dscheidt

I bought the oxo one, on the grounds that if my wife hates it, she can't blame me for buying some strange brand. We'll see how it works out. It turned up today, I'll use it later for dinner.

I need a couple small spatulas, suitable for getting the last of contents out of a small jar or can. Any recommendations? The last one, which worked pretty well, was from Tovolo, but it had a wooden handle that didn't last. I'd strongly prefer silicone.

https://camelcamelcamel.com/ will tell you the price history of an item. Because of the way amazon does short sales and garage sale day, their data may not reflect the current price, but it will still tell you if what you're seeing is a decent buy or not. There are lots of fake deals on garage sale day, black friday, etc. (The TV I bought a couple years ago was 100 more expensive as a prime day deal than it was when I bought it the month before. It was also advertised as a black friday deal, again for more than it had sold for regularly.)

Sure. I soak the toast as usual. Then it's bagged and sealed (don't pull too hard a vaccum, you'll squash the slices). The first time I did this, I did not have a vacuum sealer, so I used zipper bags and sealed them with an impulse sealer. Six slices from my pullman pans fit in the 10x15 bags I use. I get 13 1" slices from each loaf, so it works out well. It's also what we eat for breakfast. I think if I had bags that held two slices without horrible waste, I'd use that, because it's more flexible. When I'm doing it for a group, I will put more slices into a bag, in two layers. Then it's cooked at 147 for an hour or a bit longer. If you have two layers, I'd increase the time. From there, you could either hold hot at 140F, if you're serving it immediately, or it goes into an ice water bath and to cold storage. Serving is thaw if required, then brown (and make sure it's to temp internally, I sometimes heat it in a low oven, or in the water bath, before browning. Speeds things up, if you are doing a lot at once.) I first did this when I had to feed breakfast to 40 of my wife's relatives at the family cabin with a kitchen woefully ill suited for it. I bagged and cooked it all at home, hauled it to the cabin frozen, and used the circulator to thaw it and start the warming. Worked very well for that, so I've been doing it for home, and for a few other mass breakfast and brunches.

French toast from the cinnamon bread I made the other day. I make this in bulk and cook it sous vide, so we have three more batches in the freezer.

Baked a couple loaves of my cinnamon bread yesterday. I had some timing problems with other stuff, and it got over proofed on the first rise, and the second wasn't quite enough to fill the pullman pans. Still turned out okay. It almost all got turned into meal prep french toast, cooked sous vide, and into the freezer. (well, one batch is in the fridge for tomorrow....)

I doubt the cans used by a given canner are different based on what's going in them. Tomato canning is a "get it done now" operation, where the tomatoes come in, and processed, and canned as fast as possible to preserve freshness. many canners don't put the labels on cans until they ship them, because the same cans get sold under different brands. I use Escalon 6-in-1 tomatoes for pizza sauce. I have had several cans, which the canning machine labeled organic along with the lot and datestamp. The label was the normal one, as were the can and its contents.

My take on that is that the realtor wants a turnkey. They're easier to sell, they sell faster and at a higher price. The realtor does not care that you paid 100K in renovations so you could sell the house for 50K more. they care that you make their job easier, and they make more money at it. In most markets, renovations for sale do not make financial sense. Unless you can do the work cheaply, you will not make back what it costs to do the work. (Flippers can make money in three ways. If the market is rising, they benefit from buying low and selling high. Two, they usually buy houses that are such poor shape they couldn't be bought by someone who needs a mortgage. Three, they often do crap work, cutting every possible corner. )

Yeah, the only thing I find limiting with the the 215 is the width of bags it can seal. It's got a 10" bar. Also: you can use bags longer than the chamber. if you put anything with girth to it (a hunk of meat, say) you will use up some of the length of the bag going around it.

