Trader Joe's sells frozen mini-croissants. The instructions for them are, as far as I remember: set them out overnight (or equivalent) on a lightly greased cookie sheet to "proof" (or "rise"). In the morning you may want to brush a thin coating of egg wash on them before cooking to make them shiny & beautiful (this is optional). Then cook in preheated - 350 degree F - oven for 15 to 20 minutes or until croissants are quite golden brown. (TJ's says that if they are just light brown they are not done on the inside.) Then they should cool for 10 minutes before serving.

The "mini-croissants" are actually fairly big in my opinion. Not sure exactly the size of the items you have, but if they are significantly bigger than those "mini"s, you might need to add a teeny bit of time, but 15 - 20 minutes is pretty vague anyway, so I would say just watch the color. Dark chocolate-brown is a little too done; and pale beige is not done enough.

Alternatively, have you checked the website listed on the plastic bag they came in? Maybe there are instructions there. I can't really read it in your photo, but it starts out "www...."!

OK, new UK info; in case these are "Field Fare" all-butter croissants,

https://field-fare.com/product/all-butter-croissant/  says:

"Cooking Instructions

Spread out on a baking tray and leave to prove overnight at room temperature.  Egg wash and bake in a pre-heated oven at 190°C/375ºF/Gas Mark 5 for 8-10 minutes, until golden brown.

Important Information

These cooking instructions are a guide only. Your appliance may have a different power rating, so please adjust accordingly"


Supply and demand.

Supplies of avocados are declining due to droughts and unusual weather patterns. Not only drought can reduce crops, but unusual cool weather patterns can as well. Avocados dislike temperatures lower than 10°C and have absolutely no frost tolerance.

Demand for avocados is going steadily upward as more people enjoy cuisines in which they are popular, such as Mexican and many South American dishes. Avocado oil is becoming more in demand as people consume it for its healthy omegas, and cooks use it due to its high smoke-point.

Declining supply + rising demand = high prices.


Can I let food be tested for spoilage after freezer power outage?

I seriously doubt it. The expense and complexity of making sure there are NO pathogens in a random sample of food would be significant. And then that would be all you'd have; a statement that the tested sample had no pathogens, but who knows about the rest of the food.

Testing food in a manufacturing plant depends on the commonality of how the food has been treated; if no problems are found in the samples then you can presume no problems will be found in similarly-handled food. In your freezer, though, you may have different packagings done at different times, and when it warmed up, different parts certainly warmed to different temperatures. Finding out if one item is safe would have very little to do with whether the rest of the contents are safe.

There's also the liability of the tester; if they claimed they could tell you if your beef was safe, and then you got food poisoning, they'd be on the hook. I doubt they'd take the risk.


What temperature are dark beers (stouts and nut browns) supposed to be consumed at?

No, you're not crazy.  You have good taste.  The reason for drinking darker beer like stouts and porters is for the flavor.  If they are over-chilled, you lose most of that flavor.  Don't obsess over it, but in general a lot of people serve dark beer too cold.

That said, you should drink your beer at whatever temperature makes you happy. There is nothing wrong with a nice cold pilsner or Hefe-wizen on a hot day.


How to minimize the impact of unpopped kernels and kernel shards in popcorn?

Don't eat the popcorn straight from the bag. Put it into a nice large bowl. This will provide enough room for the unpopped kernels to fall to the bottom. As for hull shards between your teeth, dental floss or a toothpick will take care of that quickly and relatively neatly. Avoid burnt pieces by watching as you pour the popcorn into the bowl and as you take pieces to eat from the bowl.

Alternatively, set it all aside and serve it (in a nice bowl) when you have guests over. They are unlikely to notice you're not eating any.


Cake flour or all-purpose for shortbread?

What you really need is "in the middle". Shortbread cookies are not very different from shortbread pie crust, they use the same principle, but a different shape. So the optimal flour would be pastry flour, at 6-7% gluten, which is between cake flour (4-5%) and AP (7-8%).

If you are not aiming for five-star-perfection according to century-old traditional tastes, either of your flours will do well. AP is probably a bit safer, in the sense that the cookies won't fall apart too easily.


I learned* that before roasting, the (raw) beans are called cacao, after roasting it is cocoa.

And yes, that does noticeably change the smell and taste.

AFAIK, only special kinds of cacao are consumed without roasting.

I recently had some samples of raw cacao and roasted cocoa beans in the lab (same kind of cacao, same region + cooperative doing the fermentation) and they did smell very differently. Only the roasted samples had what I'd call the pleasant cocoa/chocolatey smell - I'd have said the unroasted samples were much different, not just a bit less chocolatey.

Differences in smell and taste can be caused by a variety of influencing factors such as region, cultivar, fermentation + roasting protocols, alkalizing (for the powder), ...

* in the academic context of botany, food and biotechnology

That being said, I'd suspect that cacao vs. cocoa could also be a caused by non-English product naming: In German, it is usually Kakao (before and after roasting), but occasionally Cacao is used, presumably to create an impression of old-fashioned quality produce. Or maybe to refer to the Spanish term.

Edit: about the linked product:

Your example cacao says on the backside that it is actually produced from unroasted beans.
It is degreased (cocoa/cacao butter removed), though: raw cacao beans have roughly 50 % lipids (cocoa/cacao butter) whereas that powder has 10 % lipids.
Degreasing is AFAIK part of the milling/grinding process: the beans or nibs are put through roller mills and the molten cocoa/cacao butter (melting at 34 - 38 °C, so roughly human body temperature) can then be removed by pressing. Thus, a certain amount of heat is involved, but far less than in roasting (e.g. 120 - 140 °C).


How to prevent brillant pink raw bread dough from cooking up to yellow?

It appears that the pH of your bread changed during baking. Beets are red because of their anthocyanins. According to Wikipedia:

Anthocyanins can be used as pH indicators because their color changes with pH; they are pink in acidic solutions (pH < 7), purple in neutral solutions (pH ~ 7), greenish-yellow in alkaline solutions (pH > 7), and colourless in very alkaline solutions, where the pigment is completely reduced.[5]

You would have to post your recipe or analyze it yourself to determine what is alkalizing your dough, perhaps baking soda? Changing your recipe to make it more acidic may change the texture
of your bread. You could look for another recipe that uses acidic ingredients, such as butter milk that might off set the color change. The pink looks very pretty though.


I assume we are talking about a variety of the Eastern European treat called Oblatne (or a variety of that name)? Which consists of five to eight layers of store-bought wafers (not "waffles" - in some languages it's the same term for both, I know), "glued together" by a fatty or caramelly cream, pressed for a few hours and cut into little diamonds? Like below:

Source

There are two main methods to create the cream, one based on condensed milk, dulce de leche or caramel, the other on butter, margarine or shortening. Often with an addition of nuts, chocolate and a dash of alcohol. Often, some raw eggs are included as well, so take the appropriate measures for these recipes.

The common trait is low humidity in the filling, because otherwise the wafers become soggy and - worst case - could even disintegrate.

Recipe requests are off-topic here, but a creative use of the terms wafer, cake, country of origin or some neighboring country, oblatne or oblate and your preferred filling ingredients in your favourite seach engine should set you off in the right direction.


Try a self basting lid? My cast iron lids all have self basting bumps on them. This lets the water and oil that's splattered up drip back down on the food rather than running off to the sides.


What is the ideal way to prepare (and the type of) beef for a homemade meat pie?

Your filling is basically a beef stew/casserole, so any cuts that suite long slow cooking are fine. They get cooked again while the pie is baked, so premium cuts will just be wasted

The lower grade and 'off cut' parts are what are most commonly used. Like rump, brisket, chuck, shank, neck etc

Using a bench top slow cooker makes cooking this all very easy. The beef needs to be fully cooked before making the pie. An eight hour slow cook is fine

You want the pieces to be a variety of sizes to fill out the pie shape, but make sure you have some at least the height of the pie filling. The larger pieces tend to be better, but that could be a matter of taste and culture

You need to get rid of plenty of fat before and after cooking. A mouth full of fat in a pie is not nice. There is already plenty of fat in the gravy and pastry, so trim off all you can

A good meat pie should have a solid layer of meat connected with gravy, not swimming. It should also not be so full as you can't eat it with your hands (for a single serve pie) without loosing half the contents

Puff/flakey pastry works best and holds everything together

Avoid overly strong flavoured gravies, you don't want to hide the beef and pastry taste

Before you attach the lid, place a slice of tasty cheese, or an extra generous serving of cracked pepper on top of the filling

A respectable pie looks like this - thanks to Ponsonby Pies (not made in Ponsonby anymore)


You're exactly right in figuring out that part of the problem is having grown up with some of the world's best avocadoes, and then moving up North where decent avocadoes are scarce!  :)  Tasty avocadoes aren't all going the way of the dodo just yet, but you might have to move to Texas or Florida, or check some Mexican markets in your area, to get better avocadoes.

My husband lived in S Calif. as a child. He is an avocado connoisseur like you, as a result. Some of the best S Cali avocadoes are 'Fuerte' variety, which is more flavorful and creamier than Hass. We live in Texas and we get some very good, tasty Mexican avocadoes here- which by the way, are Hass.

But every single avocado I've brought home to hubby, whether from Mexico, Chile, Florida, Arizona, the Caribbean, Hawaii, Guatemala or Peru, ends up being compared unfavorably to those great S Calif. avocados he remembers. We visited a relative in the S Calif. area about 4.5 years ago and hubby had a delicious, fresh S Cali 'Fuerte' variety avocado during that trip--an avocado which he still recalls most fondly.

Personally I tried that same S Cali 'Fuerte' avocado too on that trip and while it was a bit tastier than the Hass avocadoes we currently get in Texas, I didn't find the flavor all THAT much better!  But hubby did prefer it a lot; he likes what he was raised on. Also his palate is more sensitive to bitterness than mine and 'Fuerte' is less bitter than Hass.
In recent years, Calif. drought has made the delicious Cali avocadoes, especially the 'Fuerte', nearly impossible to get.

By the way- I lived in Illinois for a while. That state has the same avocado problem as Massachusetts: too far away from where good avocadoes and other tropical fruits are grown, to get avocadoes with decent quality. Whatever does survive the shipping journey that far North is usually picked much too green. Around the holidays such as Christmas and 16 de Septiembre and 5 de Mayo etc., there was ONE Mexican food store in Chicago that got some fresh, air-flown ripe Mexican avocadoes for sale just for these special days..at $5 each!

