Michael S.

Hi everyone, Saw this reviewed on Serious Eats, was interested in purchasing one for myself, but the shipping to the UK is ~$87! Does anyone know of cheap alternatives, or whether we could set up some kind of group buy to get the shipping cost below the cost of the actual product. http://bakingsteel.com/

Roast x amount of chicken bones with some skim milk powder until browned, then simmer in the slow cooker for around 8 hours with a little salt.

So I just went and made up a glass of 3% salt water, it is indeed noticeably salty, though not unpleasant/painful on my tongue. I have accidentally made some very salty things before which proved almost impossible to eat (I got the salt measurements for sauerkraut wrong once and it wasn't pretty). I'm still holding out that it wasn't just the salinity I was experiencing though.

Salted with around 5g/l so not particularly much. I tend to use a fairly high amount of salt in dishes I prepare for myself, so this wasn't too high up on the scale. Dish would have ended up around 2-3% salt.

A few weeks ago I made a risotto (single serving) and I had about a litre of already very dark chicken stock to use up, so I reduced it down and it all went I to the one portion of rice. When I was eating it, I had a very odd sensation in my mouth, almost painful but not quite. It was probably down to the combination of relatively high salinity (I have a high salt tolerance) and the sheer amount of flavour hitting my taste buds all at once. My question is, has anybody else accidentally conjured up any surprising sensations whilst cooking? I mean apart from the obvious Szechwan pepper and capsicum heat ones.

The same thing happened in another one of the books, and a lot of the pages seem to be glued together close to the spine so they don't open flat, I can't figure out if that's just how the binding works or is it's an actual issue? It seems fairly inconsistent throughout.

Received my copy a couple of days ago, decided to start in book 1 at the microbiology section and there was some glue in the pages which left a couple of tiny white patches right in the middle of the Trichinella poster where the paper tore a it. Nothing major but still disappointing. Anybody else had this, is it normal?

According to Ideas in Food, the first part of the brining process involves the water in the meat/vegetables being drawn out into the brine before the brine itself can be drawn in in it's place. By that logic there may be a small amount of liquid removed from the cucumber if only allowed to sit in the brine for a short time, but it's not likely to be much. They also note that after a short brining period fish will not expel as much albumen (the white stuff that comes to the surface during cooking) and that might be the logic behind brining fish offal. ETA: I'm not familiar with these preparations, what length of time do the cucumbers/fish offal spend in the brine? To answer your original questions, If it's anything significant it's almost definitely going to be adding water content rather than removing it.

But isn't pork also potentially, though very rarely, contaminated with Trichinella Spiralis which do lurk in the interior of the meat?

Regarding Courvoisier, I asked for one in a (terrible) bar using the proper pronunciation and the smart-arse "bartender" replied with "Don't you mean core-voice-seer" Ugh. Didn't even get one in the end.