cdh

I'll be interested in what you find. My current machine is a Lelit, which is sort of a mini-Silvia... smaller boiler, faster heating up, lots of heavy brass for thermal stability. I'm wondering what the little light modern things are able to do. Report back if you get one.

Not just African... it is clearly the product of The One True Culinary Genius who invented EVERYTHING the very first time. Everything we all eat traces back to the Genius... we just need to find the proof that confirms the perfectly self-evident hypothesis. And then give all credit where it is due.

LOL

This week? Oysters. The PHL fishmonger will truck out bags of 100 to my corner of the hinterlands... so I've been putting them to work recently.

Maybe take up Youtube-ing... Make a channel devoted to some aspect of food/bev that your network will allow you access to that other people won't get because they don't have your connections. Make videos. Interview people. Go behind the scenes. Cut together interesting 5-10 minute segments. See if they catch on. Good Youtube channels seem to pull in cash... If you're an NYC media market guy, maybe you remember Colameco's Food Show that was on the NJN channels in the late 90s and 2000s... Something like that without the whole TV crew budget might be doable again via Youtube... provided you've got the right personality and presentation to catch on. For example:

I'm not gonna get there.

If they have a fridge with an icemaker, there's already a bored passage through the floor between basement and kitchen. Running a seltzer line next to the ice maker line is totally doable (it's what I did... through the passage drilled through the 200 year old 8x8 beam that frames the edge of the kitchen floor) ... unless the ice maker installer was a precision freak who drilled a hole not a mm larger than needed to run the ice line... either way, if there's an ice maker there's already one hole in the floor in that kitchen. Your friend's husband could have his wish pretty easily. If leaving the marble sacrosanct and unmolested is vital, he can have a cobra tap with a magnet glued to it that sticks on the side of the fridge.

I think it is that underfilled bottle overpressurize... not overcarbonate. The problem is the gas that isn't dissolved in the liquid.

Bacteria have already done everything they're going to do to the milk by making it into yogurt. It will go off when technicolor molds get started... you'll know. If it looks white and lacks fuzz, it is OK.

Sorry for geeking out and talking over your head, Mitch. You're doing what normal sane people do. Us abnormal insane folks should remember that and keep it quiet. The SodaStream is a gateway to madness.

That doesn't switch gas on and off. That switches additional water on and off. Hook your plumbing up to the device, and it works like a float valve to top up your pressurized carbonation chamber.

And apropos all this... if you want the ultimate automated keg/reg setup, check this wily antipodean invention out:

Recently I've been fermenting last fall's pear pickings and some Chilean grape juice... their fall harvest got shipped up here mid May. Beer wise, I've got a lot of space taken up with a few iterations of flemish reds... need to drink through that and blend them down into fewer kegs so I have some space.

I have been doing the keg method myself for a decade... last year finally got a nice tap handle plumbed in to the bar so the fizzy water line from the basement terminates into something nice looking where I make drinks rather than a cheapy looking black cobra tap. Amazing how cheap a nice tap handle was on ebay... something like $30. It helps that the "bar" is actually an Ikea press-board bookcase that I had zero compunctions about drilling through... I've also found that delivery of fizzy water is much smoother when I have 2 kegs in series hooked up to the tap line... service keg out-port hooked to tap line, service keg gas port connected to a jumper attached to aux keg's out line... Also makes it much less likely that I'll run out of fizzy water... With some careful shopping and good luck, you could probably get a reg/keg setup going for less than the cost of a SodaStream thingy... presuming you rent your CO2 tank... But that would require diving down the homebrewing rabbit hole in a very serious way, as this equipment and info about it is not commonplace... then you'd have to figure out where your local welding shop is and make friends with them too, to keep you in gas... and that opens the door to thoughts of playing with liquid nitrogen and dry ice too (since the welding shop will also sell them)... which may be more temptation than most people are ready to resist...

Doing what you described sounds like you put a whole lot of gas into the bottle, and it didn't have a chance to dissolve into the liquid. Surface area of the liquid vs surface area of the gas are big factors in how quickly it will dissolve. If the gas was not bubbling through the liquid because it was only a half bottle and the gas injector was shooting into the airspace and not the liquid, the surface area is only the area of the disc of liquid at the top of the column made by the bottle. If the gas bubbles through the liquid, it forms spheres, lots of spheres with a massively greater surface area contacting the liquid. If the liquid was warm... or not as cold as possible to make it, the amount of gas that could be dissolved is lessened... So, for an appliance that does not allow you to do stuff that could encourage gas dissolution in sub-optimal circumstances (like chilling it for a long time before opening the bottle, and shaking the hell out of it), you have to just follow the directions.

When you say "exploded" do you mean that the bottle lost integrity and flew apart into pieces, or do you mean that the water in the bottle fizzed up and sprayed everywhere?

Sounds like that Mellow thing that tried to do that all in a waterbath... but couldn't make it happen fast enough to be safe (for certain definitions of safe).

IF you want quick water heating for tea, get a dedicated kettle. If you don't have counterspace to devote to a kettle, get one of these and store it in your tea mug when it is not in use.

Hmmmm. interesting. I'll keep an eye out for browning in a few days.

Some spring ramps have come my way, and ramp vinegar is always a yummy way to put them to use... It occurred to me that I've got a mountain of pure citric acid sitting around... so why not make up a 6% solution of that and drop a ramp leaf in and see what happens. Anybody else replaced acetic with citric in culinary preparations? I think that a citric ramp preserve might be tastier as the acid in a rampy mayonnaise.... the acetic twang just doesn't work for me in mayo... makes it seem like miracle whip... I'll report back after the ramps have pickled for a week.

Sad news.

So with most restaurants operating in a totally different mode (if at all) and many more people at home cooking, to-the-trade purveyors seem to be opening their doors to the public. I'd like this thread to explore our experiences with this new option being presented to us. A week or two ago my local metro's paper published an article about food distributors opening their inventories to the public... none of the options looked all that enticing, ranging from inflexible boxes of stuff that didn't trigger my Want! reflexes, to $200 minimum orders, to curbside pickup at warehouses an hour away. More recently, one of the big South Philly fish warehouses publicized that they were getting into the to-the-public side more seriously than they had. That sounded interesting. So, having been a subscriber to their email blasts (so I'd know when to start looking for seasonal stuff), I've dropped the $50 to join their "club" which theoretically entitles me to their to-the-trade special prices, and to delivery to my house (which will be a real winner since I live just outside the Instacart zone, where they'll say they will deliver to my ZIP code, just not to my house). I see it like a sort of Costco for fish (but with delivery)sort of proposition. I'll report back with updates on my experience. Share any adventures like this that you've got... if you've got any.

Are you asking who invented distillation, or who invented aging distillate in wooden barrels, or who invented charring the inside of the barrels?

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00480OV08?tag=slicinc-20&ascsubtag=91ba585c7e7b11ea85d8bafcfc5720790INT Momofuku cookbook by David Chang on sale for $2.99

Well, as a european-american, I'll gladly own up to heaps of cultural appropriation, or theft should you want to characterize it that way. Not a lot of tasty spices are native to Holland or North America, and I certainly like foods that contain spices. I'm guility. You win.