dtremit

@Yiannos I think the consensus is that the Anova oven will have full manual controls in addition to app functionality, but I defer that to the Anova thread which I haven't read in a while.

@Yiannos — yes, it appears to have been discontinued, though you might still find one somewhere. Amazon has a few from third party sellers but they're going for a higher price than we've seen recently ($310). That said, still cheaper than any of the alternatives. In addition to the F. Blumlein, you may want to look at the Anova Precision Oven thread — it's also bigger than the CSO, but at least solves the unknown manufacturer problem.

That is very similar to (if not identical to) the one I just replaced. Mine was working fine too, but the blade seemed to be getting kind of dull.

In many places, state COVID regulations actually prohibit cashiers from touching reusable bags — so they are probably just following those rules. (Personally I'm happy to bag my groceries most places; I do a better job! No jars on top of the bread, etc. Wegmans and Trader Joes seem to be the only consistent exceptions.)

As an aside, they used to load the molasses from the tank into train cars, and send them across the river to a distillery in Cambridge. When the Globe did its retrospective on the flood last year, I realized that I can see the train tracks they used from my window. (We live in a converted 1925 factory building.)

I also love them both (or better yet, one of the licorice varieties made with molasses), but I totally get why someone might not. (By contrast, my stepmother doesn't like the taste of butter. That, I don't get.)

It's possible that's true, though for Boston baked beans specifically, I find it kind of odd that none of the original ingredients survived. The closest thing to a spice in most Boston baked beans is mustard, and the beans tend to be New England native varieties. And pork and molasses were plentiful in Boston, which was a hub for rum distillation and pork packing (prior to prohibition and refrigeration, respectively). And there's never any grain or vegetables in the Boston dish. I did manage to find this article which quotes a culinary historian at Plimoth Plantation; she says that beans were common on ships, and that combinations of beans and pork were written about in England in the 14th century. (It also dispels the story I've always heard of baked beans being derived from Native American recipes using maple syrup). (Incidentally — @Katie Meadow — if you haven't ever made Boston baked beans from scratch, it's worth giving it a try sometime. When they're sweetened exclusively with molasses, they end up a lot less sweet, and you can adjust sweetness and liquid as desired. The acidity of the molasses makes them cook really slowly, but the result is a really lovely texture.) The other bean dishes I have seen explicitly called out as derived from Sephardic cuisine have a lot of complexity — I just saw a recipe for an Israeli-style hamin that looked amazing, with multiple kinds of bean, meat, eggs, and wheat berries. And Madrid's meat-packed cocido madrileño is usually acknowledged as having Jewish origins. (Ironically a lot of the dishes that survived in Spain ended up having tons of pork in them, as it was a way of making a show of Christianity after the Inquisition.) Either way, I can see myself cooking my way through a bunch of these now that the weather's cooler. As research, of course.

I am definitely in the camp of preferring a"well maintained original" — we are hoping to move in the next year or two, but when I look at homes that have been recently redone, I cringe at both the asking price and the completely awful work. I want the house with the new furnace and the ancient kitchen — that's the sign that it's been well looked after. (Plus I can live with it long enough to figure out what I really want.) That said, at least in our area, the renos seem to work. Anything that reads as "fresh" ends up in a bidding war, while houses with good bones but obviously old kitchens (or with missing features like central air — surprisingly uncommon here) sit on the market a bit longer and sell at or below asking price. (There is almost no new single family construction in the area, though, so that may skew things.) Given @Porthos details I'm guessing a surface refresh is exactly what's needed — you're not going to guess people's preferred paint color, but who wants to strip wallpaper? And new counters and cabinet fronts make the house work for a lot bigger pool of buyers than the ones who want (and can afford) to do renovations immediately.

@andiesenji @curls and @JoNorvelleWalker — I'm curious if any of you used your Ankarsrums to make things like cookies and cakes in addition to breads? These days I have a secondhand Bosch that I use for bread (and am happy with for that purpose) but the central shaft design makes it awkward for things like whipping egg whites. And I've heard a lot of people saying that the cookie paddles on the Bosch tend to break if you try to mix up a stiff cookie dough. The KitchenAid I killed making whole wheat sourdough is (hopefully) a new snap ring away from working again (I replaced the cracked transmission housing but I think I damaged the snap ring in the process). But if it doesn't end up working as desired after the repair, I'm hesitant to buy another — and it'd be nice to have one mixer for all stand mixer use cases.

