Smithy

This article from allrecipes.com came through my newsfeed this morning: Cook Anywhere You Want With the Best Portable Induction Cooktops It seems to be a pretty nice rundown of portable induction cooktops that are currently available at relatively low cost. (They mention the Breville Control Freak as the ne plus ultra, but exclude it from these reviews due to its price.) Here's the curious thing about the review, though: in every case they complain that they couldn't get water to boil at 212F; it sat at a rolling boil at around 210F. I wanted to shake them, or at least write and ask about their methods. What elevation were they at? At what depth did they measure the temperature in that pot of water? (I assume it was for the pot of pasta water they were boiling.) Did they try it with lid on and off? So, my questions: 1. Is anyone here a member of allrecipes.com with the inclination to write and ask them about their methodology? 2. Does anyone here feel like testing their induction cooktop's water-boiling ability to see what temperature it reaches? 3. They imply that the water temperature would be more critical in a restaurant. I think basic physics stands in their way. Am I missing something?

I'd love to become an eG enabler. 😉 Seriously, this thing is perfectly matching my lifestyle right now. It's easy and quick, and allows me to mix and match ingredients. The same can be said of salads (and often is, around this household) but sometimes I prefer the heat and the textural contrasts that a grilled sandwich provides.

Another "panini press saves the day" sort of dinner. I've had portabella caps and a red bell pepper since, well, sometime before June 14. Life Got In The Way. Tonight I went to press the mushroom caps and discovered that mold had already gotten to them. (The local bears will enjoy them, I'm sure.) The pepper was getting a bit shriveled but still okay, so I cored it, quartered and pressed it. Then I used two of those slices along with chunks of cheddar cheese, slices of smoked turkey and pepperoni, all encased in whole wheat bread with generous amounts of mayo and mustard inside and butter outside. After the grilling, I added chunks of lettuce and sauerkraut. I know of folks on this forum who like to let the bread shine if it's good bread, and not make for multi-layered sandwiches. Trust me, this is good bread...but an excellent sandwich. And an easy dinner. Move over, Dagwood!

Those are beautiful! I'd love to see them in action, if you don't mind. Show us some of your results, and if you have favorite recipes that you can share by link -- or at least describe -- that would be great too. I think I'd be in serious trouble if I lived near a Le Creuset outlet. The kitchen's already pretty crowded. 😉

Although this is true, eG still has this guideline regarding Decorum and Topicality: The points have been made; the says have been said; and I too am sorry I never had a chance to eat there. Good luck to you, Rob, in your next venture.

Most dinners here are wonderfully photogenic and tempting-looking. I wonder, sometimes, how many members might be shy of posting for fear of ridicule. Well, bring it on. I'm tired, I'm coming down with a cold, and my life is topsy-turvy right now...but I still get hungry and need to eat. Tonight's dinner: Last week's asparagus, cut into pieces and nuked, with a sprinkling of feta cheese chunks. Bits of butter and mayonnaise (the last remains of 2 packages) tossed in to melt. A hard-boiled egg, barely chunked up then heated in the final microwave pass. A travesty? One might say so. Or one might say "easy, filling, and light on the dishwashing." Tastes pretty good, too. I refuse to put this in The Gallery of Regrettable Foods, although perhaps it belongs there.

We dealt with the strength issue by judicious slicing (so we weren't trying to push, say, an entire potato through at once) but that may be too peevesome for some people. My husband thought it perfect; I used knives mostly although I found the chopper quite useful for some purposes. As for sharpening: in years of use, I've never found the need to do so.

Irish Potatoes are quite easy to cut with the alligator-style chopper (I too have a Vidalia chop wizard, but of course there are knock-offs). You do have to slice them crosswise first, to the thickness you want, but the choper requires little pressure. i haven't tried squash but as noted above some varieties at least would lend themselves to this machine. I also can't comment on sweet potatoes with this gadget.

I have two: one for the house, and one for the Princessmobile. Whereas I leaned toward hand-slicing and dicing, my darling preferred the security of having the diced product contained, even though it meant cutting things into smaller bits first. He didn't think he had the knife skills for dicing. Elaboration: Our alligator chopper, an original Vidalia chopping wizard, has too small a chopping area to allow an entire onion at once. I usually cut onions into quarters or eighths, depending on onion size, before proceeding. The potatoes require slicing before being pushed through the grid, but (a) an entire potato slice, if done latitudinally, will fit the grid area. (b) Furthermore -- and this was a surprise when we tested -- the potatoes cleaned the onion fibers from the chopping grid. The procedure became: chop onions first, and make more than needed for the night's recipe. Then chop the potatoes. Cleanup was much easier.

I don't know (I really don't) about cornstarch, but I think gelatin would work well for that purpose.

Laurentius, I haven't tested any of them because the shapes don't appeal to me. I'm glad blue_dolphin finds them useful, though!

