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Handheld pepper grinder for a wet (and therefore sticky) powder?
I am a research scientist trying to find a faster way to feed my animals. Fish food pellets are ground up in a meat grinder. About 99% of the pellets are crushed, and then the animals are handfed the powder by sprinkling it on the water surface. I tried using a pepper grinder, but the moisture in the powder made the powder stick to the grinding mechanism. The 1% of pellets that are uncrushed then clog the mechanism because the grinder becomes too blunt after the powder starts to stick. The new system is slower than handfeeding, but it does work very well until the grinder slows down.
Does anyone know of a handheld grinder that can handle sticky powders? I cannot use an instrument that exceeds the height of a typical household pepper grinder. | I suggest a small mortar & pestle, such as a suribachi. Any rotary grinder is going to have issues with gumming up. But a suribachi is small, portable, unpowered, and you can use a scraper to clean it quickly if it gets gummed up. |
Applying seasoning to mushrooms
So I started baking pleurotous mushrooms recently; they're really yummy. The recipe proposes oil with garlic, salt, and pepper to be mixed and then spread on the mushrooms with a brush. However, this is hard, as the-carefully placed-mushrooms are simply moved if I try to brush over them!
What can I do to prevent this?
Is there maybe some device that allows me to spray a seasoning on them, without clogging despite the spices inside? | You won't be able to spray that mix as the pepper will clog up the sprayer, the salt may likewise cause problems. I can think of two options that may make it easier:
Spray on the oil with a sprayer, then apply salt and pepper. I would use my fingers to sprinkle the salt for better control, then grind fresh pepper over
Mix the oil and seasoning together and toss the mushrooms in it to coat. This could work if you have enough oil mix, if it's meant to be a light coating then I would use option 1. |
Will my meatloaf cook if the sauce is mixed into the meat
I accidentally mixed the ingredients all together for my meatloaf. The recipe says to add the sauces on top but I've already mixed it in. Will it still cook and be edible? | It will cook, and be safe to eat.
However, depending on the ratio of sauce to solid ingredients, and how much binder (egg, etc.) is in your recipe, you might end up with sloppy joe filling rather than a meatloaf. |
Does cooking food inside a pressure cooker and then leaving it locked preserve it similar to canning?
I have made some food in my pressure cooker and left it in room temperature for over a week. When I opened it, there was no mold. I threw it out because it might have still been bad, but this got me thinking.
Since canning is basically cooking food in a sealed environment, isn't pressure cooking similar when I do not open the pressure cooker? Could the food be left in the pressure cooker at a room temperature for a longer time, given that I pressure cook it every time I close the lid? | When you take the pressure cooker off the heat, it's filled with high-temperature, high-pressure steam. As it cools, that steam condenses, leaving a vacuum. Pressure cooker valves are designed to allow air to enter to fill the vacuum (to avoid damaging the pressure cooker, and to make it possible to take the lid off). So it isn't really sealed once it's not at high pressure. |
Why is asking for no white sauce on shawarma so controversial?
I've asked for no "white sauce" (I'm lactose intolerant) on shawarma multiple times at multiple different shawarma places, and the reaction every time is a variety of "What!? Are you sure!? Do you know what you're doing?! Are you out of your mind!?" Is white sauce just considered integral to the shawarma experience, or is there something mysterious going on behind the scenes?
This is in Southern Ontario, Canada by the way. | There is nothing mysterious; the sauce does not hold the food together or keep it warm or some other such magic. Instead, the reaction you are getting is some combination of:
The people serving know how they believe shawarma should taste, and whatever this sauce is is an integral part of that (likely in texture as well as flavour; the shawarma I've had would be very dry without sauce).
Especially for food associated with a minority culture (this is shawarma being served in Canada), people can be resistant to changes.
The specific flavour is also tied to the identity of the food: shawarma, gyros, souvlaki and a doner kebab are all superficially very similar food items (roasted meat in a flatbread with some sauce and salad) but the specific details are what make them what they are.
They probably constantly serve people who ask for changes and then complain that the food is bland or tastes wrong, which means they want to make sure that you really mean it.
As with many non-corporate-chain fast food places, they are probably used to a fairly relaxed, jokey style of banter with customers. "Are you out of your mind!" might sound more extreme if you're not expecting that, but is likely just teasing.
Analogous requests (from the respective servers' perspectives) might be asking for no 'red sauce' on a pizza, no 'yellow sauce' on a hot dog, or no 'green sauce' with nachos. |
How to use mint & vanilla extracts when making ice cream?
I want to make frozen yogurt ice cream mixes using mint and vanilla extracts from the grocery store.
The problem is, these extracts are made with an alcohol byproduct that is usually evaporated when they’re used in things like baking.
But for making frozen desserts, the alcohol sticks around, making the taste pretty medicine-y and bad.
If I evaporate the alcohol before adding it to the dairy, I’m worried the mint flavors will go with it. But is that the way to do it?
How can I get the alcohol out of mint and vanilla extracts for custom frozen & room temperature deserts? | I generally pasteurize my ice cream bases at 83 °C for food safety reasons before ripening it. This would be enough to reduce the amount of alcohol to round about 35-40 % of its original volume, but as explained in another question it is impossible to remove it entirely. If you cook the mixture for a longer time the rate of reduction will be increased but as also a share of the water would evaporate and this also would affect the balancing and properties like the freezing curve, texture and taste of the base.
As an alternative, you could avoid the alcohol issue by using vanilla pods, mint leaves or (homemade) mint syrup. |
How to get brown tops to my garlic knots
I've found some good recipes for garlic knots, but can't get them to have that restaurant style brown tops to them. The best I can do is get them slightly brown at the top if I cook them longer than expected, on the verge of burning the bottoms. I have the same problem with pizza crusts too and some other rolls I've tried in the past.
Is there a tip to get these to brown better in a regular home oven? | The usual tips for browning the tips of baked goods:
move them higher in the oven, so there’s more top heat
a milk wash, butter, or something with protein or sugar to brown
Add sugar or protein to the dough
Add baking soda to the dough (because acids inhibit browning, bases promote it)
… but I would avoid that first one for garlic knots. Burned garlic is not good. And I assume they’re covered in butter already, so you will likely need to adjust the dough. |
Worried about my potatoes and botulism
I made mash potatoes two nights ago and I left the pot that I made them in on top of the stove for two days before washing it.
I’ve been sick and got around to it today.
The majority of the potato had been scrapped out two days ago and there was just a small a mount of potato left.
After washing the pot in the sink with other dishes I googled dangers of leaving mash potato out and it came up with botulism.
Now I’m terrified because the pot was covered by a wooden cutting board which would have stopped oxygen and I didn’t eat it but I would have spread it to my other dishes in the sink and I also have a cut on my finger and it says you can get botulism from cuts.
Now I’m terrified, | Botulism is an extremely rare illness, of which the majority of cases are in infants. It is virtually unheard-of to contact foodborne botulism except through amateur food preservation (canning, confiting, etc.) which is done incorrectly.
Food poisoning in general is a much more prevalent form of illness, and kills many more people. So do please try to follow standard food safety guidelines. And if you do want to try preserving foods, make sure you exactly follow known-safe recipes. Beyond that, botulism is not something you need to worry about. |
Cook/chill/freeze soy mince
I cooked some chilled soy mince to use in a sauce - but I wanted to add it at the end, so I put it back in the refrigerator whilst the rest of the sauce cooked.
A couple of hours later I was ready to add it - added it to the sauce, all good. But now I'd like to freeze the sauce. Is this likely to be safe? I'm struggling to find anything that covers anything very similar to what I describe above. | If the dish has been made 'safe' by cooking and it is wrapped and chilled/frozen in a timely manner, all good.
Defrosting and reheating where it can come undone:
"The temperature danger zone is between 41°F and 135°F. food must pass through the temperature danger zone as quickly as possible. Keep hot food hot and cold food cold. Always use a thermometer to check internal food temperatures."
A large ziplock frozen flat is your friend here. |
Modifying Pressure Cooker Timing for Beans
According to the Ninja Foodi FD402 pressure cooker guide, one can make 2 pounds of dry beans using the following instructions:
But, 2 pounds of beans is quite a lot. I am wondering, could I half or quarter the the amount of beans, and if so would I also half or quarter the amount of water and cooking time?
Essentially, I'm not sure the water/time is in a normal ratio of quantity of beans, so I want to confirm this. If its not, how much water and time would you reduce each by if I half or quarter the amount of dry beans? (It is slightly confusing that the book explains the pre-soaked beans assuming a single pound as well but oh well -- it would have been a bit interesting if they kept both at the same quantity.) | The beans/water ratio is not particularly important as long as there's enough water. You want the beans covered throughout cooking, keeping in mind that they'll expand and the water level will drop. If they cook "dry" on top, those beans will have a different [and worse] texture than the beans on the bottom. So halving the water is probably enough, but you may want to reduce it to 2/3 or so to make sure they don't end up cooking dry on top.
Pressure cooking time is measured once the beans are fully up to temperature/pressure, so to a first approximation, there should be no difference in cooking time based on the amount of beans.
If you want to be precise, because a smaller amount of beans would spend less time coming up to pressure (during which it would be cooking, albeit more slowly), the at-pressure cooking time should be slightly extended. I wouldn't bother with that, though. It's not going to be a significant factor in the variability in "optimum" cooking time.
Bottom line: Use "enough" water; 2/3 for half the beans should be fine. Try it with the same cooking time as in the table. Later, adjust to personal preference if necessary. |
Closest substitute for niçoise olives?
Many recipes with niçoise olives call for substituting with kalamata or even green olives.
Which olive is actually closest in flavor for a salad niçoise?
Niçoise not available locally nor on some popular online markets in my delivery area.
These are available for delivery.
Turkish/Lebanese. CooksInfo.com describes Lebanese as "The olives have a grainy texture and a slightly bitter taste" | Nicoise are a slightly sour black olive. As such, they're going to be closest in flavor to the kalamata out of the varieties you mentioned. Kalamatas are 3-4x the size of the nicoise, though, so depending on the recipe you might need to cut them into pieces. There are other olives that are even closer in flavor, such as arbequina, but those are going to be even harder for you to find.
The olives in your photo are not kalamatas, though; they are salt-cured olives. They are very little like nicoise olives -- they have a very different texture and much saltier and not at all sour -- and I wouldn't use them as a substitute in every recipe. That said, they could work for a few recipes, including salad nicoise, although you might want to cut some salt from elsewhere in the recipe. |
Is there an acceptable way of cooling red wine?
I've had several occasions by now when a red wine was clearly too warm on a hot day (a young wine with comparatively volatile bouquet and at room temperature that was way above the typically recommended drinking temperature for that kind of wine) and I wanted to place it into the refrigerator in order to get it closer to a temperature where its aromatic composition was in better harmony with the drinking experience. Each time, that was treated like the act of a lunatic even when the significant divergence from the recommended serving temperature was acknowledged.
I am certainly no expert on wine; like with other stuff I don't dive into regularly, it tends to take far too much investment (effort and price) to arrive at a result that sits ok-ish for me.
But I am not talking about chilling red wine to actually cool temperatures, but merely bringing them to temperatures that I feel are more in line with the character of their respective bouquet. I mean, there are after all different recommended serving temperatures and my own taste (I am oversensitive to smells) appears to roughly match the basic idea.
So if refrigerators are considered barbaric, what are allowed means for a red wine to reach serving temperature when it already is too warm? | Putting your bottle of wine in the fridge is fine. Even the BBC says so, as does Wine Enthusiast.
It's even OK if you forget about it, let it get down to 5deg, then take it out and let it warm up to the recommended 15deg. |
Can I replace matzo meal with flour in a popover recipe?
My favorite popover recipe includes matzo meal, which is easy to find during Passover. I run it through a blender to make it fine before mixing it with the other ingredients.
Can I substitute regular wheat-based flour when matzo meal isn't available? If so, what type of flour would give the most similar taste and texture?
Note that this is not a question about whether popovers made with regular flour would be kosher. This is purely a question about baking.
Edit
In response to comments, the complete ingredients are:
1.5 cup cake matzoh meal
1.5 cup water
.5 cup oil
1 tsp salt
1 tbsp sugar
7 extra-large eggs
The matzoh meal mixed with salt and sugar is stirred into boiling water/oil, after which the eggs are added. The popovers are cooked for 45-50 minutes at 400 degrees.
I have tried other recipes that use ordinary flour but do not like them nearly as much.
It sounds like none of the other options (using Wondra or grinding up matzoh) are easier than stockpiling matzoh meal or ordering it online. | (OP probably knows this but for readers not familiar with matzah): Matzah meal is ground up matzah, and by further blending, the OP is making their own version of “matzah cake meal.” The base of both is matzah, flour and water quickly baked.
Used in baked goods, matzah meal will not form gluten** since it is already baked. This is why a lot of Passover cookies and cakes that are made with matzah meal* are dense and dry. I will assume that the popover recipe uses a lot of eggs to get the airiness.
So to answer the OP question,
Sort of obvious- If you can get matzah in the kosher section if a store, even if it says “not for Passover,” you can grind it up in the blender and get matzah meal. cf This SA QA
No idea if this will work: Try Wondra since it is a precooked and dried and will form less gluten** than AP flour. Be sure not to over mix.
*Some are not made with matzah meal at all but with things like potato flour. If you are interested look up “non-gebrokts recipes” on line.
**Neither statement should be taken as a health claim for those who need to or want to reduce or avoid gluten. |
Re bread: What is the best way to introduce steam into home ovens?
What is the best way to introduce steam when baking bread? I’ve tried water-soaked volcanic stone (used in grills), and a simple pan of pre-heated water. | I've tried them all. Honestly, my best results are achieved baking in a cast iron pot with a cover. While I can only bake one shape, the convenience of not having to mess with stones, ice cubes, or steam burns, and the fantastic results make it worthwhile. |
escoffier : Mackerel Anglaise
One of the poached fish recipe's in Ma Cuisine is Mackerel Anglaise, it's one of those two sentence recipes. My english translation is:
English Mackerel:
Cut the mackerel in sections and poach in court boullion
with some fennel tops added. Serve with pureed green
gooseberries.
A few questions:
has anyone tried this recipe, or something similar?
what is a good substitute for gooseberries?
my initial impression was that the gooseberries are pureed raw and mixed with the poaching liquid. Is that correct?
thanks | In The Escoffier Cookbook (the English translation of Le Guide Culinaire), the corresponding recipe ("Boiled mackerel with gooseberry sauce") says to serve the sauce "with" the mackerel and describes it as follows:
Cook one lb. of green gooseberries in a copper preserving kettle with three oz. of sugar and enough water to cover them, and then rub them through a fine sieve.
Ma Cuisine was written some decades later so it's possible his thinking had changed since then, but if so you'd expect him to call it out a bit more.
As for substitutes, the sauce sounds broadly similar to a tart, strained cranberry sauce, which would have a very different color and would lack the floral notes but otherwise be a decent approximation. In a comment on moscafj's answer, jmk mentions rhubarb as well; that would be a better approximation for taste and color, but the texture would be quite different.
(Incidentally, a saucepan would be a good modern substitute for a "copper preserving kettle"). |
Where can I view the pricing evolution for a given type of food?
Recipes over the history were partly influenced by the price and availability of the ingredients. E.g., lobsters, which nowadays are typically rather expensive, used to be very cheap:
When the first European settlers reached North America, lobsters were so plentiful that they would reportedly wash ashore in piles up to 2 feet high. Their bounty made them a precious source of sustenance during hard times—and gave them a nasty reputation as the poor man’s protein.
Where can I view the pricing evolution for a given type of food? | This is really a more appropriate question for History SE, but the answer is simple so fielding it:
Short Answer: No.
Long Answer: there are, in fact, many sources. But each of them only covers specific time periods for specific foods, and all of them require a lot of background knowledge and context. For example, "a loaf of bread" means different things at different times in different cultures. And, once you jump back more than 100 years or so, it's impossible to assign unqualified "in 2020 dollars" prices to things, because people's lives, wealth, and earning power are so different. Like, was a one-penny loaf expensive or cheap in 1717? It Depends.
The information you're asking for isn't a spreadsheet or even a book -- it's a college-level course in economic history. |
Safety of Tomato Sauce that pops
my tomato sauce that I keep in the fridge has been getting pressurized and will pop when I open it. It is so forceful that it splurts a little. The air inside is white but dissipates quickly after I open the jar. It just happened a second time.
Is it still safe to eat? What is going on?
More info:
I'm not sure what the fridge temperature is but I have bought the exact same brand and had it be fine the entire lifespan of the product. It is entirely possible I accidentally used a spoon to pull out some sauce that was used for something else. | This should not happen, and sounds like you have some fermentation happening in the jar. I would suggest discarding. In the future, use only clean utensils to reach into the freshly opened jar. Refrigerate immediately after use, and use within about a week. |
Why did the base of my tart got soggy?
