Jump to content

project

participating member
  • Posts

    480
  • Joined

  • Last visited

Everything posted by project

  1. Pizza. I got to where I could make a decent pizza starting with frozen dough I bought, but just the crust from that dough has much less good yeast aroma than what Domino's sells. Chinese Stir-Fry. One of my worst frustrations is Chinese stir-fry compared with what was long readily available just at my local Chinese carry-outs (although in recent months their quality has gone way down) and far, far below what I used to get from the Northern Chinese restaurant long on the west side of Connecticut Avenue in DC just south of Maryland. I conclude that what the restaurants actually do, even for the simplest dishes such as Chicken with Garlic Sauce, is NOT well documented in readily available sources. I have a good Chinese wok, a propane burner with plenty of BTUs (170,000), etc. and did make some progress but am lacking good recipe details. Moo Shi Pork. The only Chinese stir-fry I can do that is better than the Chinese restaurants is Moo Shi Pork as in Joyce Chen, 'Joyce Chen Cook Book', J. B. Lippincott, Philadelphia, 1962. This recipe has no cabbage, but the restaurants include cabbage of some kind in their Moo Shi Pork, and I don't have a clue what they do, what cabbage they use, how the cut it, or how they cook it. Alas, the Chen recipe requires some ingredients that mostly have to come from China, and now I am reluctant to eat anything from China. Memphis BBQ. I grew up in Memphis and may have eaten a ton (2000 pounds) of Memphis chopped (NOT "pulled") picnic pork shoulder BBQ sandwiches with coleslaw and hot sauce. Their coleslaw was NOT thin and watery, was NOT especially acidic, was NOT especially 'creamy', and did NOT have pieces of red cabbage, bell pepper, pimento, or any other items on a very long list of what many cookbook authors try to include to make coleslaw or 'Memphis coleslaw'. I have only a little idea how to make the BBQ and no idea how to make either the slaw or the hot sauce. My 'oven-Q' ersatz BBQ has decent texture but too often smells awful, like pig poo (which is one of the worst smells on the planet), so I gave up on the picnic pork shoulders I can buy. Somehow I suspect that, for the pork I can buy, the hogs were not raised on a diet of mostly clean acorns from the hills of the Pyrenees! BBQ Beans. There in Memphis the BBQ places also sold BBQ Beans with chunks of meat and a good sauce, and I have not a weak little hollow hint of a tiny clue what they did. In particular the sauce tastes nothing like anything I've had outside of Memphis, from a bottle, recipe, or restaurant. Chicken Soup. After a lot of trials with a lot of chicken, onions, carrots, celery, etc., my chicken stock is passable, my corresponding 'schmaltz' is fairly good, but my chicken soup is still awful, and my local diner has Manhattan clam chowder that is consistently much better than any soup I know how to make. Pan Sauce. I am working on a pan sauce for sauteed beef steak with onions, but so far any restaurant serving the best I have would go out of business between lunch and dinner on the first day. Beef Burgundy. Similarly for all the many trials I did of Beef Burgundy -- wasted a LOT of time and money. Souffles. My souffles always puffed up nicely, and sometimes had good aromas, but the texture was always amorphous chunks of coagulated egg slop surrounded by watery egg swill instead of a more homogeneous 'custard like' texture I got at a good French restaurant. I never saw any discussion of texture anywhere. A French restaurant serving my souffles would have screaming customers, souffle goo thrown against the walls, and be out of business somewhere between lunch and dinner on the first day. Sliced Turkey. My local diner serves a turkey club sandwich with sliced turkey far better than I know how to cook or buy. The time I bought a large chunk of 'turkey' for slicing, it tasted AWFUL and had texture like something manufactured that had never lived, and I threw it out after it had rested in the refrigerator for months. Fried Fish. I finally learned how to make edible deep fried cod fish, but any fish and chips shop serving my best would be out of business during lunch the first day. Difficulty. I made A's in college chemistry, right away, easily but after DECADES of effort on and off am getting a F in cooking. I can think of two or three recipes where in total I put in more effort than my successful engineering Ph.D. dissertation, literally. Explanation. My view is that it's easier to understand the mathematics of Hilbert space (e.g., from Rudin's 'Real and Complex Analysis'), quite carefully, than how to cook just from the books a good version of, say, Chicken with Garlic Sauce. The difference is that the writing for the mathematics has quality one of the top, center crown jewels in all of civilization while the writing of recipes, especially for Chinese food, has quality even worse than the worst wasted effort among the many I flushed. Mostly I blame the cookbook editors, apparently mostly college majors in pointless, meaningless, useless, worthless, irrational, overly emotional, confused, absolute total nonsense. Planned Solution. When I retire from business, I will HIRE experts, one on one, to TEACH me to cook, one dish at a time. I will have the kitchen awash in HD video cameras. When I get good at cooking a dish, then I will back up and carefully document the work, complete with careful MEASUREMENTS of weights, volumes, times, temperatures, and maybe also viscosity, pH, and spectra. I hope to get some gas chromatography equipment for more analysis. Then I will put the resulting rock solid, very careful documentation on the Internet so that anyone who can read, watch video clips, and measure will be able to get good results QUICKLY.
  2. Consider using a chef's knife to prepare 1/4 C of minced garlic. During the mincing, pieces of garlic accumulate on the sides of the knife. So, the question is, what to do about this garlic on the sides of the knife? Here is my solution: Just keep mincing. Soon will have the garlic scattered over the cutting board. So, use the back, dull, edge of the knife to collect the garlic in a pile. Then 'wipe' the sides of the knife over the pile of garlic. This wiping effort works well enough: As the garlic gets cut into smaller pieces, the pile becomes more effective at removing the pieces from the sides of the knife. Soon will have nicely minced garlic, a knife that is clean enough, and no garlic on fingers!
  3. Made a casserole of ground beef, cheese, beef ravioli, and tomato sauce and ate some of it with some decently good Chianti. Good for a cold weather dinner. Started with a 2 quart Pyrex casserole dish. Added 1 C of loosely frozen 80% lean ground beef sauteed with onions, garlic, and black pepper and drained. 1 C of whole milk Mozzarella cheese. 2 cans, 15 ounces per can, of Chef Boyardee Beef Ravioli. 2 C of my own relatively flavorful tomato sauce. Covered and heated in Microwave. Added 1 C of freshly grated Pecorino Romano cheese. Ate about half of it with about 12 ounces of Italian Chianti. Ate some more for an early lunch today. The casserole is good and has been getting better as I refine how I prepare the ground beef and tomato sauce.
  4. Samuel Lloyd Kinsey: Nice post! I needed that! eG is TERRIFIC! Thanks!