Mom who was raised in Texas was desperate for a good avocado because they are almost nonexistent in Chicago, so she bought 2 of those $5 avocados for Christmas dinner and said it was worth it. I had a small taste in my salad, it was great but geez $5 a piece LOL! I'm real glad we left Chicago and moved to Texas soon after that!

I wouldn't count on S. California's avocado crop doing well anytime in the near future, as that area is likely to only have worse and worse water shortages and drought problems as time goes forward.

So perhaps, sadly, the 'Fuerte' avocadoes and the other delicious S Cali avocadoes you were raised on are going the way of the dodo. I hope not because they are very good avocadoes and it's always nice to be able to get USA grown tropical fruits. But unless some amazing advances in water and climate management are made to save the Cali avocado farms from extinction, your delicious S Cali grown avocadoes may become nothing more than a fond memory.


How to determine the grain of a fresh/ uncooked Arm Roast

For most cuts of meat, the direction of the grain should be relatively easy to see. Usually at least one face will have no visible striation, and the grain will run roughly perpendicular to that. If you scrape at a bit of fat or connective tissue at the surface with the tip of a knife, you can see what direction it takes down into the meat. And if there's a (long) bone, the grain will usually run parallel to it.

As for dividing it up evenly, that just takes practice. If you really want things exact, though, and you have a pot which you can submerge the entire roast in, you can use water displacement. Put the roast in the pot, and cover with water. (If the roast floats, keep it down with a thin metal utensil.) Note or mark how high up the water is in the pot. Then remove the roast while leaving the water in, and check or mark the new water line. Find the level 1/3 of the way between the two lines, and dip the roast down until the water reaches that point; note where on the roast the water comes to, and cut along that plane.


Yes, you can freeze cooked chicken, no problem. As long as you follow safe food handling techniques, it is perfectly safe to defrost it for eating later.

Since it has already been cooked, you do not need to bring it back up to 165 deg F. Just get it to the temperature at which you want to eat it, and enjoy!

Do keep in mind that when you defrost your chicken, you should do it in the refrigerator rather that out at room temperature, where bacteria can begin to grow again. You can, of course, rapidly defrost it in a microwave, or just heat it from frozen, though this can give you uneven heating depending on how big the pieces are.

More info

As it pertains to bacteria, you can think of freezing as stopping time. So if your food is clean and safe when it goes into the freezer, it should be clean and safe when it comes out. The USDA has a guide to Freezing and Food Safety if you want more details.

Cooking chicken to 165 deg F mainly serves to kill salmonella bacteria. Once this has been done, your chicken is salmonella-free, hence you don't need to reheat to this temperature again.

Also see the very thorough post on food safety on Seasoned Advice with just about everything you need to know on the subject.


Cake Pops: Ratio of cake crumbs to frosting?

Cake pops all depend on moisture of the baked or scrap cake you are starting with (and about a hundred other factors including ambient temperature and humidity, fat %, age of cake, etc etc etc).

The best way to determine your ratio is to first start with your cake in a stand mixer (if you have one) with a paddle attachment. Mix the pieces of cake on low speed and slowly work up to medium speed. Once it's all crumbed and uniform, grab a handful or one cake pop worth of cake and give it a squeeze. Does it form a ball on its own? If it's close to forming as is, add very little frosting/icing/buttercream. If it's still loose and crumbly, add a small amount of your frosting/icing/buttercream and continue mixing and test the batch again by squeezing a portion.

A little trick: to help in binding the mixture and to incorporate the sweet component of the icing (without adding so much icing it becomes too loose), add a good dusting of icing sugar before the icing while you are mixing/crumb-ing.

Hope that helps, cake pops can be tricky sometimes, epsecially with very fresh cake or very stale/hard edged cake. There's no specific fool-proof formula for these.


The primary balancing factor for sourness is sweetness - so gradually adding sugar (plain sugar, rock sugar, honey, palm sugar...) and tasting should yield good results here. "Whereever you add tamarind, you can add jaggery", one well known indian chef tends to say in his videos.

The combination of strong sourness (vinegar!) and strong sweetness (plenty of sugar!) is not uncommon in chinese (sweet-sour) and italian (agrodolce) cuisines. Also, western tomato sauces almost always have sugar added unless exceptionally good and sweet tomatoes are used.

As strange as it sounds, giving the sourness a bit more depth with vinegar (for anything with indian or thai spices in it, yellow rice wine vinegar is great; avoid distilled or white wine vinegar!) while also sweetening the dish can help here also. You got a sour dish, make it a great sour dish.

Also, make sure your salt, fat (butter, ghee, coconut oil, oil), and bitterness (spices) are balanced.


I would suggest that in this case what is described as a "head", is actually a "bunch".  Spinach is typically sold in a bunch (or already prepared and bagged...or frozen), as it doesn't grow in "heads."  Further, there is probably no need to be very precise for a ravioli filling recipe, and I am guessing this filling has other ingredients.  You probably want to avoid frozen for the pasta filling.  It could work, but is often very wet once thawed.


Contrary to what some people seem to be saying, fat will reduce the clumping effect, same way it does in almost every other baking recipe.  The clumping behaviour comes mainly from sugar (syrup) and protein content.

In other baking recipes, gluten does a lot of the "clumping"; oats are naturally gluten-free, but the instant oats you buy are probably processed in the same plants as other wheat products and are therefore contaminated with gluten, which may explain why they clump more in your granola.

So I'd recommend any or all of the following for you:

If your recipe contains any oil or other fat, reduce or eliminate it; the primary purpose of that ingredient is to reduce the natural clumping.
Increase the quantity of flour or starch.  More gluten means more clumping and a generally chewier texture.
Increase the quantity of sugar or honey.  A denser syrup is going to be "stickier" and therefore clump more.  Note that this can interfere with gluten development so you might want to do this in addition to increasing the starch.
Substitute the oil/fat with applesauce.  This is a common substitution in low-fat baking, although its applications are limited.  It's perfect in your case though, because it not only lowers the fat content, it also adds natural sugar and pectin, the latter of which is a gelling agent (albeit a weak one).
Add an egg white.  That's very good at binding ingredients and is common in granola recipes.
As a last resort, use an actual gelling agent such as pectin crystals, gelatin, or agar.  You shouldn't have to do this, but if you have a recipe you really adore except for its texture, then that's the best way to change the texture without altering the flavour at all.


So, just a quick update as it seems i forgot about all this. I eventually did it and used pudding rice for the sushi and it gave good results. Granted, I'm not a sushi maniac, or sushi trained l, meaning, somebody who's really into it perhaps will spot the difference straightaway. But to me it tasted and felt pretty much the same.


Can I use Maida atta instead of plain flour for breading?

You don't note which one you would want to use. Maida and atta are both made from wheat. Maida is made only from the endosperm (the large, starchy part of the wheat kernel), while atta is made from the whole grain, including the bran. Both are super-refined, though, so you might want to add a couple of tablespoons of finely crushed dried bread crumbs to the flour to give it some grain (texture); that way, it won't be as prone to soaking up your cooking oil and turning the patties soggy.


After a discussion in chat with @FuzzyChef I decided that I was trying too hard to keep the dough dry. I wasn't using all of the milk (just a bit left over) and struggled a bit to get all the flour incorporated into the dough. Using all the milk made the dough more sticky, so it required more careful handling, but the result came out just fine. (I also bought a new griddle and an infrared thermometer, so I have new toys to play with)


I'd recommend using ABS for food tools, as well as cleaning in the dishwasher. The heat from the dishwasher will kill whatever contaminants you might encounter and the ABS plastic has a high enough melting point to avoid being ruined. PLA will just melt in the dishwasher and some cookie cutters have details you won't be able to clean properly by hand without risking damage to the cutter, or loosening pieces that could break apart in the food unknowingly.

I'm no biologist or anything so I don't have any scientific evidence to support this claim. It's just the info I got when I asked this same kind of question to things4thinkers.com before ordering some cookie cutters from them. They're all 3D printed and the ones I got were ABS because I asked for them that way. So far I haven't noticed anything fishy about the cutters and they have held up in the dish washer fine.

I wouldn't do the foil thing personally. It seems like a lot of effort that will probably alter the mold you're trying to make. Or just end up being a pain when trying to cut cookies. Plus you still risk fragments of the foil being left behind in the food as well.

By the way, ABS plastic can be purchased from any number of manufacturers. Some may not be considered "food safe" where as others specifically state they are. Look at this "food safe" filament. Just make sure your printer can handle that filament, though if yours can handle ABS it should be able to handle this. Not an expert though.


That will be extremely heavy! Very cumbersome.
Traditionally, woks are not cast iron, but steel. They get really hot really fast. They are easy to flip stuff around in as you stir fry. Get one with a flat bottom so that it has maximum contact with your heat source as our stoves don't get anywhere close to as hot as a traditional heat source for a round bottom wok.
America's Test Kitchen does a wonderful video on the subject!


This is a very broad question. My recommendation is to look up your specific product at
the US FDA Food Safety page.

Some of the topics treated are:

Product-Specific Information

Acidified and Low-Acid Canned Foods

Bottled Water & Carbonated Soft Drinks

Cheese Safety

Egg Safety

Fruits, Vegetables & Juices

Infant Formula

Medical Foods

Milk Safety

Seafood

Food Allergens

Consumer Information

Food Allergens Labeling

Foodborne Illness

Consumer Information

Foodborne Illness, Foodborne Pathogens & Natural Toxins

Interagency Coordination

Food Contaminants & Adulteration

Chemical Contaminants

Metals

Natural Toxins

Pesticides


How to have my solar system stick that would be edible

It's really easier to do with icing, but if you make a really pale dough such as a sugar cookie dough, you can color it.

I once made pie-chart shaped cookies by doing this, then making wedges in various colors & sizes, then squishing them all back together into a log, and slicing it into rounds.  I don't know if it was the colors that I was using, but I found that they lightened up a bit as the cookies baked, so you'll want to make the dough darker/deeper than desired.

