Dakki

I assume it means the lid can be used as a grill? Lodge sells a dutch oven with a lid that can be used as a skillet.

Depends on a few factors. I have a few things I eat almost daily like green salad and frijoles charros. Obviously I need to keep the ingredients at hand so when I run out (or close) these go on the list. I've been trying my hand at baking recently so a lot of times I'll look up a recipe for whatever I want to do this time (cheesecake, apple pie, whatever), check against my pantry and list the ingredients missing. These often include stuff I don't use a lot of (milk, eggs) and freshness is important for baking so I usually buy the smallest packages available. Sometimes I'll see a lovely ingredient on sale at the supermarket and build meals around that. This is especially true of meats and seafood but also sometimes of the more expensive vegetables. Recent stuff I've gotten this way: sweetbreads, red snapper, artichokes.

Thanks for the information xxchef. Do you think if you fed a lean-type pig your original diet (that produced ridiculous amts of fat in the lard-type) you could have achieved the same results as you did putting the lard-type on a diet? 3" wide bacon would be the greatest thing ever.

Ahahahahaha how the heck did I miss this before? You just made my day, Chris. Anyway, to the pig experts out there, should a pig's diet be determined by the breed? What about climate? The age the pig will be taken to slaughter? The best cut of meat sought (eg, am I raising for bacon, ham, chops)? I bet there's books and pamphlets on small-scale pig farming from before pork went lean with a lot of the info we seek. I have a British one for goats somewhere around here...

A cousin of mine once had a go at fattening pigs on city-collected garbage as part of a recycling/landfill relief thing. Mom claims the pork chops tasted like a dumpster smells.

"Suck it up" is great advice for customers, and a well-behaved child is a far better dining companion than a badly-behaved adult. That said I think "adults-only" restaurants (that sounds weird, how about "family-unfriendly"? Anyone got something better?) might find a niche with people who want to be guaranteed dinner without wailing babies and bored, cranky kids throwing bread rolls at each other. 'Sup, Dad. I didn't know you had an account here.

True, that. It's also true not all "carbon steels" (which I think to most people simply means non-"stainless") are the same. They range from something like 1060 (which is simply iron alloyed with ~0.60% carbon by weight) to [started on a pointless and needlessly confusing exposition here but got tired of reading my own writing] some really complex alloys. The ferrous alloy naming game is kind of funny because all steel has carbon, but not all iron + carbon alloys are steel, "stainless steel" can rust and some non-stainless actually has better corrosion resistance (always depending on the particular alloy and the particular corrosive agent, temperature, etc) than stainless, and so on. I could definitely see how a "carbon steel" knife made by one manufacturer might oxidize an onion while another doesn't. No idea who uses what in their "carbon steel" kitchen knives, but it would be interesting to find out! ScoopKW, if you aren't married to the idea of a single knife to rule them all, you could always get exactly what you want in carbon and a backup in a "fancy" stainless or even one of those ceramic jobs for the stuff that oxidizes with your main knife?

I've heard VG-1 tends to chip but that could just be the Internet talking.

(Not an expert by any means but here's my 2c) I've owned a very simple folding grill and an old fashioned refractory brick grill, neither of which had any ventilation for the coals. With both of them I found that the only way to get a decent sear on the meat was to force a higher rate of combustion by moving air onto the coals using a fan, usually fashioned from a piece of cardboard torn off from a 12 pack. (Yeah this is probably as close as I'll ever get to molecular gastronomy ). The procedure proved unnecessary on windy days, for evident reasons. I've also owned a couple of modern grills with adjustable ventilation, grill height and lids. In these the necessary high heat could be obtained simply by adjusting ventilation, grill height and orientation relative to the wind direction and fanning never seemed necessary or desirable. So I think the answer depends on the kind of grill you have?

I think you can fairly say someone who takes a well-defined ethnic or regional dish and alters it beyond recognition, with no regard to its cultural context, to the point where members of that ethnicity/natives of that region no longer recognize the dish, yet insists on calling it by its original name, clueless, for at least certain definitions of cluelesness. Feel free to differ. Don't get me wrong, I'm sure he's a good cook and he's hella entertaining, he's just, er, clueless. I look forward to a future episode showing us his perfect gefilte fish, poached in pork stock and milk.

Having tried Heston Blumenthal's chili recipe (In Search of Perfection, Season 2 Episode 6) my first reaction was to heartily concur with this sentiment. Then again, perhaps I am wrong about the Brits and it's just Blumenthal who is utterly clueless?

A bit of research tells me it's the ham, cut into chunks.

1/3 is 33.333...%, which is greater than 15%? I'm going to say practically everyone I know cares about what they eat. Their preferences just aren't as developed and they aren't as strict about them as people on a comestibles enthusiast ( ) forum can be expected to be. "Really like the fries from McD's" is a food preference, just not what you'd expect from an educated palate. I think pretty much everyone would eat better (and healthier) if they were exposed to good food on a regular basis. It's basically just a question of education.

AFAIK, macisa is a cut of meat, so maybe your foreman is talking about a stew made with it?

My experience with refurbished stuff has been good as well. The KitchenAid stand mixer and the computer I'm typing this on are both refurbs, as were several laptops I've bought for my siblings - no problems with any of them.

