abadoozy

How did all you abalone-eaters prepare it? My husband spent time in California when he was a kid, and he has memories of gathering abalone with his Dad. He said it was awful - like eating rubber tires. I can only assume they overcooked it, and his Dad also pounded it on a cement sidewalk pre-cooking to "tenderize" it. I've never had it, and am curious as to what it was like when prepared well.

I've used Recipematic before and it's great because you can cut & paste an entire recipe instead of painstakingly typing in each ingredient. It's not perfect - I've had to adjust certain ingredients at times - but it's tons better than almost anything else I've found. Unfortunately it appears to be broken right now. Hopefully it's only temporary. I used to have a link to another website that did something similar, but I can't find it at the moment.

Thanks to everyone for the suggestions. I ended up pan-frying them, first with just a simple brown butter sauce, then later (we had enough for 2 meals) I did a semi-green-curry-coconut milk sauce. Semi, as in I didn't add any heat, and mostly just made up a paste in the food processor. Both were very good. I only wish I had a source for ocean fish that didn't involve lots of money and FedEx shipments!

It's the hybrid, and it's skin-on fillets. I'd been under the impression that the skin on these wasn't especially great, thus the sous-vide. Am I wrong? Assume I'm a total idiot when it comes to ocean fish. Given that it's the hybrid, is your advice the same?

I've recently come into some striped bass, pretty high quality from what I can tell, and I'm planning on cooking it tonight. I'll probably sous-vide the fish itself, but I'm looking for some sauce suggestions. I have very little experience cooking ocean fish, as it's very difficult to get where I live, so I definitely need some guidance! Any suggestions? I'm thinking something Asian-inspired, maybe with coconut milk? But I'm open to almost anything. I definitely want the flavor of the fish to come through, as I rarely get anything like it. Also not totally set on sous-vide, so if there's an alternate cooking method, I'm all ears.

Thanks for the replies. Good idea on boiling it for a while. I'm leaning towards eating it, especially since my husband, who will barely eat any leftover that's been in the fridge longer than 2 days, says he'd eat it.

Found in the bottom of the fridge: a package of duck confit that I made at least 6 months ago, maybe longer. I did them sous-vide, and they're still in the sealed plastic package. No sign of decay or leakage at all. Not fully covered in fat as you can get away with very little when sous-viding them. I did not use any preservatives - no pink salt or the like. So... do I use them? They look OK, they're definitely still sealed, and I'm tempted. But would rather avoid food poisoning if there's a risk. I ate another package made at the same time maybe 3 months ago, no clue how this package got lost in the bottom drawer, under the bacon and cheese and various other cold-storage items.

I made the Bánh mì the other day, and it's right up there as one of the best recipes I've ever made. Perfect combination of salty, sweet, hot, sour, and umami. Even better, the terrines freeze well, so I'll be able to pull some out whenever I want. Definitely something I'm not only going to make again, but will probably keep it around in the freezer for quick dinners. It was so good we had it three days in a row. On the third day, we did it in lettuce wraps instead of bread, for a lighter version. Husband said he actually liked it better in the lettuce, he felt the crisp of the lettuce added something and (of course) he could eat more of it minus the bread. I'm not sure I agree with him, but given that I kinda try to stay low-carb most of the time, the lettuce wraps are definitely a good alternative.

Thanks for all the replies! I ended up doing them like fresh mussels - just steaming them in wine & herbs & Pernod. They were definitely edible, but not as good as fresh. A few fishy ones in the bunch but overall very decent. Given that any fresh mussels I get will have to be flown in (small town, nobody sells fresh seafood), and these are $4 for more than enough for 2 people to have for dinner, I'm happy!

A friend gave me a couple packages of frozen mussels - something I would normally never buy - but here they are, and I am clueless as to what to do with them. Anyone have any experience with them? Are they decent? Typically with fresh mussels we steam them in some sort of broth or wine. Can I do the same with these? Also, with fresh mussels, I throw away any that don't open during steaming. Will the same thing happen with the frozen? I admit, I am perplexed. Edit: I just looked at the packages. They are fully-cooked farmed mussels from Canada, if that makes any difference. Brand name is Blount Seafood.

Thanks for the answer. By "thin out" I mean that the middles start out pretty thick and not very appetizing, but I've found with cooked sausages, they shrink and get very thin when heat is applied. Even so, I think I was removing them before eating (it's been a few months since I did anything with middles, I can't really remember.) It makes sense that you'd just remove the casing before eating dry-cured sausages. I've only used the 35-38 hog casings, and they are thin enough to eat so that's what I've been doing.