I made a tart with a filling of blended berries and yolks. The filling wasn't runny, but it soaked into the pie during cooling and the bottom got soggy. When I did more or less the same recipe with a lemon filling, it didn't occur (and the dough was softer, even though the butter was nice and soft and didn't melt). Why did it happen?
I baked the cake without the filling. Then I poured the filling and put it into the fridge. Should I have covered the base with egg before baking, would that form some sort of protective layer? | You got a soggy bottom because there was too much water in the filling. Water in the filling has to be absorbed by something in the filling, otherwise your crust will absorb it instead. There are a few ways you can improve the result:
Reduce the water in the fruit, commonly this is done by cooking the fruit down until it is thicker
Add starch to absorb the water, if you are cooking the mix then cornstarch works well for this, if you want to keep it cool use arrowroot powder
Use gelatin to stabilize it, note until it gels some water will get into the crust
Coat the crust to prevent water from soaking in, a thin layer of white chocolate or milk chocolate does a good job, a layer of corn syrup also can work, although those will add flavor |
Cookies are coming out like dry pancakes. What can I do?
I am trying to make healthier version of cookies. I was following a youtube recipe that was basically the following:
92g Egg Whites
30 Keto Wheat flour
30g Coconut Flour
6g Baking Soda
62g Whey Protein (2 Scoops)
32g Pbfit (Or whatever you have Pb2)
10g Zero calorie Sweetener
170g Low fat Greek Yoghurt
10g Vanilla Extract
30g Sugar free Chocolate Chips
Here is the video I was following: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iA-L82HuRU8&list=FLLhZ4_3AHzDd_qPN_ZbfHDg&index=28&t=66s
I baked in the oven for about 8 minutes. The cookies are terrible. They aren't cookies they are just dry pancakes. I ended up throwing it away.
I did some research, and I'm finding some conflicting information. Some people say that sponginess is due to too much flour, some say its due to too much leavening agent. Some say refrigerate dough, some say do not because it causes the cookie to rise more. I'm not sure what produces a chewy, soft actual cookie. Intuitively I would think a chewy cookie implies less rising + more density. My plan is to try the following recipe based on my research:
15g Whey
15g Casein
30g All Purpose Flour
15g Coconut Flour
1 egg
Some amount of Peanut Butter or Melted Regular butter, just some fat for moisture
10 g of Zero Calorie Sweetener
1 teaspoon of Baking Soda
Salt (to slow down the decomposition of baking soda)
Chocolate Chips
I will also refrigerate the dough for 30 minutes. And will bake in oven at 375 (effectively is 350) for 15 minutes or until cookie is golden brown.
Do you guys think this will result in the texture I want? | It looks like some other users have hinted at this, but I think it's worth highlighting as the primary source of your troubles: Cookies are typically heavy on some kind of shortening (butter, crisco, lard, etc). This is especially true for the kinds of cookies I'm assuming you're expecting to mimic.
My guess is that, unfortunately, you aren't going to find a "healthy" version of a cookie that has the same taste and texture as the "unhealthy" ones since it's the sugar and fat that helps create the texture you're expecting.
This article here gets into the role that shortening (fat) plays in baking: https://www.jessicagavin.com/butter-vs-shortening/ |
Canned food delivered in hot weather, is it still safe to eat
I had a couple canned campbell soup items delivered from amazon at 130pm to our door way. It was not brought inside till 730pm. And while it was in the shade the entire 6 hours, it is also about 110f degrees here all afternoon right now. Would this time in the heat have spoiled the contents or made it unsafe to use? The cans felt warm when brought inside though not too hot by that time at least. | Conventionally canned food is processed in the factory at (or above) 250 °F / 121 °C to kill Botulism spores, so a brief exposure to 110 °F is immaterial, even if it would not be an ideal temperature for long-term storage. Even high-acid foods that may not be pressure-canned even at factory scale are at least processed at 212 °F / 100 °C |
What is a salad knife?
These Web pages all depict a salad knife in a formal table setting:
Petrossian.Com
TheSpruce.Com
CzarInAShop.Com
VectorStock.Com
These Web pages offer to sell or rent salad knives:
PEAKEventServices.Com
ImpulseEnterprises.Com
Amazon.Com
I’ve never encountered a salad knife as part of a set of utensils, and the salads I’m familiar with don’t need a knife. The pictures of salad knives are not consistent sizes or shapes, and some look identical to dinner knives. I’m left with the following questions:
Is a salad knife a real thing, or is this a creation of low-quality Web content, mis-translation, or sales tactics?
When is a salad knife necessary? I.e., what kind of salad needs to be cut with a knife?
What properties of a knife make it suitable for salads? I.e., what is a salad knife supposed to look like?
(Searching the Web is difficult, because “salad knife” primarily returns plastic lettuce-cutting knives like this.) | I've been involved in table setting for pretty formal (British) dinners, and what those images are calling salad cutlery I would just call starter cutlery. I don't mean to suggest that the term 'salad knife' is wrong, but I think it's more illuminating to just think of these as the cutlery you'd set for a starter, which are smaller than those you'd set for a main course but typically similar in style.
Moving to focus on using cutlery with salads specifically, I can think of many that could benefit from a cutting implement: anything with pieces of meat or large pieces of fruit, for example, and even larger leaves can be easier to manage when cut. But don't forget that in the non-American style of using cutlery, the diner holds a fork in the left hand and knife in the right, and one of the main functions of the knife is to push food into the fork, which is useful for any type of salad.
As for what it should look like, normally I would expect just a smaller version of the knife used for the main course. The only standard 'specialised' knives in a table setting would be a fish knife, perhaps butter knife and if relevant a steak knife.
Finally, your skepticism is sensible: a lot of those kind of resources do exist to sell products and build on people's class anxiety when they feel like there must be complicated secret rules they aren't privy to. The Petrossian.com link from @moskafj is a prime example, with that 'silverware placement guide' that is ¾ total nonsense but just the kind of thing people get anxious about not knowing. |
Why do I need sugar syrup for slush?
The title says it all. I am looking around for homemade slush recipes and all of them call for the juices of the fruit plus some mixture of water and sugar.
To my understanding, both water and sugar do not add anything to the texture of the finished slush, they just dilute the flavor and make it sweeter, respectively.
If the above is true, to make a slush I’d just need to press fruit, filter the juice, and throw the whole thing in the ice cream maker.
Am I missing something here? | It's a bit more complex than you think. You need the right amount of sugar for the correct texture. Harold McGee (1990) clarifies this in his excellent book, The Curious Cook." He writes, "if the mix contains little sugar, most of the water freezes into large crystals...and the texture of the ice is hard and crumbly. If the original mix contains a lot of sugar...more syrup remains unfrozen, and the ice crystals are relatively small. The fruit ice ends up soft and smooth." His chapter on fruit ices breaks this down and explains it comprehensively. He identifies four types of ices, and provides tables for calculating the proportions of fruit juice, water, sugar, and (in many cases) a little lemon, for each. What he calls a "sweet water ice or fruit ice" is probably close to what you are calling a slush. It has enough sugar to remain soft in the freezer, but it is pretty intensely flavored. In this case you are looking at 30 - 35% sugar. The amount of sugar added depends on the type of fruit, thus the tables he provides. If that is too sweet, you can make what he calls a "medium sweet fruit ice", at about 20% sugar, but it will solidify in the freezer and you will need to allow it to thaw a bit to achieve an enjoyable texture.
The bottom line is that the amount of sugar is absolutely related to the final texture of your fruit ice. |
Dented can botulism possibility?
So this evening I made some chili the cans I bought were perfectly fine no dents or anything, I go to open the diced tomatoes and realize my can opener made a dent while opening the can I went ahead with making my chili but got concerned about botulism with dented cans. Should I be worried? Or was it okay that I went ahead with making the chili. | Botulism is caused by spores (a kind of lifeform) growing in food. It is a danger when the way food is prepared and stored could allow those spores to grow.
Denting a can that contains safe food while you are opening it is not such a situation, and indeed any commercial producer selling cans knows that they will be opened using a can opener and possibly dented. If by 'dented' you mean that perhaps pieces of metal were cut off and entered the tomatoes, then that is a danger because your do not want to eat sharp metal shards, but that is nothing to do with botulism. |
My homemade vinaigrettes are fermenting and fizzing
I make vinaigrette's using dehydrated fruit powders. Been doing it the same way for over a year. Now all are fermenting and fizzing. I mix the powder with agave nectar, wisk my oil and vinegar separately, combine both with water blend and bottle. I have 10 flavors and vinegar varies from red wine, white wine,balsamic and apple cider. I recently tried the hot fill method, still fizz! I'm stumped after doing it one way so long..now I can't seem to get it right. Please advise. | The recipe you described will not produce a shelf-stable mixture. The acidity is too low to inhibit the growth of bacteria or mold, and any stray wild yeasts will greedily eat up the agave nectar.
I can't say why this is only now happening. My first guess would be that one of your ingredients previously contained an added preservative, and no longer does so. If that were the case, adding some preservative on your own could help; but preservative dosing takes you out of the realm of Official FDA Recommendations and is thus out-of-scope for this site.
In any case, there's nothing intrinsic to your recipe that would prevent microbe growth. The mystery is not why things are bad now, but why they were okay before. |
Why does adding salt to the water keep your eggs from exploding?
Why does adding salt to the water you boil your eggs in keeping them from bursting? Interested in the science behind this piece of culinary science | I don't think the theory is that it keeps them from cracking or exploding, rather, if they crack, the white will solidify more readily in salted water, keeping the mess to a minimum. That quick congealing of the white potentially seals the "leak" minimizing further mess. |
How to use dried onion flakes as a substitute for fresh onion?
In Poland, onions are very juicy. In addition to that, gas has low intensity. As a result, it takes a lot of time to sauté onions, and onions are almost impossible to deep fry on the pan. To fight the situation, I bought 1kg of dried onion flakes.
Today, I tried to cook pilaf/plov/pulau/polao using onion flakes. The onion quickly acquired the color of chocolate, and the dish tasted bitter.
What can I do to cook pilaf/plov/pulau/polao using onion flakes properly so that the dish doesn't taste bitter?
Recipe:
Ingredients:
400g of basmati rice
4 cups of water
2/3 cup of dried onion flakes
1 teaspoon of ginger powder
1 tablespoon of dried garlic flakes
1.5 teaspoons of salt
three tablespoons of butter chunk
0.25 cup of sunflower oil
0.5 teaspoons of cinnamon powder
0.5 teaspoon of cardamom powder
10 whole black peppers
5 cloves
Procedure:
take a Chinese wok
heat butter and oil together in the wok
fry onion, garlic, and ginger in the oil for a few minutes until they seem fried
add rice
add salt
roast the rice and mix it well with onion, garlic, and ginger until the rice looks well roasted
add water and cover the wok with a lid
cook for 10 minutes | Add the dried onions when you add the rice, or even a couple minutes after you add the rice. That way they won't burn. |
What is the conversion of fresh basil to Frozen blanched basil
I grew a lot of fresh basil. I blanched and then froze it to make pesto at a later date ,but I did not measure it beforehand . So I was wondering what One 1 cup of fresh basil is equivalent to how much Frozen blanched basil? I blanched and froze my fresh basil but did not measure it beforehand. | Generally speaking blanching causes leaves to drop a lot. I suggest you cast your mind back and think about how much smaller it looked after blanching than before. This is easy for me as I tend to use the same type of container for picking fresh produce and for freezing. You don't need great precision here; after all basil is fairly variable in the strength of its flavour.
Alternatively, simply use a recipe that works by weight. Blanching shouldn't change the weight appreciably if you get the basil reasonably dry afterwards, so 1g of fresh basil is the same as 1g of blanched, to within the precision you need. |
Best natural preservative for vinaigrettes
I make organic and all Natural Vinaigrette's, lately they're fermenting and fizzing. Whats the best preservative to use? Guar gum, potassium sorbate? Don't want added sodium from sodium benzoate. | The best preservative for salad dressing is high acid content; below pH 4.5, most pathogens will not reproduce. However, most salad dressings are above that, and yours certainly is due to the large quantity of water you add.
The next method used is heat; this is how commercial salad dressings are made shelf-stable. I have a bottle of Ken's Caesar in my pantry right now that containts zero preservatives, and is shelf-stable for months or years, through heat treatment. For that to be effective, you must follow safe canning practices and heat filled bottles to at least the temperatures and times listed in the linked article. In fact, you may need higher temperatures and longer times, or even pressure canning, due to the very low acidity of your dressing.
There are chemical preservatives that you can add, but none of them protect your customers from all pathogens. For example, sodium benzoate is often used to prevent yeast and mold, but does nothing to inhibit botulism or salmonella. |
Can fish fingers include head meat?
I was wondering if the difference between cheap fish fingers and high quality ones could also include what parts of the fish get filleted and frozen.
In particular, I'd like to know if it's possible that fish heads may still play a role despite the fish being usually described as "filleted" - can its meat be part of the obtained frozen fish meat that is used for the production of fish fingers, or it is necessary that for a beheading process to occur? Can we effectively end up eating it?
I'm from Italy and Italian law seems to point out that "preliminary operations", including beheading, may be done in the ship itself, as long as the fish gets frozen right after. However, this doesn't imply anything about the necessity of beheading itself, but rather the possibility for this preliminary operation to happen. However, I'd be interested in general, not just Italy; I just tried to look it up as a reference since I can't seem to find any law that describes the necessary steps for the entire process, nor do I find anything other than filleting in Wikipedia or any other website.
It may be a trivial question, but I keep wondering about it. Any help appreciated! | In general, meat products (including fish) can be cut, or conglomerated. Cut implies butchering, and subdividing into pieces, conglomerating is what Macdonald's does when they put a slaughtered chicken in a centrifuge and spin it to separate the meat from the bones and cartilage, and then forms the meat into Mcnuggets. Still a partially amusing image in my head. But back to the original question.
Cheap usually means conglomerated (see Mcnuggets). That or fish that nobody wants, and is therefore very cheap to begin with. And in the case of fish, I believe the fish heads are considered to be more valuable for making stock, than to try to remove the meat for conglomeration. There could always be exceptions. In Florida for example, grouper cheeks are considered prime meat and command a higher price. If it says 100% fillet, then I would expect it to be illegal to use conglomerated meat, but if they leave out the 100%, it's not a guess as to why.
Addendum: Just like chicken feet make the best chicken soup, fish heads make the best fish stock. Some Asian restaurants that I frequent make lots of fish stock, and buy fish heads in bulk from the seafood processing plants.
For ground beef, technically a form of conglomeration, most companies use the cheapest cuts of beef to make them. I have not heard of beef being spun in centrifuges. From what I know, the offal, which is considered to be the parts no one wants to eat, is made into hot dogs. The offal is ground so finely that you can't discern what the original parts were. Then the trimmings and scraps, which are the next step up from offal, are made into the cheapest quality/priced ground beef. There, conglomeration takes on a whole new meaning, as waste from multiple slaughterhouses are combined and ground. I have been told that many frozen burgers are made from that type of conglomeration, and that is why you see gigantic, nationwide recalls if contamination occurs. If your butcher/grocer grinds their own beef, then it will be made from some trimming and scraps, but also better cuts, simply because they can only generate a small percentage of trim and scraps. |
What makes fries "oven fries"?
At the supermarket, I see regular frozen fries with instructions to cook in the fryer or in a pan.
And there are 'oven fries', to bake in the oven.
What makes 'oven fries' ... "oven" fries? I'm assuming it's something different with the pre-cooking and the oil, but it's just a guess | They have additional ingredients which make the fries more crispy than they would otherwise be -- often this involves cornstarch. For example, America's test kitchen has a popular recipe where you use a cornstarch slurry to make fries that taste like deep fried but use very little oil. The store bought versions similarly use cornstarch with other ingredients to have the same effect.
Fun Fact: The fast food giant Wendy's changed their fry formula in 2021 because they were getting a lot more delivery orders for fries, and typically fries become very sad very quickly. Their new fries are advertised to be more crispy for a longer time. By using archives ( https://web.archive.org/web/20201021020003/https://fastfoodnutrition.org/wendys/natural-cut-fries/medium compared to https://fastfoodnutrition.org/wendys/natural-cut-fries/medium ), you can see a major ingredient change was the addition of starches. |
Why does my curry taste flat
I made a curry using onions, garlic, tomato passata, coconut milk, coriander (leaf and ground), cumin, cardamom, star anise, ginger and chilli powder. I tasted it and it felt like it was missing something, I don't really know the words to describe it but I would compare it to a rock song with no bass if that makes sense. I added more of the same ingredients but it still had the same problem. After a while I kind of panicked and added basically everything in my cupboard hoping that something would work, I added paprika, peri peri salt, mixed herbs (thyme and oregano I think), cinnamon and clove, the curry still tasted kind of flat and one-note even after all of that. It tasted more like a fancy gravy than a curry. What was it missing? | Ideas
Old spices? If you are not making curry often maybe your spices are aged. They lose their pop. Your mix looks good. Try again with new. Buy whole spices when you can - they keep better.
