cdh

Now that the patents have gone, are there any makers whose quality competes with the original source?

Terrible news. I was hoping it was a case of Mark Twain type great exaggeration. Since that doesn't appear to be the case, I guess I need to accept the sad news. She was a pillar of this place and will be greatly missed. Extra sad that her father outlived her.

Well, thinking of power plants and crab scariness... the most jarring crab experience I ever had was in Wales, where the crabmeat tasted of the smell of a coal fire burning. really unpleasant... I chalked it up to all the coal in wales obviously leaving them with a burnt coal ash disposal problem and a big ocean as the most ready solution to it...

My (sadly now retired) fish guy had a favorite brand of frozen cooked dungeness that were really good. Icicle brand. I have no idea where the brand gets mentioned in crab marketing, but if you have a fish guy, even at your supermarket, maybe ask what packer they came from... and ask if icicle is a brand that rings any bells... That all said, I find the cooked, frozen and then thawed for display crab that Costco offers is plenty delicious as it is. Go for it.

I discovered a panettone stuck in a corner from last xmas season a week or two ago... broke it out, and it is amazingly still good. The fermentation thing really does preserve.

Welcome. We have some history here at eG with Indian cooking... Search for the 20-year-old threads where @Suvir Saran was sharing his takes.

I'm happy with the stuff the sell at Costco... Madi is the brand.

Sounds like you got a dud. Dryness has never been an issue... stuff is so rich that adding butter on top after toasting seems like too much.

I glaze salmon with orange marmalade, wine, mustard, salt and sugar... I have no re-gelling issues... leftover glaze still pours after a day or two in the fridge

She was always a pleasure to read here, with a wide range and depth of commentary. RIP.

Marc Vetri has been instagramming his panettone experiments... see, e.g. https://www.instagram.com/reel/CyQrR8nO_h1/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

An unexpected behavior I've noticed is that when the thing being sealed is 1) wet AND 2) at or above room temp, pulling the vacuum boils the liquid and inflates the bag before it gets sealed... so when it is sealed, the bag is way puffed up and doesn't seal as tightly as a plain old food saver does... Anybody else experience this, and have thoughts on dealing with it? Vac time up or vac time down?

You want quantitative substantiation? OK. Devise a quantitative and reproducible measure of bitterness that more people than you agree on and can implement. Once you have that in hand, then we can perhaps interrogate your priors, e.g. "fines cause bitterness through over extraction, bitterness is bad, so fines must not be produced by coffee grinders. " It will be interesting to see whether your numbers match up with your intuitions when you're doing a blind tasting of coffees brewed. While you're devising that metric, get yourself a finely calibrated set of sieves so we can home in on what fines are too fine.

You seem to be mistaking this forum for a free scientific research service. If you want to pull apart all of the chemical causes of bitterness in brewed coffee, I'd find a food chemistry PhD program and apply... you've got the makings for quite a thesis if nobody has done it before. And if buried in the stacks there is already a paper or 4 on the subject, then you've got the "substantiation" that you want. You're not going to get it here.

Why would I bother? You're unsatisfiable. Go on believing as you wish. I'm sure that you'll argue dark roasted robusta beans are no more bitter by their nature regardless of grind, with no substantiation of your own. Nothing I can do to change your mind. You need to take your certainty and find an investor or two and build the better mousetrap.

I've never noticed an "excess bitterness" problem that can be attributed to the grind. The only value in a highly precise grinder I see is getting a highly finnicky espresso machine to pull a good shot. I'd imagine that the engineering that goes into $$$ grinders is pointed toward people who spend $$$ on espresso machines. I'd imagine that some fines are there by design, as getting an espresso puck that both flows and provides the right resistance is a macro version of a geometric packing problem, and a certain % of fines is needed in the output to reach a satisfactory solution. If you really hate bitter coffee, perhaps check your beans and your roast... there's a lot more bitter flavor coming from those than from the way you grind it..

Purple shiso is ideal for pickling... the brine should go from muddy green to bright magenta as the pH lowers as the lactic bacteria do their thing... take pics of the journey!

For your setup, I might consider one of these. (eG-friendly Amazon.com link) I've got one and it is wonderful for keeping fizzy things fizzy... open a liter of tonic and make a drink. Screw on a Fizzgiz cap and squeeze the air out of the bottle, then hit the cap with the CO2 injector and repressurize the bottle and its contents... toss the bottle in the fridge and it acts like it was never opened. You've got the passage from basement to kitchen already set up, so keeping your tank in the cellar and having the carbonator in the kitchen should work. And the Fizzgiz tubing is tiny, so not a space consuming ugly thing...

Around the holidays Old Forester does, or did last year, do a timeline gift pack of the 1897, 1910, 1920 and another one... wait til xmas shopping time and look for that. It's a pack of 4x200ml, so bigger than airline sized, and for 800ml, not airline bottle priced... but a way to taste a bunch of them without having to buy a whole bottle of each...

60 PSI is middle range carbonation when the water is at cellar temperature... During the winter it gets a bit cooler down there and the bubbles get bubblier. If I wanted to guarantee a 4+ volumes kind of fizzyness, I'd need a fridge to keep the kegs in... or a paint shaker to agitate it all in there.

What I've got for the moment is 2 5 Gallon Cornelius kegs in the basement jumpered together connected to a CO2 tank with a high pressure soda regulator on it at about 60 PSI. The out line follows the icemaker line through the hole in the floor and into the kitchen and terminates in a tap I installed in the Ikea bookcase that sits next to the fridge and holds all the booze. Every couple weeks I need to go down and refill the secondary keg, which I do from the basement pressure tank which has the freshest-out-of-the-well water. I'm thinking about reconfiguring the jumpering and extending the connection from a 5 footer to something like a 20 footer so that the secondary tank can live close to the pressure tank and one of these little guys into the system so the checking and refilling goes away...

It's arrived. Now what do I do first?

Hmmm... interesting. Not something that appeals to me, but interesting no less. I know some brewers like to start with distilled water and mineral packets to replicate certain geographically typical beer style characteristics... Guess we have to wait for Deephaven to tell us what the intended meaning of custom seltzers is in this conversation.

I don't think salts at all... My water is hard enough and what's in there tastes good to me. A spritz of wintergreen into a glass makes a sugarless birch beer. A spritz of any citrus does just what you'd expect. A spritz of star anis makes a booze-free nod to pastis, etc....

Welcome! You've found the right spot! Tell me about your redneck soda stream. I've got my own 10 gallon setup plumbed into my kitchen... there are improvements that might be worth doing... Give me ideas. On the custom seltzers idea, what I've been doing is making atomizer bottles filled with a 100:1 everclear to essential oil mixtures, and using them to dose a glass of plain seltzer out the tap.