paulraphael

Fairway probably upgraded the oil quality. Bitterness is a desirable trait among the olive oil cognoscenti. If you want mild, are you sure olive oil is even the best choice? There are oils for cooking that won't add any flavor, and that come with other advantages. If you want olive oil flavor, you can add a bit of good olive oil after cooking. The truth is, virtually none of the inexpensive oil sold as extra virgin is extra virgin. Much of it isn't even olive oil. Some of it doesn't even contain olive oil. The industry is dominated by fraud at the distribution level, and the public just blindly believes that every bottle on the shelf can be extra virgin and can cost under $15. EVOO should be an exceptional oil, not the norm. It should be fairly expensive, and it should be used raw. There is never a reason to cook with actual EVOO. You're paying a premium for oil that tastes good because it wasn't exposed to heat! When I've needed a cheap, mild olive oil, I've had good luck with Whole Foods 365 store brand. It's labelled EVOO, which is almost certainly a lie. But it's inoffensive and affordable. https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2016/08/olive-oil-fake-larry-olmsted-food-fraud-usda/ https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/08/13/slippery-business https://www.oliveoiltimes.com/tag/olive-oil-fraud?page=6

I doubt many people get sick. It would take a lot of negligence and not a lot of ventilation. But this is the best explanation I've found for why nonstick pans eventually stick.

This study finds that pyrolysis of PTFE begins at 200°C (392°F). Zapp JA, Limperos G, Brinker KC (26 April 1955). "Toxicity of pyrolysis products of 'Teflon' tetrafluoroethylene resin". Summary is online here. It sounds like the reaction is very slow at this temperature. Abstract: Teflon (9002-84-0), a physically inert tetrafluoroethylene (116-14-3) resin, is discussed in a paper presented at the American Industrial Hygiene Association Annual Meeting in Cincinnati, Ohio on April 26, 1955, and it is noted that its pyrolytic products are toxic, and exposure to various mixtures of them will induce polymer fume fever in humans. The latter influenza like syndrome has not been reproduced in animals. Sufficiently intense exposure of animals to Teflon's thermal products, however, is generally lethal. The associated evidence of pulmonary edema, together with other early test results, originally suggested that hydrogen fluoride (7664-39-3) (HF) was the responsible toxic agent. The pyrolysis of Teflon starts at 200 degrees-C and proceeds slowly up to 420 degrees-C; at 500 to 550 degrees-C, the degradational weight loss reaches 10% to 5% per hour, respectively, depending on conditions. In the temperature range 300 to 360 degrees-C, hexafluoroethane (C2F6) and octafluorocyclobutane (C4F8) were identified as decomposition products. In the range 380 to 400 degrees-C, octafluoroisobutylene (also C4F8) could be detected and, at 500 to 550 degrees-C, the chief pyrolysis products other than tetrafluoroethylene (116-14-3) (C2F4) were hexafluoropropylene (116154), (C3F6) octafluorocyclobutane, and octafluoroisobutylene plus a complex residue of perfluoroolefins. Inhalation toxicity tests indicated that the octafluoroisobutylene gas, the most potent product, was approximately ten times as toxic as phosgene (75-44-5). The rat mortality factor seemed to be proportional to the product of exposure time and Teflon surface area as a function of pyrolysis temperature. Teflon 6, a lower molecular weight polymer than Teflon 1, produced more toxic pyrolysis products. Other kinds of industrial polymers were observed to produce lethal atmospheres under less drastic conditions than either form of Teflon There's nothing here about why 500°F would be chosen as the maximum allowable temperature; this might be based on some other studies. You can see from this summary that as temperature goes up, not only does the rate of breakdown increase, but the pyrolysis byproducts change. If you have an awesome commercial range and preheat your omelette pan to 500°C (932°F), you'll fill the air with octafluoroisobutylene, possibly helping with the vital task of population reduction.

