Smithy

I was surprised to see in Gourmet's recipe that they say "NOT dark beer". The only carbonnade recipe I've tried uses stout, and I had always thought that was a specific element of the dish. Any comments either way?

Abra, I picked up a heavy-duty baking stone from Williams-Sonoma last year. It's nearly an inch thick and seems a bit more durable than the first cheapo I bought a few years ago and promptly cracked the first time I tried to steam bread. Here's their current online offer. Without having specific measurements I can't tell you for sure that it's the same stone as mine, but it's about the same price. I'm not positive about travertine, but I seem to recall that it's more porous than something like quarry stone. Is it glazed or sealed in any way? You definitely want to avoid anything with a coating on it, as you can't be sure if the coating is food safe or not. ← It's not glazed or sealed. Just polished. Hardly any filling as well. It's pretty much solid limestone. ← Do you really want to put bread or pizza dough directly on hot limestone? Won't the steam cause a bit of etching on the stone and affect your food?

I'm happy to see that some cookbooks now say, in the introduction or earliest chapters, exactly what they'll mean by something like that. Using the convention I seem to see most in my cookbooks, I'd take that instruction as meaning "take 1 pound thighs and remove the bones". It could be taken the other way, though. Another ingredient listing that used to drive me crazy, but that I now find useful, is "divided": for instance, "1/4 cup butter, divided". I used to think, "what, they want me to chop it up?" But after a few times of pitching in the entire amount, only to realize later that I was supposed to save some for another part of the recipe, I've learned that it's a flag to people like me who don't mentally process a recipe without doing it once step by step.

Has anyone tried using the Britta water filter with calcium=rich well water? If it works to get heirloom the beans cooked to perfection in 90 minutes, I'll convert . ← I haven't tried it, but after doing a bit of reading and thinking about this I'm thinking that it might, under some circumstances, help. (How's that for a definite answer?) Whether it would help or not depends on the pH and alkalinity of your well water. What's interesting to me about these filters is that they don't exchange calcium and magnesium ions for sodium ions, as my household water softener does. They exchange for hydrogen ions. In plain English, they add a bit of acid to the water instead of adding sodium. My household water is well on the basic side (pH 8.7) so it could stand a slight adjustment downward. If your well water's pH is closer to 7 - that is, more neutral, the Brita system might end up shifting the water down below 7 and into the acid side, and slow down or stop the cooking rate. (See my earlier question about when to add acids.) I suppose you could counteract that by adding baking soda to the cooking water, but then...well, you might as well have used a water softener in the first place. Sorry if that's too geeky. I'll be happy to explain or elaborate further, if someone else doesn't jump in first. I may just go buy a Brita water filter and try it for myself. Edited in an attempt at greater clarity.

Can you tell where the time difference comes in? If you're bringing the beans to the boil on the stovetop before putting then in the oven, I'm guessing that at least some of the time difference is due to using more gentle heat with the clay on the stovetop. Am I right? Is the process slower during the oven portion as well? Finally, I'd still like to know when is the appropriate time to add tomatoes or tomato sauce or paste to the beans. Do I need to wait until they're completely cooked? What about other acids?

Scenes we don't have to imagine, because we've BEEN there... This bears repeating and further exploration. How much acid does it take to interfere with bean cookery? I've read about not adding tomatoes or tomato sauce until the beans are done. My question is whether some folks' drinking water is naturally too acidic to cook beans properly without adding some baking soda. (Our well's pH is way high, so this is strictly an academic question for me.) I'm glad for this extra bit of information. Since chickpeas are one of my favorites, I might have tried them first. I'll stick to the anasazis or white beans first. Then I'll go see what I can learn about starch density. Thanks for bringing this up, FG. I wasn't into beans when you first brought this up, so I missed it too.

I tried one as a product test for a cooking club I belong to. My husband and I both thought the results were horrid. We tried the smoker bag for poultry, cooked a chicken in it according to instructions, and were rewarded with something that tasted more of pine tar than of a nicely smoked piece of chicken. It's a shame, really: it seems like a such a good idea. But the house stank for days, and the chicken finally had to be mixed with other chicken in a pasta dish just to even out the flavor.

