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SLB

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    The Pleasures of Moka

    in Coffee & Tea

    Posted

    Resurrecting this thread for a quick q:  I've only owned an aluminum Bialetti moka pot, and am considering investing in a larger stainless steel moka pot.  Do the stainless ones need to be used frequently in order to produce a good flavor?  I get why this is true for the aluminum pots, but I think of stainless steel as totally inert and thus not subject to improvement over time.  Any thoughts on this?   

    Questions about bean varieties

    in Cooking

    Posted · Edited by SLB (log)

    I wouldn't mind, either, shew.

     

    My bean this week is RG bayo chocolate.  I made the first half of the bag some time ago,and didn't love them, and I'm not totally loving these either.  Kinda bland.  But I've been curing that problem with some pickled onions added in as served.  Which certainly works.  

    • Like 1

    NYTimes Articles on Food, Drink, Culinary Culture 2013–

    in Food Media & Arts

    Posted · Edited by SLB (log)

    Just yesterday I observed some seriously incompetent delivery dudes doing a horrible job with something like a thousand boxes, which I guess were scheduled for delivery to addresses near my office building.  One hand-truck was piled high with amazon and Blue Ribbon (meal-kit) deliveries.   mean piled and re-piled because everything kept falling over onto the ground until they finally took the job seriously of stacking strategically.  The boxes were piled so foolishly, and fell over so frequently, I figured that everybody was overly stoned.  It was ridiculous.

     

    But the real problem?  Those boxes sat in the sunshine for at least 90 minutes while the delivery dudes figured out what they were going to do to get their actual job done.  I kid you not, they were all over the ground when I arrived at my office at high noon, and I just kept staring at the catastrophe for the next hour and a half.  In the photos, the Blue-Ribbon boxes have cooking tools as decoration on them.  

     

    A poor novice-cook is gonna think s/he got sick from something they did.  

     

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    Questions about bean varieties

    in Cooking

    Posted

    I'm not worried about offspring either, but I don't have a lot of neurons to spare; all my surplus neuro-functioning has been allocated to alcohol.  

     

    I'm not too sure about this lupini experiment.  In fact, I think I might violate the first rule of my upbringing, and throw these things away.  Which is a whole different thread, I know, I know . . . .

    • Like 4

    Questions about bean varieties

    in Cooking

    Posted

    Folks, I bought some lupini beans some time back without realizing what I was getting myself into.  What drew me to them was the reported high-protein content.  I only accidentally looked at the strange directions on the package, which indicate five days of soaking with regular water changes.  Then I googled, only to discover the lethal risk of not going through alla that.

     

    Sigh.

     

    So, given that I'm about to begin a multi-day prep for some dang beans; does anybody have a delicious lupini recipe that will make feel rewarded???

     

    Also, any tried and true shortcuts on the prep would be totally appreciated.  

    Crazy priced food

    in Kitchen Consumer

    Posted · Edited by SLB (log)

    Oh, I didn't even think of that (foolishly); I thought it was some twee thing.  Perhaps this Fairway has a particular market need it's meeting, which of course I've got no problem with.  I do wish the prices were more reasonable.

    • Like 4

    Crazy priced food

    in Kitchen Consumer

    Posted · Edited by SLB (log)

    The goose prices are wild, but at least it seems like an adventure (of a sort).  

     

    Admitting that I do not purchase food in this format ever, this photo (taken in good ole NYC Fairway) is the kind of food-form that makes me think the apocalypse is upon us:

     

    2016-03-09 17.29.52.jpg

     

    I mean.  It's not like I haven't made a meal out of stir-fried onions and mushrooms.  But.  But.  I mean . . . for five bucks???

    • Like 3

    Salad 2016 –

    in Cooking

    Posted · Edited by SLB (log)

    So, I recently heard an episode of "The Moth Radio Hour" featuring a testimony from Chef Chris Fischer from The Beach Plum on Martha's Vineyard.  The episode was from the night the Obamas showed up.  There is a really very touching discussion of a salad that was prepped and served to the Obamas, and it noted that the dressing was composed of blended salad greens along with the vinaigrette basics.  

     

    Using blended salad greens in the dressing is a new one for me.  But as soon as things get springy and fresh around here, I'm going to try it.  It sounds perfect!  

     

    [Obvs Chef Fischer could easily be an egulleter; if so, hi!  Loved your tender Moth segment.]  

    • Like 2

    Questions about bean varieties

    in Cooking

    Posted · Edited by SLB (log)

    Here are the Ayocote Morado enfrijolada-like things in my Mama's Corningware, with a fair amount of cheese baked on top and about a fourth-cup dressing of a whole additional sauce made with chipotles and sherry vinegar that I use for something else but had in the freezer.  

     

    A touch dry, but ultimately not underflavored.  Echoing what RanchoGordo noted upthread about a different Ayocote bean, the Morado is really very starchy.  

     

     

    2016-02-22 11.04.47.jpg

    • Like 4

    The Bread Topic (2015-2016)

    in Pastry & Baking

    Posted · Edited by SLB (log)

    One other faint memory comes to mind re bleaching, from something I read somewhere:  bleaching was habitual with soft wheats (winter wheat, maybe?), that were typical of southern wheat crops.  You can't get the kind of rise (or maybe it's the chew?) from soft wheat that is customary for northern breads without bleaching the flour.  Bleaching subsequently became associated with a coincident preference for paler-colored flour, and thus paler resultant baked goods.  This was just aesthetic though (although not insignificant); the original purpose was to get the lower-protein southern wheat to somewhat function in northern-style yeast breads.  

     

    Like I said, I'm not an expert.  I think I may have read this in one of the KAF manuals?

