dtremit

(Man, I must have been really bored yesterday.)

Not required, just available. It's the Joule that has no buttons. Oven is available for preorder today at $599, ships September 28th: https://www.engadget.com/anova-precision-oven-pre-order-143007732.html I think it's a reasonable price but high enough that I'll wait to see reviews. (Plus Anova products tend to go on sale, eventually.)

I have not opened the package yet, but I was surprised to find Costco had bags of peeled hazelnuts when we were there last. They appear to be Turkish.

Also, what appears to be a close relative is sold by Whirlpool in Hong Kong: https://www.whirlpool.com.hk/english/productinfo/cooking/steam-oven Obviously the interface is different, but the user manual might be useful (English starts halfway through): https://www.whirlpool.com.hk/media/wysiwyg/Downloads/CS2320_user_manual_p.pdf

Incidentally, if we're really lucky, someone will import their 58L combi oven: http://www.timzuu.com/l_cp/showproduct.php?lang=cn&id=29 Somewhere in between the XL and XXL Miele in size, and seems to be $1000 in China...

I'm going to preface everything below with a big caveat -- it is not meant as criticism — just context. There is a huge and growing industry of companies trying to bridge the gap between Chinese manufacturers and Western consumers. They typically do not design products in house — they find manufacturers in China that are already making a product, and put together a marketing strategy to make sales of that product successful in the West. Sometimes they will customize it slightly, other times not. The best example? Instant Pot. You might have noticed that a lot of other, off-brand pressure cookers on the market look a lot like the first couple of Instant Pot models. That's because...they're the same pressure cookers. What Instant Pot did was to customize the controls for a North American audience, and build a support ecosystem around it. I think their later models show a lot more customization (but I think I came across the OEM of one of their air fryers as I was looking into the steam oven). There is a huge wholesale / white label business in China that will produce, label, package, and ship just about anything you could possibly want to sell. The wholesale market in Yiwu is made up of a series of eight story buildings that stretch for seven kilometers. (If you want to go down a rabbit hole, this video is a really interesting watch -- but it might ruin souvenir shopping for you.) In any case — if you look at the F. Blumlein website, there's a note at the bottom that it's "Powered by SainStore." If you go to SainStore.com, you'll see that they The name rang a bell for me, because they're the same people behind SainSmart, which markets a lot of stuff to hobby electronics enthusiasts. (They sell a lot of mini CNC routers.) F.Blumlein, SainStore, and SainSmart all have the same mailing address in Lenexa, Kansas. I suspected I could track down the F Blumlein oven in China, and I did -- at least, on a Chinese-market ecommerce site, marketed under the Timzuu brand, and marketed by the Dongguan Tianzhuo Electric Co, Ltd. under the Timzuu brand: https://detail.1688.com/offer/585827555804.html For what it's worth, it lists for more in China -- about $562 US. They also make this amazing "European Style" variant (looks like the same oven inside): They also have a website for the Timzuu brand that's a heck of a lot more impressive than the F.Blumlein one. TL;DR version: what I think that means is: either the manufacturer or marketer of the Timzuu oven wanted to sell the thing in the US, contracted with SainStore to create a US brand to market it under, and F.Blumlein was born. I suspect SainStore is responsible for the slightly questionable manual and the plagiarized recipes; I also suspect they have almost nothing to do with the design and manufacturing of the oven. Will F.Blumlein be around in five years? Your guess is as good as mine; they could be the next Instant Pot, or they could be lost to history. But I suspect the manufacturer will still be around, and that someone will be able to sell you one of their ovens.

