How do I avoid microwave-safe covers melting in the microwave?

I'm no plastics expert but a general rule of thumb is the softer the plastic initially, the more likely it is to melt (I know that sound too obvious, but hey;) Something to do with thermoset vs thermoplastic.
The trouble with plastics being advertised as microwave-safe is it is a limited claim. If you microwave a bowl of water covered by the lid, then you're fine… forever.
However, if you get food, especially fat, on it then that will create a local heat spot far in excess of what the plastic can stand.
I've found that it's not worth spending money on heat-proof covers when in fact far more heat-resistant plastics are readily available - for free.
Your take-away food will come in one - both container & lid are quite likely to survive being nuked with a really greasy curry inside, with little ill effect except perhaps some staining.

Likewise, those supermarket dishes containing ready meals are even more resilient. I have some of those still in use from probably 20 years ago. They can get a bit bashed & the edges will chip after a time until you decide they're no longer worth keeping.

They all go through the dishwasher with no worries too [so long as you make sure they don't flip over, they're very light.]
I have actually been known to buy supermarket ready meal products like this just for the dish ;)


Baking Adjustments When Using a Countertop Oven

I've found that smaller ovens do tend to crisp the top (or bottom) more quickly, as the heating element is closer to the food surface.

For scones, you may want to

prepare it in smaller batches,
lower the temperature by a few degrees, and crank it up for the last 3-5 minutes to get a more even bake and better cooked insides, while still getting a crispy crust.
arrange each batch along the "spine" so that it is evenly spaced between the two elements on the top (strictly speaking, not necessary, but it compensates for any faulty fan action and allows the top to crisp more evenly)


Lemon juice
This one is fairly obvious and self-explanatory. Although the idea is mainly associated with highly sugarey lemonade, just a few drops of juice in a bottle of water and no extra sugar gives it a nice touch.
Vinegar
A matter of taste. Many will find this just gross, but it has of course a similar tartiness as lemon and less sugar.
Cucumber
This surprised me a lot when I first tasted it: you'd think cucumbers hardly taste of anything at all. But put a few fresh slices in a jug of water for half an hour, and they'll impart a subtle, but astonishingly interesting and really quite refreshing flavour.


Why does my home made chilli sauce ferment?

It ferments, like every other food mixture, because there's microorganisms (bacteria and yeast) in the air and the ingredients that reproduce and consume the sugars and starches in it. Any jarred vegetable, fruit, or herb will ferment unless there is something specifically to prevent microorganism growth.  You can't get rid of these just by washing the outsides of everything, since these organisms are present inside the peppers, in the air, and particularly in the garlic, which is practically a microorganism incubator.

For some sauces, the fermentation is desired and intended, but apparently for yours it isn't.  So let's look at the ways you can stop fermentation:

1) Canning: if you seal, and heat the jarred pepper sauce to a sufficient heat for enough time, that will prevent fermentation more-or-less indefinitely until it is opened.  Depending on the heat-treatment and canning process, it may be storable at room temperature, or it may need to be refrigerated. Note that, since you're cooking the sauce, this may change its taste and texture.

2) Salting: if there's enough salt in your pepper sauce, it does not ferment because nothing can live in it; that's the secret to shelf-storable pepper pastes you can buy at the store.

3) Acid: on the opposite end, if the pepper sauce is sufficiently acidic, this will also stop fermentation; this is how shelf-stable pepper sauces like Tabasco work.  You'll also need to strain out the solids, though.  You need to be careful to add acids, like vinegar and citric acid, that don't come with too much additional sugar (like lemon juice does).

4) Artificial preservatives, like sodium benzoate, are strong anti-microbial substances that can prevent fermentation.

5) Combination: because peppers and garlic are difficult from a preservation perspective (peppers are low-acid and high-sugar, and I've already mentioned garlic), it can help to do a combination of methods.  When I make jarred salsa, I add vinegar and can it, and preserved lemons use both acid and salt.

Anyway, the Ball site has lots more advice about canning and preserving, you can find pretty much everything you want to know there, and you can also look at the answers to this question.


Some permanent markers (sharpies for example) can take multiple passes through the dishwasher while still being legible, but a quick wipe with alcohol of any kind will take it off.

For truly permanent marking on glass, engraving is the way to go. A vibrating engraver is more precise and more expensive than a rotary tool (dremel or cheap equivalent), but the latter is perfectly fine and makes wider lines. The downside is that this isn't particularly visible against a white background such as yoghurt unless you go over it with marker.

Simply twisting a bit of coloured wire around the clip might do the trick.

Plastic stickers (widely available aimed at children) can survive being washed many times as evidenced by my daughter's water bottles, but you're a bit restricted as to design - is one yoghurt a good match to pirates and the other better for princesses?


Microwave oven grill heating element not glowing

I remember having one of these in a kitchen I worked in. I too was confused by it.

When using the oven as a microwave the element stays off. When grilling, the element used to cycle on and off as the internal temp rises and falls. It also went off if the door was opened. It used to glow a dark orangey-red, only for a moment. It was difficult to see with the internal cabinet light on. However, it generated heat most of the time without an obvious visible glow. You can't just turn the grill on. You need to set a time as you would in microwave mode. There was no easy way to pre-heat the grill function.

In my opinion the unit was a waste of time and I only used it as a microwave. Sorry probably not what you wanted to hear.


Is it safe to eat a cooked steak that (briefly) touched the plate that was holding the raw meat?

If you're at all like me, you are reassured by hard numbers and measurables. This should help.

In this situation one of the likely pathogens would be one of the Salmonella species. Salmonella is killed by temperatures in excess of 130 F (55 C). However, it's not an instant death. The time to kill Salmonella decreases exponentially as the temperature increases.

The following table represents all the temperature and duration to kill 99.9999% of the most heat-resistant strain Salmonella senftenberg. This species is as much as 30x more heat resistant than a "normal" S. typhimurium.

   Temperature | Time
---------------|------
 140 F (60 C)  | 60m
 150 F (65 C)  | 10m
 160 F (70 C)  | <2m

For any given temperature the proportion of bacteria killed is constant. 1/6th the time kills 90%, 1/3rd kills 99%, 1/2 kills 99.9% etc.

USDA guidelines to kill Salmonella and E. Coli are as follows:

   Temperature | Time
---------------|------
 135 F (57 C)  | 86.4m
 140 F (60 C)  | 8.6m
 145 F (63 C)  | 2.7m
 150 F (65 C)  | 51.9s
 160 F (70 C)  | < 6s
 165 F (74 C)  | < 2s

So, needless to say, re-searing your steak at a typically high stove top temperature (at least 300 F [149 C]) for even a fraction of a second will result in utter devastation to whatever beastie population you may have picked up in recontaminating your meat. Chances are, if the steak came hot out of the pan, and you removed it from the plate quickly, the residual heat alone would be enough to kill it. The re-sear certainly doesn't hurt though.

A good rule of thumb is to wash plates as you go. If this is not possible or convenient you should minimally remove the plate from your vicinity by putting it in the sink or dishwasher as soon as you have taken the food off of it.


What is the difference between connective tissue and suet/fat deposits?

Suet is a particular fat from around the kidney area of cattle, it is not intramuscular.

I just learned from the other poster that adipose is considered a type of connective tissue, so from that perspective they are the same thing. However, I when chefs say it the fat would be something flavorful that you can render easily, and connective tissue would be a tough fibrous structural component that takes much longer to break down with heat. You can certainly feel the difference when you touch it, despite it not looking all that different in a photograph.

Here is a man separating connective tissue from suet https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ypRsO9KdxXk&t=190s


Choice of new seasonable cookware (iron/carbon steel, pan/wok)

I think any of the suggestions you made are great.  I would add, what type of food/style are you cooking or interested in?  More into the stir-frying, than a wok would be a good choice, besides they are quite multi-functional (fryer, steamer, stir fry, smoker).  They are also pretty inexpensive when made out of thin carbon steel.

If you are not into that, then a cast iron or my favorite are carbon steel pans.  Nearly all the seasonability of cast iron without the weight.  The carbon steel is usually also much less expensive.  Lodge makes a set of carbon steel pans.  But most carbon steel pans use rivets to secure the handles to the pan.

If you are getting fancy, there is a German brand of carbon steel pans, which makes them out of one piece like a cast iron, no rivets.  The brand is named, Turk, Albert Turk GmbH.

Good luck.


Can you roast soybeans directly in a popcorn popper or microwave?

No, you can't cook dried beans just by roasting them. All this would do is it dry them out even more and that wouldn't make them more edible. Indeed, dried beans are used as baking beans to weigh down pastry during blind baking and they don't pop like popcorn.

All recipes for roasted soybeans require some combination of soaking and/or boiling before they can be roasted.

(Note we're not talking about fresh soybeans here, those are green and succulent.)


In either case store the cheese in the liquid it came in, transferring it to a clean container and covering well. Feta lasts reasonably well, but mozzarella only keeps well for a couple of days.


Replacing red wine by vinegar to do a beef salami

Not all salami recipes call for wine. I would advise finding one that doesn't include wine, rather than trying to adapt one that does: modifications to cured meat recipes are risky and potentially unsafe. Although replacing wine with vinegar sounds intuitively safe (in that it lowers the pH), it might have the effect of messing up the initial bacterial culture you're looking for.

If you can find non-alcoholic wine (assuming the alcohol is what you're worried about), it should be fine to substitute that in. The alcohol level is quite low in the mixture as a whole, and doesn't serve any purpose.


Safe to use rice cooker after mold grew on rice?

Hot water and detergent might be enough, but after serious mold growth, I'd use a disinfectant. The easiest way to do this would be to disinfect your cooker with bleach, which is very effective at killing mold on non-porous surfaces. After thoroughly washing and rinsing your cooker, make a solution of 10 parts water to 1 part bleach and allow it to soak in your cooker for a few minutes, then dump it out and allow the cooker to air dry.

Using Bleach on Mold (note that the caveat here is that bleach isn't effective for porous surfaces. Anything that you're cooking on should be an acceptable surface for using bleach on.)


First time making fudge. Will it be okay if I forgot to add vanilla?

