hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr4375.txt

Episode: 4375
Title: HPR4375: Long Chain Carbons,Eggs and Dorodango?
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4375/hpr4375.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 23:54:08

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 4,375 for Friday the 9th of May 2025.
Today's show is entitled Long Chain Carbons Eggs and Door Dango.
It is hosted by Operator and is about 34 minutes long.
It carries an explicit flag.
The summary is, we make egg drops soup and talk about Door Dango WTF.
Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Hacker Public Radio with your host Operator.
So today we're going to be kind of doing a tofer and what the other tofer is going to
be.
I do not know.
We're going to be making breakfast which is egg drop soup and then we're also going
to be talking about, let's see, I swear I've done one on mud balls, have I not talked
about mud balls yet?
Hold on, let me see.
Okay, so it looks like I haven't talked about Japanese mud balls.
Now to do that, I need to get something from upstairs.
So Japanese mud balls is kind of like a zen garden thing or meaning least.
It's a polishing of a ball you ever heard, you know, can't polish a turd and the midplusters
did that segment.
You haven't seen it.
It's actually pretty cool.
We did a big tinfoil ball.
Same thing.
I'm going to get my gear from upstairs, which is so kind of like, you know, some people
do knife sharpening, some people whittles, some people, whatever.
I was doing this for a fair amount of time and here in Georgia we have this stuff called
Georgia at clay.
It is very hard.
It is a clay.
It is readily available everywhere and we will talk about that.
So let me get chicken broth.
We always get the reduced sodium, which means you just have to add salt.
So it cares.
The thing with chicken broth is once you open it, it goes that like quick.
So put in your fridge, use it, whatever.
I just eyeball it.
I use straight up chicken broth.
I don't use water and essentially what you want for me at least is a rolling boil.
I've seen several recipes online and the key to it is basically soup, whatever soup
you want, you can make it whatever flavor of liquid you want.
So if you wanted a miso soup, you could make a miso soup, but with eggnog in it, with
egg drop in it.
You're basically creating just a hot liquid for the egg to cook it.
The problem in the hard part is it is not making instant scrambled eggs.
So I'm going to let that heat up while I talk about mudball stuff.
Oh my god, we have to use eggs.
So it's extremely careful.
I can eat them fine, didn't it?
Oh wow.
We might have a problem here.
Nope, which Costco they didn't have any eggs, but we have two eggs left.
Now, if you live with someone else that shares a refrigerator, and you take the last two
eggs, one egg is our end of the man.
We will have a hard time.
So I'm going to keep this egg grayed out for myself to remind me to remember to put some
eggs to go get some eggs today, hopefully that will be enough.
Alright, so I just do two, if I'm doing like, you know, more than one person, I usually
would do more than two eggs, but I don't have any more than two eggs.
Usually do, I don't know, four probably.
You don't only do so much.
You can't fit a whole bunch in there.
I wouldn't do any more than three in a small, in a small pot.
This is, I don't know, two-court pot, maybe a one-court pot, two-court pot.
I don't put any milk.
Usually if I'm making scrambled eggs, I'll put a little bit of milk in with the scrambled
eggs.
Make scrambled eggs.
This, I'm just mixing it up, and you can get a little whisked thing, it actually does
help eventually, but with this, it doesn't have to be super light and fluffy, and you
actually kind of want it more than this.
I feel like, so now I have my, you know, slurry.
I've acknowledged, but you also want to be able to pour it, but you, you know, so do
you want to break up that membrane and get some pouring action going, so you can kind
of pour it.
What I ended up doing is bringing it to a rolling boil, but do not put the eggs in with
the rolling boil, because you will end up with instant, instant, scrambled eggs.
It's a way to make wet scrambled, fluffy eggs, I don't know, so anyways.
The setup for the database mud balls is, you have to find clay somewhere, go to a creek,
if you live in somewhere that doesn't have Georgia Red Clay, like literally everywhere
on everything and on all of your clothing, you can just dig near a water source, you'll
probably find some gray clay or some sand, and then you'll eventually find clay around
the sand.
Good thing to do with your kids, they come out rock hunting, there's different types
of little cheat sheets you can get and take your kids out rock hunting, and while you
need rock hunting, you can do mud hunting to make mud balls later, or later time, so you
got two activities for one.
So anyways, you've collected some, a certain amount of dense mud or clay, and there's kind
of two concepts that have worked for me, and this is, you know, your mouths may vary,
but for me, you had the inside part is the core, and the core is what keeps it all together.