Michael Solomonov has a recipe for amba in Israeli Soul — though he calls for ripe mango and doesn't ferment it, just cooks it down with spices/onion/garlic and adds lemon juice and salt at the end. Looking at those directions, it sounds like it would produce something very syrupy, which makes me a little suspicious. He also name drops Galil brand jarred amba, which they apparently sell at Goldie. (I think I had the sabich there — but it might have been some other sandwich with amba.) The best sabich I've personally had was in Detroit, from the bakery (Naba Brick Oven Bakery) that Marcus Samuelsson visited on his PBS show ("No Passport Required"). It happened to air just before I took a trip home. The Iraqi-style sabich there is served on a diamond-shaped bread called samoon which is thicker than pita but quite light — very pillowy. Closer to Turkish doner kebab bread than pita — and I think close in thickness to the Italian rolls @ambra posted above.

Thought I would come back and post what I came up with — ended up focusing on a lot of recipes from Ana Sortun’s cookbooks because my partner loves her restaurants so much. The main dish ended up being grilled sirloin tips with tomato and brown butter — the recipe called for skirt steak but I didn’t find it, and these looked excellent. Served with grill roasted peppers and grilled onions with sumac (and some store bought flatbreads). i also made some quick hummus; whipped feta with sweet and hot peppers; hot pepper labne; grilled halloumi; and some turnip pickles. I also made Michael Solomonov’s tomato bulgur from Israeli Soul, which was...ok. Thanks to everyone for the suggestions — it really helped!

No — you've got it right! 👍

One other thing that occurs to me — are you doing liquid on the bottom, then adding dry ingredients, and finally adding yeast on top? I know there are a few brands that do it the opposite way, and it seems to really make a difference.

Another recent datapoint — I have had a Breville Control Grip for about a year now and have been pretty happy with it. It's much more powerful and effective than the Braun it replaced -- though that one was about 30 years old, so not saying much! I bought it after seeing Pai from Hot Thai Kitchen use hers frequently to make curry paste; I figured if it could get through galangal it would probably be fine. The chopper bowl is about 750ml and I've found I use it quite a lot (which was kind of a surprise). The quality of the bundled accessories is also quite impressive -- the beaker and chopper are nice, heavy polycarbonate, with silicone in strategic places to keep them in place. The lid from the beaker nests onto the base to make a really good anti-slip base, and the chopper nests into the beaker for storage, as well. And excluding the parts with gears in them (the chopper lid and whisk adapter) everything can go in the dishwasher. Serious Eats had claimed in an earlier writeup that the Breville couldn't make mayo, but they seem to have retracted that claim in their latest testing. I am ashamed to admit I haven't tried it...not a big mayo guy.

I like removable cords if they're *standard* — any kind of IEC connector is fine — but would rather have a hardwired cord than some kind of custom cord. A hardwired cord is actually often easier to fix than a custom detachable one.

Tried to post this last night, but lost my post to the forum upgrade — oops! I've also had great luck with this recipe (I assume you're referring to this one). Sometimes I am lazy and just bake it all the way in the bread machine — the texture is not as nice as it is when you hand form the four-part loaf, but it's still a really nice sandwich and toasting bread. My partner likes it enough that he asked me to teach him how to make it in the bread machine, so he will make it on weeks when I'm busier than he is. One thing I was happy to discover is that the tangzhong can be made very easily in the microwave — I think I saw that in a Japanese youtube bread video. I just mix those ingredients in a Pyrex measuring cup, microwave for 30 seconds, stir, and give it another 30 seconds. Much less babysitting than stirring that tiny quantity in a saucepan or skillet, and once you get the right time it's the same every time. Plus I can even use the same Pyrex to melt the butter!

Your KBS looks very similar to the Cuisinart (CBK-100) I had before my current machine. Like, weirdly similar. Same bread pan design, same paddle design, very similar case design. Heck, per the manuals, they both apparently come with the same strange two-sided measuring spoon (which was long gone when I picked mine up second hand). I would wager the KBS is a further development of the same design. (The Cuisinart had fewer programs, and no nut dispenser.) The layout of the display is almost *exactly* the same as well -- numerical menu selection in the middle, three loaf sizes from left to right at the top, three crust colors from left to right at the bottom, and current baking phase along the sides. The manual for the Cuisinart might be helpful to you -- it's at least a lot easier to read! In any case — with that machine, I never had good luck with the recipes that came with it — and the key to not overbaking was the crust control ("color" on yours, I think?), not the keep warm cycle. "Color" seems to just be a slight adjustment in the bake time -- so if the loaf is getting overbaked on the default "medium," you can hit "color" twice to cycle to "light" and it'll bake it a little less. As an aside -- have you only made recipes from the recipe book that came with the machine, so far? If so, I would strongly recommend trying a solid loaf from a good cookbook or a website like KAF instead. You'd think the recipes in the manual for a given machine would be the closest to perfect, but I've found they're often really unreliable. I think it might be a different sort of translation issue — if the manual is translated from another language, you can bet the recipes were developed with different flour than we get here. The source I go back to most often for bread machine recipes is Beth Hensperger's The Bread Lover's Bread Machine Cookbook; pretty much everything I've tried from it is rock solid (and you can buy a used copy for <$10). But I am pretty sure I successfully made this recipe from KAF in my Cuisinart a couple of times -- so it could be a good benchmark. I also made this recipe a lot in that machine -- my partner grew up eating Health Nut bread and I was trying to come up with something with the same flavors. This is based on the KAF "100% Whole Wheat for the Bread Machine" but I tweaked it a fair amount. The below should be for a 1.5lb loaf: 300g lukewarm water 25g olive oil or vegetable oil 78g maple syrup 350g King Arthur White Whole Wheat Flour or Premium Whole Wheat Flour 50g rye flour 25g cornmeal 25g sunflower, sesame or flax seeds, or a combination 35g nuts 1.5 tablespoons vital wheat gluten 1 1/2 teaspoons salt 1 1/2 teaspoons instant yeast (I always use SAF Red) (I baked it on the wheat cycle, and just threw the nuts in at the beginning; they get broken up, but that's fine with me for a sandwich loaf.)

