paulraphael
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Posts posted by paulraphael
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On 11/23/2020 at 11:56 PM, JoNorvelleWalker said:
The state says to eat ice cream to stay warm in the cold. This is New Jersey, I'm sure someone in the park service was paid off.
Reminds me of the Cheese Cartel propaganda they fed us as kids on Saturday mornings.
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I met a guy at a dinner party who was kick-starting a company that made artisanal cast iron pans out of recycled Kalashnikov rifles recovered from war zones. Beat that!
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On 11/11/2020 at 3:31 PM, weinoo said:
I'll let you know if that happens to me - with my dishwasher or range or range hood. It hasn't yet - going on 3 years, and my last d/w of same brand was 12 years with never a problem, so...
As far as cars, well - let's face it - someone may drive that BMW like an asshole, or someone may drive that BMW like a church lady - who knows? Driving in NYC/Chicago is very different than driving in say, Sacramento. Different roads, different winter weather. Hard to do comparisons like that. But yes, repairs on the BMW/Bezn/Audi line tend to be costlier than on Hondas and Mazdas. Everything in cars (and appliances) isn't necessarily about the cost of ownership - some stuff is way more psychological to people.
All of this stuff is just about odds. An appliance with a terrible repair rate might have a 25% chance of expensive failure in the first 10 years. That would still mean you've got a 75% chance of no serious trouble. And I'm not talking anyone out of buying anything. Personally, I'd love a Bluestar range. I just think it's a good idea to get all the information and do the math before committing.
It also makes sense to consider who you can get to make the repairs. In a big city you've got lots of choices, but if you live farther afield, access to qualified service could be a reason to choose one brand over another.
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1 hour ago, weinoo said:
Let's face it, @paulraphael, any repair person, coming to any apartment in NYC to fix an appliance, from a Crapmaster 3000 range to a 60" State of The Art Aga, is gonna charge a lot of dough. Unless your appliance is still in warranty. That's just the way of the world here, as you know.
I had a problem with my fridge (a mid-range Kitchen Aid) once...still under warranty - cost me $0.
But labor rates are crazy. A plumber charges $175 to walk in the door. Service on my car if needed will be $200/hour. Etc.
My friend is a Chicago suburb.
I'm not trying to badmouth these appliances. Just repeating what I learned from my own research when exploring possible new purchases. It's like buying a BMW ... they don't just cost more to buy, they cost more to maintain and to keep going. I don't know WHY this would be with an all-mechanical, heavy duty thing, but I've heard the same story from many people.
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On 11/10/2020 at 10:46 AM, weinoo said:
What problems have you seen with, let's say, a Wolf Gas range, 30", 4 burner, with no electronics?
I don't know anything about that particular range. I've seen Consumer Reports-style longterm ownership reports on these ranges, though, and all the high-end brands have a high cost of ownership. Anecdotally, I have a friend with a 48 inch 4-burner plus grill + griddle Wolf range, no electronics (unless the IR broiler has electronics). He's had a couple of expensive repairs. His is pre-SubZero, back when they were made by Wolf. One of his repairs was because the char broiler got all gunked up. The repair guy said the solution was to not use it ("Yeah, you shouldn't barbecue indoors." Thanks for the helpful tip, repair dude!)
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Blue Star is closest to a true commercial range, in several respects. This has pros and cons, depending on your priorities. I like their open burners more than anything else on the market, but someone who prioritizes easy cleanup might hate them.
All these "high end" and "semi pro" ranges seem to have worse than average reliability and higher than average repair costs. So be ready for some of the pitfalls of owning a sports car.
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I've never heard of anything that will sanitize raw greens reliably. Chromedome's recommendations are the standard ones and are probably the best bet, but there's still some risk if you're serving someone who's got real immune system problems.
At home I just do a quick rinse, unless dealing with something like leeks that are full of sand. Never had a problem, but we're not feeding vulnerable people here. I think that for the seriously immune-compromised, greens should be cooked.
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On 11/9/2020 at 6:38 AM, weinoo said:
And at least one sane cook.
I wouldn't even know where to look for that.
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It's helpful to think about hot herb infusions as being like making tea. With mint, you'll get mint tea flavors (not very much like fresh mint). And if the temperatures are too high or the cooking time too long, you'll get overbrewed mint tea flavors, which start to inch in the direction of low tide.
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Globe is in a whole different category. Those have commercial motors and heavy transmissions, and once you get past the smallest size they have multi-gear transmissions. They're more like bargain Hobarts than like fancy Kitchen Aids.
The newer KA 7-quart mixers, which have big motors and planetary gears would probably do really well as a light-duty commercial machine. They're built better than any previous KA machine, notwithstanding all the they-don't-make-em-like-they-used-to nostalgia. Your mom's KA wasn't built like this.