The core, you don't want cracking, you don't want it to be too much like pure clay, I don't
think, because it will kind of crack, you don't want it to be super dry, you don't want
it to be whatever, so some people say we'll put it in a, they will work on it, and then
we'll put it in the oven, or they will put it in the refrigerator, which has like a
default, so we are already rolling foil, we're going to be done making eggs, scrambled
eggs in like two seconds, I don't think there's enough, this broth is like probably too much,
I just eyeball everything, it's so mean, even, if you're a hacker and you watch enough
cooking shows, you watch people cook enough stuff, you can really kind of figure it out
after a while, I'm still not a great ad hoc cook, but most of my stuff turned out pretty
good without needing to measure anything, I struggle with certain aspects of cooking,
but in general, it's pretty idiot proof, once you kind of understand how stuff, whatever,
and I'll taste pretty much the same, anyways, you have a core, and then around that core,
you have a thin layer, or maybe several thin layers of your outside part that you're going to
polish, now the really good, the easy way to do this is cheat and buy these ball brands,
which I work for new, these are two ounce mason jars, what does that say, no, with this two
pounds, one, two, three, I guess four ounce mason jars, or something, made in USA, some braille,
you know, braille reader, anyways, I think this is like a four ounce mason jar, it's perfect for
a small size mud ball, you want to do small, the smaller the better, because it's less, takes
shorter time to do, so essentially what you use is this mason jar for, and the more you use it,
the better it becomes, that's smoothing stuff out, you take the ball and you let it dry out,
so you have this mud ball that's sticky and gross and wet, you let it dry out, and after it's
dried out, a fair amount, like four hours in the sun, or whatever, then you can start
rolling that ball on the mason jar, essentially the only requirement really is that the jar
for the vessel that you're, you know, it could be an old pot, it could be anything that is,
it could be ceramic, it could be glass, it could be possibly even metal, I don't think metal will
polish very well, but it has to be just smaller than the, you know, than the diameter of the whole
thing, so you can just roll it on there, so with these small mason jars, I have like a pickle jar,
an olive jar you can use, an old olive jar I use, I started out with an old olive jar, and I use
these smaller mason jars that I got from somewhere, looks like I got three of them, I had four and dropped one,
and you just keep rolling it on there until the ball becomes a perfect ball. Now, once you have
this perfect ball, it's, it's gonna have a greedy, greedy core, the core is gonna be very coarse,
it's gonna, it's gonna kind of start abrasing on that glass, and that what's, that that takes
the way that rough edges, because there's corners on these, on all these jars, or anything you pick
has corners, but as, as you make two or three of my balls, you'll have that, it'll start wearing down
that, that edge, and once you get that edge more flat, it makes it really good polishing, so
the mason jar that I did lose, somewhere, and you could tell which ones I've used, yeah,
this one's nice and, certainly just move that a little bit, but the ones that you use,
will get worn down that edge on the outside, on the inside edge, will get worn off,
and it will be better for polishing, I got all of my fingers.
So, I'm eating half of a meal.
So, anyways, you got your, your mud ball core, and now you need a very fine, the easiest way
to do it, is a very fine clay, and you could cheat, and go get some already premade clay,
you can try different mediums, I tried chalk, that does not work, I tried, I have some of this black,
you know, when you do a fire, charcoal, so it takes some charcoal out of the fireplace,
that's kind of a cool finishing touch, but it's not good for polishing.
I don't know what constant is, a good polishing medium, but it is not, it's not chalk,
and it is not a saw that are charcoal. I picked this up from my wife's parents backyard,
they had a big burn pit, and in that burn pit, they had tons of, tons of, you know, charcoal stuff,
so I pulled some of that out, because the knife black, dense, very rich color.
That doesn't work very well, either, but it's good for finishing, it makes a really cool,
matte finish on your stuff. So anyways, you've got this mud, so what you need to do is collect
more mud, which I have, I would say a cork of, it's not super fine, it's kind of cheap, super fine,
if you really want to do it right, you make a big, huge batch of this, and that's what I have,
I have a big batch of this nice coarse, or fine, ground mud. So if you want a bunch,
easiest way to do it is to, I'm getting my thing up to a boil again, so we're going to do the
egg drop super-switching. So it's a task, so I've got it, like it just started boiling again,
and I'm going to use not a metal spoon, because you know, long chain carbons.
