Moopheus
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Posts posted by Moopheus
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Whereas the reverse is true at Dunkin's--go for the straight coffee and stay away from the mixed drinks. Though I have not tried their espresso--just the idea of it is kind of scary. And they do use decent quality beans that are ground in the shop, and not burned to a crisp like that other place. Their web site says the cream is light cream, [Milk, Cream, Disodium Phosphate (Stabilizer), Sodium Citrate (Stabilizer)].
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Dunkin Donuts for coffee over Charbucks any day. But then, DD is basically what I grew up with. I can't really say about the pastries--haven't really had Starbuck's, and I'm not sure a doughnut can really be compared to anything except another doughnut. Dunkin's muffins and "bagels" on the other hand...This is reminding me that I used to go for coffee with my dad sometimes to a Pewter Pot (a now-defunct chain with weird colonial theme) that I recall as having pretty good muffins. And the waitresses were trained to pour the coffee about three feet over the table (the pots had long spouts).
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Chicken Breasts !
As one eGulletier once said, "Tastes like bad tofu"
When I still ate it, I used to get kosher chicken (I think it was Empire brand) that was far tastier than regular industrial chicken. If you can get it in your neighborhood, try that.
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I've had good results with vanilla paste instead of extracts. Doesn't have that alchohol taste.
I completely agree with Mudpuppie about the eggs. Organic/free-range eggs aren't overpriced; "regular" eggs are too cheap.
I can taste the difference between white and turbinado sugar, and I use both. I also like Muscavado sugar, which is overpriced, but really makes a difference in baking. I guess that's sort of weird because I think $5 a pound is too much for sugar, but I use it anyway. IT really is better than regular brown sugar. Okay, so I've got like five different kinds of sugar on my shelves--that's not weird, is it? And that's not counting the syrups.
Some things just require a bit of shopping around or buying selectively--for instance, if you find a place that sells fresh tofu, it's better than the packaged kind, and costs about half as much to boot. I also don't understand why packaged seitan is so expensive when it's easy and cheap to make. (though I agree about the TVP--have had no luck turning it into anything edible)
I suppose overpriced and/or overrated can mean different things--
"luxury" items that are expensive, mainly by virtue of being luxury items, sometimes things so expensive that most people will never even eat them. Are they worth it?
Items that really are overpriced--that is the price has a high profit margin relative to cost of ingredients and manufacture (see Mrs. Field's cookie thread), that fairly or unfairly commands a 'premium' price (I think what ExtraMSG intended it to mean)
Cheap crap that doesn't seem worth buying at any price.
And of course, there's a subjective element--what's overrated to one might be ambrosia to another, and there's a so much variation in brands, fresh vs. packaged, local vs. transported, etc. that it's hard to make blanket statements.
Or have I gone and overanalyzed it?
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Anything with hydrogenated vegetable oil.
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It's like the difference between me paying Barnes & Noble $20 for a book and me paying a Barnes & Noble employee $10 to steal the book from Barnes & Noble on my behalf.
No, it's the difference between the sales rep paying the buyer to get the book on the shelf, and the publisher paying the chain to get the book on the shelf. Now all the buyer gets is a pile of worthless chotchkes printed with the name of next season's failed bestseller.
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(I'm well aware that industry play lists are still "influenced" in many ways but outright payola is in fact against the law).
I get the impression that in most businesses, the main difference between legal and illegal payola is whose pocket the money ends up in and the route it takes to get there. But it's still pay for play no matter what you call it.
Toliver said:
How many products are in the average suburban US supermarket? 10 or 20 thousand? More? I hardly think lack of choice is a problem.Of course, it's about choice. How many cable channels do you have and yet how many suck?
So what if there's 20,000 items in the grocery store?
When I go into a supermarket, it seems like most of the boxes on the shelf contain some mixture of sugar, hydrogenated vegetable oil, and corn starch, extruded into various shapes and colors. Can hardly buy anything in there any more.
