It’s Bigger On The Inside.
What do technology and noodles have in common? It might surprise you.
Two hard drives are sitting on my desk at the moment. They are both Solid State Drives, and the only difference is that one is portable and has a USB-C connection. The other is designed as an internal drive and has a SATA connection (but my friend John dropped it in a case quickly so I could use it as a portable drive). They each hold 2TB (terabytes) of data.
Why am I telling you this?
I am telling you this because it inspires me. One of these drives is the size of a credit card, and the other is slightly larger to fit inside a computer. Each of these drives can hold 6,668,000 books. To quote Doctor Who, “It’s bigger on the inside.”
Both of these drives were built by Samsung, a South Korean company that started as a grocery trading store in 1938 by a fellow named Lee Byung-Chull. Lee got his start by trading noodles and other goods produced around his city with neighbouring countries. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that my crack research team learned that “Samsung” is Korean for “Three Stars” (세 개의 별 se gaeui byeol) which was translated to Chinese (三颗星 Sān kē xīng) and then translated to English (Samsung). File that under, “The More You Know.”
After the Korean War, Lee expanded Samsung into clothing and textiles. They started becoming the giant they are today due in large part to South Korea’s protectionist policies designed to help a war-torn country get back on its feet.
Again, why am I telling you this?
I’m telling you this because I’ve decided to learn how to make all the noodles. I’ve got spaghetti and linguine down, but like many of you, I’m fascinated by macaroni and want to learn its secrets so I can fully understand penne. Penne (as we all know) is the gateway to learning rigatoni and eventually unlocking the mystery of fusilli, conchiglie and orecchiette. And once I master Italian pasta and noodles, I aim to learn how to do Chinese-style hand-pulled noodles. Will this journey ever end?
Yes, I have an end goal. All of this aforementioned pasta and noodle-making is designed to be a foundation for flavour — you put sauce on these delicious carb-filled vehicles. But that’s just the start.
What about the pasta that captures and transports the flavour? It’s not until we get into tortellini, cappelletti, and ravioli that we start to understand the importance of flavour inside the pasta. The ultimate achievement — the thing we all want most — is to learn how to make delicious dumplings.
Dumplings are the Solid State Drive of pasta. Dumplings encase the incredible and limitless flavours packed within an impossibly small container; exponential flavour, ergo making dumplings “bigger on the inside.”
“Oh Dropbear,” you say with a wry side-eye glance, “you just want to build a global electronics company and put Canada on the map.”
“I just want to make dumplings,” I reply with a sigh and a wave of my hand, “if I just so happen to become the world’s leading supplier of semiconductors, superconductors, and nano-technology, that is a burden I will have to bear.”
EDITOR’S NOTE: Or perhaps it’s time to end the Keto-Diet. Just sayin’. Things are getting weird.
