Shalmanese
-
Posts
3,850 -
Joined
-
Last visited
Content Type
Profiles
Forums
Store
Help Articles
Posts posted by Shalmanese
-
-
I cant see the pic.
-
I made this pasta/shrimp/capers/olive oil/butter but I am not happy with the way the pasta looks on the white plate. I think it looks anemic I wonder if pasta might look better on a black plate?
Again speaking as a complete amateur, I think a dusting of some saffron or other red spice around the rim of the plate would create the contrast neccesary. As it is, the pasta sort of bleeds into the plate. Also, when serving pasta, I like to do plate with tongs and give a little twist at the end to give a nice neat pile.
-
another thing: Is it really a big deal if a pizza stone cracks? After all, it still has the same thermal mass and theres a negligible decrease in contact area.
-
Try coca-cola chicken. It's disturbingly good considering the ingredients.
blanch chicken wings to get rid of scummy foam.
Wash them, then braise them with 1/2 inch of coca cola with a shot of soy for saltiness.
-
Tony:/ What do you think of glass plates? Do you ever present on them? What goes particularly well or poorly with them?
-
The pros on this board have a number of techniques for storing ice cream and sorbets for many days, often relying on added stabilizers.
My experience is that if you make a sorbet more than a day in advance, it will be an ill-flavored ice-block by the time you eat it. The dropoff in tastes is undeniable after 48 hours; and it is difficult to maintain a decent texture, period. Fresh sorbet takes almost no attention and offers explosive flavors that can't be duplicated or preserved. Make it the same day, or get some Ben and Jerry's.
All of my sorbets have been sugar, water & fruit juice. Not ingredients known for their fast decay times. Sorbet's I've made have maintained their taste for many weeks. The texture suffers but all you need to do is to give it another whirl in the blender to soften it up again.
-
The northern style bao zie are much bigger than hsiao loong bao. About the size of a dinner roll.
-
A little secret that we use for bao zie but I'm sure could be used for jiao zie as well.
The day before, make a very gelatinous stock using pigs feet/chicken feet/pig skin and various flavouring agents. Season correctly and then put in the fridge and let set.
By the next day, you should hopefully have something the consistency of well set jelly. Cut this up into tiny cubes and, for each jiao zie, put a tiny cube of jelly into the centre of the meatball.
When these are cooked, the jelly will melt again into soup so each jiao zie is literally bursting with flavour.
-
Shredded cabbages are placed in brine, covered and then left for a few weeks. It uses the same chemical process as saurkraut. The brine is re-used getting more and more complex flavouring until you do something wrong and you get a mold infection. Then you have to toss it out and start again.
This is what was typically served when I went back home:
Breakfast:
Big steaming pots of congee with various picked vegtables(not cabbage) and fish floss.
Big bowls of soy milk
Hard boiled eggs with soy dipping sauce.
Lunch:
A cold vegtable salad
A cold meat salad
Maybe some left overs from the night before
Dinner:
Hot Rice
Various pickles, nuts etc to munch on.
A soup of some sort.
3 - 4 dishes
Some recipes:
Pickled cabbage soup
Make a soup base by stir frying some spring onions in oil until soft, then putting in 1 tbsp of dark soy and letting cook for 5 seconds, just until you can smell the sugars caremalising.
Top with boiling water
Add pickled cabbage and simmer for 10 minutes
Meanwhile, very thinly slice some pork and soak some vermicelli in warm water
Add the vermicelli and pork, turn off the heat and let the residual heat cook the pork.
Pork, beans & potato
Cut some nice fatty pork into 1 inch cubes and marinate in a mixture of cornflour, dark soy, salt & 5 spice powder.
Stir fry pork until brown and set aside.
saute some onions, ginger & garlic and then add beans and stir fry until the beans are green.
Add back the pork and deglaze with a very small water.
cook covered, stirring occasionally for about 1 hour, the important part is to make sure that the beans are steaming, not boiling.
Add some roughly chopped potatos in and cook until tender.
Add a cornflour slurry until the liquid is of sauce consistency, adjust seasoning.
Serve with rice.
"Hong Shao" fish
Descale, gut and clean a white fleshed fish like red snapper.