I'm pretty happy with the previous generation Pro 600. It's not built like a commercial machine, but it's built well, and all the inner parts are metal and cheaply available and easy to replace. I've had it 14 years and had to replace gears and regrease the thing once. The main thing I'd prefer about the burly new one is how quiet it is.
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Mint is just about the most fragile herbal flavor. It's an exercise in science (and maybe futility) to get the 3-dimensional flavor of fresh mint into a cocktail that you'll be drinking 2 minutes from now. Getting it into baked goods would require better kung-fu than what I've got. Mint oil is reliable, and can be tasty in minute amounts, but really isn't anything like fresh mint. Same with extract.
If you're going to continue the experiments, maybe try Teo's idea of grinding into the sugar. It would also be interesting to do a butter infusion, but I wouldn't do it hot ... I'd go just warm enough to melt the butter, and hold it covered in a water bath. Taste it periodically, and strain before you start extracting nasty flavors. Solubility should much higher than in water-based liquids. Another possibility is infusing into sugar syrup. Syrups are powerful solvents for non-polar aromatic oils. This might be impractical, because you'd need a more dilute syrup that what's useful in a cookie ... but it might be interesting.
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On 10/14/2020 at 12:18 AM, barista said:
😪😪😪skill level is definitely lacking here...
I realise that I may have been using less pressure than needed. After the recent post, I went back to try again, but with slightly firmer pressure and indeed the result was better than previous attempts.
Another that has me stumped is how does one manage a boning knife that has a slight S-shaped edge from tip to bolster? Tried Googling and YouTube, but I can't find anything on it.
Sharpening a knife with that many curves sounds a bit ... advanced! Have you practiced on a more boring knife? Getting the basic moves and feeling with a regular chef's knife, including the ordinary curve at the tip, is the important part. I think once you're comfortable with that, the adjustments you have to make for an oddball knife will be more intuitive.
That said, I don't really understand how you'd sharpen a blade that had a really concave belly on a regular stone.
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The earliest historical accounts say that coffee was first cultivated in Yemen. But the history is spotty, and Ethiopia is practically in the same place, so no one really knows.
As far as coffee available today, all you can really do is make generalizations about a country or region. Nowadays we can get such amazing single-origin beans that have unique or even idiosyncratic characters that it's best to talk about the individual farm or co-op.
Many of my favorite coffees have been Ethiopian. I have less experience with Yemen, but imagine that the range of coffees isn't too different. If there are differences, then they'll probably be because of economic or political differences.
I've been especially crazy about natural process coffees from Ethiopia and Burundi. These tend to have big, dark, fruity flavors that are unlike any other coffees I've had. The washed versions are also great. My coffee roasting guy and I have both noticed that his Ethiopian coffees have been less fruity than in previous years. He's not sure why.
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This has become one of my favorites. Our local food coop has had really fresh hazelnuts lately . A vitamix does a great grinding them. I'm sure a mill would be smoother, but I'm sure there'd be a difference in the ice cream.
120g toasted hazelnut butter (65% fat)
(make a larger batch so it will blend easily)
570g whole milk (3.3% fat)
120g heavy cream (36% fat)
75g skim milk powder
60g granulated sugar
45g dextrose
20g fructose
2g soy lecithin (get really good quality stuff that's super bland, or leave it out. Willpowder's version is good)
1.5g pre-blended stabilizer or:
0.86g locust bean gum
0.43g guar gum
0.21g lambda carrageenan
1.5g salt
The idea here is lots of hazelnuts, balanced by reduced milk fat and zero egg fat. Also the sugar combination is jiggered around to compensate for the hardening properties of the hazelnut oil.
Total Fat: 14%
Milk Fat: 6.2%
Total Solids: 42.1%
Solids Nonfat: 28.1%
Milk Solids Nonfat: 12.4%
Stabilizer/Water: 0.26%
POD: 118 / 1000g
PAC: 223 / 1000g
Absolute PAC: 509 / 1000g
Rel. Hardness @ -14°C: 75
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Sharpening on water stones is a skillset, just like using knives. It's hard to master. But it's pretty easy to become competent, and if you're competent you'll have sharper knives you will with a sharpening machine. And you'll have sharper knives than you had when they were brand new, and you'll have sharper knives than most pro cooks ever use (outside of Japan).
I don't think it has to be such a daunting process. Just start with 2-sided combination stone (say, 2000 and 6000 grit or similar) And a beater knife that you don't mind scratching up—ideally carbon steel, because it tends to be faster and easier to sharpen. It's a longer learning curve than using gadgets, but you'll get so you can touch up a knife really quickly.
I also keep a big butcher's steel around for the western knives that I want to keep a fat toothy edge on—my German chef's knife and my Forschner utility knife. Those knives only see the stones once every few years.
If you get obsessive, you can end up with a big collection of stones, but this is absolutely optional.
