IndyRob
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Posts posted by IndyRob
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What astounds me is their value for money. Not long ago I was routinely buying a dozen large eggs for under $1. That gives me very nearly a week of breakfasts for ONE DOLLAR.
Their nutritional value, along with the number of completely different ways they can be economically used are simply mind boggling for the money.
And the super/mega marts move A LOT of eggs. The only time I've seena an obvious freshness problem was when I bought eggs from a drugstore.
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You'd think it couldn't get worse, right?
KFC says it has been discussing this step with The Food Network as a partner in the Department of Health's "Responsibility Deal" as part of its aim to give customers greater choice. -
When they came for the Colonel, I was silent - because I was not a Colonel.
When they eliminated the Kentucky, I was silent - I was not a Kentuckian.
When they eliminated the Fried, I was again silent - probably 'cause, well, I myself, was probably fried.
When they eliminated the Chicken, thus becoming merely KFC, I was silent - perhaps because I was a chicken.
But now "Finger Lickin' Good?" is gone?
'Finger lickin' good' is very good but it's very food-centric," says Martin Shuker, chief executive of KFC UK and Ireland.Oh, God forbid that KFC should be food-centric.
"'So Good' is still about the food but it also allows us to more effectively communicate the breadth of different things about the brand, such as our people and our community," adds Shuker. -
I think Kat Tanaka Okopnik has the answer that is relevant today. In my area we have no KK stores anymore. They're sold in gas station convenience stores. Our local Mom & Pop shop blows them away. Plus, our local supermarkets have stepped up their in-house donut game significantly.
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My wife bought an Accusharp. I was a little skeptical at first, but it works fine and fits in well with my 'good enough' nature. I will probably buy more sharpeners and knives over my lifetime than many, but won't spend more overall.
It gives me a good enough edge that I can get a satisfyingly clean slashes in my baguettes with a chef's knife - which I find to be a tougher test than tomatoes or meat.
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Coca Cola is definitely different from the 1880's version. Although it has changed subtely. Wikipedia has a purported orgininal formulation. An 'open source' project called Open Cola was created but has apparently not faired well.
One of the key steps in Open Cola seemed to be emulsifying the citrus oils - which seemed to require a modified power tool.
But the marketing perspective is more fascinating to me. Remember New Coke? It came out on top in blind taste tests against both the current Coke and Pepsi, but was a huge bomb commercially.
This is an important lesson. When you call something by a known name you create an expectation. When it varies from that, it's always a failure.
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I'm not sure what the DVR has to do with it. Did you fast forward the whole episode?
I, like many people, don't watch TV in real time much. I just let the DVR collect the shows I want to watch and I watch them as I please - fast forwarding through commercials. That's why I think product placement will become the norm.
I liked the challenge. I can relate to cooking in a Target store far more than I can to some Farm in Napa Valley. The only thing I didn't really like was the lighting. Target is definitely NOT a great dining atmosphere.
But it's entertainment. It's a game. It's not bocuse d'or.
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Wow. This is one crappy episode. I've defended product placement before, sort of. This is just rediculous though! I mean the whole thing is a Target commercial. It's beyond silly and pisses me off. I'm not sure I want to finish watching honestly.
While I was watching this episode, I imagined that I'd find this very post. But I enjoyed this challenge very much.
IIRC, Hubert Keller won a Top Chef: Masters challenge cooking in a dormroom bathtub. At the time, he probably would've killed for an entire Target store to work with.
A good measure of a cook is to limit them to what's in a house at a given time. An entire Target store should produce some good stuff.
I was a bit disappointed by what they came up with as a whole. But it was a fair test.
Regarding the product placement/Target commercial, I'd say get used to it. Thanks to my DVR, I watch Top Chef prectically sans commercials. And of course in Indy we have a traditional automobile race that Target (and formerly K Mart) is a big part of. Target will sponsor a couple of cars but will pay for much of it by their 'associate sponsors' (Energizer Batteries for instance)
But interestingly, no one really played up any of the products. And in fact, it could be argued that one of those products sent someone home.
[EDIT]And henceforth muppets should narrate all quickfires.
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A few years ago we gutted and completely remodeled our kitchen. It got us a lot more cabinet space, but that was soon filled up and we wound up with crowded unmanageamle cabinets again. But recently I realized there was a simple solution to much of this. More shelves.
Usually, cabinets come with two or three shelves. And as we were finsihing the kitchen by installing the shelves, we tended to space them equadistantly and figured out what went where later.
