Shalmanese
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Posts posted by Shalmanese
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11 hours ago, Okanagancook said:
Found something the Instpot sucks at. Steaming broccoli. In there for just 2 minutes and it's pretty mushy. I will throw some garlic/anchovy/cultured butter at it.
Next time I will just blanch it for 2 minutes in boiling water.
One of the difficulties of pressure cooker recipes is what do you do about the time the vessel is heating up and cooling down (for natural release)? Each variation in capacity, quantity of ingredients, heat output, conductivity of the PC, etc. will affect the length of the heat up/cool down period. Traditionally, recipes only include the amount of time at pressure and cross their fingers that your PC setup at home is similar enough to the one used to test the recipe that nothing gets terribly out of whack. For recipes that are over 30 minutes long, that's a pretty reasonable assumption but for 2 minute recipes, it starts to get a bit absurd. If you put a cup of water in instead of half a cup, you've now overcooked your veggies by 50% because it takes longer to come to temp.
Personally, for broccoli, it seems like a lot of extra effort for an extremely marginal gain. The IP makes a great conventional steamer as well and conventionally steamed broccoli only takes 5 minutes.
Also, if you feel like salvaging it, overcooked broccoli actually works well for broccoli soup. The Cook's Illustrated broccoli soup recipe has you deliberately overcook broccoli for half an hour before blending with some blanched spinach for color.
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The study is horribly designed. It examines the environmental impact if the entire planet converted to a single diet which is not only unrealistic but also not useful to the average consumer. Of course if everyone switched to veganism, there would be a lot of scrubland that we couldn't use any more but we're far from that point.
Instead, the more useful measure is marginal impact and a switch to veganism would take productive grain growing land and switch it from animal feed to human feed and be extremely good for the environment.
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Personally and self-indulgently though, my favorite memory from this site will always be when I cooked 21 course for 21 people over 21 hours for my 21st birthday while drinking 21 drinks.
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Serious Eats contributor Stella Parks (aka BraveTart) published a guide to making lemon syrups by macerating spent lemon shells in sugar until liquefied and then straining off the resulting liquid. I've tried it and it's an admirably thrifty way of producing something you legitimately are excited to use in either the kitchen or the bar.
So far, I've tried lemon and lime syrups (lime adds a distinct bitter note that could be good or bad depending on your preference), syrups with white sugar vs palm sugar (palm is great but grinding it down fine enough is a pain), macerating in a bowl vs a vacuum bag (the bag seems to speed up macerating by keeping all the fruit in contact with the sugar).
But probably by far my most successful experiments have been in making pineapple syrups. Since pineapple has such a high inedible:edible ratio, it's a really suited to this kind of technique. What you get out of it is an intensely floral, aromatic syrup with none of the acidity of pineapple juice. It seems to add primarily to the aroma of a drink rather than the taste and it's been a fun ingredient to play around with. I imagine, with some additional gum arabic, it could serve as a interesting replacement for pineapple gomme with a much fresher flavor.
Anyway, the technique is so versatile, I'm excited to play around with it more, especially in the context of cocktail making. I'd love to hear everyone else's experiences with these techniques as well.
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24 minutes ago, Taveren said:
I have five Michelin stars on my resume. Sous vide does not work well for fish. End of story.
Tell that to Thomas Keller who has a whole chapter devoted to it in his SV cookbook.
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So excited by this book! I own every one of Dunlop's books and I look forward to starting to cook from this one.
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6 hours ago, Thanks for the Crepes said:
I believe if I spent that much time on a sculpture, I would prefer to work in a more permanent medium. There's no denying that her work is amazing, though. I hope she's making money at it, but I suspect it may be more a labor of love.
Part of the reason I was drawn to cooking was the impermanence of the medium. I'm not much drawn to the structural elements of it but I can see the appeal, as someone who's spent many hours painstakingly making just a few scant ounces of a sauce. In cooking, you eat your failures and triumphs equally and there's something poetic about that.
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"vegetable broth" is just the manufacturer's sneaky way of saying MSG.
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It's certainly possible although it seems like the worst of both worlds compared to hand rolled dough or pre bought wonton wrappers. Two experienced dumpling makers can turn out about one dough round every 5 seconds. Unlike machine made doughs of uniform thickness, hand made dough will be tapered so that the fluted edges will be the same thickness as the bottom. Between the sheeting and the cutting, machine made dough seems like it would take longer, need more space and produce an inferior product. If you have staff primarily trained on European technique and aren't willing to get the muscle memory down for high throughput, I can see how sheeting can seem like a time saving but at that point, why not just go for pre made wonton wrappers and cut that production step out entirely?
Go to a high volume dumpling restaurant like Din Tai Fung to see how the are set up for high throughput without compromising quality. It requires a bit of training to get people up to speed but once you reach that point, the old ways of doing things beat any mechanical improvement you could add to the process.
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We had one but the downside was that, even if only the oven feature was on, the turntable would spin and the fan would be on such that it was the same noise as running it in microwave mode. Microwaves are fine for 2 - 3 minutes but the same noise level over an hour could get pretty unbearable. We ended up rarely using the oven feature in favor of the conventional oven.
