_john

I love my oven. It has a rotisserie in it. Which I use once in a while but mostly think is cool. It's wide and has 4 rack positions. The problem is that it is uninsulated so I feel like It is not so efficient. It's not a microwave but I never find myself wanting a microwave (except to melt butter). There was one advertised on TV that heats from the sides and bottom. It was advertised cooking pizza. I thought that one looked great but I have no idea how much it is. I don't have a fish grill either. I do everything on the ami stove top grill.

ok, so it is to fry things in and add flavor from the solids. should I fry the curry paste in it or the other ingredients? when does the curry paste come into play?

I remember seeing somewhere that when you use coconut milk or cream for a Thai curry it should be "cracked" at some point. By cracked I mean boiled down so that the oil separates from the solids and almost all the liquid is boiled off. Has anyone else heard this or know when/why it's done?

a lot more from this user

hey-song sarsaparilla 黑松沙士

Making your own salt from seawater. Has anyone done this? What is the technique and how can you control the crystal size and texture?

some one gave me some hasukappu-shu from hokkaido. tastes like a medicine cabinet. apparently it has a lot of vitamins? hasukappu is Blue-berried Honeysuckle. I can't recommend it.

I love fresh sardines. I often buy 4 medium sardines for about $1 and then decided what to do with them. One thing I love to do is use two small cast iron squares to grill the sardines on both sides at once. I butterfly the fish first. I heard Mario Batalli call this technique "a la plancha". They cook in about 30 seconds. I also eat them raw, or make meatballs, stew in miso and ginger, pan fry and put on pasta, and I make "bone crackers" from the spines. to make bone crackers I salt the bones and fry them, or salt them and let them dry and grill them dry on a stovetop fish grill. Sometimes I need to prep a lot of sardines, what is the most efficient way to clean and debone them?

I don't slash and I use about 1/4th the yeast that the recipe uses.

I make something like this. 70% hydration stays in the refrigerator for weeks. I combine yeast and sourdough starter. I bake it inside a terracotta pot 30min covered 10 uncovered. It's my daily bread.

Sorry, I posted that without doing the research. I would like to know more about these types of allergies though. They can't be as common as it seems. I'm sure a lot of people say they are allergic when they mean "I don't like..." I have asked people to clarify but they get really defensive so I tend to avoid it. Trying to be sensitive to dietary restrictions is a double edged sword.

I really really really hate it when customers say they are allergic to things that do not contain proteins. "please make sure there are no mushrooms/garlic/onions/ because I am deathly allergic to them". I try to be nice.

i only use it in Japanese fried rice yakimeshi.

but there is no octopus "yakibon"!

yup, I do this all the time. Knead and portion your dough. flatten into disks, individually wrap, freeze, and then stick the bricks in a freezer bag. when you want to eat fresh pasta put a brick in the refrigerator for 24 hours. If I thaw on the counter top sometimes there is weeping and I worry about food safety. The trick to freezing things that are moist is to minimize surface area. Less surface area means less oxidization and less freezer burn. I keep frozen pasta dough for up to six months, but it never lasts that long. I freeze other noodle doughs as well. Soba, udon, somen. All of which can be made with a pasta machine.

I think gogo no kocha tastes different in Japan than it does in the U.S. Would someone mind posting a picture of the package and the ingredients label I'm curious. I remember it not coming in the standard 1.5l rectangular PET bottle that it comes in here. Anyone else think so?

I did a little searching. There seem to be many restaurants named donguri as well as a small okonomiyaki chain. It would help if you could describe some sort of signature dish or what type of food they served.

I had to slice seared tuna for a 250top event. the best way I found to do it was to start at the heel of the knife and cut through in one clean slice. you have to squeeze the the piece of fish while you are cutting too. The pieces I was cutting were sort of triangle shaped so I was cutting in on on corner. Both the saran wrap and pre-scoring sound like good ideas though. With the scoring one I would be worried that steam or heat would discolor the slices though.

I love Iron Chef so much. I used to watch it in San Francisco when they would rebroadcast TokyoTV when I was young. I learned a lot of Japanese from watching it. Admittedly only food words . I have seen every single episode thanks to the internet. Needless to say it made a big impression on me. It exposed me to so many techniques and ingredients. I have a notebook somewhere where I took notes on episodes I watched in Japanese. Then they started airing it on the Food Network so I was able to watch the early episodes. Most educational show ever!

I used a ceramic knife for about 6 months professionally. I was processing a lot of stone fruit and the blade was pretty worthless by the end. I use sandpaper and foam to do convex grinds on my steel knives and I always wondered if I could use diamond sandpaper to sharpen the ceramic knife in the same way. are kyocera knives sharpened like a chisel? my non kyocera is, which might make it easier to sharpen.

about ginger: When I was learning about Japanese food someone told me that pink ginger is not natural and to avoid it. But real pickled ginger turns pink naturally from some sort of chemical reaction with the vinegar. My favorite ginger is actually not pink for some reason. The sushi restaurant that serves it buys it from a pickle shop that supplies some of the best sushi restaurants in osaka. It is very delicate, not very spicy or sour, to me it almost tastes like vanilla sugar. In my experience it is usually used as a palate cleanser. When I order in a sushi bar I ask the chef to make me "some" sushi. It comes one item at a time and there is usually some time in between items if the restaurant is busy so I munch on the ginger.

This was my christmas cake this year. It was my first time to make it and my first time to eat it. I think it turned out well for a first try. The cake itself is a chiffon cake with strawberries, cream, and freeze dried strawberries in the middle and on top. I used fake cream though. It is more stable and so much cheaper. Helen helped me fine tune the chiffon over on the chiffon forum. We had roast chicken too. I made it on the rotisserie in my oven. I used the zuni cafe method, came out well. Korea town had really cheap chickens (700¥) for use in samgetang. so it was a delicious and economical christmas as well.

Thanks for sharing your wonderful trip to Osaka. I don't know much about Osaka, so I had to google to find out what German Christmas Market. You have to pay to go to the "Floating Garden Observatory", right? According to their official site, the admission fee is 700 yen for adults and 500 yen for seniors. Did you actually pay 1000 yen? And, thanks for posting a photo of yourself! ← They seem to have all kinds of festivals at the sky building. I went to a Hawaiian one and the food was pretty good. My friend also went to this one but I couldn't understand what she was talking about when she said guruu wain. We looked it up on wikipedia, I had never heard of it before. The only time I went to the sky building I paid 1300¥ I think. Just a heads up for tourists, there is no garden, it's an observation deck.

二度づけ禁止! ni do dzuke kinshi This is a sign that is very famous in kushikatsu restaurants. It means no double dipping! my version: 二度づけ禁止OK! means that is ok to double dip if you want. There are many variations of this sign, they are a good way to study Osaka's dialect. I was asked by the owner of a famous shop to write a sign in English because he had many foreign customers I made the batter and bought fresh oil, about 500¥. Then I asked everyone to bring one normal ingredient and two unusual ones. So everyone paid for themselves. Some people brought drinks too. But, of course, I washed all the dishes!

after many, many, free samples at the liquor store I decided to go with an inexpensive shochu over the expensive jyunmaigenshu pure rice unprocessed sake. the shochu was stored in a big barrel in the liquor store and I think the flavor matches kumquat quite well. I cut the kumquats in half and removed all the seeds and used honey to sweeten. can't wait to try it.