Fountain Pens!

A couple weeks ago in chem lab, I noticed that my lab partner was writing in her lab notebook with a fountain pen. A fountain pen?? I thought those had died out decades ago! But no, she was writing with a bona fide fountain pen. It was beautiful.

For a week starting that afternoon, I spent all my free time researching fountain pens on the internet. My lab partner had recommended gouletpens.com as a good source of pens, ink samples, and information. From there I found a whole fountain pen community on the internet. There are forums, blogs, stores... All the things I had come to expect from the internet foodie community, I found for fountain pens. I learned about proprietary cartridges, cartridge converters, and converting cartridge pens to eyedropper pens. I saw a range of 3 dollar disposable fountain pens to pens worth hundreds of dollars and inlaid with Japanese lacquer. 
From pens I went to paper, and I read about super smooth French Clairefontaine paper that weighs 90g per square meter. I read at least 30 various notebook reviews. I found writing samples of different pens and inks on different papers. It was an obsession.

Finally, I deposited my paychecks and bought everything I needed to start my fountain pen experience: a $4 Fine Platinum Preppy, three ink samples (Noodler's Blue-Black, Private Reserve Purple Ebony, and Rohrer & Klingner Alt-Goldgrun) and a Clairefontaine notebook. 

The Platinum Preppy

The Preppy's nib

The Preppy came with a cartridge of purple ink.

After reading about the ink that comes with the Preppy and being disappointed by its quality, I decided to not use the cartridge right away.  Instead, I did an "eyedropper conversion" so that I could use better inks. I got some silica grease from my lab partner and now I use the barrel of the pen to store ink! I used a syring to fill the pen with Noodler's blue-black ink.

2mL ink samples from Goulet Pens

10mL blunt tipped syring for dispensing ink

Now I had a working pen! Writing with a fountain pen is cool because I barely need to put any pressure on the paper to write. The ink just flows. Naturally, I then needed to test this pen everywhere. I first tried out the fancy French paper.

Clairefontaine's A5 "Basic Life. Unplugged" Notebook

It is clothbound!

Clairefontaine paper is well known in fountain pen circles for its smooth surface and absorbance. It is supposed to have minimized feathering (little spikes around lines) and minimized bleed through. I was not disappointed. I tested the paper with all the pens I could find in my room:

Various pens

No see-through!

A cool part of using fountain pens is shading. Shading is the effect of having different parts of letters have different amounts of ink. On the picture below, some strokes are lighter and more blue/green, and others are closer to black.

Close ups of the various pens are here. 

I also used my fountain pen on more standard papers. My "Evidence Ampad" recycled paper notebook actually fared very well. It had little bleed through although it did have some feathering.

Thin printer paper did not have as smooth strokes. Notice the feathering on the f. 

In conclusion, the platinum preppy is a fun pen to use, the ink I got has pretty shading, and fancy paper is nice but not necessary. However, I do find the lines a bit thick. After a bit of research, the most thin but reasonably priced fountain pen I could find is the Pilot Penmanship with an Extra-Fine nib, it is the next pen I will get. It has a nice looking clear barrel that could be converted to an eye-dropper pen, although I might get a cartridge converter to keep it cleaner. Cartridge converters are basically refillable cartridges that can be used with any ink.  

Now I want to go back to writing on random different types of papers with my Preppy pen :)

(Actually, I'm going to work on chem homework...)

Grapefruit

Sometimes you just need a bowl of sweet, pink, grapefruit to get you through Ecology homework.

Orange Peels and Liquid CO2

This post is not about food. Well, it not about eating food. Although eating did happen. This post is about Science. With a capital S.

This post is about a molecule called limonene. As you may be able to guess from the name, limonene is what makes citrus fruit smell cirtusy. It looks like this:

limonene

For my carbon compounds lab, we extracted limonene from orange peels. If you know anything about organic chemistry, you can see that limonene is made only of carbons and hydrogens. So, it is rather non-polar*. The traditional way to extract limonene is to mix watered orange peel mush with diethyl ether. The diethyl ether is less polar than water, so the limonene goes hangout with its bat-shaped buddy. Then you let the layers separate, like oil and water, and keep just the diethyl ether layer. Yay! But now your limonene is floating around in anesthetic diethyl ether, so you pour your solution into this cool spinning vacuum pump that vaporizes the solvent to purify your limonene.

diethyl ether (see, it looks like a bat!)

* A "polar" molecule is one with an uneven distribution of electrons such that one side of the molecule is more negative than the other. This happens because the elements to right side of the periodic table (O, Cl, etc) tend to be more attractive to electrons than elements to the left, like C and H.

Getting limonene is all very great, but you used a fair amount of solvent that must now be disposed of as hazardous waste. This is expensive and not very green. What to do?

