Shalmanese

I've found, as a general rule, ideological cooks are worse than non-ideological cooks, whether it's vegetarian, paleo, low fat, organic, whatever. The best vegetarian food I've had comes from non-vegetarian chefs who just happen to be making a vegetarian dish. If a recipe writer is specifying a single organic ingredient in a recipe, that means that they've noticed a clear difference in the way organic and non-organic foods behave and the difference is notable enough to be worth calling out. If they specify every ingredient should be organic, that means they don't really know how to taste and are just driven by ideology.

The concern for botulism was always with long term storage. Storing it for a day makes it not a risk. Also, for some reason, the popular food world has somehow caught the link of Garlic <=> Botulism the same way as Raw Chicken <=> Salmonella despite neither of those being the major vector of contamination. In truth, botulism outbreaks in the US are extremely rare and highly treatable. People collectively freak out about botulism because it's been hyped up and has easily defined criteria but the truth is you're probably doing many things in your kitchen that have food risks thousands of times higher than your botulism risks.

I've tried both searing with a blowtorch and searing in oil in a hot cast iron skillet.

Has anyone else found that the sear you get on meat cooked sous vide is completely different from conventional? With SV, the sear is like the meat has dehydrated and is leathery and almost jerky like. Especially prominent when you sear across an end grain but also apparent along the grain as well. It makes SV cooked meat not especially fun to eat.

I just crunch them between my molars until I feel the shell crack, then fish them out to extract the meat.

Popular sadist Chili Klaus disagrees (klik/kik her)! So do I. And, prompted by this topic, I recently had this discussion with my boyfriend (incidentally, also Danish), and by way of demonstrating that chilies do have actual flavour (and that their heat often masks flavour nuances, which are difficult to discern when your head is in flames), halved one of the eleventy-zillion arbol chilies from our insanely prolific plants, stripped out all the seeds and white membranes, and snipped it into small pieces. Although still distinctly hot, eating this is an entirely different experience than that of eating pieces of the whole chili. I recommend giving this approach a go, since you'll very likely find a great new range of flavour. Worst case scenario, you hop around for a quarter of an hour with your eyes and nose streaming, cursing me and the chilies, and get to say 'I TOLD you so!' If you rotovap chillis, the capsaisan does not evaporate so your distillate contains the flavor of chilis without any of the heat. This is an easy way to prove that chilis have flavor beyond heat.

According to this PDF This is too inconsequential to care about from a food safety perspective.

At the end of the day, the question of authenticity was moot since the person who was sent off was sent off for technique reasons. Double frying the shrimp and then coating it in a wet sauce resulted in unappetizing shrimp.

You can believe a lot of wacky things that are only incidentally about cooking and still be a great cook. Eric Ripert for example, believes that menstruating women can't make mayonnaise without it breaking.

My friend wrote a great review of the Nomiku on Techcrunch today.

I think it's safe to say that Thunderbolt Chili wins the prize for most unusual ingredients in a chili. For reference, here are the ingredients: 4-5 strips of bacon cracked black pepper 1 pound ground beef 1/2-1 pound ground turkey 2 onions 1 bell pepper 1 fennel 1-2 carrots 1/2 eggplant 2/3 teaspoon curry powder 2 tablespoons crushed red pepper 1-2 tablespoons dried rosemary 1-2 tablespoons adobo seasoning 5-7 garlic cloves 3 tablespoons fig jam 1/2 cup yellow mustard 1-2 tablespoons Thai chili sauce 1-2 tablespoons Hungarian paprika 1/2 cup barbecue sauce 1/3 jar of pickles (with juice) 1 poblano chili 1/4 cup brown sugar 1 teaspoon cinnamon 2 tablespoons salt 1/3 cup spaghetti sauce 1 cup beer 1/2-1 cup cooked rice 1 handful of baby arugula 2/3 cup cherry tomatoes 1 small package pork rinds (crushed) 1 handful of cilantro unlimited pepper jack cheese (shredded) 1/2 teaspoon cayenne pepper 1 can kidney beans 1 can pinto beans

* Clarified Butter & Ghee is unsalted butter, heated and strained * Simple syrup is sugar & water

Home deep frying and commercial deep frying are such different beasts that they might as well be separate cooking methods. With commercial deep frying, you care about volume of production, longevity of oil, reliability & reproducibility and simplicity. With home frying, you're rarely cooking more than 3 - 4 portions and batching is fine, you're generally attending to the frying rather than doing "set and forget" and you don't care as much if you slightly abuse the oil. Given that, how home frying generally tends to work is that you bring the oil up to above the target temperature, drop the food in which is drop it down to target temp and then regulate the heat to maintain target temp for the duration of the frying. With this approach, you don't need 1:10 food to oil ratio, generally, you just need enough to cover the food. Most frying oils degrade around 450F and general frying temperatures are around 350 - 400F, overshoots tend to be around 15 - 25F so you have a bit of headroom to play around with. You could try to add more thermal mass to the equation but all that does is reduce the overshoot which might be slightly kinder on the oil but doesn't get you much beyond that.

