Moopheus

What about dairy--milk, cheese, eggs? Allowed or not? Restrictions on cooking oil? I think you'd find a lot of Indian, particularly Indian vegetarian, recipes could be adaptable to your needs. You can even get brown basmati rice, but you might have to hunt around for it.

This list reads more like "Top ten food threats that have become news items in the last year or so." As to the eggs, that number sounds closer to the total the CDC gives out for food poisoning cases from all sources.

It's not much of a problem for the typesetter. It's a little extra work for the author and editor before it gets to the typesetter, but the main obstacle is just a conceptual problem for the publisher--the conviction that the home cook is not going to bother with weighing stuff. The publisher isn't seeing people refusing to buy cookbooks that don't have the weights included, or seeing extra sales for books that do (not that they could really tell, anyway). So the publisher doesn't see any incentive to change the way the books are done, and just goes with the conventional wisdom. When Isaac Newton wrote the Principia he used the publishing industry as his model for the concept of inertia.

If you search the archives here by brand name, you'll probably find endless discussions of any type of knife. If you're looking for something inexpensive but serviceable, look and see if there's any restaurant supply stores in your area. I picked up some Dexter-Russell knives for about $20 apiece, and use them every day, and they're not hard to maintain.

That was what I thought of, though I'd think a lot of the excess carbonation would be released when the liquid is boiled. The cake came out pretty well, though maybe too strongly flavored of the molasses--we used blackstrap, so it kind of overpowered everything else. Maybe I'll just have to try it again without the baking soda and see what happens.

The wife recently made a recipe for Guinness Stout/Molasses/Ginger cake that was from Claudia Fleming's The Last Course. It involved boiling the stout and molasses together, then putting baking soda into the hot liquid, which of course immediate foams up. This is added to the batter (which includes baking powder) after the foam subsides. Am I missing something? It seems to me that letting all of the leavener's gas dissipate into the air kind of defeats the purpose of using it. Is this step as useless as it seems?

Thanks for that link. I've never seen Kojel, but it looks like something that might be useful.

In the 80s a friend of mine was working at a department store in the suburbs, when someone attempted a holdup. The manager in the back of the store called the Dunkin Donut shop across the street, and two cops ran over and caught the guys on the way out. A good location for an ice cream parlor would be near my apartment.

Most slaughtered animals are bled pretty thoroughly before packing; the red coloring comes mostly from the myoglobin.

That's very likely the case--the variability in the actual sugar content of the fruit can definitely be sufficient to make a difference in the final texture of the ice cream.

Most of the ones you might find in a supermarket--Nestle's. Ghirardelli, Guittard, etc.--do not have any vegetable oil. Only a really cheap b**tard or an Englisman would put vegetable oil in any kind of chocolate.

I've tried a few different brands of store-bought hummos (don't remember them all now) and would agree that Sabra was the best of them, by a pretty wide margin. But I haven't actually bought hummos in years--it's so easy to make I don't understand why anyone with a food processor would buy it.

Generally, chocolate chips have much less cocoa butter than regular chocolate, so they retain their shape better when melted. So they have the opposite property of couverture, which has a very high cocoa butter content, so it melts into a liquid quickly.

Just your essential food groups: chocolate, cheese, coffee. When buying equipment, it kind of depends on how much I'm using it. Also, I like durable products. I basically don't want to ever have to replace something.

Here's a faq from a German coffee web site in which dictionary editor Jesse Sheidlower gives an opinion on the topic. I would say that regardless of etymology, if I should happen to see "expresso" in a manuscript or proof I'd mark it as an error.

I'd be pretty pissed at myself for ruining an expensive meal--I don't like to ruin any meal, regardless of cost. I'd probably be less annoyed at breaking a piece of equipment, unless it was something very expensive. On the other hand, I know what you mean about the can of paint thing--I always try to scrape every bit of whatever from the pot or the jar.

Freeze it overnight? But that means planning ahead! What about my instant gratification? I want my instant gratification now! Actually, on day two the cake seems a little moister just from having sat under a glass cake dome overnight; it has not become dry or stale even where cut.

I tried the cake today. I started with 12 oz of sifted cake flour (4 oz per cup), 6 oz of cocoa powder (4 ozs Valhrona (dutch) and 2 oz Ghiradelli (plain)--it's what I had in the cupboard), and 6 oz butter, other measures as given in Wendy's post. I went with the coffee, figuring that would boost the chocolate flavor. With less flour and gluten in the mix, there was still a bit of a round dome, but not too bad, no worse than any other cake I've ever made, though I suppose if it were for presentation it would still need to be leveled. Wendy didn't indicate time for cooking, and with the low temp it was hard to be sure. It's also the first time I've baked in the oven in my new apartment. The mix and baking were much as lorea described. A cake tester came out clean after 45 minutes. I did wrap them a few minutes after taking them out of the oven. On the whole I like the cake, it's fairly chocolatey, and the number 1 failing of most chocolate cakes is lack of flavor. The crumb was fine, not too sweet, and the only real failing was it was a little dry, and did not hold together well. One of the cakes broke apart while I was assembling it. I can see why it needs to be wrapped for cooling--it would be very dry if it were air cooled. It's possible it was a little overbaked, but it didn't look it.

These are good, but they've been done (I had a couple of these t-shirts until they wore out).

A few years ago when I was living by myself and just getting back into cooking, really, and still had an office job, it was great for stuff that could be made without too much hassle after work and still be real food. I don't use it much any more, but would still recommend it for someone who doesn't have a big cookbook collection, and have given copies as gifts. It does cover a lot of ground, has a lot of useful advice and information, and the directions are well written. Torakris wrote: Mine's broken too--in order to keep the cover price down on the big book the publisher appears to have cheaped out on the binding, which is completely crap. I actually asked a buyer at a bookstore about this, and they told me a lot of copies had this problem.

I'd be up for some experimental chocolate cake baking. Have an idea of what you think would be a good starting point? I have no use for white cake. Or yellow cake. Cakes should be named for flavors and not colors.

According the adverts, it's powdered cocoa butter.

I made the waffle recipe from Real American Breakfast this morning, and it made fine waffles. Cook's is correct in that if you leave the mix out overnight, you don't get maximum rise out of the yeast, I could tell by looking at the bowl that the mix had risen and settled some, but there was clearly plenty of air left in it and there's no way to mix the eggs in without deflating it a bit anyway. The resulting batter was enough to fill my iron twice, so it doesn't really seem worth worrying about. I found that setting the iron fairly light but leaving it on a couple of minutes extra made a nice crispy brown (but not too dark) outside and light fluffy inside. Yesterday I found some nice ripe strawberries to go with. I'm trying not to think too much about how much butter went into the batter.

That's how a lot of commercial food companies operate, but a trade secret is only good as long as you can actually keep it a secret. There's no Federal law protecting them, and state laws vary. I'd think in a restaurant kitchen it'd be pretty hard to enforce.

Right after that should come the mantra of clean the machine. No matter what you're using, you won't get the best out of it if there's a buildup of rancid oil residue in it.