Vanilla is not an essential ingredient in fudge. The essential ingredients are sugar (or an equally calorie-rich sugar substitute like corn syrup), milk and butter. Everything else you might find in a fudge recipe is just added to modify the basic flavor, texture and/or color. There are lots of fudge recipes around which don't use vanilla at all (it's a treat which is very open to experimentation in general).

So if you don't add vanilla, it won't taste like vanilla, but that doesn't necessarily mean it will taste bad, have the wrong consistency or behave differently when cooked and cooled. It's certainly worth a try to complete the recipe, even if just to collect some experience with the non-trivial phases of making fudge which are going to follow.


Kenji Lopez-Alt wrote about this issue on the website, Serious Eats. Salting the meat before making the patty does not cause it to fall apart, rather it creates a more bouncy, sausage-like texture.  His conclusion is that most people prefer a patty that has a loose, open structure. His advice is to salt immediately before cooking.


There should be no adjustments required:
Yes, two pots take a few minutes longer to heat up than one, but with 4-5 hours total, it shouldn't matter.


What can I do with batter that has lumpy sugar in it?

Don't most cake recipes require mixing dry ingredients first? Well, what's been done has been done.

The standard professional chef way of getting lumps out of anything is to pass it through a fine strainer. In your case a standard metal pasta strainer should work. Put the strainer over a bowl, pour the batter in and use the back of a large spoon or ladle to gentle press the batter through. The lumps of sugar will be left over and you can just crush them then.

Whipping the batter might work the gluten proteins in the flour which will make for a tough chewy texture. Some cakes actually take this into account and others it is bad, so be careful.


What would cause maple syrup bottles to bulge?

Even though the risk with canning/bottling maple syrup is supposed to be virtually nonexistent, it sounds like yours was somehow contaminated. I definitely would not use them as "bulging" cans or bottles are a prominent sign of botulism spores.

See the CDC's Home Canning and Botulism:

  Home-canned food might be contaminated if:

  The container is leaking, bulging, or swollen
  The container looks damaged, cracked, or abnormal
  The container spurts liquid or foam when opened
  The food is discolored, moldy, or smells bad

That said, it's not necessarily botulism, that's just the worst-case scenario - but it definitely sounds like some sort of bacterial contamination which is usually due to either improper canning or improper storage. What you're seeing is the result of a pressure build-up, and the pressure has to be created by something, and that "something" is usually bacteria eating the food inside and producing gas.


Comparison between cast iron and forged pans

Cast iron and carbon steel (aka “forged iron”) are fairly similar. Both require seasoning for best results, and can produce a decent non-stick effect when properly seasoned; both have high heat capacity but mediocre heat conduction; both are quite durable. Carbon steel is somewhat more lightweight than cast iron, making it more versatile (you wouldn’t want to flip the contents of a large cast iron skillet one-handed). Additionally, modern cast iron pans are rough-textured, which can make them  more difficult to effectively scrape with a spatula.
I own and use both. These days I use carbon steel much more than cast iron.


From my experience the size of chili peppers is not related to the pungency.
Some time ago I grew all my chilies at home and while some were hotter than others it had nothing to do with their size.

But there might be varieties where that is true.

Some kinds of chili peppers start out hot, get mild after some time and then again become hot. So if you compare ones not fully grown to others in their mild stage it might explain differences in heat.

One variety I grew a lot started green (hot), then turned a dark violet (mild) to turn red (very hot) when ripe. But peppers of different sizes at the same stage of ripeness had similar pungency.


Mystery "organ" on the underside of chicken thighs?

As discussed in the comments under the question, I believe the organ in question is a kidney, from the pocket in the pelvis of a thigh butchered in a fairly unusual manner, with that part of the pelvis still attached.

See page 3.21 in the University of Kentucky's PDF of Chapter 3 of Chicken Anatomy and Physiology.   It shows where the kidney's are in the chicken (moderately graphic), and the shape looks quite similar to the mystery item in the original question's photographs, allowing for shrinkage from cooking.


Blind baking: Does the choice of weights matter?

What matters is keeping the crust from puffing and pulling away from the pie plate or tart mold.  So any of those work...more or less the same, but the typical drawback is that it is difficult to keep the sides of the crust in the proper form.  One of the most ingenious ways to deal with the issue is to line your pie plate with dough, place parchment on top, place an empty pie plate on top of that.  Now flip the whole thing over so that the empty pie plate is on the bottom (placed on a cookie sheet).  The dough is now baking upside down on top of the empty pie plate (leave everything in place, so that the dough is between plates with parchment while baking)...no shrinking or puffing.  Also...a well-chilled dough helps.  You can even form, then return to the fridge for a while to chill before baking.
Edit after question in the comments:  The question from @Alex led me to revisit the origin of this technique, which I recently heard about on Dave Arnold's radio show, "Cooking Issues."  It comes from a book called Pie Marches On by Monroe Boston Strause.  It can be found online.  It does not use two pans as I originally thought, rather, he blind bakes on the bottom side of one pie tin.  Then flips onto a shallower pie tin for cooling and filling.


Is copper cookware really better than stainless steel?

Modern stainless steel pans with clad bottoms can be as good as copper pans.  McGee developed a simple technique to test the heat distribution where he fits a piece of paper to the bottom of the pan, placing the pan over a burner and carefully watching how the paper browns.  Thick aluminum, clad bottom stainless, and copper all worked equally well.

There are differences that relate to the techniques used in cooking.  A thin copper pan is great for melting butter or chocolate straight on the burner.  Modern air-gap wall stainless steel pans hold the heat better and work better for simmering or boiling.  Copper is harder to upkeep.

Pans will develop hot spots, even copper which is the better conductor. Until we get graphite added to the cladding  or some other exotic material to distribute the heat, thickness will matter the most for even heat distribution.

I have read several consumer tests and reviews of pans and they fail to note that thermal conductivity and thickness can both be used in practice to balance the temperature distribution and heat flux in a pan.


Kimchi juice to aid lactic fermentation of half-sour pickles

Short answer is "yes".

Sour pickles don't get sour because of yeast. Pickles get sour due to lactic acid produced by bacteria, the same way kimchi works. Propably you could even add a bit of real home-made yoghurt to boost the bacteria. The bacteria needed are already present on the cucumbers (even after you wash them, but you shouldn't srcub them too much!), and addition of bread heel, kimchi juice or youghurt will just boost their growth.

As a seasoned Polish sour-pickles maker, I can assure you that you don't need the bread or kimchi juice at all. The pickles will get nicely sour without it, but they will just take a few days more. In summer I prepare sour pickles with the bread, in order to have them ready really fast and always on hand, but for my winter jars I never use the bread. If I put the heel in a jar that's supposed to wait till winter, the cucumbers will overferment, might get soft and generally will be good only for cucumber soup.

My other comments on the receipe: using iodised salt is fine, as long as you don't exceed half of all salt used (the other half must be pickling/kosher salt). It is not just the brine that keeps them from spoiling - it's mostly the lactic acid. The "pickled water" is sour enough to prevent fungi growth, and it is extremely rich in vitamin C and is a great cure for hangover ;)


Is it safe / advisable to use a nonstick baking sheet on an induction cooktop for pancakes (375 F)?

I'm using nonstick pans on my induction cooker without any issues. Also frying pancakes is fine.

So, if something smells weird, it must be a particular issue with your pan, not a general induction-cooker-vs-nonstick-pan thing.

375 F (190°C) should not be a problem for any decent cookware, regardless of the cooker the cookware is being used on. This holds true, regardless whether you're using Teflon, Ceramic or a stainless (uncoated) pan.


Add refined peanut oil. Add more than a couple of tbsp. Add it generously. Try using peanuts from a different source.


How can I reconstruct my Grandmother's recipe from just ingredients?

I think that actually you already have all the information you need. Let's go through the questions you mention:

You can use whichever process you prefer. Any of the usual methods for making yeast dough will give you the same result here.

This is the wrong question to ask. Deciding on the baking time first and choosing the thickness second is very difficult and serves no purpose. Just use the thickness you prefer and then bake until done, no matter how long it takes. Obviously, don't go with anything crazy the first time, use a thickness that is somewhere within the typical roll range, accounting for rising.

Yes, this kind of buns is generally arranged with sides touching before rising.

I think that it is intentional to use the sauce before baking, but you can try both ways and see which you like more. Both will produce edible rolls, and if you distrust your grandfather's memory, there is only one way to discover which one was your grandmother's preferred method - a side-by-side test.

So good luck, and go enjoy some nice rolls.


How can I specify the correct type of bacon in the US?

In Canada, we have lots of different types of bacon. I believe in the states, "Canadian" Bacon, as far as I know generally refers to back bacon. Standard Bacon (Also called, side Bacon, Strip Bacon; which comes from the belly), is usually just known as "Bacon". I believe this is true in the states.

What happens when you just ask for "Bacon, please!"?

Wikipedia link of different cuts of bacon. The link also includes the different local terms for bacon.


I can't say I've browsed through dozens and dozens of no-bake cheesecake recipes but the ones I've looked relied on the ingredients being whipped (usually cream) or gelatin to maintain their shape. Mousse style no-bake cheesecakes use a whipped mixture of gelatin and some milk product that gives the foamy texture.

All no-bake cheesecake recipes (that I've read) require them to be refrigerated before serving. A no-bake cheesecake made with whipped cream, cream cheese, sugar and other ingredients would simply melt into a mess if baked. Ditto for one made with gelatin.

Baked cheesecakes call for eggs and flour to provide structural strength to hold the fats together. I guess if you wanted to add flour and eggs to a no-bake recipe, it might hold some sort of shape. Or not and you get a less spread out mess instead. I really don't think it's at all plausible and I wouldn't want to test it and clean the mess each time.


Ham bone soup and red eye gravy are some common preparations (in the southern US, at least) made from pork leftovers. We'll also make sawmill (white) gravy with cooked sausage. It's delicious over biscuits.


I never succeed in thickening sauces with pasta water. What am I doing wrong?

