Never go by time when roasting nuts.  Always go by smell.

When you smell toasted nuts, get them off the heat immediately, and out of the hot pan.


How do you make a smooth and creamy apple custard?

Bake the apples and have them dry and crisp up (cut the apples thin so that they dry up evenly and crisp faster) and concentrate the flavour. Then blend to a powder and mix into the custard.
Cook and reduce the apples till a very tender gooey apple pie texture comes and then thicken and reduce excess water as to not thin out the custard, mash till homogenized and fold in with custard.
Get something like apple juice and reduce till thick and add sugar to make syrup and use that in addition or in place (depending how much you want in) of the sugar for the custard recipe.

Personally I'd go with the first option though time consuming.


Mushrooms typically release water if they are overcooked and also if salt is added too early in the cooking process.

When cooking mushrooms, cook them on a relatively high heat until they have just developed some colour. at the end of the cooking process add your seasoning.


What is the reason behind seasoning "from a distance"?

Looking at the Scallop-and-peas video, it just looks like the chef is trying to sprinkle seasoning evenly onto a relatively small area of food. If you rain seasoning down from a distance it is less likely to land unevenly than if you shake some on at close range. Imagine spray-painting a wall: for even coverage, you gotta stand back.

In the case of the Turkish meat-chef, it is because it looks cool. Notice his theatrical posture.


What function that is suitable for baking cookies

A convection oven uses a fan that circulates the air so it shouldn't matter which self you use in the oven. I suggest you use the bake setting which only uses the lower heating element and not the roast setting which uses both the upper and lower element. When I bake cookies I baked it 25 degrees lower in my convection oven. Hope that helps!


Does cornstarch affect the pH of what I'm cooking?

I don't have any info on the affect of pH, but cornstarch can make your compote separate when canned: http://www.sbcanning.com/2011/08/canning-pie-filling-education-in-clear.html.

Two alternative thickeners are tapioca and clearjel.  I've used clearjel for canning with excellent results.  I haven't used tapioca to can, but do prefer it in my pies.

(posted as an answer per Sobachatina's recommendation)


I have always made sure that I only defrost enough to meet the needs of the moment for sushi.  If you cut the blocks into 4 to 8 rolls worth, they should defrost under running water in just fifteen to twenty minutes, just about the time it takes me to do a batch of sushi rice.  That said, fish once defrosted will start to lose flavor immediately but will remain edible for 2 days.  Once it starts to smell, get rid of it immediately, and I would play it very safe on that "starts to smell" the faintest whiff should be enough to send it to the bin.


Is mechanically separated beef legal in products in the U.S.?

My knowledge MSM Beef was banned in 2004 but had been used since at least the 80s before that. I originally heard about this from my dad who was and is still a butcher manager.
I just texted him and he said that MSM Beef is still prohibited for human consumption because of mad cow disease but mechanically separated Pork is legal and can be used when the package says so. He was not sure about chicken but if it's not banned then they probably do put it in products. he says he likes that they "use as much of the animal as possible but yes , its kinda gross."


Why do some pies call for two crusts, and some do not?

Yes, it is mainly tradition, appearance, and how you like the ratio of crust to fruit in your pie. You can make any pie open faced, with a full top, or any type of lattice top. The other thing to consider is that a top crust provides some heat insulation to the fruit, so if you don't want the fruit to caramelize as much, it will help with that.


From a search I found this simple recipe for Rakugan. Scan to bottom of page.


I was also unable to find the extract, but I was able to find a site that allows you to purchase the chinotto sour orange tree!

Here you go: https://www.fourwindsgrowers.com/store/sour-orange-trees.html?page=shop.product_details&flypage=flypage.tpl&product_id=30&category_id=8


How to clean an all-clad stainless steel pan

Brillo/S.O.S pads (the real metal ones) and Barkeepers Friend.Recently I found a liquid Barkeepers Friend that works well also.

Use the Barkeepers Friend first or just trade off.  Brillo/S.O.S last.

There has never been crud or discoloration that has survived these two products. There have never been scratches with Brillo/S.O.S on my stainless steel both inside and out All Clad.

