jsolomon

I don't have any yet, but it's only been recently that my office has received a break room and requisite refrigerator. Of course, we also have biohazard bags, cleanroom gowning, and autoclaves large enough to decontaminate a whole fridge-worth of microbiology. I'm sure our time will come, though...

Well, there are two answers for your two questions. Yes, we know what dextrose is broken down into, and yes, there are very comprehensive descriptions of the chemical pathways that it goes through. First: dextrose is a simple sugar. It is also known as D-Glucose, yes, blood sugar! So, in that regard, it isn't broken down into any other sugars that your lactobacilli may or may not be able to metabolize. As for the fate of the glucose in a chemical reaction sense, that is known as glycolysis and is well-studied. Post glycolysis, in lactobacilli, the "waste-product" pyruvate is further reduced to lactate which is the final waste product (like CO2 and H2O for humans). Glycolysis and fermenters A slightly more graphic representation I hope these help!

I would call them the Marvin of my kitchen repertoire... oh well. I guess it's a generational thing.

Copycats Nebraska, freshwater prawns

I'm not really all that concerned about breakage, etc. Bottles are generally made with thick, resilient glass, and I have a fenced-in yard and am sans-children. Also, I am very familiar with how to work a rake and a shovel, so if I break one, I can fish out the pieces. Also, if someone trips into it, they'll also crack their head on the side of the tool shed. Life is not meant to be safe.

Get a cut-up chicken. Brine it. 500F oven 20 min on one side, 10 min on the other. Mind the smoke detector. Zounds!

I'm on the fence, but mostly because my beer tastes are pretty well-defined, and in my locale, there are painfully few offerings that fit my tastes.

Pardon my thought process. It's a little muddled right now. Anyway. I'm curious, what do people do with their emptied wine bottles? I had a brainstorm while talking with a friend about using them inverted to border a raised herb bed. Experiences? Thoughts? Other ideas?

My suggestion: Wait til tomato season. Make some good homemade bread that toast up beautifully, or find some from an artisanal place. Get some good bacon. Gather some charming tomatoes with lots of flavor. Pull one of your questionable bottles and chill it to the appropriate temperature. Make BLT's. Open the wine. Have the wine with BLT's. If the wine is good, it'll be a really memorable meal. If the wine is bad, well, at least you had BLT's which are one of the, IMHO, top 5 most charming sandwiches ever to come with a recipe. Seriously, from my current champagne-imbibing state, I'm jealous about the opportunity you have for discovery.

You could also elevate your plastic wrap over the curd using toothpicks strategically placed at about 2-inch intervals along the curd.

The dextrose provides an energy source for the bacteria that do the actual curing. Their action turns the dextrose into lactic acid which subsequently raises the acid level (lowering the pH). So you need the dextrose both as a fuel for them, and as a raw material for the manufacture of the acid that actually does the curing.

Spilker Ales Hopluia. Yum.

Ginger snaps

Last night: Empyrean Ales (Lazlo's) Scottish Ale. Quite a restorative after a full day of work and an evening of cleaning and packing to move. Good flavor, good mouthfeel. No flavors that really pop out at you, though. It's kind of like a subdued Boston Lager from Sam Adams. Pretty good with my fish and chips, even if they did undercook the fish the first time around. They made it good, and I've never had complaints about Lazlo's.

I would tread lightly if you're thinking of cutting the coconut out of your granola. My brother does not like coconut whatsoever. He took my mother's recipe and made it without the coconut and ended up tossing the batch in the trash. Coconut definitely brings many flavors to the table and rounds out the granola quite nicely. I believe you'll miss it if it's gone. How about mixing yours in yogurt instead of milk so the coconut doesn't float?

jmolinari, what did you end up doing to solve your search for an appropriate area/chamber to age your sausage?

Hmm. Hmmmmm. Hmm.......... I posted in Adventures in Eating that I'm thinking of trying a sausage with Cocoa as one of the main spices. I'm having a unique thought process of cocoa, sriracha, crystallized ginger... I'm going to have to do some cooking tonight! Woohoo!!!!

Instead of strawberries, I suggest people try a rhubarb-raisin pie, too. The raisins have their own tartness and the tannins really bring something spectacular to the combination. Besides, isn't it a misdemeanor to cook strawberries? Edit to r/raisin/strawberries in a place or two.

I was searching Google and only found 1 brewpub for San Antonio, the Blue Star or something similar. Are there any others in San Antonio, Texas? Should they be on my beer radar if I visit?

I've used frozen rhubarb side-to-side with fresh, and they seem to perform the same.

Not to swing too far off-topic, but I think the problem starts more with our factory farming of them, even earlier than with our factory processing of them. Birds that don't eat bugs just don't taste right.

Part of the difference of a freshly killed chicken may also be in the different care taken in the raising process. Having grown up a on a farm, as a sprout we would usually get between 50 and 150 chicks and butcher them in 2 or 3 flights during the summer. We had damned good chicken. Although, I have never, to my knowledge, had freshly killed chicken. After slaughtering between 20 and 60 chickens in a day, the last thing you want to face is a drumstick, no matter how charming it is. But, our chickens were damned tasty. Fresh or not.

Sheesh, y'all travel to Nebraska and you can pick all you want out of my mom's patch...

Ack! You're right. I blindly went on with my units(1) conversion. I'll have to check the program. Let's say, 160C. You can subsitute nearly any thick syrup for honey. You can use sorghum, molasses, fructose syrup, glucose syrup... I would steer clear of simple syrup because of its high water content, though. What is the texture that you are aiming for with your granola?

Another suggestion I have is from my mom's granola recipe--which sadly I don't have access to right now--hers calls for honey and corn syrup instead of granular sugar. I also recall her recipe gets baked at 325F/180C. Hers is crumbly because it gets stirred every 15 or 20 minutes to break up the "bars". It's significantly different than store-bought granola bars, but much tastier, IMO. Hers also calls for wheat germ which I've never noticed burning, but it does take on a "golden brown and delicious" character.