  5. I just USE the knife mostly without thinking about any particular 'technique'. For making the knife dull, my guess is that contact with the cutting board is the worst cause. The most important cutting I do with my chef's knife is dicing onions. There mostly I just push down on the knife, that is, 'chop'. But a slicing action where draw the edge across the line to be cut cuts with much less pressure and, thus, can be better, and safer, for cutting, say, dry onion skins.
  6. Fireplace, but while being careful!
  7. Apparently significantly often in practice there is a third option: Once when I was trying yet again to do a brown beef stock much like in Escoffier (I know; I know; it's mostly hopeless), I called around and tried to find shin bones of mature cattle. Escoffier claims that mature cattle yield a better stock. I discovered that, especially here in NY, there are mature cattle available, especially 'retired' dairy cows. With some more calls, I discovered that there is a packing plant in PA that gets a large fraction of such retired NY cattle, called them, and discussed. They could sell boxes of 50 pounds or so. Dairy cattle lead relatively good lives: If the food they eat is not good, then the flavor of the milk suffers. So, if want ground beef or stew beef that has been feed well, try retired dairy cattle! To explain what happens to much of such meat, I was told to "think fast food". Also that packing house has another outlet: They coarsely 'pre-grind' the meat, package it, and sell it to retail grocery stores to be 'freshly ground' again, appropriately finely, daily for sale as ground beef. This ground beef may be among the best tasting beef readily available in the US market, e.g., better tasting than nearly anything from the 'beef cattle' part of the industry.
  8. gregnz: We are discussing cases there the cooking instructions ask that the cooking water get back to a boil. In particular, we are not discussing cases of rapid blanching or poaching where the cooking time is so short that the temperature of both the food and the water, with different parts of the food at different temperatures, are increasing fairly rapidly during the cooking. You wrote: "I'm not sure it's an accurate analogy to equate chemical reaction kinetics and heat transfer." Right: Chemical reactions and heat transfer are very different things. For some mathematics, let t -- time, with the cooking starting at t = 0. T(t) -- temperature at some test point inside the food r(T) -- rate of cooking at temperature T C(t) -- amount of cooking by time t Then in TeX notation: C(s) = int_0^s r(T(t)) dt So the amount of cooking C(s) at time s is a Riemann integral from 0 to s. Intuitively the point is that, since r(T + 10 C) = 2 r(T) the function r increases so quickly with increasing T that it is essentially an exponential and nearly all the cooking is just from the time at boiling or near boiling. Or, letting B = { T | 200 F <= T <= 212 F } essentially C(s) = int_B r(T(t)) dt That is, start timing when T gets back up to 200 F. Basically, for a first-cut view, I was neglecting heat transfer essentially by assuming that the food would quickly be at essentially the same temperature as the water. For small pieces of food, e.g., broccoli flowers, chunks of beef and vegetables in a stew, with a lot of water that should be an okay approximation. Then I was assuming that the 'cooking' was more than just getting the food up to a specific temperature and, instead, also needed time at some such temperature. This cooking by a time at 'cooking temperature', then, I was assuming was essentially a chemical reaction of some sort where another 10 C = 18 F in temperature doubles the rate of the reaction (cooking). This view of 'cooking' as a chemical reaction may be appropriate for, say, breaking down collagen, enzymes, or cell walls, killing bacteria, etc. E.g., can't make BBQ just by heating small chunks of pork shoulder to 180 F; instead, need some time at 180 F or some such. With this approach that the cooking proceeds much like in a chemical reaction, and assuming that the cooking is to take place in boiling water, then for a first-cut rule in practice starting the timing when the water gets back to the boil should be okay if only because at 10 C = 18 F less than the boil the rate of cooking is so much slower.
  9. There's another point: The old first-cut rule in chemistry was that the rate of a chemical reaction doubles with each 10 C = 18 F increase in temperature. If regard cooling in hot water as such a 'chemical reaction', then, when the temperature is 10 C = 18 F less than boiling, aren't cooking very fast. So, are really cooking at a decent rate compared with boiling only when the temperature gets back within 10 C = 18 F of boiling. So, first-cut, start timing the actual cooking at a decent rate when the temperature gets back to boiling.
  10. Here are the two best tasting ways I know of for using leftover turkey: First, lightly toast some white bread and make some well stuffed turkey sandwiches with mayo, lettuce, and tomato. Wrap each sandwich thoroughly and heavily in aluminum foil. At least 2 hours before dawn, get in a small, flat bottomed boat and travel across a nearly frozen lake to a crude duck blind and go duck hunting. Near noon, in the duck blind build a charcoal fire in an old five quart oil can with some air holes punched in the side about 1/3rd of the way up. When the fire has stabilized, place the wrapped sandwiches on the coals and warm until can smell the bread start to burn. Turn the sandwiches and continue on the other side. Eat. Wash it down with some hot beef consomme from a thermos bottle. If at noon the temperature is about 20 F, the wind is about 20 MPH, and there is a lot of snow falling, guaranteed to be one of the best tasting foods ever ate, turkey or not! Can instantly develop a deep affection for the aroma of burned toast that will last for decades! Second, in an individual casserole dish, line the bottom with toasted bread. Top with diced left over turkey well coated with sauce Parisienne: Chardonnay, turkey stock, shallots, mushrooms, bouquet garni, reduced, added to blond roux, thinned with hot milk, combined with heavy cream, enriched with egg yolks, finished with lemon juice, S&P, and soft butter. Eat with more Chardonnay and a good friend of the opposite sex.
  11. Since the idea of egg sandwiches seems to be so popular and since I have a way to make them I like, I'll share: two pieces of toasted sliced bread 1 USDA Grade A Large egg 1 t butter salt In a Teflon skillet, gently melt and spread the butter. Beat the egg, add the salt, and pour into the skillet. Let the egg spread to cover the flat bottom of the skillet. As the egg starts to set, using a light touch with a dinner fork, fold each of four sides to make a 'packet', a square or rectangle, to fit the toast. For more detail, regard the egg as a circle and consider centered in the circle a square or rectangle that will fit the toast. Then fold the circle on each of the four sides of the rectangle. To make a fold, have the skillet handle in one hand and the fork in the other, lift the skillet to make the egg nearly weightless for a fraction of a second, and, during that weightless interval, make the fold. With all four folds done, flip the egg to cook the other side. If have some moisture inside the square packet and have the packet nicely sealed, then the packet can expand to over twice its original volume. Slide onto toast and eat.
  12. project