You seem to have the wrong expectations. No, it will never be as thickening as a cornstarch slurry. If that's the level of thickening you expect, you are really better off using the slurry.
Don't forget that pasta water thickening is a traditional technique from the time when people did not go to the supermarket to buy a pack of cornstarch. They cooked down ripe tomatoes for several hours, and the starchy water saved from needing a few more hours of evaporation. Also, they cooked with homemade pasta, which had some flour residue sticking to it, not the perfectly-gelatinized industrial pastas we buy today.
If this is not how you cook, and if you prefer pudding-thick sauces, then the slurry is probably the better method for you.
I notice Kenji from Serious Eats has also tested pasta water and recommends it for flavor reasons. He also tested it for thickening - but against salted water, not against a slurry. That's what people mean by "it thickens" - it thickens when compared to random liquids, not when compared to thickeners.

There is also another thing that might have been meant in connection with "pasta water for thickening sauce". It is actually a very specific kind of sauce: an emulsion between pasta water and a liquid fat. There, you start with the pasta water, cook it down sufficiently, and stir in the fat into the hot pasta water. It produces a "thick" sauce - not as thick as, say, mayonnaise, but it is certainly thicker than the oil you are putting in, or than the pasta water itself. It may have been in this context that you have been hearing of "pasta-water-thickened sauce" and thought it meant that pasta water is a thickener for random styles of sauce.


Little maggots on top of my home-made apple cider vinegar, is it bad?

I wouldn't even try to salvage this. It's not worth it.

The two main problems I see are:

You don't have enough liquid. There should be enough water and apple juice that apples can drown in it.
Even with a lid on, there should be a gauze under or over it. Like in the old pictures of a jar with anything sweet.

Because those maggots probably originated from fruit flies (or regular flies) that were lured with the sweet scent. And you won't see them under the surface as flies don't lay eggs in water.

The foam/scum would be natural as your mixture started to ferment.


Is it safe to reuse loose tea leaves the next day? What precautions need to be taken for storing tea for reuse?

Here in China, it is normal to reuse tea again and again. Typically the first cup from the tea is bitter. Chinese people commonly pour one cup and then throw it away and drink the second cup from the same leaves. Workers here can be seen with a large mug or jar of tea. When drunk, they top up the water again with hot (but not boiling) water. This will go on all day.

The next day, however, they will not reuse the tea. My Chinese wife always tells me off if I reuse the previous days tea leaves. She says they are bad for you, though I have never had any problem myself.


What's the process of making black garlic called?

What you're describing - a material being broken down by its own enzymes - is usually referred to as "autolysis".


Do flax seeds lose their fiber if cooked?

A survey paper concluded, "Heating generally changes the ratio soluble to insoluble fibre." Both forms are good additions to your diet. The way the ratio change varies from source to source, and the paper does not specify what happens to flax seeds in particular. But flax seeds are well supplied with both kinds of fiber, and unless you have some extreme requirement for one form or the other you'll get sufficient health benefits from consuming them either raw or cooked. (And if you do have extreme requirements you need a doctor's and dietician's advice on your diet.)

This site is not for nutritional advice, so I can't really address the rest of the question, except to note that the form in which you consume the different ingredients doesn't radically alter the nutritional properties. So eating X sugar and Y flour and Z flaxseeds doesn't undo anything; it just adds those amounts of nutritional components to your diet.


How much should a poolish increase in size?

A few things that could be going on:

0.2 grams of instant yeast is a pretty small amount.  Even a little variation in measurement could make a difference in how fast it rises.  Also, whether this small amount was well-distributed throughout the flour at the outset could affect the timing of the rise.
Is the yeast fresh/good?  Older yeast can be sluggish.
How are you measuring whether it "tripled" in volume?  Many people put dough in bowls that get wider toward the top, so it can be difficult to measure exactly when something "triples" in volume.  Unless you're using a straight-sided beaker or something, or have measurement marks on your bowl, it's possible that something "tripled" in volume while not rising to three times the height.
Have you monitored the poolish?  Did it simply stop rising at some point, or was it still rising at 12 hours?  With high-rising preferments, it is also possible that a poolish might rise higher and then fall after some point, collapsing under its own weight.  If you weren't monitoring this, you might see evidence like streaks higher on the side of the bowl if this happened.
If it simply stopped rising at some point, the question of protein content in the flour may be useful to think about.  If the flour doesn't have enough protein, it won't hold up a very high structure in a wet preferment.  Eventually the bubbles will get large enough that they will simply rise to the top and burst, rather than staying within the dough structure.  It's also important to note that higher protein flours can sometimes absorb water better, so if the recipe was designed for "bread flour" or flour with a higher protein content, the moisture level in your poolish could be high enough that it is producing large bursting bubbles rather than holding the air in the dough.

In any case, if the preferment at least doubled in size and/or is very bubbly, I doubt there's anything truly "wrong" and you should go ahead and bake the bread, which will likely turn out fine.


Turkey fat will emulsify into the water at a lower temperature than chicken fat, so one key to clear turkey broth is to be careful to NOT boil it. You want an occasional burble, no more. Also, the proteins in turkey muscle tend to release their bound up water more readily than chicken (that's why turkey often becomes dry more easily than chicken does) and will begin to disintegrate. So the more meat in your carcass, especially white, the more cloudy it will appear.

[as per my own education in Animal Science]


When (and how) do I add a pre-packaged japanese curry to a slow-cooker?

Just break it up and add it after the vegetables and any meats are completely cooked. Do keep the curry on the heat, stirring constantly, until the blocks have become thoroughly incorporated but don't let it stay on the heat unattended after you add the curry blocks as the mixture thickens considerably and may burn (guess how I figured that out).


The method I use is to leave on high for a few minutes to burn off the worst of the food residue.

Then I scrub it with a wire grill brush and , while still warm, I then re-oil with cooking oil.

There are proprietary products you can use and I've seen people using oven cleaner but I steer well away from those!


Leaving empty cast iron pot on a gas stove

I think you should be safe, but depending on the abrasive pad (plastic or metal?), you might have scratched the enamel.

Try the different methods to clean a burned enamel cast iron; most methods used boiling water with baking soda.

https://www.thekitchn.com/how-to-clean-burnt-stains-off-enameled-cookware-cleaning-lessons-from-the-kitchn-217457

or

https://www.epicurious.com/expert-advice/how-to-clean-stained-enameled-cast-iron-pot-article


Can I substitute Soy Milk when a recipe for baking calls for regular milk?

The short answer is yes; the longer answer depends on what kind of soy milk you're buying and how you plan to use it. I've used soy milk in my breads and cakes without noticing much of a difference in texture, but I use the unflavored, unsweetened versions of it (especially in cake-baking, as many recipes call for vanilla and some soy milks have vanilla in them). I avoid "light" soy milk when making creamy dishes or sauces because I want them to have the creamiest texture possible. If you're using soy milk in a soup or stew, don't allow it to boil because that can cause the "milk" to curdle (and add your acids at the end of cooking, also to avoid curdling). Oh, and be aware that some brands of soy milk are very sweet (you can buy it unsweetened, though); the sweetness might not work well in some dishes.


I can't speak specifically to the shelf life of salami, especially considering all of the factors that come into play (source, type, age, storage, etc.), but when dealing with meat in general, you should never eat it if it smells or tastes "off".  Smell is really the most reliable means of determining whether or not meat is still good - far more reliable than the use-by date.

It's unusual for meat to smell or taste sour as a result of foodborne bacteria; sourness is more likely to be due to rancidity of the fats, which is of course equally dangerous, albeit in a different way.  Oxidation is very likely if the meat was not properly wrapped and/or stored in an airtight container.

Of course, many people have trouble telling the difference between spoilage due to rancidity and spoilage due to bacteria, and so what you're perceiving as rancid (sour) may really be bacterial spoilage.

Either way, if it tastes off, it's spoiled; don't eat it.


What effect will this have on my french fries?

I would reverse those two steps -- bake first and then pan fry. By baking first the potato will cook through in the oven without necessarily crisping or burning, then the frying step will add the crunchiness and texture that you want on the outside when you're ready to serve.

Frying first would be the same as searing, which you would only do when you don't want the inside of the food to be cooked as high as the outside. Either one of two things would happen: a) the middle of the fry won't cook all the way through and you'll be left with raw potato on the inside and perfectly cooked on the outside, or b) you'll have to change your timing to leave the fries in the oven long enough to cook in the middle, but that will increase surface exposure to heat and you'll burn the fries.


How does sourdough (wild yeast) starter differ from location to location?

You're right, sourdough starters are different everywhere, based on what yeasts and bacteria are prevalent in that specific location. Certainly climate and altitude affect the living things that float around, so in turn those variables affect starters. I don't know about the poles or the peaks of Denali or Everest, but you can make a perfectly good starter everywhere else, they will have their own character everywhere you go. Even a distance of a few miles can drastically change the flavor and behavior of your starter. Some places have less or slower to grow natural yeast, so starters can take longer in some places to be ready, but it will happen eventually.

Some places, San Fransisco for instance, are well known for their local starters. You can buy San Fransisco sourdough starter online, but your bread will only taste like San Fransisco Sourdough for a few days or a couple of weeks. If you keep that starter alive, it won't take long before it takes on local yeast and bacteria and creates bread that tastes like the sourdough made by everyone else in the neighborhood.

The bottom line is that without speaking to another maker of sourdough in your immediate area, you can't really predict how fast your starter will grow, how often it will need to be "fed" or what your bread will taste like. Allow for some variance due to location, but standard recipes and techniques will work just about everywhere. Once you've made a few loaves, you'll get to know your local yeast!


Googling 香茜 ("Wu Chinese") and 芫荽 ("Chinese") yields the wikipedia page for coriander in both cases. Coriander is also known as cilantro in parts of the world, which causes some confusion with culantro. Parsley is a different plant.


How do I adjust the temp to bake country ribs so they take twice as long?

I don't consider this a complete answer, but I've been told enough times to stop putting potential answers in comments ... so ...

Temperature / time curves are so strange for meats that I find it easiest to look at a whole bunch of recipes, and find the one(s) that match the time I'm looking for, and then average the temperatures from those.