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Can you buy yourself an IR thermometer? They're pretty cheap these days and knowing the exact temperature of your various surfaces is going to help with diagnosing what to improve.
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For most fish served whole, there's a simple technique to eating them and completely avoiding all the bones. First separate the upper and lower filet on the top and slide them across, then grasp the tail and pull the entire spine out in one go. You're left with 4, boneless filets of fish.
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It has nothing to do with it being sticky, it's the same reason 100 grams of ice at 0C can cool a lot more than 100 grams of water at 0C. There's energy latent in the phase change. However, one big difference is that 100 grams of ice has roughly the same volume as 100 grams of water but 100 grams of steam occupies a much much larger volume.
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Another route to take is to hunt for an only Kitchenaid K5SS mixer from when Kitchenaid was owned by Hobart. The mixers are solidly built, repair and spare parts are abundant and it's compatible with modern accessories.
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6 hours ago, Okanagancook said:
Two minute Mayo: I too have had some failures with that method but when it works, it's brilliant.
Foolproof Soft Boiled Eggs: I must be a fool because these were totally not what was promised. Page 101: Chose the 6 minute egg: Description was "white is opaque, firm all the way through; yolk is warm and starting to firm up at the edges". I used cold eggs from the fridge and followed all the directions. The eggs were farm eggs, probably large sized. The white was slimy and runny. The yolk was just warm. I had to put the two unopened ones we had on the table back in the water for another four minutes and still the white was a little underdone for my tastes...less slimy but still not soft firm.
Sheesh.
There's something wrong with your procedure because an egg shouldn't take 10 minutes to cook to soft boil. Make sure you're following the steps listed exactly.
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This bon appetit recipe claims that rubbing Koji rice over the outside of a steak and letting it sit for 2 days will replicate a lot of the flavor notes of dry ageing. On the surface, it doesn't seem implausible, a lot of similar enzymatic reactions are going on between koji and dry ageing. Sounds interesting enough for me to experiment with. There seems to be a lot of variables to tweak that might produce better or worse results.
For example, I wonder what would happen if you made a koji brine for the meat to sit in? Would the brine draw the flavors more into the interior? Also, would applying a meat tenderizing brush help draw more flavor into the interior? I wonder what a koji corned beef recipe would taste like? Anyone willing to experiment and report back?
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On 4/14/2016 at 11:27 AM, Anna N said:
The test cooks responsible for the sample plate don't even know enough to cut the edges of the pork to avoid cupping. Doesn't give you much confidence of the general level of culinary sophistication of the entire operation if something as basic as this passed through so many layers of review.
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The ones I've purchased from The Spice House have been by far the highest quality ones I've ever used. Highly recommend them for all your spice needs.
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21 hours ago, liuzhou said:
And who in the world books into a 5-star hotel and suddenly thinks, "I really got to buy some overpriced salt before I leave!" Regular, local sea salt costs 3元 and I can buy the Maldon stuff for 45元, if I so choose. I tend not to.
I suspect a) local Chinese who are making a trip to the "big city" and want to bring something fancy back home to show off how worldly and sophisticated they are and b) some weird loopholes involving what can and cannot be expensed meaning anything bought in the hotel store winds up being on the company dime. -
On 3/20/2016 at 3:07 PM, Chris Hennes said:
I just made the harissa recipe over on Saveur, and while the taste is great, I was a bit disappointed with the lack of spiciness. As a general rule, how spicy is this stuff supposed to be?
The answer is as spicy as you want it to be! Harissa is a catch all label applied to a wide family of spices that serve very difference purposes. To me though, it's meant to be more of a warming spice than a blow your head off one. To me, the perfect harissa dishes aren't too spicy when you first bite in but warms up gradually over time into a pleasant glow but never enough to stop you from continuing eating.
As with all dishes involving chillis, feel free to modify the quantity and types of chillis to reach the level of spice you prefer.-
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Unlike the ridiculous June oven, this one is priced at a much more reasonable $349, $199 if you buy during the kickstarter and comes with steam.
The whole meal delivery service idea seems kind of far fetched and idealistic. The truth is, oven heating alone is only an appropriate technique for a very small number of meals.
However, the tech seems cool and the price is on point. Will this be able to pull market share away from the Cuisinart Steam Oven and other high end toaster ovens?
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5 hours ago, liuzhou said:
It is derived, I think, from an ancient tantric divination practice imported from India in the Tang dynasty involving chicken entrails, the direction of the wind, and a broken calculator. These results are offered up to the mahjong table and gamblers rate the dishes on a personal scale. The results are then ignored and a random number generator is instead employed. It's the scientific approach to socialism. Or possibly the diners are cheapskates. I notice that, in general, the lower numbers are cheaper.
Either that or "No, I haven't a clue!"
Please walk in there next time and confidently order the #2 without looking at the menu. I really want to see what they bring out.
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14 hours ago, Rafa said:
Don't mess around with psychoactive substances or any kind of meat infusion in alcohol unless you really understand the science of alcohol solubility. These can be very dangerous. And never infuse tobacco, ever.
What's dangerous about meat infusions?
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BBQ safety
in Cooking
Posted
You can also use half an onion and then rub with a small chunk of beef fat to season.