Toast spices? A trick to bring out flavor. Pan toast. Have some mustard seeds in there and black pepper. When the mustard seeds start hopping around spices are done. I toast spices whole then let them cool then grind them up before adding.
Toasted nuts? I think toasted nuts can serve as the bass (to use your analogy) in a curry. Maybe more of a mole? Almonds are good. The last curry I made I used shelled sunflower seeds, toasted in the pan after the spices.
A little sour? Maybe less orthodox for an Indian style curry. A hit of vinegar or lemon juice once you are done cooking can bring out flavors.
Overcooked? Then the high flavor notes cook away. I killed many a curry in the slow cooker before I figured this out.
You don't like cardamom? It can be a weird flavor. I suspect there is genetic variaton in how it tastes. It can sort of take over. Go easy on the cardamom. |
Boil dried pot...is it safe?
I have an All Clad stainless steel pot and I was cooking some soup In it. The timer went off to tell me to turn the heat off but I must have been daydreaming because I merely looked at the soup at that point and walked away from it again. Maybe about 15 minutes after that I noticed a strange smell and I realized I had kept the fire burning. There had been only a couple of cups of water to begin with so that was all burned off by now and the noodles were burning at the bottom of the pot. I was fortunately able to clean about 99% of the residue and debris off of it, thanks to some baking soda, vinegar, salt, and a lot of elbow grease.
My concern is if I should still use the pot. Most of the Internet tells me it should still be fine and it was only 15 minutes and not an hour or anything. However, I'm a bit concerned because I stupidly had a similar incident a few years ago. At that time, I was boiling a pot of water and left it for 2 hours. (I know, bad). Though I tried to salvage that pot, the steel inside was definitely bubbling and buckling and when I tried to use it a few more times after that, it was making very unsettling, and very loud, snapping noises. Speaking to All Clad confirmed that the heat that long in the empty pot separated the layers inside (hence the very visible bubbling) and it was time to retire the pot.
Though this situation is definitely different in that it was only over boiled for 15 minutes and there was still food inside this second pot, and I'm reluctant to throw away an expensive pot and it looks fine (though there’s some discoloration on the outside). However, I'm also reluctant to take a chance if perhaps there has been some similar layer separation inside due to the heat (that might be too slight to see), and if this could cause some danger.
Thank you for any insight or thoughts! | First, I think you should maybe consider making better use of kitchen timers.
The way to test whether you've damaged the pot is:
Fill it around 2-3cm deep with water
Turn on medium heat
Do NOT walk away. Instead, watch and listen to the pot as it heats up
If you've damaged the fit or bonding between the layers, you will hear pings and cracking noises as it heats up. If not, you won't.
Remember to turn it off as soon as you've done the test. |
Time and temperature required to kill parasites in fish?
There's a lot of incomplete information floating around the internet about food safety with regards to fish, sous vide, and sushi.
For example, plenty of sources say that cooking at 60C / 140F for 1 minute will kill Anisakis (a common parsite in salmon, and probably other fish as well).
Another source shows that a tapeworm called Diphyllobothrium can be killed by cooking at 55C / 131F for 5 minutes.
But they don't provide a range of times and temperatuers for pasturization. As far as I know, cooking times for food safety are always a function of both time and temp, so there should be more information than this.
Meanwhile, I've found a lot more information about killing bacteria on fish rather than parasites. This popular sous vide guide presents a pasturization chart for seafood with regards to bacteria, and the author suggests using those same numbers to deal with parasites like anisakis as well. This would suggest that killing bacteria and killing parasites is a roughly similar process, but I haven't found any other source to confirm this. Also, that guide's chart tells you how long to cook the food in a sous vide bath — it doesn't tell you how long to hold the food at a given temperature to pasturize it, so it won't really help if you're pan cooking.
--
So, does anyone know if this has been researched before? Do you think you can kill anisakis with 5 mins at 131F?
I ask this because, in terms of culinary quality, fish at 130F tastes a lot better than 140F or 145F. And from what I understand, killing off parasites is important for nearly all* fish, not just salmon. Home freezers don't go low enough to kill parasites, and I think that's why the official guidelines always tell you to cook to 145F. Granted, I've routinely eaten fish at 130F-135F, but I never really confirmed if this was safe or not.
At the same time, I've also eaten pork chops at 135F plenty of times, while the tapeworm Trichinella doesn't die until 60C / 140F for one minute. But I think this is more impacted by farming practices than anything else (i.e. the number of pigs infected with tapeworms has probably decreased over the years with changes in farming practices, but this may not be true for wild-caught fish).
* I've heard that farm-raised salmon are less likely to be infected with parasites than wild-caught, but I can't find a source right now
tl;dr I've been unable to find a time-temp pasturization chart for parasites (not bacteria) in fish — and due to the prevalence of parasites in fish (compared to beef/pork/chicken), I can't figure out if it's reasonably safe to eat fish at 130F or 135F, even though most cooks probably do this regularly. | Anisakis is a tough parasite. According to the CDC you have to cook to 145°F/63°C to instantly kill Anisakis parasites, not 60°C. This study I found has a great deal of information about fish parasites, according to it a 3cm salmon fillet needs 10 minutes at 60°C to be fully safe. Between the two I'd probably cook it to 63°C and get it off the heat.
I could not find a distribution curve for Anisakis versus cooking temperature, there were citations on the study to other papers that could be relevant but they don't seem to be available on the web. There's plenty about freezing, and according to the CDC a week at -f°F/-20°C is enough to kill it, and that's do-able in most home freezers, as long as you carefully monitor it to make sure it's hitting that temperature.
From a heat perspective, looking at other parasites gives an idea of how long it takes to kill. Trichinella needs 2 minutes at 60°C, 6 minutes at 131°F/55°C, and 6 hours at 120°F/49°C. As Anisakis takes 10 minutes at 60°C we can extrapolate it will require much longer to kill it at lower temperatures, using 5X as a guide you'd need 30 minutes at 55°C and 30 hours at 49°C, but that's simplistic, without data we just don't know. An hour at 131°F/55°C is probably more than sufficient, the key word is probably. So if you've got some wild fresh salmon and you want to cook it to 131°F sous vide you're probably fine as long as you keep it at a high enough temperature long enough, you just need to be aware of the risks.
However, it's probably not a problem you need to worry about. 85% of the 'fresh' fish we eat is actually frozen on the boat, then shipped and thawed before being packaged and sold as 'fresh', this is because fish goes bad so quickly there's no other way to get it from the ocean to inland stores fast enough. So if you want to cook it to 131°F/55°C sous vide without worry your best source of fish is the freezer section. |
What is this number (275) on the bottom of stainless steel pans?
I recently bought a set of stainless steel pans from Amazon (I live in the UK). The information on the product page says the material is 18/8 stainless steel. I believe this refers to a (common) type of 304 stainless steel, comprised of 18% chromium and 8% nickel.
But when the pans arrive, on the bottom of them, there is a number 275 (see image below).
That is on all of them, so it shouldn't indicate the diameter.
Therefore, could anyone suggest what this number means?
In particular, does this indicate the grade/type of the stainless steel? And if so, what is this type of material, and is there any indication/research on its implication to health as a cooking ware (sauce pan)?
I know some stainless steel products have a mark (e.g., on the bottom) stating the grade/type of the material.
But I did not find 275 as a grade for stainless steel.
The closest thing I found was S275 steel – not in the stainless category (if there is such a thing).
To be complete, there are 5 pieces in this set: 3 are stainless steel, 2 are stainless steel with non-stick coating.
The package says pans were made in India (not sure if it's useful or not).
Pictures: | I have reached to the seller. It was third-party on Amazon, but it was directly linked from the brand's website, so I presume that is the reply from the manufacturer (or at least with a close contact with them).
They say the number 275 is the batch number, telling them when they were manufactured.
And they say they can confirm that the pans are 18/8 stainless steel.
Although there is still a little uncertain, I'll take their word. |
Potato with core temperature of 100C but no carbonisation
I was experimenting to find out that is the temperature at which a potato is "baked", i.e. edible and completely cooked but not burned.
I put one in a tiny pot in my oven at 100C, thinking it won't actually reach 100C and left it for many hours.
When I eventually pulled it out I took a candy thermometer and checked its core temperature and it was, indeed 100 degrees Celsius. Yet the potato was fine, it was not even slightly burned and no part of it has been turned to charcoal. It was a peeled potato.
As far as I know at 80 degrees tissues start turning to charcoal so I am completely flabbergasted as to how this is possible. | There are many issues with your assumptions, settings, and procedures. I'll point a couple out:
100C is a very low oven temperature...not a problem, but it will lengthen the cooking time.
Ovens are notoriously inaccurate. The temperate inside your oven was likely not 100C and could have been much lower (or even higher), but you didn't measure it, so you don't know.
A potato is fully baked when it reaches about 100C at the core. So, with your oven set at that temperature, I would guess it would take several hours to get the internal temperature of a potato to that point.
If your reporting of the internal temperature is accurate, you baked it perfectly, so it would not burn or caramelize.
Potatoes are quite moist, and evaporative cooling keeps the surface temperature well below your oven temperature, not a situation where caramelization would happen.
Paper will not ignite until somewhere in the 225C and above range, but that varies depending on thickness and moisture content.
Given all of this, your results are not surprising. It would probably take a few hours to bake a potato in a 100 C oven. Now that you know a potato is "baked" when the internal temperature is about 100C, you can save yourself some time by setting your oven at a higher temperature. |
Are shrivelled chilis safe to eat and process into chili flakes?
I home-grow chillis (Capsicum annuum, "Guarda Cielo") on my windowsill. This year, some of them began to have fruits very early (February to March). I left some of them on the plant for too long, which caused them to shrivel up quite a bit. I usually dry the chillis in the oven and use a mortar to process them into flakes for storage. Assuming there is no mold or obvious spoilage on the inside, are these still safe to eat? | I've certainly done this with no ill effects, including on flavour - in fact when freezing some and drying some I tend to dry the ones like this, and freeze the juicier ones. One thing to watch out for is if you're drying some of these and some that aren't so dry to start with, the others will need a head start. In fact your middle one, with its greener stem, might have a little more moisture than the other two.
I'm pretty certain there's a traditional use of chillies that have dried on the plant, but I can't think of the name. Wikipedia has a photo showing whole bushes drying in a field at a commercial scale. This Indian company mentions partially drying on the plant in making sun-dried chillies. |
Can you steam a potato for too long?
There are several questions which cover overboiling a potato, where you would excessively hydrate it. However when it's being steamed this seems to not occur, and in other overcooking settings you are prone to drying it out. What happens in this case, does a potato really overcook in a steaming setting and if so what happens?
Since it's very similar, lets also answer whether this occurs during pressure cooking (in the pressurized steam). | In a boiling setting, the full water immersion rinses away the structural pectin and starches, causing the waterlogged texture.
Serious Eats has a good explanation of potato pectin and starches.
An older research paper on pectin and potato texture - full text behind paywall.
In a steaming situation with potatoes raised above the cooking liquid, without the large amount of liquid water in contact with and penetrating the potatoes the starch gelatinization is limited to water already present within the cells and condensation on outer surfaces of potato pieces. The gelatinized starch tends to stay contained within the pieces as well since the pectin structure is not washed away by mechanical agitation and exposure to cooking liquid. The potatoes still release cellular fluid during cooking, and that collects at the bottom.
From personal experience pressure cooking only potatoes in my Instant Pot, yellow-fleshed potatoes such as Yukon Gold remain creamy throughout and Russets become a dry fluffy when cooked up to 50 minutes on high pressure with a natural release.
Given a long enough cooking time the potatoes would expel all the available internal liquid - waxier potatoes become gummy and starchier potatoes become powdery. After that, pectin and starches break down and turn to mush, though that would be on the scale of hours. |
Is my powdered milk still ok after being in a 100 ° hot trailer for 3 weeks?
I was out of my trailer for 3 weeks here in Yuma AZ. Temps reached 100 degrees in trailer. I had powdered milk (Augason Farms brand) left behind.
The milk is unopened. Is it still safe? | If it's "Country Fresh® 100% Real Instant Nonfat Dry Milk" it is advertised as having a 20-year shelf life. Storage requirements are 55° to 70° F, though, so way less than what it experienced.
If the container is unopened and not otherwise breached, then there should be no danger of bacterial contamination, so unlikely to be harmful. The problem will be breakdown of the milk's components and loss of nutritional value.
Open it and give it a look. If it's distinctly yellow, it's over the hill. Give it a sniff. If it smells bad, pitch it. If it smells OK, mix some according to instructions and taste. If it also tastes OK, it's probably OK.
Utah State University did some tests and found that non-fat dry milk held at 32°C (90°F) for 6 months began to develop off-flavors and by 24 months was considered unacceptable by a trained sensory panel.
Edited to add: I see this was migrated from Parenting. I wouldn't give any questionable food to a child. Their lower body weight will make it harder to deal with problems than an adult body. I mentioned loss of nutritional value above. |
Chopping shallots super fine
My favorite recipe for deviled eggs involves finely-chopped shallots and a piping bag. It’s rather labor-intensive to chop the shallots finely enough to avoid clogging the piping tip. My knife skills are up to the challenge, but as I was doing it today I was wondering if there might be a better way. I’ve never tried grinding them with coarse salt and the side of a knife, as you can do with garlic; I suspect it wouldn’t work. Any other ideas? | Use a grater
If you use a box grater (or a microplane style grater), you can peel and grate your shallots very easily. By holding the root end, you can grate the entire shallot pretty easily and quickly.
Grated shallot won't look as pretty as a carefully cubed dice. It will have some "shaggy" edges and resemble pureed shallot. In a dish like deviled eggs, this lets the shallot show up with flavor, even though it's not seen. On the other hand, as a garnish, grated shallot won't look very good. |
How do I cook chicken skins on the grill – but only the skin?
I want to cook chicken skins on the grill – but only the skin, no meat. My kids like the seasoning and crunch of the skin and always leave a skinless drumstick behind, so I want to just cook the skins so I don't have to eat a bunch of chicken meat by itself. Is this even possible, and if it is, does anyone have a good recipe or idea? | Edit for details - thanks moscafj
Yakitori - Japanese grilled chicken skewers - may be a good option for you if you want to stick with grilling. It's generally seasoned with just salt and white pepper, or a sweet soy sauce/teriyaki style glaze.
Yakitori comes in many varieties based on the parts of chicken used, and chicken skin-only skewers are known as 'kawa yakitori'. You can separate the skin from muscle on thighs, breasts, etc., skewer and season them separately, and grill them together for a variety of skewers in the same meal. Serious Eats has a recipe for chicken thigh and green onion yakitori, as well as a more detailed article on yakitori culture.
The texture will vary with how you prepare the skin for skewering. Tightly rolling the skin into cylinders would keep the centre from rendering too much and remain soft as the outside crisps, while a looser roll or sheet will crisp up more. |
Some duck egg yolks orange while others are yellow: does that reflect the egg quality?
I have noticed that some duck egg yolks orange while others are yellow. Does that reflect the egg quality? E.g. will dishes made with a dark yolk taste better than the ones with light yolk, or vice versa?
Example of a duck egg with yellow yolk bought in Seattle: | Some duck egg yolks are orange while others are yellow.
Does that reflect the egg quality?
Summary
No
The following applies to poultry eggs in general, not specifically duck eggs.
Where does the colour come from?
Egg yolks get their colour from carotenoids. Carotenoids are plant
pigments, responsible for red, orange and yellow hues in certain
vegetables and fruits. You might guess then that carrots, pumpkins,
peppers, Vietnamese gac fruit, and sweet potatoes are all particularly
rich in carotenoids.
But carotenoids are also found in green plant material, because
carotenoids absorb light for photosynthesis and protect the plant from
sun damage.
What affects the colour?
It depends on what the poultry eats.
There are two classes of carotenoids:
Carotenes, which tend to produce reddish colours, and
Xanthophylls, which produce yellow shades.
Farmers can adjust yolk colour through the chickens’ diet. Small scale
farmers can directly feed plant material naturally high in carotenoids
(e.g. algae, alfalfa, citrus peel, fortified corn), while larger-scale
farmers rely on processed feed that contains such ground-up plant
material or synthetic supplements.
Processed poultry feed is a blend of grain, protein, vitamins and
minerals. In Europe, the EU Register of Feed Additives lists which
xanthophylls and carotenes can be added. So, a large-scale farmer has
to strike the right balance of yellow and red carotenoids to keep the
shade consistent. The types and ratios of carotenoids in feed and eggs
will depend on what yolk colour consumers want, and farmers provide.
Source: Orange Egg Yolks: Why Are Some Egg Yolks So Orange? |
Did broiling kill my pork loin?
I know that the crockpot is not the best device to cook a pork loin but I found myself in this situation. The meat did reach 62C then was left to rest first in the "keep warm" mode of the device then removed and kept in foil for some hours.