Hog middles or beef middles? And do they thin out, like they do when they're cooked?

My Chorizo turned out great, as did the second round - this time, I made my own recipe of oregano, green peppercorns, and lemon zest. We just tried it over the weekend and it's great. Next question - what kind of casings do I get if I want a finished product around 1.5-2" around? I've been using 32-38MM casings, and though they work, the finished, dried sausage is smaller than I'd like. I can get 38-42MM hog casings, but that's not that much larger. Anything bigger, you get into middles, which in my experience are thick. Are they OK to use for curing? It seems like they might be problematic. I called sausage-maker.com, and they recommend synthetic casings, but I'd much rather use natural.

I didn't think I had anything to add to this thread until you reminded me. I once had a bumper crop of cherry tomatoes. This was in Colorado, and we often got a freeze in early September. Sure enough, snow was predicted one night. I picked all the cherry tomatoes, and seeing as there was no way we could eat them all fresh before they went bad, I decided to make salsa with them and freeze it. But I prefer salsa made from peeled & seeded tomatoes. That's not too bad when you're talking normal sized tomatoes; for some reason, I didn't think about just how much work it would be to peel & seed close to ten pounds of cherry tomatoes. I think it took me most of a day, and my hands ached at the end. This was when my husband and I were first dating. He tells me now, over ten years later, that he began to doubt my sanity at that point in time. At least the salsa turned out tasty! (but not any more tasty than had I made it with standard tomatoes)

Well, that really sucks, but it doesn't surprise me much. The amount of disinformation out there for diabetics is astounding, and it's really hard to sort through it all even when you're diabetic yourself. Add in the fact that a LOT of people are in denial over it, and it gets very frustrating. But you are right, sugar-free is hardly the answer. But I know more than one diabetic who will happily eat tons of white bread and potatoes while shunning small pieces of candy or chocolate. It does no good to point out to them that those fries have 5 times the carbs as that chocolate they refuse to eat. I think all you can do is try to make low-carb desserts. Sugar-free pies really are not too horribly bad, especially if you can find a crust that incorporates flax or nuts or something other than plain white flour. I made a batch of meringues today that are only 3 or 4 carbs each, very easy to make, and very sweet. I'm guessing you could substitute splenda for the sugar and make them virtually no carb. And practically calorie free as well!

I started my first-ever batch of cured sausage last weekend - Spanish Chorizo from Charcuterie - and today found my first mold spots. They were definitely white, no bit of green at all, but I'm new at this and couldn't really tell if they were fuzzy or not. Looking through old posts on this thread, it seems the good mold shows up as a film - like the sausages were sprayed with snow. My mold was in clumps, tiny spots maybe 1/8th inch across at the most. Is that an indication that it's the bad mold? Or does the good mold show up first in spots as well? Even looking closely, I couldn't really say for certain if it was fuzzy or not fuzzy. To be safe, I wiped them all down with a 50/50 vinegar solution. From everything I read, the vinegar solution works well, if you catch the mold early enough. Mine definitely was only on the surface, and I check the sausages every day, so it can't be more than 24 hours old. I know that the good mold will prevent the bad mold from growing, but aside from that, I've never read that it helps with anything else (flavor, preservation, etc). Given that, why would you not just continue to wipe down the sausages with vinegar solution every couple days, to prevent any mold at all? I figure if that was a real solution, I'd've read it somewhere, and I haven't, but I'm still not quite sure why it wouldn't work. Anyone?

An easier idea - just posting a carb count would go a long way. Single bites of praline or chocolates aren't that high carb, because they're small, and a lot of diabetics can/would fit it into their diet if they knew it was only 10 carbs or whatever. I figure out carb counts by recipe (www.calorieking.com is a great resource), then divide by the # of individual pieces it makes. Takes maybe 10 minutes per recipe.

I'm a diabetic. The problem with making food for diabetics is that there's no one diabetic diet. A lot of people just assume that diabetic food = sugar free food, but that's advice from fifty years ago. Nowadays we know that any carb - flour, sugar, fruit, vegetables, anything that has carbohydrates - is of concern to a diabetic. I know some diabetic people who avoid processed sugar and flour but will eat fruit. Others eat just about everything, but watch portion size. Others have gone totally Atkins and eat little or no carbs at all. Most Type 1s (which is what I am) don't have a special diet at all, because we can cover just about everything with insulin (Thank God!). So it's pretty hard to make something that the "average" diabetic can eat, because there truly is no "average" diabetic. Pretty much the only thing that is truly OK for any type of diabetic is food with no carbs. Meat/Cheese/etc. Of course, candy and pastries are difficult to get carb-free - even if you go sugar-free, there's still flour (at least in pastries.) You can make meringues with egg whites and a sugar substitute, and those are mostly carb free. Anything with nut flours instead of grain flours - coconut flour, almond flour, ground almonds, etc - made with sugar substitute is also very low carb. Dark chocolate - the 70% kind - is really low carb, maybe something with that? Bacon dipped in Dark Chocolate would be trendy & yummy. Or dark chocolate dipped nuts. Orange/lemon/lime rinds in dark chocolate would be good too. It's pretty difficult, really. Maybe think "Atkins" and see where that takes you.

