jrshaul

I'd like to have SV-level precision cooking regular stuff in my crock pot. If I'm gonna buy a temperature probe..

I actually attended a Jewish school for 6th and 7th grade. (Disclaimer: Sending your children to a religious primary school is guaranteed to fast-track them to apostasy faster than Ozzy Osbourne. You have been warned.) Anywho, favorite included: -Morningstar Farms Vegan Corn Dogs. Given the highly artificial bizzaro nature of real corn dogs, starting with textured vegetable protein can't do any harm. The "chicken" patties were pretty good and the soy breakfast links passable, but avoid anything approximating beef. -Pizza. It's good cold. -Bagels + Lox. Bagels + Whitefish. Bagels plus anything. -Falafel. Come to think of it, anything in a pita. -Cold tuna/swordfish/whatever steak. Trader Joe's Tuna, at $6/lb, works really well for this. -Sushi. -cold lasagna. I've also had a bit of luck with leftover tofu I put in my smoker. Marinade it in something to hide the tofu taste, and cook it at ~200-225 for about two hours until it goes squeaky like cheese. I'm not a super-huge fan, but cold deep-fried tofu is a traditional sushi ingredient. Also consider the use of a vacuum thermos. You can keep a risotto piping hot for four hours easy.

I have a bit of a conundrum: My "anchos" (as labelled) look an awful lot like anaheim chiles. Any easy way to tell the difference, or do I call the horticulturalist? (He introduces himself as Pepper, I kid you not.) On a related note, a specialty pepper vendor at the Farmers' Market has some neat stuff, including Cascabel peppers. I actually ate one of the darned things raw when the vendor dared me to - not the best decision, but he gave me quite a deal afterwards.

Does anyone know a source for food-safe thermocouple probes?

Oh mah gawd. I never even thought of that. Version II of the barbecue sauce is still more or less recipe-less, but it looks something like this: 1.5 cups water 1/2 cup brown sugar 1/3 cup vinegar 6 large dried ancho chilis 1/4 cup butter 3 cloves garlic 1/2t cloves (whole) 1/2t allspice (lightly crushed) 1/2t cinnamon 2t black pepper Worchestershire sauce (to taste) Salt (about a teaspoon?) Simmer cloves, allspice, cinnamon, and peppers in water until peppers reconstitute. Remove peppers; continue to simmer until water is aromatic. Continue to simmer while blending de-seeded and stemmed peppers with vinegar. Add garlic, salt, and water, sieved to remove whole spices. Blend to a homogenous paste; warm and add butter shortly before cooking. I might add some cayenne - the heat diffuses pretty heavily during baking. Can anyone suggest other options for adding some flavorful heat?

Bone in pork loin roast with a sweet ancho chili and butter glaze smoked to 140F internally over six hours. Next time, I'm going to cut it into chops and finagle a higher temperature - my smoker is crap.

The very cheap kind I buy at the grocery store. I actually can't tell you more than that (it's not a name brand), though the fine texture allowed it to mix well into the custard and helped it to thicken.

Here's a picture of how it turned out. My smoker is rage-inducingly awful, but the meat was fabulous anyway. I was actually happier with the texture (and increased surface area!) on a big pork chop that was thrown in with the roasts to see what would happen. A higher cooking temperature also produced better results; however, the heater in question has no thermostat (!) and as a result just sets at whatever temperature the electric heating element produces.

I just made a "mop sauce" as suggested, but with a bit of a twist: No tomato sauce. Instead, I used allspice, cloves, cinnamon, some other stuff, reconstituted dried ancho peppers, water, cider vinegar and butter to make something with approximately the correct viscosity and taste. It turned out pretty good, and it was pleasantly different in an I'm-not-quite-sure-how sort of way.

When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. When life gives you hot dog buns, and you decided to take summer classes instead of getting a job...

The fluffy texture is due not to any leavening, but the base ingredient: hot dog buns. I made a custard out of eggs, milk, sugar, butter, vanilla, almond meal and almond extract, then saturated some brick-stale buns and baked until a fork came out clean. I keep getting huge sacks of them as leftovers from friends' barbecues, and this seems to be a good use. The cherries were Trader Joe's dried montmorency cherries soaked in a bit of brandy. They were good, but given the cost ($4 in cherries!) I'll likely do a cherry sauce instead. Of course, I could do both...

