jokhm

We still use a blixer 4vv robotcoupe for light loads occasionally. It's really completely awesome and gives you a lot of control. That being said if hummus is all you will use it for I'd stick with a larger and cheaper R-series. You forgo the fancy cover but it barely matters with the speed the things get to anyway. For us we use it for a million things -- Really great. Prices go a little overboard as you go up in size though. the 4vv does a load of about 1.5KG of hummus at once. Seems I didn't have the right calculation before. But 1.5KG without shuffling things around. So I'm guessing the R8 could do close to double that. I looked into an R30 btw. 4 months delivery (HAAA) and about $15K. No thanks. That could be more of a China problem though.

Funny I did consider initially to just scale up the robotcoupe. The R30 looks nice. Holds 30 litres. Delivery date for it is 4 months after payment and the cost for the device was $20K !

Ya definitely the blenders would great for this kind of thing. Before we used a really fancy robotcoupe blixer. That could process loads of 3kg at a time. More than enough for smaller middle eastern restaurants as a base load. But ya, I don’t want to stress it out with 10 loads a day even if the machine only takes 3 minutes. Also another oddity of blenders or high speed professional food processors is that because they are just chopping things up the water absorption continues long after the final product is made. So if you made enough to put away for the next day everything will require additional liquid to loosen up later. So no one had played with one of those mills?

Hi everyone ! I’m tasked with a situation now where I will need to get my kitchen to output about 30kg of hummus daily. This is a lot more than we did before and I can’t imagine using the robotcoupe Blixer unit to do things in a timely manner. Does anyone have some better ideas? have been eyeing one of these colloid mills. Some are marketed for ‘hummus’ but I’m not sure about that. I also don’t want a situation where I need to input too much water when simply grinding the chickpeas. Have also tried a 2800rpm stone grinder and that seems to have unpredictable results while occasionally needing far too much water to get through everything. Although if you put too much water in the job is done in 5 minutes! anyway- just curious what others have tried for equipment. And also I’ve never spoken to anyone using a colloid mill for anything so I’m not aware of any experience with this one way or another. Although if I needed to make more peanut butter these look like the way forward!

holy &^*# What happened to my actual post!? Here's a rewrite, sorry if it is less linear and containing less content then I originally wrote.. Hard to remember precisely.. Hey All I'm about to arrive in thailand, after several hundred days away, and this time, despite it being the 10th time I'm traveling there, I'd like to get my street food done correctly. Can anyone discuss this a bit further, with some thai names (with pronunciation) for these snacks and general foods that I should be expecting to see and look for? I'll mostly in Bangkok, and then further south near koh lanta for much of my two week stay. I'm really hoping that this time I can take proper advantage and not mindlessly wander through the great snacks uninformed. I've done that countless times, and loved it, but always felt like I've missed so much. Also a few random thai connections with travel buddies at previous trips took the time to show me some of the best food I've ever eaten in my life, but somewhere, somehow, I left with only the knowledge that I had eaten fantastically well, and not with the details of exactly what I ate, and how/where to find it in the future. Hope this post makes sense to some. I know that if someone asked me the same thing for my area, I'd likely turn them to a few major specialties, and my routine favorite places to find them. In this case the language is also an issue! So I think the ideal would be to simply have an extensive vocabulary list to walk around with and help with ordering/identifying, rather than simply locating the correct stall or restaurant. But so far my searching online hasn't produced some kind of list I can build or study from. Anyway, any thoughts? Thanks! J

looks like it.. forget the name for them. But they see far more everyday use in Hunan cuisine. That dish you just posted in particular is a very famous hunan dish, not sichuan. Typical home-style food. But every hunan restaurant in China will offer it.

definitely is wo sun.. I remember seeing an english translation of it in a restaurant once that mentioned it as some form of lettuce, but can't remember now. In any case when it is fully grown out, it does look like a kind of lettuce

mmm i believe that cubed gelatinous thingy is actually made from potato flour. Interesting eh.

ooh that strange noodle-like dish you have in the steamer there is pretty rare to find in most places. I've lucked upon it only once in Beijing, and it was near the fragrant hills. They usually serve it with like a vinegary hot sauce right? Oh delicious.

your kids sinned. At least have them eat KFC which has a reasonably advanced sinocized menu compared with locations in other places! Not the worst deal in the world. I spent several months in Shanghai and throughout Zhejiang/Guangdong with a colleague that for the first 4 months would insist on eating at mcdonalds every time! Beat that! I still just barely converted him.. but barely. He still wouldn't eat anything with bones in or nearby and the same for seeds for fruits... which were also called 'bones'. Also the idea of eating bamboo was crazy enough to always suggest to other diners that he'd take them back to north america and feed them 2x4s. I always wonder about families like your in china frequenting the MCDs' and KFC's and i can just imagine the arguments and frustration the parents must go through. You are all troopers! But I think by the sound of it your kids did quite well overall no?

not sure which kind you are trying to make exactly.. but these aren't the shaanxi, lanzhou style lamian, which are the most obvious type that come to mind if you say lamian in china. The guys here barely add flour when they fold. They also don't fold it so many times, and they can additionally make them about 3x faster! hah. Remember, that over-added flour will really taint the broth or stir-fry in my opinion. Different use I suppose.

interesting, actually 4y/hour is fairly common at places like starbucks or MCD/KFC. In Beijing I know a lot of expat owned places that require english-speaking staff pay about 7-8 normally. But anyway it's good to see some people taking notice and changing things, cause 4yuan!! horrifying

interesting take on things fengyi. It's true that I actually don't know too many foodies who are or who's family members are beijingers. A lot of foodie friends are from sichuan/hunan/fujian/guangdong so there is always too much north-south comparisons(animosity). It's quite funny actually.. but I'm sure that helps distort my appreciation for some of the local foods. It's also interesting to see us foreigners coming to China and finding immediate satisfaction in some foods over others. In that respect from the few times I've been to some of the imperial cuisine restos many of the dishes almost felt like they were designed to be appreciated by foreigners. I can't tell you what that does for all those north-south conversations again. hah. One place comes to mind that was kind of new-beijing-with-hints-of-imperial-style that I visited recently, but the name escapes me. It was behind the two LG towers around Jianguomen built inside a siheyuan. Really gorgeous.. and really busy. Unusual amounts of sugar though, but a few dishes were quite interesting. Most of the non-chinese loved it and all the chinese save two absolutely hated it. Anyway, traveling too far off topic here. I'm looking forward for the chengdu pics.. since I really fancy going there the next time the flights drop in price! That, and the OP's interesting and detailed take on chinese resto-beer travel reinforces why I like being here. (not including the scorpions, thanks)

Yes I've heard of this place, at first mostly from you.. and indeed it looks appealing and upon my first trip to Beijing I tried getting there many times, but kept getting caught up with something. Then maybe a year ago I tried getting some others to go once again and found a few who'd been there recently and advised me not to since it had 'changed'. Stupid, indeed. So I will eventually get myself over there. I'm not one to believe of most people's casual dismissals of a restaurant, but I suppose at that time it was enough motivation-killer to keep things simple and go for dimsum..!!

I've had this cooked by some northern fujian people and they always added a touch of wine, and lots of garlic and green onions. I have to see how exactly they prepared it though, but it was the best variation of such a common dish that I've ever had. Delicious