haresfur

My try at low and slow in the oven was a failure. For some reason the meat temperature stalled out and I had to bump the temperature up to get it to cook. And that was fan forced with a probe in the meat and another to monitor the oven, which stayed within a degree of the set point. I'm not sure I see the advantage over sous vide.

In line with other responses, I don't usually pay attention to video opinions because I find them an inefficient way to convey information and because I don't appreciate being treated as a click. This forum would be better served by posting salient points that we can discuss here. That would also serve the eG goal of being a resource for cooking related information. With regards to the one point you posted, there are plenty of other techniques that have long periods with little involvement in the cooking. I don't cook for the smells - they are a side bonus. And I have no problem doing a quick stir fry rather than feeling I have to have a stew pot going all day to make the kitchen smell nice. You get that quick smell hit when you brown meat after sous vide. In fact, I often sous vide beef and add it to a stir fry at the end to get the combination of med-rare meat and charred veg. In that way I suppose you could just consider the sous vide to be part of your prep. To me sous vide is primarily about precision and flexibility. I don't doubt that a top steak house can produce a better steak with their equipment but I can produce a much better steak with sous vide than any other way I have found. I like a roast chook but sous vide chicken is convenient and delicious for preparing ahead.

Silverbeet (chard), white bean, and chicken soup with Turkish roll garlic bread. Someone wasn't enthusiastic about the stems so those are fermenting as an experiment. The silverbeet is really taking off in the garden now that the soil is warming up. I was hoping it would be a winter crop. And don't get me started on the nursery selling me plain silverbeet as rainbow.

I have done green tomato chutney, but I too, was underwhelmed so no good recipe.

This discussion is very interesting because I am realising that most of what I know about Indian festivals and food, for that matter, is heavily slanted to northern India. I just watched a video of a race between incredibly long canoes for this festival, which links several of my interests. The whole context for the food is fascinating imo.

Great idea on making the dressing in the bottle. My problem with the container on the left is that soft plastic isn't really recycled here. But I suppose there isn't much of it compared to the squeeze bottle. I may go back to glass.

Looks like you are set for Canadian Thanksgiving!

When drying apple slices I would dip them in orange juice to keep from browning

Maybe fish cakes, too

Be sure to let us know if you die (I would risk it, too)

Part of my failure as a gardener is difficulty murdering thinnings. Right now I have some spinach doing pretty well even though there are more than one plant in a clump and some rather sad thinnings that I teased apart and planted separately. My tendency would be to keep them together since you are doing hydroponics. You can always train the plants to grow farther apart for light. And they should help each other pollinate

One of my baristas grows plants in pots of pure coffee grounds. Surprised me. Not sure how much magnesium is in egg shells, since they are calcium carbonate. I use dolomite rather than calcium carbonate for my citrus on the advice of a garden shop owner. That's calcium-magnesium carbonate and dissolves much slower. He said you can't really add too much.

Oooh! I just bought some rib strips from my beef dude (actually my beef dude's grandson) with no idea what I was going to do with them. Now that's sorted, thanks.

It will be a while before our soil outside is room temperature and in the past my seed has just sat there until much later in the spring. Then again it will be a while before my house is room temperature and then there will be a short period before it is blazing hot. Older houses here are poorly constructed, not well insulated, and have single pane glass. Doesn't make sense to heat a lot, only to pour it outside. I had my first unsuccessful batch of sauerkraut this year because the house was too cool.

It is weird that avocado oil is a specialty item here, only sold in small bottles and cost prohibitive for deep frying. We grow a lot of avocados and a lot are dumped in good years. Seems like a natural to produce more oil. I mainly fry in rice bran oil or grapeseed oil

Planted some supposedly heirloom jalapenos and a bunch of pots of sweet basil in my cold frame. Hope that helps the basil germinate because I think it needs warm soil. Also some dill, jalapenos, and basil outside to hedge my bets. Seeded an area with Italian parsley a while back and I might have to thin it. The stuff self seeds like crazy and I decided to pull a couple of huge plants out of my wallaby grass lawn area (which seems to be getting taken over by other grasses, unfortunately). My best looking cauliflower seems to have suffered a setback, maybe because of the hail a couple of weeks ago. All this reminds me I need to make a spinach salad for tea.

Any chance of doing it over a wood fire?

I have wanted some 2 liter mason jars for fermentation for a while but getting them has been problematic due to shipping costs. So I tagged along on a trip down to Melbourne on Sunday and made it to Kitchen Warehouse, which actually has a fancy storefront for the foodies, but apparently is well set up to get things to restaurants quickly. Not without some issues because they don't know that their jars take wide mouth Ball lids (why would you make anything different?). Pretty ridiculous because the replacement lids they sell are only in a set of a band and a lid for about $7.00. Anyway I took a lid down with me, found a single jar on a clearance shelf where I could test it and decide it should work. Had to send someone into the back for Barkeepers Friend and picked up off-brand microplanes and kitchen shears. So a bit of a weird operation but a successful trip.

An idle thought, would an unglazed clay banneton work? Because I can see how you could incise more complicated designs that you can get in a coiled basket. I'm even imagining something where the banneton forms the lid for a clay baking vessel. The trouble is I don't eat much bread so it probably isn't worth the effort.

I think they suggest storing the liners in the freezer so that wouldn't take up as much space as trying to freeze the baskets. https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/blog/2023/01/25/bannetons-brotforms-proofing-baskets

King Arthur suggests the freezer, as I found out when I was googling what a banneton is

I did a little looking and it gets complicated because apparently when people say sodium citrate they generally mean tri-sodium citrate and there are mono- and di-sodium citrate, depending on how many hydrogen ions you have knocked off. So the pH gets buffered by multiple reactions. Then, if you want to look at the reactions making the stuff from citric acid and sodium bicarbonate, you get into the whole system of carbonate chemistry with carbonate, bicarbonate and carbonic acid, which is H2CO3; a water and a carbon dioxide. So there is pH buffering in that system, too. And a lot (most?) of the carbonate in water at low pH is actually CO2, not joined to a water molecule. I studied carbonate geochemistry and it is really hard to wrap your brain around. Throw in the citrate chemistry and I'm out of here. I'll buy my sodium citrate powder, thanks.

I use my IR thermometer now and then. Mainly when preheating a pan or now and then for shallow frying oil to know when to add food. It is decent for pseudo-Neapolitan pizza where you get a pan screaming hot and whack the pizza in to cook the base for a few minutes then finish under the broiler. I should use it more but usually wing it. Aside from that, it is ok at figuring out when the gas grill is heated enough and how even the heat is (for mine it is not). I did love seeing the science geek kid running around Old Faithful geyser basin at Yellowstone, measuring the different hot springs. They don't let you cook in them anymore, though. I don't think mine adjusts for emissivity, but that's not a big deal if you are using it to get consistency using the same setup or just to get ballpark temperatures.

I had raspberries planted in the garden beside the horse pen. I would have thought that the thorns would have dissuaded them, but no. I have planted butternut, zucchini, and cucumbers in that area since. Zuke haven't been very successful, never got a cuke, and the horses have had to content themselves with the butternut that grow through the fence.

I wonder what they do with it. Too good to waste Do they perhaps sell rump cap? That's basically the back part of a full tri tip. Also known as picana but they probably don't know about that. My beef guy sells the front part without the fat cap but the rump cap with the thick fat on one side.