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Shalmanese

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Everything posted by Shalmanese

  1. I've pretty streamlined my large batch brown poultry stock making procedure: * Acquire exactly the amount of bones it would take to fill up your largest pot. * Get your largest pot of water to the boil * Cut off any large chunks of fat/skin from the chicken carcasses * Dunk the fat & skin pieces into the boiling water, let it cook until all the pink is gone, then remove with a spider strainer. * Drop the cooked pieces of fat/skin into a food processor, process until pea sized chunks (the brief blanch makes the skin much easier to chop) * Put the chopped skin in a non-stick pan with a cup of canola oil, start cooking * Cook until fat has completely rendered out of the cracklings. You can then either add the cracklings to the stock to add flavor or eat them as a snack (they make an excellent garnish for salads) * Add the bones one at a time to the rendered fat, keeping the temperature around 325 - 350. If it climbs above 350, add some more bones. As the bones become sufficiently browned, take them out and add them to the large pot of simmering water. * You can then decant whatever fat is left over and have an incredibly chickeny schmaltz that adds insane flavor. Don't let the oil get much above 350 for too long though as it'll degrade too quickly and you're left with useless broken down oil. * Cook the bones for 3 hours at a low simmer, then strain and skim off most of the surface fat. * Put it back in the pot, add your vegetables and cook at a high boil for another hour * Strain out the vegetables, let the stock chill in the fridge, then remove the fat cap What you get is a super gelled, crazy intense brown stock that tastes like essence of roast chicken. I like deep frying the bones instead of roasting them because I think you can get a deeper level of brown without it being burnt. Also, I like cooking the veggies separately during the reduction phase as I feel it leads to a cleaner flavor and also allows you to cram more bones in the pot, leading to more stock.
  2. I disagree, I think a weak stock is worse than no stock. You get all the muddled, samey flavors you would get from a full on stock without any of the rich, depth of body. In my mind, there's an optimal amount of stock to add to a dish and you should either add as close to that amount as possible or none at all, but not anything in the middle. Treat it like any other seasoning.
  3. I find stock and dairy can be tricky to work together. Sometimes, they harmonize but other times, they clash and form a weird, chemically aftertaste. When I make polenta, it's usually half milk, half water as that provides a nice neutral flavor to absorb the stronger flavors of what I top it with. Occasionally, I'll use half milk, half stock if I want a more intense flavor.
  4. Are you talking about the Bob's Red Mill GF pancake batter? Because that contains baking powder and baking soda in it. When you wet it, it's going to produce CO2. That seems far more likely that a mutant fast acting yeast.
  5. Ambergris was a lot cheaper when we had a whaling industry since we would cut them out of whales all the time. Now that whaling is illegal, we can only find the occasional lump washed up on the beach.
  6. I don't understand where the waste is coming from. When I broke down my own lamb a few months ago, pretty much every part of the lamb was useable. I ended up with barely enough trim to make a few sausages and just enough bones to make 2 quarts of stock. For the fat, I cut them into chunks and made them into Xinjiang Yang Rou Chuanr which are skewers of alternating fat and lean meat, heavily spiced with cumin, chilli and other flavorings.
  7. The reason I suggested the buffet steam table is almost everyone knows someone with a spare one lying around. Ask around, especially to people who do catering orders, see if you can borrow one for a week and experiment. If it works, then you can think about buying one and it's versatile too in case you ever need to use it as a steam table.
  8. People keep on assuming nylon drives are put in for penny pinching. They're not. The Nylon drive is deliberately designed as a sacrificial cog, so that it breaks before something more serious is put under strain. If you're constantly breaking the nylon drive, that means you're pushing it too hard and you should either figure out a way to back off or put a metal cog of the same shape in there and accept it if the entire machine blows up. Designing the nylon cog is about tradeoffs, make it too weak and you lose most of the power of the machine. Make it too strong and it doesn't protect against failure and you have a bunch of expensive repairs to make. Companies are understandably conservative given that most people barely push the capabilities of a machine.
  9. is that like what you put the sternos under to heat up the food? Yeah, exactly. Its basically a giant double boiler setup so the heat is gentle. If yoy have one you can borrow, I'd experiment with it. I'd start with just filling it with water and using a probe to see how hot you can get it. Then trying with just milk, cornstarch and eggs too see if you can get the texture correct, then making a full recipe.
  10. I wonder if it's possible to cook large batches in a buffet steam table. The bottom never gets above 212F so it's guaranteed not to scorch and if you clamp the lid on tightly enough, it may heat up enough to thicken the custard.
  11. It's mugwort potash, so I assume potassium hydroxide (basically, the older form of lye, which these days is more often sodium hydroxide from what I understand). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potash Please do a lot of research. Sodium hydroxide is very very VERY corrosive. Is your stomach made of stainless steel? dcarch Noodle recipes contain about 0.1% NaOH which is well below a lethal dose.
  12. Grant Achatz is doing this with the quarterly Next ebooks. Each ebook is $4.99 IIRC.
  13. Boil, fry at low temp, fry at high temp.
  14. Any other starches that absorb liquid are good for the octopus stock. Rice, polenta, cous cous etc. The zucchini water, I wouldn't want to cook so maybe make it into a gazpacho or something similar?
  15. 90% of the use of my torch these days is lighting the chimney starter for my grill. I light it in 3 different areas in the base and then hold it vertically down through the center of my starter for about 30s to get the top coals lit. So much better than the wimpy candle lighters I was using before.
  16. Statistically, you're more than 10 times as likely to die by being hit by lightening than die from botulism and botulism takes weeks to develop. There's no way that 18 hours would make it remotely a risk. There may be other pathogens you need to worry about (you don't) but focusing on botulism just because it's the giant bugbear of food safety is absurd. It certainly doesn't justify a "better safe than sorry" approach to throwing food out unless you want to throw everything you buy from the grocery store out as soon as you get home because they've definitely been sitting around for more than 18 hours.
  17. Botulism also doesn't happen overnight, it takes a few weeks at fridge temp.
  18. I find it almost universal that the people most preachy about food almost universally eat restaurant or packaged food. Or, they follow incredibly rigid and prescriptivist diets which are, in and of themselves unhealthy because they have such a limited range of foods. People who know how to cook well tend to be far more relaxed and less dogmatic about food rules. The irony is, I'm not convinced it's even possible to eat healthy if you outsource your food production. I can put two plates of food in front of you and they will look functionally identical but the one on the right will taste 10% better than the one on the left but contain 40% more calories/fat. When I cook for myself, I cook the one on the healthier version but when I cook for others, I cook the more indulgent one because they don't know what went into it. Same with restaurants, there's no incentive for them to cook healthy. As long as their food tastes good and *seems* healthy, they make their money. The only way to have a diet that is actually healthy is to align the incentives correctly and that means getting really good at cooking and eating most of your meals at home.
  19. Shalmanese