To expand that comment into a real answer, for this particular case, allrecipes.com gives 41 recipes when searching for 'pork country ribs'.  I then weeded out those without temperatures (stovetop, grill, slow cooker), or that weren't actually country rib recipes, leaving me with:

250°F : 2 hrs, drain fat & liquid, coat w/ sauce, another 1hr
300°F : flour & brown on all sides, bake ribs in sauce for 1.5hrs, turn over, another 1.5hrs.  (problem: calls for basting 'several times', which  slows things down)
325°F : simmering for 10 minutes, bake for 1.5hrs
325°F : 1 to 1.5 hrs (until 160°F/70°C)
350°F : 1 hr, add sauce, another 1hr
350°F : grill for 12 minutes, bake for 1hr, add sauce, bake another 1.5 hrs.
350°F : 2 hrs
400°F : 1 hr

Slow cooker, just for comparison:

low :

6hrs ('asian style', so I assume wouldn't be 'fall off the bone')
7 to 9hrs
'about 8 hours' (until tender)
4hrs, add sauce, another 4 hrs
9hrs, straight from the fridge
8 to 10 hrs 'til falling apart (x2)
3 hrs  (major outlier)

high, then low:

1hr high, 8-9 hrs low.

...

So um ... wow, that wasn't useful.  I likely should've made sure if they were bone-in vs. boneless.  And it's possible those baked w/out sauce would have less insulation and cook faster.

Looking at more recipes isn't making it any clearer, but I'd have to say 225 to 250°F to get it take 4 hrs -- warm enough to dissolve the collagen, but low enough to make it take a while to overcook.


How to separate meat from vegetables in a soup?

Since the intermingling of the flavors is what your soup is about, and you want to remove only some of the solids (the chicken), a metal insert or colander might be too cumbersome.

Boil bags are what I’d suggest - cheap, disposable, and will allow everything to simmer together nicely.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B071RJTTXH/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_8SdHCbFWV2C0R


You can curl them at home with a little effort.. Cut your pasta into ribbons and then cut those ribbons into smaller ribbons. Let them dry for just a little while (not so dry that they have lost all moisture) and then pull them gently, twisting them slightly as you do. Let them dry again to set and you should have what you're looking for.


How long is the cooking time for pork roast?

As in all meat cookery, it is not possible to give an exact time, as that depends on too many idiosyncratic variables:  the size of your roast, the temperature it starts at, the temperature of your oven, and so on.

Instead, you want to cook it to a particular temperature as measured with an instant read thermometer in the thickest part of the roast.

A lean roast like this should be cooked approximately to mediumish, which is 150 F or 66 C.  This will probably take about an hour, to an hour and quarter at 350 F / 180 C.

When you suspect the roast is close to being done, insert your instant read thermometer in the thickest part of the roast, as near to the center as you can.  When the temperature stop rising, that is your reading.  You should check several spots, and assume the lowest of them is the temperature to watch.

When the roast is uniformly cooked to the target temperature, it is done.


What is a good resource for learning about Molecular Gastronomy?

Khymos is a fantastic resource, and has probably the best collection of recipes out there at the moment.

There's also a lot of good stuff at the French Cullinary Institute's Cooking Issues blog. They've got a good post on hydrocolloids that's quite enlightening.

I actually disagree on the McGee recommendations. While it's an excellent book, full of great info, I don't think it's a good starting point for molecular gastronomy (in the sense of the cooking movement rather than the more literal sense)


Ice Cream Sugar Substitutes - Applesauce?

Ice cream needs a certain ratio of solids to liquids to work. Sugar is an important solid in ice cream. As applesauce is mostly water, you can't replace all, or even most of the sugar.

The amount of carbohydrates in applesauce will vary depending on how much you cooked it down, but based on a few nutrition data results for the commercial variety, it seems that 40% carbohydrates is a reasonable assumption. So you want to remove some sugar and milk and add the applesauce and some butter (to compensate the missing fat). Calculating with 8% non-fat solids and 4% fat in the milk, and 83/17 fat/water ratio in the butter, we get following substitution: for each 10 g of sugar you remove, you also have to remove 20 g of milk, and add 29 g of applesauce and 1 g of butter. You probably need a recipe with emulsifiers to get the butter into it.

Most ice cream recipes will have much more cream than milk, and so not much milk available to remove. You'll have to recalculate to get the amount of butter needed when you are replacing cream. But the more dairy you remove, the more you are changing the flavor. While the texture is likely to keep up well (the pectin from the applesauce will probably do a good job to reduce ice crystals), the taste will move in direction sorbet. Depending on your expectations, this might be OK for you, or it might be a problem.

As for reducing sweetness, I am not sure this will happen. At very cold temperatures, sugar loses much of its perceived sweetness. Fructose loses some, but not all. And apples are very high in fructose. So, even though not all carbohydrates in applesauce are sugars, you might end up with a quite sweet ice cream. On the other hand, if you used sour-ish apples, the perceived sweetness will be low. There is no way to tell but try it out.


If it's a stainless steel pan then the eggs should not be sticking. Your pan is too hot I think. It is always best to cook eggs over low heat, they won’t stick that way. I always remember this: “More butter less heat”.


How do canned soup companies keep their noodles from absorbing all the liquid in the can?

Canning
I've been looking up canning, as I suspected it had much to do with the process of noodles not absorbing all the water. I've found this tangentially related post and quoting:

You CAN can pasta yourself. It is not difficult but, like the commercial caners [sic] you will need to make sure it is high acid (they add flavorless citric acid) but using a red tomato sauce works just as well.

I have also found this very interesting set of ideas:

The idea is simple and genius: combine par-cooked noodles, a bit of vegetable base, some raw sliced veggies, and a few seasonings inside a jar.

Partial cooking
On an article about partial cooking which has some good ideas on par-cooking. I suspect this, combined with the above factors, as well as vacuum-sealed canning, is what allows for noodles, and vegetables/potatoes, to not absorb all the liquid.
Dig deeper
If you wish to dig deeper, I have found a scientific paper by American Association of Cereal Chemists specifically on the topic of liquid absorption by noodles:
Noodles. V. Determination of Optimum Water Absorption of Flour to Prepare Oriental Noodles


Do dishes used for preparing food need to be washed with soap?

Human saliva is not your only concern.  There are a variety of pathogens that could be problematic if food preparation items (hands, utensils, cutting boards, counter tops, and containers of all sorts) are not properly sanitized. This includes potential pathogens that already exist on the raw food itself. Soap is not necessarily required, but some type of sanitizer is.  Dish soap just happens to also remove grease, and is most commonly found in the home kitchen.


Both the oil and the yogurt are helping to make these cake-like. The easiest fix might be to find a different eggless recipe which calls for butter (or shortening of some kind) and no yogurt. Maybe look  for "ginger snaps", and if you don't want the ginger you can leave it out. I'm pretty sure ginger snaps without the ginger would have to be called "molasses cookies". The following will probably get edited away since exchanging recipes seems to be a no-no, but I did find one recipe here     http://www.spiceupthecurry.com/eggless-gingersnap-cookies-recipe/#wprm-recipe-container-26703

If you want to tweak the recipe you have, my first recommendation would be to substitute butter for some of the oil. Evidently you are open to a little experimentation since you already modified the sugar quantity.

Which brings up sugar quantity: not sure if you want "less soft": brittle and crispy ? -- or "less soft": hard ? White sugar promotes the brittle and crispy characteristic, and flour promotes the just-plain-hard characteristic. So if you want crispy and less sweet, maybe removing some of the molasses would be better than removing white sugar. Losing some of the liquid from the mo. in the batter might also help with getting them less cake-like.

I have made ginger snaps that came out real hard and clunky (sort of like the cheap ones in the box at the supermarket) just by putting in a little too much flour. If that is what you are going for, a little more flour is your answer.

Keeping the cookies in the oven just a teeny bit longer can also harden them up a little.

Of course changing stuff will require a little trial and error to get a good balance, but keep an eye on the dough as you tweak things to make sure the consistency remains reasonable. If you already decided to go ahead and halve one of the ingredients just to see what happens, then it sounds like you are ok with experimentation.


What type of bowl is best for a fruit salad?

I don't think the bowl has anything to do with it, unless it is some sort of reactive metal, but you don't normally find food grade bowls made of a reactive metal?

To stop surface oxidation of non-acidic fruit (apples, bananas etc.) coat them with a suitable weak acid. See this previous answer  How to Prevent Apples from turning Brown


Try 50/50 sugar corn syrup. The corn syrup may help with retention


Why do they put the fruit on the bottom?

Fruit will settle to the bottom of the yogurt during transit anyway; this way, it ends up neat and tidy and intentional. Many people mix it together just before eating if they prefer a more blended flavor.


Can I bake a finished Ginger Bread House

This seems like a bit of a catch-22.

If you bake the assembled gingerbread house for an extra 90 minutes at 90°C, the gingerbread cookies will possibly/likely become dried out, hard, and inedible.

Candies and decoration may become similarly dried out and inedible. Some chocolate or gummy candies may melt, even at the relatively low oven temperature.

I wouldn't consider baking the completed gingerbread house as a means to make it edible. I think it would have quite the opposite effect (though, I've never done it).

I think the real question is whether the raw egg whites used are safe to consume as is. As mentioned in one of the comments, this can vary depending on where/how the eggs are sourced and what country's regulations you're listening to. Here in the US, the FDA warns against eating raw eggs, but US eggs are quite different than European eggs due to the differences in cleaning/processing eggs between the farm and table.


If you're worried about feeding the yeast, you'll probably want to add a little sugar to your recipe. If you keep the amount low enough (I'd probably start with half as much as would usually be used for a given amount of yeast) the yeast will consume all or nearly all of it.

As to cake-like texture, that's as much a factor of lack of gluten development as it is the leavening agent. If you don't have much gluten going, you get that crumbly cake or muffin texture--which is what you want in cakes or muffins.

If you're going to use very little wheat flour or none at all, you might consider adding vital wheat gluten to your recipe so that you can build a decent structure in your bread.

I imagine you'd have to make hundreds of loaves of bread to get the balances right on your own, so I'd recommend looking for low-carb yeast bread recipes that contain a bit of sugar and maybe vital wheat gluten. Those would probably have a decent chance of success.


How to fry in a wok without burning oil?

I think you will find smoking inherent in the wok construction. Every bit of oil that spatters up the sides from deep-frying will smoke.