I think that Brillo/S.O.S works to really put a shine on the interior of the pan.  Eggs do just slide around.  Not too shabby.


The water frequently sits in the danger zone for bacterial growth, and even though it is a sealed bag, fats can migrate through the plastic (not considering contamination to the outside of the bag either from cross contamination or from juices drawn out during vacuuming/sealing).

I would suggest changing the water if:

is looks dirty/cloudy
it smells like anything other than water

Additionally from the PloyScience site:

  Occasionally or when a cooking pouch may have leaked, simply replace the water with a vinegar/water solution and run unit at 160°F for 25 minutes to remove any residuals or lime.

So you can probably throw a little vinegar into the water to up the pH and make it more hostile to bacteria (though it will smell up the house when you use it).


Preventing Diced Vegetables Added to Simmering Liquid From Becoming Mushy

Once you add the vegetables to the broth, they are going to begin absorbing water and becoming softer and eventually become mushy.

This effect is slowed but not eliminated when the soup is cooled.

The only robust way to prevent it is to only add vegetables to the portion that you are going serve immediately, and then serve the soup promptly when the vegetables are cooked to your liking.


I recently seasoned my new stone by lightly oiling it and heating it at 450 degrees for about 20 minutes. The biggest thing to remember is placing the stone in a cold oven, and removing it from the oven only after its cooled back down. Taking the stone in or out of the oven while the oven is hot can cause the stone to thermal shock and break.


You could make a ganache type filling if you used water, cocoa powder,chocolate chips, butter, and icing sugar. Adding all but the chocolate chips in a saucepan will create a chocolate like sauce. Thick and with body. Once everything has melted,and blended smoothly together, you add the chocolate chips with the heat off. let the residual heat melt them the rest of the way. Once cooled it can be sandwiched between cookies, cake topping, cupcake "frosting", eclair icing. It is a shelf stable "ganache" like filling I like to use. In terms of quantity, I use 1 Lb. butter, 4 cups icing sugar, 1 cup water, 1 cup cocoa powder, 2 cups chocolate chips. This is a very rough recipe as I do most of my pastry making/baking by feel. *Note...The more chips you add, the thicker the end results.


Why is my stock jelly-like when cold but watery when hot?

The properties of gelatin are that it gels when it cools and turns liquid above 90F (32C). There's nothing wrong, it's supposed to do that. The melted gelatin has a silky mouth feel which many consider desirable.


I think that first you need to decide on the type of bread you want to achieve, which basically means deciding which leavening agent and which baking method to use.

Leavening.
Common leavening agents are yeast, sourdough, baking powder/baking soda, unleavened bread, and eggs. For creating a new recipe, you should pick a method you are very familiar with. Eggs and unleavened are more likely to fail if the proportions are not optimal, so I'd say you shouldn't create a recipe with them from scratch, it is much safer to alter an existing known-good recipe. Also, experiments with nonsweetened dough using baking soda have taught me that while it is no problem to achieve a good leavening, the taste is often bland and dry. So I'd say to go classic with yeast or sourdough. As I don't have much experience with sourdough, I will describe the yeast case here. If you are a sourdough expert, you'll probably be able to duplicate my reasoning for sourdough.

Baking. As for baking methods, the oven is the traditional one, and a bread-baking machine should be equivalent. There are types of bread made on a stovetop (with or without fat) and also some which require open fire, but oven is the classic one and probably the easiest to work with.

Non-flour grains. Now we have decided on yeast and oven/machine, we want to determine the proportions. The most important variable should be, as you mentioned, the moisture content. I think that the easiest way to ensure that the non-flour solids (cracked wheat, bran) don't soak up too much moisture is to precook them. Then you can also time the baking after the doneness of the crumb and the crust, without worrying if the bran etc. are already done. So just boil them separately (or together if you are sure that their cooking time is similar), until they are al dente (completely done is probably too much, as they will be spending time in the oven). While still hot, put them through a sieve and then spread them on something (e. g. baking sheet) so they can lose the excess moisture while cooling down. This is only for dry grain products; if you decide to use something else too (e.g. sunflower seeds), it doesn't need the precooking.

