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jrshaul

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Everything posted by jrshaul

  1. I have recently been confronted with the fact that I can't make cookies worth their flour. I feel like a goon.
  2. I'm not the only one? I didn't list it because I can't actually afford to eat them.
  3. I think that the "processed food" argument is crap, at least as applied to industrial vs. traditional preparation techniques. 100g of sugar is 100g of sugar, regardless of whether it's toffee or in a pear. However, there is some merit to it. Some carbohydrates flat-out cannot be digested. The best example is corn - in order to get a valuable percentage of its' caloric value, it must first be treated with lime. Without nixtamalization, the empires of south america would have been nonexistent. Kale, in any form, is not very calorically dense. Raw kale (which I've started eating in an attempt to preemptively jumpstart the new years' diet) is nutritionally similar to cardboard. Memo to self: Eat more kale.
  4. I need a bit more than the molds, though - I'd like to pick up a good immersion blender and some of the more highly specific tools of confection. A complete set of Wybauw's "Fine Chocolates" trilogy is over $200 new, and the used prices on Amazon aren't great.
  5. I'm using only 3/4C, so I didn't think it important. Should I be using closer to 1/3?
  6. Hmm. It seems that the syrup is a large part of the flavor. I've been carmelizing the sugar, but I should perhaps look into getting some myself. It mentions some can be produced by treating sugar with an acid. Any suggestions?
  7. When looking for secondhand gear of a specialized nature, I've had my best luck making acquisitions through online classifieds specific to the activity in question. However, I've yet to find anything of the type for culinary gear, save perhaps for "The Chocolate Life," which is somewhat specialized. I would like to enrich my selection of tools despite my limited budget, but finding copies of the Wybauw books or polycarbonate molds has been difficult. Can anyone suggest a relevant forum?
  8. 0.5g guar gum per liter seems to do it for me. It's only necessary when you're making relatively low-fat ice cream, though.
  9. Free speech doesn't really apply when you're a representative of someone else's business.
  10. My favorite batch of caramels so far used nothing more than butter, sugar, and water. I'm not sure if this is actually caramel, though, as the sugar is initially caramelized and no cream is added. What am I making, exactly? Did you caramelize the sugar at all before adding the other ingredients? I'm somewhat perplexed.
  11. I ask: "How do you suggest I should fix it?" If they can't come up with an answer, I get to make them look like a fool. If they can, I profit. Either way, I win.
  12. I still don't get it. Are menus so difficult to navigate that punters need guidance? Really? Okay, if I'd never been to a restaurant at all before, then I'd understand it. As a consequence, the question "Have you eaten here before?" immediately translates itself in my mind as "Have you ever eaten in a restaurant before?" One of the last places I was at had half the menu up on the wall. If the waitress hadn't explained it, I wouldn't have realized - there wasn't a lot of detail, and the printed menu was reasonably sized.
  13. I've been focusing on my confection skills, and have been making many variants. I'm not sure if I'm bodging the process, so I'm posting my results for your comment. #1: Lebovitz's Salted Butter Carmels: http://www.davidlebovitz.com/2010/01/salted-butter-caramels/ I actually did a few variants on this, as the results I had were much lighter and color than his own results. I'm a bit perplexed by his recipe, as he shows a very dark carmelized sugar; however, his recipe (unless I misread it) features heating sugar to a clear 310F, adding cream, cooking to 260, and cooling. The end result is very much on the hard side. #2: Modified salted butter carmels Salted butter carmel heated to 260 are brick-hard. Heated to 250, it's much better. Am I doing something wrong? Or is my thermometer borked? #3: Salted butter carmels with carmelized sugar. I heated a dry carmel (ignoring actual temperature,) then added the cream and continued as standard to 260F. This was pretty tasty, though quite hard; I ended up adding a little milk and corn syrup and recooking to 250, which produced a good texture and darkened it considerably. #3: Cream-less caramels. The first batch came out burned and greasy. The second batch was made with a wet carmel (sugar syrup heated until it started to brown) of 1C sugar with 1T corn syrup, then 2T of butter, 1T corn syrup and some water was added to liquefy the caramel and it was recooked to 250 before a further 1T of butter was added. I actually think this one came out pretty well: I find that standard caramel, unless made with a lot of honey and other expensive ingredients, is somewhat tasteless, and this came out very nicely. #4: Fruit caramels. Assuming my thermometer was reading low (foolish, given it's alcohol), I cooked 1/3 cup cherry juice concentrate, 1/2 cup water, and 1.5 cup sugar to 250F before adding 2T of salted butter. The end result is pretty tasty, but it's not setting very well. Next batch will have 1/2 cup cherry juice concentrate, but it overall came out well. I'm not sure to what degree I'm reinventing a wheel, but I'm getting a lot of practice out of $2.50 in sugar. The only real catch is my inability to dry caramelize sugar: The combination of poor pans and an uneven electric stove results in dry carmels burning well before the majority of the sugar is melted unless 30+ minutes of careful heating is applied.
