibt es einige Funktionen, die nur die Desktop Anwendung kann. Darunter fällt auch leider das Aktualisieren der Bibliothek. Zum Glück gibt es immer noch SoCo [http://python-soco.com/], eine Python-Bibliothek, mit