Water. Now your additional ingredients are rendered more or less moisture inert, you can determine the ratio of water to flour. All bread yeast recipes (and lots of other yeast dough recipes) I've come across require you to add between 35% and 65% of the flour's weight in water (35% for some hard rustic breads, but very uncommon, and 65% for soft airy breads like baguette). (Edit as derobert pointed out, this range is somewhat low, you can have bread which uses much more water than that, though probably not kneaded, and the 35% dough will require additional sources of moisture. So trying to create a recipe from scratch on the lower end of the range would be quite risky). As the additional ingredients still present some risk regarding moisture (and I cannot tell you if they tend to lose the already soaked moisture or start getting more from the dough), you should steer well away from both extremes and stay in the middle, at somewhere like 50-55%. As the whole wheat flour will need slightly less water than the white flour, I'd say go with 50% (and also because of the fat - see below). So if you use 500g flour, add 250ml water. And yes, you have to work with flour by weight. Flour by volume is way too risky for a new recipe, especially if you are mixing two different types.

Fat. A good way to reduce the risk of getting bread which is too dry is to add fat to the dough. For bread, it is more typical to use a fat which is liquid at room temperature, but for some richer breads, butter is also used. For your whole-grain kind of bread, I'd tend to use either a neutral or a nut-tasting oil (canola, refined safflower, walnut, pumpkin seed, maybe even hazelnut if you want to go exotic). But too much fat would be a problem, not only because it hampers yeast leavening, but also because the whole grain stuff cannot soak it up as well as white flour. So a tablespoonful of fat per 500g flour should be enough.

I wouldn't use any liquids other than water and oil the first time, it makes things more complicated. If you make it and notice that you have some leeway in moisture, you can experiment with other stuff.

Yeast. Now about the yeast. Normal bread calls for between 10 and 25g fresh yeast per 500g flour. More yeast results in more leavening, with big air pockets in the crumb, but the bread dries more quickly afterwards. As your dough contains lots of inert mass beside four and liquid, my intuition go for about 20g yeast per 500g flour. (I am assuming here that your so-called "bread flour" is just a white flour and not some premade baking mix already containing a leavening agent. If it is premixed, it is best to leave it out completely and use normal white wheat flour instead. If you don't want to, you have to read the ingredients list very carefully, calculate the proportion of leavening agent, salt, and other stuff it contains, and change the ratios of the things you will be adding). Just remember to put it in a big enough pan for baking, because under perfect conditions, dough with this amount of yeast can increase its volume up to 2.5-3 times while baking. If it turns out well moistened but with too big air pockets in the crumb, either use less yeast, or add an emulgator (lecithine, egg yolk).

Don't forget to use some salt, it is very important for a yeast dough. Typical dosage is one teaspoonful per 500g flour.

Amount of "other" ingredients. As for the ratio of the atypical ingredients, I'd say that mixing too much of them up is too risky. There is bread made completely without flour, but not yeast bread. I think that it is best to add no more than 50% of the flour's weight in inert (=non-flour & non-liquid) ingredients, maybe even as low as 15-30% the first time and then increasing if the initial batches turn out well.

Preparing the dough. For the mixing, the traditional method is time-consuming, but the least risky. Make a predough from some water warmed to 35°C, a flush tablespoonful of sugar, a tablespoonful or two of flour, and the yeast. Mix your flours, the salt and any dried herbs you are using in a bowl, make a hollow in the middle. When the predough becomes foamy, pour some of it in the hollow and mix it with enough flour to make a thick fluid, like pancake batter. Then add some more predough, mix in some more flour, etc, until the predough is used up. Then pour the oil in, stir well, and continue stirring while grabbing some more flour, until it is too thick for stirring. Then start kneading. Continue until you have a dough of the consistency you wish. Then take it out of the flour bowl and knead the wheat, flakes, etc. into it, as well as any non-dry herbs.

This kneading method is much more work than dumping everything into a bowl and using a handheld mixer or the bread machine for quickly kneading it, but it ensures that if you miscalculated your amount of flour, you still end up with a good consistency. Once you have determined the actual amount needed for your recipe, you can start using the easier methods.

Let the kneaded dough rise in a warm place, then re-knead it and shape it into a loaf. Don't make the loaf too thick, 5 cm should be the maximum.

