browniebaker
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Posts posted by browniebaker
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Old Bay Seasoning, from Maryland!
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I feel like a fraud for keeping my garlic cloves in the freezer, where they keep forever. They are not fresh!
Do they freeze well enough to use as one would use never-frozen-garlic? I always have trouble with rotting garlic, since I can never use up an entire head before it goes bad (and I have to buy garlic in bags of three heads!). If it works, I'm freezing mine!
Well, it works for me. [insert shame-faced emoticon here.]
The appearance and texture does change: the garlic looks a little waxen and transparent, and it loses its crispness. It's fine in dishes where the garlic is cooked. In dishes where the garlic is used raw, the difference in texture would be palpable.
Some people say the flavor of the garlic deteriorates in the freezer, and some say the flavor gets harsher in the freezer, but some say there is no noticeable change in flavor.
Another option is to freeze it chopped up in some oil. There is said to be less change in flavor this way.
But frozen cloves are good enough for me, the fraud. Hey, no more rotting or sprouting garlic!
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I feel like a fraud for keeping my garlic cloves in the freezer, where they keep forever. They are not fresh!
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I'm in the clean-cookbook camp. If I open a cookbook for use, I place it on the dining-room table just outside the kitchen doorway, away from splatters. I walk back and forth between kitchen and dining room. Do I ever touch a cookbook without wiping my hands utterly dry first? No. Neurotic? Yes.
Sometimes, I'll copy the basic list of ingredients and amounts and take that into the kitchen with me.
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The dry bread from the pineapple bun would go right into the "crumb bin" I keep in my oven (when oven's not in use). The crumbs reach a critical mass and get put into meatballs and meatloaf.
The potsticker skin would have been cut up and thrown into the container marked "garbage" in my freezer. Once a month or so I make "garbage soup."
Bad food can be transformed. I like saving money, which I can then spend on good food.
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If you have not baked two or more pies side by side in your oven, I would give it a trial run to make sure you can do that successfully. I found that I cannot bake two custard pies (e.g., pumpkin pie, chess pie, pecan pie, or sweet-potato pie) on the same rack in my oven; the filling at the edge that is next to the other pie buckles, maybe because of the heat given off by the other pie. To get a smooth, evenly baked custard, I have to bake one at a time.
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Ground ancho chili pepper! I use so much of this, once, Penzey's customer service telephoned me to confirm that I really wanted to buy *10* pounds, as I had ordered on-line the day before. To their credit, they didn't want to sell me more of the stuff than I had meant to order or than I really needed.
Big vats of chili. Big skillets of taco filling. I freeze tubs and tubs of refried beans and sauce for enchiladas and tacos.
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As a woodworker I consider "multiple coats of polyurethane" a crime! Cover it when in use, use a good quality polish and enjoy its soft natural gleam at other times.
Edited to add: and don't leave the pads on it when it is not in use. They'll dull the finish over a period of time.
This is pretty much what I do. cover it with a pad and tablecloth for use, and leave it uncovered all other times.
Uncovered when not in use.
When in use, a felt-backed vinyl pad, then a tablecloth. Sometime a runner or two on or three on top of all that.
I can't imagine ever using just place mats on the bare, unprotected table. So why did I buy 12 place mats? I guess so that my daughter will have them in the same tablecloth pattern in case she's more brave than I am.
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Has anyone frozen some canned tuna? How is it after freezing?
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How come you don't make pork stock? You make beef stock, chicken stock, fish stock, vegetable stock, why not pork? Why doesn't that porky goodness translate to stock?
Oh, but pork stock is big in Chinese cooking, has been for a long, long time.
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Maybe Todd English should say, "Never trust a pizza that is consistently round."
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Brownies routinely look good but disappoint! it's so hard to tell by the looks of them, I've gotten to the point where I take from the buffet table just a crumb off one brownie, to taste before I commit to an entire brownie.
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Please don't do this to any valuable silver! It's a quick way to clean, but it's also a quick way to erode the silver. Your silver will lose weight each time you do this. With erosion, details in the design will blur.
What might be a better way? I have some older silver-plated forks, knives & spoons that accidentally (I had nothing to do with this, trust me!) went into the dishwasher one Thanksgiving and came out, for want of a better word, cloudy. They might not have much monetary value, but they have enormous sentimental value. Can they be saved?
pat w.
I've read that cloudiness results from the heat and/or detergent of the dishwasher. How deep is the cloudy layer, I do not know. I'd consult an expert to see whether any other polishing method might help. Certainly a set of such great sentimental value is worth the effort, and I hope you have good luck. Most certainly silverplate should not be put into any electrolytic solution; else you'll have to re-plate sooner than you'd otherwise have to.
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I keep all my shrimp shells from peeling raw shrimp in a bag in the freezer. A five minute simmer in white wine and water and you have a lovely delicate shrimp stock.
I do this too. A lot of times I will make a shrimp stock the same day I peel the shrimp but if not the shells go into a bag in the freezer. I do the same with bones for other stocks.
Yes, I'd like to know that silver cleaning tip, please.Use a sheet of aluminum foil to line the bottom of your sink or any other large vessel that you want to dip your silver into. Add hot water and baking soda. When you dip your silver item into the water and it touches the aluminum foil the tarnish will be liberated from the silver. The baking soda/aluminum combo pulls sulfur off the silver by a small electrolytic current set up through the "salt bridge". The heat of the water is just a catalyst and makes the reaction occur faster
Please don't do this to any valuable silver! It's a quick way to clean, but it's also a quick way to erode the silver. Your silver will lose weight each time you do this. With erosion, details in the design will blur.