Make several slits into the fish and run over with a mixture of salt & 5 spice powder.
dredge both sides with flour.
Fry for about 3 mins on both sides in a large wok.
Add some ginger & spring onions and let them cook for a few seconds.
Add a mixture of chinese rice wine vinegar and sugar and put the lid on and let it steam until done.
I don't know how representative that is of Manchu cuisine but those are some of my families traditional recipes.
-
Here are some jiao zie we made for chinese new year. I agree with most of the instructions in this thread, mix meat for a long time in one direction to get the right mouthfeel. Make your own dough and knead it well.
Instead of rolling it out like a western pastry, roll from the outside in till you reach about 1/3rd of the way in, roll back out and rotate the dough by 45 degrees. That way, you get a lump in the middle which helps with the bite.
Our family likes to use pork and celery which I don't think has been mentioned here. IMHO, the texture of celery is superior to cabbage and gives it a nice fresh tang. Chive & port jiao zie are considered to be fancier because chives are more expensive in China.
But the most important part of jiao zie making is that it has to be a communal effort. Making jiao zie alone just defeats the purpose of it. It's a perfect dish for assembly line cooking, normally, we have 2 or 3 people stuffing for every person rolling skins and 1 person cooking for every 2 people rolling.
-
Born in China, moved to Australia when I was 5.
Family is from Manchuria.
-
Exactly, since firebricks are such poor conductors of heat, I'm guessing they would work worse than ceramics.
-
I would love a machine that could perfectly julienne or bruinoise anything you put into it.
I would love a microwave that could heat completely evenly with no hot spots.
I would love a microwave that only acts on ice but not water so you can perfectly defrost something without it being heated up.
I would love a microwave "gun" so that you could focus microwaves on specific areas of food like a blowtorch.
I would love a set of pots and pans that have one or several temperature probes built into the base and sides of the pot so I can figure out exactly what's going on.
I would love a "smart" gas stove that could communicate wirelessly with the aformententioned pots to automatically adjust the flame and keep the pots at a programmed temperature.
I would love a magic machine that you could put a plate of food in and it would go into suspended animation and not deterioate.
I would love a reducing machine that can remove only water from a sauce without removing any of the volatile flavourings as well.
I would love an "anti-salt" powder that would magically reduce the salt flavour in food without affecting anything else.
I would love a pressure cooker that you could add stuff to while pressurized, possible via some sort of airlock system.
I would love a pressure cooker you could see into while it was cooking.
I would love a perfectly insulated, always on oven so you don't need to bother pre-heating it.
What else would go into your fantasy kitchens?
-
So then why bother cooking directly on the stone? Obviously, thermal mass is important but if that's all the stone is providing then just keep the stone on the bottom rack and put the pizza anywhere you like.
Besides, I find that a stone adds a trival amounts of thermal mass for something as small as a pizza. With modern ovens, as long as you allow the walls to pre-heat, very little heat is lost. Using my oven thermometer, opening and closing the door drops the temp by about 10C, with a stone, it drops 5 - 7C. Neither of which will be disaterous to a pizza.
Big roasts and other large, cold things do benifit from the stone though.
-
Obviously, with all things, you need to step back and ask what's the point of all this.
For restaurants, its "So we can make more money", so obviously, there is an incentive for pretty plates.
At home, its "Because we can, and we want to". Plating is something we do because we find it fun, or relaxing, or a challenge, or to impress. Ultimately, if you don't see the point of good plating, then that's perfectly okay. Nobody is going to ostracise you because of it. Like any other hobby, if it ceases to be enjoyable, then why bother doing it.
-
Apparently, vermicelli noodles deep fried will form large, fluffy white noodles that you can use to bed or garnish a dish.
-
These articles (see also Articles 2 and 3) by Dr Joseph Mercola should clarify a lot of myths about saturated fats. Whew!
Joseph Mercola, to put it politely, is a crank.
-
Ugh, the same thing happened to my mother. Anything with visible fat = instant no, stuff with the fat emulsified in, perfectly okay.
She was adamant that I stop buying salami because of all the specks of fat, even though I pointed out that, at the rate I was eating it, I was only eating 0.5 grams of fat a day or a couple of rice grains worth. Still no go, the salami had to be out of the house.
-
Where does the lamb come into this.