Crust. The only thing left to decide is how you want your crust. For a thick rustic crust, just bake it in the preheated oven. You can even spread flour on it first, then brush it off, leaving a very thin layer clinging to the dough. For a baguette type crust, you must have lots of steam in the oven while baking. Heat water in a wide pan to a rolling boil and put it on a lower rack in the oven while preheating. Leave there while the bread is baking. For a fancy crust, brush melted butter on the bread and shortly before it is done, take it out and brush egg yolk or whole egg on it. For a seed crust, put on the seeds before baking. Or if you like lye-baked goods, bring a strong baking soda solution to boil, and put your small loafs in it for about 30 seconds, then drain before baking. For a soft crust, wrap it in aluminum foil, trying to not leave any air pockets. But for your whole-grain bread, I'd go for the rustic crust or, if you use seeds inside, for the seed-covered (or cover with dry bran flakes if you don't use seeds).

That's about it when baking fairly standard bread. If you want to go fancy (you could add quinoa, ricotta and agave syrup and still get a good bread), you should better start from an existing recipe and try a single new ingredient per batch.


Most creme brulees require baking, however after a little research I did find a recipe in "On Cooking" (Sarah Labensky/Michael Hause) that came from Chef Vincent Guerithault of Vincent on Camelback in Phoenix, AZ and his was similar in that it was not baked.

First, just making creme anglaise with heavy cream isn't going to do anything to let it set up into a firm custard.  More egg yolks or starch would be needed.

Supposing that this really does work and it was something you perhaps did, my guess would be that it was either mixed too much (breaking down the proteins trying to link together) or too vigorously (incorporating air which weakened the protein links).  In your description you say you "beat it".  Did you beat it or stir it?  It should be stirred back and forth zig-zagging across the bottom of the pan with a wooden spoon or heat-safe rubber spatula to keep from whipping air into it.

Time, temperature, and eggs/dairy ratio are going to be the main issues in getting custards to set.

Egg proteins begin to set at 160 degrees but curdle at 180 so there's very little "wiggle" room temperature wise.

According to Shirley Corriher's "Cookwise":  2 egg yolks will just barely thicken 1 cup of milk or cream.  Her Creme Anglaise recipe uses 5 egg yolks to 1 cup of milk and 1/2 cup heavy cream which is more yolks and less liquid than Julia's and this isn't intended to set up.  1 teaspoon of starch isn't going to provide the thickening power that is needed, it's there to keep the yolks from curdling as easily.

The recipe I use and many others I've referenced (including Chef Vincent's), use a ratio of about 6-7 yolks per cup of cream.

Also, if using a starch, you need to nearly bring the custard mixture to a boil (as is common in puddings and cream pie fillings) otherwise an enzyme in egg yolks known as alpha-amylase will eat away at the starch bonds and break them down into a watery mess.
Chef Vincent's does not use any starch.

If you want to use that recipe, I would increase it to 10 egg yolks.  After the hot cream is tempered into the egg yolks then return to the heat and cook, stirring constantly, until very thick but do not let it boil.  Remove it from the heat and strain into a clean metal bowl and chill over an ice bath to cool quickly.  Once cool, spoon into your desired serving dish or a cookie cup and caramelize the top with sugar.


What method yields best result for washing breads?

I have always used egg and milk. Two thirds egg to one third milk. Use a spray bottle to ensure that you get a nice, even coverage.

Also make sure that you have a full proof on your goods, because (obviously) anything that gets exposed to the heat due to oven spring will not have color.

Just the way I have always done things (and I used to work in some pretty nice pastry shops back in the day).

EDIT:

Just noticed the comment from sour d'oh... Should've mentiontioned that stuff myself... Very important. The higher the fat of the dairy, the better the color (use a high fat cream instead of milk).


Can I use low-temperature cooking for foie gras

You should be fine if you your product is in the oven until the center reaches 58C.  Carry over cooking will cause the temp to increase slightly, and your fois will be in the safe zone.


What brand of roasting dish would you recommend?