The trick is in getting the mottled look of some of the planets -- what you want to do it color two or three chunks in the different colors found on the planet, and once they're each well blended, break them into little bits, then toss them together before squishing it all back into a single ball (or sheet).  You might want to be a little more specific in your squishing things back together with the earth, if you want to do the continents + oceans ... but you can cheat and do blue & white (oceans + clouds) so you don't have to be as precise.

If you wanted to do it in icing, you can get the mottled look by loading two colors in the bag, so you get a little of each color with each squeeze.  A star tip will help to make each less distinctive.  You can see the effect at:

http://geeked.gsfc.nasa.gov/?p=5355  (scroll down 'til you see the orange bits)
https://www.flickr.com/photos/gsfc/4311777957  (top right one; waited 'til it crusted up a bit before I smoothed it down)


What is the proper serving temperature for Turkish coffee?

The temperature at the time of serving doesn't matter.

The Ottomans knew how to enjoy life. Coffee was served on social occasions, which happened at a slow pace in that part of the world. The ottoman effendi would spend hours sitting there, smoking a nargileh, endlessly turning the beads of a rosary, and taking a sip of coffee now and then. Even though it is served in tiny cups (which don't hold as many sips as your typical US mug), it would cool down considerably until it was drunk.

Note that hot food is a cultural tradition typical of Western cuisine. Being hot is not a quality attribute of food in Turkish cuisine in general, many dishes are eaten at room temperature. Coffee is still preferred to be hot, but this requirement is viewed with a much more relaxed attitude than in the West. If the coffee has gotten cold, it is still considered good enough to be drunk to the end. Or rather to the sludge, you don't drink Turkish coffee to the end.


Will putting a salted steak into a preheated stainless steel pan cause pitting?

I don't think so. The contact time is so short. These pans are meant to take a beating. They are very high quality SS. If it bothers you, get a cheap cast iron pan for this type of thing, it's what I do. You can read more here

  Pitting corrosion - The passive layer on stainless steel can be
  attacked by certain chemical species. The chloride ion Cl- is the most
  common of these and is found in everyday materials such as salt and
  bleach. Pitting corrosion is avoided by making sure that stainless
  steel does not come into prolonged contact with harmful chemicals or
  by choosing a grade of steel which is more resistant to attack. The
  pitting corrosion resistance can be assessed using the Pitting
  Resistance Equivalent Number calculated from the alloy content.


How do I cook large quantities of Boston pork butt?

You can keep them together, but I would recommend budgeting a very long time for cooking. In my opinion, your better bet would be to slow roast them in the oven, with some air space between the two roasts. I would also consider cutting each roast in half. Four 7-8 pound pork butts will cook much faster than two 15-16 pound ones.


No, that is just normal dried yeast. Allinson do an instant yeast (they call it Easy Bake yeast) that comes in a green container.

You can still use your dried yeast though. Use double the amount, and instead of adding it to the flour, add it to the milk (which should be warmed very gently first - not hot, just 'finger warm'). Let it sit for 5 minutes and get bubbly, then proceed as normal.


How to choose not only juicy lemons but lemons with less acrid flavor

For thin-skinned, you can try pressing the lemon, they are thin-skinned if you can kinda feel the lemon flesh. While if it is thick-skinned it will be very hard to press. (i mean press in a way not to destroy the lemon).
Generally, the deeper the yellow color, the less sour the lemon is, as it is riper. So if there is any pale yellow or green, then it is not ripe enough. All citrus fruits are green while they are still growing on the tree. As lemons ripe, they lose their green color because the chlorophyll pigment is replaced with a chemical called anthocyanin.


Does dirt sink or rise in boiling water?

No, you can't clean your tubers by boiling them, you'll just end up cooking them in mud, which will stick to them when you take them out. You need to clean them first.


In these sort of circumstances, as the cooked pork would have been left out for an extended period of time, it would be safer to throw the meat out. Even if no visible mould is showing. The meat would have been sitting in the correct thermal conditions for bacteria to begin growing, which is 4-60 Celsius.

Although it is common to hear that re-heating will kill the bacteria, the produce of the bacteria, i.e. protein toxins, cannot be killed off and can cause damage to your health if ingested. It is better to be safe than sorry in situations such as these.


What's the difference between a deep fryer and a chip pan?

The part that handles the food is comparable, as you noted: A container for the hot oil plus a basket to lift the food out again.

But the difference is in the periphery:

A chip pan is just a pan (or what you may also call a pot), but the heating is done on the stove, like for all other pots.

A deep fryer has its own heating system, either via a heated thick wire in the container or by heating the exterior walls. It’s an independent unit and actually shouldn’t be placed on a stove for various reasons. It typically has an insulated exterior and often a lid to minimize splattering and keep the oil from dirtying up the kitchen. If you see a built in fryer  in a commercial kitchen setup, it’s still a separate unit.


It actually sounds like your dough is good, your description is just what I'd look for in a dough. It may be your technique which is the trouble. It's takes practice to hand stretch dough right, you could try using a rolling pin instead.

You should be able to stretch your dough very thin and still have it hold together. If your dough is breaking easily then you may not have enough gluten development. If you still want stiffer dough then you could go for a higher gluten content, or go for a lower hydration level, say 70%.

EDIT: One thing I've found with pizza dough is that if you try to stretch it too far too quickly it will be uneven and prone to breaking. I've found that if you stretch it part of the way then leave it a few minutes it will relax a bit and be easier to work with.


How can I make breadcrumbs without a full, yeast-leavened loaf of bread?

Three substitutes come to mind:

Saltine Crackers
Pretzels
Select brands of Cereal (Chex, Corn Flakes, etc.)

Take these for a spin in your food processor till you reach the consistency you desire.

Depending on your ultimate goal one or any of these could serve as a suitable sub for "bread crumbs"


If the problem you're having is that it is too watery (I assume that's what you mean by "too thin"), there might be two causes:

The recipe you linked to calls for a sizable amount of stock/broth, relative to the wine. It might be assuming that you have something closer to homemade stock, which has a high concentration of gelatin, as opposed to store-brought "broth", which is more like meat-flavoured juice.
You might not have reduced it enough. A "thin layer" could mean anything, but it's not thickness you're concerned about, it's viscosity. When the sauce has been reduced enough, it should have the consistency of... sauce. As in thick, sticky, and slow-moving. If it still looks and pours like water, it's not reduced enough.

On the subject of taste, there's also the question of which wine you use. The wine sauce is going to taste like the wine (stronger, actually), which is one of the reasons why chefs will tell you not to cook with any wine that you wouldn't drink.

It's pretty easy to make a reduction - just continue to let water boil off until it turns into the consistency you want. If you overdo it, you can always add a little extra wine to compensate.

As noted in the comment clarification - if you're simmering at a reasonable temperature, expect to wait at least an hour, and for no less than half the water to evaporate.


why do my pancakes (crêpes) take such a long time to cook?

If it doesn't contain eggs, or at least something that serves as a substitute for eggs, it's not a crepe. Crepes cook quickly because eggs need very little time/heat to set up. Like justkt said, what you've described is a tortilla. I'm not exactly sure how or why a tortilla "sets up" (if you can even use that term for a flatbread), but it's a completely different mechanism than cooking eggs, and takes a much longer time.


Jars of salsa, do I have to boil the jars if they sealed on their own?

Yes, you should fully process your salsa, even if you got the "hot jelly" seal just from hot packing.

The reason for this is that part of the processing is to ensure that the entire contents of the jar, all the way through, is at a high enough temperature for a long enough time to be safe as a shelf-stable product.   This may or may not already be true from the initial cooking down, but in these matters, you absolutely positively want to be sure.


How to keep cake topper from toppling over

You can make the base wider with white chocolate. No glue, and you can do it in advance so you don't need to have any electricity at the site.

Put a parchment paper round into an appropriately sized cake pan or a plate or shallow bowl. Stand the cake topper in the middle of the parchment paper. Carefully pour or pipe melted chocolate around the edge of the base and build it up, coating the base and widening it. Allow the chocolate to cool,  carefully peel away the parchment paper.

If the weather is likely to be warm, you may want to make the additional chocolate layer thicker so that it will not melt quickly and release the topper.

You could also widen the base with some other material (cardboard covered with foil, for example -- make a large cardboard disc, cut a hole in the middle for the stem of the topper, cut a slit on one side of the hole the size of the base, slide the base through and center it) and cover that with chocolate or frosting, but I think plain white chocolate would work well and it sounds like the bride wants to keep everything touching the cake edible (except the topper itself, of course).


You could/should directly ask the sausage maker, if you do, report back and edit your question (or answer, I'm not certain which is proper).

lindamccartneyfoods.co.uk/contact-us


Does Heating Up A PTFE Non-Stick Pan Create "Fumes"?

PTFE (Also known by Dupont's trade name, teflon) can decompose.  For this reason PTFE pans are not recommended for broiler use.  Per the Dupont Key Safety Questions:

  At high temperatures, the quality of the coating may begin to
  deteriorate — it may discolor or lose its nonstick quality. This can
  begin to occur at temperatures above 500°F (260°C). If heated to an
  extremely high temperature, the coating may begin to decompose and
  give off fumes. Fats, butter, or cooking oil will begin to scorch and
  smoke at about 400°F (204°C). DuPont nonstick coatings will not begin
  to significantly decompose until temperatures exceed about 660°F
  (349°C) — well above the smoke point for cooking oil, fats or butter.
  It is therefore unlikely that decomposition temperatures for nonstick
  cookware would be reached while cooking without burning food to an
  inedible state.

Note that even heating a pan completely empty on a high flame will take some time to achieve these temperatures, so if you exercise even a reasonable level of care, you are extremely unlikely to have this occur.


Anything susceptible to moisture will go stale if exposed to air long enough. Storage will only get you so far, depending on the temperature and humidity in the storage area. In a restaurant kitchen, I don't have to tell you that both are rather high.

I'd suggest blanching them after cutting. You could basically cook them through then store them in a relatively air-tight container for a period of several days. When a customer orders chips you'd just drop the blanched chips in the deep fryer long enough to brown and crisp them. This is what essentially every restaurant outfit that serves chips and/or french fries does and it works well. Experiment with blanching temperatures and liquids to see what works best.


Sous-vide without a pump using convection?

I made a sous-vide setup that uses a slow cooker and no pump.