You haven't watched that documentary, it's good stuff. I've got a silicone thing, and what I do
is I swirl it around, so we have our super hot medium, it's not boiling anywhere, I swirl it
around in the circle, and I pray to the gods, you know, you kind of get the tornado action going,
and then I pray to the gods that it's going to not turn into instant, instant scrambled eggs,
and I'll kind of pour it in there, and when it, as it's spinning around,
it's spinning gives you that silk here. So now I have this nice looking,
streaming, whatever. Now the problem with this is, like I said, you can only do so much egg at a
time. So I'm going to spin it around again, get it going, try not to be too rough, and break up
that beautiful, beautiful silk, and you kind of, you know, you're dropping it in there, so from a
fair height, you want to drop it down, you're not too much, not too little, I mean,
there is no wrong way, the only wrong way is to do it when it's in like a rolling boil.
So I'm not a ton of room in here actually, I'm starting to spin it again,
and if you spin it before it's cooked, then you'd have just kind of a mess, that's not really
a drop at that point, you've got just like this weird, you probably mess. So if you do it right,
you had those long pieces of silky looking egg drops. So now I've got some nice egg drop that
has little no taste. There's a very tiny sips right out of the pot, like an idiot.
Yeah, it's like, there's just nothing in there. Oh, he's garlic salt. I've actually been really happy
with my son is obsessed with lemon pepper chicken wings, and we bring lemon pepper salt everywhere.
So if we go somewhere and somebody has normal wings, we can make lemon pepper wings on the side.
They have normal lemon pepper, which already has salt, and they have salt-free lemon pepper,
which obviously doesn't have salt. So I'll actually put a little bit of the lemon peppers,
salt in here, because I love it, like on everything. It's kind of like all-spice,
everybody that, what do they call this stuff? All-bedding, everything bagel,
everything bagel seasoning. I love everything bagel seasoning, because it's salt,
bunch of other good stuff. So put onion powder, you know, onion powder, garlic powder,
garlic salt, onion powder, and maybe a little bit of ginger. It's all really what your
preference is. But the key is putting enough sugar in here, or salt in here, to make it good.
You can also try it with some hoisin or soy sauce. Soy sauce is mostly water,
anyways, which you can put this hoisin sauce. It's like a duck sauce. Usually you'll see it on
Bansi. Yeah, this is hoisin dipping sauce. We don't have any true hoisin. So I'm going to have to do
soy sauce. I've got a little little smoky, but not so we have a little bit of Asian,
we got a little bit of spicy. So I guess I don't have a choice. I've got to use the soy sauce.
Same thing with like your salt, you know, both sodium soy sauce is ridiculous. Why? Why? Why
by just watered down the soy sauce doesn't make any sense. The same thing with everything. Milk.
Why? I mean, well, milk is different. Technically, to get milk and all that stuff is
a different process. It's not just watered down milk. Apparently.
So, got soy sauce, a little bit of
devasquely type of stuff. This is a very like bold sugarbabs, smoked maple,
sriracha. Not so much to the burned or boo boo, your bum home, your bum home.
So hopefully this will be nice warm thing to eat for breakfast. We got a lot of salt in here,
which is not great. Now you can see some of where I tried to stir it. And there's like little tiny
bits. So if I had more water, it's really a more water thing. If I had more water or more heat,
I feel like it's not a heat problem. It's definitely high enough. Well, I think it was just
I was stirring it before it was actually cooked. That's kind of where I'm at.
I'll dump this in a bowl and tell you about the rest of the whatever we were talking about.
Japanese mug balls. Now, the Japanese mug balls, you've got your core, you've got your
your extra mud or extra clay that you want to make into a nice spine powder. There's several ways
to do that. The easiest way I found is to get a large home depot bucket, whatever cat poop bucket,
or cat food bucket, a cat litter bucket. Yeah, that first drop I can tell I can tell the first drop
is the first drop because it's a nice big long silky piece. And then from then on, I've got some kind of
like little little bits in here. It's a good simple easy breakfast or meal whatever.
Oh, God. Not too much salt. Yeah, really tastes this Roger.
Oh, yeah, it's good. I don't want to put the rest in here. Now, ladles, Jesus Christ, ladles are not a thing.
I guarantee you everyone, every one of you has a ladle that is not to me a ladle. So there's
I don't know the different kinds of ladles, but the ladles everyone has ever used are completely useless.