I'd steam them rather than boil them unless you were making a soup. No sense in losing all that flavor into the water.

I think a lot of the confusion around basting has to do with whether the liquid is a) water & fat at 100C/212F or b) fat only significantly hotter than 100C/212F. Depending on the oven, pan, bird & stuff in the pan, a recipe that might work well with basting in one setup can be a total disappointment with another.

Could it be a Lemon Cucumber?

I like keeping a minimal set of required ingredients around to make any particular dish. That means, if there are ingredients that can be made up on the spot, I generally prefer making it vs keeping another thing in my pantry. For example: Half & Half is half whole milk and half cream.Light Brown Sugar is half dark brown sugar and half white sugar.Coconut Milk is pretty reasonably approximated by half coconut cream and half water.Popcorn/Pickling Salt can be made by grinding kosher salt in a spice grinder.Confectioner's Sugar can be made by grinding white sugar in spice grinder/food processor with optionally a bit of cornstarch.Salted Butter can be made by mixing unsalted butter with salt.Does anyone else have examples of ingredients that they regularly make from other ingredients?

The New York Times has an article on Mary's marinating sticks, a new and apparently better way of infusing flavor into the middle of large roasts compared to traditional injecting. Has anyone tried one? Do they work? Are they worth buying?

I had a chance to test the Nomiku against the Anova side by side last night. I'll repeat what I said in the Anova thread

I had a chance to test the Anova and Nomiku side by side yesterday: * Nomiku oddly does not have an off switch, you turn it off by unplugging it which is annoying. Even more annoying, if the low water sensor trips, you have to unplug the device to reset it. * Nomiku was much easier to attach/detach from a pot but much less securely attached. If you want your device permanently mounted, Anova is better, if you're attaching and detaching for every cook, Nomiku is better. * Nomiku's circulation was noticably weaker than the Anova's which I actually like better since too strong a circulation causes more problems than it solves. * Nomiku, out of the box, was 0.6F low. My Anova out of the box was 3F high, apparently due to a manufacturing mistake. In any case, it looks like calibration is recommended for any of these devices. * Nomiku was noticably slower than the Anova to heat up a bath, despite both nominally having 1000W ratings. This is in line with another poster over in the Nomiku thread who seems to have measured 800W actual heating power. * The Nomiku is much lighter and sleeker than the Anova, but has a breakout box. * The Nomiku dial based UI for setting temperatures is much better than the touchscreen for the Anova but lacks features like timers. * The Nokimu had a weird problem when attempting to cook some chicken at 61C where, after the food was dropped in, the temp dropped to 58C and then slowly climbed to 60.5C but never went above that. * Overall, the lower power is annoying but nothing else was a deal breaker for either device which makes it hard to justify the $100+ premium of the Nomiku over the Anova.

Any time I get ungelled jam, I just repurpose it instead of trying to make it gel. Just pour it over ice cream as a sauce or use it to poach fruit or something.

Lately, my Anova has developed a problem where the shaft holding the impeller became slightly offset, causing one of the blades to hit the sleeve of the device. This causes the device to rattle extremely loudly when turned on. It's possible to bend the shaft back a little bit to temporarily halt the problem but it comes back again after a while. I emailed Anova about it 2 weeks ago and haven't heard anything back from them yet. Wondering if anyone else is experiencing anything similar?

I'm sure the chef who was sent home is a perfectly nice guy but the entire time he was on the screen, I could not help but think "goddamn, that man is an aryan super soldier".

I like lao gan ma but I've found that it doesn't seem to play well with others. Anything you mix it in tastes unmistakably like lao gan ma and that has to be the effect you're after. It's never been a general purpose condiment to me the same way sriachia or soy sauce is for example.

I tried going through the first week of this course to try it out and I'm pretty disappointed so far. The lessons involving food professionals is semi-decent but essentially the same as what they say in other venues. The lessons from the professors running the class are awful. They take otherwise familiar physical/chemical concepts and then lazily graft a food layer on top without any real attempt at relevance. I already had a very good understanding of molarity and I've never had to apply that knowledge in the kitchen because molarity is very seldom a relevant measure (ironically, the one place it's even conceivably useful would be to calculate how much baking soda & vinegar is required to make a perfectly neutral base. This concept which would have neatly tied together the physical and chemical halves of the course but it is never mentioned in the course). If I didn't already have such an understanding, the way it was taught using food would have been even more confusing to me than via a standard approach. On top of that, the quizzes and labs are slopping in many places and downright conceptually wrong in others. One of the labs rests on the assumption that sugar melts at 366F despite the current consensus being that sugar does not have a fixed melting point but instead, decomposes. Another homework assignment relies on you knowing the density of flour despite telling you earlier that the density of flour varies and then using a density of flour that is different from the one they previously used. One of the questions asked was "is baking soda natural" which becomes maddeningly philosophical for anyone who knows anything about the debate surrounding the concept of natural (according to edX, it's not!). The entire course is riddled with poor pedagogy that gives online learning a poor reputation. If other courses on edX are similar to this one, it's no wonder that completion rates are abysmal.