JoNorvelleWalker

Thank you @liuzhou! The press you linked is exactly the same as mine. Strangely I note only one of the Alibaba product pictures shows a beaker, such as the beaker in the video. Would it be common for Chinese kitchens to have metal beakers to use with the press? I have beakers, but my beakers are glass. As always, I love eGullet!

No tube and no place to affix a tube. No room in the (plain unmarked) box for a tube to have been. The plunger has teeth, though said teeth are not sharp.

Any guesses as to what this is? There are no wrong answers because I have no idea. Actually I have some idea, it is a kind of press. It was sold as a citrus press. A citrus press it clearly is not. There is no place for juice to drain. Height is 15 inches in the lowered position. It is heavy. It works as a nut smasher if you are fond of shell fragments. The asking price was $158. The device has since been removed from Amazon. The fact remains someone designed it for something.

I've been known to use my hand.

I received my new Cake Bible copy two days ago. Fortunately the binding seems more sturdy than on the first edition!

I've been reading it. I'd say it is their best book so far.

I've done the same.

I have the 35th Anniversary Edition of The Cake Bible preordered: (eG-friendly Amazon.com link) Will be fun to see what's changed. Thirty percent new content is promised. Besides, my thirty year old Cake Bible copy is showing its age.

On the way home from the hospital tonight my kind friend who was driving stopped at Jersey Mike's, a sandwich shop, so that I could get a bite to eat. The man who made the cheese steak handed the bag to me and said "On the house."

Their unground ras el hanout is a wonder to behold. I'm in the US and have not had trouble ordering from Canada. Most of my spices though I get from Penzeys. Penzeys offers Tuscan Sunset, an Italian style seasoning, as well as Italian Herb Mix. I have never tried them.

For the time being I've decided on grapeseed oil. Last night I used the new contraption to spray my porkchop.

Did you ever get an oil sprayer for your air fryer? I received an air fryer a few weeks ago, and I am evaluating an oil sprayer that I received to test. I have to say I am a little worried about breathing an aerosol of oil. Another question is which oil to use in a sprayer? The particular sprayer I am playing with works well with water, but the fluid container is clear glass, thus exposing the oil to oxidation. I'd like to keep the apparatus in the refrigerator, however most cooking oils are solid or close to solid by 0C.

I posted the footnote because @rotuts had wondered about the discrepancy between 700F and the maximum stated cooking temperature of 450F.

No.

The footnote about the 700F temperature says: "Temperature is reached on the surface of the carbon fiber heater."

I wonder how full fat Dutch cocoa would work in that?

As I said, one was 25C and one was 26C. Not much difference but cast iron measured higher than stainless, as predicted.

Now that Amazon has sent me an IR thermometer to test I did a quick experiment: I measured a stainless steel pan and a cast iron pan both at room temperature. At the default emissivity setting of the instrument the stainless steel measured 25C and the cast iron measured 26C.

The Anova interior is 16"x12.5". The Anova has been my primary oven for years.

Liners would not take up much freezer space but the Matfer bannetons have the linen linings permanently affixed to the wicker.

Me too. And I'm first in line! (Being library staff had nothing to do with it.)

I could fit one or two in the freezer, just not eight or nine. Do you have the link to the King Arthur page? Meanwhile I will try to google it, although I didn't see it previously.

I had to laugh. By "coincidence" Amazon is now wanting me to evaluate and review an infrared thermometer.

I prefer wicker with linen liners. I had been storing my bannetons where they received sunlight. What I don't understand is how the liners got wet. Flour, I guess, is hydroscopic, but in the decades that I've been baking I've never had wet bannetons, nor for that matter a mite infestation.

Thankfully not! But I did look at a dead one with a 30x loupe. They may indeed be mites, although mites are supposed to be light colored and these are dark.