I was able to observe as much as a 5 degree temperature gradient from the bottom to the top of the cooker. A big part of the problem was that my target food almost fills the cooker and impedes convection. I didn't measure the temperature gradient with an empty bath.

My setup worked passably well as long as my food was small and my thermometer was positioned at the same depth. I didn't enjoy the precision that commercial products have.

Obviously your setup will have a lot more power than mine. If your bath is much bigger than your target food you would have less of a temperature gradient than I did.
If your bath is much larger than your target food then convection will give you enough water circulation. Even a 5 degree drift will let you do some interesting things, however, It is one more variable to keep track of.

I was not satisfied with my setup and my next attempt will have a stronger heater as well as a circulation pump. Water pumps are cheap.


Why does rinsing lentils create foam? Is this natural?

Yes, it's perfectly natural. Dust being rinsed off the outer surface of the lentils makes the water more viscous and helps to trap air in the form of small bubbles. In a strainer, the dust would be rinsed away, so you don't see the same effect; a spray nozzle especially adds a lot of turbulence, which causes more air to get trapped. You can get similar results when rinsing many processed, dried grains or pulses.

The effect from potatoes is similar, but it's caused by proteins in the potato being rinsed out into the soaking water. Neither has anything to do with the presence of arsenic, so don't worry.


Why do apples, when placed in a cool environment for extended periods of time, form a 'waxy' layer on their skins

This waxy coating is called epicuticular wax, as it forms the cuticle of the fruit. It is essentially paraffin. It acts to both seal in moisture and keep out fungi, dirt and microorganisms.

As rumtscho suggests in her comment, even if you could prevent it from forming, it's not a good idea for obvious reasons: it does no harm and keeps the apples fresher for longer.


Looking for the name of a sweet green drink

It sounds like you are looking for Pisang Ambon, a banana liqeur, which is seethrough and green. It is popularly served over ice, mixed with orange juice for a Tutti Frutti kind of drink.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pisang_Ambon


I have used these tips from TheKitchn for my latkes and they have always turned out fantastically!

  Strain, Squeeze, Strain: To avoid soggy latkes, you need to wring out your potato mixture really, really well. Folks have different theories about how many times you should wring out the mixture and what you should use. I favor cheesecloth if you have it. If you don't, a clean dishtowel will do the trick. Just keep in mind that you can't do this too firmly: it's impossible to hurt the latke mixture. Be tough. Be firm. Squeeze like there's no tomorrow. Then squeeze again.
  Watch Your Oil Temperature: This is the one tip that I struggle with mainly because I don't do much frying at home. So I usually end up heating my oil too much and burning the outside of my latkes and then the insides aren't even cooked all the way through. My dad always puts a pinch of the latke mixture into the pan before frying up the latkes. If it's at medium heat and it still sizzles, the oil is ready.
  Finesse Your Timing. Or Don't: In our family, we eat the latkes to order. So some of us will have a few while the others don't yet have one and my dad is standing cooking them off the whole time. While I generally love sitting down to eat together as a family, latke season is the one exception. After resting for a moment on a paper towel to drain, they're really best right out of the skillet. That being said, if you're serving them for a party or would rather set out a large plate for folks to serve themselves, you most certainly can set the oven to 300 F to keep cooked latkes warm while you cook off remaining ones.

Additionally, on the consistency of batter/how to handle potato prep please see here for this this is a great tip about hand grating.

Hope this helps and good luck!

(Edited to clarify final tip (thanks Laura))


Which foods are certain to never cause food poisoning?

There is almost no food which is guaranteed to be safe. If it has nutritional value for a human, it has nutritional value for many microorganisms too, some of which are human pathogens.

So, out of the FATTOM rule, you can already throw out F: you cannot remove the food. A is also not a good candidate - no food is naturally acidic enough, and while there are foods preserved by acidity, an error in processing can lead to the food being dangerous. Also, there are some bacteria and molds which thrive in quite acidic environments (although few of them are pathogens). Oxygen is even worse, as botulinum is anaerobic and very dangerous. Also, once you open the canned food, it can get contaminated again.

Time and temperature are quite good, but they are no guarantee for no food poisoning. First, processing errors are common. Second, you can't sterilize the food in a normal pot, and the remaining bacteria resume multiplying even before it's cooled off enough to eat. And, if it was contaminated before the cooking, the pathogens can have produced temperature stable toxins before you cooked the food.

Moisture is probably the only factor which can produce completely safe food. Most dehydrated food is not 100% safe. Beef jerky, cured hams, dehydrated fruit, nuts and similar can easily grow toxic mold during improper storage. Depending on how much water was removed in the preservation process and where you live, the kitchen shelf can turn out to be "improper storage". Flours are quite safe too, but you have to cook them, and the cooked product is again not guaranteed to be safe.

The only foods which will be completely safe will be the ones which never had any moisture to begin with, and will remain bactericidal if they acquire some moisture from the air. So sugar (either granulated, or hard candy),salt and pure oil can be declared safe from pathogens, but not from some kind of factory mishap where toxins can have contaminated the sugar and oil. A protein powder may fall in this category, I'm not completely sure how little moisture would be sufficient for a mold to grow on it.

And don't forget that you can infect yourself with digestive tract pathogens by handling the food with contaminated utensils or fingers, even if they don't get the chance to build a colony in the food. You could in principle hold your dining room clean to operation room standards, but people get infections in operation rooms too.

Nutrition is off topic for this site, so I won't discuss the wisdom of eating nothing but sugar, oil, salt and boiled water in order to eat guaranteed pathogen free food. For me personally, the trade off is absolutely not worth it.


I see two factors involved in this process. The sprinkles' tendency to release their colors, and the icing's ability to absorb them.

Moisture is undoubtedly involved in the color transfer, so the drier the environment they're stored in, the less likely it will be to occur. Of course, this also means your cookies will become dried out sooner.

If you are able to acquire different brands of sprinkles, you may find that some are less likely to bleed than others.

You might also be able to control the color transfer by modifying your icing recipe to include less moisture, or allowing a period of time for the surface of the icing to dry before applying your sprinkles.

You could easily experiment with this the next time you make a batch of cookies. Apply the sprinkles to some of the cookies immediately, but wait a while before applying it to others.

If you wait too long to apply the sprinkles, they may not adhere as expected. Through trial and error, you might find the "sweet spot" of timing that minimizes color bleeding, while allowing for proper adhesion of the sprinkles.


It doesn't need to be "expensive," but it should be extra virgin olive oil, not just regular olive oil. You don't cook a pesto, so the flavor of the olive oil will definitely stand out. Also, when buying/storing extra virgin olive oil, always go for a dark bottle and store in a cool dark place, as the oil is sensitive to light (just like beer or wine).


If I have large calamari tentacles, can I achieve the same taste and texture as with small ones?

Calamari or squid is of course famous for being difficult to cook, because it gets tough or rubbery.

As Harold McGee explains in On Food and Cooking, octopus and squid meat are very rich in collagen:

  They are chewy when lightly cooked, tough when cooked to the
  denaturing temperatures of their collagen, around 120 - 130 F / 50 -
  55 C, and become tender with long, slow cooking.

The trick then is to either:

Cook them minimally, so they do not begin to toughen.  This Serious Eats recipe for fried calamari recommends no more than one minute.

My own interpretation of this is that it will keep the temperature of the squid below the 120 F threshold, at the risk of being below the pathogen kill point, so it should be done only with squid from a trustworthy purveyor.
Cook them for a long time, slowly, as in a braise, so they move through the tough phase to tender again.  This Food Network recipe  for stuffed squid by Ann Burrell is an example.  The total squid cooking time is 20 to 25 minutes.

Trying to make a large squid taste the same a small squid would with fast cooking methods like frying is going to be very challenging.

The key obstacle to overcome is that the larger squid are going to have more connective tissue (collagen) in the meat, and will be fundamentally a tougher piece of seafood.  They simply are more suitable for slow cooking methods, which can be delicious in their own right, but are a different outcome.

If you do wish to experiment, your best bet would be to slice the tentacles very thinly, maybe only 1/8 of an inch, and flash fry them quickly.   You may have better success with the bodies, which are not as tough as the tentacles.


This is a common problem with coconut milk in cooler drinks, most commonly coffee.  Coconut milk is approximately 25% fats (Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coconut_milk) which will coagulate in cooler temperatures or exposed to ice.  You're essentially cooling the coconut milk fats with ice past their solidification state which is causing the lumps.

You can try using coconut creamers that are specifically designed for coffee since in my experience they do not clump with iced coffee.  Or, there are other milks like almond that don't have as much fat content to solidify in cooler temperatures.

Another note, a lot of people seem to have this problem with iced coffee and coconut milk on forums and seem to swear by using a blender to blend the chunks away.  Supposedly, this will keep the chunks from returning.

Example of others with the same issue: https://forum.whole30.com/topic/36315-lumpy-coffee-with-coconut-milk/


Try Glucose syrup, usually (in the UK at least) its sold in tubes in the baking aisle.


Well, let me just cover bottled spices here, since that seems like enough to bite off:

Age: while often difficult to determine, age is the #1 determinant of spice quality.   Unfortunately, most mass market brands of spices do not print packaging dates on bottles (deliberately).  Try asking the staff at your market.  Dried herbs are at their best for 3-6 months, and ground seeds (cumin etc.) are good for 6-12 months.
Vendor: different brands of spices have different levels of quality of sourcing, preparing, and packaging spices.  For example, I buy spices from Penzey's specifically because I know their high-quality sourcing and preparation.  Cook's Illustrated rated Spice Islands superior among supermarket brands.
Variety: some varieties of certain common spices are better than others.  Ceylon cinnamon is superior to Mexican; Tellicherry peppercorns are superior to the common variety; and Turkish bay leaves are better than Californian.  Also, because they are more expensive, finer varieties of spices are often packaged and stored better.
Storage Conditions: heat, moisture, and/or direct sunlight all cause spices to age much faster.  To check for moisture, look for caking.  To check for exposure to sunlight, look for faded colors, especially on only one side of the bottle.
Smell: if you're buying in bulk, or you already have the bottle open, most spices should have a strong and distinctive aroma.  If they don't, they're probably old.
Taste: Spices should taste of themselves and not have extra musty or bitter flavors. These off tastes are generally indications of age and/or poor storage.