You may reduce smoking-sides somewhat by using the smallest burner possible but not entirely eliminate it. Many Chinese restaurant kitchens (many Indian too) have small 6 - 8" openings above furnace like flames that the woks nestle into. The sides are sealed against excessive heat.

Also, the heavier the wok the less the sides seem to start smoking ahead of the base which is counter-intuitive given the better distribution of heat by heavy or copper-bottomed woks. I am less certain about this point, merely personal observation.


It doesn't much matter in that respect. The degradation of the gluten structure during a long proofing acts on the constituent parts of the gluten as well, so you can't really 'save' the gluten by delaying its formation.


So I have a method that I just worked out but it is insanely labor intensive and only suited to small batches.  With that said, here you go. Also, steps will be slightly out of order so make sure you read completely through.

To create filled french fries:

First, you need to cut your potatoes into slightly larger fries than normal. You are looking for about 1/2 to 2/3 of an inch on each side.   You need to preheat your grease to 275. Once your grease has preheated, parcook the french fries.  They should be cooked but not crisped or browned. Lay fries in a layer on a pan and place into fridge. Prepare your injection.  I used sour cream but you can add whatever you want. (I thinned the sour cream down with a little milk till it got to the consistency that I wanted) Load your injection into a syringe and inject into the now cooled but not cold fries. Don't over-inject or you will ruin fries left and right. Inject by running the needle fully in, then slowly removing while slowly deploying the filling. As you inject, lay on a pan in the freezer. This is important because you need to get the fries frozen as quick as possible.

While you wait, prepare your seasoned flour.  I tried some with out the flour and the fries tended to lose the filling.  Your are going to be working the fries in small batches.  It is imperative that the fries be frozen through, if they aren't you will lose your filling.  Toss a handful of fries into the flour and coat thoroughly.  Alternately, you can coat fries in an egg wash then flour, but the results were a little too far from traditional fries for me. Toss the fries into 375 degree oil until fries brown and are crisp on outside.  You need to watch carefully and as soon as they start floating count to ten then remove. You can't over cook them or you will not have any filling remaining.

A couple of extras:
I don't know how a filling that is predominately water will work in these, but I would conjecture very poorly given how fries cook.

Your hole in the potato is only going to be sealed with flour so you might see some leakage. I couldn't figure out a way around that.

You benefit from the freezing with a much improved bite texture over my normal fry prep.

The final result has a high wow factor, and was pretty tasty. I am not sure the results are worth the effort, but I think if you try a high flavor filling it will go a long way to making it worth while.


Can I Brown Beef For Slow Cooking the Night Before

I assume that the section of the USDA article you're referring to is this:

  Partial Cooking
  Never brown or partially cook beef to refrigerate and finish cooking later because any bacteria present wouldn't have been destroyed. It is safe to partially pre-cook or microwave beef immediately before transferring it to the hot grill to finish cooking.

Before I go on, I should point out that the USDA obviously has much greater expertise than I do when it comes to food safety.  Nevertheless, I find this recommendation to be extremely bizarre bordering on silly.

For full cuts of beef (not ground beef), bacteria should only be present on the surface.  That is why most people - or at least most people I know - choose to eat their steaks rare, or at most medium rare.  The "interior" is not fully cooked, nor is it supposed to be.

Searing the beef will kill any surface bacteria almost immediately.  That is why rare steak is (relatively) safe to eat.  As far as I am concerned, once the beef has been browned, it is already cooked sufficiently.  The only reason to add it to a slow cooker later would be to tenderize it or even out the cooking.

If the USDA expresses concern over refrigerating beef that has basically been cooked sufficiently, it must be because they believe that browning/searing kills enough of the bacteria to make it safe for direct consumption, but not all of the bacteria - such that they could multiply again and contaminate the food over a long period of time.

But refrigerating immediately after browning should prevent that.  No part of the beef will be in the "danger zone" for longer than 45 minutes or so, and even if you did miss some of the bacteria during the browning and they manage to multiply overnight, you're still tossing them into a slow cooker and that's going to kill any remaining bacteria.

Perhaps I'm missing something obvious, but from what I can tell, any health risks associated with browning a large cut of beef and subsequently refrigerating it for a relatively small period of time would have to be infinitesimally small.  It's not something that I would concern myself with.

Edit:

I did just think of one other possible reason for the USDA warning.  The key phrase is "partially cook."  If the browning is being done as a means for shortening the subsequent cooking time (i.e. slow cooking for 6 hours instead of 12), then you might have a problem.  Because if you don't manage to kill all the bacteria, then the total required subsequent cooking time is going to creep back up as they multiply; that means your 6 hours in the slow cooker that might have been enough if you had seared the beef immediately before, are no longer enough to guarantee safe consumption.

So I am adding a caveat to my original answer: It is probably safe to refrigerate the browned beef, but you should calculate your cooking time as though you had never browned it.  If you are concerned about safety (and I maintain the risks are minuscule), then treat the browned/refrigerated beef as uncooked meat.  If you do that, I cannot see any reason why this wouldn't be safe.


How do I keep cake from collapsing when adding lemon juice?

I think your fat-to-flour ratio for that kind of flour might be too high. Cake flour can't handle a lot of fat. As another answer suggested, try a higher protein flour--start with all-purpose (AP) flour and, if that isn't enough, use bread flour but remember to barely stir it together or you will make a mess. I would mix everything together except the flour first, then carefully stir it in.


A pizza stone can help an older or cheaper oven hold temperature as it will retain heat because of its mass, releasing it when the thermostat turns off the coil and reducing the variability in oven temperature. So, keep your pizza stone in the oven.


Holding a bit of 2X4 (wood) up to the bent edge and banging on the wood with a hammer works for aluminum pans. If steel, but not too thick, the technique should work as well. You have to start slow, with light hits, to get a feel for how much deformation you get for force applied. Don't use a hammer directly on the pan surface, it'll likely leave damaged areas.


If milk is not enriched with vitamin D, it usually contains very little when straight from the cow. This can vary based on the cow's diet and the breed of cow along with other factors.

To find out whether whole milk in your country has added vitamin D, you will need to read the labels on the milk you buy. If it's not mandated by your government, each brand may be different. Generally, if vitamin D is added, it will be listed in the ingredients list and on the nutrition panel under "vitamins".

From the UK dairy council page:

  There are two sources of vitamin D, it is made in the skin by exposure to sunlight and there are a few dietary sources, such as oily fish, eggs, and fortified foods including margarine (which is required by law to contain vitamin D), some yogurts and breakfast cereals. There is very little vitamin D in milk and in fact only trace amounts and in the UK milk is not fortified with vitamin D.

From an organic US dairy:

  Vitamin D: We add vitamin D to all Organic Valley fluid milks, with the exception of some specialty milk products. Vitamin D is naturally present in milk, but it can be low due to several factors like cow breed, seasonal exposure to sunlight, diet, and lactation. For confirmation, please reference the ingredient label.

From the Nutrition Facts on their "Grassmilk" page (which they state does not have added Vitamin D) you can see that it isn't even included on the chart:

If you compare this to the nutrients panel for their regular whole milk, it contains 25% RDV of Vitamin D and the ingredients list includes "Vitamin D3".


Making a gelatin-based and non-sticky "salmon"

I can't read French fluently (or quickly), so I missed any specifics there.
It looks like you probably already cooked your fruit puree? If not, you should. Various fruits contain enzymes that will actively break down the gelatin protein and prevent it from setting properly. This would typically leave a bitter taste. But this might not be your problem.
The other thing you can try is simply using more gelatin powder. 2.25 teaspoons will set about 2 cups of liquid to a fairly soft consistency. You can increase the amount of gelatin to get a firmer, non-sticky gelatin sheet.
I will occasionally make gelatin "noodles" for dessert by 1) hydrating roughly 1/4 cup of unflavored gelatin with 1/2 cup of water, 2) and melting the lump of gelatin in 2 cups of whatever flavored/sweetened liquid I like. I let it set in a non-stick baking dish, or just a Pyrex dish, and generally gave no issue removing the sheet from the pan or slicing it into noodles. The edges might stick, but generally once the seal is broken, the gelatin can be slowly, gently pulled off the bottom of the pan. It will stretch a bit without breaking.
That works out to nearly 4 times the amount of required gelatin. I haven't experimented with reducing that amount since it serves my purposes, but there is plenty of room to do so. The texture of this gelatin is very firm, but it will still melt in your mouth, if more slowly, and is not rubbery or chewy. It also is not the least bit sticky.


What is the difference between preserves and conserves?

The main difference is conserves are boiled down until they reach a consistency that can heap on a spoon. Preserves generally are not boiled down, and are chunky.


What percent of the inside lining of the Instant Pot actually stainless steel?

There is no such thing as a mixed material containing "x percent steel", unless you are talking an inhomogenous composite material (which would be most certainly more expensive than using all steel, and wouldn't look metallic). A metal alloy is either a steel (stainless or not stainless), or it isn't a steel.

There are thousands of stainless steel types (which you could group by 3 major types and a few specialty ones) which have varying corrosion resistance. Also, a major factor here is how the steel was polished/finished.

Have you compared cooking the same dish in another (non instant, non pressure) stainless steel pot?

Were there any other metal items (spoons, standoffs, immersion blenders...), especially made from something else than stainless steel, more than momentarily present in the liquid while cooking or while the contents were still hot? Stainless steel doesn't like being part of a boiling battery...

A salty, sour liquid at pressure cooker temperatures is actually a rather aggressive chemical mixture - even stainless steel has to work hard here.

By the way, the stainless steel typically used for pots has mostly iron (good for you), carbon (not bad for you), nickel and chromium (technically not good for you)...


Soft dinner rolls always taste bland or flat

You've answered this question yourself.

Flavor in bread comes from:

salt
yeast action

and to a lesser degree

fat
sugar

Obviously you have plenty of fat and sugar.
As you suspect, your yeasty flavor will be improved by letting it rise longer in the fridge.

Flat flavor in bread is almost always because of not enough salt. I agree with you that you don't have enough.
As the saying goes: "Bread without salt is insipid"

For how much salt is good, see this question: Amount of salt in bread

About 2% of the flour weight. In your recipe with 5 cups of flour (600g) that would be just over 2tsp of table salt (12g).

