percival

The only two Asian cookbooks I've found that are even remotely close to the real deal are Corinne Trang's Essentials of Asian Cuisine -- in particular her Southeast Asian food -- and Hiroko Shimbo's The Japanese Kitchen. The former covers Chinese, but with a slant toward Cantonese (SE Asian) cuisine. And ketchup IS classic for mapo doufu -- classic Chinese American. Ketchup is also standard for sweet & sour sauce and hot & sour soup, etc. What do you expect from Cantonese cooks with American ingredients cooking Szechuan food for Cantonese people?

I live in San Francisco. We cook seafood as often as we have beef. In order of most to least home consumption: Shrimp Salmon -- farmed or wild, sometimes smoked Octopus -- we have a lot of takoyaki Catfish Tilapia Crab Halibut Mackerel Trout Cod We really only have a top 3. Everything below is nearly the same frequency. Why? I don't like salmon, but everyone else does. But I do the cooking. When I grab non-salmon for dinner, I always try and vary it up.

There's a similar thread going on. Love the smell of freshly grated horseradish -- more a feel than a smell, though. Love the rich stink of dried squid roasting on an open flame. And the sweet, warm smell of freshly steamed jasmine rice. Gross smells: rosemary, chicken fat, natto, durian.

Ah I use my iPad in the kitchen primarily just to look up a recipe or notes. Grab, drop, cook, grab again. Keeps water and food gunk off, and you don't have to wash your hands. If you need a stand, just find a place to put an .

If you're going to bag it, why not a sous vide iPad? Just did it right now for kicks. I took a bad photo -- the screen is clear. Reynolds Handi-Vac bag. I actually opened it a bit and let in a tiny bit of air to let the button depress to make it usable. Just push the air bubbles and creases off of the screen to make it flat.

What if you and a group of castaways were stranded on a deserted island/in a jungle/on a remote mountain for a month/a season/a year? How would you and your community survive? Real survivor, not Melrose Place with stupid human tricks. You start with nothing. You are given nothing. You farm. You hunt. You cook. You build shelter, make fire, build food storage, aqueducts, herd flocks. In essence, taking all the current fads of locavorism, slow food, organic, and making it a reality. Would Alice Waters really practice what she preaches if he had to cut and haul her own fire wood and break down her own oxen? Take food bloggers, celebrichefs, food critics, GMO corn farmers, organic farmer's market vegan sandwich wrappers -- and kill their Interwebs, destroy their iPhones, bury their Le Creusets, and make them actually walk the walk. Make them learn to live and to cook with their hands. Make Jeffrey Steingarten raise and slaughter his own bacon. Make Rachael Ray make distill her own EVOO. Make Michael Pollan actually run a subsistence farm, instead of just telling others they should be doing it. Can't hack it? Can't offer anything that benefits the community? You're voted off the island. Each week, instead of being given a freebie or a pointless challenge, give them hell. Your hen house just blew away. Your only oxen is now sick. The grain silo caught on fire. Your vines just froze over. Make them cry. They can always forfeit and quit whenever they want. Since it's celeb, make it a big pot: $1 million to the charity of their choice or something. Split between X remaining contestants. The show would turn food entertainment and politics upside down.

Generally what you can't pressure can is food that can't handle pressure. They're safe to eat, but just undergo volume/texture changes that make pressure canning not possible. Certain things like grains and beans foam up. You'll have to do some research to find out what you can can and cannot can. (LOL)

Freshly steamed jasmine rice. Grated horseradish. Dried squid roasting on an open flame.

La Vache qui Rit is definitely the cheese of Vietnam. It's the only cheese my mother ate, and there was always, always a wheel or two in the fridge, growing up. I couldn't stand the stuff.