Consider the castiron stuff from Le Creuset; my father-in-law has one that's at least 50 years old and it's still going strong. Lifetime warranty, too.

http://www.lecreuset.co.uk/Product-Range-uk/Cast-Iron-Cookware/Oven-Dishes/

They have roasting racks to fit as well.


Impractical? I think the wet grass + sun idea sounds fantastic!
I see two options here-

Wood is shaped with the application of moisture and heat. Run it through some steam in the dishwasher and while it is still piping hot clamp it tightly between rigid boards to dry. This method works with all kind of wood shaping but you should know that there is always the risk that the stress will cause the board to crack while it dries.
For descriptions of this technique google "wood steam bending". Most results will describe using a specialized steaming chamber rather than a dishwasher but the technique is the same.

The other method is mechanical: use a belt sander or planer to remove the convex material. Less risk but more work.


"Safe" does not mean 100% nothing will happen, it means that, even if all assumptions are met perfectly, there is a tiny chance that you will get bacterial growth. Even more likely is that not all assumptions were met. Maybe there was a small problem in the production process - storage procedures assume that food is produced under nearly sterile conditions, but maybe your milk was just over some threshold of contamination. Or possibly, your fridge is a bit over the recommended upper limit of 4 C.

However the spoilage organisms got into a growth phase, they soured the milk. Throw it out. If the fridge is under 4 C (measure in the place where you keep the milk - the door is frequently somewhat warmer), it is unlikely to happen again anyway.


It is actually quite simple. After you have cleaned it, simply coat it lightly with vegetable oil. You can rub it on with your fingertips or a paper towel.


"Cream Biscuit" a little raw in the middle

Baking times are never exact, as there can be considerable variance in the product and environment.  The three most likely variables to affect total necessary baking time are:

How thick the biscuits were rolled
How moist they dough was
Actual oven temperature accuracy

For this reason, there is normally a test or indicator for doneness.  The best possible test is internal temperature of the biscuit, but this recipe does not give that information, and it is difficult to get an accurate reading for something as thin as a biscuit.

The recipe indicates browning as the test, but that does not indicate the state of the interior of the biscuit, only the exterior.

Still, there are several things you can do:

Use an oven thermometer to verify the temperature of your oven
Roll the biscuits so that they are slightly less tall
Be sparing with the cream, adding only as much as necessary to bring the dough together
Of course, bake them a little longer.  The trade off here is that you will get more browning on the outside the longer you bake them to get them cooked through to the center.  If you are at the max time the recipe indicates already, and are getting sufficient browning, one of the other factors may be in play

Assuming your oven temperature is accurate, the most likely factor is how thick or thin the biscuits are.  The cooking time will pretty much directly related to this, all other factors being equal.  Even the amount of cream has less effect than you would think, because doneness is related to the internal temperature achieved (the starches will hydrolyze and taste cooked around 195°F / 90.5°C) regardless of moisture level.

I have never tried the toothpick test on a biscuit, but fundamentally, they are quick breads, much like a muffin, so it may be worth trying:  stick a wooden toothpick into the biscuit to its center.  When it is pulled out, there should be only minimal slightly moist crumbs sticking to the toothpick when it is done.  Wet crumbs indicate under baking, perfectly clean indicates over baking.

In the end, biscuit making is a matter of experience, and you will get better at it with more  batches.


How can I pick the correct avocados for guacamole?

I find it super difficult to make guacamole without ripe avocados, as I like a dip with no huge avocado chunks in it. Thus, as you mentioned, ripe avocados work best.

Ripe?

To deem if an avocado is ripe or not, give the avocado a gentle squeeze. If it is firm but gives a little (is a little squishy) then it is ripe.

It is interesting to note that avocados do their ripening after they are harvested, so each avocado goes through this process of getting softer until it is eaten. If the avocado doesn't squeeze to your desire, time will allow the avocado to ripen more until it is the desired squishiness to be eaten.

On how to squeeze an avocado: here

Ripening Avocados

I have found that the best way to ripen an avocado (for example you bought an avocado from the store and it isn't ripe enough for guacamole yet) is to leave the avocado in a room temperature area, by fruits like bananas, which are also ripening.