Emulating Starbucks Frappuccino Cream Base

I can't comment yet...but if I could, I might suggest using or swapping a portion of your sugar for liquid invert sugar, instead of caster or white granulated, in conjunction with the afore mentioned artificial flavorings, and possibly some more milk protien like sodium caseinate.  Invert sugar is often used in candies that must maintain a soft creamy liquid center (like those queen anne cherry bon-bon things), and I think it would positively alter the end-texture.  I bought some in Austin at a local cupcake/candy bakeshop that wasn't very expensive.(www.allinonebakeshop.com call them,  the website doesn't reflect all of the cool products they have).

Hansson et al experimented with different sugar compositions for their beverages and noticed that there was a greater release of specific aromatic compounds using invert sugar. They posited that the glucose-fructose ratio that liquid invert sugar possesses, causes the water molecules to be more structred, thereby decreasing the amount of free water around.  Hyrophillic(water loving) flavors in the mix are then more concentrated in the available free water, waiting to be tasted. The hyrophobic( water-hating/fat loving) flavors like to stick with the fats, so using a very good emulsifuer to effectively distribute/suspend the fats through the rest of the mix will be important for the end flavor profile.
doi:10.1016/S0308-8146(00)00243-0

I might even add some turmeric to your mixture when you heat it (be aware of some yellow color transferrence), since the curcuminoids (bioactive ingredients in the turmeric rhizome/powdered spice) decompose into a few compounds like vanillin and ferulic acid when heated (longer the incubation = more vanillin as a result of its degradation). Here's one research paper doi:10.1016/S0731-7085(96)02024-9 I'm happy to provide additional peer-reviewed sources if desired.

One last thought on flavor additions...if you dont mind artificial, this is a gluten-free butter flavor:  http://www.shanks.com/product-category/extracts-flavors/imitation-butter/  It almost goes without saying, that only a VERY small amount would be needed(maybe a drop or two at most to really round out that creme profile).


How long should I keep something in the freezer to chill it?

One could probably figure it out, but imagine the variables:  (a) temperature of the liquid before entering the freezer, (b) volume of liquid, (c) shape of container, (d) temperature of freezer, (e) air circulation in freezer, (f) desired final temperature...I would eye-ball it.  Give it 30 minutes, check, and proceed one way or the other.


What's the difference between a French oven and a Dutch oven?

Ok, so the "Smart XXX Alec" in me wanted to start out by saying: "The French oven is more arrogant and less useful."  But I refrained until I learned I was right.

Looking at these two similar products Dutch Oven vs. French Oven I notice that there is not much difference except that the "French Oven" is 4 times the price & only good to 350 degrees in the oven where the Dutch Oven is rated for 400 degrees (F).

So I think I have to stand by my original thought.


Is there a faster/less messy way to stuff manicotti/canneloni?

Piping bag is your answer. You just don't use a tip on it.


To some extent chilli (capsaicin) is like salt in that the best way to reduce the taste is dilution. However with capsaicin you can also make use of the fact that it dissolves in fats. But you can't neutralise it - up you'll always be increasing the size of the dish.

To dilute you could make another batch without the heat, and combine the two.

A good source of fats is dairy, so you can indeed stir in sour cream (this isn't a time for the low fat version) or cheese. Both of these are often served with chilli, and take some of the heat away even then, but you need to mix the in. I use cocoa powder in my chilli, others use dark chocolate, which is easier to add at the end. Again, this is a source of useful fats, but be sure to get one with a high cocoa content unless you like your savoury food sweet. With all of these it's a good idea to cook a little longer, so you can also add a bit more of some of the other ingredients - beans, tomato, the liquid in your sauce (perhaps thickened with a little cornflour), etc. which will dilute the heat. You may be left with a portion for another day.


How long will vacuum sealed grilled lemons keep in the refrigerator?

Vacuum sealing food does not make it safe at all. You have to treat it like any other cooked food, only with the added risk of botulism.

I was looking into whether your lemons might be acidic enough to be treated as a refrigerator pickle. I could not however find anything to confirm that. Worse, newer studies recommend against previously used "tried and tested" refrigerator pickle recipes due to listeriosis danger.

So no, it is not safe. You shouldn't store it for longer than 5 days.


Can half cooked pork chops be cooled then fully cooked later?

Even though you turned the oven off when you left, there was still likely enough residual heat to continue cooking the chops.  Rather than a half-cooked chop that sat out for 4 hours, you've got mostly or fully-cooked chops that sat in a warm environment for 2-3 hours.  Whether they hit the recommended internal temperature (which is now actually 145F with a 3-minute rest for fresh pork, rather than the 165F quoted in other answers, at least according to the USDA) is anyone's guess.
From a culinary standpoint, since they've been pretty well cooked, baking them back up to that temperature (or more likely to 165F, which is the recommended temp for leftovers) will probably dry them into leathery little pucks.  If you're going to risk re-cooking and eating these, I'd recommend a higher-moisture cooking method like braising; chops stand up pretty well to this treatment.
As mentioned in comments, these have been sitting at near-room temperature for longer than is generally considered safe.  And without knowing what temperature the interior of the chops reached, it's unknown how safe they would have been even if you returned before they cooled into the dreaded "danger zone".  There are a lot of questions here from a safety standpoint.  I'll quote another answer here, as I think this says it best:

The safe limit for raw or cooked food is 2 hours in the danger zone (40-140° F or 4.4-60° C).
If you're a restaurant owner or cook, you must follow this rule [...] If you are not working in a professional capacity then you are not legally required to follow it, but if you are serving guests then it would be irresponsible (and possibly actionable, if someone gets sick) to do otherwise.
If you're an individual serving only yourself, then take whatever liberties and break whatever rules you want; it's your food, and your body.

I personally would probably write these off as a loss, but I tend to be fairly risk-averse.


Adding an acid is indeed the way to brighten a sauce.  You could go with vinegar (red wine, sherry, champagne, rice) depending on the ingredients in the sauce. Alternately, a squeeze of lemon is often used.  Start with a small amount...you can alays add more.


Is putting meat in the fridge to marinate necessary?

For a 30 min marinade, no, you don't have to put it in the fridge.  In fact, many recipes will call for removing thick beef cuts from the fridge 20-60 min before cooking, to let the meat come up to room temperature.

That being said, there has been some testing of what sort of difference bringing a steak to room temperature makes, and the general concensus is that cooking a cold steak gives better results.  America's Test Kitchen's tests found that people preferred frozen steaks, although it required freezing to ensure you didn't develop surface ice crystals, and cooking in more oil than typical.


How to maintain my knife? What am I missing, and what am I doing wrong?

I would suggest professionally sharpening your knife and then buy a new steel (steel or ceramic — some manufacturers recommend one over the other for their knives) and use the steel every time either before or after using your knife to keep the edge aligned which will keep it sharp much longer.


You can cook Brisket to the point that it it is tender but sliceable, but that's tricky if you're slow cooking while at work or the like. Try topside, also often called salmon cut. It has a less a denser texture than brisket but still responds well to slow cooking.


How can we keep the crisp part of French Fries for longer time?

I am no expert but I recently moved to a student apartment in the Netherlands and my roommates have some experience making fries.

I'd say one of the main factor that makes the fries get soggy is the steam that comes out of them. If all of the fries are very close together, like in a bowl, the fries will basically steam themselves. To prevent this try to spread them out as much as possible. What we usually do is put the in an oven tray (with parchment paper) and season them.


How does "Brownulated" light brown sugar compare with regular light brown sugar?

Your question seems to be conflating the question of bag vs boxed brown sugar with the question of "Brownulated" light brown sugar vs. regular light brown sugar.

Brownulated pours like white sugar, but turns into a paste when it gets damp or wet. I think it tastes funny.

Boxed vs Bag sugar is just a matter of storage and convenience. It's the same sugar.


If you heated the eggs above 160°F/70°C (and boiling is definitely above that), they're cooked, and any harmful bacteria has been killed. Can't say for sure that you did this without knowing the steps you performed.

Given, if it doesn't taste good, and it was cheap ingredients... sounds like an argument to discard it anyway. Even if its perfectly safe.

(Note: lower temperatures will also kill the bacteria, but it's no longer instant—you may have to hold it for a few minutes to a few hours, depending on the temperature.)


Mixing cooking chocolate with normal chocolate

Divi, I would try a sample melting of the two chocolates - do this very slowly in a double boiler or if you are super-careful, in a microwave - to see how the two chocolates react to being mixed once melted.

If they mix adequately, drop the test mix on a piece of wax paper and let it cool to see how the re-hardened mixture firms up.  Based on your experiment, you should have a better idea of what to expect with the two dissimilar chocolates.  (rumtscho has a good point that without knowing exactly what the two chocolates are, it's hard to give an answer.)


Substituting sweetened condensed milk for evaporated milk

The main difference between the two products is that sweetened condensed milk has added sugar.  This could be a problem for your recipe.  Evaporated milk, since it is concentrated (about 60% of the water is removed) is already a bit sweeter. When sweetened condensed milk is made, more sugar is added to evaporated milk, leaving the final product in the 40 - 45% sugar range.  So, the answer to your question will, in large part, depend on your recipe.  There are caramel recipes online that make use of sweetened condensed milk.  You might just start off with one of those.


Chef's knife for someone who uses it harshly

A so called Western Deba/Yo Deba could be what that person needs - this is a very heavy version of a chef knife, explicitly designed to deal with things like "half frozen food", "small bones" (commonly found descriptions in catalogs).

Do not confuse with the true japanese style deba (single bevelled and thick as a cookie.), that would be a pessimal knife choice for such a use(r). These look even more brutal/sturdy than the Yo-Deba but they aren't, you will need a whetstone and/or a first aid kit very quickly if you abuse it.

A so called "lobster splitter" would be the all-western equivalent.

Another, more rare designation for such knives (from japanese and japanese style makers) is "Reito-Kiri", these are explicitly designed for handling frozen food; not everything designated as a Reito-Kiri is chef knife shaped (some are serrated or double-handled).

Avoid hidden-tang handles (like those found on aforementioned chinese cleaver or more delicate japanese types) on knives used for really rough work: Your blade could literally fly off the handle and cause an accident.

"prying stuff open" and "chopping hard up and down" are two very different requirements when it comes to knife selection. Hard chopping (not TOO hard chopping) can actually be done well with a thin and quite hard knife - such would be a disastrous choice for prying. This exactly applies to the chinese vegetable cleaver that was suggested.