I don't see how it can cook in 5 minutes, even grilling it takes longer. I guess the appeal though is that you can leave it in as long as you like. I wager there would be nothing wrong with duck fat.
-
The "cookbook" that came with my microwave. Oh wait, I think I tried scrambled eggs once just to see if you could.
-
Firebricks take so long to cool down because they have very poor thermal conductivity. I'm not a pizza expert but my understanding was that the point of a stone was that it had better conductivity than air so you get a properly cooked bottom.
-
Today, for lunch, I decided to put plating theory into practise:
This is a chicken, mushroom & leek risotto.
Instead of just dumping everything in as I usually do, I decided to reserve some of the larger chicken chunks, deep fry the leeks and shave the parmesan to serve as garnishing elements.
I'm not very happy with the final plating but I guess I have a lot to learn.
In retrospect, I think a soup style bowl would have worked better than a deep bowl since it gives me more room to work. The chicken was obscured by the other garnishes and, unfortunately, my pan wasn't hot enough to brown it well enough. Perhaps next time, I would have grilled an entire breast and fanned it on top. The resting worked wonders though, virtually no juice leaked out.
I didn't really know what would work best for the parm shavings, I just sort of dropped them down at random but I get the feeling that larger shavings would give you more freedom with placement.
I think with plating, I just need to take a deep breath and calm down. Usually, during cooking, I'm so frantic doing everything at once that I tend to try and plate as fast as possible. An extra minute or so to arrange things piece by piece could have worked better.
-
I like uneven cut potatos, the jaggy bits on the edge add texture.
How about just serving smaller portions at home and then allowing people to go for seconds, it seems this would be an obvious way to keep plates smaller.
-
You have to really step back and think about what is happening here. Normal cooks are used to dealing with 2 liquids, water and oil. Water has a freezing point of 0C and a boiling point of 100C, oil has a freezing point around the same range and a boiling point higher than 300C(500F) which is irrelevant because it smokes anyway.
What we are doing with caramel is creating a 3rd type of liquid with significantly different properties. Sucrose has a freezing point of about 160C and boiling point higher than 200C which doesn't matter because it burns at that point anyway. Sugar has the additional interesting property that it's physical properties change depending on the maximum temperature you take it to. What your aiming to achieve, is to first melt this mass of sugar by raising it about 160C and then to stop overbrowning it by keeping it below around 180C or so which is amber. But since sugar is such a poor conductor of heat and mechanical agitation is something you try and avoid as much as possible, then things get a bit tricky.
Using water is a good way to safely get it up to around the 150C mark since it dissolves the sugar and increases conductivity. At 100C, the water starts boiling off. A water and sugar solution can keep increasing in temperature up to about 150C as the water slowly boils off the sugar-water solution. By 160C, you should be looking at pure sugar in it's melted form. However, while water is nice, all it's doing is making sure your entire sugar solution reaches 160C at about the same time. Dry melting sugar can mean that some sugar might get appreciably hotter than other parts which can lead to burning.
Now, your challenge is to get the entire mass to about 180C without having significant parts of it go above, say, 200C when bitter flavours start appearing. The advice about a wide pan is good since it means the sides of the pan are relatively cool, alternatively, you could use a low flame or a pot with very good conductivity like an unlined copper pot professional pastry chefs use. How you do this is up to you but you need to be aware of all the different temperature variations and how it will affect your caramel.
As an aside, I hope by now you realize why sugar can sometimes sieze on the side of a pan. To the sugars perspective, your pan is ice-cold, any sugar that hits the side of the pan is essentially freezing instantly.
Now, once you have this mass of 180C liquid, what you want to do is to form a gastrique essentially. The problem is, how do you introduce a liquid that boils at 100C to a liquid that freezes at 160C succesfully. Theres really no easy way to do this, you can let your caramel solidify and drop down to 100C first and then add the liquid so it doesn't boil but that takes time.
Alternatively, you could try dump the 2 things together. The caramel will essentially flash freeze into littly chunks of candy and the soy will boil as if it hit a hot pan, but, once the two things come into equilibrium, the candy bits will slowly dissolve back into the soy for a smooth solution of sugar water.
Baking / Pizza stones
in Kitchen Consumer
Posted
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.