Just like any food, putting avocados in the refrigerator will prolong the freshness of the food. Thus, refrigerating avocados won't help the avocado ripen (it does however preserve the state of the avocado, and slows the ripening period by about a week to two weeks, from my experience)

On Ripening avocados faster: here


Gingersnap Pie Crust - how to sub butter as binder

I have seen some recipes that use milk instead of butter. They would be slightly healthier, but I find that the crust burns easier and feels drier and more brittle. Keep in mind that a lot of the calories come from the ginger snaps that themselves contain sugar and butter. I haven't done the math, but I think the calories from the butter are negligible compared to the calories in the pie filling and the gingersnaps.

For a healthier crust, I would use a base of some unsweetened cracker and mix in the same spices that are in gingersnap cookies when I mix the crumbs with butter. That would cut some calories, while retaining the feel of a butter crust.


Is there a lamb dish that is as easy to prepare as steak?

You want the ones that look like little tiny T-bone steaks.  Typically they are called Lamb Chops, but look first as there are different cuts under that name.   You might also consider doing a rack, which is the equivalent to a Rib Roast, but obviously much smaller.  For the rack, I'd sear it in a pan, and then broil it until done. (15-25 minutes, 140-160 degrees).


Forgot to add salt to rice before cooking. How can I add salt after cooking to fix that?

Seems there is no need to cook rice with salt, at least in my country or my friends who love the culinary.
But if you really need some salty flavor in your rice, maybe you could:

Turn your rice into fried rice, seasoning in the end.
Make some yummy sauces and add onto your rice.
Dissolve salt in water to become a salty solution, spray it on your rice and reheat again.

Hope this would let your rice more flavored :P


How to make best milk chocolate at home?

To really be considered chocolate, you need to use cocoa butter as your fat. Cocoa butter has a few properties that other fats don't have. Most notably, it is capable of forming a crystalline structure which is what gives tempered chocolate its "snap" and—when tempered—it has a melting point above external body temperature but below internal body temperature. Using any other fat will result in a chocolate flavored material that is not chocolate (more akin to frosting or fudge).
The other factor in the "expensive" chocolates at the store is the particle size of the cocoa powder. This can be in the neighborhood of 20 microns in a good chocolate, but can be half that size in high-end chocolates. To achieve this, the chocolate needs to be physically worked for many hours, if not days. Commercial suppliers use a machine called a conche to accomplish this. Cocoa powders usually contain particles in the 35-50 micron range, so you'll never get that "expensive chocolate" mouth feel.
In addition, the temperatures, humidity, roasting times, mix of beans, type of sugar and fat content of the milk powder are all precisely maintained, further impacting the flavor.
You may have trouble with milk powder at the store because it is usually made with little or no fat to extend shelf life. The same goes for the fat content of cocoa powder, as there is a wide range in the available products. Check to see if your recipe specified a fat content for the milk powder and cocoa powder, and if not, you might need to experiment.
As you said, you can make "pretty good" milk chocolate at home. The most difficult part will be tempering the chocolate, but it's so common to need to re-temper commercial chocolate when you work with them that it's a good skill to master anyway.
Most of the people I know who make chocolate at home do so because the vast majority of chocolate makers use soy lecithin as an emulsifying agent and they (or their loved ones) can't eat soy, but even then, there are a few manufacturers who make soy-free chocolates these days.


How do you make popcorn with "indian corn"

When popcorn pops, it makes a distinctive popping sound (unsurprisingly). I would microwave the ear of corn until the pops come about ten seconds apart - at this point, you're well into the tail of the normal distribution which describes how long it takes each kernel to pop. If the corn doesn't pop after about two minutes, it probably won't pop at all.


Yes it will probably be safe, but it might not be very good. Keep in mind if a sweet potato is cooked properly it doesn't need any seasoning at all. Bake it until it's dark on the outer layer of flesh and the potato will be so sweet you'll wonder why you don't cook it that way all the time.


How to keep my pizza stone from smoking?

(1) Wikihow suggests "As a last resort, soak your stone in water," and also "Baking soda is a sodium bicarbonate and is great for cleaning off dirt and grease," and lastly, an a one-shot hail mary, "Using The Self-Cleaning Function."

http://www.wikihow.com/Clean-a-Pizza-Stone

(2) Caveat: I've not tried any of these methods myself.  I bake pizza on a flat cast iron pan, which I use for everything else.  It works fine, you can put a bit of oil on the bottom of the pan.


