Shalmanese

Cooking Issues says that sugar will burn before the puffs puff. A beach?

I've been making a lot of fresh pasta recently and a lot of my recipes involve using pasta cooking water in the sauce. In restaurants, the same batch of water is used to make multiple batches of pasta, leading to full bodied pasta cooking water and superior sauces. I've taken to trying to replicate this effect at home by reusing pasta cooking water. I keep a half gallon tupperware container of pasta cooking water in my fridge. When it comes time to cook pasta, I'll add the water + another half gallon of fresh water to a large pot on the stove and bring it to the boil for at least a minute and use it to cook about a lb of fresh pasta. Instead of draining in a colander, I use a spider to scoop out the pasta and dump it directly in the sauce (bringing some cooking water along with it). I leave the water on the stove until it's cooled down to room temperature, then strain half a gallon of it back into the container, discarding the rest. I then add enough salt such that, when re-diluted, it'll be at the appropriate salinity to cook pasta next time. So far, I've been using the water at least once a week so I'm not too concerned about the food safety issues but I figure the excess salt buys some protection as well. Every time I've used it, I taste it beforehand and it's fresh and clean tasting but I assume if you're cooking pasta less than once a month, there may be issues with this approach. Also, now that I have it around, it's been occasionally useful as an all-purpose light thickener when I want to add just a bit of body to a dish. Because it's so heavily salted, it needs to go in before the final seasoning adjustment but I've found it's actually really great in soups where it adds just that hint of thickness that gives it the mouthfeel of a stock based soup (at the expense of cloudiness). Does anyone else regularly do this? What's been your experience?

I think it would be easier to make a list of foods that onions don't go with.

Here's a really good article from Cooking Issues on the science of puffing

I just tested my Braun stick blender and it was a G# which is ~200Hz so about 12,000 RPM. My Waring Pro countertop blender was 350Hz (21,000 RPM) on low and 500Hz (30,000 RPM) on high.

The 3.7Khz appears to be something else, I'd focus on that line between 500Hz and 1Khz. That seems like a far more likely candidate.

This looks like something worthy of Dinner II!

If you're at all musically inclined, you can figure it out by the tone it's generating. For example, 15,600 RPM is 260 RPS which is 260Hz which is middle C. ~8,000 RPM is the octave below middle C and ~30,000 RPM is the octave above middle C.

This only works well in the specially provided container the blender comes with. If you try it in a pot on the stove, it's a good way of finely decorating your kitchen walls with an even layer of soup.

Why not throw some wheat gluten in there as well to mimic the stretchiness of pasta?

Many bamboo cutting boards like this one claim to be dishwasher safe. It's also possible that the board you bought wasn't actually dishwasher safe but just happened to have managed to survive 9 years of abuse and that there's no guarantee a new one of the same line would do the same.

After owning the Kitchenaid rollers for a few months, I have to say it's a great purchase. It's turned fresh pasta from an special occasion thing to an everyday ingredient. I've found myself not really using dried pasta anymore as fresh is almost as easy. I just form a fairly stiff dough sometime early in the day without kneading and let it hydrate, then run it through the rollers a couple of times to get it soft and supple.

I've noticed that grocery store shelves are jam packed with balsamic vinegars and various herb and flavor infused vinegars and a couple of cider and rice wine vinegars but there's often only 1 or at most 2 red/white wine vinegars, often of questionable quality. What gives?

A friend of mine made an app called Journly for just this purpose.

One thing that's helped me was that I installed bar seating for my dining table so I can use the dining table as a countertop in a pinch.

Note the product I linked to in my first post: $25 plus $40 for shipping. No thanks. That's because it's sold by a 3rd party. Anything sold by Amazon itself has free shipping over $25 (and free shipping outright if you have Amazon Prime). For example, the first result is $30 with free shipping.

Amazon?

Purely decorative items placed on countertops. To me, countertop real estate is precious and hard fought and you can never have enough. It kills me to see people cooking in the area the size of a paperback book because the rest of the counter is stuffed with trinkets they got on vacation.

Any decent supplier, if you told them you got fishy smelling pork, would give you an immediate refund with no hesitation.

Sukiyabashi Jiro is a 3 Michelin Star sushi meal that you eat in 15 - 30 minutes.

I'm currently advising the team behind Kitchit and I think they're doing a fantastic job. So far, people who have tried it rave about the experience. Private Dining used to be something that you had to be in the right social circles to even know that it existed and I think it's great that Kitchit is democratizing the experience and making it accessible to everyone. If you're interesting in doing a Kitchit dinner, PM me and I can try to hook you up with some kind of eGullet discount. If you have any questions, let me know and I can get someone from the team to reply here.

Simple stir fry.

For cocktails, though, you both want and need the dilution that comes from the melting ice. So just add some water to the recipe.

Buttermilk, traditionally, is the leftovers from making cultured butter. You can make it by buying/making some creme fraiche, whipping it until the fat separates and what you have leftover is buttermilk. You could also make cheater buttermilk by either adding 1 tbsp of lemon juice to a cup whole milk or a 1:5 ratio of sour cream to skim milk.

Have prices gone up considerably or is $175/14 courses pretty steep? I remember paying $175 for Tetsuyas just a couple of years ago.