I use kosher salt and would probably use closer to a tablespoon for a batch of bread this size.


I want to substitute liquid oil with a dry product

Bisquick is a dry product that contains partially hydrogenated soybean and/or cottonseed oil and leavening. You can get recipe ideas from their website. With the Bisquick, some powdered eggs and powdered milk, you could create all kinds of fun mixes for camping.


Is it safe to use oil at its smoking point?

The smoke produced from a heated oil isn't all too different from the smoke produced by a fire.  You are essentially burning that oil and causing rapid, incomplete oxidation (or rather peroxidation).

In actual fact, the peroxidation will start to occur long before you hit the smoke point; however, smoking is an indicator that this is happening very rapidly.

The net effect is very similar to that of rancidity, in that it will produce many peroxides and free radicals, and while this isn't the place to be debating whether or not that's bad for you, I will simply point to the aforementioned link on free radicals and say that at the present time, the prevailing belief is that these free radicals have deleterious effects.  It's up to you decide what level of risk is acceptable to you.

The effect may in fact be identical to that of rancidity, although I can't confirm that with a source at this time; all I know is that heating an oil up to its smoke point will increase the oxidation rate (make it go rancid faster), and rancidity in turn lowers the smoke point, so the two are definitely related.

So what I'd say is, if you don't mind the idea of occasionally eating rancid fat, then go ahead and smoke it all you want; otherwise, you might want to be more careful.

Several studies also indicate that the fumes are hazardous, even if the actual ingestion isn't.  So again, be careful.  Avoid overheating oil if you can.

By the way, saturated fats like coconut oil, animal fat or (clarified!) butter tend to have the most immunity to this particular chemical breakdown, as evidenced by their naturally higher (unrefined) smoke points.  Lipid peroxidation works on the double bonds, which don't exist in saturated fats (polyunsaturated fats have the most).


Recipes say not to boil butter for beurre monté - why?

Cooking doesn't equal boiling, mind. For example, sous-vide cooking cooks something at very low temperature.

Beurre monté is a sauce of emulsified butter, which will remain emulsified up to 80-85ºC (more or less). If the temperature goes up, your sauce will separate into fat (~80%) and water (a little less than 20%), will lose texture and you also might end up with rancid flavors if the temperature goes up too much and the fatty acids in butter hydrolize (as in break down with the help of water)


How to understand the effect of individual ingredients of recipes?

This is an overly broad question which may get closed by some here for that reason. For the future you may want to limit your questions to specifics goals or issues. It is often helpful to include what you have already tried.

As for general resources YouTube and other sites offer a variety of videos where experts will teach and demonstrate a variety of techniques. If you search Google or YouTube for "Alton Brown" and any of a variety of topics you are likely to find a video that will be helpful. Here is an episode from Alton Brown on Shish-Ka-Bob as an example.

Your profile indicates that you are in Pakistan, some of the best resources I can suggest come not directly from the internet but from television, much of which is also available via YouTube, Hulu and other internet sites. Also The Food Network website is a great resource.


According to Spanish winemaker guru the Marqués de Griñón, you can safely warm a bottle of wine to serving temperature (12ºC-14ºC). Put the microwave at high for two seconds for every ºC you want to raise the temperature.

Also here

Edit: I looked up the reference in his book. It says to heat a bottle out of the fridge (where stored after opening) in the microwave for two minutes at low.


Assuming you're asking about what's pictured in this question, they're basically just bubbles made out of honey, so they'll taste like honey - sweet, and maybe with some fragrance depending on what kind of honey it is.


Mixing cheesecake batter with an immersion blender

The place I learned how to make cheesecake used an immersion blender. because that is what the person teaching me preferred to use. Technically it works, however it was a real pain. I couldn't get the cheese to seperate from the bottom of the bowl. The instructor finally took over and reccommended I use the mixer.
Also you cannot feel the consistency as well, when using a machine to mix the batter, that is why I prefer to use a fork or a hand mixer.

Further info to avoid cracks: Cooking the cheesecake in a waterbath is always the most effective way to avoid cracks.
Put a cake or jelly roll pan beneath your springform pan and cover the bigger pan with water before putting your springform pan in, when you are actually cooking your cheesecake. And slowly. Cranking up the temperature to cook it fast will still kill it even with a water bath. I think that is true for anything you put in the oven though.


How much water to add to rice cooker when cooking brown rice?

A little experimentation with each machine is in order as boiling time and amount of steam lost varies.

A good starting point for short-grain brown rice is to cover by inch.
2 inches if rice is to be rinsed and further steamed.


Wether or not the stone of a rambutan comes out cleanly depends on the specific variety of rambutan:

There's freestone and clingstone ones. The stone of the freestone just pops out, the clingstone ones, well, cling to the fruit. The only option for those is to either try to clean it, make a mess, waste fruit, and fail, or to just pop them in your mouth, suck and chew of the flesh, and spit out the stone.

In other words:
If you want to clean them nicely buy the freestone ones. Problem is: I've never seen rambutans actually labeled as such, at least not where I live, and they're not often available (lychees are more easy to obtain). Maybe it's different in other countries, but over here, it's impossible to tell which variety you have, without trying one.


Can I replace baking soda with bread flour in a cake recipe that already has baking powder?

No. Not at all.

Baking soda is a leavening agent. Together with baking powder it gives your cake lift and airiness. Bread flour is just flour with a higher protein content. If anything, it will make your cake more dense (though not in such small quantities as you would have for baking soda). If a recipe calls for both baking soda and baking powder, the recipe is balanced to rely on both and omitting one will cause the recipe to fail (to some degree). How it will fail will depend on the recipe, which you haven't included.

If you already have baking powder, and don't have the time to find baking soda, I recommend that you instead find a different cake recipe that uses ingredients you already have at home - specifically one that does not require baking soda at all. Many cake recipes use only baking powder, so this should not be overly difficult.

You may be able to replace the baking soda with baking powder at a powder to soda ratio of something between 2-1 and 4-1 depending on who you ask (e.g. two teaspoons of baking powder for one teaspoon of baking soda). Depending on the type of cake this may create off flavors in your final product. This and other possible substitutions for baking soda in cakes are discussed on this site in the related question: Replacements for baking soda in a cake?

Note, while these options are available to you, I still recommend finding a different recipe, particularly if you're not set on this specific one you're already using.

Also, since you mention bread flour, I hope you're not using bread flour for your cake instead of all purpose flour or cake flour. These three flours are quite different and will cause different outcomes if you use one when the recipe calls for another.


How do I turn on an auto ignition stove?

A couple of things. First, you just bought it, it surely came with a manual, you should check there to make sure you're doing it right.

In general there are a couple of things that come to mind:

You may need to turn the burner to high to get it to ignite.
You may not be waiting long enough. It takes a few seconds (at least on mine).
There may be something wrong with your stove. For example, maybe the burners aren't installed properly. You're seeing the spark, so that part is obviously working. If giving it a few seconds on high doesn't get it to ignite, and the manual provides no help, I'd suggest calling the manufacturer or the dealer, they'd be in the best position to diagnose a defective unit.


Removing burnt olive oil from an enamelled cast iron pan and a non-stick marble pan?

Lodge has a pretty extensive, instructions for usage and caring for enamel cast iron pans.

In short the advice is as follows:

Hand washing with warm soapy water and a nylon Scrub Brush is recommended to preserve the cookware’s original appearance. Citrus juices and citrus-based cleaners (including some dishwasher detergents) should not be used, as they can dull the exterior gloss.
If necessary, use nylon pads or scrapers to remove food residue; metal pads or utensils will scratch or chip porcelain.
Remove slight stains by rubbing with dampened cloth and commercial Enamel Cleaner product or other ceramic cleaner according to directions on bottle.
For persistent stains, soak interior of the cookware for 2 to 3 hours with a mixture of 3 tablespoons of household bleach per quart of water.
To remove stubborn baked on food, bring to a boil 2 cups of water and 4 tablespoons of baking soda. Boil for a few minutes then use a Pan Scraper to loosen food.


This probably isn't safe, and there's no reason to do it in the first place
The purpose of sous vide cooking is to get your food to a very specific and even temperature throughout, in order to guarantee a certain degree of doneness and minimise the possibility of overcooking. It achieves this by holding the food in a water bath at that appropriate temperature until the food has equalised with the water in temperature.
Pressure cookers, on the other hand, work by preventing steam from escaping from a boiling liquid, thereby raising the pressure in the vessel and hence raising the boiling temperature, which will allow certain reactions in the food to proceed more quickly than they would at a regular boil. This means that a pressure cooker is held at a much, much higher temperature than a sous vide water bath - indeed, if i wanted to overcook food without burning it, an extended stay in a pressure cooker is the most effective method I can think of.
If your sous vide bags can handle the elevated temperatures of a pressure cooker (and I don't think that's true for you; a quick Google suggests that pressure cookers are generally capable of hitting 250 degrees Fahrenheit, which is the number you provided for your specific bags) there may still be a danger in putting them in your pressure cooker; when you release the pressure, the liquid inside your pressure cooker boils rapidly to come back down to a temperature that makes sense at its new pressure; the liquid sealed inside your sous vide bags, however, can't vent to the atmosphere, meaning that your sous vide bags are suddenly themselves tiny pressure cookers, except they're not built to withstand internal pressure like that and will likely burst, spraying boiling liquid out of the pot.
In summary, cooking food sous vide inside a pressure cooker will generally drastically overcook it, and then, if you're not careful, spray boiling liquid around your kitchen. Personally, I wouldn't try it.


What would be good substitute for Thyme and Oregano in Chili

There is tremendous variation in how chilis are flavored; if you have three chili cooks in the room, you probably will have six  different opinions.

The most traditional flavor base is built on chili and cumin, plus (depending on region and variant), tomatoes, onions and/or garlic.

After that, you get into preference.  Some cooks don't add any herbs at all.  Others add complex blends of spices (even chocolate) rivaling some of the mole sauces of Mexico.