Having just repaired my Zojirushi, I think the mechanical design of the machines is responsible for that outcome. The two paddles aren't driven *quite* evenly. The paddle closest to the motor is driven directly by the motor; the second paddle is daisy-chained off the first paddle. Add in some (necessary) slippage in the belts, and I think there ends up being a strength and speed difference between the two.

I wish someone made a high-end, American-size rangetop similar to a typical Japanese cooktop: Burners and a broiler (for fish), no oven.

@CeeCee — for the skordalia I was thinking of something simple like this one — vegan, even. I'm assuming one could adjust the liquid to solid ratio to make it more pourable.

This is a feature, to remind you not to put it back in the fridge 🤣

This one from Bee House is so lovely, and holds a knife in the base in a way that I think would keep the smears to a minimum: Alas, from my research it seems it perfectly holds a West Coast stick of butter, and is slightly too short for an East Coast stick. (Edit: oops, realized this is the same one @robirdstx posted under a different name.)

You had said 8-10 per person -- I was just suggesting adding an approximate weight. Maybe that's in your ingredient list already, though? Littlenecks are about the smallest clam frequently found in the US, so you might end up with someone buying 8-10 huge clams per person and getting confused. Chowder clams are sometimes 200-250g each, though I don't think they get shipped to Cincy that much! I know it from UK cookbooks but haven't ever seen or heard it outside that context. (See also: courgette, aubergine, rocket)

Awesome, thanks! DeBragga will deliver to Boston, it seems, and obviously Great Alaska will as well. Sadly not so much for the other two. Fresh Direct has been saying for years they're planning to expand to Boston (I said that recently somewhere, maybe upthread). I really look forward to that. (My biggest disappointment has been Baldor -- there was a lot of press about them doing home delivery here, but every time I look at their website, nearly everything in their home delivery selection is sold out. I have no problem meeting their minimum dollar amount, but when e.g. 15 out of 16 of their tomato varieties are unavailable, it's hard to piece together an order.)

One possible note – if the type matters, you may want to be more specific than "mustard greens." We have a variety of mustard greens that's fairly common in southern US cooking, but it's very different from the kind (芥菜?) pictured in your recipe. It is leafier, with thin stems, and IME is stronger/sharper tasting than the common Chinese varieties. Looks like this: If you don't specify, I suspect that is what people will buy. On the other hand, I think it would still be good in that soup, just different. For the clams, you may want to specify the size in terms of how many per pound (I think that's ~6-10 for littlenecks?) as that's a common way of specifying size for seafood here. As an aside -- people may have good luck finding bitter melon at an Indian grocery in the US. For some of the pantry ingredients like black beans and doubanjiang, online ordering is easy. One other potential pitfall is soy sauce. Soy sauce is very easy to buy in American supermarkets, but the selection is heavily biased towards Japanese brands and varieties. In many cases, the only "Chinese" soy sauce is an awful fake soy sauce like La Choy. Also, the term "light soy sauce" is often used on reduced sodium Japanese-style soy sauce. I'm not sure exactly the best way to approach that -- besides saying "buy your soy sauce at a Chinese market." Couple other miscellaneous notes: The term "mange tout" is not used in the US at all. Snow peas and sugar snap peas are common and available all over. To be utterly unambiguous, you could say "snow pea pods." For the recipes that specify chiles -- are they supposed to be fresh or dried? For either, specifying a similar Mexican chile variety is helpful. The most common "neutral" cooking oil in the US is canola by a long shot. If you say "like canola" people will use the right stuff. I think there is just not that much commercial duck production in the US -- I think traditionally it was more likely to be hunted than farmed, and now is raised mainly as a gourmet ingredient for fancy French dishes in relatively small numbers. In my local supermarkets it is very expensive -- 4-5x the price of chicken, and on par with the better cuts of beef. But it is not exactly hard to find -- most supermarkets I think will have some kind of duck somewhere.