So, unless the keep warm mode carried on the cooking, we can think it was pot-braised.
At this point, I tried to slice it and it was pink inside as I wanted. Then I had the unfortunate idea to broil it for some minutes in the hope of obtaining a bit more crust since at the beginning the searing was not very good.
Then after slicing it turned out to be as dry as a spoonful of nails. Was the few minutes broil that killed it or perhaps it had been dry all the time? | When the meat reached 62C (145F) it was done. The "warm" setting on most crock pots is between 74C and 80C (165F to 175F). So, any time spent in the warming mode, then the broiler, continued to over-cook cook your pork. In this case, you were not "resting" the loin, rather, you were continuing to cook it. The dry, tough end product was less the result of the method (though, in my opinion, I am not sure a crock pot is best for pork loin), and instead the result of being cooked too long and far exceeding the desired final internal temperature. |
How do achieve a dry injera top without burning the bottom?
I've tried making injera 3 times so far, the last time went best, but I struggled a bit with actually cooking them.
Note that I don't typically make pancakes or crepes either, so my familiarity with their techniques is low.
My recipe came from How to Make Ethiopian Injera- Ferment Teff Flour - YouTube. No, it might not be very traditional, but that is not a big consideration for me. I'll mention the overall idea, but prepping the batter went well enough:
2 parts teff, 1 of water bit of salt and yeast. let sit 3 days.
add 1 part flour (I subbed amaranth for wheat as one motivation for injera-making is gluten intolerance from my partner). some water. 2 more days.
So, after 5 days I ended with a sourish-as-expected smelling injera and batter somewhere between pancakes and crepes that flowed easily.
But this where things got challenging:
I don't have a non-stick pan - I prefer avoiding non-stick surfaces - and am instead using a cast iron pan, on a gas range. I slightly smeared some avocado oil to lessen sticking.
Experimented with various heats, from high to medium. The video shows 360 on an electrical plate, so not sure what I am aiming for.
My main problem is achieving a "dry top".
Injera is not supposed to be flipped. While I can achieve something somewhat satisfactory on the bottom side, I found that the top remained rather wet and moist and I could not dry it out sufficiently without burning the bottom.
Nothing I saw in this video or others really gave me any idea of how to do this. If anything the video proposes covering the injera once it starts to bubble which would retain water.
Should I?:
Use a lower temperature throughout and let it sit in the pan longer? What duration should I aim for?
Try pouring the batter more shallowly? I tried doing that but the cakes tore apart upon removal. I had best results at about 4-6 mm (1/4").
Use another flour than amaranth? My first tries were with pure teff and that didn't really work any better with regards to my "wet top" problem.
Have more or less water in the batter? I am hesitant about this as the consistency did seem fairly optimal for pouring and spreading.
Remove it once it seems cooked at the bottom and let it sit for a few hours? I found my injera improved significantly in that regard after a few hours. They were quite good later, just not great at first. Maybe that's just how it should be prepared?
I also tried removing them and finishing them off in the microwave for a few minutes. Not entirely conclusive but it seemed to help a bit.
I tried covering. And not covering. The difference wasn't super clear - remember my problem is an overmoist topside so that wasn't intuitively obvious to me (but, yes, noted Esther's remark, quite helpful).
I was pretty happy overall and would like to continue experimenting. Still I would welcome any tips on bettering my cooking technique. | I'm no injera expert, but I would suggest two things that come to mind, and one item I picked up from the linked website: If you are using a cast iron pan, make sure that it is very clean and well-seasoned. This will help with any potential sticking, and allow you to use less oil (which may put you in a frying situation). Alternately, a well-seasoned carbon steel pan will do just fine as well. Then, use a lower temperature and be patient. If you are getting burning, it's too hot. Finally, are you covering the injera during cooking? There are several steps for traditional cooking that you might need to review. You should be able to make it work, and the less successful ones are probably still delicious. |
How did replacing flour in muffins go so wrong?
I had a whole bag of Cocoa Puffs that had gone stale, and thought it would be fun to mess around and see if I could bake something with them. So I aimed for muffins. I more or less based it on a banana muffin recipe I make all the time:
2 1/2 cups ground Cocoa Puffs (I used this to replace both flour and sugar)
1 tbsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt
1/3 cup vegetable oil
1 egg
1 cup milk
1/2 cup vanilla yogurt (I figured this plus extra milk would make up the mass, pH, and moisture content of the bananas)
I didn't really expect it to go well, but I figured I'd probably have bad muffins, not this:
The batter was stretchy, like less-sticky bread dough. I spooned it into paper cups and baked it at 400ºF. At first they looked like they were puffing up as expected, then they looked a little imploded in the center and shiny on top, then one by one they burst and started dripping everywhere. I expected 20–25 minutes but had to pull them out at 15. The aftermath was soft but cohesive and a little rubbery, not at all hard to clean.
So, lesson learned: Cocoa Puffs are not flour. But what chemical reaction happened or didn't happen to make it go this wrong? | Muffins and cakes rise because of chemical leavening agents and the expansion of hot gasses, they stay risen because the flour and sugar forms a structure which traps the air, then solidifies enough to hold its shape once the expansion has stopped. Cocoa puffs are made in a process called extrusion, where batter is pressurized and shot out in little spurts. On the release of this pressure the little squirt of batter expands and almost crystallizes in the same way as a muffin or cake, in other words puffs are cooked by a different method, but the processes which make them hold their shape is the same.
These processes aren't reversible, you can't turn a cake back into flour, milk, sugar and eggs. Grinding up cocoa puffs is essentially the same thing as grinding up dried cake, they may absorb some moisture but as the chemical and physical changes involved in crystallization have happened it won't happen again.
What it looks like is that your batter expanded enough to go over the top of the muffin pockets and then outward, then collapsed because there was no structure to keep the shape. |
What are the dips in muffin/cupcake tins called?
When I was writing this answer I realized that I have no idea what to call the dips in muffin/cupcake tins. I used to call them cups but when I looked it up I found that the cups are the paper inserts or liners you put into the dips or whatever they are called.
What is the right terminology? | Looking at Amazon listings and Wikipedia Cup seems to be the correct terminology, or at least the most common one.
Alternative names I found are cavity and well, which also seem adequate.
The paper cups are known by many names including but not limited to cup liners, paper liners, muffin wrappers, muffin cases, baking liners among others. |
Is this type of scratched pot safe?
I found What can I do about scratched pots? But the type of pot, and level of scratch, is much different than that which was mentioned in that question.
Is this
Safe, at all, to cook with?
I tried describing it to a friend without showing him the picture and he said it might have harmful chemicals from the coating once it's scratched, but I don't know if that's true | To me this looks like an enamel pot with some of the enamel gone. It shouldn't be losing any more enamel particles unless scratched some more, and even if it does, enamel is basically sand, so it is chemically neutral and likely harmless to swallow in small quantities.
Enamel on pots is used to prevent harmful chemical reactions between food and the base metal of the pot. For this reason the lack of enamel makes this pot unsuitable for cooking foods that react with steel or aluminium. It's likely OK to boil water or cook things with low acidity, but I wouldn't use it for soups, sauces, and such.
It also looks ugly. Why don't you just toss it? |
Why did my pizza toppings slide off while baking?
I made a New York-style pizza using recipes from the Elements of Pizza book by Ken Forkish, and some of the cheese and pepperoni slid off in the oven while baking. This was my first time using these recipes and a baking steel.
I believe I followed the recipes pretty faithfully, measured everything by weight, etc. The steel preheated in my home oven at 500°F for about 45 minutes to an hour as the manufacturer recommended.
The book says to cook the pizza for nine to ten minutes. About five minutes in, I could hear something sizzling. When I peeked into the oven I could see the dough had puffed up, and some of the pepperoni and cheese appeared to have flowed over the edges in a couple places and was burning up on the steel.
My pizza went in the oven looking like this:
It came out looking like this:
Why did this happen and how can I avoid it?
Edit: added photos of second attempt with a smaller overflow.
Top edge where overflow occurred:
Close-up of top edge: | It likely comes down to how you've formed the crust. The "normal" method involves pushing the gas out of the middle of the crust, ideally shifting it to the outer edge. So the middle of the crust ends up fairly thin and dense, and the outer edge has more remaining bubbles. If you pull out the crust more gently, and don't squeeze the gas out, then it'll rise like a loaf of bread rather than like a pizza.
The other possibility is that the crust somehow sealed to your baking surface around the edges, and vapor puffed it up and away from the baking surface in the middle. That would be indicated by the underside of the crust having a dark rim and a very pale middle. I've never seen this happen, and I'm not sure it actually could, but I thought I'd mention it for completeness. |
Why did my cheesecake fall?
I tried this recipe (more or less). It's quite delicious and all, but why did my cheesecake fall?
I didn't open the oven early, it stayed in the oven long enough | What I see here is the typical cross-section of e.g. a German cheesecake (which would use quark) or similar. Not bad per se, but probably not what you expected.
Your cake has risen and fallen again as evidenced by the thicker “outer ring” and the cracks whose shape indicates expansion. That kind of “movement” is quite normal for the aforementioned kind of cheesecake, and there are methods to deal with that, e.g. running a knife along the edge at some point during baking.
For the cream cheese based American / NY-style cheesecakes, however, they don’t “fall” (much), because they are not supposed to rise (much) in the first place, so you will want to minimize the expansion and ensuing shrinkage, and the typical measures are:
Avoid incorporating air into the filing. So instead of whipping your eggs and cream cheese (or even worse, beating the egg whites separately), you want to stir gently and only as little as possible, until the ingredients are combined properly.
Lower your oven temperature to ensure an even bake and to avoid or at least delay the formation of the top crust. That’s also what the water bath is used for. Your cake seems quite brown at the top, which can indicate a too-high oven temperature or too much top heat. (Shielding the top with aluminum foil can also help.) |
How much can be learned from a regular cookbook as a vegan?
I've been looking since quite some time for books on gourmet vegan kitchen, that require a lot of competence, and I even asked here on the board for advice. That time I got recommended "Crossroads" by Tal Ronnen, which is a great book in my opinion and I'm very thankful for that answer!
Besides that, I'm having a very hard time searching for similar books, so I was wondering if it could be useful to go for books like "The french laundry" by Thomas Keller, which is not aiming for a pure vegan cuisine (allthough they may contain some vegan recipes, couldn't figure that out). Still I could imagine, that books like these contain a lot of knowledge that can be used for vegan kitchen aswell. Is that a correct assumption, or doesn't that make sense at all? | This is borderline opinion based but I'll give it a shot. Cookbooks vary in how much technique and science they explain, some cookbooks are mostly eye candy, beautiful pictures of professionally prepared dishes with some ingredients and basic technique. Other cookbooks go into what is actually happening to the food when you cook it, explaining the science behind the chemical and physical changes caused by heat and chemical reactions, it's those cookbooks that have the most transferable knowledge.
This isn't just about vegan cooking, understanding the science is valuable no matter what you are cooking. For instance, learning why a steak browns is applicable to other proteins, including vegan ones. Techniques are transferable as well, the process for making a pie crust is the same whether you are using butter or a vegan alternative. |
What is the name of this indirect grill?
In Japanese, it seems to be called a Machuugrill. It is fired by charcoal and the grill arrows are just air. It seems to be some convection heating with the temperature moderated by water. Translation dictionaries don't include it all. What is closest term for this grill? | The grill in question seems to be the Loyly Smokeless BBQ (「ロウリュ」無煙バーベキューグリル "Rouryu" muen bābekyū guriru), a proprietary device by a Japanese company of the same name and intended primarily for camping use or for charcoal grilling in small outdoor spaces.
These are not particularly common even in Japan, in fact I'd never heard of this concept before. "Smokeless grills" are a common product category, but the term usually refers to electric or battery-operated grills, not this unusual charcoal-and-steam combo. |
My silicone mold got moldy. Can I clean it or should I throw it away?
I've tried to google for an answer, but it's hard because mold has two meanings and in this case I'm using both. Some dessert got left in a silicone mold (shaping device) in the back of the fridge, and when I discovered it the dessert had gotten moldy (fungal growth). I washed the silicone as well as I could with soap and water, but it's still discolored. Is it possible to clean it enough to be food safe or do I need to throw it away?
If it is possible to clean it, what is the best way? | If the mold (shaping device) is actually silicone rubber, you should be able to kill any mold (fungal growth) quite easily.
I use silicone bread pans that are rated to 450 °F / 232°C (correction, poor memory and I never use them this hot - 500 °F/ 250 °C) in the oven, and that will kill fungal growth (and any others) in a matter of minutes or less. You could also put it into a pressure cooker, if it will fit.
Now, I also have some sort of rubber ice cube trays that are not actually silicone, and I expect those would melt into a stinky puddle and/or catch fire.
You can also run it though the dishwasher on "sanitize" if you have a dishwasher and it has that cycle option. You might look for a marking on the shaping device indicating a safe temperature range or limit (often right next to the food-safe cup and fork icon marking.) |
Olive oil gave bitter taste to a curry, is this expected?
I cooked chicken with olive oil. I observed that it gives a bitter taste to the curry.
Using soybean oil or sunflower seed oil gives a taste which I like more.
Is this effect expected? | Some oils work better in some dishes than others. It sounds like you wanted a neutral oil. I certainly wouldn't use olive oil in curries, but that's mainly because sunflower or rapeseed (canola) oil is cheaper and the olive oil would be wasted.
Olive oil has its own distinctive flavour, which works well in some foods, but not in others. This flavour is described as bitter, though not usually bitter enough to be a bad thing in many dishes - after all, extra virgin olive oil can be used alone for dipping bread, though it's common to dip in balsamic vinegar as well, which provides sweetness to offset the bitterness.
However the tastiest olive oils aren't very good for frying - they're unrefined and burn too easily. Bitterness can be a result of burning, and with olive oil particularly it seems to come out at the first hint of smoking. So you may have cooked too hot, especially if you used an unrefined oil Refined olive oils work well for cooking chicken. I used to do it a lot, either by pouring some into a pan and adding the chicken, or by brushing large pieces of chicken with oil, and sprinkling herbs and black pepper on the surface. Now I don't cook chicken but do the same with veg, tofu, etc. Again a little sweetness (from well-cooked onions for example) mutes any bitter flavour. |
What's the science behind citrate's emulsifying power in cheese sauces?
Given citric and tartaric acid can help make a good fondue, how on earth does the non-acidic citrate work? What's the exact science behind sodium citrate? Do they all work by removing the effects of calcium, allowing casein to more freely move and associate with fat globules or membrane-free fat? Is calcium phosphate or calcium citrate somehow involved? Is it the negative charge of all these weak acids that's important? | A key compound affecting texture in cheeses is colloidal calcium phosphate - calcium and phosphate dispersed throughout the fat, and water, and casein matrix.
Typically, heating would cause the casein to clump and expel the water, fat, and calcium phosphate from a nice even suspension without the aid of an emulsifier. pH has an effect on structure, but the effect of citrate salt on pH is negligible. Two articles explain the effect of citrate:
J. Pastorino, C.L. Hansen, D.J. McMahon, Effect of Sodium Citrate on Structure-Function Relationships of Cheddar Cheese.
https://doi.org/10.3168/jds.S0022-0302(03)73912-5
N.Shirashoji, J.J.Jaeggi, J.A.Lucey, Effect of Trisodium Citrate Concentration and Cooking Time on the Physicochemical Properties of Pasteurized Process Cheese.
https://doi.org/10.3168/jds.S0022-0302(06)72065-3
The Pastorino article concludes that citrate binds with calcium and frees phosphate, resulting in decreased protein-protein bonding (casein clumping) and increased protein-water bonding (emulsification). |
Why are my salt cured egg yolks still wet?
I've been trying to cure egg yolks in salt. They've been in it for 2 weeks now, but they are still too wet. At this stage they look more like a very thick paste than something I could actually grate on top of pasta. They are clearly not losing enough moisture. It's the first time I attempt this, and, hence, I used 1kg of this salt for only 5 yolks.
The salt is already hardening, and I still have 2 yolks in there. I don't think leaving it for longer will change the outcome. I had to throw 2 away after 1 week because I uncovered them and found them to be too wet. Then, I had to throw away another one on the following week because it was also still too wet.
What am I doing wrong? | You’re worrying too much about whether they look wet. And you probably shouldn’t have thrown away the other ones.
Egg yolks are never going to completely dry out in salt. They will reach an osmotic balance with the saturated salt solution and that’s it. If you want to dry them further you’ll need to do it in a dehydrator or low oven.
Incidentally, even after that they’ll look “wet”, because they contain oil. |
Can fish be inflated with saltwater like meat?
Recently I noticed that fish fillets from several brands and also fish steaks shrink visibly after cooking. I was used to see this happen regularly with beef, but seeing this happening to fish is something new. Is it possible that the meat was soaked in water? How much could it increase its weight in this way? | Yes. Cheap seafood is frequently treated with sodium triphosphate which causes it to absorb up to 30% of its weight in water, "plumping" it. This causes it to shrink and become soggy when cooked.