I use mine for squeezing tamarind juice out after I've soaked a chunk of tamarind pulp in boiling water. I also have used mine for "processing" watermelon to get the seeds separated from the juice. A lot of watermelon pulp also gets through, since the flesh is so porous, but the result is quite nice and thick. I think I did that with an accidentally-frozen watermelon one time and ended up with watermelon ice. Either that, or I juiced the watermelon in my mill and then stirred it up in the ice cream maker. It's been long enough since that particular incident that I only remember the fine results.

By the way, they're absolutely right about the importance of proper field dressing. You'd have to read up a ways to get the discussion about a quick kill, but that's also very important.

Browse is the shoots, leaves, twigs, buds from trees and shrubs. Graze is the herby stuff: grass, for instance. (Do apples and corn qualify as browse? I've never thought about it.) If your hunter wasn't just winding you up, you should figure that there may be a gamey taste. Marinade (but NOT just a vinegar water boil, fer cryin' out loud) appropriate to your final flavor choices will help. Depending on how it smells after you thaw it, you may want to consider cutting it into small chunks first and marinading those, and giving up on the idea of a roast. Somehow this all reminds me of a guy I used to know who swore he had THE BEST venison recipe ever. He went through some long-winded explanation of the cooking process and the sauce that went with it, complete with cherries and rum and who knows what-all. The details have faded with the decades, but I still remember his enthusiastic endorsement: "It's wonderful! You can't taste the venison at all!"

Gaah. Boiled in vinegar water, then fried? That sounds like a travesty to me. I'd go for a good marinade (this happens to be my favorite), then either grilling it in kabobs or cooking it in a pilaf, or doing a slow braise. I agree with dockhl: go look at the One Dead Deer thread for ideas. You could do a nice stroganoff with that venison, too. ETA: Thanks for merging the topics, Susan. Now thecuriousone doesn't have to go looking so hard!

Hmm. I'd be concerned about the grease going off overnight, at least from a flavor standpoint. I also wonder if the meat juices in the grease might encourage bugs to grow, but maybe the hot grease effectively sterilizes those juices so that it isn't an issue. I'd probably try it, after sniffing (or tasting) the bacon grease to make sure it didn't have any off-flavors or -smells. I don't find cleaning cast iron to be all that difficult. My first thought is to compromise: heat the pan gently so last night's bacon grease will flow; pour it out; replace it with fresh grease. If you really want to go hog-wild you can wipe the pan dry with a couple of paper towels before adding more grease. What do you do, more than I just described, that makes cleaning the pan so tough? Or is your pan not well-seasoned yet?

You have become my romantic heroine in one fell swoop, Carolyn. Meatballs roasted on the open carburetor and all. Keep up the good work. ← There used to be a cookbook (I'm too lazy to check but I think it's out of print now) about cooking in your car's engine compartment, developed by a couple of rally drivers who loved to eat well. They had the techniques down: how to determine the proper heat source for what you were cooking, how to secure the packet so it stayed put during the drive, and how to wrap it to keep it from leaking. I think the cooking "times" were even expressed in miles driven. I thought the book had one of the all-time best titles: "Manifold Destiny".

I have that cookbook and have used it a fair amount. It's a lot of fun.

You can try The Salt Traders as a source. I got some Japanese sea salt Japanese Nazuna sea salt from them some time back, and it sounds a lot like what you describe. Edited to correct a misspelling and add this info: I don't see a specifically Okinawan salt listed, but I still think the Nazuna salt sounds like much the same thing.

That's an interesting bit of history. I don't know where exactly the butterstick West begins, but Minnesota is quite definitely in the butterstick east. When I first moved here I was brought up short by the funny-shaped butter sticks: long and skinny. What was up with that? Now, whever I go "home" to visit, I'm brought up short by the funny-shaped, short and fat butter sticks. My mother, originally a Floridian, remembers the same surprise when she moved west lo these many decades ago. JAZ, I now realize I have one of each type of butter dish in my house. Hadn't really thought it through before now.