How to adapt brownie recipe to cook well in a mini-muffin tin?

Brownies are bar cookies.  Note that the brownies are at the edge of the pan are more cooked, and raised higher:  they set before they settle back down.

Baking the brownies in a mini-muffin tin will essentially make each mini-brownie all edge.  They will rise and set very rapidly, and then easily over bake.

I would suggest that brownies are not ideal in a mini-muffin tin.  Instead, cutting them smaller would be a better solution.

If you do want to try it again, I would suggest:

Don't overfill the tins.  You don't want the batter more than about 1/2 inch deep; you want about the same depth it would be in the pan for which they are designed.
Let the batter sit for about 5-10 minutes after portioning into the muffin tins.  This will give some additional time for the sugars to dissolve, and the flour to hydrate since they won't have as much time in the oven.  This should help texture and crust development (the shiny crackly top).
Reduce or eliminate the chemical leavening.  I would experiment with cutting the baking powder by 50% to start.

There are ways to incorporate air into brownie batter mechanically, by (for example) beating air into the egg-butter-chocolate mixture, but the exact way to approach it would depend on your particular brownie recipe.  If you go that route, you can probably completely eliminate the baking powder.
Reduce the oven temperature by about 25 F (maybe even 50 F in a second trial, if they still over bake and are too crusty too rapidly) or so, to allow the baking process to slow, and give more time for the mini-brownies to rise and settle.
Check them much sooner.  Mini-brownies are going to go from not-done to overdone very, very quickly.  I would start checking as early as 15 minutes, until you have an expectation.  When you can smell the chocolaty aroma is a good time to start checking.
Bake only one mini-muffin tray at a time, so that they are even.  You don't want shadow effects and changes in oven convection to throw off the baking by having more than one tray in the oven at the same time, although that is more an issue of consistency than it is of the complete character of the outcome.


How to turn a large piece of meat without losing breading

Here are a few ideas which might help:

Toss the meat in some flour first, then put it in the sauce, then breadcrumb it. The flour will help everything stick better
I haven't seen your honey sauce recipe, but if you can incorporate an egg or egg yolk in it, give it a go: it will work with the flour to make the sauce far stickier for the crumbs and you won't taste it
After breadcrumbing the meat, leave it in the fridge a few hours or overnight before frying
Don't try moving the meat until the surface in contact with the pan is genuinely cooked and golden - it will naturally start to unstick from the pan as the cooking surface caramelises so this is your best shot at keeping your crust. Before getting your spatuala under the meat, shake it loose first, and once it is moving you can go in for the flip
If 4. just isn't working, you can even put a piece of siliconised greaseproof paper in the pan, put the oil on the paper and fry the meat on that - you can then flip it just by lifting the paper (I sometimes do this with fragile fish)

Hope it works out for you!


Quantities of salt and MSG for a chicken stock substitute

I think you need to use MSG by taste.  If you are too heavy handed, your stock will wind up tasting more dashi-like...probably something you don't want in a stew.  If you are new to MSG, to get a handle on it do a bit of a taste test on the end of your finger.  Compare salt, MSG, and a salt/pepper mix.  When you understand the taste perceptions, you can better season your final product.  By the way, you can always add more once the dish is complete...you can't remove too much.


What are the pros and cons of Convection Microwave Ovens?

Microwave:  A microwave heats water and molecules in the food by using microwave radiation.  It will heat food efficiently and quickly, but does not brown or bake like a conventional oven.

Oven:  Fueled by gas or electricity and heats from the bottom (baking, roasting) or from the top (broiling).  The heat is from a single direction and not uniform.

Convection Oven:  An oven that has a fan that circulates heated air.  This allows for operation at a lower temperature while cooking more quickly.  It also results in a more even bake.

Convection Microwave (Oven): A combination of a microwave and a convection oven.  Allows for even, quick cooking that is browned or baked.

So, at the bottom of the scale is a microwave and an oven.  They each have different functions.  Then there is a middle tier that would be a convection oven - an improvement over the oven.  The top tier is the convection microwave oven that provides all the features:  quick cooking, heating, baking, browning, and evenness.

If you do a lot of cooking and only have a single oven, but find yourself wishing you had a second, a convection microwave would be useful for you.  If you want something truly multi-purpose, then yes.  Since each has a set of features it provides and/or lacks, it comes down to what best fits your needs.


Removing oil bubbles from bolognese sauce

There is only one significant source of fat in the recipe that you have shared:  the ground (or minced) meat.  The single teaspoon of oil is a fairly trivial amount.

You might wish to drain the ground meat after browning and prior to continuing with the recipe to minimize the amount of fat that ends up in the final sauce.


(Is it safe?) Preparing Breakfast in Bulk

I honestly can't think of any reason that the bananas or milk would spoil over the course of the week.  None of your ingredients seem to interact with each other in an adverse way.  You might try making a small batch, sealing it, and checking on it after a week.  That should give you a solid (no pun intended) basis of comparison.


Achieve crosshatch on grilled pork chop?

First, make sure your grill grates are brushed well to remove debris so that the food has complete contact with the grates.  After preheating the grill use a clean old towel to wipe the grates with a light coating of oil.  Additionally, a thin coating of oil on your pork chops or other protein item will be beneficial.

Once you've placed the meat on the grill it's really just a matter of paying attention to the meat.  Don't try turning too soon or you'll tear the meat and leave the grill marks behind.  If the meat resists, leave it alone.  It will release itself from the grill when it's ready to be rotated for the cross-hatch marks or to be turned over.

Of course there is no need to be concerned about grill marks on the second side as only one side will be the "presentation side" and the second side will never have marks as good as the first since there will likely be small bits of food debris keeping it from having complete contact with the grill.

Presentation side for other items would be the flattest surface (such as the skin side of a skinless chicken breast) or the nicer looking side (flesh side of a fish fillet).


What is the difference between roasting and toasting?

The previous answer which says to toast something means to brown it is accurate. The difference between roast and toast is simple, really: roast means to expose something to dry heat (in the west, usually in an oven) and to cook whatever it is right through; toast means to brown the outside of something, either held over a fire (as in marshmallows) or placed under a dry heat source such as a grill or inside a toaster.

In practice, for your peanuts, its a lot easier to roast them than it is to grill them to get a toasted effect, but toasted should mean you put them under a grill and shake them about to brown them all over rather than 'cook' them right through. The risk with toasting under the grill is, obviously, burning - I've 'toasted' cashews in a hot oven by shaking them about a bit periodically for a short time, and I've also done it in a dry pan on the hob. The only time I did it under the grill, I burnt the lot...


I would think that would be fine, but keep in mind that rinsing is going to remove some of the flavor that you've cooked on to them.  It is certainly safe, so long as the water is potable.  I would even venture to say there's no reason specifically to use salt water.  Looking at the recipe, it seems you're going to add more seasoning(and salt) after this step anyway.  In addition to that, I always tend to cook with slightly less salt than a recipe calls for, so I can allow my guests to add salt as desired at the table.  Always remember that you cannot remove salt from the food, and shrimp is no exception.  That said, rinsing shrimp in cool/cold salt water is not likely to add a significant amount of salt to the end product, assuming you drain and/or dry them afterward.

*This is a segway to my answer, but it seems to me that the recipe is a bit misleading by telling you to boil them until "most of the gravy dries up".  I would say you want to cook them until you have only a very thin layer of simmering gravy left in the pan.  Continuing to cook until the gravy begins to dry up is what will result in greatly increased temperatures(hot spots) and charred particles.  As long as you have water lining the bottom of the pan, the gravy should not exceed 212 degrees F(100 degrees C), and you should have a minimum of anything becoming charred.  The shrimp itself would be likely to still undergo mild maillard reactions on the surfaces directly contacting the pan(which is a controlled precursor to charring).*


How to bind chopped pepperoni, salami, and bacon

What I did to solve my problem was I made a thick cheese sauce with some of the pepperjack/sharp cheddar (grated some of it, coated in corn starch, melted in a little bit of milk), and mixed that into the meat mix, just enough cheese sauce to bind it, just enough to make the meat start sticking together (and I reduced amount of sliced cheese on top and bottom to make up for the addition of cheese in the meat).  Worked pretty well for me!


Lemon zest and thyme would be a perfect substitute for lemon thyme. Lemon thyme is an entirely different species from regular thyme, but the name is very apropos. Figure maybe 1 part finely grated zest to 3 parts thyme. As with all herbs, the ideal amount is really very subjective. Start with half of what your recipe calls for, taste your dough and guess from there. You won't really know until you taste the baked shortbread, but you won't be terribly off either.

As a general rule of thumb, 3 parts of fresh herbs equals approximately 1 part of the same herb dried (whole leaf). If your dried herb is ground (or rubbed), figure just over half of the dried, whole leaf amount. Know that ground herbs and spices lose flavor quickly (as in they are pretty tasteless after a matter of a few weeks).

It means nothing, but I hate lavender: Is there a typical ratio for Herbes de Provence? :)


Cooking alcohol: how many calories are lost?

It depends on how much alcohol there is relative to other things--sugars primarily, as they are about the only calorific part of most alcoholic beverages once the alcohol is gone (alcohol is the most calorific part for sure). You can use the alcohol proportion by volume (ABV) to approximate a little.

Assuming equal amounts of each:

Spirits don't leave much calorific stuff behind at all after the alcohol is gone because they're mostly alcohol. Alcohol by volume is between 40 and 60 percent in most cases.

Wine leaves a bit more, as there is more unfermented sugar remaining in the beverage you buy, but there's still not a heck of a lot. It depends on how dry the wine is. Alcohol by volume is between 10 and 20 percent mostly.

Beer can leave quite a bit, as many have significant amounts of unfermented/unfermentable sugar. This can be where ABV lets you down for estimating--high alcohol beers are also often high in unfermentable sugar too, so when the alcohol goes you're still left with quite a few calories. ABV can be anything from 4 to 20 percent, with the majority clustering around 5 percent. Lite beers are usually pretty low in alcohol and also pretty dry, meaning low residual sugars too.

A gray area is liqueurs and the like. Many are fairly high in alcohol by volume, but also heavy on sugars.