In the USA, Canada and several other countries you can look on the label for sodium compounds to detect and avoid this. |
How Can Cooked Meat Still Have Protein Value?
I've been taught 2 things that seem to contradict each other:
Cooked meat has plenty of protein
Heating proteins denatures them and damages/changes them
If this is the case, then cooked meat must have very little usable protein, which is clearly not the case.
How does protein in a fully cooked food, e.g. chicken/pork/eggs survive the cooking process in a usable form?
Note I'm not asking about burnt meat, browning or flavour reactions, or rare meat e.g. a medium/rare cooked steak. | Structural proteins in foods, i.e. albumin in eggs, myosin in muscle meats, gluten in wheat, are formed by amino acids in complex structures. Proteins are folded and clumped chains of peptides, and peptides are chains of amino acids. Your body uses stomach acid and proteases (enzymes) to break down proteins in digestion, but this requires time and energy (stomach churning, body heat).
The amino acids are what your body requires. They're used to build more complex proteins. Cooking gives a head start in un-clumping/unfolding proteins, and in some conditions into peptides and amino acids, that are easier for your body to digest making them more 'bioavailable'.
Some of these amino acids can be produced by your body using nitrogen compounds from breaking down other amino acids and nutrients. The ones your body can't produce on its own have to be obtained in the proteins you eat. These are called 'essential amino acids'.
Different protein sources have different amino acid compositions, giving them different 'protein values' in how complete the range of essential amino acids are available; i.e. collagen/gelatin is a common structural protein that provides great texture for sensory applications, but the protein value is 0 for regulatory labelling requirements in some countries since it is missing an essential amino acid. |
Why must fermenting meat be kept cold, but not vegetables?
This is a somewhat unique question, so I'll start by stating my assumptions that I understand to be "widely known" among food preservation enthusiasts. If any of these are not accurate, please let me know!
Assumptions:
Improperly handled food kept at low oxygen (e.g. submerged in liquid) carries a risk of causing deadly botulism.
The bacteria that create botulism toxin require certain conditions: low oxygen, low acidity, low salt, low sugar, sufficient protein content, correct temperature range.
Lacto-fermenting vegetables in a salt brine carries little to no risk of botulism, and no case of botulism has ever been reported from lacto-fermenting vegetables.
Lacto-fermenting meats and dairy products must be done in a cold environment like a refrigerator to prevent the risk of botulism.
Lacto-fermenting protein-rich vegetables (e.g peas, beans) can be safely done at room temperature.
So my question is: what's so special about meat and dairy that it carries a high risk of botulism? Botulism can occur from improperly canned beans, yet fermenting beans at room temperature is okay. Why is it not okay to lacto-ferment meat at room temperature? What's different about meat vs. high-protein vegetables?
And a follow up question: could there be any substitute safety measures other than refrigeration to make room temperature meat fermentation safe? E.g. Extra salt, acid, finely shredding the meat (to ensure brine penetration), etc.?
Edit:
My main motive for this question is determining whether room temperature preservation of cooked meet is possible using a salt brine + other vegetables / ingredients in a process similar to lacto-fermentation; I'm not concerned with the technicality of whether the bacteria feed off the meat or if the meat truly "ferments"; I'm only concerned with preservation. Example: if adding freshly cooked (i.e. mostly sterile) meat to a jar of fermenting vegetables (at any stage of fermentation) effectively prevents spoilage of the meat, I would consider that an answer to my question. If not, the reason why not would also be a good answer. | It is a good thing that you wrote up your assumptions, this helps greatly with explanations. To look at each:
Assumptions 1,2 and 3 are true.
Assumption 4 is false. You can't lacto ferment meat. There is only the edge case of cured sausages, and their fermentation process is very far from the lactofermentation of vegetables. Lacto fermenting dairy is done at high temperatures - from about 20ish celsius for Kefir, to up to 45 for some strains of yogurt culture.
I can't comment on Assumption 5, since I have never looked into lacto-fermentation of legumes.
Looking at these assumptions, it looks as if you are equating the absence of botulism bacteria with food safety. This is certainly not the case! There are dozens of different kinds of bacteria which can cause food poisoning, most of which are more difficult to guard against than botulism bacteria.
Whenever you leave some food sitting out, you create a new microenvironment which gets colonized by its own ecosystem of microorganisms. Which type of organism will grow and displace all others is dependent on the conditions you offer it, just like in your assumption 2. It just so happens that, if you leave out vegetables at room temperature with the right amount of salt, it is the benign lactobacilii which proliferate best and occupy all the ecological niches in your fermentation jar. By the way, your fermentation can go wrong and create the wrong microorganisms, but they will not be c.b., that is usually seen under much stricter anaerobic conditions, such as in canned food and sometimes under oil.
But meat is not a vegetable; it is a different source of food, on which lactobacilii cannot thrive. Instead, you get other types of bacteria on meat, usually ones which cause food poisoning. To prevent that, you have to preserve meat by making it inedible for any kind of bacteria, before they have overtaken it. This creates different curing methods for it, which require very tight control and multiple bacteria-controlling methods at once (e.g. cold temperature plus the right amount of salt) to get a safe cured meat.
If you were to just leave your meat out in the conditions for a vegetable lacto-fermentation, you would get neither a lacto-fermentation, nor botulism, but just a crock full of spoiled meat, ready to give you some kind of non-botulinic food poisoning.
Update To the point in your edit: It is absolutely not safe to just add meat to properly fermenting vegetables. Actually food safety is much more cautious than that, and any kind of self-experimented recipe is not safe by definition, but this is one of the rare cases which are not just unsafe, but decidedly dangerous. Probably not because of botulism, but the other types of food poisoning are no joke either. |
What is the best way to store potatoes?
We have a bumper potato crop.
Considering that we want to keep them as long as possible because we can’t use them all in a short time, what’s best for storage? | Potatoes last best when stored in a cool, dry place between 45°F/7°C and 55°F/13°C, so a basement is often your best shot if you have one. Keeping them dry and giving them airflow is important so they don't grow mold, a wooden crate with gaps, a box with air holes or a cloth sack are good options.
Also, you need to keep them dark, exposure to sunlight can lead to them turning green, which produces Solanine that is toxic. |
Should I cook mushrooms on low or high heat in order to get the most flavour?
According to On Food and Cooking, mushrooms are about 80-90% water.
It makes sense, then, that when frying the mushrooms I should aim to remove as much of that water as possible. That way, I could actually start "frying" and could begin caramelisation and the Maillard Reaction.
Bon Appetit give that exact advice here:
If you keep the heat low, the mushrooms will just simmer in their liquid. Medium high or high heat will get rid of all that liquid, and will give the mushrooms a nice brown color.
Advice from On Food and Cooking, however, is the exact opposite:
Their flavor is generally most developed and intense when they are cooked slowly with dry heat to allow enzymes some time to work before being inactivated, and to cook out some of their abundant water and concentrate the amino acids, sugars, and aromas.
Which approach will work best for extracting the most flavour from mushrooms: low heat, or high heat? And why? | I am with Bon Appetit on this one, or even more extreme - I always pan-fry mushrooms on the highest heat setting.
For me, the keys for nice, browned mushrooms on a domestic stove are:
Use very high heat, and preheat the pan before the first batch.
Don't crowd the pan, make a single layer of mushrooms.
Use a proper turning/stirring regime. That mostly includes to have the patience to wait for the mushrooms to brown well on one side before flipping them to another.
McGee's advice sounds intriguing, but note that he specifies
with dry heat
At least for me, that is incompatible with the "cooked slowly" suggestion. Whenever I try to pan fry mushrooms on medium or low heat, the water they exude stays around, instead of instantly evaporating the way it does on a hot pan. They just stew around in their own sauce, which makes them soggy, bland, rubbery, and prevents caramelization.
I don't know why it works for McGee; it might be that he has some technique trick I don't know, or maybe he simply leaves mushrooms in a low oven overnight with the intention to produce a kind of undiluted stew, or even to process them further to something marmitey. But for pan-frying, I have never had success with medium or low temperatures. |
How to use a carbon steel pot (not pan)
I found a very old pot in my very old house. I suspect it to be carbon steel, for the following reasons:
It's rusty
It's magnetic
It looks a lot like the carbon steel pans that were stored with it, except it's the shape of a pot
I would like to use it for the same purposes one usually uses a pot: cooking rice, boiling water etc.
I am wondering how that works though:
If I follow the same processes as with a carbon steel pan, I would always have a thin layer of oil on the walls and bottom. Can one cook rice or pasta in such a pot, with boiling water?
If I season but I don't add a thin layer of oil everytime, I am afraid the pot will rust very quickly
Does anybody know how to use such a pot?
Side note on why:
I am well aware that using another pot would be simpler. The reasons why I am asking this question are the following:
The goal is to use the pot over a wood fire. The aforementioned pot used to be used in such a setting, thus wouldn't be dirtied by doing so. Conversely I don't have other pots whose cleanliness I would be willing to sacrifice
The goal is also to give a new life to this pot, which is probably a century old, and use it the same way the previous inhabitants of this house did
More generally, I am interested to know how cumbersome it would be to use it
Thanks in advance for the help | You can use that pot for almost anything except high-acid foods, if it's properly prepared.
First, remove all of the rust and clean it thoroughly. Next, you'll want to season it the same way you'd season a cast iron dutch oven. Because you're planning to boil wet things in it, you'll want to apply at least seven layers of seasoning. You need to be really exacting about getting each layer of seasoning on well; any "sticky" patches of seasoning will detach when boiling. You'll also want to apply a restorative layer of seasoning after each use. One tip is to heat it low & slow to make sure the walls of the pot heat as well as the bottom.
(Other commenters are correct in that this probably isn't worth the trouble; this is why you don't see carbon steel pots around anymore.) |
How can I properly use bell pepper in my meat curry?
I use this chili to cook meat curries. However, I have an exacerbated skin issue due to this chili ingestion. Therefore, I need a substitute that has the same fragrance but is not hot.
I tried to use green bell pepper. However, it doesn't work. Bell pepper is too juicy, and the fragrance fades away after cooking.
How can I properly use bell pepper in my meat curry? | if the issue with the skin condition is due to the heat of your chili, I think the way to go is "piment vegetarien". It is improperly called vegetarian pepper due to its lack of heat, it's commonly found in French Antilles and French Guiana. To my knowledge there is no english term for those kind.
Lots of flavor, no heat, I think it's worth the try
I have found an example here:
https://arawakmarket.com/epicerie-fr/epicerie-salee-fr/sauces-and-condiments-fr/piment-vegetarien-en-morceaux-190g/?sl=en
And close species listed on the french wikipedia (https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_de_vari%C3%A9t%C3%A9s_de_piment):
Bahamian chili pepper (there are 2 kinds, one with heat, one without)
Sweet Datil Pepper
Aji dulce
Hope it was what you were looking for |
What is the point of the "oven" step in seasoning pans?
Many or most sets of instructions on how to season cast iron and carbon steel follow these steps:
Clean
Get really hot on the stovetop
Apply a very thin layer of oil
Heat for a short time, then take off the stove
Put it upside down in a medium oven for an hour
Cool
Repeat if necessary
Examples of these instructions: cast iron dutch oven; carbon steel pan.
Thing is, I've seasoned more than a dozen pots and pans, both cast iron and carbon steel, including both seasoning from scratch and restoring damaged seasoning. I've never done the oven step, and haven't noticed any deficit thereby.
Am I missing something? Is the oven step necessary? What does it actually do? | For me, the oven simply works better than the stove. It is the stove that you can skip.
First, the heat. It is the same principle as with many foods. A pan heats quicker, but with more variability. An oven is slow and steady, and reaches equilibrium more easily - and it is much easier to control the equilibrium temperature. On a stove, especially empty pan, a low heat will not be enough to polymerize the oil, so it is tempting to turn up to high heat - but then you have to manage to not overheat it and either burn away the seasoning while it is happening, or produce a different reaction - I don't know which one it is, but I suspect it may be the non-rust iron oxide, from the looks of it.
Second, the layer thickness. If your oil layer is too thick, you don't get seasoning, you get a puddle of hot oil. If you continue heating that for too long, you get a thick crust of soft polymer that is prone to peeling off, instead of a thin layer that is well-stuck. A thin layer is optimal, but difficult to produce - the usual method of letting the oil spread by flowing (aided by tilting the pan) makes it too thick. Smearing it with a towel (paper or cloth) gives you a good thickness, but you get a bit of lint onto the pan, especially if the surface is rough, like cast iron. What works well is to cover the pan well with the tilting method, and then have the excess drip slowly when heated to low enough viscosity - which happens automatically during the upside-down seasoning in the oven.
Third, there is the "how to season the sides" problem that Sneftel covered.
Fourth, if you don't have a hob that is the exact same size as the pan, the high temperatures on the empty pan can easily cause warping, especially in thinner forged iron pans.
Fifth, seasoning on a stove is a very active process. You have to manage the heat, keep an eye out for an overheating (warping or fire risk), look for hot spots and possibly rotate the pan, and look out for oil pooling into an undesirable thick layer. In the oven, you set it and forget it.
In summary, the oven is simply the much friendlier way to do it. |
How to avoid oil burn on the exterior of stainless steel pan
After I sear a steak the exterior sides and bottom of my stainless steel pan get coated with what looks like burned oil.
I usually let it cool down, then fill with the soapy water for overnight soaking. Only to find all the exterior stained in the morning.
I am puzzled how that happens: I’m using a splatter screen and while cooking the exterior does not seem dirty. | The blackening on the exterior of your pan begins with the polymerization of oils, which sometimes spill over, but often times collect there as a result of being aerosolized while you are cooking. This happens whether or not use use a splash screen. To have any luck cleaning this, you have to get it right after cooking, and you have to work at it quite a bit with an abrasive cleaner. When it first appears, if you catch it before burning, it is usually brown. After a couple of uses (or high heat, long enough) it will blacken and be even more difficult to remove. Some folks like a shiny exterior and will work at this diligently after each use. Personally, I don't give the exterior of my pans much attention. For the stainless ones, the inside is shiny and clean, the exterior is black and not so pretty to look at. I don't find it impacts the functionality at all. |
Can vegetable oil be infused with paprika without heating?
Some recipes, particularly for salad dressings, have a step where you are expected to heat a minuscule amount (e.g. 2 Tbsps) of a vegetable oil and cook paprika in it for a brief period of time (e.g. 30 seconds).
It seems extremely impractical: trying to to get 2 Tbsps of oil out of a pan will leave half of that amount in it spread over and render only a few drops. Also maintenance.
My understanding is that heating is to accelerate dissolution of paprika. But is it required for the reaction? If I am in no rush, can I just leave the solution overnight at the room temperature? | First of all, yes. If you think of it ahead of time, infusing oil with paprika at room temperature will work fine as long as you can do it overnight. While heat can in general be important to rupture cell walls and such to support dissolving, paprika is already pretty finely ground so it’s largely a matter of dissolution rate.
Failing that, though, you can use the microwave. This is a bit tricky, as small quantities of low-water solutions will heat — and burn — very quickly. But if you’re quick about it, you can bring paprika up to infusing temperature almost instantly. Note that the oil is not heated as fast as the paprika, despite there being more of it, so you’ll have to heat it 3-4 times. The basic recipe is, microwave it until the moment anything happens (sizzling, bubbling, w/e) and then immediately turn it off. Wait a few seconds for the heat to disperse and then turn it on again. After 3-4 rounds let it rest for 5 mins and you will have infused oil. |
What happened to my pizza dough?
I am a complete noob to baking/making dough so if I made a clear mistake in my process please correct me.
I am trying to make pizza dough. Based on the recipe I was following I suppose its neopolitan pizza dough, but honestly I just see it as pizza dough.
I mixed 500g of bread flour, 14g instant yeast, 14g cane sugar, 380g (65% hydration) of water at 115 degrees F (46 degrees C). I also mixed in 70g of Greek Yogurt and some arbitrary amount of salt and garlic powder. Once I mixed this all together in a bowl, I attempted an easy kneading process where I cover the bowl with saran wrap, then every 5 minutes I unwrap the bowl, fold the dough over on itself from all 4 sides, then rewrap, repeating 4 times (20 minutes). After doing this, the dough was still sticky and wet, and NOT springy at all.
Finally, I lifted the still very sticky dough out of the bowl, sprayed with some olive oil so it doesn't stick, then let the covered bowl sit on my windowsill under direct sunlight. My understanding is that doing all of this was supposed to build the gluten network as well as let the dough rise.
After about 2+ hours of it sitting on my windowsill, my dough looked like this, which doesn't look right at all:
It did rise, but seems to have "popped". And certainly the saran wrap did not have dough on it before, so my assumption is that the dough rose to the point where it hit the saran wrap then "popped". It was still sticky at this point, so I "kneaded" it in the bowl (mostly just mushing it around to be honest), added a bit of AP flour on the surface of the dough, rewrapped then placed in the fridge.