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Currently I am addicted to Kettle-brand Buffalo Bleu potato chips. Thick, ripple-cut chips are kettle-cooked and coated in hot buffalo-wing spices offset by the cool tang of bleu cheese. This is like a drug to me! There's a padlock on the bag right now -- no joke.
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Masters Super Fish, just two or three blocks from Waterloo tube station, is the best fish and chips I've had in London. Both eat-in and take-out. Popular with the cabbies.
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Masters Super Fish -- excellent fish and chips (and huge portions of them) just three or four blocks south of Waterloo tube and train stations, on Waterloo Road; a complimentary plate of three steamed prawns; they make their own pickled onions and gherkins; take-away and eat-in. It's where I am going as soon as my plane lands again at Heathrow.
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I use a lot of bananas, two cups mashed (extremely ripe!) bananas to two cups flour, making 12 muffins.
Two eggs.
No other wet ingredients.
I like brown sugar best as the sweetener.
Toasted walnut pieces (not too small) are the nut of choice.
1/4 cup canola oil usually, although I sometimes make all-butter or half-butter-half-oil muffins.
The leaveners are 2 teaspoons baking powder and 1/2 teaspoon baking soda.
No vanilla or spices.
Oat-crumble topping of rolled oats, brown sugar, butter, flour, and a little salt all rubbed together until clumpy.
1 cup semi-sweet-chocolate chunks or white-chocolate-chunks get thrown in if I want to make these muffins extra-kid-pleasing.
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Well, I didn't put any oil in the bag and my microwave is not of any extraordinary wattage, yet I heard a bzap-bzap sound and turned to see the whole chamber filled with orange flames. I did what I later learned I should not do: I opened the door. You're supposed to leave the door closed and unplug the microwave oven. I threw in a cup of water and that doused out the fire. Later, shamefaced, I called the customer service department of the manufacturer, Panasonic, and was told never to put any brown paper bag in the oven because brown paper bags may be made of materials not safe to heat in a microwave. I am embarrassed to say that it's all in the manual.
Now I happily pop without oil in my cheap and durable Orville Redenbacher hot-air popper.
Once you've had the fright of a flaming microwave, you'll never put another brown paper bag in!
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I tried this and started a fire in my microwave! Some brown paper bags are made of materials that are not safe to heat in a microwave. Of course, my microwave manual says not to use brown paper bags in microwave, but a friend told me she zaps her popcorn and persuaded me to try it, too. Very dangerous.
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My reply may be too late, but for individual dessert pies (as opposed to individual main-course potpies) I like to use Magic Line's 4-inch aluminum pie plates. The serving size is perfect; 4-inch springforms, on the other hand, seem a bit too much volume for a dessert. In addition, aluminum browns crusts well.
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The moisture should be on the scone, not in it: clotted cream with strawberry jam is classic.
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I'm going to work on a new demo for almond butter crunch and sponge toffee over the next week or two.
I can't wait for this demo, Kerry. You have no idea how much I have learned from the demos you've done thus far. Thank you so much.
English toffee I have successfully made twice recently, but one detail bothers me: I sprinkled Nestle semisweet chocolate chips oon top the of the still-hot toffee, let the chocolate melt, spread the chocolate evenly, pressed in toasted chopped pecans, and left the toffee and chocolate to set, BUT the chocolate never hardened except in the fridge and would not stay hard out of the fridge. A call to Nestle's consumer line got me the explanation that their chocolate chips, once melted, may never harden again at warmer room temperatures. I asked whether to use some other type of chocolate but probably because Nestle doesn't sell some other type for coating candy, the answer was unresponsive. Kerry, I'll be interested to see what type of chocolate you recommend for coating the toffee.
Actually when I make things that require the chocolate on top of the candy, I temper the chocolate in order to insure that it hardens at room temperature and doesn't get cloudy or streaky. My demo of tempering milk chocolate is here. That is tempering in a bowl, for these recipes you only need to temper a small amount of chocolate, so you could do that in a small measuring cup, or on a marble slab.
Using confectionary coating (those discs they sell in the bulk food store) means you don't have to temper, because they replace the cocoa butter with other fats that have a stable crystalline structure at room temperature. Trouble with those is the taste in my view. I like the real chocolate, and for the almond butter crunch, the more bittersweet the better.
Thank you, Kerry. I am going to try tempering chocolate so my English toffee can be given as gifts instead of being fridge-bound. Tempering chocolate is one of those mysterious things I had read about but never thought I would have to do!
Your demos are terrific, Kerry. Thank you so much!
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I'm going to work on a new demo for almond butter crunch and sponge toffee over the next week or two.
I can't wait for this demo, Kerry. You have no idea how much I have learned from the demos you've done thus far. Thank you so much.
English toffee I have successfully made twice recently, but one detail bothers me: I sprinkled Nestle semisweet chocolate chips oon top the of the still-hot toffee, let the chocolate melt, spread the chocolate evenly, pressed in toasted chopped pecans, and left the toffee and chocolate to set, BUT the chocolate never hardened except in the fridge and would not stay hard out of the fridge. A call to Nestle's consumer line got me the explanation that their chocolate chips, once melted, may never harden again at warmer room temperatures. I asked whether to use some other type of chocolate but probably because Nestle doesn't sell some other type for coating candy, the answer was unresponsive. Kerry, I'll be interested to see what type of chocolate you recommend for coating the toffee.
"Velveting"
in China: Cooking & Baking
Posted · Edited by browniebaker (log)
This method does require half-cooking the meat, not cooking it all the way before removing the meat from the pan. All other ingredients are added, in sequence. Just minutes later, near the end, the meat is returned to the pan and the heat of the pan and of the surrounding ingredients finishes the cooking of the meat. Half-cooking prevents keep the meat from toughening from overcooking. Holding half-cooked meat for such a short time is not dangerous.