I won't speak for Paulraphael but IMO the big question here is what we talk about when we talk about "performance" - what we look for in a knife under our particular circumstances. A light, thin blade with a fine hard edge of the sort we associate with Japanese-made chef's knives will "outperform" (allow us to make thinner slices, for instance) a traditional Western-style knife in many or most circumstances but I personally wouldn't feel it's the ideal tool for breaking down a chicken or chopping chocolate. (I'm sure some people do it with no problems though). I think our judgment of how a certain knife "performs" is going to be informed to a great degree by our particular habits and how ingrained they are. If you've been happily using a heavyweight German knife for 30 years and developed your technique to take advantage of the weight, belly and balance, using a gyuto with its thin blade, triangular blade and different balance is just going to feel weird and flimsy, like trying to prep with a straight razor. On the other hand someone used to a gyuto is going to find our heavy German knife unwieldy and dull - the thicker blade and fatter edge will have more resistance cutting through food even if it is razor sharp. That said I think most people will find a gyuto "outperforms" a traditional chef's most of the time, even if they have some experience with a Western-style knife. This is purely empirical, based on my own experience and on observing (very closely, lol) people who use my own gyutos. In conclusion, I guess there's no one best-performing knife for everyone?

What are the odds of that happening three times in a row?

"Stress cracking" does indeed seem to be used as a synonym for corrosion stress cracking. My apologies, English is not my first language. That said, brittle fracture is the result of crack propagation. "Brittle fracture is characterised by the very small amount of work absorbed and by a crystalline appearance of the surfaces of fracture, often with a chevron pattern pointing to the origin of fracture, due to the formation of discontinuous cleavage cracks which join up (Fig. 4). It can occur at a low stress of 75-120 MPa with great suddenness; the velocity of crack propagation is probably not far from that of sound in the material in this type of fracture plastic deformation is very small, and the crack need not open up considerably in order to propagate, as is necessary with a ductile failure." http://www.keytometals.com/page.aspx?ID=CheckArticle&site=kts&NM=44 And I agree we won't know for sure what the cause is unless Luke sends the blade to a lab, but improper tempering seems to me overwhelmingly probable.

From the photo and your description of the problems, I think it's due to stress cracking, probably the result of improper heat treatment, as other people mentioned. This isn't necessarily because of the steel-shaping process; when you heat treat steel to achieve the desired hardness, you basically heat it to the austenitic crystal phase, then cool it rapidly (quench) so some of the austenite becomes martensite, which is extremely hard and brittle. More martensite means a harder steel, which is good in this context as it'll resist deformation, giving you the possibility of using a sharper angle at the edge (and thus a sharper knife), but too much will result in an edge that chips easily. It all depends on the exact alloy used, which in turn will be a compromise between hardness, wear resistance, corrosion resistance, cost, etc etc etc. Rapid cooling will also produce internal stress as the material cools and contracts at different rates; combining hard but brittle martensite with internal stress can easily result in catastrophic failure. The typical solution is to heat it again (temper), enough that the steel is soft enough while hot for the stress to work itself out, so to speak, hold the temperature for a while (how hot and how long will depend on the shape and size of the piece and the exact alloy used) and then allow it to cool slowly enough that all the steel cools at approximately the same rate, so you don't re-stress the metal. tl;dr Somebody screwed up at the oven. I'm going to join the choir and suggest you return the knife and politely but firmly demand your money back. Catastrophic failure while you were actually using the knife would really be catastrophic. EDIT: Not a metallurgist but I play one at work.

Two batches of carrot cupcakes, to compare what I suspect is cassia vs true cinnamon. I'll serve them plain to some guests later, since I suspect any kind of frosting would muddle the issue.

The Tragedy of the Commons. This was required reading in an Economics class I took ages ago, and I've seen it referenced many times since by OpEd writers who want everything privatized. I think it makes a far more compelling argument for gov't regulation but that could just be me. (tl;dr: If several people share a resource then everyone tries to maximize their immediate profit from it rather than a long-term profit they'd derive from using it in a sustainable manner.)

Made two batches of carrot cupcakes to test the "Mexican" (I suspect Cassia) vs Sri Lanka (presumably Ceylon, given that Sri Lanka = Ceylon) cinnamons. There's a definite difference - the Sri Lanka batch seem to have a more complex aroma - but maybe I wouldn't notice if they weren't side to side. I'm going to feed this to my lab rats, I mean dear dear friends later and report on my findings.

So I recently started baking and realized I go through quite a bit of cinnamon, enough that those little 6-stick packs from the grocery just didn't seem like enough. Long story short, I went to the local restaurant supply place and scored a whole kilo of the stuff for ~12 USD. It was imported from Sri Lanka, comes individually wrapped in ~4" sticks inside the larger package and examined side by side with a stick of the Mexican (or Mexican brand?) stuff seems to be lighter colored and has a different aroma. I think I remember "cinnamon" actually refers to the bark of a number of different trees, each of which has distinct qualities. So here are my questions: What's the best cinnamon? Are different cinnamons better for different purposes? How do I identify the top-quality sticks? What can I expect to pay for them? How do I keep the stuff? Sorry if this has been covered in another thread, I did a search but couldn't find anything.

Made the cheesecake again, same recipe. It worked this time, and it looks like the previous failure was due to incompletely beaten cream cheese as suggested by CanadianBakin. Thanks to everyone for your advice and encouragement (and inspiration).

I'd say she needs to stay in her house, forever.