I should also point out that in many cooking applications, the calories added by the alcoholic beverage are fairly negligible, given the small amounts used relative to the number of servings. Even a Boeuf Bourguignon or Coq au Vin with a whole bottle of wine in it doesn't have all THAT much wine per serving--that whole bottle gets broken down into 6 or more servings, so each person gets less than a glass worth of alcohol-free wine calories. That probably averages something like 40 extra calories per serving.


Depending on the design, the heating coil may have collapsed and is shorting out at various points

This may cause it to run hotter than intended, and result in problems you describe

Measure the current with a meter and compare to manufacturers label, if much higher it's time to scrap it. Unlikely to be easily repairable if it has a heating coil

If it is running hot it is likely to fail soon and not heat at all

Modern crock-pots used solid elements, not coils. They also often have physical temperature regulation systems, not just a simple element selector switch


This is an incredibly useful Hydrocolloid Recipe Collection if you are interested in modernist techniques (so called molecular gastronomy).


Mutton shoulder versus mutton leg - any difference in length of cooking?

Leg is usually leaner than shoulder and so doesn't benefit from a long slow cook. A quicker, hotter roast is generally best, something on the order of 2-2.5 hours @ 220C for a good-size leg. Let it rest for a good half hour afterwards.


Can fresh pasta sheets be used to assemble a lasagne, then left in the fridge overnight before baking?

It can be done (my mom does it every year for Christmas Eve).

One thing to note, however -- you must boil the noodles before assembly -- it doesn't take long, maybe a minute or less (although, work in batches).

This will prevent the noodles from turning into paste as they sit.


All my attempts to "clean and repair" a sticky-seasoning layer have ended badly as well. I know who already snickers in the background, but my opinion is: start clean. Give the pan a lye bath and a good scrub, then reseason with a better seasoning.

"The new hotness" of flaxseed oil goes back to the fact that it doesn't go rancid easily, without heat it just dries out making a film which can protect things like wood. I bought into it, and seasoned a pan with it, and wondered why all my seasoning tries were unsucessful (I stripped and reseasoned 3 times, I think). I came to blame it on the smooth forged iron.

Then I got Cookwise and read the chapter on fats. And surprise, what does it say? That PUFA stick to everything around. (Makes sense, if you stop to think about it - those unsaturated bonds are unstable, they itch to break apart). So, when I got my next iron pan, I seasoned it with three (very thin) layers of flaxseed oil (for a solid base which will stick to the pan and the finishing layer) and then two layers of lard. After the oven, I heated it from brown to almost-black on the stove (empty).

This seasoning turned out perfect. I made crepes on it, re-oiling once every 7-8 crepes only (no fat in the batter). The pan released them like a charm. The old flaxseed-seasoned pan still sits around with some carbonized matter burnt onto the seasoning, and waits for a lye-flaxseed-lard session.

Of course, I would still take some caution with new seasoning and oil well the first few applications (I only tried the crepes after I noticed that less problematic items work great). And if you tend to often fry with the fashinably-healthy nonsaturated vegetable oils, don't heat them too much, else they could bake in a sticky-seasoning layer onto the pan. In the worst case, if you do get sticky-oil (but not carbon) buildup, try adding a new lard layer before you strip-and-reseason.


Adding melted chocolate to a sponge cake batter

Will it end up being a (probably delicious) cake? Yes. Will it have the texture of a Victoria sponge? No. The melted chocolate will destroy some of the airiness of the sponge, making it more like a brownie.

Instead, I would recommend substituting a few tablespoons of flour for unsweetened cocoa powder. That will give you a chocolate Victoria sponge.


Yes, you absolutely can.

A couple of times I've had 1% or 2% milk left over after having guests, and not had any trouble turning it into ricotta or farmer's cheese.


Problems heating up pans on an induction hob

Any electrical device that is used to maintain a constant temperature (ovens, induction hobs, immersion cookers, even thermostat-based space heaters) does so by first sensing whether the current temperature is below the set temperature. If so, the heating element/induction coil/etc... is turned on. Once the temperature reaches some upper threshold, the element is turned off again, and the cycle repeats.
Different devices have different ranges of thresholds. For instance, the temperature in an oven may vary by as much as 30°C, while an immersion cooker will keep the temperature range withing 1°C or so.
The reasons your hob overshoots the set temperature, then takes some time to stabilise, can be:

The hob is built to operate on a much wider range of temperature thresholds than you thought.
The hob is built to keep a pan with contents at a constant temperature, but heats up too powerfully for an empty pan (i.e., the hob makes the 'assumption' that there is something in the pan, and delivers power based on that assumption).
There is some distance between the hob's temperature sensor (often in the center) and the induction coil (a ring some distance from the center), and your pan does not conduct heat instantly. Then, while the pan has reached target temperature at the spots closest to the induction coil, it is still below the target temperature at the hob's sensor, causing the hob to add more power.

Using an empty pan will make points 1 and 3 worse as well. You can check if any of these are occuring in your case by heating a pan of water, and taking the water temperature (points 1 and 2), or by moving your surface thermometer to different spots in the pan (point 3). If the issue turns out to be 1, there is not much you can do. If it's either 2 or 3, you can mitigate the problem by starting to cook (almost) immediately.
Alternatively, you could force a slower heating curve by starting the hob at its lowest temperature and manually changing the temperature setting every minute or so.


Ice cream depends critically on the fat in the dairy to form the structure and mouth feel.   Ice cream mixes there fore are typically fairly high in dairy fat.

You have substituted a comparatively low fat mock cream. which simply does not have the fat necessary to create the body of the ice cream.

In fact, the so-called homemade cream recipe is just thickening milk with gelatin, the thickening agent in... jelly (as they in British English, Jello in the US).  It is no wonder that your product has a jelly like consistency.   Also, gelatin is not stable for keeping its thickening (gelling) power when frozen.

Derobert is also correct in pointing out that switching from a traditional churned ice cream to a hand stirred freezer method will also alter the texture radically, although it is likely to make it grainier and icier without the milk fat to help buffer the formation of ice crystals.

Ice cream is a recipe where you do not want to substitute for the specific dairy called for in this way.  Ice milk recipes do exist, and will perform better.


preseasoned pan - now blackened and chipping

Try to use vinegar in the hot pan to remove solids of food. Also, adding salt while washing and brushing helps removing that heavy duty dirty.

After that, gently dry the pan in the stove and add oil just after all the water evaporates. Use a paper towel to help evenly spread the oil.

Then put the pan back in the stove or oven in a low fire.

That's what I do.


Me think the juice will lose some of its taste.

Instead of freezing the whole bottle, try freezing smaller portions so you only thaw portions as you need them.

You could use "Ziplock" type freezer bags, or small plastic or glass containers  to portion the juice in smaller quantity.


Is Mulan-themed Szechuan McNugget Sauce really just a blend of BBQ and S&S?

See related question on Skeptics, which is basically a continuation of the original of this answer: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/38472/was-a-package-of-mcdonalds-dipping-sauce-just-sold-for-almost-15k
EDIT:
Was the 1998 Mulan sauce a mixture of McDonald’s sweet-and-sour sauce and barbecue sauce? The world may never know. But since Rick and Morty has endorsed this cooking video from Binging with Babish (the endorsement is here in the description), and I suspect the makers of Rick and Morty are pretty cozy with McDonalds, maybe Babish knows something the rest of us don’t.
In the video, Babish mixes two parts McDonald’s sweet and sour sauce with one part McDonald’s Tangy BarBeQue sauce. He declares it not bad, but not as good as the following:
He really likes the sauce he made from a recipe from a Reddit user, who created the recipe with his father in an attempt years ago to duplicate the Mulan sauce. The video doesn’t give measurements, but luckily I was able to track down the original Reddit post  and the recipe.

•  Mince 6 cloves of Garlic and sweat (heat them up in a skillet)
•  add 4 tablespoons Balsamic Vinegar
•  add soy sauce to taste (DO NOT USE LOW SODIUM SAUCE)
•  add 2 tablespoon Plum Sake (Drink additional 3 oz Plum Sake)
•  Reduce sauce slightly (Drink additional 1.5 oz Plum Sake)
•  3 1/2 tablespoons cock sauce (Sriracha)
•  add 2 tablespoon brown sugar
•  Red pepper flakes to taste
•  Minced Ginger to taste
•  Consume remaining Plum Sake
Simmer that shit for a solid 5 minutes, stirring pretty much constantly. The brown sugar helps it keep the proper consistency, so it's important to use. Play around with the recipe to your taste. Might want more or less balsamic vinegar. Might want more or more Plum Sake. I'd definitely recommend you make it several times to figure out your own flavor.

The rest of this answer is as it was before I knew for sure that the Mulan sauce package in the news recently was a hoax See https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/38472/was-a-package-of-mcdonalds-dipping-sauce-just-sold-for-almost-15k
TL;DR
According to the labels on the sauces, the answer to your question is no, McDonald's Mulan SzeChuan Teriyaki Dipping Sauce is not a mixture of McDonald's Sweet and Sour Dipping Sauce and McDonald's Tangy BarBeQue Dipping Sauce. I say that because because the sweet and sour sauce lists "apricot purée concentrate and/or peach purée concentrate" as its third ingredient. The Mulan sauce does not list that as an ingredient at all, so the Mulan sauce doesn't contain the sweet and sour sauce.

That should be it, right? This is where it gets weird.
The first thing I looked for was a list of ingredients for the sauces. I couldn't find that as text anywhere, so I looked at images of the actual sauce containers. I quickly saw that I wasn't going to have any problem reading the ingredients from pictures of the packages. I choose the first two images randomly. Notice that they're from completely different sources.

From: TheEater.com
And

From: Mouthful of Sunshine
There are two very weird things here. These are supposed to be pictures of the Mulan sauce package and the BBQ sauce package, respectively.
The ingredients on both packages are identical:

High fructose corn syrup, water, tomato paste, grape vinegar, distilled vinegar, salt, soy sauce (water, wheat, soybeans, salt), food starch- modified, spices, dextrose, soybean oil, natural smoke flavor (plant source), xanthan gum, caramel color, garlic powder, cellulose gum, dried chili peppers, malic acid, natural flavors (fruit and vegetable source), onion powder, sodium benzoate (preservative), succinic acid

But that's not even the weirdest thing. Got your tin-foil hat?
Look closely at the two images:

They are the same photo of the same package, with different sauce names Photoshopped in and the color manipulated.
Now that my mind had been totally blown, I looked for other images of the packaging of the sauces that didn't seem to be manipulated. I figured one of the packages above listed the wrong ingredients. Well...