Just adding one or two shelves and optimizing their spacing based on what was stored on each shelf made a huge difference. It has eliminated a lot of stacking of bowls and whatnot. Once I get around to the cabinet with all the sheet pans, cookie sheets, pizza pans, etc., we may have as many as 15 shelves in one base cabinet.
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There didn't seem to be a "Burritos - The Topic" discussion, so I am posting here, though I think I might know the answer.
I made homemade burritos last night. I had extra large "burrito-sized" flour tortillas purchased from the grocery store. When I placed the hot filling on the room-temperature tortilla and began folding it, the tortilla split and cracked open.
Why did the tortilla split?
My uneducated guess is that perhaps I should have heated the tortilla first before topping it with the hot filling and attempting to fold it. The tortilla is thin, of course, and that may have contributed to the splitting but I think the difference in temperatures of the filling versus the tortilla may be the culprit.
Anyone?
I've just gotten off a 'cheese rollup' kick. At Taco Bell this is a tortilla that, for 79 cents, they put some cheese on a tortilla and roll up in a wrap and nuke briefly. It's pretty unremarkable except the tortilla gets nicely steamed. So I had been doing this with with a variety of fillings.
For example, put a tortilla on a piece of wax paper, spread with some chili, sprinkle some cheese on top and roll up jelly roll style and tightly roll in the wax paper. Microwave for 25-40 seconds. In the rare case I get a tear, it's usually buried inside. Not exactly Haute Tex-Mex, but a good way to get from hungry to burrito in 3 minutes. Pan fry in butter for a different character.
For just the tortilla you could try putting it between two pieces of wax paper (perhaps with some weight on top - may a silicone pot cover) and microwave for 5-10 seconds.
Or just look for fresher tortillas. The ones I buy (from GFS for those in the midwest) are quite fresh and flexible.
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I think the problem would be salt leaching into the water during cooking. This wouyld be fine if the manufacture could get everyone to use the same volume of water, but that's probably not going to happen. So people boiling a pound of pasta in a gallon of water would likely find the pasta undersalted; people boiling it in a quart of water would likely find it inedible.
This is just a guess ... there may be no problem at all and it's just done as it is out of tradition.
I'm putting my money on this. Salt in a solution tends to want to equalize. We are instructed to use plenty of water to cook the pasta. If we were to salt the pasta and cook in plain water, salt would be drawn out into the water. So when we salt the water, the opposite is happening - which is what we want.
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... but I wish they would concentrate on the food and cooking techniques more than the drama and back-biting comments.
Well, in a sense it's not that sort of show. But I agree with you. But I've been thinking about all the footage they haven't used and hope that someone may come along and re-cut it and put a clever narrative over it. Maybe Bourdain and Ripert watching preparations and arguing about whether the dish is going to work or not.
Or maybe Fabio and Stefan ("I'm a tellinGah you NOW, my friend, thees eez goinGah to be sheet!").
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We've found, in practice, that often Wikipedia articles contain quite a bit of information that is not culinary in nature, and so they can be of limited value. For instance, given that our project has a culinary focus, the WikiGullet article on crayfish rightly ignores large sections of information that can be found in the Wikipedia article, such as raising crayfish as pets, the fossil record of crayfish and the etymology of the name.
This makes sense, but it leads me in deeper to some of the thoughts that assailed me. In this case, only the first couple of paragraphs from the Food section appear to have been used. I agree with excluding the sections you mentioned, but a lot more relevant info was excluded.
I understand that we don't need to be knitpicking individual articles at this point (there's the Discussion tab for that), but it would seem to me to make more sense to dump the whole article in and let it get edited down.
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Wow, the amount of questions flooding my mind is daunting. I'll just pick one....
It looks like the content is published under the Creative Commons license which I think, generally speaking, means that Wikipedia content could be used. That might be a good way to seed articles. Should this be encouraged? Discouraged?
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And yes, I realize I could buy KA in bulk from KA, at a cheaper per pound price, but that means coming up with more money at one time, rather than spreading it out over several purchases. It may not seem like a big deal to you, but it truly is to me.
For what it's worth, buying KA flour from KA is no great bargain. I can get a 5-lb. bag of their A/P flour for $3.29 at Wegmans (down from $3.99 in recent months). Even when buying the 25-lb. bag online, you're still paying the equivalent of $4.10 for every five pounds of flour, and that excludes shipping.
I'm buying high gluten flour in 25lb bags rom GFS for $8.99 which works out to about $1.80/5 pounds. I can get KA there as well for just a little more, but it's AP which I don't use much of.