I'm a fan of a strop for finishing and quick touch-ups. It's a flat block with a strip of smooth hide that sticks on with a magnet. You treat the hide with a bit of very fine abrasive compound, and it puts a wicked finished edge on any knife you've sharpened to a mirror finish. A few seconds of stropping gets the edge back to crazy sharpness. I only hit the stones when this doesn't work anymore. The strop takes less skill to use than a finishing stone. I can get a better edge with it than I can with a stone. The guy who taught me to sharpen can get a better edge with a stone, so it probably has to do with your skill level.
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On 9/24/2020 at 10:03 PM, jimb0 said:
I thought the same thing.
I have an awesome 6-qt bowl lift KA that I bought refurbished for about $150 usd shipped, like 12 years ago. It’s finally stopped working, and I’m pretty sure something, somewhere has shorn. Taking it apart should be fun.
On the subject of dough making, I never really have a problem regardless of quantity. I do take the hook in hand and do a rough mix first before engaging the mixer. Alex and aki at ideas in food are firmly convinced that the paddle does a better job of kneading dough than the hook, though I'm not entirely convinced either way. I have to imagine the paddle is a bit harder on the motor for doughs of mass, though.
I've used a paddle on VERY high-hydration doughs, like when doing an autolyse stage, or in the earliest mixing before the gluten gets going. But as soon as the dough gets thick you absolutely risk overheating the motor breaking gears. You also risk overworking the dough, which basically means ripping the gluten strands apart and killing the dough's strength.
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Any idea why comparative reviews online often give Bamix lousy scores? I find it confusing. Lot's of people I trust swear by them, but then I've seen at least a couple of reviewers say they were outperformed by much cheaper consumer brands.
Just curious. We have a god-awful cheap stick blender that will need replacing in the next few months. I'm not dying to spend Bamix money, but will do so if they merit the hype.
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1 hour ago, Kim Shook said:
I thought those were gorgeous, but couldn't see spending half again the price of them for shipping.
Yeah, good point. A few times I almost bought something from them and then just got mad.
They do sell some of their products through Amazon. Sometimes it's a better deal.
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Many years ago I had the bright idea of sending knives to a local sharpening service ... the kind of place that butcher shops hire. Luckily these were cheap Chicago Cutlery knives. The place just threw them on a bench grinder. They all came back with several millimeters of steel gone, and a concave bevel. They were basically shop knives at that point. Beware!
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On 9/19/2020 at 9:31 PM, dtremit said:
@andiesenji @curls and @JoNorvelleWalker — I'm curious if any of you used your Ankarsrums to make things like cookies and cakes in addition to breads?
These days I have a secondhand Bosch that I use for bread (and am happy with for that purpose) but the central shaft design makes it awkward for things like whipping egg whites. And I've heard a lot of people saying that the cookie paddles on the Bosch tend to break if you try to mix up a stiff cookie dough.
The KitchenAid I killed making whole wheat sourdough is (hopefully) a new snap ring away from working again (I replaced the cracked transmission housing but I think I damaged the snap ring in the process). But if it doesn't end up working as desired after the repair, I'm hesitant to buy another — and it'd be nice to have one mixer for all stand mixer use cases.Don't give up on it! Almost all the repairs it might need are quite inexpensive, and you'll be able to make it better than new. It can sometimes be tricky figuring out what the problem is. I broke the same pair of gears 3 times before figuring out the real problem—during the first repair, I bent the gear housing while reattaching it. Once I replaced it again, with less of a ham-fist, the thing worked perfectly.
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I've used oat flour in many things. It has a very high protein content. I'm not sure of all the ways it might alter texture. It will almost certainly require more liquid, and might help things stay moist longer.
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Making ice cream's easy. The hard part is getting it to do what you want it to do.
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3 hours ago, ccp900 said:
That's an interesting old study. I actually had a copy in my pile of digital papers. It's one of the more thorough published papers on this topic—along with some of the earlier papers that it tries to refute.
It's important to consider specificity in science. This paper looked for specific effects under four different combinations of time and temperature. The earlier papers that came to different conclusions were looking at somewhat different effects, and were looking at different combinations of time and temperature. It's not surprising that they came to different conclusions. I pasteurize at 75°C for 30 to 45 minutes; this is outside the range looked at by these researchers.
Commercial ice cream manufacturers have become quite sophisticated at manipulating time and temperature. Jenni Britton Bauer uses protein denaturization to get custard-like textures without eggs. Haagen Dazs uses it to make retail ice cream without stabilizers. There are many possibilities.
The sad part is that most of the ice cream-specific research has been done by manufacturers and is proprietary. Haagen Dazs publish in science journals; they keep secrets. Britton-Bauer said she figured it out with the help of some hints from university researchers—probably ones who had worked on commercial projects.
eGullet content being plagiarized / rehosted
in Food Media & Arts
Posted
Someone just brought this to my attention:
https://diabetestalk.net/blood-sugar/what-is-atomized-glucose
The same page scrapes information from my culinary site also. Probably all of the site's content is stolen.
Any of the legal minds here have thoughts on this?