Shalmanese

All the chinese bao tang I've seen have been made much like a western white stock except with different ingredients. Gently simmering over many hours, flavours not too intense, use the bits of the pork with lots of gelatinous tissue, ie: near the bones. In restaurants, they usually start the soup early in the morning and add whatever scraps are left over from prep throughout the day AFAIK. In a home kitchen, I would just pull out your biggest stockpot and fill with ingredients and just cover with water and simmer all day. Strain out the solids from the liquids and freeze seperately. Every time you feel like bao tang, just combine, let come to the boil and serve.

Xiang Chang means sausage in Chinese.

They might be Haw fruit. Were they round and red about the size of a lychee and taste sorta like apples?

Perhaps loosening the framing of the shots would give a bit of perspective. Sometimes, it's hard to figure out what some of the stuff is because it dominates the entire frame.

My everyday salt is Sel de Guerende, a french grey sea salt. Salt for pasta water is plain generic table salt. Maldons for the table or when I want to sear something.

I like to roast whole heads because then I don't have to worry about peeling them. Just squeeze them out like toothpaste. I like to mix them about 50/50 with either olive oil (for liquid spreads) or butter (for solid spreads). I put the OO ones in mini-squeeze bottles for easy dispensing and do the plastic wrap trick for butter ones to make garlic butter medallions.

I'd like to hear more about this. Does anyone know exactly what chemicals do exactly what to cakes that makes AB say that boxed is superior? Is your objection to boxed mixes because they use inferior ingredients or because of the chemicals inside them or because from scratch is just inherently superior? If KatieM put her home-made mixes in a box and sold them, would they still be inherently worse than from scratch? What if we got KatieM's mix and doctored it up with all those chemicals that AB claims makes cakes better?

Salt caremalises?

I'm paying about $7.00 a Kilo for shanks, $6.50 for leg of lamb.

Rather a trivial question but why do I frequently see lamb shanks priced higher than or equal to legs of lamb at butchers and supermarkets? Surely the leg is a more desirable cut? I have a hankering to make braised lamb shanks but I simply cant get myself to pay that much for them.

It's also really good slipped into risotto at the last minute. Roast or boil your marrow bones before hand. Scoop out the marrow and roughly chop.

I think 500F is when PTFE starts giving off chemicals that are toxic to birds and 700F is when the coating starts flaking off. When you are searing a steak, you have 1 part of the pan in contact with the steak but a large area exposed to open air. The part under the steak may only be at 300F but the edges of the pan could quite easily get up to higher than 700F. Similarly, when sauteing, theres only a certain amount of heat food can "suck" out of the pan. For example, If you have something like dry green beans with very little oil, I've found that the conductivity is so poor that you might as well be heating an empty pan.

Why? Those mushrooms were likely cleaner than you could get at most restaurants, which only brush them with tiny mushroom brushes to get the dirt off.

The email is a bit disingenious. Sure, no part of the pan thats actually cooking the food is likely to go over 500F, but if you put a steak in that pan to sear, then any place NOT in contact with the steak is quite likely to reach much higher than 700F if you leave it for long enough. Personally, I would never use a non-stick pan to sear with, even sauteing is a bit iffy as there might be very limited contact between the pan and the food, not enough to suck all the heat out. A good rule of thumb to find out how hot a pan has gotten is to try and deglaze it and see how much deglazing liquid evaporates. I've found that when sauteing, you can easily get a pan about as hot as an empty pan left over heat for 5 minutes.

I would say that almost all of my cooking is for therapy. I've come to the incredibly disturbing realisation that I"m not a very good eater. I appreciate good flavours and contrast ans subtlety and all that jazz, but all to often, I find my mind being distracted by other things while I eat and I've gone through half the bowl without tasting it.

Haw is the processed pulp of a certain type of chinese fruit that, as far as I can ascertain, are unavailible outside of china. The fruit are about the size of a lychee or large grape, spherical and red in colour. Inside, there are some seeds but it's pretty much entirely edible. Once processed, haw can be made into thin haw flakes or a sort of chewy gummy like substance.

Any plans on making the previous daily gullet accessible via the forum? I notice the link to it was removed when the new system was put in place.

I don't understand your point . Are you saying you can only buy one size cooktop in the entire country? Over here there are options in sizes. Although, don't many apartments in AU have smaller apartment sized ovens (which you may need to consider if you'll be renting an apartment)? ← No, I'm saying that you'll have the same option in sizes over here as you would in the states. The oven designed to fit under a 4 burner stove is going to be the same as in the US etc. I've never seen mini-ovens, apartments with limited cooking facilities tend not to have ovens at all.

I imagine ovens would be the same size as they have to fit under cooktops which are standardised.

I still say charge by the actual labour you perform. That way, she won't believe that your ripping her off and she can't take advantage of you by offloading 10lb of grapes.

Yes, there are many food processes that depend on the controlled action of microscopic orgamisms. Cheese, wine, beef, beer, bread, yogurt etc. If you want such things to happen, just don't irradiate it. rancho_gordo: How many of us today, realistically get a chance to pick a ripe tomato from their garden? How many of us at any point in time have ever had that chance? In all likelyhood, the tomatos of yesteryear that were picked from from our gardens were maggoty, small and uneven. I think it's fantastic that you and like minded people are trying to provide the absolute best quality food you can but simple market forces dictate that only a scant minority will ever enjoy such luxuries with today's technology.

I'm sorry that scientists have such a bad reputation in your mind. In this case, when we say irradiated foods can cause no harm, we genuinely mean it not in the "we don't expect it to cause harm" fashion. But in the "If it did indeed cause harm via radiation, then we would need to re-write virtually every rule in physics" fashion. Irradiated food doesn't have anything to DO with radiation. To make an analogy, irradiating something is like shooting bullets at it. Radiation is like the gun. If you started shooting bullets at something, left it alone for a while, and then all of a sudden, it started spontaneously shooting bullets, thats about as likely as irradiated foods being radioactive. Having said that, I do think there are some legitimate claims against irradiation, some of which have been brought up. Another one I think hasn't been brought up is that over-irradiation could compromise our immune system by not giving it enough bugs to fight. By overrelying on irradiated foods, our immune systems become more fragile and what were once relatively benign bugs could floor us a lot harder.

If you want to do it as a good service to a customer, why not charge her the amount of chocolate you use at cost + 10% and then a fixed price per hour for labour? If you want to do it to make some money, telepathically figure out the maximum she is willing to pay and charge her 1c less than that :D. edit: added per hour

For a fascinating read, have a look at: Food and Eating: An Anthropological Perspective

As long as you're talking about equilibrium thermodynamics (read: everything has come up to temperature properly) mass is mass. You could smash your pizza stone into sand and it would still provide the same thermal performance. For that matter, you could put a bunch of sand between two aluminum pizza pans, weld them together, and still have a good pizza pan, thermal-mass-wise. ← No, because you also have to take conductivity into account. Put a pizza stone and a cast iron pan into a 500F oven and let it come into equilibrium. Touch your finger on the pizza stone for 2 seconds and touch in on the pan for 2 seconds for a graphic demonstration of thermal conductivity. In addition, contact area also plays a role. I suspect that placing it on sand would cook it just as well except you would get a different pattern of browning on the bottom of your pan.