Better, just get a set of bits for your drill. Not only is cutting the bit in half a pain (do you think people have hacksaws and vises handy?), but most bits that come with furniture are made of cheese, and there's always one fastener which requres using the short side of the L key, because of clearance. I'd also recommend spending $20 and buying a set of decent allen wrenches (these are very good, made in the USA, and fairly cheap https://smile.amazon.com/Bondhus-20199-Balldriver-L-Wrench-1-5-10mm/dp/B00012Y38W/ Currently $18 for a set of both metric and SAE sizes.)

I figured it was too late for you, but I figured it could help someone in the future. No one seems to know about these boxes. They're not stocked by big box stores. Mine cam,e from a plumbing supply place, which had it in stock, but the counter guys had no idea they existed. (I called to check stock, guy asked what it was after saying thye had one. Guy who sold it to me also commented about never having seen one.) If you know what stove is going in, they're a great solution.

Most of the storage solutions are going to be for the person who has ten cans of the same thing, because that's the common and easy situation. Random access to small objects on shelves or in cabinets is hard problem to solve, that's why drawers are so much nicer. I did tour a house with a two million dollar kitchen[1], which had pull out shelves for cans, each shelf being two small (15oz) cans wide, and six or eight cans deep, with a little lip to keep things from flying around. I'm sure they were custom made. Failing that, the best solution I've come up with is stepped shelves, so you can see at least part of the cans behind the front row. Organization and inventory are important, so you don't end up with four cans of artichoke hearts. (I don't know what I'd do with one can, but we're prepared!) We have a real walk in pantry, about 3 x 7, and lots of cans on the shelves. (and more in the basement, for stuff we use in large amounts like beans and tomatoes, and for some #10 cans.) [1] the kitchen renovation had, according to the realtor, involved buying the house next door and tearing it down, so the kitchen could be expanded into that lot. I was with someone who was looking at it, way over my budget.

I heartily recommend an ox box gas valve box, like https://smile.amazon.com/Sioux-Chief-696-1031GF-Box-Outlet/dp/B003QSPUJO/ I installed one for my range, which greatly simplified installation, and got rid of the pipe coming through the floor. Plaster was the next step...

Buddy of mine bought a milling machine, about 3500 pounds, at an auction. He hired a rigging company to move it and install it in his basement. He was a little surprised when the truck showed up, and the only one on it was the driver. Dude had a collection of pretty impressive jacks, air bags, rollers, and big levers. (and a forklift to get it to the door.).

spec sheet says "Dry rocker vaccum pump". Rocker is a manufacturer (or maybe just a branding) of vacuum pumps, they're conventional piston pumps, and sucking stuff through them will cause damage. They work fine until they wear out, and for many applications that's pretty much never. That's probably the case for most home chamber vacuum sealers. When I bought my machine, the cost difference between the oil pump and dry pump version was only thirty or fifty bucks, pretty negligible compared to the cost of the machine. There are vacuum pumps that can ingest water, and which are oil free (scroll pumps, for instance), but they're not cheap, and even further over kill for the home kitchen.

seems to be https://www.lemproducts.com/product/maxvac-pro-chamber-sealer/all-vacuum-sealer-products this model. has an oil pump, which is a good feature. don't have a clear sense about how tall the chamber is, but it might be short. That's a limiation on my vp215 (not most of the time, but there's stuff I can't see I'd like to because of the height, particularly near the sealing bar.). it's probably a good buy for $600, given what tarriffs have done to prices. (I paid not much more than $600 for my vp215 about four years ago. )

I've never gotten a bucket from a food service operation with a lid worth a damn. No problem with the buckets, but the lids aren't good. They're not designed to be reused, so not really a surprise. Spending 6 bucks on a good screw on lid that will last years and years is worth it in my book.

White flours keep better than whole wheat. I've had bread flour last a year, not rancid, stored in a bucket in my (coolish) basement. I use regular 5 gallon buckets, with a 'gamma seal lid". Much cheaper than the thing Chris linked to (which may just be an amazon crazy price?) 50 lbs of flour is about 8 gallons, so you could use a 7.5 gallon bucket, and get most of it in the bucket. Of course, your bucket would weigh 50 pounds, which may be a problem.