I'll do a more rigorous test than I've done so far, and get back to you on that. Right now mine's in the dishwasher -- but all I used it for was peanut butter.

My pair of these spatulas has arrived. I think they're going to work well. They're a little shorter than the iSi spatulas I so love and can't replace, but they're the same thinness. Below: Mrs. Anderson's on the left, iSi on the right.

I'm on a grilled sandwiches kick thanks to my thrift-store find of a panini press. I'd save some of that gorgeous brisket in slices and press it with proper accompaniments into a sandwich. Mushrooms, cheese, condiments of your choice. Tomatoes? Pickles? Kraut? Lettuce? into the sandwich after grilling. My husband would want to slather it with barbecue sauce (ick, I say!). Actually, cheese and maybe some sauce trapping chunks of brisket would be good in grilled sandwiches too, using the little chunks that are leftover from slicing. I did something like that here with a badly-abused pork tenderloin. I'd want to use some of that lovely brisket, gently warmed (microwave if I had it, low skillet otherwise) to dress up a nice green dinner salad. @rotuts' ideas above all sound good, too. I'm just adding to what he said. 🙂

I can't note what @JoNorvelleWalker did, but here's a topic on making crumpets. Mmm...maybe time for me to revisit the issue!

Well. Now I've discovered that I really, truly want that automatic shut-off feature. I ordered this model (eG-friendly Amazon.com link) for our house, thinking it was automatic shut-off. It isn't. I'm sending it back in favor of this unit (eG-friendly Amazon.com link), which (also) claims auto shut-off. We'll see what happens, won't we?

It's now June, with no visible change in the roll. Could it be bagged in, say, a nitrogen atmosphere? Or is it really so heavily laden with preservatives?

That is a beautiful platter of food! Are you saying that the rice colors are their own natural growth colors? I've heard of the the forbidden black rice, but I had no idea rice could have such vivid colors as the blue and magenta you show above.

No, it's a Catzilla butter dish.

Last night I tried the press for something other than sandwiches: used it as a griddle instead. We had 1 burger and 1 bratwurst. I quickly decided that the griddle wasn't hot enough to cook that brat in a timely fashion and put it in the microwave with my darling's ear of sweet corn. His bun went onto the griddle instead. That also allowed me to smash the burger and cook it on both sides at once. The griddle put very nice marks on the bread. The burger? Well, the jury's still out on that. I can see that this device might make nice smash burgers, but I would have liked the surface to get a bit hotter. In this particular case, the meat tasted old. That had nothing to do with the cooking technique and everything to do with how long it had been sitting out of the freezer. I'll try again and experiment with the controls a bit more, sometime in the future.

One problem I see with your idea is that cheesecakes tend to become more dense the more you handle them. Mixing the two batches together by hand may hurt the texture. I'd be inclined to try a half-batch and cook it that way, and use a smaller pan if necesary.

Dingdangit, I didn't think of that! No, they're the same level. A good workaround will be to put some sort of support -- a coffee can lid, or a salad plate, for example -- on the larger platform, then tare it out and use it as the support for the pan or bowl. It's possible the designers thought there might be times that either platform would need a "boost" so they kept them the same height. I suspect it was more for aesthetics.

Sure. Note that the crock pot was "warmed but not on". You could do the same thing with a heavy pot that's warmed. Friends of mine used a glass jar although they may have been in a warmer climate than you. The main thing is to wrap it well so it stays warm. Putting the entire assembly into an insulated cooler / styrofoam chest (but NOT cooled) will protect the batch even more from cooling too quickly.

I adore this simile! 😄

Here it is: my KitchenAid KQ909 Dual Platform Digital Kitchen and Food Scale, 11 pound capacity and Precision 16oz capacity (eG-friendly Amazon.com link). The box arrived the other day: ...and I finally had time to open and play with it. Pretty, isn't it? Someone noted uptopic that they didn't see the point of having two separate scales if they're integrated into the same platform but the weights can't be added together. Although I understand that sentiment, it doesn't matter to me as much as the ability to weigh small amounts of something and add them to larger amounts. At 10-1/2" x 6-3/4" x 1" it has a smaller footprint than a piece of office paper, and is slim enough to fit into one of my gadget drawers. The screen is very bright and easy to read. That's a plus for me; I'm used to needing a penlight to read my scales even in bright light, but I won't need it for this one. The screen automatically reads whichever pad is being used. Note that there's more precision for the smaller scale than on the larger scale. That's no surprise, really; but it's nice to see. The other thing that makes this easier to use is the size of the larger platform. For comparison's sake, I've parked my existing (and trusty) Salter scale atop the larger platform of the KitchenAid scale. Most of my mixing bowls overhang the screen on the Salter and make it difficult to read. The screen on this scale is out in the clear and less likely to be blocked from view. Another scale discussed above, with a pull-out pad, eliminates that problem but I wasn't in a buying mood when I looked at it. For $33, I'm keeping this scale. I think it's going to work very well for me.