What to do about beetle infestation of wheat products? How do we prevent reinfestation?

Ugh, I feel for you!  Just based on the description, it's probably some type of flour beetle (normally either red flour beetle or confused flour beetle -- but check on wikipedia for pictures).  I'm no exterminator, but I've dealt with infestations of both in my pantry.

The only thing that I've found that works is to go through all food stored in the pantry (including that in sealed packages) and make sure that you throw out anything that is infested.  I'm not sure how you feel about chemicals, but at this point, I bug-bombed the house.

After you're sure that you no longer have an infested food, seal everything in plastic food storage containers.  In theory, that should contain any further infestations to a maximum of one container.

The other thing that I've done is to store as much of my dry goods as possible in the fridge/freezer... so stuff like flour is now stored in a sealed container in the back of the fridge.

My exterminator has said that a lot of times the beetles come in a package from the grocery store (a couple beetles in a box of pasta, for example) and they just overrun/overpopulate as much as they can.


You don't say whether the ham had been defrosted first; if not the temperature would have taken so long to rise that you're already outside the safety guidelines.  Even then, turning off the slow cooker for several hours is a bad idea from a food safety point of view.  The beans shouldn't overcook too much on low anyway, so I'd say just leave it on low.


Don't put the shrimp etc in the sauce in the first place and cook it separately, that way you don't have to take it out. Then just top your pasta with it and if say you are cooking meatballs and want a little sauce on them mix a little sauce in with your meatballs and then put them on top. If you want that mixed in with the pasta look then do the same thing I said above and mix the pasta in your individual serving bowls or plates if you are using one after you have dressed your pasta.

Your just not going to get an even distribution with random variables, all you can do is pick and count if you want everything evens.


Pure polyamide is foodsafe at these temperatures, they make pan spatulas out of them, which are safe to about 200 Celsius.

The problem is that we cannot know if your bag is 100% pure polyamide. It could be that the coloring is not food safe, or that it was contaminated with something inedible during production. So nobody can promise you that a nylon bag from unknown origin is food safe.

Products meant to be used in the home are unlikely to be produced where they can come in contact with extreme irritants. So you can decide to take the risk as one more potential environmental pollution, and go with it. Or you can think that it's not worth it, and look for other bags. In any case, there is no indication that the main material (nylon) will cause any trouble.


Might be temperature, might be technique. While the dough will proof faster at the optimal temperature, you can also proof it for longer. Some recipes proof the dough in the refrigerator (See Using low oven temperature to accelerate proofing). So you can compensate for a lower temperature by extending the proofing time.

Technique is also important. I don't know why you split the process into 2 parts, but my guess is adding the salt without a buffering agent is killing off the active yeast.

I have had a lot of success with no-knead recipes, which you can modify if you prefer to knead your dough. Add your flour to the bowl, 1 Tsp salt and mix well. Add your yeast (1/4 Tsp packet or bread machine yeast), and mix well. If desired you can add sugar and some olive oil. Add your blood temperature water (~ 38C) a 100ml at a time, reducing the quantity towards the end. You want add sufficient water to hydrate the flour until it just comes away cleanly from the bowl. Your dough is ready to be proofed when it just comes together and is neither too sticky or too dry. You can then cover and proof for between 2 - 18 hours or until it doubles in size. You can tell by the "stringiness" of the dough how well it has proofed.


Anything you salt will firm up in texture over a period of time. I suspect that since you cooked these with seasonings and then chilled and left them in the fridge before reheating an eating they firmed up a great deal in the fridge.

If you check out this blind tasting conducted by Dave Arnold at Cooking Issues you'll find some more detailed info about this topic. The gist of it is that for cook-chill-reheat purposes you shouldn't salt the meat before searing. For cook-direct serve meals your just fine doing it that way.

http://www.cookingissues.com/2011/10/12/to-salt-or-not-to-salt-thats-the-searing-question/


How can I get these stains off my glass stove top?

