Shalmanese

When making dim sum meatballs, its desiarable to have that chewy texture. Same with jiao zie/gyoza.

I've taken some pics of my PC. We got it as a present from a friend in china. This is with the lid open, it's controlled by the dial on the right side. There are different pre-programmed settings which I guess correspond to different times and pressures. It will automatically keep warm something after the pressure cycle is over (at around 50C I'm guessing) and can even cook rice. This is with the lid on. The blue button is the pressure release valve. The inside looks just like a rice cooker.

Theres nothing inherently wrong with parrafin wax. It's virtually tasteless and completely food safe and helps with the texture. As long as the wax doesn't overwhelm the chocolate, it should be fine.

I'm piggybacking on this thread in the hopes that someone will know. In alton's recent truffle episode, he always scalds the cream, pours it on top of the chocolate and let stand 3 minutes before stirring. I've never seen a ganache recipe reccomend this, is there a reason for this?

A clarification: The old style pressure cookers with a bolted on lid meant to be used on the stove WILL boil when it reaches pressure but the rate of boiling can be controlled by adjusting the flame. Adjusted properly, only a tiny bit of steam will escape and the boiling rate will be negligible. The new style pressure cookers that look like a rice cooker on steroids and is heated by an internal heating element will NOT boil. It may boil a little bit as it comes up to pressure but after that, sensors inside the pot will keep the cooker at a constant temperature. without any escaping steam. Either one of them, if used properly, should never agitate the stock enough to cloud it.

Stock is actually great in a pressure cooker because it never boils. As long as you take care to heat it up gently and let it cool completely, you get crystal clear stock. Make sure to pre-boil your bones first to get rid of scum though.

Making stock. I love disassembling all the various bits and pieces. Wrapping gyoza. It's a great time to talk with family. Butchering meat. Pounding things. Great as an anger management tool.

I leave Lemon juice at least overnight to let the mint properly steep but I haven't seen any significant deterioation over 2 days. I've never kept it for long than that so I wouldn't know. I would say the best thing to do would be to make it the night before.

Not gluten, but minced meat is full of long, thin strands of connective tissue. Imagine you have a pile of string loose on the floor. The more you mess with it, the more tangled up it becomes.

Overmixed meat definately changes in texture. I wouldn't say it toughens the meat but it gives it more bite. I think what happens is that as you mix it, the fibers start interlocking.

Most food processors come with a juicer attachment, this would be far easier than juicing by hand. Heres how I've seen it done. Cut up all your lemons and place in 2 piles, cut side down on both sides of the juicer. Place a clean garbage bin underneath the juicer, in between your feet. Take a lemon with the left hand, juice it, throw it in the bin, take a lemon with the right hand, do the same and repeat. If you get the rhythm down, you can easily do a lemon half every 3 seconds or so. I would also bruise a bunch or 2 of mint leaves and throw them in and let steep for at least 3 hours as well.

DongBei is a cuisine that hasn't seemed to have gained much penetration. I don't know of any DongBei restaurants in Hong Kong and only 3 in Shenzhen so I doubt there would be more than a dozen outside of asia.

In Jilin, we were staying in a hotel which had a muslim restaurant next door. Intrigued, we decided we had to try it. Unmigitatedly awful was what it ended up being. Served up by the chefs reccomendation, were the following 2 dishes: A lamb dish that consisted of tough, stringy pieces of lamb, boiled in plain, unsalted water for too long for it to be tender, but too short for any of the connective tissue to break down. Served alongside was some sort of thin, soy based sauce whose only high point was that the extreme saltiness of it managed to hide the faint odour of decay from the lamb. A beef dish that consisted of what I imagine could only be the afterbirth of the cow featured in the dish, kept locked away in a dark and humid place to fester until this hunk of walking flesh from which it belonged had died of old age. Apart from the perculiar texture, like a cross between flubber and library paste, the second thing that hits you is the overwhelming stench strongly reminisicent of the scum that floats to the top when you boil meat. Fortunately, the copious amounts of chilli peppers meant that you tastebuds were soon too numb to take on any more punishment. Later we heard from locals that the only reason this place managed to stay in buisness was that it the only muslim restaurant for quite some distance and served a quite sizable muslim community. In an even more bizarre turn of events, the jiao zie that was ordered as a side to the main meal turned out to be some of the most spectacular I have ever encountered. The skin was ethereally light but just with the right tauntness. Biting through, you got that tiny squirt of liquor from inside that just exploded with flavour in your mouth, slightly sweet, slightly salty. The celery had just the right amount of crunch to offset the chewiness of the beef (no pork served there). And 15 of them were mindbogglingly cheap at only 70 US cents. I don't think in 10 years of making jiao zie at home, I've ever approached the quality of the ones I had there. I think, without a doubt, that has to be the most interesting restaurant I've yet to experience.