This could explain why nonstick pans gradually lose their mojo. As I read it, they warn people about 500F because it's the point where byproducts can reach a concentration in the air that can cause health problems. 400F isn't very hot ... you'd have to be really careful when pre-heating a pan to consistently keep it cooler.

That's really nice, Anna. I'd consider ending it at "...and keep." Rakuten's imagination seemed to wane a bit in the last three lines.

Well, you gotta heat the water. I can maybe see it for plastic cutting boards, but I don't want to dunk wood ones water that hot. And it's not so practical for sanitizing fixed surfaces.

Rakuten's automatic translations may be the best thing that ever happened to avant-garde poetry.

High temperature sanitizing works the same way as pasteurization and sterilization. It's the simplest to understand sanitization, because temperature/time/death curves for all pathogens are well known. I've never heard of a health department not acknowledging it. It doesn't come up so often, because for the method to be practical you need a heat-sanitizing dishwasher. Water from the tap isn't hot enough, and if it were, it would do the same things to the dishwashers' hands that it does to the bacteria. That quotation about dipping a cloth in quaternary ammonium is a bit of a straw-man argument. It's basically saying that if you use those sanitizers exactly the way the manufacturers tell you not too, they won't work well. There are mountains of legitimate research on sanitizers. Beware of treating a single, non-peer reviewed article as gospel. Vinegar has many shortcomings. It's fairly weak against lysteria and e.coli. It's useless against most viruses (quats are ineffective against norovirus, which is the one real strike I see against them). Vinegar is absolutely more effective than not using vinegar, so if you're looking for a bit of additional insurance, there's no harm. Just don't overestimate it.

Oh yeah, that's mandatory. The albumin will curdle. But it doesn't bring bad flavors with it, so if it's a sauce I'm planning to strain, I might just strain the globs out at the end.

The link you cited really just showed generic information on the behavior of a bunch of sanitizers. It doesn't address the measured performance of any of them when sanitizing produce (you can read the same descriptions of these chemicals, practically word-for-word, referring to their performance on nonporous surfaces). Here's an FDA study analysis that directly addresses sanitizers on produce. This is the only one I could find that even addresses peroxide. It's not surprising that H2O2 isn't so popular; It's effectiveness is spotty, and it causes browning of some vegetables, bleaching of others. Excerpts of shortcomings: "Treatment of whole cantaloupes, honeydew melons, and asparagus spears with 1% H2O2 was less effective at reducing levels of inoculated salmonellae and E. coli O157:H7 than hypochlorite, acidified sodium chlorite or a peracetic acid-containing sanitizer (Park and Beuchat 1999)."" "Use of a 1% H2O2 spray on alfalfa seeds and sprouts did not control growth of E. coli O157:H7 (Taormina and Beuchat 1999b)." "... however, obvious visual defects were noted on the treated lettuce." None of this is damning. It appears to be safe to use. But it's also only marginally effective, and can discolor food. If I were looking for a produce sanitizer, I'd keep looking.

Escofier's recipes? Those were written back when veal grew on trees. Maybe not literally.

After the smoke clears and you sweep the rubble away, the surfaces should be safe for preparing a salad.

Another source of minimalist stock is plain old sous-vide bag juices. I accumulate them in the freezer to add them to stock, but in a pinch have used them in place of stock. The flavor is pure and intense. Definitely benefits from some onion / shallot, and wine or other spirit, and it needs acid. But a little goes a long way, the flavors can be pushed in whatever direction you want.