I've seen some neat helical screw-stirrers for mixing ceramic glazes. I'm pretty sure they're stainless; given what goes in some of those glazes, anything else would probably dissolve.

I made my father an almond bread pudding with brandy-soaked montmorency cherries for Father's Day. Good stuff. Uploaded with ImageShack.us

You may have had savory bread pudding before under the names "dressing" or "stuffing", the later often coming out of a turkey at Thanksgiving. Most dressings/stuffings are a bit looser than bread pudding, but not all. I think the only place I've seen a dressing or stuffing solid enough to be described a pudding was on Food Network, and the recipe in question was sufficiently bizzaro world that I'm not likely to replicate it. The Capirodata, however, sounds absolutely fabulous. I'll do another custard with mixed ingredients, but I swear that you get a better texture mixing the two beforehand. It also helps to evenly dissolve the sugar. Can anyone suggest a binder for a vegan bread pudding? I've had egg-less concoctions, and found them somewhat lacking. Maybe xanthan gum? Also, gratuitous food porn: Uploaded with ImageShack.us

I've never had a savory bread pudding before. Further suggestions?

I recently received about seventy slightly stale hot dog and burger buns. I intended to use them as breadcrumb fodder for meatballs and breading, but the styrofoam consistency of supermarket buns is not so suitable. Instead, I've been making a lot of bread pudding, with very good results. I frequently produce these these for BBQs and such due to the low effort of production, and would be very keen on learning some new variants. Here's what I've come up with. It's a bit different from the other recipes I've seen due to the bread, but it works well. - 1.5c whole mik - 1/4c butter - 1c + 2tbsp sugar - 1.5tsp vanilla - 4 eggs - About 8 brick-hard hot dog buns (or similar quantity of burger-style equivalent) torn into 2" bits - Seasoning to taste Beat eggs. Bring butter, 1c sugar, milk, and vanilla to boil, and slowly pour into eggs while continuously beating. Add buns to custard; allow to sit ten minutes, agitating occasionally, to allow custard to soak in evenly. Bake in 8" round pie plate at 300F (my oven doesn't have a thermometer...) until a fork comes out clean. This is a pretty standard recipe aside from the modifications to use hot dog buns, but I've had some success recently modifying it for other purposes. Adding a few tablespoons of ground almonds before boiling the milk plus some almond extract produce a very robust almond flavor - the sort of thing I've only seen previously when large quantities of marzipan was used.

I'm off to make a batch today. Should be pretty good. Out of curiosity, is there anything beyond standard canning techniques to preserving BBQ sauce?

The lend of an electric smoker has lead to record-breaking quantities of barbecue this summer. Smoked meat just isn't complete without a vinegary Tennessee-style sauce, and I've found the stuff from the store comes in only three categories: 1. Prohibitively expensive 2. Ketchup 3. Prohibitively expensive ketchup. Most of the DIY recipes aren't much better - the Heinz flavor in the recipe I use always seems to pull through , and the large quantity of ground seasonings produces gritty texture. I also double the vinegar; while I haven't set foot in Tennessee for nearly ten years, it just doesn't seem right otherwise. I've been mulling over a few possible improvements, and was wondering if anyone had any insight. 1. Using tomato paste as a base. My past attempts to replace the ketchup weren't very good, but it seems like an obvious improvement. Perhaps frying the paste first would help? 2. Alternate sweeteners. Brown sugar is all right, but the corn syrup has to go. Vietnamese cooking includes a basic caramel in numerous meat glazes - why not use it in barbecue sauce? 3. Alternate seasonings. The recipe I use presently, while functional, includes an absurd number of "spice mixes" with overlapping ingredients: I suspect cayenne is added at least thrice over. Substituting fresh or reconstituted ingredients would be a big improvement. I've already had success substituting chipotles for smoke extract, and the use of reconstituted anchos could potentially displace paprika. In addition to improvements flavor and texture, they're also much cheaper. More problematic is dehydrated onion. Fresh onions don't substitute well for onion powder, and too much raw or fried onion would affect the texture. Maybe pureed shallots would work? 4. Infusing spices into vinegar. A BBQ sauce just isn't without black peppercorn, but I'd rather not have it floating about in the bottle. Bearnaise sauce solves this problem by using seasoned vinegar as an ingredient; hopefully the same will work here.

