Smithy

Welcome! Looking forward to your participation!

Welcome to eGullet, bionut. I hope someone can answer your question. Please let us know how it works for you if you try to make your own without the koji-kin.

Those are gorgeous photos! The first one makes me hungry for curry. Please tell more about the pink fir crisps with the grouse. If I'm looking at the right item, I'd be expecting standard potato crisps. What difference would I taste?

Google has failed me. Is this an apple cake? It looks beautiful: a celebration of seasonal, tasty and free(!) produce.

I'm in. I've been hesitating because the starter will be have to go untended for around 3 weeks, beginning sometime the last week of October. Tonight I decided to give it a go anyhow. If it's alive and bubbling in 2 weeks, maybe it will survive 3 weeks in a fridge without me. Unbleached all-purpose white flour, and tap water, mixed together in a glass jar. I weighed 50g each but it's such a thick paste that I've added a touch more water to make it stirrable. It is definitely not worth a photo at present.

I used to think I didn't like any form of barbecue sauce, because I also usually find them too sweet. My darling finally converted me enough to allow certain tangy not-too-sweet barbecue sauces to be painted onto, oh, slow-cooked ribs during the last half hour. So far we've settled on Jack Daniels Bourbon Sauce as the favorite, but I think I'll have to give the recipes in this topic a try. Some of these look like real winners. Thanks, Ann_T and Thanks for the Crepes, for adding recipes to this set.

Beautiful day, beautiful descriptions! Thank you! Before the cranking started, it looked like the apples were several inches higher than the rim of the press. How did you prevent them from spilling out the sides?

There isn't much discussion about it here...yet! These links may provide some useful information; not all of the posts refer to the boudin noir with rice: British Black Pudding (blood cake, boudin noir) Boudin question Meanwhile, let's hope someone comes along who can give you direct advice. Good luck!

Welcome, asadus. Tell us more about yourself. What are you doing with chocolate? I like to eat it, myself, :-) and occasionally bake with it. There are some very accomplished chocolatiers and bakers around here who do amazing things. Since you're "new to I.T" you may have a lot of technical questions. There are help files (a quick link is at the bottom of every page) and we hosts are also happy to help. Just send us a question using the Personal Messenger system - there's a link in the help files, and there's an envelope icon at the top of every page. We look forward to reading about your cooking and food in the forums!

I have cooked on stove top (electric coil and glass cooktop) with my clay pots from Egypt as well as my rifi tagine. I've done the same with ceramic cookware from Crate and Barrel. I've experimented with heat diffusers, wok rings, and direct contact. I'm convinced that any of these items can be used on the stove top if the heat is gentle enough. The trick, of course, is knowing what "gentle enough" means. It depends on the thermal characteristics of the fired clay (how quickly and how much it expands due to heat, and how quickly the heat radiates outward so the entire pot heats and expands) and how concentrated the heat source is. So yes, I think you can cook on stove top over low heat with the tagra. I'm not sure I've tried it with my elongated clay pot - which may or may have been intended as a tagra. It just looked like a good pot for cooking chicken or duck to me, and nobody suggested otherwise when I bought it.

Someplace, probably in these forums years ago, I saw a space-saving trick: use an empty cereal box as a mold. Put the meal to be frozen in a microwave- or boil-proof bag, and put the bag in the box until frozen. Removed the bag and stack with more frozen bags. The frozen meal-in-a-bag is a nice shape for freezing, like the boxes CatPoet advocates (I've never seen them over here, but maybe I haven't looked in the right place) but even more compact. The cereal box may be too big, but something smaller like a Zatarain's rice mix box sounds about right.

chefmd, please let us know what you two come up with and how they taste. That combination of ingredients is mind-boggling enough that you could have some very funny failures - but there may be a surprising success, too. I'm looking forward to reading more about the cookery that results from this.

Welcome, scaffoldinginkent! (Don't be surprised if people misspell or shorten your name around here. :-)) I've read your public profile. Funny, innit, how people get into food and cooking? I learned to love mooshy peas in English pubs, and made friends in Edenbridge, Kent over that dish. So I've seen some of your part of the world and enjoyed the food...other dishes as well as mooshy peas. At what sort of establishment are you a chef? What do you like to cook? Have a look around, have fun talking and learning about food here, and don't let anything more serious than a souffle fall. ;-)

It looks gorgeous to me, CatPoet...eminently edible.

Very pretty! What makes those seams? Was that put together as a half-dozen balls of dough that rose together and were baked (like 'monkey bread', but a different flavor) or did you manage to put a braid into a loaf pan?

Microwave, usually, on a low cycle for leftovers...stew, soup, pasta, most meat. If I want to be careful with a braise I usually store the meat and sauce separately and reheat them together on the stovetop, but it depends on how much meat and of what quality.

I'm thinking the same thing, Darienne. Heaven knows I have enough of the stuff around. What would you think: parched, or not parched, for popping?

The cake filling comment threw me, and looks more like a throwaway (no pun intended) comment in its current location. I'd suggest establishing a separate paragraph, if you can make the room. It only needs a couple of sentences, possibly along these lines: "Note: the pudding can be used as a cake filling with the addition of 3 sheets of silver gelatin...." then adding 1 or 2 sentences about blooming and when to add. I wouldn't know about blooming the gelatine sheets, but I'm not an advanced pastry / confections cook. Aside from that, I agree with Kerry that it looks pretty straightforward. It also looks delicious.

Amen. Readers may be interested in/amused by this blast-from-the-past conversation: In praise of out-of-season fruit. I was particularly amused by Jinmyo's icicle.

I've been reviewing this topic - a good exercise for me, because I'm relearning things I learned once already - and there's a lot of good information here. I recommend going through it. Maybe we can get a good conversation going again.My tests indicated two differences in the results of cooking a tagine in a glazed clay pot vs an unglazed clay pot. The glazed clay pot had slightly less liquid loss due to evaporation, meaning slightly more sauce from the glazed pot, at least until it was concentrated by boiling down. The far more important difference to me was that the meat was noticeably more tender when cooked in the unglazed pot. You can read about the specific test in this post: #98. A fair amount of discussion ensues. I also tested cooking the same dish in enameled cast iron vs. unglazed clay pot. There was much, much less loss of liquid - hence more sauce, as well as more fat thrown off - in the enameled cast iron. I posted about that here: #58. Again, there was a lot of discussion afterward. I haven't read as far yet as when I actually got the rifi tagine. If you're interested, I recommend going back to the beginning and reading the topic through. You may come up with questions as you go. Unfortunately many of the original participants are gone, but there are bound to be new people who can contribute.

Zucchini

That makes sense. Thanks for the curing information.

I'm not sure I follow the question. We did a lot of tests comparing the outcome in different materials and finishes, but I don't recall comparing what happens in an oversized tagine vs. a small one. I have no plans to get a souss tagine, but only because I don't have storage space without getting rid of something else. It's smaller than my rifi and the cone geometry looks like it would provide less overhead volume even if it were the same size.

That yolk technique sounds very interesting, and I'm looking forward to trying it. I'm sure at some point you'll be discussing possible substitutions, but I'll ask about one now. I had to look up Okinawa black sugar. It's obviously a different color than piloncillo, which is readily available. How different are they, aside from the obvious color differences? Would the Mexican sugar cone be a workable substitute? I ask this because I'm also dying to try the cured egg yolks!