Lisa Shock

I am a FoodSaver owner and love it. I vacuum seal all sorts of things in canning jars to help prevent pantry moths and keep things fresh: dry cat food, rice, sugar, flours, dry beans, raw nuts, dried fruit, bulk candy, etc. I also use the bags to portion out and preserve cheese, and items headed for the freezer. I also sous vide in canning jars as well as bags. I believe that I have gotten a great deal of value from my $150 purchase a decade ago. That said, it appears that Ziploc has made a product just for you - a hand pump that costs less than $5, and, specially designed bags in lots of sizes: gallon, quart, etc.

Are you allowing at least 30 minutes between folds? The gluten in the dough gets tough as it is worked and needs time to relax so that it can be fully rolled each time. Try lengthening your time between folds and see what happens.

BTW, you should look into a slightly longer proofing period or adjust your temperature. The striped effect, of very light dough just under the seams, is caused by a late bit of rise in the center happening after the exterior is browned. The crisp, sharp outside edges of the wrapped triangle are also an indication that they needed a longer proof. Overall, though, they look very good: well shaped, uniform and, it appears that you have an even-heating oven. As for recipes, I go with Ciril Hitz now, both for work and home. His instructions are very clear, and he gets world-class perfect results. edited for clarity

Butter in america is unregulated, so it can have wildly differing amounts of water in it, by manufacturer, season, region, etc. Generally, cheap butter, even from a good supplier, is for whipping and serving at the table. The added water helps lighten it. But, it's not good for baking because most recipes are formulated assuming a 20% water content in the butter. I have gotten super-cheap butter from US Foods, not my decision, that turned out to be 45% water!!! I think that generic or store brand butter might sometimes be from that same manufacturer -cheap butter is like playing the lottery. Better, branded butter, tends to run closer to the 18-20% water that one wants in a croissant formula. In europe, you can by lower moisture butters, these work well in croissants. One company even makes commercial butter in sheets ready to fold in.

Aren't these the cherries that are used in real black forest cake? You could make that, or Heston Blumenthal's 'perfection' version.

Oh, I had one more thought, if you really want to save time, why don't you occasionally make a frittata instead? They are lower calorie and can satisfy the no-gluten crowd. And, just like quiche they can be a way to serve small amounts of scrap vegetables or meats, or leftovers.

I agree with Diet for a Small Planet and it's successor, Recipes for a Small Planet. I started being a vegetarian when those books were released, and recall vividly measuring out ingredients to ensure complete proteins were available at every meal. The Moosewood Cookbook was a little better, and, the Vegetarian Epicure was notably better. I'm not saying good, I'm just saying that the 'Diet' books are a lot worse. There used to be a website with a really disgusting company cookbook posted on it. I have lost the link, or else it no longer exists. I believe that I linked to it on EG long ago, before some forum updates that make search kind of wonky. Now, that cookbook was not a professional endeavor, and was only made to be seen by employees, but it was bad, really bad despite low expectations.

And, in the case of some of the bad bacteria, especially anaerobic, they produce toxins which, once in the food, cannot be cooked out. -Unlike some foodborne illness which are bacteria or viruses which infect your your body with disease which are killed by heating.

Essentially the app doesn't provide much value unless it references excellent recipes. Making the software and the just expecting high quality content to fall into place from nowhere is going about it backwards. Especially since pretty much all of the existing recipe websites around the world already have functions to search for combinations of ingredients on hand. To make your app stand apart from the dozens of established competitors, you'll need to source unique recipes. I get the impression that the OP is a software developer, not the head of a large test kitchen that will run experiments hundreds of times before publishing a single recipe. (like Cook's Illustrated does) And, probably not really prepared to run a professional test kitchen. -Thus the website allows anyone who registers to submit recipes of unknown provenance and quality. GIGO...

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424127887323455104579015162135676136.html I have boycotted WF for quite some time now. I was a Wild Oats customer. WF's illegal activities during the takeover were extremely reprehensible to me. More recently, I disagree with many of his publicly stated opinions and store policies. Sprouts started here in Phoenix and is a good store with much better prices, especially on produce. They don't have as much high-end product (fancy cheese, olives) but, I have a Trader Joe's nearby as well as an AJ's -local high end market.

The ingredient list cannot be copyrighted, but the instructions can. That's why you see people posting recipes here often times as just ingredients lists. Here's a review of 6 refrigerator content management apps. Tastebud, an app debuting in 2010, reviewed. Here's a review of 20 apps that allow you to enter ingredients in the fridge to find recipes. After a bit of looking around, all of the major recipe sites have apps that allow you to enter ingredients and find recipes. These sites include: Epicurious, Big Oven, Martha Stewart, and Allrecipes.com's Dinner Spinner which won an award from Time Magazine for being one of the top apps of 2012. Looks like all of the major content (recipe) providers already have their own apps or participate in an app program. I can't see this working because you're going to need to develop a HUGE library of new/unique recipes to compete.

Agree with HungryC, less than a day is fine, longer than that, or for insurance, I'd freeze. If you have freezer space, I'd par-bake a lot of them, double wrap in plastic and stack them, thus saving a lot of time. BTW, you don't need to hold in an airtight container. It's probably better if you don't. Just make sure they are protected from dust. In a larger bakery, I'd put them on sheet pans on a speed rack and then put one of those large plastic bags over the whole speed rack. Point is, you don't want to hold in much/any moisture, you just want to keep airborne contaminents off.

