Sublime Superlemon

Peach and Lychee Tart

Simply because two things seem very close together doesn’t mean that they necessarily are. Fortunately for hungry stomachs and curious minds one can only find out for themselves through experimentation. As it happens, last week I found such unexpected distances (or disimilarities) hiding in the extra dimensions of fruits and of quantum information physics.

I was trying to make an apricot tart from a recipe by a Paris baker so that I could send pictures of my version to Laura (loc: Paris) and she could go try for herself. There being a severe lack of fresh apricots in the grocery stores around my house I had to settle for canned peach halves. I also noticed canned lychees sitting on the shelf not too far away and I immediately remembered a drink I had with a friend at Gogo Lounge called the Hello Kitty. Don’t ask why we went to Gogo Lounge, don’t ask why we ordered a drink named after a subculture I have no grasp over. The Hello Kitty was garnished with the fruit in question and this being my first time eating a full pitted lychee I couldn’t believe I wasn’t eating an overly sweet peach. It was without question though, extremely “fleshy”. It almost resembled a small sea creature that would have easily been served in a Chinese restaurant… or Hello Kitty lunchbox.

The tart itself was not a problem. Start with the same shortcrust I use for everything. One batch of creme patissiere from Michel Roux. Then the bit I wasn’t so sure about, I caramelized peaches and lychee with almost a full cup of sugar. It was a kind of insurance in case the flavours didn’t work out. Maybe the sugar would be deadly and no one would have to know the pain of a failed experiment.

Peach and Lychee Tart

The tart turned out fine though! The caramelized fruit still a little awkward but the flavour is good and the lychees really clean up the sugary mess I made of things. But didn’t we start by talking about distance? So the answer is yes, there is a wierd distance between peaches and lychee. Both are fleshy, both are very sweet and both caramelize roughly the same way. It’s the lychee that’s awkward though, in the same way that eating candy from a foreign country sometimes is. Like not being able to recognize the brand of artifical sweetner as your own. Although I thought the two would work well together, and even after a full cup of sugar, the differences between peach and lychees are highlighted in this tart.

In a similar effort to bring things I thought were similar together, I have also royally screwed the pooch on a whole bunch of my work. On Friday I was trying to tighten an equality in my paper in order to avoid the complete collapse of my final result. Basically I have this variable, “B”. It’s very large and crops up at critical moments in the calculations for better or for worse.  My final result is suposed to get better as “B” gets large. In effect, I’m trying to say that the “information locking effect” demonstrated by my calculations is stronger for larger black holes (bigger “B”). I had made a big mistake last summer while working on this and not carried through the variable “B” somewhere. As I went back to fix it, my whole result became invalidated. The only thing to do in this case is to go back and check where you’ve made assumptions, then verify those. This is a really critical step since assumptions and bounds are something you usually choose yourself, and more importantly, you choose because they’re easy to work with. So maybe I had been lazy somewhere, maybe I could have written a more complicated expression and had a more accurate estimate.

Fortunately I did find such a spot! and what a clever solution I found too! I introduced an extra variable here, used some simple arithmetic there and all of a sudden I had a working parameter that I could adjust at will. There’s a problem with having that much power though. When doing calculations, if you chose an “arbitrary” parameter you are effectively doing the calculation for all possible values of that parameter. So in essence, I had just explored every possible way to tighten this assumption. And every single one, was wrong. In trying to better my estimates and bring to expression closer together I’d shown that my result was even less valid and things were even farther apart. This was Friday though, today is Monday and I hope that a weekend of rest will show me a better way to do it.