Guess what I made for someone's birthday? Three pavlovas with kiwifruit and stabilized whipped cream(though I only had enough whipped cream for two) Ten poached pears in tea with ginger (gluten-free and vegan!) And, using the egg yolks from the fifteen eggs: Eighteen small creme brulees. The pavlovas were an excellent suggestion - I wouldn't have thought of them otherwise, but they went over fabulously. Very few of those attending had ever had it before, and it was a welcome change from box-mix birthday cake. It was also surprisingly easy to do - making three pavlovas isn't much more difficult from making just one. I'm serving the creme brulees tonight. Serving meringues with creme brulee is a great combination, as it uses the surplus egg whites to produce a gluten-free low calorie counterpart. Gotta get over and start torching! I did, however, learn that Knox gelatin is a bit more powerful than some brands, and 1 teaspoon per cup of whipping cream is really quite excessive. If anyone has a better suggestion for stabilizing whipped cream, I'd be open to hear it. Still have a lot of kiwis, though. Can anyone suggest a vegan pastry cream recipe?

It seems most egg substitutes are, in reality, nothing more than gums and starches - I had assumed some sort of highly processed vegetable protein. I have xanthan gum and a few other related items on hand, but I've yet to use them for anything. Can anyone suggest how I might go about using them to create a decent pie crust? I'd like something I can fill with a precooked pear filling, so a strong almond flavor (from almond meal) would be a major plus.

Plumber's solder is almost always mostly lead. Jeweler's solder is a nickel/silver mix and much more suitable (though much harder to work with.)

Could this be used to make a garlic-tomato jam? Has anyone done anything like this?

Thanks for the sheet cake suggestion. I think I'll be going for something a bit less traditional - possibly a huge batch of creme brulee. Poached pears in tea is also popular, and it has the major benefit of being both vegan and gluten-free. (I did it!) After much lobbying, I think I've successfully badgered the house into acquiring a new Vita-Mix blender. (Hooray for customer loyalty programs.) It's $280 after discount, but that gives a 7-year warranty. Anyone have any thoughts on these? The last one managed roughly fourteen years, so it seems like a good investment. Can anyone recommend a heavy-duty stick blender? I think we'd benefit a lot from having one. Also, maybe a food processor and whompy-stompy microwave? I've been making vast quantities of pies. I'm not very good at pie and don't have proper tools (turns out a potato masher really isn't the same thing as a pastry cutter), but I'm getting better and have an excellent gauge of how much people like the result. My mom's Idiotproof Lemon Tart was actually eaten sans permission in my absence, which means I'll need to make it again shortly and then put a lock on it (or hide it under the celery.) Can anyone suggest something to do with lots of fresh kiwis? We have a carton, and no one is eating them but me. Maybe some sort of fresh fruit tart with a cream base? Between the non-vegan nature and the frequency with which the French students make proper pommes de terres au gratin, I don't think they'd go over so well. Plain ol' roast spuds are inhaled at a genuinely frightening velocity, though. (For those interested, I did a test on whether low-sided pans really have an advantage over high-sided pans. Turns out they do.)

I think Cutco pretty much wins the blue ribbon for overpriced knives. I've had very good luck with my el-cheapo Victorinox, which probably would sell for more money had they not branded it the same as a keychain gadget. I have one of those. It's really good. I'd buy a T-shirt, except that then I'd have to ask awkward questions about the name. Anyone know where I can get a "Hobart" shirt?

I'm trying to cook vegan for some friends, and was wondering if anyone could comment on the use of egg substitutes in various roles. I'd like to try for the vegan/gluten-free/alergen-free trifecta, and if I can eliminate the eggs from an almond meal based pie crust recipe I have, I might just have something rather handy.