KennethT

Everything looks great. How does the tempura hold up as take away?

Teochew style bak kut teh made with super rich pork stock. Here's the chilled pork stock: It supports the weight of the ladle!

Yes. They're soaked for about 20 min, drained then chopped and pounded a bit, then fried until crunchy.

If this is the "not bad", what's the spectacular view? 😁 Seriously, thanks for bringing us a long once again. I always look forward to your trips, especially as I'm getting ready to go on a SCUBA trip in the summer!

Singapore night, brought to you by: dried shrimp, it's the best shrimp in town! Black pepper shrimp with belacan bok choi.

That makes sense. I think the reason people talk about them here so much is that they're the predominant hot chile in the US and the easiest and most reliable to be able to find in grocery stores here. Here in NY, our hot chile selection is pretty abysmal. Practically every store has jalapenos, most probably will have serranos as well as habaneros. After that, probabilities go way down. Next in line are probably the goat horn chillies or Anaheims. Large red chillies like you find in Thailand and SE Asia are much less common - I can only find them in a few stores and lately not very reliably which is a shame because I use them the most out of everything.

A kilo of chillies is a LOT of chillies!!! Personally, unless you're making a lot of Mexican food, I'm not a huge fan of jalapenos myself. For either Asian or Indian foods I much prefer other varieties. But that's not really your question.... While many say that you can freeze chillies with no issues, I think it depends on how you plan to use them. If you plan to mash them up into a paste, then yes, freezing is just fine. If you want to chop them to add to a fresh tomato salsa and you want the crispness they can provide, then no, freezing isn't so good as when they defrost they'll be mushy. I've kept other chillies in the refrigerator's crisper drawer for maybe 3 weeks, but by the end, they're really starting to look sad - slightly shriveled and wrinkly and definitely not as crisp as when fresh.

Neither my wife nor I like beans either (other than peanuts), but we love dishes made with black beans. As @liuzhou said, they don't taste like beans at all. If/when you cook with them, if you give them a rough chop before adding them in, they really get lost in the dish - although their texture is very un-bean like. For some reason, I always associate their aroma with dark chocolate.

Made a new batch of sambal over the weekend, now with even more dried shrimp. It's a lot better - I have to change the recipe in RecipEgullet. Singapore style sambal grouper.

Have you googled the title of this thread? This comes up pretty high in the rankings and is quite informative - and seems to answer most of your questions: https://www.industrialpackaging.com/blog/what-is-modified-atmosphere-packaging

I have to make more things like this. I've been locked in a box that the only thing I use mahi mahi for is the Sichuan twice cooked fish. Is there any kind of starch coating or marinade on the fish? By pan grilled, do you mean a grill pan?

Do you buy the duck breast presmoked and reheat or did you smoke it? What are the common smoking, er combustibles, in your area?

I think the juiceless lime syndrome has less to do with how to cut them, but how to store them and choose them in the first place. Lately, I store my limes in a wicker basket that I keep in the wine fridge. The wine fridge has actually become my new root cellar. I store all onions/shallots/garlic/potatoes/ginger in there and they all last so much longer than they do either on the counter or in the regular refrigerator. I've gotten pretty good at picking decent limes, and now in the wine fridge, they will still be really juicy 3 weeks after I purchase them. The lime in the shot above is probably about 3 weeks old (plus however long it was in transit to NY and sitting in the store).

This is the common method of cutting limes in SE Asia. I think it originated because they limes they have there have seeds, so when you cut this way, you basically leave the core with the seeds so it's easier to squeeze. But for the normal US limes, I find cutting it this way actually yields more juice, not less, than when cut in wedges or across the equator. I'm not a big fan of using those citrus presses - I find it too easy to squeeze too hard and you get some bitterness from the pith into the juice. Plus, nowadays, I'm usually cutting limes for people to add themselves, so I definitely wouldn't want a half a lime like you get when you cut across the equator.

Javanese chicken soup - soto ayam.

Fantastic. Is that bottle of Chilean Syrah empty or is it a white syrah?

Many years ago (while most of us were getting our circulators as used Polyscience on Ebay) I made a circulator like this - magnetic stirrer with a heating element controlled by a PID controller and a type T silicone encapsulated thermocouple. You need a rack that sits above the stirrer bar to make sure there's no interference. As @gfweb says, nowadays, there's no reason to go to such lengths with decent quality inexpensive circulators available.

The problem with vacuum sealing is the direct bag contact with some foods like fresh fruits and leafy greens. Using a nitrogen flush, you can use a rigid container that will not contact or squeeze the contents but also get rid of excess oxygen.

but even if duck fat is liquid at room temp, it is a thick liquid - much more viscous than a veg oil is at the same temp. While duck fat does have some unsaturated fat, there is quite a bit of saturated fat as well. I'd find it hard to believe (or it would be ridiculously expensive) if that can held duck fat from wild ducks.

We need a drool button... x2 for the blaufrankisch!

Sichuan twice cooked mahi mahi. And cucumber salad.

Great looking rendang... nice and dry! I've been itching to make rendang too... I have some goat meat in the freezer with rendang written all over it but I need a lot of time and I'm still on the hunt for some either fresh or frozen turmeric leaves, which would be a common ingredient in a traditional North Sumatran rendang. According to William Wongso, the premier Indonesian food authority, rendang originated there. He has spent years trying to bring Indonesian food outside of Indonesia and was very proud that in 2011, rendang was named the World's Most Delicious Food in a CNN article.

ha! To tell the truth, I'd do the same thing assuming I had a decent mayo in the house. But, considering I don't really eat mayo on a regular basis, I'd have to make it from scratch because I wouldn't want to buy a big jar just for that!

How else would you make it, other than making the mayo from scratch?

huh. I always thought that we were told not to eat raw cookie dough because of the raw eggs in there. I would never have imagined that the flour would be the danger!