I had a similar unexpected bounty from Costco recently -- one that is partially my fault, but I think I've done my best to try to fix it. I placed an online order from them for a bunch of stuff, and the day it was (finally) due to arrive, I couldn't find it in the mail room. Checked the UPS tracking, and it was listed as delivered, signed for by "David" in "Shipping and Receiving." We don't have a shipping and receiving department, and no one in our building office has a name anything close to David, so I assumed it was lost and gone forever. Called Costco, waited on hold for half an hour, they looked it up, and re-shipped what they could and refunded the rest. Well, wouldn't you know it, two days later the original box was delivered. I guess it wasn't misdelivered, but rather mis-scanned when something else was delivered. Oops. Called Costco again, this time waited over an hour on hold, to try to get them to cancel the re-shipment. When I finally got through to someone she couldn't make heads or tails of what I was asking about, and kept insisting that the order couldn't be edited after it was shipped. At this point I was late for a meeting and just gave up. So we have a lot of pecans, sea salt, and coffee now, among other things. I decided I'm just not going to ask them for the refund for the executive membership that I lost money on last year and call it even. Their mail order has been an utter disaster since before the pandemic, so I don't feel too bad.

And @MokaPot we did that already! Did a huge pantry cleanout last year. Weirdly we had very few redundant things in cans specifically -- lots in jars, boxes, and bags. My biggest concern with cans is not realizing I have something. I suppose I will have to inventory as @weinoo suggests...

@JoNorvelleWalker Technically no! 🤣 We're in a loft, so only one bedroom, and it's probably legally a studio since the walls don't go up to the ceiling. The shallow shelves on the staircase would be perfect -- my parents have something similar, though smaller. Unfortunately we are very short on wall space generally -- so no place to put something like that here. In the longer term we're going to be renovating our pantry and could integrate a pullout of some kind, but for now I think I need something that can go on a pantry or cabinet shelf. I am sort of intrigued by this variation on the shallow shelves: Sort of like @ElsieD's option on steroids. We don't have space next to our fridge like that, but I might be able to find someplace else for it -- behind a bookshelf or something.

Curious if anyone here has experience with racks for storing cans -- of the "tin" variety. It doesn't look like it's anything that's been discussed here before. We are overrun with the damn things and I can't make them fit well in our pantry -- the shelves are deep and the solutions I'm coming up with either waste a lot of space, or make it necessary to remove huge bins of cans and sort through them. We live in an apartment with no basement or garage, so everything needs to stay in or near the kitchen. Looking around I see two basic types of racks on the market -- simple gravity-fed shelves like these: and fancy "FIFO" racks like these: The latter seem better designed in a lot of ways -- but they also seem designed for people who have a huge quantity of a small variety of cans. (Also a lot of this is discussed on sites with...very different perspectives on society. I am not looking to equip a bunker, thank you.) With a very few exceptions, we have a small number of a huge variety of things. I'd thought about getting a FIFO rack for the few things we do stockpile in quantity (tomatoes and beans), but those come in different size cans (28oz/#2.5 vs 15oz/#30x). The other stuff we have is probably 80% smaller cans and 20% in larger #2.5 cans. So I feel like we'd end up needing two FIFO racks for the tomatoes and beans, and two non-FIFO for the other stuff... All of this is a long winded way of saying...does anyone have a solution that works? 😀

I am not an expert in such things, but my impression is that there's almost as much difference between some forms of low German and "Hochdeutsch" as there is between German and Dutch. My grandfather spoke a bit of Plattdeutsch (admittedly, learned secondhand in the US from his parents) and it was pretty hard to comprehend.

Make a pavlova and put them (well, their contents) on top! This is cause for celebration!

I think a lot of stores also just don't have enough stock room space to handle the higher volume of sales in this moment. Even with panic shopping behind us, people are buying more groceries than they were before, since they're eating more at home. And they're buying different things, making it harder for stores to predict what people will want. You know they're going to buy extra hand sanitizer, but it's harder to guess that they'll be eating more boxed mac and cheese, or when that trend will stop. There's also been a trend for grocery stores to keep less in back stock -- Whole Foods in particular switched to a "just in time" model a few years ago that resulted in a lot of stock issues when they first implemented it. @BeeZee, I think it makes a lot of sense for the dry goods to be out first -- those are things that are normally delivered less frequently, since they don't spoil. Produce has to come in every day anyway, so it's easier for them to adjust the orders.

I get the sense that a lot of the shortages now are rather fleeting -- nothing is truly unavailable, but everyone is understaffed and so things don't get restocked as frequently as they should be.