Disinfectants and sanitizers are not quite the same thing. I use a peroxide-based disinfectant at home and love it; it's pretty non-toxic, it works well, and it smells good. There's no nasty residue. It's sold as a commercial product for hospitals, so it's not so easy to find ... I'm not sure why. Sanitizers are used in somewhat lower concentrations and in much larger quantities, and need to stay stable in an open sink for a whole shift. Peroxide is unstable even in a plastic bottle. In a sink it will off-gas to basically nothing very quickly. Peroxide is much more expensive than the usual suspects (quaternary ammonium, chlorine). For reasons I don't know, it hasn't been approved as a commercial restaurant sanitizer by health departments (at least not as of the last time I looked into it). It used to be a popular sanitizer for breweries. They used it in higher concentrations than household peroxide. Mostly for stainless steel and copper surfaces. From what I've read it's no longer popular; that industry has switched to stuff called PAA, which is a strong peroxide/acetic acid blend that is nastier than anything you'd want in your kitchen. It must be pretty effective for people to put up with it.

Sanitizing works on clean surfaces (no organic matter hanging around) and there's no guaranteed way to get that stuff out of the deepest reaches of a hacked-up cutting board. That's why most sources say to toss a poly board when it gets scored. Or sand a wood or rubber board. Someone around here said they had a method for sanding poly boards that didn't wreck them. I'd be curious to hear it.

You can't count on me doing it all the time at home. But at restaurants and food trucks you can absolutely count on it. Health codes just about everywhere in the US require it. Probably elsewhere in the developed world. Commercial dishwashers are either heat-sanitizing or chemical-sanitizing. The latter runs a solution just like the one I describe through the rinse cycle. Commercial dishwashing sinks are all triple—for wash, rinse, and sanitize. If you don't have a sanitizing dishwasher or 3-basin sink, you won't get licensed to open. One of the first things a health inspector checks is if the three sink basins are properly filled and that the water isn't dirty. They cary test strips to make sure your sanitizer isn't exhausted. Commercial kitchens I've been in have a sanitizer-filled tub full of clean cutting boards, and bussing tray to throw used ones into. This is all commercial kitchen 101.

Extremely acidic. I like some brightness in a tomato sauce but this was over the top, at least in the Margherita where there weren't other fatty ingredients to balance it in any way.

In the basic sourdough recipe, with the machine mixing instructions, do they clarify what they mean by "mix to medium gluten development?" I use a 6qt KA mixer with a spiral dough hook, and have gradually been shortening mixing times when using medium to high-hydration doughs and autolyse steps. If I go longer than 90 seconds, the dough seems to get soupier rather than firmer. I'm assuming the gluten will break down if I go longer than this, but everyone online who writes about mixing bread mechanically mentions mixing times of several minutes. Should I ignore the apparent weakening of the dough and mix longer? My dough ends up being extremely extensible, but almost entirely without elasticity. At hydration levels above 65% my boules get floppy and almost resemble focaccia. (using half KA AP flour, half KA bread). But it's delicious ... like the best tasting bread I've had. When I lower the hydration, I get beautiful, professional looking boules that just taste ok. Should I mix longer or change the dough development steps in any other way? Right now I'm making the recipe as written, with regard to autolyse, mixing, and stretch / fold schedule. I've increased the hydration to 70%, and am using a lower percentage of starter, to facilitate a longer warm ferment. My starter gives the flavors I like if it gets a few hours in the 90°F range. For one trial I tried adding a couple of extra stretch / fold steps. This made a stronger dough, but gave a tightly organized crumb that was less chewy, and resembled commercial sandwich bread. Not awesome. Any tips on how to get a stronger dough that will hold its shape, without compromising flavor, will make me oh so happy.

Cocktails are maybe the preferred way to keep everyone healthy. When not imbibing, I use soap and water, and then give a quick spray with restaurant sanitizer. I bought a gallon jug of the stuff about 8 years ago, and have only used about 3/4 or it. One capful dilutes in a quart of water to make the working solution. Put it in a generic spray bottle. The stuff I like is made with quaternary ammonium compounds. It's colorless, odorless, tasteless, and doesn't attack metals or textiles (bleach attacks just about everything). It has a very long life in working solution, so you don't have to throw it out ever. It has a wetting agent, so you can use it as the final rinse when hand-washing dishes, and you won't get spots on glassware. As with all sanitizers, it's only useful on surfaces that are actually clean. Quaternary ammonium compounds work better than bleach on organic surfaces (like wood). They're less effective than bleach against some viruses, including norovirus. When my gallon jug runs out, I plan to replace with the same type of chemical in tablet form. This $5 bottle makes 150 gallons of working solution.