    Shrimp Stock

    Enough, enough! Enough teasing! It's CRUEL, SO, cruel! I have a five pound frozen block of shrimp, headless, about 16 to the pound, shell on, raw, in the freezer; you regale me with fantastic images of awesome flavors from shrimp stock; and then -- cruel, so CRUEL -- you DON'T tell me how to make shrimp stock! Gee, my shrimp cooking just goes back to my parents where they took a big pot of boiling water, tossed in pickling spice and vinegar, cooked the shrimp, and then discarded the stock! So, two big, HUGE questions: (1) How to cook the shrimp and get a stock from the cooking? (2) What to do with the resulting shrimp and stock? Cream? I like cream! I have two one quart boxes of heavy cream in the refrigerator; they are old, but a dairy store is not far away. Also, have plenty of milk and butter. Chardonnay? I have big bottles of the stuff, available to add to stock, if helpful. Have lots of yellow globe onions, some fresh chives in the herb garden, lots of fresh garlic, lots of dried herbs, can get some carrots, celery, shallots, etc. But I'm lacking information! It's sad, really sad: Dinner tonight was two cold pieces of cod fish breaded and deep fried -- a WEEK ago! -- with spicy cocktail sauce, when I could have had something terrific with shrimp, shrimp stock, heavy cream, chives, etc. I even have some Meursault I could wash it all down with! Or beer. How could you be SO CRUEL!!!!????? HELP! Save a poor, suffering eG reader! If I were to improvise, then I might: Let the shrimp thaw. Peel the shrimp. Set the shrimp aside in the refrigerator. Put the shells and legs in a pot, add shallots, garlic, thyme (my herb garden has plenty), a bay leaf, some dried parsley, liquid from some canned sliced mushrooms, cover with Chardonnay, simmer, strain, and call the result a stock. Then, gently poach the shrimp in the stock and set aside. Reduce the stock, combine with white roux to make a shrimp stock 'volute', add hot milk, whip, add egg yolks and heavy cream, test for salt and pepper, add soft butter, warm the shrimp in microwave, pour over the sauce, sit down to a good movie with the Meursault and a pretty woman? For proportions, I have an old recipe I can post. Is this what I'm supposed to do?
  13. Well, here on Earth, likely at least a few billion years before the Sun becomes a red giant and evaporates the Earth.
  14. project

    Broccoli Caesar

    emilyr, You are at least partially correct! When I wrote about peeling broccoli stems, the ones I had had very irregular cross-sections and were not nearly 'convex' (explanation below). So, these stems were difficult to peel, and after peeling very little was left. However, the broccoli stems I used last night had cross-sections that were nearly oval and quite accurately convex. Thus those stems could be peeled by starting at one end and taking off long strips much like peeling a banana. The result was a little more edible broccoli. Peeling was a lot of work, and I sliced and ate the results, and they were okay. So, some broccoli stems have cross-sections close enough to convex to be used, and others do not. Note: 'Convex' is from some fields of mathematics. In space a set of points is 'convex' if for any two points x and y in the set the line between points x and y is also in that set. An egg is convex but half of an empty egg shell is not. For many applications, e.g., cooking, we can assume that the convex set includes its surface ('boundary'). In this case, a standard result -- an important 'separation theorem' -- is that any such convex set can be obtained by using planes to cut away points not in the set. There is a proof, e.g., in W. Fleming's 'Functions of Several Variables'. In cooking, a knife or vegetable peeler can act as such a plane to remove points not wanted! That is, in cooking peeling usually results in a convex result and works better starting with a convex object. Or using a knife or vegetable peeler to peel an object that is not nearly convex can result in a lot of peelings and a small result.
  15. Hot enough to make water boil off: Browning, and a good way to do it with 'fond' creation, etc. Not that hot: Dumb!
  16. My grocery now has big heads of fresh broccoli. Basically I like broccoli after it is fixed up with enough butter, garlic, Hollandaise sauce, etc., but now wanted to try it with basically a vinaigrette. But, with a vinaigrette, can borrow from traditional Caesar salad ingredients and get more flavor. Then can borrow more from Caesar salad and add croutons and grated hard Italian cheese and do still better? Yes! It's good! Good way to eat broccoli. So, I took two heads of fresh broccoli, cut off and separated the 'flower' parts, peeled and sliced some of the stalks, and added to a 2 quart pot. The pot was about 3/4ths full. I added about 1/2 C water, covered, placed over high heat, waited until steam came out of the pot, turned heat to low, and got the croutons and cheese ready. So, I steamed the broccoli maybe only 90 seconds once I turned the heat to low. Should basically just get the broccoli nicely hot. If cook much more than that, then will have limp, soggy, mushy broccoli. Drained the broccoli, dumped into a serving dish, topped with salt and pepper, vinaigrette, croutons, and grated cheese. For the cheese, I used an Italian Pecorino Romano, but Parmigiano Reggiano might be a little better. I couldn't make the stalks good and will omit them the next time: If don't peel the stalks thoroughly, then get some stringy inedible parts. If do peel, or trim, the stalks thoroughly, then don't get much, and what do get needs more cooking than the flowers. Ideas for more? The key is just the vinaigrette, and that is: 1 USDA Grade A Large egg boiled 10 seconds (at own risk!) 1 T Worcestershire sauce 1/3 C red wine vinegar 1 1/2 T finely minced garlic 3 T prepared Dijon mustard 1 t dried basil 1 t dried oregano 2 T dried parsley 1/2 t salt pepper 1 C olive oil One 2.0 ounce can flat anchovies packed in oil, minced, with the oil Combine all but last two ingredients. Whip. Add last two ingredients slowly with whipping.
  17. dougal, Now, now, looks like I'll have to explain it to you! You, see, don't you see, that it isn't just 'salt'! Instead, it's status, prestige, style, being in the peer group of people 'who know the difference and appreciate it' enough to pay MUCH more for flakes of genuine sea salt gathered ONLY from the west coast of Scotland and ONLY in January ONLY by maidens and ONLY using 100% all natural hand hewn buckets to dip the seawater, all because the very special people who appreciate the best of the best can tell the difference! Of COURSE they can tell the difference and do not NEED a carefully constructed double blind experiment to tell! It's not about NaCl! For me, I just buy the most popular US brand of iodized table salt and use it exclusively and heavily, but that's a deep dark secret I'd never share with any of my highly sophisticated friends! But I did want to explain!
  18. project