Enter carbon dioxide:

carbon dioxide

As you can see, carbon dioxide is a linear molecule, so even though the oxygens pull on the electrons, they cancel each other out and neither side of the molecule has a higher electron density than the other. Therefore, CO2 is non-polar. CO2 is also a gas, which makes it not very convenient for dissolving things. However, if you look at the phase diagram below, you can see that we can get liquid CO2 by raising the pressure. 

CO2 phase diagram (from wikipedia)

To recap: carbon dioxide + pressure = liquid carbon dioxide. liquid carbon dioxide + orange peel = extracted limonene.

Here is the set up for the extraction:

I zested an orange.

With a copper wire and some filter paper, I set up a little stage for the orange peel to be elevated above the bottom of the centrifuge tube.

I packed dry ice (solid CO2) above the orange peel, capped the tube and dropped it into hot water. 

Here pressure builds up in the tube and the carbon dioxide melts, dribbles through the orange peel, taking limonene with it. Since the cap's seal is not completely gas-tight, the carbon dioxide finds ways out and vaporizes, leaving limonene at the bottom of the tube. 

I repeated steps 3 and 4 four times to build up limonene at the bottom.

Now I have limonene without generating any hazardous waste! Yes, carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, but the dry ice was made from CO2 that was already in the atmosphere, so there is no net harm. 

Here is a video of the dry ice melting:

Of course, at the end of the lab period, we all ate our oranges!

Bagels

Hi! I made bagels. They were round, and had a hole in the middle. See?

Just like a bagel should be. And it wasn't even too difficult! I followed the recipe in Peter Reinhart's The Bread Baker's Apprentice. Sure, there were a couple specialty ingredients, such as malt powder

I got this stuff from my local beer brewing store.

and high gluten bread flour, such as King Arthur brand, but all in all, the recipe is pretty straightforward. 

These bagels have a pretty crusty crust, and a dense and chewy crumb. I recommend eating them.

The recipe takes 2 days. The first day is pretty involved, but you only need an hour or so on the second day. According to Reinhart, allowing the dough to ferment slowly overnight allows it to develop deeper flavors. to get maximum flavor, this recipe uses both a sponge and overnight fermentation. 

The quantities listed will make 12 standard sized bagels

Ingredients:

Sponge

• 1 tsp instant yeast (none of that old fashioned active dry stuff)
• 510g / 18oz / 4 cups high gluten bread flour (It is generally better to measure flour by weight or mass rather than volume, because flour density is very variable.)
• 2.5cups water

Dough

• 1/2 tsp instant yeast
• 482g / 17oz / 3.75 cups high gluten bread flour
• 2 3/4 tsp salt
• 2 tsp malt powder

To Finish

• 1 tbsp baking soda (although this quantity doesn't mean anything because Reinhart does not specify the amount of water to dilute it in...)
• toppings: sesame seeds, poppy seeds, rehydrated dried garlic/onion, cheese, salt, etc... 

  

  to rehydrate, just add water!

Method (slightly simplified from the original):

1. Mix together the "sponge" ingredients, the dough should look like pancake batter.
2. Let the sponge sit, covered, at room temperature for 2 hours (until it is foamy and bubbly and has doubled in size.)                                          



bubbles!

3. To the sponge add the "dough" ingredients. Stir well with a spoon or your hands to form a coarse, shaggy dough. 
4. If you are kneading by hand, turn out the dough onto a floured surface and knead for 10 minutes. If you have a stand mixer, have the machine knead the dough with the dough hook for 6 minutes.   Either way, the dough should be "satiny and pliable, but not sticky" (Reinhart).
5. Divide the dough into 12 pieces (each about 128g / 4.5oz). Cover with a damp towel and allow to rest 20 minutes.
6. To make the bagel shape, poke a hole into the center of a piece and shape the dough into an even bagel shape. The hole should be about 1 in in diameter. 
7. Line 2 sheet pans with parchment paper, and place the raw bagels on it. Let the dough sit for 20 minutes, then put it in the fridge overnight or for up to 3 days. 

   

   transporting bagel dough

8. The next day, preheat the oven to 500F and bring a wide pot of water to boil. Add the baking soda to the water.
9. Take the bagels out of the fridge and drop a couple of them into the water (only as many as can fit comfortably on the surface of the water)
10. Boil the bagels for one minute on each side. 

    

    boiled bagels

11. Sprinkle the baking sheets with semolina or cornmeal and place the boiled bagels on it. Top the bagels with desired toppings (I like sesame+poppy+garlic.) Note: to prevent the garlic from burning, you need to soak it in a bit of hot water to rehydrate it before using.

    

    toppings!

12. Bake the bagels for 5 minutes at 500F, rotate the pans and bake until golden, about another 5 minutes.
13. Let the bagels cool for 15 minutes on a cooling rack. 

    

    Om nom nom

14. Slice the bagel open, and spread with cream cheese! 

    

    No bagel is complete without cream cheese.

     



Cheese on top is also good.