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edwardsboi

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Everything posted by edwardsboi

  1. Where have you seen Kapoor's Taste book at that price? It sounds interesting and something I'd like to see, but I haven't even seen it in bookstores, not even at full retail.
  2. I've got a chinese cleaver, but its not as sharp as my chef knives. Are chinese cleavers not supposed to be that sharp? And, if they are supposed to be sharper, how do you sharpen them? Is it the same method that you'd use to sharpen a chef's knife?
  3. How do you pick out the best shellfish? What are you looking for? For me, it doesn't seem to matter how many shellfish there are or how busy it is because I tend to pick out the worst one possible. I've been buying Dungenese crabs from the same place over the past month or so, always trying to pick out the liveliest and heavy for its size crab. But, one week, the crabs will be sweet and the next week they won't be sweet. Its just so random.
  4. So, what if I used filtered or bottled water, with no chlorine in it, and then added some salt to it. Could the lobster survive in that environment?
  5. What's the difference between damp and wet, and why is one better than the other?
  6. Why not? Lobsters and shellfish live in water, right? So, I've never understood why we couldn't store them in water.
  7. Given its range, are there any cases where you don't want to use the thermapen to measure the temp? When I'm frying something to a certain temp, I could use it to test the temp or will it break?
  8. When I went into Mitsuwa, I noticed that some of their bags of rice bore a sticker that said they were 'new rice'. I've bought bags of rice from other asian supermarkets, and don't recall seeing a similar sticker. Given the name, I'm assuming new rice is newer and fresher than regular rice. What's the difference, if any, in taste and texture? Are you supposed to cook them differently? And, if new rice is better and on sale, should I stock up on these bags? Or, by the time I eat the later bags, they'll no longer be new?
  9. As a newcomer to Japanese cooking, I really don't have a reference point about how to judge all the different misos I can find at an asian supermarket in America. What am I looking for that separates a good miso from a mediocre miso? When I'm about to buy one, without first tasting it, is there anything I should look for in trying to determine the quality of the miso?
  10. I know that with meat, you should take it out of the fridge and let it sit out enough so the meat's temperature will be at room temp before you cook it. But, do you do that for other types of food? Eggs? Fish? When do you want to not let something sit out to warm it up, and cook it while its still cold?
  11. I usually go there to eat the salt ramen in their food court, but I want to start beginning to cook Japanese food as well as use Japanese ingredients in non-Japanese dishes. So I want to build a basic pantry of Japanese ingredients of mirin, ponzu, miso but I was floored by all the different choices. Does anybody have any recommendations for which brand of mirin to buy at Mitsuwa, which miso(I'm looking for the medium yellow one), etc...
  12. With all the different types of sherry out there, which one are you supposed to use when a recipe refers to sherry? Fino? Olorosso? I've got my eye on a couple of a kabocha squash recipes from Sundays at Luques by Susan Goin. And, since sherry is fortified, how long can you use it after you open the bottle? I don't really drink, and would mostly use the sherry for these recipes. I know you're supposed to get a sherry from the Jerez region, but are there any specific brands from that region you'd recommend. I've got access to BevMo, Costco, Trader Joe's, etc...
  13. edwardsboi

    Brussels Sprouts

    What do you look for when you buy brussels sprouts? I went to the farmer's market, and theirs were all dried out on the bottom and woody. Is that normal, or should you be looking at something else to determine freshness?
  14. Is there any difference between Italian chestnuts and the chestnuts sold in a local Korean market, other than price? With the Italian chestnuts, I see them being sold for $4, but the Koreans sell their chestnuts for only $1.50.
  15. The New Yorker isn't a newspaper, but I was still shocked to hear that they laid off Gael Greene because they felt it cost too much to employ her. I'm not her biggest fanboi, but she had been there so long that she had became an institution, no matter how anachronistic she may have been.
  16. What's the difference between the green skin kabochas and orange skin kabochas other than the color of course? What's the difference in flavor profiles, if any? So what program did you use to translate it?
  17. What happened to Rosengarten? How did he go from "Taste" and Dean & Deluca to something so cheesy? Did something happen to him on a personal level where it derailed a once promising career and banish him into doing informercials?
  18. That's funny you mention that as that's what partly drove me to ask this question in the first place. I drank some Mexican Coke in a glass bottle, and it tasted different than one from a can. (Coke for the Mexican market uses sugar cane, while Coke for America uses corn syrup). But, I was just curious how much of the difference in taste was because of the sugar cane or the glass bottle, if any.
  19. So, which Kennedy book would you recommend to a beginner but a beginner with access to a supermercado? And, conversely, which Bayless book should a beginner use?
  20. If you could only read and use one cookbook on mexican cooking, which author would you choose and why? How would you characterize the difference between these two cookbook authors?
  21. edwardsboi

    plantains

    I'm trying to cook a dish that includes plantains, so I left them outside for about a week to get the plantains black as that's supposed to be a sign that the plantains are sweet. But, now, there's all this mold all over the skin which I'm assuming is not safe to eat. When a recipe talks about waiting till the skin of the plantain is black, how black are they supposed to get? Was I supposed to store them in the fridge while I waited for it to turn black?
  22. Other than aesthetics, is there any difference in taste for the same soda that's bottled in a can vs. soda that's bottled in those glass bottles?
  23. I don't know if Le Creuset would honor its lifetime guarantee if we're talking about irregular pieces which might be an issue since that bump might get chipped off over time.
  24. I have this same problem, and nobody at the farmers market can help either. Their response is that all their Kabochas are good. When I did a little research, I found that the key to Kabocha is storage at the correct temperature and humidity for a few weeks. That's even more important than how long it was on the stem. But, do the stores or farmers do that or are we supposed to do that? And, just by looking at them, how can you tell if that's been done? And, with some of the Kabochas I'm seeing, they've have these rough orange bumps on their skin? Is that a good sign, or bad sign? And, if you're eating the skin, do you want to avoid those areas.
  25. Where did this idea about the differences in aluminum between All-Clad's Master Chef 2 and Stainless Steel originate which seems to be the basis for the argument that one line is superior to the other? I can't seem to find any such numbers to prove that one way or the other, and I'm assuming those numbers are proprietary. And, when I go to the All-Clad website, the diagrams, assuming they're correct, doesn't seem to prove that either. If we don't know those numbers, then it seems all such discussions are a moot point.
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