I think the most compatible herbs for chili include include Mexican oregano (which is a different herb than oregano), so if you can get it, it is the best choice, oregano (as you have already mentioned), and thyme.  I do like to put a bay leaf or three in my chili although that may not be traditional.

Still, if you don't have them available or cannot use them for some reason, leaving them out is a fine option.


What's the difference between orange extract and orange blossom water?

Orange blossom water is distilled from actual orange blossoms, and will have a subtle orange flavor, probably more delicate and complex than orange extract, at least on a per volume basis.

Orange extract comes from the zest or colored part of the fruit, and is a very powerful flavoring with a strong orange presence, but no acidity.

You will find that blossom water is more commonly used in recipes from the middle east and northern Africa, that have migrated up into Italy and France as well.

Orange extract is used in more assertive, more typically western recipes.

Given that fresh oranges are readily available, and the zest can be removed and use directly, using either of these is not as common as it otherwise might be.


What does the Cinnamon in my coffee turn into?

Cinnamon is made from the ground bark of a variety of trees in the Cinnamomum genus. All of these barks contain starches, soluble fibers, and insoluble fibers to some degree.

Lower grade cinnamons such as Cinnamomum cassia contain higher amounts of lignins, bassorins, pectins, and mucilages; accounting for almost 80% of the mass of the powdered cinnamon.  These compounds form gummy, mucus-like masses when hydrated or dissolved in water.  The mucilages in cinnamon can be dissolved in cold water, but it takes heat and time to fully hydrate the bassorins and other compounds which creates a gummy mass.  Higher quality cinnamon from different species may contain less mucilages or other compounds, but all powdered cinnamon will form a mass to some extent.  Herbs and spices such as cardamom, chicory, nutmeg and many others contain many similar compounds in various proportions that could also form gummy masses, but it would take research and/or experimentation to figure out the amounts needed.

Cinnamon flavors can be added to coffee without ending up with sludge in your cup by adding the cinnamon to the brewing chamber or by adding cinnamon extract or cinnamon essential oil to the brewed coffee.


As long as they aren't spoiled they'll be fine for a crumble/crisp/cobbler. You'll want to have someone else taste them to make sure first. They may need less sugar and less or no precooking. If they are really, really mushy then you might want to add some firmer plums or other fruit to give some texture.


There are electrical devices using a tumbler:

http://www.amazon.de/Melissa-646120-Kartoffelsch%C3%A4lmaschine/dp/B0079X0EQ6

(The German name is "Kartoffelschälmaschine" for anyone who wants to research it and doesn't like to read encoded URIs ;)

Interestingly, they are uncommon in the US judging by the amazon offers there- instead, the US knows a lot of electric versions of the "apple peeler/corer/slicer" design (which could probably peel a potato too if it was reasonably round, or a certain amount of waste is accepted).


Is it ever more accurate to measure by volume rather than by weight?

Better is a subjective term, however you can see what is done in practice as a guide to what people think is generally efficient as a balance of preparation speed, accuracy and cleanup.

Many recipes use a combination of volume and weight. Volume for most liquid measurements like milk, water or stock is considered more efficient than weighing them because although weighing is more accurate in most recipes the differences are small enough not to make a difference.

Weight is generally considered more efficient than volume for larger quantities of dry ingredients or gels (butter, lard, shortening) as it's faster, more accurate, and less cleanup.

Small amounts of wet and dry ingredients like spices, herbs, powders, flavorings etc are usually measured using volume measurements like teaspoons and tablespoons. I've tried it both ways and I've found that using teaspoon fractions is much faster than trying to weigh out small amounts of ingredients, and that my scale isn't accurate enough to weigh the fractions of grams you'd need to get that level of accuracy.


I agree with the "fast rise" requirement. An additional suggestion: it might have been not the oven, but your muffin tin.

A hot oven is not enough for pop overs, you need well preheated containers. Originally, you would use iron ones, not just a muffin tin. If you do have to go with the tin, choose a metal one, the ones with silicone cups just don't hold enough thermal energy to give to the dough.

Be generous with the fat. It is not only the tin which makes them rise well; being dropped in sizzling hot fat does them good. The pastry brush suggestion doesn't sound too well; it might work, but you are on the safe side if you melt a bit of lard in each cup. It is even better to get it heated on the stove, it gets hotter than in the oven.

And a different suggestion: The temperature of the batter is important too. They tell you to use warm ingredients, and that is good. Too cold and you won't get the popovers to steam internally quickly enough. But be aware that you shouldn't make it too hot. If your milk and/or butter is hot enough to cook the eggs while mixing, the batter won't rise. Best to use all warm ingredients in the 40-50 degrees celsius (100-120 fahrenheit) range.


Does the yogurt set from 500 ml milk result in 500 g yogurt?

Making yogurt means letting lactic acid bacteria alter the texture and chemical composition of milk by digesting lactose and producing lactic acid, which in turn interacts with the proteins in the milk, causing the milk to thicken and taste sour.

Unlike in cheese making you are not separating curds and whey, so you are not "losing" significant amounts of substance.

Yes, there might be some fluctuation - an increasing number of lactobacillae and them eating lactose - but on a very small level.

For our general kitchen precision, 500 g milk makes 500 g yogurt.

 Side note: 500 ml milk is not exactly 500 g, in fact, it's 510 g according to my sources, but I consider these values precise enough for general cooking purposes. Otherwise, you can't even stir, as minute amounts will remain on spooons or in your pots and pans. This is a kitchen, not a lab.


If you want to reduce total preparation time, you can skip the soak. Then you can just boil for about 4-6 hours, instead of soaking overnight. This is not a tradeoff most cooks are willing to make, since it wastes quite a bit of energy, and reduces the taste qualities of the prepared beans somewhat.

If you want it even faster, as weets mentioned, pressure cooking is the way to go. Then you can get away with about 45-50 minutes for unsoaked and 25 minutes for soaked beans - that's the time spent at pressure, the total time will depend on the warming up time, which differs with pressure cooker type and total amount of beans you are cooking at once. The same preference for soaked beans applies with pressure cooking.

If these times don't work for you, you cannot reduce them, but you can switch to buying canned beans. The disadvantages there are the higher cost, higher storage volume, and the fact that some brands have off tastes.


Cocoa powder stays stuck at the bottom of the cup

Cocoa powder does not dissolve in liquid, it prefers fatty liquids like milk.
You need to create a liquid think enough so that the cocoa particles stay suspended in it.


How to avoid ridiculously salty results when brining?

Did you rinse the ribs well enough before cooking? Brined food should be rinsed several times to remove brining solids from the surface of the food before cooking.


How do I get sausages to cook evenly in a pan?

Whenever I have cooked sausages in a pan, I have always added some water in the pan that way they cook through on the inside. Once they are cooked through and the water has evaporated, I keep them in the pan to crisp up the outside.


Why does my fudge always set up like a rock?

In Scotland we make a kind of fudge that is deliberatly hard and crystallised known as Tablet. This was a popular treat when I was growing up. Essencially the recipe for tablet, soft fudge, toffee and caramel are quite similar. The difference is made by how you cook and treat the mix as it cools.
Essentially you need to know about sugar boiling points. There are two important levels used: soft boil, and hard boil. My cook books suggest using a sugar thermometer to get the perfect boil but I've never found a sugar thermometer in the shops. Instead I rely on a great deal of practice, the colour, the texture and the drip of the mix to gage how hot the sugar is.
In a soft ball (234–240 °F or 112–115 °C), if you drip the mix onto a very cold surface or into cold water, then touch the drip with your finger, it will be soft like caramel. Additionally the colour will change from cream to yellow/tan.
In a hard ball (250–266 °F or 121–130 °C), dripping again onto a cold surface or into cold water, then touching the drip with your finger, it will be firmer or even hard. The colour will darken slightly to a dark yellow or light brown.
For caramel and fudge you go to a soft boil then cool. For tablet and toffee you go to a hard boil.
The next part is the cooling. This is equally important as the boiling. The faster you cool the mix the smaller the crystals become. The slower, the larger. If you want a caramel or a toffee, you must avoid agitating the mix as it cools. For fudge you should stir the gently as it cools slightly before pouring onto the try. For tablet, the mix should be vigorously stirred until stiff then poured onto a try.


Is this cooking method likely to yield a tasty pork chop?

So let's see what would happen:

salting

Assuming you mean brining, not too much. The meat would absorb some of the liquid, that would be unwanted in step 2.
If you mean a dry rub with salt, the outer layer of the meat would dry out a bit. Not nice for a lean chop.

making confitSlow simmering in fat would most likely render the lean meat of the chops tough. Confit is excellent for meat with a higher internal fat content - think duck legs vs. duck breast. Neck instead of chop could work.
smoking
The meat from step 2 now contains a lot of fat (albeit little moisture), especially in the outer layer. Fat absorbs and binds scents. In perfume-making fat was used to extract aromatic oils that couldn't be heated. So the result of smoking the chops would be a lot more intense than you'd probably expect.

As I said in my comment: Smoked shoe leather. I wouldn't recommend it.


How to reduce the taste of horseradish in hummus?

Yes. Make it again and don't add horseradish. I'm totally serious - no traditional hummus recipe in the known universe has horseradish in it. There is nothing you are going to be able to do to your existing batch to remove that flavor, other than diluting it, but I don't think you'd be able to dilute it enough to be worth the effort.


Generally speaking when speaking of "stew beef", the meat will break down more the longer you cook it. I often make shredded beef for tacos out of that cut by simmmering it for a few hours or more. At 1 hour, I'd say it was undercooked.

For example: http://www.foodnetwork.ca/recipes/Main/Beef/recipe.html?dishid=1772

In there he recommends using stewing beef, browning it first and then "... stew until the meat is tender and can be cut with a spoon. This will take at least an hour and a half."


How long is it safe to drink coffee after brewed?

If it's refrigerated, it'll last for at least a week, as long as you didn't pre-dairy it.

Unrefrigerated, I wouldn't trust it for more than a day. Coffee is a crappy growth medium and it should start out the next best thing to sterile, but, even covered, its going to start to get moldy.

Obviously if you add dairy, then you're dealing with that dairy shelf-life, and that isn't very long at all.