I can just drink this like coffee, egg coffee. Everyone, every ladle I've ever seen has been useless
because it'll dribble and make a big fucking mess and go all over the place. What I found
it's like a punch bowl ladle. So it's a normal ladle. You know, it's got the soup, you know,
think at the bottom, but it has a spout and that spout prevents it. And it's not a little stupid
triangle thing like some of these other ones have where it's just like a little bit. No, this is
an actual, I mean, it sticks out maybe an inch, inch and a half. This spout sticks out. So when you
get the medium in there and you actually go to pour it, it doesn't dribble down this side and
make a huge mess. And so, you know, usually you're pouring, trying to pour inside of a cup or
trying to pour inside of a very small medium and the ladle just makes a big mess. So I actually bought
this nice ladle and I hid somewhere. I like to, I like to minimize our tooling. I hid the other
dumb plastic ladle that just makes a mess. I used to make lots of sangria with a rum.
And you can make sangria with anything else. It's not sangria. It's just,
my people make it with vodka. Something since anyways, we have our, our medium and our extra dirt.
We want to make this dirt super fine and super, super fine to put that last layer.
So we have this dirt that got rocks in it and big pieces of stuff in it. There's several ways
to do it. The easiest way is kind of the skinning method. So you get a big bucket, you put it all
in there and you fill it with water. And you fill it with water and you start up. You fill it with
water and you stir it up. And if you want, you can go on the bottom and get some of the big rocks
out or whatever. I don't think it really matters because you're skimming. You're going to be skimming
the dirt. So you're going to lose more than half of, you're going to get like a, a tenth of the
medium back of what you're going to be putting in there. So this, this, this, like a court almost
maybe of pretty super fine, pretty fine clay was from like a quarter bucket of, of the clay.
So I got, you know, like a one to, I don't know, one to ten probably ratio. So,
so what you're doing is you're breaking up all the bits in there and you're getting the big
pieces off. So you'll spray it. And some, what, what worked for me is overfilling the bucket and
letting, letting the water come out. But you don't necessarily want to do that if there is
medium on the top. If there's clay on the top, that is super fine clay. And that's what you want.
But you don't really get a ton of that. But it's nice to keep it if you've got it. But they're
going to be stuffing, stuff floating on the top of there. And you're going to probably want to
take it off anyways. But essentially what you want is the top layer. So once you've, and there's
you know, video is all mine for this. But once you've done it, you dump out the water and then you
let it dry. And I've let it dry before it. And once I let it dry, I will, I want to say I'll
kind of scrape off the top. I can't even remember. But there was a, there was a, the process was
I would, I would fill it with water and then try to dump out as much water as I could and then let
it dry. That's what it was. So you fill it with water, mix it up, and then let it dry as much as
you can, dump out as much water as you can, and then let it sit out in the sun. I put a piece of
plexiglass over the top. And then I would check it and kind of dump out the water. And eventually
I realized if you put the plexiglass at an ankle, the water moisture would drip down. And if you give
the ability to drip down away from and out of back end to the bucket, you're not like rehydrating
the bucket as it's, you know, as it's condensation is filling up. So put the profit and refrigerator
and make sure it's not going to go bad. So many of you have that you have a nice dry bucket of
clay with your layers. And essentially what you do is you take that mud that's on the top
and you just skim it off the top. You can do the pour method where you fill it with water and
you pour it into a big flat cookie sheet, but you're not going to get that much. So this method
you'll get a lot more, but it won't be like super, super fine. But you can actually take that
not super, super fine and then do your your lift method to get like really super fine. So I can
take this this court of, you know, pretty fine clay and make super fine clay pretty easily because
it's like a lot. And then I can take the leftover that's left over and put it back in there because I
know it's good, you know, pretty good fine clay. So you take that skim off the top and you can
kind of let it put it on a cookie sheet, let it dry and then smash it with a hammer and crush it
up and get those rocks out of the, you can manually take manually take the rocks out. That's one method.
The other method is to buy some very expensive, I haven't found this cheap anywhere. You can buy
some very high micron. I don't even know what this stuff I bought was. It was like, you know, one
micron or whatever. Super fine mesh to filter out super to make a powder essentially, super fine
powder. And what I did is I used a toothbrush and all I like a toothbrush head poured the
uh, poured the mud in there and then had it vibrate up against the mud and then it would create a big
cloud of dust and make a big mess. But it would go into, you know, a bigger bucket or a bigger size
bucket. So I was sitting on the table and I kept the table with a toothbrush and all the toothbrush
and then I would put, pour a little bit of the clay in there and then I would hit the bottom of
the thing and it would vibrate and that vibrate would make it just dump down. And that's how I got a
lot of this super fine stuff. I think all of this is done through that method actually.