Old thread but banh mi are a fav so I have to throw in some comments/clarifications. Bánh mì thịt nguoi ("cold cut baguette"), also known as Bánh mì đặc biệt ("baguette special") is the classic Vietnamese American sammich you're talking about. And it's one heavily influenced from the days of French colonialism. The bread is a French baguette. It's not a psuedo baguette. It's not a rice flour bastardization. Unlike what a link previously mentioned purports, a Vietnamese baguette tastes just like a French baguette. It is nothing like a bolillo roll, which is round, has a soft crust that does not flake, and is spongy, almost marshmallowy soft. (The Vietnamese baguettes you find where the crust crackles off in flakes has just been overly spritzed with water towards the end of baking. The rapid surface cooling cracks the crust.) The city of Đà Lạt in Central Vietnam, established as a resort town for the French, is known for having the best baguettes in Vietnam. The baguettes there are much lighter and less dense than in the rest of Vietnam. I'd say this is primarily because Đà Lạt has a very unique climate compared to the rest of Vietnam -- it's more like San Francisco, with cool summers, cool rains and morning fog, as opposed to being hot and humid year-round like the rest of Vietnam. It's 1500-2000m up a mountain, deep in the middle of a conifer forest -- you won't find seafood here. It's known for its wild game: boars, frogs, and deer especially. More like France, n'est pas? In the rest of coastal Vietnam, they may try and imitate, but high elevation bread is hard to imitate I imagine. As for ingredients you would typically find in the U.S. or other nations with Viet Kieu diaspora communities, predominantly made of South Vietnamese and Chinese-Vietnamese emigrants: the yellow stuff is in fact home-made mayonnaise, all yolk and no whites. There is no garlic aioli or gods forbid, fish sauce. The meat is chả lụa(steamed pork pâté), head cheese, and pork liver pâté spread. The vegetables are long thin cucumber slices, cilantro, sliced Serrano chilis, and pickled radish and carrots. The pickle? Simply, vinegar. You season with black pepper and Maggi. Soy sauce is the cheap substitute. Cheaper, non-"special" versions will take out the head cheese and liver pâté. The chilis are often left out -- Southern palates generally prefer sweet and avoid spicy. Central palates are vice versa. Note that this is a very South Vietnamese style baguette. Lots of filler. I never saw one of these Vietnamese American baguettes in Central Vietnam, in Đà Lạt. What I commonly saw was Bánh mì hột gà ốp la bít tết (fried egg steak baguette) -- a baguette with eggs sunny side up in a baguette with thinly sliced steak grilled medium rare seasoned with garlic and black pepper. Drizzle with eggs with Maggi and dig in. The baguettes were amazing. The food? Absolutely Vietnamese. My dad was a chef, and is from Đà Lạt. This is what he ate for breakfast. He never ate those veggie filler baguettes. The only other kind he made were bánh mì xíu mại -- baguettes with ground beef meat balls seasoned with diced onions and black pepper. You boil the meatballs and drizzle the hot, fatty broth onto the baguette -- not too much or it becomes a soggy mess. Note that xíu mại is borrowed from the Chinese shumai dumplings -- though the Vietnamese only borrow the name. Xíu mại are very much meatballs and are not meat dumplings. And a digression: the only other common Vietnamese dish you will find served with baguettes is beef curry -- again an interpretation of the French boeuf braisé aux carottes. Stewed brisket, carrots, bay leaf, star anise, lemongrass, anatto oil, turmeric, onion, garlic, ginger, fish sauce.

Thanks for the link, Blether. Subs are a good idea. What's the ideal sub for cabernet sauvignon? For burgundy? Red wine vinegar adds far more acidity than normally found in red wine, which is less acidic than white wine. Oh and just needed to point out one of your suggesions: raising your alcohol past ethanol's boiling point will in fact not boil off the ethanol, as alcohol -- wine, hard liquor -- is mostly water. And the two together boil off at different rates. Hence all this thread: if I could just selectively boil off the alcohol, I would.

Thanks for the feedback, folks. I think I will just have to reduce the alcohol on its own first prior to incorporating into stocks or deglazing. Oh and as for feeding infants like little adults... anyone with a growing kid would know that they eat disproportionally far more than an adult. In my teens, I easily ate twice as much food as I do today, and I was much, much skinnier. My infant has consistently been in the 99th percentile for height and weight -- he's height-weight proportional for a kid easily a year/year and a half older than he currently is -- and can easily eat as much as an adult in one sitting, if I let him. Which I don't, cos I don't need a bowling ball child. If I wanted that, I'd treat him like a typical American kid and feed him deep fried chicken nuggets, soda, and Happy Meals.

You want to look into pressure canning, in which case hi/low acidity is a non-issue.