Help! I poured the syrup over my Baklava before I baked it. Is it ruined?

You have ruined it as baklava, pouring the syrup on before baking means it won't crisp up, you can't pour the syrup out and get the same result. However, you may as well just bake it and see what comes out, it won't be baklava but it may taste good. Feel free to post an answer if you do and tell us what it was like.


How to figure out where is the best place to store homemade cookies: in the fridge or on the counter, in an airtight container or elsewhere

If the cookies are baked, I cool them completely. Then, I put them on a plate and under a cake dome. They look nice, don't get smashed or crumbled, keep their flavor, and maintain their texture for a few days.

I do not store baked cookies in the refrigerator because I have had problems with the cookies becoming dry (even in an airtight plastic bag).

If I don't need to bake all of the cookies at once, my best results come from freezing the cookie dough and baking on demand.

I mostly bake chocolate chip or sugar cookies. So, my answer is based on those types of cookies.


When coating raw meat with flour, does leaving it for a period of time make the flour 'disappear'?

It doesn't go into the meat, it soaks up water and becomes a slurry. The slurry is transparent, so you don't see it.

If you fry it as it is, you won't prevent spraying and sticking the same way it would have been possible with a dry flour layer. If you roll it again, you will have these effects again, plus slightly more heat buffering because of the double amount of crust. The crust will be more noticeable in taste, towards schnitzel style.

In general, you don't want it to happen at all. If you miss your timing and it happens, re-roll. But the proper way to do it is to roll each piece separately, directly before dropping it in the pan. This gives you the optimal effects from the flour with minimal change in taste.

If you want the benefits and taste of a thick crust, make a real schnitzel, including pounding the meat thin and making several alternating layers of egg and flour in the crust. Double dipping in flour is not a good approximation, it is a middle thing which doesn't approach the good parts of either technique.


How can I make McDonald's type French Fries

What you want is Kenji Lopez-Alt. Here.

Summary:

Cut fries 1/4 inch thick to maximize crispiness
Blanch fries with a little vinegar in the water
The vinegar preserves the potatoes' pectin and keeps them from disintegrating in the water
Briefly fry
Freeze the fries
This opens up their internal structure and allows more crispification
Before serving, fry for the last time

Another advantage of doing fries this way is that the blanching, pre-frying, and freezing can be done in large batches in advance.


Why should I let bread cool before slicing and eating?

It is because of the way starch retrogrades. It does so in stages. The first stage needs between 1 and 2 hours, the second one a few days.

You have probably seen it more clearly in starch-thickened puddings: they thicken a bit on stovetop, but are only ready to unmold after a few hours, else they wuoldn't keep their shape. In a bread, the starch granules are the same way: right after baking, they contain too much moisture.

Sure, if you eat the bread right away, the aroma is very good. But the texture is problematic. It gets doughy and dense at the smallest amount of pressure. Tearing instead of cutting helps a bit. And if you are at home, eating with your family, go for it and eat the tasty still-hot bread. It is especially good with soft, low-gluten breads made with AP flour with the least amount of bran (50% milling grade or even less), my grandma would say that they "melt in the mouth" when they are hot. But if you serve bread slices to guests, or want to spread something on the bread, wait for its starch to set.

On a side note, the second stage of starch retrogradation is the reason why you should use day-old bread for crumbs for thickening, and the third stage is the one which makes bread inedible. But this goes too far away from the original question.


I am sensitive to Caffeine, how could I prepare a chocolate-like sauce?

There's actually very little caffeine in chocolate. So little in fact that decaffeinating it in any kind of economical fashion is next to impossible. Scientists have done it in the lab, but doing it on a scale where you could actually buy it at a reasonable price remains out of reach for most. If you feel like chocolate leaves you 'wired' it's probably down to the theobromine which is another chemical present in chocolate which is structurally very similar to caffeine, but it has a more pronounced affect on your body and heart rate than your head usually.

I'm not sure if this would work, but you could try steeping cocoa powder multiple times. Caffeine (and I'd assume theobromine as well) are very water soluble. For example, with tea approximately 75% of the caffeine will dissolve out of the tea leaves into the water after a single steeping. If you took cocoa powder and steeped it in hot water, and then filtered it through a coffee filter, and did this a few times you should be able to eliminate most of the caffeine and theobromine. You could then use the cocoa powder to make some sort of chocolate-like sauce by adding in some sweetener and coconut oil to make it vegan.

Or you could use carob.


It doesn't sound like you have anything to worry about. It's very possible that botulism or some other organism grew in that time in those conditions, so you were right to throw the food away.

You can't get botulism or other foodborne illnesses from smelling food, you'd have to actually eat the food to get sick, which you wisely didn't do. Thoroughly cleaning the container will get rid of any contamination on it and make it safe to use again. I wouldn't worry about the sink personally, just give it a rinse afterwards.


Do modern ovens bake the same as the old ones? Is the new oven the reason popovers don't rise?

I'd guess it's not the new oven that's wrong, but the old one.
Older ovens has less accurate thermometers & were maybe 20° hotter at the top than the bottom. The chances are your hand-me-down recipe was based on this phenomenon & your new one is accurate… & therefore not hot enough.
I'd never heard of popovers until 10 minutes ago, but reading through recipes online, they seem to be exactly same as Yorkshire Puddings, just served with sweet toppings instead of roast beef & gravy. [How two sides of the Atlantic arrived at that difference, I'll never know nor understand ;)
Most say to use 450°F [230°C] which is more like I'd use for Yorkies - in fact for Yorkies, the hotter the better, preheat your tins too. My rule of thumb has always been, once everything else is done [roast dinner, remember;) just turn the heat to max, add your oil & put your tins in the top half [high as you can but leaving room to rise], then give it 15 mins to come up to temperature. The oil should be smoking before you drop your batter.
Pour quickly & get that door shut. Once in, never open the door until they're ready.
After comments
I've never known anyone to drop the temperature half-way through [but then again, 'crispy' is not something I'd want from a yorkie [only supermarkets & restaurants think they should be crispy, ordinary Yorkshire folks don't]), but I still think you're not getting enough heat into them right at the start.
Maybe your oven really does slump the temperature easily; maybe you've got the door open too long or the element isn't fast enough to get back up to temperature; tins aren't hot enough to start with.
I'd try at least once with the oven simply "on full" - whatever it thinks it can go to - but watch it doesn't switch mode right at the top. if I turn mine full then back it switches to rotisserie/fan grill rather than 'oven'. That might be a little excessive ;)


I've used butchers twine on the grill many times with only the cut ends charring a bit.  As the meat cooks the twine absorbs some of the fluid that it exudes, which evaporates and cools the twine some.  By the time the twine chars the meat has started to shrink and usually the shape has at least started to set.

As an alternative you can use wire. Stainless steel wire for this purpose can be purchased online from many grilling and BBQ retailers. For larger projects, like whole hog rotisserie, I've seen people use chicken wire fencing material.  Just make sure to thoroughly clean off any oil or coating that may be on the wire before using it on food.


How should I pick a flour volume to weight conversion for an arbitrary recipe?

This may seem to be an overly simplistic response, but if it's in a decent cookbook that deals with baking, the book often has an introduction or appendix or chapter that describes how to measure flour.  If it does, I measure the flour according to their directions, which can give a weight estimate.  Older cookbooks tend to advocate a lot of sifting before weighing (in my experience).  Newer ones sometimes mention spooning then leveling.  And I've seen at least a couple which just admit they scoop and sweep.

If the recipe is from a book without such instructions or an internet resource without such instructions, I generally avoid it unless it's a type of recipe where I know exact flour measurement is unlikely to have a big impact.  If I end up using such a recipe with no guidance on flour measurement, I sometimes try to take the era of the source into account if I know.  Otherwise, I'm not sure my personal practice matters, because I'm just guessing -- like anyone else who answers this question will likely be.  (Frankly, I worry this question is likely to turn into a poll.)


Off flavor whipped cream from an ISI charger

Bob, welcome to Seasoned Advice. Are you thoroughly rinsing whatever chemicals you use to clean it? Also, are you adding any other ingredients, such as sweeteners?

Obviously it wouldn't be the same bad batch of cream over a full year (although that would certainly explain a gross taste...), but you might check the freshness and flavor of any other ingredients.


Using applesauce to sub for butter in biscuits

Adding butter to biscuits or bread is what allows for that flakiness in the crust and that creamy texture in the bread itself. Lard would give you the same effect -- it's pretty much the saturated fat that makes the biscuit taste so great. Substituting applesauce for the butter won't give you the same results. It will be edible, but it will be more like a quickbread or cake than the biscuits you were hoping for.


The rim is off, the lid is secure, but the button can move up and down, is it safe?

The button on a metal lid- whether purchased or home canned- is an indicator of a vacuum in the bottle.

During canning, a vacuum is formed that sucks the lid on tight and pulls in the button so it can't be depressed.

If the button can be "popped" then there is no vacuum and the bottle is not sealed. If the lid doesn't move that just means it's stuck not that it is sealed.

This means that the safety of the food is compromised. If you just canned the bottle then you can either try to can it again with a new lid or put it in the fridge to consume immediately. If it has been in your pantry then consider it spoiled and throw it out.

Incidentally- having a button not pop does not guarantee that the bottle is sealed. Rarely, the button will be sucked in and the seal will fail but the button does not pop back out. If the lid is stuck in place you would discover this when opening the bottle as there would be no resistance from a vacuum. After bottling, I gently check the seals on my lids even if the button is in.


Medium-rare sous vide steak - achieving coloring without slicing?

My observation for cooking steak sous-vide and avoiding this issue is as follows:

If I cook it in a complete vacuum, it really stays gray for a longer time. Cooking in a zip-loc bag helps me shorten the time the steak turns red.
Normally you’re not supposed to rest the steak after sous-vide cooking. However, resting can also help (without cutting into it) the steak turning red from gray.


I doubt it'd increase the proofing time, since that doesn't generally vary with the quantity of dough; the yeast is working in all the dough at the same rate. It would definitely need to increase baking time, though, since it takes longer for heat to transfer all the way into a larger loaf.

Sounds like with that machine you might have to do some non-automatic proofing in order to increase the time, e.g. with a preferment.