So I see some big chunks in here, but I think the only reason these are big chunks is because it's
just dried up. I think this might be super fine. I think all of this was done with that method.
So um, that's the easy method is to use like a micron, super micron, whatever. But for your
first go around, you're not going to want to buy that stupid. It's like, I bought a sheet of it
of like 12 inch sheet or two foot sheet of it, two by one foot sheet and it was like $17 or
something and I could not find it anywhere, anywhere cheaper. You might go to like a craft store that
has something close to it and you don't have to be one micron or whatever. So you probably get a
better feel at a craft store or something. But now that you have this super fine, you, and it's kind
of an art form, you will get it wet. So you get your core wet and then you either roll it in
the super fine stuff and you get that outside layer that's kind of powdery and then you start
polishing and you'll hear this like a squeaking nails on chalkboard kind of sound if you're doing it,
right? You don't want to push too hard because you'll pull the whole layer off. So
you still have a kind of layers and you can do sort of both. So you can wet the core again
and once you wet the core and put the soft super fine on the outside, you're kind of combining those
two layers. But if you pick it sort of dry and then you try to put you know wet or maybe there's
if the if the layers aren't mixed well, you're going to have more a bigger chance of like it breaking
up. But that's only really happened when I tried to rush it and I dug into the layer and like
completely like taking a chunk out of a out of one and it's you know that's that's the thing. It's
not always perfect and that's kind of what the imperfections will make to make you look kind of cool.
So you got this core and you polished out your first layer and what I do is I'll I'll actually lick it
sometimes to patch little holes. So essentially what's happening is you're rolling the ball on this
thing and it's never going to be exactly a perfect sphere. Like you can work on it for a long time
and it'll be very close to a perfect sphere but it will never be perfect because it's you know
microns you know smaller or they'll be you'll set up a polished side and that polished side is not
exactly perfectly round but it got polished in a good it looks good. But maybe you know the other
side of it doesn't match and it's not perfect. So it's usually never perfect and I've had some
that are really close to completely completely polished but it's cool to have the imperfections
in there because you can use like I said a different medium chalk didn't work but the the ash was
cool to put into fill in the holes. So if I could be having holes in there you can use the
the the different medium or whatever you want to throw in those holes and then kind of do like a once
over with the polish and you'll have like a really cool marble looking effect with that. Another
cool thing I did was different colored waxes. Now with the wax you can't use like an oily wax with
all that shrap in it like your snowy pretty stuff. This very gooey wax. What you want is like the
cheap you know dollar store wax that's very hard. I did one of the blue wax and white wax
for the outer layer. Now the way to get it on there I actually had it over an open fire
for a second. So I would take the the wax and I think put it in something like a cup or whatever
um and heat it up and then I would kind of roll it in the wax. That's sort of worked
but you would get like large chunks of it on there and it wouldn't kind of come off. So once I got
it coated with however way you want to do it drip it on there or whatever but you'll want to take
the the big chunks off. I just like ran it over an open flame you might be able to even I wouldn't
put it in a microwave because that's going to expand the core and mess up everything.
But I put it over like an open flame and it melts the outside off but not the bit that you want
you know to polish over it. Then you lightly because if you polish too hard you'll take the
take that layer of wax right off. So it'll fill up the voids with the different colors and kind
of marbleize it. Um that one was real cool. I went to go add more color to it and we didn't have
I didn't have any more of the blue or it was the white. One of the two colors I didn't have any more of
and all I had was like a gooey wax. It was from an all work on different candle. Well it turns out
that was like a gooey wax and it would make a big mess of everything and it was sticky and gross
and I kind of had to just make it a normal a normal mud ball because I had to had to polish off all
the old craft. But yeah it's like a like a Japanese you know zen garden whatever type of thing.
Anyways if you're still listening I don't know why you must be really bored or doing something
important. But anyways if you're you know want to record an episode what is your passion what is your
what's your hobby and what kind of what is your zen garden it'll be interesting to know what
people's little projects are. But this was kind of cool and it's something that you can lose time.
You can lose four hours easily just by listening to a podcast or even just sitting outside and
doing a polishing mud balls and they look cool.
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