The business of allowing anyone who registers to submit recipes is bound to lead to something halfway between trouble and mediocrity. As things stand right now, most recipe sites are worthless compilations of substandard recipes with a healthy dose of copyright infringement mixed in. I'd worry about both poor recipes and handing copyright infringement. Right now, I only trust a few sites for recipes: Epicurious, Cook's Illustrated, Food & Wine, a few newspaper sites like the Washington Post & NYT, and chef's personal websites. Have you thought about partnering with Eat Your Books? They have the copyright part down cold, and tons of recipes.

I'd worry about aflatoxin, but, I have no idea how length of time in soy sauce making affects its presence or lack thereof.

Have you tried it with different cheeses? I have similar tastes, and really wanted to like macaroni and cheese and never did. (I am also a person who likes minimal sauce on my pasta.) I found that making it without bèchemel, just with cream, garlic and mozzarella, with a little oregano sprinkled on top, much the same as I make scalloped potatoes, works very well for me. I also made a really good version with smoked gouda - I made a layer of ziti in tomato sauce then added the gouda, cream and pasta mixture on top and baked the whole thing as a two layer casserole.

Make salad dressing. Start with a recipe for mayonnaise but don't add as much oil, let it be a bit runny, then add crumbled cheese. If kept refrigerated, it will last about a month.

The main issue here is trying to copy the flavor, texture and overall experience of a middle-of-the-road item. When you use different ingredients, better ones or worse ones, you're bound to get different results one way or another. Maybe you need to ask yourself why you want to try in the first place. If I make ravioli from scratch, they won't be like canned Chef Boyardi ravioli. Fans of the canned stuff will whine if I try to feed it to them, so maybe there's no point. If a person's taste is set on the canned ravioli, so be it. If they are more adventurous eaters, perhaps they will enjoy freshly made ravioli with fresh sauce. Some of the customers I cook for are like this, certain dishes have to be a certain way. They don't care if I can make something better, they just want the middle-of-the-road food, so, it's a huge waste of my time trying to convert them. The reverse of this commentary is commercial products which are clearly inferior to ones freshly made with good ingredients. An example which comes to mind is Lady Stella cookies by Stella d'Oro. The fresh cookies at my local Italian bakery are tremendously better -so much so, that I wouldn't choose to eat Lady Stellas unless there were some sort of widespread famine caused by a zombie apocalypse, or something. I'd like to point out that cream and orange is a classic combination. It's super-simple to infuse orange peels and vanilla bean in a pot of cream or milk, and make orange-vanilla flavor panna cottta, ice cream, whipped cream, pastry cream, etc. And, all of these can be super-delicious and have super-premium ingredients.

I'm still using my wok at home for popcorn. I've been trying different types of salt on it and have also experimented with making flavored butter toppings. Nothing perfected enough yet to post about.

I saw silicon cups that you put your own ground coffee into to use instead of the pre-made cups today at T.J. Maxx. Don't know if they were there because they failed at retail, but, it seems like you could roast and grind your own and get a better result from the machine this way. I don't drink coffee, so, I won't be doing any experiments with this.

Fondant potatoes are one example of a deliberate attempt at adding maillard flavors to something that wouldn't normally have much of them. Cooking root veg around a roast in the oven is another.

Old beans can definitely be unusable and may never soften. That said, I used to cook black beans daily for the cafè I worked in, and, once I switched from tap water, which is very hard here and full of minerals, to filtered water (I actually used ice from the ice machine) I got great beans every time. -No soaking, just simmered for about 35 minutes with salt and a few spices.

I live in a big, multicultural city (Phoenix) that always seems to have something new happening. That said, almost everything is brought in from someplace else. We have lots of citrus, dates, and pistachios. Non-native, local food production includes a hydroponic tomato farm, a seasonal shrimp farm, an herb farm, and a large egg production facility. Most residents here are from someplace else, too. So, 'local' food is a hodgepodge of things from around the world. Sonoran dogs are very popular street food here. Restaurant-wise, we have more sushi restaurants per capita than any other metropolitan area. (yes, Arizona is a land-locked state) The chimichanga may or may not have been invented nearby.

There are federal guidelines regarding how food packagers can label their foods. I agree with Syzygies that this system is flawed, in particular by the serving sizes allowed which give some foods a better profile than they would have if 'normal person' portions were given. If it were me, I wouldn't round. You're taking already estimated material, why make it even more vague? I personally am on a low methionine diet and would be pretty upset to discover that rounding had occurred in the generation of certain numeric values. (it's not so critical for, say, watermelon, but, super important when measuring pumpkin seeds)

Minerals in the water may be the culprit. Try filtered water.

This reminds me of seeing my Japanese Facebook friends passing around a recipe for a typical Okinawan dish: Taco Rice. Yep, it's rice covered in shredded iceberg lettuce, chopped tomatoes, avocado, onion, etc. topped with taco seasoned ground beef. I too would like to object to mac & cheese as representing the US. IMO, you should pick something that we developed and elevated like barbeque. Not a recipe that Thomas Jefferson picked up while he was in France and Italy and was later a feature of British cookbooks. That said, the US is huge and very regional and each of those regions has unique specialties: gumbo, jambalaya, crab cakes, fried chicken, lobster roll, brisket, chili, chioppino, chowder, etc. The best selling fast foods in the US are burgers, pizza, and submarine sandwiches. Honestly, I'd go with pizza before mac&cheese. At least pizza is something we adopted, changed and is now literally everywhere you go in the country. And of course, burgers were created here and we consume a lot of them.