From Popsugar.com
and

From An Immovable Feast
Full-sized, you can read the ingredients on both. They are identical to the other two.
So, either (a) McDonald's had a massive labeling error that would have cost them millions if caught at the time, or (b) the Mulan sauce is actually made from the same ingredients as the BBQ sauce, in the same order of quantity (so, very likely identical sauces), or (c) something is afoot.
I am going to get to the bottom of this with McDonald's, I am starting an email campaign now.
For the sake of completeness, the sweet and sour sauce contains:

High fructose corn syrup, water, apricot purée concentrate and/or peach purée concentrate, distilled vinegar, soy sauce (water, wheat, soybeans, salt), salt, food starch - modified, dextrose, soybean oil, xanthan gum, spices, sodium benzoate (preservative), natural flavors (fruit, vegetable and plant source), garlic powder, cellulose gum, dried chili peppers, malic acid, onion powder, extractives of paprika, succinic acid

From Craveonline.com
This video gets into the lore of the new-found interest in McDonald's Mulan sauce. The video repeatedly refers to the Mulan sauce as only available for a limited time. Hmm. Scratch the surface of the "Mulan" name, the BBQ name might be underneath.
I suspect that the reason the photoshopped image exists is that it was used in a pitch, showing how easy it would be to fool people into thinking that McDonald's created a sauce, available for a limited time only, to tie into the Mulan movie.
EDIT
I just noticed this!:

Now I'm really at a loss.  Even Time missed that date. A new Mulan movie is scheduled for 2018. Is this whole thing a marketing gimmick? The Mulan sauce had been discontinued for a very long time by 2011.
I tried to read the copyright date on the picture of the container in the hand, but couldn't. The printing looks suspiciously like the photoshopped C2011 package, but it's either not the same package or it has been further Photoshopped since the lower left hand corner is clearly different.
I find this whole thing very mysterious, so I will continue the investigation. I think I'll ask the folks at Skeptics for some help with this.


preserving dehydrated foods prepared with citric acid, honey or syrup

Using a vacuum sealer before freezing should generally improve lifetime in the freezer. Note that this lifetime is all about quality; safety-wise, everything lasts forever in the freezer.

When food is frozen, the main thing that keeps it from lasting forever is interaction with the air, and it only reduces quality. As time goes on, water and flavors escape from the food, flavors from the freezer enter the food, and frost accumulates on the surface. (In the case of dehydrated food, water entering the food might actually be a problem.) If the food has been vacuum-sealed first, then there's no way for any of this to happen. This is why you can find things like individually vacuum-sealed frozen fish fillets - the quality is much better. So if your vacuum-sealing is good, your food should hopefully last as long as you want it to in the freezer.


I waited two hours before starting my slow-cooker. Will the food be safe to eat?

The general rule is that food can only spend two hours in the 'danger zone'. Leaving it out for over two hours before starting the process of heating it out of the danger zone means that it could now be unsafe.

Cooking it for seven hours on high will probably kill all bacteria in the food, however, it is not the bacteria you need to worry about. The problem is if the bacteria have produced any kind of toxin. These toxins are generally proteins, which will not be destroyed at any normal cooking temperature.

I would recommend following your username and throwing it out.


Do older apples contain more or less pectin in the skins/cores?

Older apples should have less pectin, probably:

  The chemistry of pectins is a vast and complex subject ... all these enzymes work together to degrade the pectin and eliminate is sticky effect. They exist naturally in plant tissues ... after harvest, during apple storage, the protopectins within cell walls are naturally broken down ... During that process, the apples get softer ... as the apples become overripe and mealy, the soluble pectins are degraded into nonpectic substances.

Quoted from "The New Cider Maker's Handbook" chapter 12 "The Pectic Substances" by Claude Jolicoeur. (There's also apparently an entire book on this called "The Pectic Substances" by Z. I. Kertesz.)


Soak in a mild borax solution. fill the sink and throw in gummed up juicers, colanders and tea-stained spoons as well.

If your kitchen is humid, a bit of an oil rub after thorough drying should slow down the rust.


The brown stuff is presumably polymerized oil, AKA "seasoning". At sufficient thickness, it appears black (but blackness is unnecessary for it to be effective as a surface treatment). I don't see any sign of rust in those pictures.


I worked three years in a movie theater in my early twenties.  The butter is tricky.  We would microwave it then separate the water from it.  If the water is still in the butter and put on the popcorn the water will make the popped corn soggy and give off an unappealing smell.  We would usually pour it off to separate them but that works best when a large amount is used.  A small amount could be warmed in a pan long enough to evaporate the water.  then alas put it on the finished popped corn.  Time it so both the corn and butter are warm at the same time.  Don't cover the popped corn with the idea of keeping it warm; There is still a little moisture in the popped corn and will make your treat less crispy.
If dried spices are the idea then try infusing the spice with the butter after the water is removed.  Don't get the mixture any warmer than warm.  You don't want the spices getting browned.  If the spices were put in the kettle while popping the corn they would be too toasted.


Can Calcium Chloride be Used to Prevent Lentils from Bursting?

That's a good question, and I have no direct experience in using calcium chloride, however looking at the ingredients for many canned lentil products shows calcium chloride being a very common ingredient, so I would suspect it may work. It's got a very salty flavor though, so don't go overboard.

As a counterpoint adding salt to lentils during cooking is discouraged as it makes them tough, it's quite likely calcium chloride will have the same effect.

If you do try it please post your experience, I'd really like to hear how it works out.


Green tomato soup calls for creme fraiche. I cannot have creme fraiche. If I add heavy creme will it be ok?

If you add only heavy creme the final result will be more smooth and a little bit sweeter (even though green tomatoes are very sour to taste). If you have access to a white yogurt (non sweetened) or greek yogurt you can add that to the soup, maybe by adding it gradually and correcting with cream if the taste degenerates.


Do I need special gloves for mozzarella stretching?

There is no requirement for specific gloves so far as I know. Gloves themselves aren't actually even necessary. They do however keep your hands clean, and they keep any nasties that could be on your hands or arms out of the cheese. When I make mozz for my family I usually just use my clean bare hands. If I was making to sell I'd most likely use food service gloves with a little butter on them to prevent sticking during stretching, similar to when you're pulling taffy.


How to find out if the coconut oil that I will buy from a supermarket is food and/or allergy safe

Since the question is off-topic, I'm not sure if I should be answering this. If not, I'll rely on those more experienced to edit or remove it.

If you have no known allergies to other nuts or seeds, coconut oil sold in the FOOD section of a supermarket is safe. If you have allergies to any nuts or seeds, then you'd need to check for labeling saying if it was processed and packed in a nut/seed-free facility to be safe.

On the other hand, if you're wondering if you might be allergic to coconut itself and you don't know, think back to other foods you're eaten. Coconut is in many foods and I'd be surprised if you haven't eaten it before. It's found in a host of different candies (even as small bits of crunchy toasted coconut), puddings, cookies, cakes and other baked goods. It's included in different curries; sometimes finely ground like flour or as coconut milk. I'm sure there are other foods but this gives you an idea.

If you simply don't know, you might try a very small amount of dried shredded coconut and wait 24 hours. Initially, allergic reactions are generally mild as a full allergic response normally takes 2, 3 or more exposures to cause a full allergic reaction. Perhaps keep something like Benadryl on hand. Mind you, this is what I'd do but please use caution. You may not feel like trying this.


How to reseason cast iron skillets using a fire

Have they simply rusted? Clean cast iron or steel without oil (having been burned off in the fire) will rust at the least provocation.

Steel wool and oil should clean that off (it also requires "elbow grease") - use whatever oil you intend to re-season them with.


How to clean up the smell of egg from a pot?

I've never heard of lingering egg smell from eggs. Is there a possibility that there is a certain amount of sulfur content in your water?

  Sulfur water (or sulphur water) is a condition where the running water contains a high amount of hydrogen sulfide gas that escapes into the air when the plumbing line is opened, giving a distinct "rotten egg" smell.

  The condition indicates a high level of sulfate-reducing bacteria in the water supply. This may be due to the use of well water, poorly treated city water, or water heater contamination.

Wikipedia: Sulfur water


Can I save a Creme Brûlée with a soggy crust?

Just before the party, sprinkle some granulated sugar on top. Use a blowtorch (preferred) or a very hot broiler to "brulee" the new sugar. That will cause both the old and new sugar to get browned and crunchy.

I just saw this on a related question. Alton Brown on Creme Brulee. He shows great blowtorch technique, do it just like that and you'll be fine, no need to remove the soggy layer.


Just divide one pound (16 ounces) by the weight of the box you have now. For example, if the new box is 14.4 ounces (seems to be a common size for graham crackers), then you need 16/14.4 = 1.11 boxes.

You might find Google helpful for this kind of thing: you can search for 1 pounds / 14.4 ounces and get an answer.

In the end you're probably best off just weighing, though: get enough boxes to have more than a pound, then weigh out a pound.

Or... if you're in exactly this situation, with a 14.4 ounce box that contains 3 packages of 9 crackers each, then that 0.11 of a box is an extra three crackers (27 * 16 / 14.4 = 30).


I have seaweed salad with sesame flavor. What are some good ways to garnish it or nice things to garnish with it?

Asian style - usually with a sprinkle of white sesame on top and that's it.


What can I do with my failed tomato canning attempt?

Generally, when you find that you have a jar that failed to seal, you move it to the fridge, and use it up quickly.

... but by now, you've had the jar at room temperature for a really long time, especially if you didn't move it to the fridge immediately after you asked.  If it had been a few hours after canning, especially with a high-acid food like tomato sauce, I'd have no problems recommending that route.

As it is now, I'd recommend composting it and recovering the jar for your next batch.  You can decide for yourself how much you're willing to risk getting sick over wasting the food (how hearty your immune system is, how close you are to scraping by 'til the next pay check, etc), but if I were going to eat it, I'd bring it back up to boiling for a while (with the lid on, or a splatter screen at the very least) and only eat it myself, not serve it to others.