    Hush Puppies

    Okay, kept working on hush puppies. Kept it simple, kept working on a simple recipe, and took it to what seems about as far as it will go. I regard the effort on this simple approach as done. Below I describe what I concluded and have in my notes the next time I want hush puppies. Since the recipe is simple, there is no buttermilk, bacon fat, scallion, baking soda, beer, etc. All these clearly have promise but need more study than I have done so far. The good news: (1) it's simple and (2) there's a LOT of flavor. The bad news: Mostly have to mix up a batch of the dough (batter), cook it all, and eat it all, right away. The dough and cooked hush puppies do not keep well even overnight. Good news about my notes: They are explicit. The measurements were all carefully done and 'level'. Ingredients: 1 T baking powder 1 t salt 1 T Cayenne pepper (e.g., Tone's from Sam's Club) 1/2 C all purpose flour 1 C yellow corn meal 1 C yellow corn meal 2 USDA Grade A Large eggs 1/2 C whole milk 1/2 C whole milk 1/4 C whole milk (if needed) 12 ounces of finely diced yellow globe onion 1 1/2 quarts or more cooking oil for deep frying butter Steps: In 2 quart stainless steel bowl, add 1 T baking powder 1 t salt 1 T Cayenne pepper With back of a spoon, crush lumps. With wire whip, thoroughly mix. Add 1/2 C all purpose flour With wire whip, thoroughly mix. Add 1 C yellow corn meal With wire whip, thoroughly mix. Add 1 C yellow corn meal With wire whip, thoroughly mix. In 300 ml Pyrex bowl (or something similar), add 2 USDA Grade A Large eggs Beat eggs. To eggs, add 1/2 C whole milk and mix. Add egg mixture to dry ingredients and mix with wire whip. Add 1/2 C whole milk and mix thoroughly with wire whip. If dough is too dry to hold together, add some or all of 1/4 C whole milk and mix with wire whip. Add 12 ounces of finely diced yellow globe onion. Mix by cutting down and into the dough with a large, solid cooking spoon and folding. In a 300 ml Pyrex bowl, put a few T of cold oil. Get deep fryer ready. Position deep fat thermometer in the oil. Heat oil to 360 F. During the cooking, try to keep the oil temperature between 350 and 360 F. For one hush puppy, dip 1/4 C Foley stainless steel measuring cup or equivalent in the cold oil to give a thin coating of oil on the metal and, with the large cooking spoon, pack dough to a level 1/4 C or a little less. With fingers low and outside the pot of oil and out of the way of any hot oil splash, invert the 1/4 C bowl over the oil and tap with the spoon to release dough. Cook up to 6 hush puppies at once for 3 minutes or a little more. Remove cooked hush puppies from oil using a slotted cooking spoon. Drain hush puppies on white cotton towel folded to four layers. Lightly salt. Each hush puppy will be nicely brown and crispy on the outside with some aroma of fried onions and like corn bread with onion and Cayenne pepper flavor on the inside. To eat one hush puppy, slice in half and apply to cut surface a thin slice of butter. They are full of flavor and filling. Notes: Dip the 1/4 C stainless steel measuring cup in COLD oil. If use hot oil, then the dough will cook on, stick to, and coat the measuring cup. Then after just a few hush puppies, will have to clean the measuring cup. The 1/4 C measuring cup makes hush puppies of about the right size or a little too large. Curiously but pleasantly, even with the roughly cylindrical 1/4 C measure, the shape of the hush puppies is a good approximation to a sphere. Do not want them bigger; 1/3 C of the dough per hush puppy is TOO MUCH. There is a BIG problem with salt: The dough DOES need salt, and 1 T (that I tried) of salt DOES taste good but DOES very much pull water from the onion and soon makes the dough too wet and makes left over hush puppies soggy. But, as I also tried, no salt in the dough makes the flavor TOO FLAT. Salting on the outside helps but is not enough. So in the recipe above, the 1 t of salt in the dough is a compromise -- enough salt to help the flavor but not so much as to pull water from the onions rapidly. Still, even with just the 1 t of salt in the dough, if let dough rest in refrigerator overnight, then it will be nearly too wet and loose to use. For dough stored in the refrigerator overnight, having the dough fully cold when dropped into the hot oil can help the dough be more stiff and, thus, maybe still usable. Basically the next day, the dough and any cooked hush puppies will be too wet. So, have to mix the dough, cook the hush puppies, and eat them all quickly. About as good as can be expected from such a simple dish. The huge amount of onion is not excessive. If thoroughly mix the Cayenne pepper, then it is not too strong.
  19. project