Thank you for this suggestion, by the way -- this method made quick work of a half bushel of peaches we recently procured. As long as one has enough pans, one can shuttle them in and out of the CSO faster than they can be cooled, peeled and sliced. The only issue I had was with the last tray that was half full -- those ended up being a little overdone. Will know to reduce the time for a partial tray next time. My sense was the batch I did on the "official" CSO pan -- the one with the ridges in the bottom -- was the most successful; the ones I did on a flat pan had a little ring of cooked peach where they made contact. Putting them on a rack would probably be ideal.

Strangest pandemic purchase to date -- we have a local restaurant that's transformed itself into a takeout + grocery operation. They're part of a small cluster of restaurants in the neighborhood run by the same group, one of which is a sort of hipster Jewish deli. So one of the pantry items when we ordered the other day was "pastrami fat" -- at $6 I couldn't resist trying it. "Use it like bacon fat," they said. Photo was of the top of a deli container. Turns out the deli container was a QUART. I was expecting, like, a half pint. Haven't had a chance to do anything with it yet, but probably will start with some breakfast potatoes. Other project has been dealing with a carton of peaches from the GA-based peach truck that popped up here recently. They really are quite tasty. Peeled and sliced them tonight after making a crostata last night; most will go in the freezer either as is or as a sort of jam I think.

I could have sworn she had a video with her visiting an artisanal palm sugar producer, but I can't find it. I might be conflating her coconut milk video and another video? HTK has been a fantastic resource for me for Thai cooking, though -- I can't recommend the channel enough. I have had tons of Thai cookbooks for years but it really took me being able to see the techniques (the curry paste is fried enough when it looks like this) to actually produce food I am happy with. I also like her segments on various home style Thai dishes and things that don't often make it out of Thailand. ETA, re @weinoo's haul -- we developed a love for Thai-style sriracha when visiting there a few years ago — and have found that we like Sriraja Panich better than any other brand, by a long, long shot. It has replaced Huy Fong entirely in our house (though I still keep their chili garlic and sambal around). Shark is very good in its own right, but isn't quite as craveable.

Bumping this ancient topic -- wondering if anyone has a preferred pectin/method for jam that will be frozen? We are about to acquire an absurd quantity of peaches, and in addition to freezing some in slices, I'd like to make some jam. It'll be a fairly small quantity and I figure it will be easier to freeze than can. I see there's a Ball pectin for no-cook freezer jams, but I also see a lot of freezer jam recipes that cook the pectin prior to adding it to the fruit.

I suspect this means they are getting very low on stock -- I bought mine from RC Willey and at the time they were happy to ship it out.

The white sauce could be toum: https://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2018/01/toum.html It has a kind of mayonnaise consistency, most of the time.

Worth keeping an eye out for the Knorr (or Maggi) caldo de pollo mentioned upthread, as well, which usually comes granulated (and in smaller, more manageable containers).

So true! We are really trying to minimize store trips, though -- and I was growing wary of repeatedly feeding my sourdough starter without baking anything. Most of our bread, of late, has come out of the trusty Zojirushi, which barely seems to produce any excess heat.

I have been craving corned beef hash for a couple of months now, but I've been afraid to pull the trigger on the canned stuff. I know I've had it plenty of times in restaurants and liked it, but somehow couldn't work up the courage. I think all your encouragement is helping!

I will have to give it a try on my next batch of dough. Finding something workable would be very welcome in these temperatures, to say the least! Sadly most of my collection of heavy steel or iron objects don't fit in the CSO, but for these purposes I can probably do a test loaf in a 7" skillet. I don't see why it wouldn't scale up. I *started* a boule on Super Steam yesterday but only left it in for 15 minutes but transferred it to a cast iron skillet in the Breville to finish. Didn't get a ton of oven spring but I think that was just the dough, I was experimenting with that too!

@JoNorvelleWalker - I think the boules I've had trouble with were closer to that 850g size. I really do wonder if there was some kind of production change at some point that altered how the top heating elements cycle. I have been meaning to see how far I can push the thing on the SuperSteam setting, where it only heats from below.