I have to give my local Key Food some credit, though, since partly due to the presence of a fair number of British ex-pats in the neighborhood, they are relatively well-stocked with UK imports.
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My favorite place for samples is the Aji Ichiban Japanese candy store. They usually have little dishes of samples in front of all the bins, which the staff are always encouraging people to take, especially the items that some of us are not quite brave enough to try.
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Try the mousse on p. 166. I made twice in the span of a week -- that's how good it was.
Yeah, did that--six to eight servings, yeah right!
Cocolat is a cool book, great food porn, but sadly out of print and expensive in the secondary market.
Tonight's desert will be the last piece of peanut butter mousse pie from the pie potluck.
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I'm having fun with the Alice Medrich book Bittersweet.
I came home from Xmas with a copy of this book and a 10-lb slab of chocolate to play with, so yes, definitely some fun.
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The same thing is done in most retail industries: white goods, brown goods etc.
In the book business it's called "cooperative advertising". In the office we referred to it as "bribery".
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Terra and I had a good time at the potluck. It was cool to meet some of the other folks on the board and the pies were great.
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Uh oh, there goes one of the best cameras! Sherribabee, forkandPen, anyone else, HELP!!
I'll try to remember to bring mine.
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Start with cold water. That has something to do with the molecules available in cold vs. hot.
Hot water out of the tap tends not to have as much dissolved oxygen. When your hot tap water looks cloudy, that's big bubbles of oxygen coming out. What difference this makes to your pasta, I don't know, but I always start with cold water. I usually don't use more than 2 or 3 qts of water, but I'm rarely making more than 1/2-2/3 lb of spaghetti at once. But then, I make my sauce by the gallon, "grandma-style" (or in my case, grandpa-style, since he was the one who made the sauce at my grandparent's house) and freeze it in pints, so that I never run out.
On the other hand, if you need a jar of sauce, you could definitely do a lot worse than the Five Brothers.
Rosie said
Steven--If you want really FAST sauce use ketchup!It is alleged that when my Jewish father was first dating my Italian mother, he actually did this to my grandfather's pasta, and almost didn't make it out of the house alive. But obviously he did.
Fat Guy said:
I don't like to cook pasta at a rolling boil. I add it to a pot at that temperature, but as the pot comes back to the boil I lower the heat and cook the pasta at a simmer. I don't know if this really makes a difference, but enough chefs have sworn by the method that I'm sticking with it.My own experience is that if you leave it at a high boil, the pot might start to foam up and overflow; turning the heat down a bit after the boil comes back keeps this from happening.
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Cook's Illustrated Double Chocolate Pudding
I made that once; I forget which chocolate I used but it came out pretty well. Really nice and smooth, creamy, and chocolatey.
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Normally I work at home, but one day a week I go to one of my client's office to do some in-house work. Rather than have my own coffee before I go, I have theirs when I get there. Yes, I could buy some on the way, but I'm a cheap bastard. Anyway, they've got one of those newfangled Flavia machines, which if you haven't seen one is supposed to be an 'improvement' over ordinary institutional office coffee by making individual cups of coffee from little packets of instant coffee. Or at least I assume it's instant--it brews too fast for real coffee. It is, as a former boss used to say, not good. One of the worst things (of many) that's bad is that the coffee is very, very weak.
But the packets come in all sorts of blends, including tea, 'choco' (hot chocolate, I guess), espresso and even cappucino. So I get a bit bored and think, what the hell, I'll try the espresso. You take the 'espresso blend' packet, put it in the machine, and select 'espresso shot' from the menu. A few selects later you have a cup of dark liquid that tastes, well, dark. Sort of vaguely reminiscent of espresso. It's probably about 3 ounces. No crema or actual coffee taste. Not even bitter, really, just dark. It's not really fair to compare it to real espresso, even not very good but still real espresso. Is it fair to compare it to instant espresso from a jar, such as Medaglia D'oro? Actually, no. It does not even compare to that.