    Hush Puppies

    So this is the first hush puppy thread! For the uninitiated, e.g., people who concentrate on Escoffier, 'hush puppies' are roughly convex hunks, a little smaller than a golf ball, of corn meal, much like corn bread, with onion and other flavors, deep fried, great with butter, and often served with fried seafood. I remember pigging out on hush puppies with scallops in Maryland and with whatever as a child in Jacksonville. Now, to recapitulate those good times of the past, I seek more hush puppies! My first effort is essentially: 1 C yellow corn meal 1/4 C all purpose flour 1 T baking powder 1/2 t salt 1/2 t Cayenne pepper powder 2/3 C chopped yellow onion 1/2 C milk 1 large egg water as necessary to make appropriate viscosity Recipe is 'robust' -- variations also work. Mix first five ingredients. Add onion and mix. Beat egg, add milk, and mix. Add to dry ingredients and mix. Add water if necessary to give a very thick batter or a very wet dough. Get the cold beer ready, if it is not already! So, don't have to make a special trip for buttermilk! Cooks from Tennessee not expected to wear shoes! To cook, get deep fryer ready at about 350 F. Dip a soup spoon in the hot oil. With a second soup spoon, get a big glob of the dough/batter, and transfer to the oiled spoon. Transfer the glob to the hot oil. Repeat. Cook for about 3 minutes. Drain. Serve with butter: Slice in half. Top with a slice of butter. Eat. Follow with fried seafood, beer, and another hush puppy. Better recipes? For recipes that call for buttermilk, baking soda, and baking powder, any easy way also to use just whole milk?
  20. project