Hi! I haven't tried igniting boiling wine by itself, but from what I've read, even igniting alcohol in a pan only burns off ~25% of the alcohol, before the proof drops too low for enough fumes to continue the burning. Of course, common sense says if you just keep the flame at it, eventually the alcohol will evaporate -- along with all the water and the wine flavor. I need a way to take out virtually all alcohol while still keeping the alcohol's flavors. Just doing some math, I figured that you really can't give a lethal amount of alcohol-stew to an infant -- they would have to consume far more liquid than their stomach could hold -- but they could still get very sick. The simplest solution would be to skip using alcohol at all, but I'm trying to find a scientific solution, if one exists, that makes this possible. I don't have a chemistry background, so I don't know how to go about measuring the alcohol content, or else I'd have started experimenting already.

Old post, but I wanted to drop in a reply. I can't recall ever eating bun bo Hue, in California or in Vietnam, with rau ram. The go-to herb for bun bo Hue is the banana flower. From a flavor standpoint, the mild sweetness of rau ram would be lost in the strong chile flavor. The banana flower is there I think mostly for color and texture. In other cultures, banana flower is partnered with meat curries: strong plus strong. Rau ram traditionally goes with poultry: soft plus soft. Or I could be completely wrong. But I do know that the further north you go, the less garden you get with your food. In the South, they have jungles full of vegetables, and they toss it in as filler. In the North, it's go meat (relatively speaking) or go home. And Hue is in Central, and has a very long history of more refined cuisine.

Are you sure you've got the right word? The only one I can think of is tỏi, which is garlic. Hổi is steam/steaming/hot.

Tahini is sesame. Sesame oil is ~85% unsaturated fatty acids. Unlike saturated fats like beef tallow or lard, unsaturated fatty acids go rancid over time. Heat, oxygen and ultraviolet light speed up the process. When they go rancid, they release carcinogens. You can do things to reduce the rate of rancidity, e.g. storing oil in a sealed container away from sunlight and putting it in a cool place -- like a fridge. Heating unsaturated fatty acids makes them go rancid as well -- it's why you want to throw out deep frying vegetable oil after one or two uses. If you're skipping out on things like smoking and trans fats, you'd want to skip out on rancid oils, too.

Hate to burst your bubble, but salt + water + meat, it's brining. Brining works via osmosis. More salt outside of the meat than inside, so osmosis moves the salt (and water) into the meat. When you're doing a dry salt rub, you're doing the opposite effect: you dry the meat out, because the relatively dry surface of the meat covered in salt has less water than the inside. Salt goes in, water goes out. And temp makes no difference here. As long as it's warm enough for your salt water to be water instead of ice, your meat is brining. A marinade works the same way. Salt goes in. If you're going to use salt, you're going to need to dial it down if you don't like the taste after a six hour soak.

Sounds great in theory, but as long as you have to break down your chicken, gunk is getting everywhere anyway: your hands, your board, your counter, your sink, your knife. In an ideal world, it would come pre-prepped in vacuum sealed zip-locked bags...

Hot vit lon/balut or fertilized ducks eggs. Hard boil em, eat with Vietnamese coriander.

I know that when cooking with alcohol, it takes quite awhile to actually burn off the alcohol content, even when boiling a stock/sauce at ~212 Fahrenheit, something along the lines of three hours to evaporate 90% of the alcohol. My question is, how is the rate of evaporation affected by another 15 PSI, cooking at ~250 Fahrenheit within a pressure cooker? Only so much steam is released from the small rocker atop the pressure cooker, and though 250 degrees is well above what is required for alcohol to evaporate, the extra 15 PSI ups alcohols boiling point, just like water. Another concern is whether the alcohol would precipitate back into the pressure cooker as it cools, unless one rapidly releases the steam inside the cooker. The purpose of this questioning is that I cook for my infant, and a little alcohol goes a long way here -- alcohol poisoning is a very serious issue, especially in smaller infants, as it's purely a weight issue. Now my kid eats everything -- duck feet, jelly fish, osso bucco -- but I'm concerned when I give him things like chicken teriyaki made with a mirin/sake reduction or a risotto made with white wine. If a pressure cooker can get the alcohol out relatively faster than normal boiling, great. If it actually evaporates less -- or none -- then that method's a no go, like sous vide. Any ideas, folks? And a bonus question for the scientifically inclined: how would I go about finding the actual alcohol content of say, a stew?