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Blether

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Everything posted by Blether

  1. Blether

    Homemade butter

    Here in Tokyo, the cheapest butter I can find is JPY360 - about USD3.50 - for 200g, i.e. about 6.5oz. About USD4.25 a pound ? In regular supermarkets it's typically around JPY400 Litre packs of heavy cream are rare, but I know a shop that has them regularly - they're JPY1,400 / USD13.75 or so.
  2. No, I won't justify my love for Wikipedia. Aristotle has a lot to answer for, and what's more, that was an awful long quote for one wee snippet. Was that to cover up the fact you only own half a library ?
  3. As I understand it, in L'art de la Cuisine, Careme said: Veloute Bechamel Espagnole Allemande and in Le Guide Culinaire, Escoffier said nah, Allemande's just a derivative of Veloute, and changed it to: Veloute Bechamel Espagnole Hollandaise Tomate Just call me Wikibot.
  4. If you're fine with a little fish, you could try some gohan desu yo (I can't speak for this supplier, it's just one of the first Google results). If you want easy konbu, you can get it as a "tea" powder (can't speak for the brand this time - I've only tried Ito-en's) It's actually a good drink, like beef tea but... well, you get the idea. Oh, here's konbu-cha in the NYT, too. You probably know it already.
  5. Blether

    Breakfast! 2014

    Hash of potato, bacon & cheese.
  6. It sounds like you know what you're doing, and why. Are you really going to deep fry, as opposed to the two-side fry in the Thai recipe ? (BTW have you watched any of those videos of folk deep-frying turkeys ?) What will you use to lift (& turn) the fish in one piece ? I'm guessing you're not concerned about losing a portion of tail meat to dryness. jayt90, in the UK "brown trout" is used for the freshwater-only fish. The ones that have gone/been to the sea are called sea trout. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_trout http://www.fishbase.org/comnames/CommonNamesList.php?ID=238&GenusName=Salmo&SpeciesName=trutta&StockCode=252
  7. Mackerel and herring are commonly shallow fried - as can be any fish. You'll need to be on the ball if you choose to cook your sea trout this way - it'll go quickly from just right, to dry and hard. See also: tuna steaks bought at restaurants that don't care. This sort of treatment is fine for something like grouper that's mostly bones anyway - to me it seems a waste of sea trout. I'd bake it in foil in a very low oven - 120C, say. Then scatter on some brown-fried onion if I felt I couldn't do without some finger-lickin' crispness. How big's the fish, anyway ?
  8. You could pick out the fat bits, crisp them up by frying and plate separately.
  9. So here's an opinion, though it's not one I can claim any credit for as I read it myself here on eG. In most of the excellent restaurants that you go to for fantastic food, the cookware is cost-conscious no-brand aluminum.
  10. You could put the tubes through the lid to make the sealing easier - but so long as you have the pump and the motor in a single unit, what with the super-cooled alcohol going through, it's going to chill. Hell, with the alcohol pre-cooled well enough, a bagged steak'd freeze so quickly you could reach in and swish it about with a pair of tongs.
  11. What an action-packed house yours must be The hair-dryer-and-external air plan needs a hell of a lot of dry ice, because you're constantly drawing in "warm" (much warmer than the dry ice) air, then losing the cooling by venting cold air. So it looks like you have 2 options: 1 dry freezing - set up a fan (like DCarch says, a personal battery fan ?) inside the box, and freeze using circulating cold air. You can vacuum-pack the meat first, or leave it naked and wrap afterwards. 2 wet freezing with (high proof) alcohol. Test your vacuum-seal plastic in the alcohol first - vacuum seal something absorbent so you can open it after and see if there was any seepage. Then if the result looks good, put enough depth of alcohol in your foam box, chill it by "dissolving" a load of dry ice, and drop in your sealed steak. Make sure the steak is on a rack so the alcohol can at least convection flow. Unless you can get a strong fan, my guess is #2 will give the faster freeze. Either way, smaller pieces of steak will freeze quicker than one larger piece (surface-area-to-volume ratio), so break the meat down into the sizes you'll finally use it in, first.
  12. I never saw you as a big hair-dryer user, DC ? I know mine blows cold air, mostly because I switch it to cold by mistake when I'm after hot for enabling or curing adhesives, or driving moisture out of the air gap in my double-glazed motorbike hat. If I have it right. the point of blast- or flash-freezing is, the faster you freeze something - the quicker you draw the heat out of it, the less and the smaller the ice crystals that form in and on it. That preserves the texture better. You could probably better use a small fan in a closed system to circulate the chill. So far as you can seal the food to be frozen, I like the alcohol idea a lot, but ideally I'd also want to get the liquid circulating somehow. A blast freezer works like a convection oven. Or a cheap hair-dryer, of course.
  13. An enclosure of thick cardboard (layers ?), and a hair dryer on 'cold' pushing air in over the dry ice ? It's the blast furnace that does the quick-freeze in commercial plant, isn't it ?
  14. Thanks, Kerry. I like the clean detail on your chocolates. Anna & Ann - it's a Nigel Slater recipe, "Demerara Lemon Cake". I copied it from the newspaper years ago, but it can be found online easily enough - straight from the horse's mouth, even. It can be a fuss sourcing demerara sugar round here - I used san-on-to which is more-or-less soft brown sugar. It's a cake with lots going on - there's lemon zest in the batter, the lemon slices on top are briefly confit'd in sugar & water before being baked in place, and you pour a syrup of sugar & lemon juice over the top while it's still warm. It's very rich - near half-a-pound of butter, four eggs, to three ounces each of almond powder and flour - but the lemon juice cuts it nicely and there's the bitterness in the topping to keep you engaged, too. The mixer's a Tefal. Only its second outing (I blooded it on a taramasalata), but so far it doesn't change its tone no matter how heavy the going gets. This one here - comes with beaters and dough hooks. Anna, you probably know that the electric mixer takes the hard work out of creaming the butter & sugar well to get air in the mix, likewise the eggs.
  15. Cake. I beat the eggs in so hard it's almost like an omelette - moist, wobbling & expectant. Which means... yes, I bought an electric mixing tool. Handheld, but 350W. 350 !
  16. Insofar as you can cope by using a single file (txt/doc/xls/ as you like) that the app makes accessible on all your devices, Dropbox is a great system. Now I can see all my work files on my smartphone, transparently, I carry a computer less and less.
  17. Who me ? Some trout cooking, from the archives: http://forums.egullet.org/topic/29870-lunch-2003-2012/page-24#entry1841545 http://forums.egullet.org/topic/143505-dinner-2010/page-7#entry1731410 http://forums.egullet.org/topic/70254-fish-and-other-seafood/page-12#entry1724920
  18. Now I have trout envy Hot smoked trout is excellent. I haven't heard of it being cold smoked. What size are the fish you're getting ? Plantes Vertes is right about almonds - you can equally well fillet, coat with almonds and shallow-fry. Breadcrumb-coating and shallow/deep frying also work well. Personally I'd kill for some good fresh trout just to salt lightly and grill with a little lemon & parsley butter in the cavity. On the trout farm where I worked part-time in my student days, one of the guys ate a whole live trout for a dare, head and all, but there's no need to go that far.
  19. Blether