I am disappointed, but of course not surprised. I haven't tried the cappucino. The cappucino is made in a two-step process that involves first making a packet of 'creamy topping.' I am afraid of the creamy topping.
However, this morning I have my brilliant flash. Will it work to use one of the regular blend packets with the espresso shot setting? Yes! it does! Making the coffee with half the water brings it up almost to the strength of coffee-cart coffee. I can use two packets to make one cup of coffee. Yay!
I realize that this does nothing, really, to advance the state of the art in coffee-brewing, but I wanted to share my little victory over office-coffee technology.
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That's sort of what I thought--you'd end up sort of boiling/steaming the food until you ran out of water, then just burning it onto the pan. Even with a nonstick pan this doesn't seem like a good idea.
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Pixy stix...Andre Champagne. Carmex Lip Balm. Campbell's soup.
This is for a souffle?
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Today I go to work and I'm handed a manuscript for a health/diet book on the topic of hydrogenated oils and how to avoid them. Main tip: don't buy products that have them. Buy products that don't have them. Anyway, I have to review the copyeditor's queries, and make sure the author has answered them. In a couple of places, the author refers to sauteing with water instead of oil. The ce, not surprisingly, queries this, and the author responds that "water saute" is a well-known term. I am dubious.
This isn't the biggest problem with the book, but I have to ask: have any of you heard this term? Am I missing someting, or is the author?
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I have pancake problems. I like buttermilk pancakes. But I only have to make them for myself and my wife, and I only do it occasionally (on weekends, sometimes). So I use dry buttermilk powder, so I don't end up tossing most of a carton of butttermilk. But the consistency is wrong--too thin, and the batter is too runny. Anybody else use this stuff? Have better results?
The other problem I have is controlling the heat on my pan. I make the first few, which come out all right, and I give them to my wife, then the next ones in burn almost instantly.
It's pretty frustrating--I consider myself a pretty good home cook, I've made fairly complicated meals, but a simple brekkie is a problem.
Oh, and of course real maple syrup only. I also have this great blueberry syrup from Maine that I like.
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And that recipe above where you have to scrape the insides of a pound of oreos? Freakin' Hilarious!
That recipe is not one of Sandra Lee's, it's from a book called Junk Food that was published in 1980, consisting of a wide variety of brilliant satire on the theme of junk food. Unfortunately, good satire has a disturbing knack for becoming reality. SL can't really be parodied; she is the parody.
It does seem that when you see her recipes written out on the FTV web site, they sometimes seem more like 'normal' recipes, but I think that is partly an illusion because they aren't a product-specific as her cookbooks and TV show presentations are.
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So the only difference between plant food, dog food and hot dogs are that hot dogs come in a casing.
You mix it with partially hydrogenated vegetable oil and it becomes 'food plasma' that can be extruded into various shapes and containers to make 'food products' to adorn supermarket shelves.
Personally, I gave up on hot dogs a long, long time ago.
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I made chocolate mousse tonight., It was good. I hadn't done that in a long time. The other night I had a hazelnut velvet cake at a restaurant--hazelnut cake, chocolate mousse filling, buttercream frosting, which was pretty good but my mousse was better than what was in the cake. The filling was very dense and not as chocolatey.
Espresso vs. Coffee
in Coffee & Tea
Posted
I poo-pooh milk based drinks generally--for me coffee means coffee and just the coffee. Actually I do like a nice cappucino once in a while but most places put way too much milk in. The other thing that you might get with bad espresso is a burnt taste from too dark roasting. No coffee should have this burnt taste. Maybe Java-Joe will correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that the darker roast coffee is destroying some of the flavor elements of the coffee. No that dark is necessarily bad just that if it's not done carefully it can be ruined. There's a shop down the street from me here in Brooklyn that actually does a pretty good dark roast, one of the few that I've really liked.