My question is, is my dough still useable for pizza? What did I do incorrectly? The video I was following gave the instructions for kneading like that and stated the dough should be springy afterward, but it was not as I mentioned above. My dough is still very sticky. Also, I have no idea anymore whether I should let it proof at room temp or in the fridge.
My understanding of pizza dough is:
Mix ingredients with yeast, with correct temp water, and proper hydration
Knead dough to build gluten network until its no longer sticky but rather smooth and springy
Let it bulk ferment in warm place for about 2 hours
Once it's risen, cut into smaller dough balls and place dough balls in fridge
Eat delicious pizza
Can someone help me understand what went wrong here and how I can correct this for next time? | If you divide the amount of water (380) by the amount of flour (500) you get .76 x 100 = 76% hydration. Then, you added 70 grams of yogurt (which is not usually found in pizza dough), but that adds to your hydration....now you at around 90% hydration. Neapolitan pizza is usually around 55 to 60 percent hydration. So, I would say you have too much liquid for the amount of flour, and you might want to use a different formula. |
Are pig testicles edible?
I’m just asking a question about a part of the animals anatomy. I’m watching something on the discovery channel and where they are located they stated that, people in this part of the village eat every part of the pig . Every part!!! They worship the animal and to waste any of the animal is frowned upon. That’s why I was asking if you can cook and eat the pig’s testes? | Yes, testicles are just a part of the animal that is perfectly edible like many others. This includes mammals like the pig in your question, but also birds. They are usually served as special dish because like other organs they need certain preparation steps for best results.
The (modern) western everyday cooking culture tends to ignore parts of animals that are not nice steak-like cuts, but apart from certain exceptions like a few organs (think gall bladder), most animals are pretty much edible completely - and were used that way for human consumption because it's valuable protein and calories (so a basic necessity). Just consider the British steak and kidney pie or the German liverwurst, even "inedible" bones can be used for bone broth. Recent trends like nose-to-tail cooking go back to these roots even in a fine dining setting.
In animal husbandry, keeping multiple intact males in a herd can be problematic, so removing the testicles in young males has been a long-standing practice for centuries, making lamb/beef/goat/… testicles even a seasonal ingredient. |
Looking for a butter dish with space for spreader
This is a very specific question .
I like to keep room temperature butter in a small dish to spread on bread or drop into my cooking. I always keep a knife or spreader nearby that I reuse for the butter; I don't like washing a new knife every single time I access the butter. But I also don't like keeping the knife or spreader outside the dish where it may draw the attraction of ants etc.
Do you know anyone that sells a butter dish that has room to keep the butter spreader either (1) entirely inside the sealed dish or (2) with the spreader end inside the dish but the handle sticking out? | Do a web search on "Butter keeper with integrated spreader". Multiple products exist. |
Solubility of chocolate in water and fat
do you have any idea about the solubility of chocolate? I experimented a bit and I can't make sense of what I've found. It isn't 1+1=2. It's rather like 1+1=8,3543 or so.
Here is what I found:
Chocolate mixes with water, milk, and coconut cream, and gives a homogenous liquid
Cacao butter does mix with chocolate the same way
But coconut oil doesn't mix with chocolate, and instead segregates and repeals, giving liquid chocolate with oil swimming on top.
Yet, cacao butter and coconut oil mix together well, giving a homogenous liquid
When chocolate is already quite diluted in water / milk, cacao butter doesn't mix in anymore
Whether water mixes when chocolate is enriched with a lot of cacao butter, I didn't try
Now, I used a chocolate that consists of cacao mass, cacao butter, cacao powder, and a non-caloric sweetener.
Why doesn't coconut oil mix with it when cacao butter does? Making chocolate at home from cacao powder and coconut oil and assumingly cacao butter works well. | So I think there are two big players in your experiments. Chocolate is complicated, and I won't pretend to know it all though. Chocolate has two big, arguably essential components: cocoa butter and cocoa solids. (White chocolate lacks cocoa solids, and is therefore a point of contention.) Melted fats are a liquid, water is a very different liquid.
As far as the liquid fat stuff goes, I'm paraphrasing Chocolate Alchemist to the extreme: Cocoa butter is actually a collection of fatty acids. Three are dominant and of particular interest: Oleic, Palmitic, and Stearic acids. These three collectively provide the crystalline structure of chocolate by connecting to each other, forming the cocoa butter crystal, and giving chocolate shine and snappy qualities. When chocolate melts, that structure is lost, the three go wild, and the reason tempering as a process is such a big deal is because those three acids will try to settle down at different temperatures. As a result, they won't return to the desired crystalline state without some kind of tempering process. (Which involves heating and cooling chocolate in a particular sequence, or agitating chocolate while it cools to prevent crystals from forming at all until all three acids are ready to cooperate, or using cocoa butter "seed" crystals that will encourage the other acids floating around to fall in line, into the proper crystalline structure... It's a terrifying process for a lot of baby chocolate geeks.)
So a lot is happening when you melt or cool cocoa butter chocolate, and similarly, adding any other fat will throw off the fairly delicate balance of fatty acids and drastically change the effectiveness of tempering and the texture of the final product. You should consider the melting temperature of any fat you decide to add at the very least - Coconut oil melts around 78F - so even without all the chemistry, it makes sense that if you add coconut oil to a fat solution that melts at 93F, you'll get something that melts at a temperature between 78F and 93F. When you dig into the chemistry of it, you find that you're adding a bunch of lauric acid and other shorter chain fatty acids that want to hook up with the cocoa butter and won't let the crystals form properly at all. Practically speaking, it won't set up and form a solid.
I once attempted to make a white chocolate ganache with coconut milk and...yeah, it never set up. It was velvety smooth, impossible to whip, never stopped dripping, and therefore completely useless to me. (It was a tasty sauce though). That was what led me to the Chocolate Alchemist once upon a time, and since real white chocolate was very expensive to me back then, I was sad. Hence my warning in the comment above. You can make something tasty with chocolate and coconut stuff, but it will be softer. It might not be what you'd call chocolate at all.
If you want to extend solid chocolate, you should look into paramount crystals - easy to use and give you a hard chocolate. Paramount crystals, or partially hydrogenated palm kernel oil, lecithin, and citric acid, are easy to use, raise the melting point of your chocolate, and contain an emulsifier to prevent separation issues. They're the main component of compound chocolate made with cocoa butter. Unfortunately, while they can be very helpful, they also don't contribute much to the aroma or taste of the chocolate, so I'd recommend using them sparingly. Some people absolutely despise the stuff lol. You could also look into edible waxes, but... again, use them sparingly. Wax has a very... waxy texture. Hard to describe any other way and extremely recognizable, and not generally desirable.
As for why you witnessed complete separation, my guess would simply be proportions, a resulting loss of emulsion, and the cocoa powder settling, even in your liquid fat.
Which brings us to the other feature you should consider in your experiments - the cocoa solids. These become more significant when you start adding water. The cocoa solids, not to mention the milk and sugar as applicable, are not liquefied in the chocolate, they are just extremely finely ground particles suspended in that cocoa butter crystal matrix. So when you melt and solidify chocolate carelessly, you may notice sugar or fat bloom on the chocolate. You may notice areas of dense, grainy chocolate next to smooth creamy bits. That's the result of cocoa solids and the other components settling out unevenly. My though is that by adding enough fat you saw this happen in an exaggerated sort of way, real time. It wasn't just the coconut oil refusing to mix, but the entire chocolatey emulsion breaking down.
As soon as you introduce water to the mix, as in some of your experiments, either in your mouth or in a cup of liquid, you dissolve any sugar and start to hydrate the cocoa solids and any milk. That hydrated chocolate mixture might remain thick and emulsified at first, especially if the solids aren't fully hydrated yet. At this point, you can add more fat and easily mix the two substances because those cocoa solids are holding onto the liquid for you. But the more liquid you add, the less dense the solution becomes, the less your cocoa powder can keep it locked up, and the harder it is to keep emulsified without additives like lecithin, and ultimately the cocoa powder will in fact sink to the bottom. Even if you thicken the liquid with corn starch for a drinking chocolate, the cocoa powder will settle out with a little time. And since you're dealing with a mixture that's mostly water at this point rather than fat/particulate, any added fat will act like... well oil to water. Even with added emulsifiers, it's not truly dissolved into a new solution. The liquid and fat never really become one, they're just held in suspension with each other, forming an often uneasy peace.
To summarize a bit, if you want to extend and dilute some solid chocolate, paramount crystals are your best, easiest option. You can use other fats with a higher melting point than chocolate, but even then, by doing so you'll interfere with the cocoa butter crystal structure and get something that while firm, likely lacks any snappiness. Cocoa butter is a fat that a lot of people think will work great in this application, but due to its chemical composition is arguably the worst lol. And many of us learn this the hard way.
When you add water in any form to chocolate, you've created a whole new liquid emulsion to which different rules apply. While you can make a partially hydrated kind of ganache that sets up firm, the particulate can only absorb so much liquid, and you can only add so much fat to any emulsion before it breaks down. |
When you velvet chicken, are you supposed to wash off the baking soda?
I am trying to make chicken breast taste better and a technique I found was velveting. However, I'm finding some conflicting information on how to properly do it.
The way I velvet right now is I cut up my raw chicken breast (800-1000g), then add about 10g of baking soda, then add a bit of water, just enough to submerge the chicken breast pieces. Then I leave it on my countertop for like 15-20 minutes. Once that's done, I drain and squeeze the chicken pieces a bit, then I coat with some sesame oil and let it marinate for a bit more.
My question is, is this technique correct? Am I supposed to just mix chicken with baking soda and nothing else, no water? Am I supposed to wash off the baking soda once it's done? What if I want to add spices, at what step does that come in? | There is some controversy about the ingredients for velveting, but the idea behind the Chinese technique, is that meat (chicken, pork, or fish) is marinated, then given a hot oil blanch, before being stir fried. The purpose of the technique is create a smooth and silky texture.
Baking soda is indeed mentioned, but less commonly than egg white and cornstarch. Some, leave those three ingredients out altogether, and simply marinate in oil and still call the technique "velveting." Most common seems to be a combination of egg white, cornstarch, and Chinese cooking wine.
The marinade is not washed off before use. Here is a good explanation.
I haven't looked for any science on the topic, but it would be interesting to see if it has been studied. If I find anything, I will update. |
Is it ok to have blood in crease of vacuum seal? For steak and freezer
For vacuum sealing steaks for the freezer, is it ok to have blood/liquid in the crease?
https://imgur.com/a/OTsYdsl | Since the blood is inside the sealed part as indicated above, if the package conforms tightly to the contents and there are no air bubbles,loose wrinkles, or milkiness to the seal, then it is as air-tight as can be with retail machines, thus safe to eat, thus "ok". This link is pretty good for more info: https://yourmeatguide.com/vacuum-sealed-meat-smells-bad/#:~:text=Check%20the%20seal%20prior%20to%20opening!&text=If%20the%20meat%20is%20loose,caused%20the%20meat%20to%20spoil.
In future, set the juicy meat in the vaccum bag and freeze it like that, then vacuum seal it, so you don't have a messy seal. |
Sous Vide for infinite shelf life
Sweet potatoes already last a relatively long time. If I were to sous vide a sweet potato until everything inside of it is dead, let's say at 215°F for 24 hours, I should have a sterile potato on my hands. If I then place the vacuum sealed potato into a mylar bag and vacuum seal that bag as well, have I created an infinite shelf-life potato?
Natural decomposition may occur, but for how long will it be safe to eat (though disgusting) if stored in the pantry? What about other foods, like beef? Once all of the micro-organisms have been eliminated, what will make me sick? | No, you most certainly haven't.
First off - boiling water is not sufficient to sterilize it. Even if you could raise the water to your 215 F (101 C) point (unless you live beside the Dead Sea you won't be able to) For sterilization of solid and liquid substances usually this is done with temperatures between 121 C (250 F) and 132 C (270 F) for times between 30 and 60 minutes. The only way you can achieve this with substances that contain water (e.g. your sweet potato) is to raise the pressure in the surrounding container so that the boiling point of water is raised to the temperatures above.
The risk you run with your idea is that (as noted in comment by @RonBeyer)) is that endospore-forming bacteria and fungal species are generally not killed by heating water to it's boiling point. You may reduce the numbers of bacteria present, but you can't generally eliminate them. These bacteria can then exit their endospore phase and start growing. Once they grow, they will spoil your food and potentially make you very sick if you were to eat it. Endospore forming bacteria include some of the more significant human pathogens such as Bacillus anthracis (anthrax) and Clostridium species (colitis (C. difficile), relevant to food poisoning: (C. perfringens), and tetanus (C. tetani)). None of which you want to get!
However, even autoclaving isn't sufficient to kill all bacterial species (see my answer on the Biology SE), but most of these highly resistant species are not pathogens that we know of. However, one of the more resistant genera Desulfotomaculum is a soil bacterium (where sweet potato grow...) and a significant spoiler of canned foods.
Long story short: DON'T DO IT! |
I accidentally sprayed bleach on some apples. Is this dangerous?
When I was bleaching towels, I accidentally sprayed some on apples nearby. The next day, to be safe, I washed these apples for about 15 seconds. Are these apples safe to eat Could someone get sick?
Please answer for my peace of mind. | At least in the US, as of 2017 (last reference I found), commercially packed apples are washed in a bleach solution, then thoroughly rinsed before being sold. We, of course, have no way of knowing the concentration of your bleach spray, but I would think that if you washed these apples they are safe for consumption. |
Why does my Indian food taste bland?
I recently tried an Indian recipe and event though it was spicy hot, it didn't have much flavor which surprised me for how much seasoning I put in. Does anyone know why this might be so bland?
1 pound boneless skinless chicken breast cut into bite size chunks
1/2 onion finely minced
2 tablespoons butter
3 cloves garlic minced or grated
1 tablespoon freshly grated ginger
2 teaspoons curry powder
1-2 teaspoons Thai red curry paste
2 tablespoons garam masala
1/2-1 teaspoon turmeric
1 teaspoon cayenne pepper, use less if you are not a spicy person
1/4 teaspoon salt
1 (6 ounce) can tomato paste
1 (14 ounce) can coconut milk
1/2 cup greek yogurt
1/4 cup half and half or heavy cream
cooked white rice for serving
Fresh homemade naan for scooping (a must!)
In a large glass measuring cup or bowl mix together the coconut milk, greek yogurt and cream. Stir in the tomato paste, garlic, ginger and all the spices. Mix well.
Spray the inside of your crockpot bowl with cooking spray or grease with olive oil. To the bowl sprinkle the onion over the bottom. Add the chicken and then pour the coconut milk mixture over the chicken so the chicken is completely covered. Add the butter and place the lid on the crockpot. Cook on high for 4 hours or on low for 6 to 8 hours. | You just don't make a curry by throwing all the ingredients in a pan & heating them for a while.
Even using good ingredients & putting enough salt in, that recipe will come out bland. I'd also imagine it would be a little bitter too because of the tomato paste thrown in 'raw' & the amount of garam masala is complete overkill.
Curry is all about method as well as ingredients. Two different people given the same ingredients will make two different curries, on method alone.
The onions, garlic & ginger should be fried, the spices should be fried, the tomato paste should be fried [if you don't, it will be bitter]. The coconut milk & cream should go in near the end, so should the garam massala.
The butter should be ghee - different flavour profile.
See https://cooking.stackexchange.com/a/121074/42066 for more detail on general curry methods.
It's honestly just a lazy recipe - as comments indicate, it's a clickbait recipe. It doesn't belong on anyone's list of 'how to make curry', of any sort.
The more I look at even the ingredients list, the more I worry about it. It's a truly terrible recipe.
Even if we're using generic supermarket curry powder, there's nowhere near enough. There's also far too much garam masala [possibly to try cover for the fact it's going to be cooked into submission rather than added late so you can taste it].
There's not enough onion to make the sauce properly, so it's making up 'gravy' with a lot of additional liquid ingredients. I've never known quite so much 'wet' in what purports to be an "Indian" curry - coconut, cream and yoghurt. Maybe one of those, not all three.
…and cooking skinless chicken breast for 4 hours is going to come out like bullets.
So… under-salt, under 'curried', over-perfumed, consistency of soup & inedible chicken… what's not to like? ;)
If you read the comments under the online recipe, then once you get past the 'paid to give it 5 stars' reviews, you find complaints about each of these points. |
Can I skip cooking vegetables for curry if I plan to freeze it?
Many curry recipes I came across involve frying and then boiling vegetables before mixing with roux.
I presume that’s to damage the cells to impart the juice (and soften the vegetables).
However, since I’m planning to freeze the curry, wouldn’t it be sufficient to just blanch the veggies in stock? Freezing in itself will damage the cells and reheating (20 min on medium-low) should be sufficient to complete the cooking. | For best results, no.