But I'm definitely eating far less meat nowadays. We used to have ribeyes 2-3 times a week. Now they're really only for semi-special occasions. And it sems that those cheap cuts aren't so cheap as people learn how to cook them.
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They have actually posted the recipe on the BravoTV website. Though through initial first glance, the recipes are as bad as the show with product placement (1st step mentions a KitchenAid mixer).
Just watched Rick Moonen's video recreating the dish. No crust on the bottom, no pea salt, I don't think the herbs were fried. I'd never even thought to question these videos before.
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BTW, if ribs "fall off the bone" they're overcooked.
I'm not sure if I would agree with this. Although I think 'comes cleanly off the bone' is a better rib experience, if I'm at a table, I wouldn't have any problem with 'falling off the bone'. It is certainly much better than still clinging to the bone.
I went to a place in Illinois that Bon Appetit chose as their best ribs in America one year. The were the best I'd ever had, but I didn't really care for the much vaunted 'bark'. To me, it's blackened shoe leather. But under that was wonderfully pink, tender, flavorful porky goodness.
So I think if you can get the job done without drying the outside for so long, it could be a good thing.
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I was playing with this a few months ago and got the best results by wrapping a strip of bacon around the dog in a spiral fashion, securing the ends with toothpicks and throwing in the oven. I don't remember the time or temp, but you're really just cooking the bacon to the stage you want. The hot dog can stand some over cooking (as evidenced by grill charred dogs, and deep fried 'rippers' that people seem to like).
One thing I found was that using a hot dog that's good by itself results in overkill when you add the strong bacon flavor/texture. The bland, whitish dogs used in Detroit under mounds of Greek Coney sauce would probably be good.
From there it's just looking for the right flavors which led me close to condimentia.
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It's probably necessary to include Arby's in the discussion. Also, many steakhouses offer a sliced-steak sandwich.
Alas, my challenger for Arby's is nearly extinct. Rax is down to a single restaurant in a few midwestern states. And to add insult to injury two closed Rax Roast Beef stores I knew of were razed and replaced with Arbys. The Rax roast beef product is very similar to Arby's. But while still sliced paper thin like Arby's, it somehow retains it's juicyness.
In the unlimited division, while I favor the French Dip, I feel as though there's still room for a better new idea. It may involve mushrooms, and gruyere and a baguette. A restaurant near me had a very good steak and cheese sandwich, but it's really a one-off preparation where the bread played a large role - perhaps more than the beef.
Pastrami would be right up there, but I agree that it doesn't really fit the spirit of 'beef sandwich' any more than a salami sandwich. These kind of transcend the 'beef' label.
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I know this post will cause some backlash but here goes.
Bad rabbit. Bad, bad rabbit.
I think in a previous thread I got freaked out about this and did some googling and found a similar statistic. While I don't intend to repeat this practice after that, I've often used room temp infused garlic oils after six months or more (although always heated to frying temps when used), I don't think it's a necessarily bad thing to put the problem into perspective.
Given the fact that I'm still alive, and that I hear more about salmonella problems than botulism, I can't help but feeling that there might be a Douglas Baldwin-esque (in reference to his conviction that lower cooking temps can be proven safe) admonition lurking in the wings.
I am making no claims, just acknowledging a data point that seems oddly out of place.
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Hot cocoa mix is worth doing. You can customize your own mix.
I once tried premixing dry ingredients for pizza dough. That turned out to be pretty pointless. Now I just make bigger batches and freeze some dough balls.
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(And I too can confirm from recent travels to Northern Italy that risotto isn’t always or doesn’t have to be creamy/soupy).
And here I was about to point out that Tom mentioned that he's never been south of Rome and that he needed to get down there. Well, it was a good hypothesis while it lasted.
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I was shocked to see Tre go, as it seemed to me that risotto made to a different standard was less of a crime than undercooked pasta.
I wasn't suprised. Mike knew his pasta was bad, but that was the only real problem. If Tre's risotto texture was all that was wrong, I would agree that it was a lesser sin. But there was the veg problem as well.
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Aren't bananas a sort of miracle food even when slushified? The base offers several different directions to pursue.
World's Simplest Recipes
in Cooking
Posted
While cooking some fettucine, saute some bite sized pieces pieces of shrimp in (preferably herbed) oil. Remove from pan and pour in some cream, and a spoonful of pesto. Mix and reduce slightly. Combine pasta, shrimp and sauce.
If on Top Chef, add some lemon juice and garnish with chopped fresh basil.