Pepper in certain circumstances. Most of the time, I treat pepper like I treat garlic, namely, you should put too much in and then an extra grind/bulb. But in some dishes, pepper needs to be toned way down from what typical recipes suggest.

My guess is that first of all, the fat was hotter this time than the previous times and that also you sprayed the lemon juice directly into the pan in a wide area this time instead of mostly onto the pork chop. It also depends on the position of the pan being just a tiny bit off the flame.

If you think about it, your effectively rudimentrally canning the food. The procedure is pretty similar. If a procedure can keep food sterile for 6+ months, I'm pretty confident it can do it overnight.

Cooking vessels at home, I can't think of anything offhand that you can't buy at a western store. Possibly, in some villages, there were communal pieces of equipment that are pretty esoteric. The only one I can think of is a giant flat griddle about 2 ft wide for making paper thin cakes made of corn. Meats, definately pork, Chicken and lamb less so and beef very rarely. The explaination given to me was that beef was muslim food and the ethnic chinese didn't eat it. Manchurian food seems to rely a lot on pickling the same as a lot of cultures in that climate. Pickled cabbage is a big one, nearly every home used to have a big clay cabbage fermenter although I've heard they've officially banned home production after a spate of food poisoning although it's not really tightly enforced. Pickled cucumber, watermelon rind, garlic, bamboo shoots etc. They are usually eaten with congee in the morning or with rice at dinner. At my grandmothers place, the typical meal would comprise of 2 courses, first, a variety of cold meats and pickled vegtables and nuts would be set out on the table with hot rice and people would nibble and talk while grandma cooked. Once dinner was ready, the cold food was taken off and the hot food put on. There wasn't any soup course but occasionally, soup would be on the table.

Those of you reccomending ice-baths and blast chillers need to take a BIG step back and look at the big picture. Every day, billions of people across the world at home are leaving soups, stews and every other cooked item to cool on the counter and then transferring to the fridge, sometimes as much as 48 hours yet Restaurants are still the major vector of food poisoning. Applying restaurant standard food handling to home situations just isn't worth the effort. Personally, my strategy has always been to use a pot with a tight fitting, holeless lid. Bring the soup to a boil with the lid on and then turn off the flame and leave it. As the soup cools down, the internal pressure drops and creates a slight vacuum seal around the lid. As everything inside the pot has been steaming for the last 30 minutes, the insides of the pot are effectively a sterile area and it's perfectly safe to leave the pot overnight. The key is to resist the urge to crack open the lid to look inside. Once it's cool, it can then be portioned into containers and stuck in the fridge.

Feenie was wrong about the equipment being the cause of failure for his pineapple jelly. Pineapple contains an enzyme that inhibits gelatine from gelling. You need to cook the pineapple first to deactivate the enzyme which I'm pretty sure he didn't do.

I don't know why nobody has realised yet but pineapple will not gel with gelatin unless an enzyme is deactiviated by heat.

Tater tots, roasted cauliflower and onion confit - egullet special :D

I know for a fact that you can get them in Melbourne and Sydney. They are usually sold in vacuum sealed plastic bags.

I disagree, from scratch vs out of a box is not the same as durian/anti-durian. If I were to crave a meal that tasted exactly like Kraft Mac & Cheez, I could concievably make it from scratch. If I were to crave homemade Mac & Cheese, there is no way I could make it from a Kraft box. The difference here is control and freedom. Everytime someone else makes a decision for me, that's less control and less freedom I have to construct my meal. Cooking from scratch allows you to control every variable and ultimately, gives you a superior finished product. Whether this control is important to you is something that has to be decided on a case-by-case basis until you find something your satisfied with.

Just curious, whats the etiquette with the half sized pieces around the edges? Obviously, with a round cake, you can't cut it into equal sized, square portions. Do you still serve the off-cuts?

I see cooking from scratch as the same as making your own clothes or renovating your own house or building your own furniture, a hobby, not a goal to strive for. It's all about whether you care enough about food to use up your free time making it. For most people, thats not the case and I don't look down on them just as hopefully don't look down on me for having a mechanic fix my car instead of learning how to do it myself. Personally, my philosophy is to always try and do everything once the "right" way and then see what shortcuts are acceptable. This includes stuff like baking my own bread, making my own sausages, making stock, butchering my own meat etc. Half the time, I find that professionals can do it far better and that's okay because the goal to learn something new, not put food on the table. When I'm in the right mood, I love the buying, chopping, blanching, smearing, roasting, simmering, straining, chilling, defatting, reducing, poritioning and freezeing that is required to make a good brown stock. But if I found these activities to be mind-numingly dull as I'm sure 90% of the population would, then it would seem bizarre to me to spend half a day in drudgery at the altar of "from scratch".