The frying/sauteing stage gets you browning/maillard/umami; skipping it will give you a quite different texture and flavor.
The subsequent simmering (20-25m in the example you linked) does two things*: it continues to soften the foods (not all of which will have been pre-sauteed), and it diffuses the flavors from the solids into the broth (and into other solids). While a freeze-thaw cycle could complement the softening, it's not the same, and it won't help with the diffusion.
On the other hand, if it really matters, you can probably get away with greatly reducing the simmer-time pre-freezing, because you'll be bringing the soup back up to boiling when you thaw it.
* actually in the example you link, it does a third thing: it boils off a lot of the water. |
Is the transparent thin layer on top of my broth gelatin?
I let a bone broth simmer over night and I woke up to a transparent, thin, and almost plastic-looking like layer that creases easily when moved on top of the broth. Is this gelatin? I'm just checking that it's not something I should discard. | That's probably fat, which congeals (and sometime solidifies, depending on how much) at the surface of cold broths and stocks. Gelatin will often be distributed throughout, and if there in sufficient quantities, your chilled stock will be jello-like. |
Earliest pizza recipe?
What is the earliest recorded recipe for pizza ever written? I think it’s in the 1700’s, but I’m just not really sure myself, thusly my question. If this is the wrong stack to put it on I apologize. | The earliest example of unquestionable Italian pizza in the modern sense started in the slums of Naples in the late 18th century. These had pizza crust, tomatoes, mozzarella, basil, and other ingredients. Since they were poor people food, it took a while for them to be documented in writing; the earliest clear description of them is from 1849. By 1889, the monarchs of the newly unified Italy chose Pizza Margherita as the representative food of Naples.
Dishes called "pizza" such as pizza rustica go back much further, first recorded in the 10th century, likely brought by the Gothic conquerors of Southern Italy. These would have been pies of eggs, meat, fish, and/or vegetables in a short crust.
If you expand the definition of pizza to "flatbread cooked with cheese and stuff on it", such a dish goes back to at least ancient Persia, and likely to prehistoric times.
So, which recipe is first is going to depend on which of these definitions of pizza you're using. |
Why cut on the bias?
It seems like lots of recipes these days specify to cut long vegetables (like carrots) on the bias (diagonally) rather than straight across.
It seems to me that this results in extra wastage at the ends of the vegetable.
Is there actually any advantage to cutting vegetables on the bias, or is it just a trendy presentation thing? | By cutting on the bias a little more surface area is exposed, and the interactions we are interested in for flavour (between food and tongue, and between ingredients within the dish) are all about surface area.
Beyond that, it tends to be regarded as more interesting and pleasing presentation, and results in larger pieces of food which are easier for the diner to see and pick out (with hands or cutlery). If the goal is pieces as small as possible (another way to increase surface area) then traditionally food gets diced or minced; cutting on the bias tends to happen where the intention is that the ingredients will be visible and appreciated by the diner.
Regarding the unused ends of what you are cutting, depending on the context the ends could be used in the dish (if you are not too fussy about presentation), used for other things like stock (especially if you are working with large volumes), or eaten as snacks for the chef (my preferred option, for carrots at least) in preference to being thrown away if you are worried about wastage. |
What happened to this garlic clove?
I bought a box of veggies and such to make dinner and it included a few cloves of garlic to add to the meal.
I opened them up and then found one of them that looked like this:
I've never seen one like this before. What happened to this clove? Is it just rotten? It didn't smell bad or anything, and felt a bit like a squishy soft candy when I touched it. There's no spots or discolorations or anything, it's just an even yellow.
I decided not to put it in the meal, but could I have? Or would that have ended badly? | That's cooked.
Somehow your garlic bulb was exposed to too much heat, either during drying or during transport.
So, safe to eat, but mild-tasting and won't keep very long. |
Water soluble vs oil soluble vegetables
I was watching an educational documentary on cooking vegetables and the chef (Sean Kahlenberg) categorized vegetables into two large groups: water-soluble (do well when cooked in oil, poorly when cooked in water) and oil-soluble (vice-versa). There were even examples for each category: carrots, asparagus and zucchinis as water-solubles; green beans, broccoli and cabbage as oil-solubles. The video is from 2019 and I cannot find a comprehensive list for either.
Is this approach still used? | What the chef refers to as 'solubility' and their ideal cook methods is better explained by each vegetable's density, ideal cooking temperatures, and heat transfer abilities of oil vs. water-based methods.
As far as I know, 'solubility' referring to those concepts has never been used for any professional culinary manuals, let alone research articles.
Cooking in a water system, i.e. steaming, poaching, boiling, etc. would have submerged ingredients limited to a maximum temperature of 100C. This would be ideal for avoiding caramelisation and Maillard reactions ("browning reactions") where you want to showcase the food's characteristics, say for delicate flavours or novelty.
In contrast, 'cooking with oils' would generally be high heat applications where the maximum temperature is determined by the heat source and heat transfer by the smoke point of the oil as a transfer medium, above 100C. Think grilling, frying, sauté. Surface water typically evaporates too quickly to limit the surface temperature, unless the technique is poor or heat source insufficient.
Foods benefit from that type of high-heat cooking where added flavour complexity from browning reactions is desired, like for steaks, or where low-temperature prolonged cooking generates unwanted flavours - Brassica family vegetables (cabbages, Brussels sprouts) release sulphur compounds.
This isn't to say that mixing methods doesn't yield good or even better results. Grilled asparagus and zucchini, and boiled cabbage with corned beef come to mind.
Re: actual water solubility - most compounds in both vegetables and meats can be easily solubilised with water in normal cooking. In a live state plants and animals have natural barriers to prevent nutrient leaching, like wax coatings, dry protein skins, etc. Cells rely on nutrients being soluble in water-based systems (blood plasma, cytoplasm) to get from A to B in organisms. |
Why does it take longer for food to bake when the oven is full?
It seems that if I have fully loaded our oven, everything takes longer to cook.
A pan of veggies will roast in an hour at 400. But if we are also baking chicken and fries in there at the same time, nothing is ready in time.
Here's what I don't understand. The veggies are still exposed to 400 degrees for an hour. What physical effect could cause the food to take longer to cook? Or am I imagining it?
For the record, I'm a regular person cooking in a regular electric oven at home. | Regular domestic oven - so, not convection. Fill it up with pans, poor air circulation. The area near the thermostat sensor may well be at 400 °F (or depending how much your oven lies, it may not - I've seen multiple cases of domestic ovens always reporting they are at temperature once they get there, even if the door is opened or they otherwise are not actually at temperature - but they don't want to tell you that, so they don't) but temperatures in different parts of the oven will vary considerably.
Any food containing water will cause an area around it of "pretty much 212 °F/100°C" due to water boiling off from the food. Get enough of that going on and much of it won't see 400 °F, really.
A convection oven (at least a half-decent one) will generally be more even due to forced air circulation. |
How do you measure 2 ounces of dry thin spaghetti pasta?
I tried the size of a quarter and a juice bottle with a long neck. When I cook half of what I measure as 2 ounces it is enough for me. Two ounces according to the quarter theory makes a mountain of pasta. I am thinking maybe there is a difference between the pasta size? The thin spaghetti has a smaller diameter and maybe a handfull that has the diameter of a quarter is 3 ounces not 2 ounces.
Does anyone know.I didn't want to but I guess I need to buy a scale. | When you make spaghetti, pay attention to the size of the bundle before cooking and then pay attention to whether it makes the desired amount, so that you get used to the correct sized bundle for the pasta you are using. As you note, different pasta may have different thickness and length so the size of the bundle might be different for different brands.
Having said that, a scale is a very useful kitchen tool and good compact electronic scales can be obtained very cheaply. I would recommend one in general, not just for measuring pasta portions. Then you can get used to what your preferred mass of dry pasta is and measure more confidently for any pasta shape. |
Extra-thick pasta machine for udon noodles?
I enjoy making udon noodles occasionally. But the main point of labor & annoyance is hand-cutting the noodles. I would really like a pasta-maker that is thick enough to cut out square udon noodles. Issue is that udon is a particualrly thick noodle so I don't think most simple hand-crank pasta maker's have this a thick enough cutting option.
Any suggestions or recommendations? | I would suggest a chitarra. It is used to make a pasta typical to the Abruzzo region of Italy. I use mine also for udon and ramen noodles. It creates a rectangular shaped pasta...you can control the thickness with your roller, then cut on the chitarra. |
My bowl cracked when I poured hot soup into it - what happened?
I was preparing a bowl of Ramen Noodles, and rather than use a ladle decided to just pour the soup directly into an old ceramic bowl (at least 10 years old).
Suddenly, the soup starts to spill out of it, and I look and see a long crack leading from the rim to the base and around in a circle - bowl completely ruined!
What could cause a ceramic bowl to crack like this from just pouring in hot noodles and broth? | Your bowl broke because of thermal fracturing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_fracturing_in_glass
Thermal fracturing in glass occurs when a sufficient temperature
differential is created within glass.[1] As a warmed area expands or a
cooled area contracts, stress forces develop, potentially leading to
fracture. A temperature differential may be created in many ways,
including solar heating, space heating devices, fire, or hot and cold
liquids.
Heat causes things to expand. Cold causes them to contract. If a rigid object expands in one area more than another that puts stress on that area and it might be more than the object can handle. True for glass or anything else that is rigid - ceramics, concrete, rocks, even metal.
One would think a soup bowl could handle such stresses but not this time - hot soup, cold bowl and it broke. Take comfort in the fact that your bowl died proudly in service and will go straight to bowl Valhalla. |
Large kitchen scale shows very inaccurate results for large masses
I have a three different huge kitchen (?) scales with accuracy / being able to measure stuff to up to 200 kg / 440 lb.
When I compare the results, for first two scales they're:
comparable or identical (+/- 0 to 0.5 kg) for 0-100 kg range,
comparable (+/- 0.5 to 1.5 kg) for 100-200 kg range.
When I compare these two scales to the third one then the results are:
comparable or identical (+/- 0 to 0.5 kg) for 0-100 kg range,
way not comparable (+/- 6 to 9 kg) for 100-200 kg range.
How can that be? Has anyone ever heard about such situation? I can't say that my third scale is broken or inaccurate, because for 0-100 kg range it measures identical results as two other scales. Only going above 100 kg causes it to go wako. | What you're observing matches my experience for inaccurate electronic scales. Inaccuracy is more severe at higher weights. Usually this is because the inaccuracy is progressive; the scale is, for example, 2% inaccurate. At low weights that's hard to observe because it's smaller that the scale's own precision limitations, but at large weights it's quite apparent. This is why calibration of scales usually uses weights that are close to the top capacity for the scale (for example, my 0.01-200g scales use a 100g weight for calibration).
Speaking of calibration, you really need calibration weights if you care about scale accuracy. It's more likely that the one scale is off -- but it's certainly possible that that scale is accurate and it's the other two that are off. Further, most scales come with calibration procedures, but that calibration requires you to have a scientifically precise calibration weight to use.
(My experience is based on teaching ceramics classes using cheap electronic scales, which has involved buying dozens of them and calibrating them myself.) |
When do bananas go bad?
When do bananas become unsafe for eating? Is it when they turn brown? Or black? Not for recipes, but for straight eating. Also, does the peel color even matter if the inside of the banana is still more or less okay? If a banana is green with brown/black spots, does that say anything bad about the banana? Because bananas that ripen like that are often chemically treated or ripened, but it sometimes happens naturally as well. EDIT: The difference between this and the original question is that this question has other factors, like what is going on with bananas that have an okay inside but black peel, and what color should I trust with green but spotted bananas. | (Note: this is for Cavendish bananas, the main banana sold in the United States; I don’t know if this is true for other banana varieties)
As a banana ripens, it becomes sweeter and softer.
When is best to eat it directly is a matter of personal preference. I know people who eat them when yellow or even green. I prefer them when they have a good amount of spotting, but no large black spots.
If they’ve ripened further than you’d like, I recommend freezing them (peel first, then a plastic bag) for later use (in ice cream or banana bread), or if they’ve gone completely black, you can use them in banana bread immediately. (The freezing helps to break up cell structure so they mash up very easily after you thaw them)
Once they’ve gone to black, you want to consider freezing or using them soon, as they may start to attract fruit flies. At some point after that, they might start fermenting or rotting, as the insides basically liquify. |
Is the red substance leaking out of the ham bone blood or marrow?
We had already eaten the ham and I was boiling the bone for soup. I noticed a red substance oozing out of a hole in the cooking bone. There did not appear to be a large vein near the hole, so I would like to know if this was bone marrow or blood. | From the information you have given, I am almost certain that what you are describing is the bone marrow, found inside the pig equivalent of the femur bone. The bone marrow of pork has a very rich and meaty flavor and described as greasy/fatty by some. Its a delicacy, some people even eat bone marrow as a main dish, like ossobuco.
Whilst bone marrow is not blood, it does produce red blood cells, so if you are avoiding eating blood due to religious or cultural reasons, you might want to ask someone else for further advice. |
Herb drying question
I picked fresh oregano, rosemary and purple basil. I placed them in a dark room with a oil heater set to high and a oscillating fan blowing is in the room as well. The heat was on for 4 days, then turned off. The herbs stayed in the room to dry for 3 additional weeks. They all smelled wonderful at this time. Then I place them into air-tight plastic freezer bags and placed the bags into a tightly closed mason jars kept in a closet. After a few days I open the bags and all three herbs smelled bad as if moister remained in the herbs. What did I do wrong? should I have left them out to dry for a few more weeks for a total of 7 weeks? The have been removed from the bags and jars and I placed them into paper bags. But now the herbs don't have any smell. | If they were not dry, and they smelled bad when checked, they are not going to get better - toss them, do better next time.
It's hard to know how an uncontrolled environment drying will work out unless you have experience using that particular system in similar weather patterns - it's aways advisable to pop product you think is dry into glass jars and recheck several times within a day or so (not longer, you want to catch this as soon as it becomes apparent) for any condensation inside the jar, which is a sure sign more drying is needed. If you unjar and continue drying as soon as you spot condensation, it generally won't spoil. You can use bags once you are sure it's dry (though if you are going to put them in mason jars anyway, the bags are a waste of plastic.)
In my personal experience, the basil is better made into pesto and frozen than dried. But you can dry it if that's what you want.
The oregano and rosemary should dry fine. Though if you have any ability to not kill plants, a potted rosemary is not a very fussy houseplant, and you can have it fresh that way. Added after remembering to water mine...
When I had an airy attic I could string herbs up in that got nice and hot, I'd put them there. When I had an oven with a standing pilot light, I'd use that. These days I use a plug-in electric dehydrator with a thermostat and a fan. That gets most things done in a matter of days.
Unless you are in a terribly dry climate I would not regard 4 days of heat and 3 weeks of room temperature (which may not dry at all, depending on the weather) as a particularly good regime - it certainly would not do much in my humid climate. At minimum, some additional time with heat before sealing up would likely help.
There are various other "tests" for dryness of variable usefulness or reliability - do stems snap .vs. bend? - Do leaves crumble .vs. crumple?
If you happen to own or can borrow a dehumidifier, that would be a better way to heat and dry the room you are drying in than a resistance heater (does a better job making it dry, not just warm.) |
What are the black little seeds in my chia?
Regardless of where I procure my chia seeds, I always find, mixed with them, some quantity of smaller and darker seeds which don't seem to be chia.
These seeds are black (noticeably darker than the dark-gray chia seeds) and lentil-shaped, about 1mm in diameter. They don't gel in water like the chia seeds do.
What are these seeds? How safe are they? Should I make an effort to get them out?
Here's a sample, the 3 little seeds on the top right are the kind in question, the rest are chi | null |
Can I save my vinegar soaked caraway seeds?
I prepared some quick-pickled onions (the variety that you only keep in the fridge for a few days) and used a "boil the vinegar then pour it over" method. I accidentally dropped about 40g of black caraway seeds into the brine due to my spice container malfunctioning. Due to the pour-over method, I managed to separate most of them. Unfortunately, the seeds are now soaked. Is there a safe way to dry and use them, or will I need to use them quickly? | Rinse them in a few changes of water and then dry them throughly in a warm/dry location; they should be fine. If you happen to have a standing pilot oven (old-fashioned these days) that works well for drying things.
You can blot most of the water out with a towel. The main issue is to get them throughly dry, so they don't grow mold.
An alternative would be to jar them in vinegar and put them in the fridge for future use in other pickled foods. |
Why are beans I soak myself always smaller than canned?
I've taken to buying bags of dried garbanzo beans instead of canned, however, no matter how long I soak them, they never expand to be as large as the canned, pre-cooked variety. This means when I try to roast them according to most of the recipes I find, they end up burned. I know there are different types of beans in that family, but the canned kind and the dried kind do appear to be the same. Can anyone tell me where the discrepancy in size comes from? | Dried beans swell when soaked, and swell further when cooked. Your question implies that you are only soaking, not cooking the dried beans - which would both mean they would not get as large as the cooked canned ones, and that they would presumably roast differently than the cooked canned ones.