I went this morning. No signs about a change in policy on who gets to shop, but I didn't ask. Reasonable selection of frozen stuff, full stock of baking stuff, except no dry yeast (fresh in the cooler), canned tomatoes in stock, pasta in stock. Plenty of cheese, dairy, eggs. NO pork at all. had beef (but I think limited varieties) and chicken. Produce looked like it always does (poor, with random stuff out of stock).

I have a 20K btu burner on my range (a GE, couldn't quite convince my wife to spend the money on anything that expensive. The feature I found most attractive about the BS is fitting a full sized sheet pan in the oven.) The difference between 15 and 20K is substantial. It gets used for things that don't necessary require it, but it makes them faster -- a pan sauce, or similar reductions, for instance. It also makes boiling water faster. Not everyone cooks like this, my wife routinely puts water on to boil and sets the burner on medium. It's an effort to keep from turning the burner up, and putting a cover on the pot, let me tell you.

How strict the RD is at letting people depends very much on the store. The one I go to in Chicago has a reputation for not letting anyone in. Other places, they don't care. Some of it depends on the state, and what the sales tax rules are. Illinois wants to see the tax id of everyone sold tax exempt stuff, which is part of why they're strict. They're also very busy, and moron members of the public wandering around cause problems. (I can spot the people who are clearly not restaurant shoppers, not just because of what they're buying, but because how lost they look and how often they jump in front of a speeding forklift.) The last time I was there, a couple weeks ago, they had a bunch of weird out of stocks, but the baking stuff was pretty well covered. I don't think there was dry yeast, but plenty of flour in all the things they carry. Dairy was well stocked, plenty of eggs (have to buy 15 dozen, of course....). There were some unit level meats missing, but I think there were cases of everything. I need to go again in the next couple days, I'll report back.

Ok, sometimes things hang out for a while in the freezer. Baked these tonight, from December 2018. They were indistinguishable from freshly made.

My chamber vacuum hint is simple. Get it into your kitchen. Or at least get it kitchen adjacent. Mine had been down in the basement, I finally moved it to the back porch off of the kitchen a couple months ago. It's so much easier to use for a single bag of something. I'd been keeping bags in the pantry, so we could put stuff in a bag, and I walk down the stairs to seal it up. But it wouldn't happen for a little leftover; now it's much more likely to. And I've convinced my wife to use it, though I haven't convinced her she needs lo really learn how to anything more than seal a bag with whatever setting it's programmed with. That's a start. I figure it'll take her a year to train her.

International Fuel Gas code (which is the model code used in most, but not all, of the US) requires that gas appliances be listed for the purpose they're used. No one makes a commercial range that's listed for residential use. If you have sufficient piles of moolah, you can get an engineer to certify a particular installation. I did some work in a lake house a decade or so ago. the basement kitchen had a full on line of commercial equipment under a commercial hood, with fire suppression. One of the inspectors I talked to thought the engineering work had cost $50K. This, of course, was not the kitchen the owners would ever use, this was for the help. The previous palace had the caterer's kitchen in an out building, but there wasn't a place to put one on the new property. T'his is a relatively recent code chage (probably 20 years or so); it used to be possible to get away with this.

It's an abrasive cloth or paper. It's an iron oxie abrasive (usually fine, but in theory, it was available in a range of grits), loosely bound to the sheet. Because iron oxide is relatively soft, and the grains are not firmly attached to the backing, it will not cut well, and is used for finishing, the steps before a buffing compound is used. It's very much like (real) emery cloth, but using iron oxide instead of the aluminum oxide in emery. I rather expect you're not going to find it at your local hardware store, let alone a big box. It's pretty thoroughly obsolete for industrial use.