    Straining Oil

    I strain through a wire mesh strainer lined with two layers of men's white handkerchiefs. Then I wash the handkerchiefs in the washing machine. If wash the handkerchiefs promptly, then they get nicely clean easily; if wait to wash, then they can easily become rancid with an odor that is difficult to wash out. The handkerchiefs may have some chunks of browned breading. If so, then shake those out before heading for the washing machine. My Maytag doesn't do well washing away those chunks.
  21. Caesar salad but willing to back down to just Romaine lettuce with mustard vinaigrette. But willing to add some of: cold, cooked meat -- chicken, tuna, pepperoni hard cooked eggs artichoke hearts marinated in vinaigrette hearts of palm chickpeas tomato chunks of blue cheese
  22. Chad, That's better content. You wrote: "Ideally, the blade should taper to about .02'/.5mm measured a quarter of an inch behind the cutting edge, a measurement first put forth by John Juranitch's 'Razor Edge Book of Sharpening' and, if I remember correctly, confirmed by John Verhoeven in his Experiments in Knife Sharpening 2004, an excellent read, by the way." and I wrote: "on the sharp edge from the handle to the tip the thickness descends 0.0394", 0.0286", 0.0208"" so on thickness my $7.50 knife seems to be on the way to "ideally" thin! Thanks for the remark on the NSF plastic handle: To me the handle seems fine, and I don't let it constrain me to just one hand position. Thanks for the references: Good references -- for support of points or for more information -- are one of the key features of good technical writing, or usually good writing on any subject. Of course, unlike essentially all editors in publishing houses of popular books, I regard all fiction, especially that from Chaucer through Milton, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Dickens, and Henry James, as writing that should be left as irrelevant down to toxic on the scrap heap of history from the ascent of man! In grades 9-12, only one year of way too elementary physics and four years of brain-dead English literature: If in revenge I can ruin a day, or even an hour, for at least one English major at a publishing house, it will make my day! Topics such as "isothermal transfer curves, carbide distribution in martensitic stainless steel or the trigonometry of sharpening" are fine and possibly helpful if the writer will just: (1) define the terms, (2) explain what the terms mean, (3) say why the topics are useful for the subject, (4) use the topics and the terms to add information the reader can use. Readers are correct to regard undefined technical terms as unacceptable obstacles in the text, and some people use undefined technical terms apparently intentionally to intimidate readers. Undefined terminology is not 'advanced' or 'difficult' but just silly as in speaking gibberish; the main difficulty is not the subject but just the missing definitions. Even when all terms are defined and described well, a subject can still be difficult, just conceptually. In this case, a writer can warn the reader and put the more difficult material in a separate subsection or in an appendix. These are just standard means of good writing on technical subjects, but of course don't learn these things in English literature classes worshiping Shakespeare! Trigonometry should be acceptable: It's just a standard high school subject. In a book of 70,000 words just on kitchen knives emphasizing high quality, some material on metallurgy should be not only acceptable but appropriate and even necessary. Your point about a too thin edge on a too soft steel will result in the edge bending over is correct: My father explained that to me when I was about 9 years old, and I saw the effect when I did such sharpening on a sickle. As he also explained to me, a crude but somewhat effective correction to straighten or remove the bent edge is to draw the edge lightly over a block of soft wood as if trying to slice the wood. The effect I saw with a sickle was visible without magnification; no doubt with hard kitchen knife steel the effect could be the same but on a smaller scale and needing magnification to see. My father didn't pay much attention to sharpening kitchen knives, but he had done plenty of sharpening of tools for cutting metal and wood. Thanks for the metal hardness data; that's a start. I mentioned in my posts, that's some of the data I've long known was important for knives but have not seen from knife manufacturers. So, generally a harder steel can take a sharper edge and hold it longer. But to get most of the potential, have to sharpen the edge to something quite smooth and without small groves on the sharpened faces and small teeth on the final edge. Yes, I have a low power hand held microscope that clearly shows such lines and teeth from sharpening with my hard, splined sharpening steel. So, to do better sharpening, I will need something better than that sharpening steel. You have mentioned abrasive paper used in auto body work -- good. Point: If have a knife with 'high performance' steel (i.e., especially hard steel that can take and hold a very sharp edge), then need to pay a lot of attention to means of sharpening. I knew that and that's why in my post http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showto...ndpost&p=128582 I was trying to engineer an appropriate sharpening jig. My intention was to use diamond abrasive from, maybe, the company DMT. So, even if I do find a French chef's knife with, say, a blade 10", 12", of 14" inches long, with a lot of good technical information on the steel and a blade as thin as you mention, then there is not much sense in my buying the knife unless I can also make comparable progress on sharpening tools. Know of any such chef's knives? If so, then I'll return to the issue of sharpening jigs. Does your book have a table that stays what sharpening materials -- your sandpaper suggestions, sandstone, tungsten carbide, diamond, etc. -- are needed for what metal hardness values? Or does the sandpaper suggestion work well on any steel knives? It does appear that knives that can take and hold especially sharp edges are so far mostly from Japan and not really in the shape or style of a French chef's knife that I prefer for nearly all my use in my kitchen. So, again it looks like I'm stuck: It's still tough to get French chef's knives with thin blades of 'high performance' steel and good data on it and comparable progress on sharpening tools. So, for now it's still a $7.50 knife, a sharpening steel, and maybe a sharpening stone. So, what's wrong with my $7.50 knife? That it is a "Yugo", has a low "level of performance", or doesn't have "wondrous" steel? No: These qualitative, pejorative remarks are meaningless. What matters is just what the knife can DO and, for that, what it IS in the sense of engineering. If the steel is too soft to take and hold a sharp edge, then that really IS meaningful. E.g., you gave, "Your knives are probably in the 48-52HRC range." GOOD! That's MEANINGFUL. That's numerical, factual, engineering data and not just qualitative adjectives. It is really "bitterly painful" to use engineering data instead of qualitative adjectives? If you do a second edition, then maybe get one of those $7.50 knives, discover what the steel actually is, report the amounts of iron, carbon, chromium, etc., have the hardness measured, and evaluate the ability of the knife to take and hold a sharp edge. Indeed, get such data for all the knives you discuss and THEN compare the knives in terms of this data and THEN draw qualitative, pejorative, or laudatory, conclusions. Just a suggestion from one candidate reader still interested in kitchen knives. Carbon in steel is expensive? Hmm .... Never mind. A used Yugo can last longer than most US marriages and, thus, longer than the 'useful life' of wedding gifts! I'll try to quit seeming like the uncouth, uninvited interloper at this Victorian garden party and quit asking for information on such inappropriate subjects as metallurgy!