I employ the difference in making felafel with soaked, dried beans rather than canned beans - the soaked, dried beans need no binder, while cooked or canned beans need some sort of binder such as wheat flour.
It may well be possible to roast soaked, dried, uncooked beans, but it may require different time and temperature than cooked/canned ones.
Incidentally, if you have the time, cooking your own from dried (when you want cooked beans) is far superior to canned ones on all fronts (taste, cost, amount of salt, etc.) except being exceedingly fast. |
How do you prevent ice crystals from developing in your ice cream?
So I heat and whisk some cream with egg yolks, sugar, and lemon juice in a water bath until thick, whip the rest of the cream, mix the two together and put it into a freezer. After five or so hours I take it out of the freezer and it's done. It's the recipe from my ice cream book. Four yolks per 500 ml of heavy cream (33%). But it's not smooth, it has that "ice crunch". I can feel and hear those tiny ice crystals being crushed by my teeth (it's quite subtle, but it's there). How do you prevent ice crystals from developing in your ice cream?
Fat must be the key, but I had plenty of it. Besides, you get no ice crystals if you just freeze whipped egg whites with sugar even though it contains approximately zero fat | The key points of avoiding the formation of ice crystals are primarily dependent to the speed of the freezing and the amount of agitation. Commercial batch freezers have more powerful compressors that only take 12-15 minutes to complete the process, while ice cream machines for home use tend to take 45-60 minutes. Also a higher dasher speed, with up to 200 rpm, can help to gain smaller ice crystals, but also results in a higher overrun, which might or might not be wanted.
A detailed description of the freezing process can be found in
the Ice Cream Technology e-Book by H. Douglas Goff:
Theoretical Aspects of the Freezing Process
Structure from the Ice Crystals |
Can biscuit dough be left out at room temperature before baking?
I have an event I've volunteered to bring biscuits to. I'm making kimchi cheddar biscuits (baking powder, baking soda, buttermilk are the leavening ingredients I believe). The recipe says to freeze the biscuit dough for an hour before baking.
I can either:
-follow the recipe: freezing my dough for an hour, cooking and allowing the biscuits to cool completely before bringing them to my event, which I will then be very late to
-bring the fully assembled uncooked biscuit dough TO the event, arriving on time, and using my friend's kitchen to freeze+bake there.
Are there any downsides to packing finished biscuit dough into a few tupperwares and letting it rest for an hour or so as I bus over to my event? I'd be as conscious as I could be about over-handling it. | The purpose of freezing biscuits before baking is to make sure that the layers of fat are nice and hard, and don't have a chance to soak into the flour before they start steaming and pushing the layers apart. If your dough is sitting for an hour or more at room temperature (or warmer), you risk them being doughy and/or tough and not rising properly.
Freezing them solid (6+ hours), carrying them in a cooler, and then baking them from frozen on-site should work, though. The key there is not letting them start thawing before they go into the oven -- half-thawed but frozen in the middle would be even worse that starting them at room temp. |
How to reduce the taste of tomato in a tomato sauce?
I did butter chicken for the first time. It was good but I felt that the tomato sauce had too much tomato flavour.
The sauce was made of tomato passata and liquid cream (and what remained from the marinade of the chicken, it was very little).
What should I do to reduce the taste of tomatoes? (it is a bit too present compared to what I get in Indian restaurants, and my personal taste as well). | I think you should look for a different recipe or tomato component.
After a quick look around, I found some differences in the tomato components used. Some recipes are using passata, some are using tomato purees and some chopped canned tomatoes.
So if you feel there is too much tomato, I'd suggest trying chopped tomatoes either canned or fresh.
If it tastes not tomatoy enough you could add tomato puree or passata step for step until you achieve the desired tomato taste. |
Can you shred raw potatoes to make mashed potatoes?
When cooking sous vide, will shredding the potatoes, instead of cubing them, work just as well or could it have unintentional consequences?
Context:
I am trying to improve my mashed potato recipe to get more consistent results. Unfortunately, I don't have a ricer, so I have to mash them by hand. I have previously tried mashing them in the bag, but I ended up missing several cubes of potatoes. By simply starting out with them shredded, would it make it easier in the end? But I'm also concerned it might change the texture negatively. I figure it would also allow them to cook more evenly. | Shredding the potatoes raw will release too much calcium and disrupt too many cells, similar to pureeing them.
You can definitely give it a try, though the end result will likely have a firmer gelled texture more suitable for latkes or hash browns. On the plus side, you can salvage the results for those uses.
You could try passing the cooked potatoes through a coarse strainer or sieve if you have those - not as fine, but will prevent major chunks.
The science behind it
Raw potatoes will have certain enzymes active (pectin methyl esterases, 'PMEs') that convert pectins in the potato cell walls from one general state to another - high methoxyl to low methoxyl.
PMEs and calcium naturally present in potatoes are released when the cells are disrupted from cutting, blending, shredding, etc. The pectins get converted and the low methoxyl pectins readily bind with the calcium, forming strong calcium pectinate gels.
Heating inactivates the PMEs, with full inactivation around 80C, which is why cooked potatoes usually do not gum when mashed.
Resources to look into:
Potato tuber pectin structure is influenced by pectin methyl esterase activity and impacts on cooked potato texture, Heather A. Ross, Kathryn M. Wright, Gordon J. McDougall, Alison G. Roberts, Sean N. Chapman, Wayne L. Morris, Robert D. Hancock, Derek Stewart, Gregory A. Tucker, Euan K. James, Mark A. Taylor, https://doi.org/10.1093/jxb/erq280
Optimization of calcium pectinate gel production from high methoxyl pectin, Hanying Duan,Xiaoyun Wang,Nima Azarakhsh,Chao Wang,Meng Li,Guiming Fu,Xuesong Huang, https://doi.org/10.1002/jsfa.11409
Pectin methylesterase catalyzed firming effects on low temperature blanched vegetables, Li Ni, Daniel Lin, Diane M. Barrett, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jfoodeng.2004.10.009
Extraction and characterization of pectin methylesterase from Alyanak apricot (Prunus armeniaca L), M. Ümit Ünal and Aysun Şener, https://doi.org/10.1007%2Fs13197-013-1099-3 |
How can I determine protein content of random cottage cheeses at home?
I'm currently in the Republic of Georgia, and locals sell farmer cottage cheeses at the markets. These cheeses are albumin-based "nadugi" and casein-based "hacho". No nutritional info is available for them. I would like to measure protein content of the cheeses I buy, even if approximately. Is there a way to do this at home? | No, this is not something you can do at home (except if you are Walter White). Here is a good overview of common methods: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7597951/pdf/foods-09-01340.pdf
Below is a chart from page 2 which summarizes the methods:
Table 1. Protein quantification methods—advantages and disadvantages.
Protein Quantification Method
Advantages
Disadvantages
Kjeldahl method—digestion of food with a strong acid so that nitrogen is released which is then quantified using a titration technique.
Considered the standard method globally and therefore easy to compare results with other laboratories
Does not measure true protein and overestimations of protein can result due to use of standard nitrogen correction factor 6.25
Dumas method
Fast and does not use chemicals; can measure several samples at a time
Costly to set up and is not very accurate as it does not measure true protein.
UV spectroscopy methods
Simple, does not require any assay agents
Highly error prone due to other compounds that absorb at the selected absorbance wavelength (280 nm)
Biuret methods—protein–copper chelation and secondary detection of reduced copper, includes the bicinchoninic acid (BCA) and Lowry assay methods
Less protein–protein variation than the Coomassie dye-based assays; compatible with most surfactants used for protein extraction
Incompatible with copper-reducing surfactants and reducing agents including DTT
Bradford Coomassie Blue assay method—protein–dye binding and direct detection of the color change
Fast, performed at room temperature, compatible with most solvents
High protein–protein variation; incompatible with detergents
Fluorescent dye methods—protein–dye binding and direct detection of increase in fluorescence associated with the bound dye includes the Qubit assay and EZQ TM assay
Very sensitive and uses less protein
Requires a fluorescence detector
Direct amino acid analysis using hydrolysis and HPLC quantification
Accurate
Initial investment in HPLC equipment required; hydrolysis step required; time consuming
I'm not going to pretend to understand all of that, but the takeaway is that you either need semi-hazardous and (relatively) hard to obtain chemicals or access to expensive analyzers (often both).
You may consider contacting local universities' food science or chemistry departments. It's possible they will programs set up where they perform this sort of analysis for a fee or perhaps such analysis was already done and the university library can locate the journal article. |
How to adequately secure a liquid filling in a piece of pastry?
I mixed peanut butter, chocolate, heavy cream, honey and froze it in an ice cube mold. Then I put those cubes into dough and baked at 180°C for 15 minutes. The dough is great, the filling is good, but all of them leaked:
How can I adequately secure a liquid filling in a piece of pastry? What are the techniques I need to adopt? I don't think there was too much filling. | Liquid fillings are typically piped into pastries after baking, like with donuts, eclairs, and cream puffs.
The method you used relies on crimping and sealing the dough with a long seam in contrast to a single hole, giving the potential for leakage from a seam failure along the entire length of pastry.
The filling itself is rich in fats from the peanut butter and cream, which can also interfere with the dough bonding to itself if smudged along the seam. Additionally, heating from baking reduces the filling's viscosity, making it runnier and able to more easily seep through any small gaps present in the seams.
Chill your filling just enough to thicken it for piping, fill by piping into cooled baked pastries, and if it still leaks out try capping the hole with melted chocolate. If you don't have a piping set, you can improvise with straws and plastic food bags with cut corners.
Copied from comments discussion below:
Sergey Zolotarev: What's wrong with the freezing method? Had I sealed the dough better, would it have worked?
Answer:
The sealing method would have worked for other types of fillings with lower fat contents like jellies, or using only baking chocolate, some varieties of which have stabilisers added to prevent them from becoming runny when heated. The filling you used has mainly oils and fats with the only water coming from the cream and honey - the fats and oils don't truly 'freeze', and melt and become much more runny at a lower temperature. The dough sealing method does work, just not very well with this specific filling.
Sergey Zolotarev: Isn't it even worse with watery filings? Won't they largely become steam and force their way out, as bob1 pointed out?
Answer:
For your dough, this would be unlikely. This depends on the composition of the fillings and pastry, broken down into 3 general groups:
water
fats and oils
non-fat solids, i.e. cocoa, milk sugars and proteins, starch
Based on the crumb structure in your pictures, your dough appears to be a leavened high-moisture dough with low fat/oil content. Your filling is a majority non-fat solids (peanut pulp, cocoa solids, and sugars from honey and cream) and fats/oils (peanut oil, cocoa butter, milk fat) with a lesser component of water.
Pastries baked with liquid fillings typically rely on the insolubility of oils and water to keep the fillings from leaking through. This is usually done with high fat/oil content in the pastry and high water content, low fat/oil content in the filling:
fruit pies, strudels, and tarts with puff pastry made of mostly starch and fat
cheesecakes with graham crackers bound in fat
various applications of Greek phyllo pastry
As @bob1 mentioned, steam generated as the filling heats up is an issue, and these types of pastries rely on slits or openings to allow steam to escape since the water is not readily absorbed into the dough. Openings are not an option for your filling, since it is made up predominantly of non-fat solids and oils and fats that do not evaporate, and as stated above, become runnier and flow more easily when heated.
If a primarily water-based, low fat/oil filling were used with your dough, you would have completely different interactions depending on the ratio of non-fat solids to water, and temperature and state of the water present in the filling:
High solids, low water: similar to a calzone, pierogi, or buchty with proper povidla mentioned by @Colombo, where the free water remains bound in the filling or partially absorbed by the mainly water-based dough.
Low solids, high water: the use of jam by @Colombo instead of povidla, where the filling will leak as steam as generated. This can be adjusted for in the case of Chinese soup dumplings, as @quarague mentioned, where the water is bound by gelatin.
Freezing a high water content filling: Additional energy is needed to go from 0C solid ice to 0C liquid before the temperature rises, about the same amount as the energy required to go from 20C to 100C - this is called 'latent heat' required in a phase change. The downside to this approach is that the solid chunk of ice acts as a heat sink in the centre, which may inhibit the dough from generating steam and rising during baking. Your filling is primarily fats/oils and non-fat solids, which do not have the same latent heat capacity as water - coconut oil, with one of the highest latent heat capacities for edible oils at approx. 105 J/g, is 4000x lower than that of water.
Image from "Specific Heat and Latent Heat Capacity of Water." https://geo.libretexts.org/Bookshelves/Oceanography/Oceanography_101_(Miracosta)/07%3A_Properties_of_Seawater/7.02%3A_Specific_Heat_and_Latent_Heat_Capacity_of_Water
Further reading:
Edible Oils as Practical Phase Change Materials for Thermal Energy Storage. Samer Kahwaji, Mary Anne White. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/app9081627 |
why do we use ginger and garlic in meat curry?
Garlic and ginger are a staple in South Asian meat (chicken, beef, goat, lamb, duck, etc.) curries.
I am just wondering, why.
What attributes of garlic and ginger made them essential ingredients for meat curry?
What do they actually improve in meat? Do they remove meaty smell? | Ginger can potentially tenderize meat. But the ginger in curries is generally cooked before even adding the meat, which would destroy the enzymes responsible for doing anything like that.
It's commonly held that that ginger (and, less commonly, garlic) mask the smell of raw meat. It would be difficult to draw a principled distinction between "A masks the aroma of B" and "A and B taste good together": As far as I know, ginger and garlic do not chemically react with the undesirable flavor compounds in meat. And in something like a curry, you'd expect the other flavorings (particularly turmeric and cumin, common in curries) to suffice for that even if the ginger and garlic weren't there.*
Finally, the ginger/garlic combination is found in many Asian cuisines: South Indian, North Indian, Thai, Cantonese, Korean, etc., often in meat-free dishes. So whatever other reasons one might have for using these ingredients, clearly they're widely considered to simply taste good together, including in meat curry.
* I'd note that one published paper takes an evolutionary perspective and argues that covering up the aroma of foul-smelling meat would not be a reason that people use strong-smelling flavorings, simply because eating foul-smelling meat is a bad idea even if you cover up the smell. I'm not particularly convinced by their reasoning, though: it seems rather hastily teleological. |
Lead metal removal/mitigation in old kitchen appliance
I received a brass pepper grinder like this:
Maybe it's a modern reproduction but it certainly has patina and does not look like Pottery Barn. Unfortunately the giver helpfully melted scrap lead and poured some into the base to make it heavier and to keep it from toppling over as these things tend to do. Unfortunately lead metal is easy to buy and melt and they did not realise that the kitchen is the last place you want it.
I'm not about to use it with solid lead in the part that collects the pepper. What can be done to make it usable again? Would covering that lead with some food-safe epoxy be enough? It is never going to be heated or washed, I just want to grind pepper - especially when you want a lot of pepper, like for salt & pepper squid - and then be able to tip it out and use it.
(The giver would really like to see it on the kitchen table...) | On this site, when it comes to questions about food safety we defer to official guidance (overcautious though it may be). In this situation, you won’t find much official guidance, simply because the idea is absurd. Lead has been banned in cookware for (IIRC) more than a century. While creating an epoxy barrier might be sufficient, it would be difficult to ensure that this was done correctly, or that the barrier did not crack or otherwise fail over time.
It's a nice looking grinder. Use your epoxy to glue it shut so it can never be accidentally used (remove and discard the grinding surfaces, just to be certain), and put it on a display shelf. That, at least, should be safe. |
Are Brussels Sprouts and Brussel Sprouts the same dish?
Because one implies "Sprouts from Brussels" and the other implies the vegetable that children stereotypically hate. | The veggie is correctly spelled brussels sprouts. I assume spelling it without the "s" is just an error or being unaware of the proper spelling. Wikipedia suggests the vegetable got its name because of its popularity in Brussels, Belgium. So, in a sense, they are "sprouts from Brussels." |
What is the basic difference between beef stew, braised beef and beef curry?
What is the basic difference between beef stew, braised beef and beef curry?
Is there really any difference other than the combination of spices? | Stew and curry both describe broad types of food, that typically contain meat and/or vegetables in a flavorful liquid that may be more or less thick. As you have noted, the difference is one of typical flavours because they are terms associated with different food traditions. They are vague terms that both cover a very diverse range of dishes, so it's not worth trying to define them more than that.
Braising is a cooking method where the food is lightly fried before being cooked slowly in some liquid (generally not fully immersed, and generally in a closed container to retain moisture). Braising could be used to make a stew or curry, and it could also be used for other dishes.
As a dish, 'braised beef' (on a Western, English-language menu) would be associated with a typical presentation, generally with a thick beefy sauce and served alongside vegetables, which some would call a stew. But this isn't inherent to the meaning of braising. |
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