    Tamarind

    Virtually any asian grocery store, no matter how small should have the paste. If not, Amazon has paste for $10 or fresh tamarind for $15. You can also get it jars which are more convenient but I don't like the flavor as much.
  20. If you have the right blender, you can attach a mason jar to your blender which can help with smaller quantities.
  21. Shalmanese

    Dinner! 2012

    I decided to do a Chinese feast tonight based on some produce I found at the farmer's market: vivid green broccolini, tiny asian eggplants and roma beans so fresh they still had their fuzz on them. I defrosted two lamb shoulder eye filets from a lamb I butchered a few months ago and made: Cumin dusted, charcoal grilled lamb filet, sliced thin and served as is (Xinjiang) Lamb and Broccolini with Oyster Sauce (Cantonese/American) Fish Fragrant Eggplant from Fuschia Dunlop's book (Szechuan) Roma Bean, Pork Rib & Potato Stew (Manchurian) A Peach, a Plutot & A Heirloom Tomato for Dessert (Chinese in spirit) I'm refalling in love with Chinese food again after a long hiatus as I'm slowly discovering the depth and soulfulness of flavors that Chinese Food has to offer.
  22. Shalmanese

    The Terrine Topic

    For a thick enough product, holding at 130.1 might allow the core temp to come up too slowly, causing bacterial spoilage before pasteurization. While there would be no more live pathogens, there would be enough byproducts that the product would be unpleasant or even unsafe to eat. You still need to have a rigorous understanding of microbiology to safely SV or to follow well tested guidelines.
  23. I bought the black one but, in retrospect, I maybe should have picked up a colored one to distinguish it from the rest of the stuff in my drawer.
  24. Shalmanese

    The Terrine Topic

    This is objectively incorrect. Beef/Pork held to 60C for 30 minutes are pasteurized to a level deemed safe. Cooking Issues recommends cooking pork based forcemeats to 60C.
  25. Stale bread isn't actually all that great for bread & butter pudding. Staling is just crystallization of the bread which locks up moisture and makes it seem dry. Heat it up and all the moisture comes back out (put a slice of stale bread in the microwave). Instead, it's generally better to use bread that's dried in the oven as the moisture is actually driven out. You can use both fresh and stale bread for this so by all means still get stale bread if it's more economical but don't think it's neccesary to the recipe.
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