  23. Chad, I'm just judging from your posts in this thread here on eG: E.g., I said, "Net, from your posts, ...." I'm not judging the whole book. I do have a sore spot -- "sore" as in RAW and TORQUED -- about books on cooking that look like they were written for readers of romance novels and edited by editors of romance novels and that lack solid, technical information crucial to actual use in the real world and not just to romantic novel fantasy. I don't know that your book is close to the romance novel crowd, but I have plenty of examples of books in cooking from other authors. As I illustrated, your posts in this thread here on eG -- including your sample from your book -- are long on adjectives and qualitative remarks (that I conclude don't mean much to someone selecting a real knife for real work in a real kitchen) and short on numerical measures that would be meaningful; so, your posts here and your book excerpt, assuming that you have representative samples, make your book look like it is for the qualitative, adjective, fantasy, fiction crowd and not for the quantitative, technical, practical, real world crowd. As I mentioned in my first post in this thread, a big reason I gave up on Wustof and Henckels is that they wouldn't give me solid, detailed information on metal hardness, appropriate sharpening tools, practical edge angles, or ability to take an edge or hold an edge. As I mentioned, they seem to want to sell their knives just as wedding gifts, and only a TINY fraction of brides will care about metal hardness, edge angles, or steel, stone, tungsten carbide, ceramic, or diamond sharpening tools and appropriate jigs for them. I DO CARE! Since my $7.50 knife seems to have nothing seriously wrong with it and since Wustof and Henckels won't tell me why their knives are better, I'll stay with $7.50 and save the money. For me, people selling chef's knives for more than $7.50 each will have to get solid, technical, and quantitative on just why their products are better, or I'm going to call their stuff good for wedding gifts only and not for my use in my kitchen. If they have some solid reasons their products are better, then they should trot out those reasons. If they don't trot out such reasons, then I have to assume that they have no such reasons. "It's 'wondrous', but you wouldn't want to know why" won't get my time, effort, or money. I got your attention; I hope MUCH more to get the attention of your editor and publisher. Maybe I'll also get the attention of Wustof and Henckels: "Listen up, guys: As it stands today, a world-class, 10", French chef's knife is worth, retail, tops, quantity two, $7.50 each. If you want to charge more, then you MUST give some solid reasons why your product is better. I know; I know; you sell your knives in a fancy wooden box that costs more than $7.50; sadly, when I tried to use your box to slice a tomato, all I got was a big mess. I didn't think it was going to work, but with your reputation I gave that beautiful box every chance I could!" Another big pet peeve: From doing Google searches starting with this thread, I saw lots of knives for sale. I never once saw any information sufficient even to get me to consider a purchase. E.g., for product pictures, all I ever saw were tiny, gratuitous, uninformative, nearly useless photographs that looked like they were 'optimized' for transmission at about 15 characters per second. Can't see the product: Even if grab the GIF or JPG file and magnify it in, say, Microsoft PhotoDraw, once get some reasonable size, say, 1000 x 1000 pixels, the picture just gets fuzzy. The photographs are just TOO DARNED SMALL to have useful information. Not once did I see dimensions of the knife that would let me estimate the room for my knuckles. Heck, their pictures would have been MUCH more useful if they had simply included a grade school plastic ruler as an indication of scale. Yup: Selling to people who don't care what the size of the knife is. Right: Sell to that collection of people ready to spend over $100 on a knife and don't care what they are getting. Got a list of those people? Hmm ...! I think I can get a gross margin of 92.5%! Knife makers and retailers, listen up: You're not even TRYING to sell your stuff. Thanks for your offer, but let's compromise and save on effort and postage: Say where I went wrong on the $7.50 knife I mentioned. Or, and especially if you have not seen that knife, just say where I MIGHT have gone wrong realizing that it's in the style of a French chef's knife, has a 10" blade, is stainless, is not cut from a flat sheet and has the blade thicknesses I got and reported from my Dad's 70 year old micrometer, and seems to take and hold an edge as well as my Sabatier carbon steel knife. Where even COULD I have gone wrong? Or, where, in solid respects, even COULD a $100 or $200 10" stainless steel chef's knife be significantly better? E.g., my 10" carbon steel Sabatier that I bought decades ago is not really better in any significant sense that I can see, and today such a knife might cost over $100. Yup, my $7.50 knife has a white plastic handle: Since that handle works fine, I regard it as a feature, not a flaw. I don't conclude that a handle of black plastic attached with chrome plated, solid brass rivets or a handle of rosewood is better. I just used my $7.50 knife: I buy eggs in shrink wrapped packages of 36, USDA Grade A Large. I just made an omelet of six eggs and 2 T of butter. Yup, in a skillet about 10" in diameter -- maybe someday I'll write on eG just how to do that. Started with a new package of eggs. Once I open a package, I like to repackage the eggs in 1 gallon freezer bags, and for this I have to cut the egg cartons. So, I used my $7.50 knife. It worked fine. The thin blade helped me be sure not to slice or crush a raw egg! To me, I have good news: I've got for $7.50 what is apparently about the best 10" chef's knife on the planet, good enough that it's harder than pulling wild bull elephant teeth to get meaningful information that there is something better. So, my frustration is not the usually difficult one of getting a good product at a good price (I've already got two!) but just reading about products that are "wondrous" with no meaningful indication of WHY they are better. "3000 words"? Heck, just on this thread, just trying to get some solid information on where I went wrong for $7.50, I've already written 4455 words!
  24. Chad, Here, in your book excerpt and posts I don't see much information actually useful for a cook who needs to select a knife. Disclosure: My financial and economic interests are in some original mathematics and some associated advanced computer software, and I have no financial or economic interest in knives or other products for food or cooking. My only interest here is general 'contribution to the quality of information in cooking and civilization'! It seems to me that you have relied heavily on adjectives that are nearly useless for helping a cook who needs to select a knife. E.g., some of the adjectives I found in your posts #1, #29, #36, #38, #39, #42, #43 are: "ahead, best, better, big, cheap, excellent, fine, garbage, good, great, hard, hardened, harder, high, low, optimal, quality, screaming, sharp, sharper, simple, super, superior, ubersteel, wondrous". I have long suspected that editors at publishers of popular books are infatuated with adjectives: "Vera Pure suddenly felt warm, unambiguous, compelling, autonomous tingling sensations totally new to her; could this be her long sought, highly coveted pinnacle of 'true passion' about which she had read on so many past, uninterrupted, indistinguishable, quiet, solitary, dark and lonely nights?". My view is that adjectives are nearly meaningless! To support this claim, I add detail: E.g., your posts include "very inexpensive and very light" "all of those wondrous virtues you've read about" "is indeed better" "a quality knife" "a superior blade" "great steel" "modern ubersteel" "optimal hardness" "harder steel" "light weight, hard steel and screaming sharp edges" "very fine" "a quality knife" "harder and sharper" "great steel" "good and truly excellent" "pretty good steel" "They're good knives" "better than" "a high quality chef's knife" "excellent" "one of the best around" and from these (and the context of each) I see no useful information because it is not at all clear what constitutes "best", "better", "excellent", "fine", "good", "great", "hard", "harder", "high", "inexpensive", "light", "optimal", "quality", "screaming", "sharp", "sharper", "superior", "ubersteel", or "wondrous". I have to doubt that you mean that "ubersteel" is from Alberich or Loge in R. Wagner's 'Der Ring des Nibelungen', maybe with "high-alloy" content of unobtanium, but you have not been more specific. In cooking we gave up saying that an oven was warm, hot, or "screaming" and adopted the practice of reporting temperature in degrees F or C. That's crucial progress in the rise of civilization out of superstition, witchcraft, and the depths of degradation! In particular, if a blade is "hard", then what would be meaningful would be to say how hard it as measured on one or several standard scales of hardness, e.g., Rockwell, and then for comparison to list the hardness of some other blades on the same scales with some indications of what sharpening means are effective at various values of hardness. In my experience, if we do not have some actual numerical measures, then usually even for a start we will have next to nothing. Similarly: If we are going to consider ability of a steel to take an edge or hold an edge, then we should have numerical measures. Similarly, to say that a knife is "light" or "heavy", we should have its weight and, for comparison, the weights candidate alternative knives. E.g., for the chef's knife, two for $15, blade length about 10", I described in my post #25, I just weighed one of the knives and got 6.6 ounces. From the Sabatier chef's knife I mentioned in that post, also with a blade length of about 10", the weight is 8.7 ounces. With more such examples we can get more information on what actually constitutes a "light" or "heavy" 10" chef's knife. I also noted your: "they are, in fact, made by punching a knife shape out of a flat sheet of steel and putting a simple edge on it." Well, you did get me, at least for a few days! In my post #25 to this thread I did say: "Yup, they look like they were cut from sheet stock, have no bolsters, no rivets, and have white plastic handles." So, to be more sure about the "sheet", I went to my basement, found a cardboard box from the firm of Strong, Carlisle, and Hammond in Cleveland, OH mailed to my father likely in the 1930s, with a micrometer manufactured by Brown and Sharpe in Providence, RI. Using that micrometer, I got out the chef's knife I described in my post #25 and took six measurements of metal thickness: A. Dull edge of blade near handle -- 0.1009". B. Dull edge of blade half way from handle to tip -- 0.0823". C. Dull edge of blade about 1/4" from the tip -- 0.0394". D. Sharp edge of blade near handle -- 0.0286". E. Sharp edge of blade about half way from handle to tip -- 0.0208". F. Sharp edge of blade about 1/4" from tip -- 0.0166". where for the sharp edges the thickness was from the unsharpened part of the blade but still close to the edge. So, was this knife "out of a flat sheet of steel"? From my measurements, clearly not! That is, on the dull edge from the handle to the tip the thickness descends 0.1009", 0.0823", 0.0394"; on the sharp edge from the handle to the tip the thickness descends 0.0394", 0.0286", 0.0208", and clearly the thickness descends from the dull edge to the sharp edge. "Flat" (i.e., each side a plane and the two planes parallel) it's not! Ah, before concluding a flat sheet of steel, nothing like taking some numerical measurements! Do these thickness measurements mean that the blade was made by "stock removal" or "forging"? Maybe not: It may be possible to get this blade just by rolling flat sheet steel through cylindrical rollers that are closer together on one edge than on the other and, then, cutting the blades carefully selecting the orientation on the resulting sheet! Maybe! If so, then that would be a fourth manufacturing technique in addition to forging, stock removal, and cutting from flat sheets! I noticed your discussion of how sharp some knives were new from the factory, but I can't conclude that this is very meaningful because in use too soon such a knife will need sharpening so that after a few sharpenings the sharpness obtained at the factory will be only an example of how sharp it is possible to get the knife with special equipment and otherwise nearly irrelevant. Similarly for your mention of a "simple edge". I also noticed your: "If you compare a $100 forged knife from the gourmet boutique to the stamped knife you picked up at the grocery store in an emergency, forged knives do come out way ahead." Now, I definitely prefer a "gourmet boutique" for the MUCH prettier sales clerks, about 5' 5", 115 pounds, 22" waist, very long blond or auburn hair, cute face, etc., even if they don't know which edge of the knife to use, but I still have to ask, for the knife, just the knife itself, "Way ahead" in what respect? I also noticed your: "As I said before, if you compare a $100 forged knife with a cheap grocery store knife, the forged knife wins." "Wins" in what respect? I also noticed your: "That $100 range is the real breaking point between good and truly excellent." "Good" and "truly excellent" in what respects? You have just unsubstantiated, qualitative remarks that can be taken as pejorative or laudatory personal opinions but otherwise nearly meaningless. You're not giving us solid, meaningful, supported, useful information. If you have some solid information -- hopefully numerical measures -- on some significant differences for some of these knives, then trot it out. I mentioned a 10" chef's knife, two for $15, and that is clearly MUCH less than your $100 or so. Since what I mentioned was really $7.50 per knife and from Sam's Club, essentially a "grocery store", sounds like I got a "cheapo" knife. Yet, I can find nothing seriously wrong with it: For the metal "quality", as far as I can tell, it takes an edge and holds it just the same as the carbon steel Sabatier I mentioned. Of course, I don't have the hardness on the Rockwell or other scales of the $7.50 knife, the Sabatier, the Henckels and Wustof knives I looked at before I gave up on $200 knives, or most of the knives in your posts, and without such figures about the best any of us can do on metal "quality" is just to sharpen a knife, see how sharp it appears to be, use it, and see how well it seems to hold an edge. Somewhere in my collected papers I may have signed last statements from pounds and pounds of onions, carrots, celery, tomatoes, BBQed picnic pork shoulder, corned beef, oranges, grapefruit, lemons, etc. saying that the knife is quite sharp. Sure: For some additional solid information, I'm willing to get it; I'm wanting to get it; I'm waiting to get it. But I ain't got it yet. Then, so far I'm left with a lot of meaningless adjectives -- maybe I'll send them to Vera Pure or her editor for their next efforts in romance novels -- and otherwise essentially no useful information that you have found a 10" chef's knife better in any significant sense than the $7.50 item I mentioned. Net, from your posts, I am getting essentially no useful information on knife selection beyond what I picked up two for $15. Hey, guys: Looks like you can get a 10", stainless steel chef's knife as useful as any for $7.50 each! "Why pay more?". Why read the book? Why buy the book? Save your time, money, and effort! Save some trees! Hooray for the Internet and eG! Now, someone, please, write a book on kitchen knives that lets me get a genuinely more effective chef's knife than I already have for $7.50. "More effective" how? E.g. with appropriate sharpening tools, takes a sharper edge and holds it longer, and where the metal hardness is documented, appropriate sharpening tools are listed, and we have some meaningful numerical measurements on how sharp we can get an edge and how long it lasts. Now I realize that Vera Pure's favorite romance novel editor might not think this way, but such thinking is MUCH easier for someone making mirepoix out of two pounds of each of carrots, celery, yellow globe onions, and leeks!
  25. On my question "Question: In the back of the refrigerator I have a bottle of Caesar style vinaigrette I made last summer. I wonder: Is it standard food chemistry that the vinegar has necessarily stopped bacteria growth so that that batch is still safe to eat?" in my post #37 here with http://forums.egullet.org/index.php?showto...dpost&p=1583156 for an answer, some simple Google searching indicates that there are lots of bacteria and even at least one worm that can live in vinegar, even mostly pure vinegar. So, that the usual vinegar in vinaigrette will keep the mixture sterile seems hopeless. So, the answer to my question has to be, "No, standard food chemistry does not say that the vinegar in vinaigrette will keep the mixture sterile." So, if make vinaigrette, then likely should keep it refrigerated and use it quickly.
×
×
  • Create New...