    Lemon miso sauce

    I should have added that by coincidence, I used some (light Akita) miso to gussy up a soup of lentils and tomato (with my usual chicken stock) just a couple of weeks ago. As a supplementary ingredient it added a really satisfying, hard-to-identify depth.. A puree of lentils is another option for (part of) your sauce. I've posted before that I find lemon & black pepper a great enhancement for a standard Japanese-style miso soup.
  20. Blether

    Lemon miso sauce

    Lemon and miso are a good choice together (white wine and miso's good too). Of course miso is salty at a level like things like anchovies, so it can't be the body of the sauce. If you're just dressing carrots, simplest might be melted butter ? For me the miso gives enough depth that you don't need to be caramelising onions or anything (though there's nothing to stop you, and onions improve anything, browned or not).
  21. I was wrong - they're from Campbell's, not walkers http://www.647-florist.com/campbells-ginger-lemon
  22. I had a girlfriend called Midori for a while. She at least was classy.
  23. "Barf" ? Suntory's single malts and Hibiki blend get good press, but for those of us drinking lower down the market, there's the likes of Suntory Old and "Kakubin". It's a matter of taste of course, but I like Black Nikka & Super Nikka a lot better. Funnily enough, amongst the big volume Japanese lagers, Suntory Malts is the only one I'll try to avoid. Pappy, I say. I've posted this before, I think, but both whisky operations were set up by the same guy - a Mr. Taketsuru. Heartwarming - and nicely crafted - story of love, loss and life in the drug trade. What I want to know, is how long do they leave the bubble gum in Jack Daniels while it's maturing ?
  24. Marks & Spencer Butter Crunch, circa 1982. But recently, the Walker's shortbread variant with Sicilian lemon and ginger. Spectacular ! Forget the raspberry ones or the chocolate ones.
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