One way to think about stocks is that they let you front-load much of the labor. If you have a traditional stock that balances a basic meat flavor, gelatinous mouthfeel, and aromatics, then you have much less to worry about when assembling the final sauce or dish. But this isn't the only way to do it. We have many other ways to control texture and mouthfeel now, so it's not mandatory to extract gobs of gelatin. Some chefs prefer to leave the aromatics out, because it's more efficient to add them toward the end when you won't lose so much to evaporation. Basic meat flavors can come from pan drippings or sous-vide bag juices. If your final dish is already full of meat or texture-enhancing ingredients or aromatics, then you'll be depending on the stock much less for these contributions. The stock qualities can become matters of subtlety rather than the broad strokes of the dish.

For chocolate I get rid of the eggs entirely. I want to get rid of every unnecessary source of fat. I add a bit of lecithin, but don't know if this is necessary. My chocolate flavor's still in beta testing. Why don't you write to Jenni about the cream cheese? I never asked her about it because it's not what I'm up to. Probably there's some kind of emulsification / stabilization power that it has, but she finds it inappropriate for some flavors. Skim milk powder won't substitute for egg yolk, but I gather the cream cheese does in her home recipes.

The thing with food-born illness is you never really know. Someone can get sick anywhere from 5 minutes to 3 weeks after eating something bad, and often it's never diagnosed. And it's not always the case that everyone who at the thing gets sick. You do a much more thorough job than I do with fruits and vegetables. It never occurred to me that I could reliably wash e-coli off of salad greens, so I basically just hope for the best. Maybe not the smartest approach.

Should have added that I'm asking for a friend

Why do we assume chicken is some special case? Any uncooked food can be covered with pathogens. Most of the recent e-coli epidemics have been from vegetables. Nothing to be done about it you're eating salad, but otherwise the cutting board is probably the 2nd most common vector for cross-contamination (next to the cook's hands). Cutting boards are mostly a problem if they get deep grooves. Grooves have room not just for bacteria, but for plenty of food for the bacteria. This is also called a petri dish. Or a bacteria farm. Wood boards and rubber boards have the advantage of being sandable. Rubber and poly boards have the advantage of being dishwashable. Generally it's recommended to toss poly boards when they get hacked up, but I've heard from a couple of people who have figured out how to sand them without making a huge mess. I don't know how. But to your second question, dish soap and hot water and scrubbing is all that's necessary in most cases. It won't get 100% of the pathogens. If you're cooking for strangers or anyone who might be immune compromised, or if you just want to play it safe, you can spray with sanitizer and after washing and let it drip dry.

That's right. The cream cheese is a hack to simulate the emulsifying power she gets at the factory from milk proteins. Maybe, but I'm really not sure what improvements you'd get over using high quality nonfat dried milk. If you can't find that at a local store, it's easy to get on Amazon. Also keep in mind that Jeni's uses its protein denaturizing process purely to substitute for eggs. You should ask yourself how important this is to you. If you simply don't like the flavor of eggs in ice cream, or the flavor-masking of heavy custard, you can always just use fewer eggs. I use two yolks per liter (less than 4% by weight). This is more than enough emulsifier, and enough to influence the texture a bit. I don't notice any egg flavor or muting. You can use as little as 1/4 yolk, but will forsake any of the textural advantages yolks can offer. Using cornstarch or tapioca starch as a stabilizer is an effort at label-friendliness. Those ingredients sound "natural" to customers, while the gums that work better sound scary. In real life, I don't understand the distinction between powder dried from a cassava root and powder dried from a locust bean seed. They're both polysaccharides. The one from the locust bean tree will work better, and at 1/10 the concentration.