I'm glad you bumped this back up to the top, lovebenton0. There's been a lot of discussion about cooking in clay since this thread was last active. I'm convinced that clay adds a bit of flavor and character to dishes cooked in them. For starters, it has a good high thermal mass so it's slow to respond to temperature changes - and for those of us with electric ovens and burners, it evens out the cycles to maintain a more constant temperature. I think it also does an interesting flavor meld that I don't get, say, from enameled cast iron. In my Romertopf I've taken to coating and stuffing a whole chicken with paprika and whatever spices I thought might go nicely with that, adding bits of quartered onion and celery and whatnot, and cooking it in the Romertopf for oh, a couple of hours at 375. (So far in my experimentation I've decided that 375 is as hot as I'd care to take the chicken; hotter temperatures seemed to cook it too quickly, and it wasn't as tender. 350F might work better but I haven't tried it yet.) Here's my original post on that discovery, over in the "Paprika: Confessions of an Addict" thread. I do soak the bottom of the Romertopf for a bit, but as someone else noted above, it's just a matter of pouring water into that bottom while you're prepping the dish, and then pouring the water back out. My Romertopf was a $5 garage sale special also, so I've been dishwashing it after most uses. I haven't regretted it so far, and can't taste any off tastes. It's possible I'm missing out on some flavor melds that come from seasoned pots.

A vinaigrette with walnut oil and balsamic vinegar is a wonderful thing.

Chufi, I've never made that recipe but I have, long since, quit simmering or cooking fresh lemons with their rinds for any time. I've had too many fish recipes go bitter that way. I think there may be some lemon varieties whose rinds break down unpleasantly when cooked. (I haven't researched lemon varieties to know how plausible that theory is, but I know my empirical evidence.) I've had pretty good success with adding lemon slices late in cooking, and I've never had lemon juice go bitter on me, so I'm inclined to blame the peel instead of the flesh of the fruit for the bitterness you describe. The sour note, on the other hand, might have been from too much lemon flesh (or too long cooking it).

My dad always used to say that there was no point in going to Las Vegas if you were a farmer. I have some photos from 9 or 10 years ago of icicles in our groves. It's a silent disaster, not as uproarious as a hurricane, but a disaster nonetheless.

This weekend I cooked the Oxtail Daube. The taste was fabulous, and right now I'm wishing I had more leftovers. The finished product was deep, rich mahogany in color, and the best way I can describe its flavor is to say that it was equally deep, rich and complex: meaty, almost caramelly. It is not cookbook hype to say that the flavors have multiple layers. Pleased though I was with the outcome, I didn't try to photograph it: the shredded meat in brown sauce would require a better photographer than I to do it justice, even over noodles. The cooking and straining process left me with a question of technique. Step 7 begins with "Strain the cooking liquid, pushing down on the onions to extract all their juices." I chose to do the straining in my china cap, which I'd lined with cheesecloth. The process wasn't very effective: the onions were so soft that my spoon tended to push them around as much as push them down. Eventually I took to bunching the cheesecloth and squeezing it gently to squeeze out as much juice as possible without rupturing the cloth. It was still a long process, and by the end I was beginning to design screen presses and vacuum filters in my head. What should I have been doing instead? Should I have poured the onions and juice into a broader, shallower strainer instead of that deep cone? Pushed with another china cap nested inside, so it would push everything at once to the walls?

This is exactly what my husband, Minnesota born and bred, remembers from his childhood. When his parents got their first deep freeze, his mother and the kitchen were both liberated from having the canning kettle running nearly nonstop during the hottest days of the summer. She never looked back.

Those are just flat-out beautiful, as are the squash. I can't get behind squash as a rule, but I would surely like to know the proportions you use in that relish. Is it cooked before stuffing it in the squash?

<the screen opens on a scene of peaceful condos nestled in snowy mountains...cue narrator's voice>... The crowd anxiously awaits the outcome. Did Barb make peace with her deceptively-advertised and poorly-equipped kitchen? Did she find just the right cookware that she'd never known existed? Are the vacationers groaning with pleasure over coddled pork? Will UPS overload its next cargo plane with her shipment home? Find out in our next exciting episode! ...So, Barb?

The vintage Le Creuset pieces I first picked up from eBay also have cast handles on the lids. I don't know what I'll ever do if a handle breaks, but in the meantime I like the looks of it, and the cost was much lower than for the new stuff.