I'm curious to why you think that. I'm totally a beginner on this and trying to figure it all out, so would be interested in a more thorough explanation.

Cool, thanks for the feedback. I've already gone over the machine and washed it thoroughly. I just got over a bout of a nasty gastrointestinal virus - it's amazing at how much I fixate on food safety after that!

No need for confusion. If you look at the other recipes in that section, you'll see that each recipe describes just one of the methods. Rather than give two parallel methods for each recipe, the authors are teaching (or expecting) interpretative skills. That's why they outline "master recipes" for both methods - quite distinct from the specific sausage recipes. Since you have both mixer and processor, you could start by simply following the Mortadella recipe as printed. Then, as an "exercise for the reader", you could try interpreting it in the light of those two master recipes, using the mixer. (It isn't hard, just compare the Mortadella recipe with the master processor recipe!) Thinking it through for yourself is a great way to learn. And then, once you've done it both ways, you can see which one you prefer making -- and eating! There isn't necessarily One True Way. Especially with Charcuterie! One great thing about the book is the rational way in which skills and techniques are built up, and then built upon. Its more of an educational course than a plain recipe book for dipping into. All this would make more sense if, at the beginning, they had said like "There's two methods to make emulsified sausage, they both result in slightly different sausages, experiment and see what you like." But I'm not interpreting it that way. The way I read it, the standing mixer method is the preferred method, but the food processor way is included because it results in a decent quality product and more people have food processors than standing mixers. I've got a ton of Mr. Ruhlman's books, and he's never let me down, so I'm sure both methods will work. I was just looking for some feedback on one versus the other before I plunge in. I'm leaning towards the mixer method for the first time - we'll see how it goes.

According to the book, either the stand mixer or the food processor can be used. There's sections on "Basic Emulsified Sausage: Food Processor Method" and "Basic Emulsified Sausage: Standing Mixer Method." They make a point to say they prefer the standing mixer because the sausage comes out with a firmer texture. But like I said in my first post, the Mortadella recipe itself says to use the food processor, which seems to be not at all what the intro says. Thus my confusion.

I finally took the plunge and bought a sausage stuffer, so I'm actually going to make something out of my Charcuterie book instead of just drooling over the pictures. I'm going to start with Mortadella, since I've made a lot of simple sausages in the past and am looking for a challenge. First question - the intro to the chapter has instructions for both food processor and standing mixer methods, but pretty much says the standing mixer method is best. But the recipe for Mortadella explicitly talks about using a food processor. I have both - which should I use? Second question - I'm also the proud owner of a Sous Vide Supreme, and I figure I might as well use that to poach the Mortadella, it'll be easier to let the Sous Vide machine keep track of the temperature than doing it myself. The recipe states to poach at 170 until the sausage reaches 150 degrees. Sure, I can do that easily enough. But would it make sense to actually sous vide the sausages? I could just do 'em at 150 for a few hours and thus assure that I don't overcook. (and FYI, I wasn't planning on using the vacuum bags, the sausages will be in casings. I just figured that the sous vide machine probably works really well as a poacher.)

Really? Haagen-Dazs is about the only ice cream around here that doesn't have tons of additives - guar gum, ten different preservatives, etc. etc. The ingredients are typically "Cream, sugar, vanilla", stuff like that. And it comes through in the flavor. WAY better than Ben & Jerries and most other "premium" brands.

Great, thanks for all the replies. Given that I'm paying something like $2/pound for these bones, that was going to be some pretty expensive stock if it only made 2 quarts. And I, too, like Ruhlman's book. I can understand the criticism - it certainly doesn't have full coverage of every single element of cooking - but for what it has, it's great. He's managed to kick me off my ass and make sure I have stock in the freezer, something I learned at my mother's side but have too often been lax on. And I have no excuse at all seeing as someone gave me a full size freezer about a year ago. I have no children, it's just me and the hubby, what ELSE am I gonna do with a huge freezer other than fill it with stock?