     

    Other southern wheat breads, like classic southern biscuits and some of the cakes, are only really attainable with bleached soft wheat.  Like good ole' White Lily.  The cliche is that if you try to make a southern biscuit (in my family, this was known as just a "biscuit") with non-southern flour, you will get a hockey puck.  I do recall my Mississippi father finding my Chicago mother's biscuits intolerable.  He would pull out the dense interiors, and just eat buttered hot crust.  At the time, I believe the family conclusion was that it was the altitude we were living in at the time (Colorado).  

     

     

    • Like 1

    The Bread Topic (2015-2016)

    in Pastry & Baking

    Posted · Edited by SLB (log)

    I did not realize that KAF had discontinued the Queen Guinevere!  I have a bit left from over a year ago, and actually made the RLB chocolate bread with it earlier today.  It's a gift for a friend who is mourning; but I really wish I'd gone ahead and made two of 'em.  That was just dumb.

     

    2016-02-21 20.46.15.jpg

     

    You can see I used a bit too large of a loaf pan.  But it should taste alright.  We're talking chocolate here.

    • Like 4

    The Bread Topic (2015-2016)

    in Pastry & Baking

    Posted · Edited by SLB (log)

    I thought bleached flour was for recipes that aspire to rise but involve a lot of additional ingredients that are heavy -- butter, sugar, buttermilk, etc.  Bleached flour will effect a better rise where there is a heavy load.  

     

    Interestingly enough, my regular non-gourmet grocery store basically switches out all the flours to bleached when the holidays roll around, and you can't find unbleached flour there until after the new year.  I assume that's so that customers aren't complaining that their sugary festival foods didn't perform like they remember.  

     

    I'm no expert, though.  And I don't know what happens if you use bleached flour in a flour-yeast-water-alone scenario.  Please do report back.

    Questions about bean varieties

    in Cooking

    Posted · Edited by SLB (log)

    Today is RG Ayocote Morados.  They were soaked overnight in heavily salted water, and are now mostly tender after an hour and a half of a brisk simmer in the clay pot.  There's still a touch of chalkiness, and the broth is too thin for my taste, so I'm lowering the temp and letting them simmer for a bit longer.  I remain startled at how long it's taking others' Ayocotes to cook through.  

     

    The taste, however, is bringing commercial kidney beans to mind, which is in turn generating some PTSD-style terror.  [I, uh, rather dislike red kidney beans and would be thrilled if the variety went extinct and therefore no other child would be subjected to them, ever].  We'll see how it goes as they continue to cook.  I have enfrijoladas on the brain, but I may have to drench everything in an additional sauce of some kind.

    • Like 2

    Questions about bean varieties

    in Cooking

    Posted · Edited by SLB (log)

    That parching method is fascinating!  I would've imagined that doing so would extend the cooking time, like with the pie weights.  

     

    Soaking has gotten a bad rap, and loses round after round, but still I soak every bean.  I find that they not cook not only more quickly -- I about fell over dead at the report of four hours in the pressure cooker --  but also more evenly.  

     

    On the unspeakable.  I have also heard that eating beans frequently is the antidote, and I definitely find that soaking helps (in fact, this is why I soak the quintessential no-soak bean, the lentil.  Unsoaked lentils cause me serious Problems).  That said -- I eat 'em almost every day, and I continue to be a lady with some Problems.  Not catastrophic problems, to be sure.  But smallish, persistent Problems.   

    • Like 2

    Questions about bean varieties

    in Cooking

    Posted · Edited by SLB (log)

    I made a pot of the RG Ayocote Amarillos this morning, just to follow up on JoNorvelleWalker's experience.  These beans did not have a best-by date on them (some of the non-Xoxoc RG beans do now), but I received them a couple of months ago.  I made them with my basic-beans recipe, which is how I usually test varieties I haven't had before.  It's not the same for every single type of bean, but anyway --

     

    I soaked overnight in heavily salted water, which was then drained off.  The beans took awhile to start puckering up, which I have not found to be unusual for the larger beans.  In any case, they were squeezy-soft after the overnight soak, and had absorbed enough water that when I squeezed one, a small stream would spew out.  Stands to reason, but I had never noticed anything like this in any other bean.  

     

    I cooked them in a clay bean pot with onion, green bell pepper, carrot, garlic, cilantro, celery, and a small amount of otherwise-unflavored ham hock stock.  By small amount, I mean about a cup of pork stock, with the rest water.

     

    I added bay leaf, black pepper, and a little more salt at the start of cooking.  [I realize that this is against all kinds of rules and notions, but this is basically the way I make beans week in and week out.  The seasonings change somewhat, but not the salt part.  I am a serious salt person.]    

     

    Anyway, for the last few weeks I"ve been using the clay pot with no flame-tamer, right on the grate.  So, kind of a high temperature simmer for the duration.  The beans were edible if firm after about 2 hours of cooking.  I then started reducing the liquid, and everything was tender and delicious by about 2 hours 45 minutes.  

     

    As I've noted, the only other Ayocote that I've cooked to date is the Negro, and it did not take this long, or even long enough to be notable.  But, it is a significantly smaller bean.  It looks like the Amarillos and the Morados are a lot bigger than the Negros and the Blancos.

     

    So, the Amarillos took what is for me a long time to cook, but nothing along the lines of JoNorvelleWalker's experience.  I suspect it was the soaking, for what that's worth.  

    Cooking Process Question

    in Food Traditions & Culture

    Posted

    I took the survey and for most questions had more than one answer.  I would not have thought the queries to be productively vague, but rather got the feeling that the author wasn't totally familiar with the range of real-life answers.  It might make more sense to ask people what they think they need in order to cook more often, or to try to ask a question that relates in some specific way to how your product would advance the project of getting meals on the table.

    • Like 3
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