Tri2Cook

In my personal opinion, the only thing good on potted meat is the lid to the trash can. But I can't say that I've tried it with pimento cheese... seems like it'd be a good way to mess up some perfectly good pimento cheese. I look forward to hearing what you think of the combination though.

This is so cool. Freeze dried everything!

I remember that episode, it doesn't make it look any nicer but it makes a little more sense in context. It was supposed to have shock value. They were supposed to make a gothic horror feast for an evil queen (Charlize Theron was the guest and the dinner was an homage to her role as the evil queen in Snow White and the Huntsman).

Me too. I don't have gas (well, not for my appliances anyway) so I could be wrong but I'd think it would take as much or more gas to reheat the oven as it would take to maintain the temp of an already heated oven for that short amount of time.

I think I'm gonna have to try that corn tart... but I'm not leaving out the butter. Calories be damned, butter and corn is flavor combo perfection.

Toasting flour in the oven gets rid of some of that raw flour taste and gives it a bit of a nice, nutty flavor.

No problem, wasn't accusing... it was just coming across as a possibility based on your posts. I just thought there may be a chance that, in your new-found excitement over the food world, you may have been letting google tell you what's best. No insult was intended.

I'm seeing a link between your "best I ever had" threads and the price of said items. That and the "newfoodie" moniker lead me to believe that you're getting caught up in associating cost with quality. While that is frequently true in the world in general, it's quite often not at all true in the food world. It's cool that you're excited about food and food quality but you need to ask yourself if these are really the best things you've ever had or just the most expensive. And I'm not suggesting they're not the best you've had, they may very well be, just be sure you're not buying into what other people tell you is the best. You might miss out on something you really like because it wasn't the most expensive option.

If this is the same peanut butter pie you were on a mission to perfect a few years ago, there's going to be some real happy peanut butter lovers when they get the book. I still have what was the final version at that time saved and it still gets used.

It might make a passable tiki drink with a little embellishment. Starting with their 6 oz rum, 2 oz Cointreau, 8 oz passion fruit juice, work in 1 1/2 oz lime and 3/4 oz orgeat and you'd have a twisted variation on the Reverb Crash. Passion fruit juice replacing the grapefruit juice and Cointreau replacing the passion fruit syrup. No idea if it'd taste good and it might need more lime in this configuration. I'd make a half recipe just out of curiosity but I don't currently have passion fruit juice in the house.

I'm picturing people thinking Dr. Beal is collecting souvenirs and then trying to figure out how to leave quickly without raising your suspicion. The local store actually brought a few of those in once. I didn't grab any that day and when I went back they were gone. I wasn't too disappointed because I have no idea what I would have done with them.

According to Harold McGee, variances in egg yolk size won't matter at all. His experiments concluded that a single average sized yolk has the ability to emulsify something in the range of 24 liters of oil as long as the water phase is kept sufficient to maintain oil droplet separation. Something in the range of 10 - 15 ml water for every 250 ml of oil was suggested. Of course, I've never attempted to replicate his experiment, I don't know what I'd do with 24 liters of mayo.

Got that one when I was a kid. My mom used to get mad because I'd sometimes come in from playing outside and take a big swig out of the milk jug. She finally got tired of telling us not to do it and, as I discovered the hard way, filled an empty milk jug with buttermilk. Not only was it an unpleasant surprise when I took a big drink of it, cleaning up the mess after I sprayed it all over the floor wasn't too fun either.

Exactly what I've been saying... maybe you'll have better luck with it.

Yep, I always scale my cake batter when doing multiple pans. "Picky S.O.B." is one of the milder things I've been called when people see me doing it.

I think the communication problem is that we're focusing on different things. I'm not addressing food safety, I'm addressing what I think is the reason behind your burger cohesion issues. I think 40% cooked meat in the mix just isn't allowing for a good bind. Eggs, etc. would very likely help with that, they're just things I don't like to put in my burgers. If you don't mind them in yours, that's completely fine. I was just trying to help track down the source of the problem in case you prefer not to add additional binders.

150F meat is cooked. Maybe not cooked to some people's preference, but cooked. Cook a hunk of beef to 150F internal, run it through your grinder and try to make a burger patty with it. You'll then see what I'm getting at.

I'm going to help pacify those who don't suffer from this affliction by breaking into one of my stashes this weekend. It's simple items that are simple to get for most people and not even that difficult for me to get if I'm willing to pay shipping almost equal to the product cost. Since I'm a bit on the cheap side when it comes to that, I try to limit that type of ordering and thus tend to hoard. But, in celebration of this years return of NCAA football, I'm going to break into my Cajun ingredient stash and do a shrimp boil (since crawfish are a non-option here) for Bama's opening game against West Virginia. Of course, in the interest of full disclosure, it's not going to deplete my supply. Just lessen it by about 1/3.

Except maybe my Lemon Heart 151. You don't even want to know the shenanigans involved with getting my hands on that one from where I live. But I understand your point... just not sure I can follow your advice.

It may be okay. This was a really long time ago and information about it was hard to find. I'd probably already had it for over 2 years before I learned I was supposed to keep it in the freezer. Then it sat in the freezer for a long time. By the time I finally opened it, cooking issues had posted their primer on it which said if it smelled kinda like a wet dog, it was still good. If it smelled pretty much like nothing, toss it. Based on that, I tossed it. Then it became easy to get and I stopped worrying about it. Now I just order a small package if I have a project in mind... because I know I can get more.

I didn't know there was a word for it but I'm glad I'm not alone. I once had to toss a 100 gram pack of activa (back in the days before it was easy to get in user-friendly amounts) because I'd managed to get two and already used one so I kept not using the other so I wouldn't be without. By the time I finally gave in and opened it, it was trash can fodder. I'm really bad with my booze cabinet. I have many things that I acquired via the help of others that I know I'm unlikely to be able to replace, so I'm very stingy with them. I haven't even been able to bring myself to open my bottle of Lemon Heart 151 and I'm having a difficult time convincing myself to open my last remaining bottle of American rye. I have more modernist ingredients and their supporting cast than I'll ever be able to use because I always buy them in the larger containers in case I can't get them again if I run out. I won't even go into my freezer stash or spice cabinet hoarding.

He's pre-cooking the bacon to 150 F according to his previous post. I still think that's the primary cause of his cohesion problem, 40% of the mix being pre-cooked meat.

i couldn't take it anymore. Your banana bread posts were driving me, well, "bananas". I love banana bread but for some reason rarely make it (probably because I would eat way too much of it). Today is chilly, windy and raining. The perfect day to cave to temptation, so banana bread is in the oven now. I tempted fate by replacing part of the butter with some roasted walnut oil I wanted to use up. We'll see how that goes...

I haven't used them in quite a while. The last thing I did with them was a bit on the cheesy side but it went over well. I dropped some into a molded bon bon shell, sealed them off with a bit of chocolate and dropped in a cherry with some fondant before backing. When bit into, the liquid from the fondant cherry combined with the pop rocks and put on a little show in the mouth. Yes, I'm afraid I did introduce them as Cherry Poppers. I've also used them in aerated chocolate by combining them with caramelized rice krispies and lining the container with a layer of the mixture before shooting the chocolate in. Fun to eat and also makes a nice base layer for some constructions. After deciding at one point that I was using them a little too much, I kinda forgot about them for a while. I stumbled across the container one day and they'd all melded into a giant lump of crackly sugar that I tossed in the trash.

I used choke cherries, wild blueberries, smoked elk bones and dried elk meat to make a pemmican consommé. It was tasty and the color was really nice but that's as far as I got with it. Never did get around to developing it into a complete dish. I might have to revisit that.