  14. I expect to have a good experience. Then I have a good experience. Then, the next day, my friend from out of town starts vomiting so hard she ruptures some esophogeal blood vessels. Then we go to the ER. Then she gets a bill equal to a month's pay. Then I call the health department. Apparently, they nearly killed my friends at the next table, too; had they not all received a few bags of saline through IV, they would have passed out from dehydration. I lived on carelessly prepared hippy co-op food for a few months, and am apparently now immune. Saturday marked the first time I visited a sit-down restaurant since maybe mid-october. I like my $3.65 corned beef from the deli bolted on the local bagel factory just fine, but my default assumption about "Nice" food is that I'm going to get screwed. Maybe if I was older and had better shoes.
  15. The problem with cheapo meat isn't the texture; it's the flavor. $0.99/lb chicken is one step away from the sponge I use to wash it. Braising and slow-cooking require immersion in a quantity of water and heating to a sub-optimal temperature (200F is a minimum); the end result is stringy and tasteless. Sous vide is a nice alternative. A secondary advantage is heat efficiency. Warming up the oven isn't so bad in the winter, but in the summer, it heats the whole apartment. A sous vide rig setup is far more efficient - especially for small quantities of meat - and you can put it outside if you're desperate. If only the @#$#@$#! thing worked properly.
  16. There's a place around here that gets some Neiman Ranch (spelled improperly?) steak. It's the most expensive thing on the menu, but it's a pretty good steak for a sub-steakhouse price. The ribeye is bigger and a lot cheaper, but... I'm not particularly wealthy. The meat I eat is frequently the less desirable cuts - supermarket-brand frozen thighs, mostly. If I want to cook for a crowd, it's going to be shoulder, not fillet. The ability to turn what is (for the most part) poor quality ingredients into something edible without risking safety is a fabulous innovation.
  17. Cornstarch. It's the worst thing in the world. You can taste it everywhere. It works in flan because it's supposed to taste like cornstarch, but placing it in gravy is heresy. I'm not sure how you define "plain red sauce" - there's a wide margin between a really fresh homemade tomato sauce and the thin ketchup you get at Ruby Tuesdays. Agreed, however, that angel hair is flavorless rubbish that serves no purpose but to replace a worthy pasta with some sort of texture. I like offal. I just have to keep reminding myself that it's food. I'm not sure if this makes me a white privileged male, or just weird. The exception, curiously, is liver - outside of pates, at least. Is it the flavor or the texture? I have no qualm with a nice Bearnaise and flat-out adore meringue, but the weird sulfurous flavor you get when you heat them above 190 is awful. Of course, I'm a student, so I eat a lot of them anyway.
  18. Actual interaction between two friends: "Dan, is that cupcake flavored vodka?" "Yes." "Do you know what goes well with cupcake-flavored vodka?" "No?" "Underage girls with daddy issues." "Hmm." (pause) "I suppose it does." I jumped the shark on posting without reading the whole thread. Dan bought one of these for thanksgiving, and roasted it straight frozen. I didn't try any. Years of working at Papa John's has apparently made him immune to food poisoning. I wonder how many more references to the man will result of this thread?
  19. I have not seen this discussed previously. I'll have to try it.
  20. Can you link to the specific model? My present IR thermometer is inadequately accurate, and I would be interested in an inexpensive replacement of required precision.
  21. I'm going to pick up one of the I-1433s. Very good price. Thanks for the tip!
  22. I called both of the restaurant supply stores Google returned; Williams Sonoma had a thermocouple thermometer, but for more than I'd just paid for 22 pounds of coverture. Ouch. It turns out that my $100+ thermometer is working fine - it's the probe that's malfunctioning. In what I feel was a fairly heroic fix, I removed the thermocouple from the original probe and, after hollowing it out with a tiny screwdriver, inserted a replacement thermocouple. It measures beautifully, though the poor thermal conductivity makes it awfully slow.
  23. The standard oral thermometers at Wallgreens dont' go above 102F or below 95F; the ovulation thermometers appear to have an even narrower range. Any suggestions for a specific model?
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