My stove regularly looks like this, and I can get sparkling clean by using Weismans(sp) glass cooktop cleaner and a green scrubby. Doesn't have the be Scotch-brite  brand, a dollar store scrubby will do. Don't use any water, just cleaner, scrubby and elbow grease. I do use a painters sanding block on top of the green scrubby to help with even pressure on the scrubby pad.
I have also heard that Vim cream cleanser works as well. However I've found that cleaners specifically made for glass cook tops will buff off and leave your stove shiny and any other cleansers tend to leave your glass dull after wiping clean.


Are there any substitutes for squash puree?

If you want something storebought, just get pumpkin puree - it is squash puree, not really even a substitute. Pumpkins are squash, and "pumpkin" is a pretty broad term, covering a lot of winter squash. In fact canned pumpkin is often made with things more similar to butternut squash than what you'd think of as pumpkin (jack-o'-lanterns and all). Just make sure you don't accidentally get some kind of pumpkin pie mix that has spices and maybe other things added.

I suppose if you can't find that either, you could also look at baby food, since squash is fairly common there.

If you really can't find anything in the store, though, don't just give up on the recipe. It really is incredibly easy to make - just cut squash in half, throw in the oven cut side down, bake until it's soft, scoop it out and mash up a bit. The actual active working time is only a couple minutes, and you'll probably get much better flavor than you would from canned goods.


Generally, pumpkin pie is made in an unbaked crust. So just pull your frozen shell out of the freezer and let it come to room temperature before filling, and bake it per your recipe.

EDIT: I looked at a few recipes, and some do call for prebaking the crust, so let the recipe be your guide. The most common recipe, the one from back of the most popular brand of canned pumpkin, calls for filling the unbaked shell.


Can I use a whole uncut green pepper that I accidentally froze or is it garbage?

It is certainly still safe to use.

Freezing vegetables will cause the the texture to soften, so it wouldn't provide a very enjoyable crunch, depending on how you plan on using it.

It would be well suited for use in something like a pasta sauce, stew or chili.


Why does pasta dough need to be kneaded for such a long time?

Kneading aids gluten development, which does facilitate dough stretch-ability.  You do need to let the dough rest, after kneading.  This allows for hydration, but also lets the gluten structure "relax" so that the dough can be stretched. Gluten development also impacts crumb texture.  So, for, say biscuits, you would not want to knead and develop gluten. For pasta and pizza you are looking for a different final texture/chew.


No. Bulgur is (almost always) made from wheat while barley is a different species.

Bulgur is cracked and parboiled before sale, while pearl barley has had the outer layers of the barley grain removed but is otherwise intact.


There are several different compounds that affects our nervous system in a way that we colloquially call "spicy" or "hot". The most common ones in culinary use are Capsaisin, Gingerol, Piperine and Allyl Isothiocyanate.

Capsaisin is the type of spiciness you feel on your tongue and throat. This is found in the different types of chili peppers.

Piperine is a low but accumulating burn on your tongue. This is found in black pepper.

Gingerol is what causes the sharpness and spiciness found in ginger.

Allyl Isothiocyanate is the compound which causes the burn that hits the sinus. This can be found in mustard, radish, horseradish and wasabi.


How to make ridge structure of crispy chicken

In many places cornflakes are very cheap, I am assuming where you are they are expensive because they are imported. You aren't going to be able to get the ridged structure without something like cornflakes because it's the flakes themselves that give the breading that texture. You need to find something that you can afford, perhaps another cereal that is similar to cornflakes would work, it all depends on what you have in the stores. If you can find them Panko breadcrumbs would give you a nice texture, not the same as cornflakes but pretty good. Otherwise I suggest you go shopping and see what you can find.


How do you know if your starter is powered mainly by yeast or bacteria?

Unfortunately many kinds of fermentation produce CO2 as a byproduct, so the presence of bubbles hardly give you more information than 'it is alive'.

If what you want is a precise identification of what strain of yeast and bacteria are present in your starter, I see no easier way than looking under a microscope or making a laboratory analysis.

If you just want to heuristically determine if yeast or bacteria is present, the easier way is to guess from the taste and smell profile of your starter. The guess can be more or less polite depending on your training, just like in wine tasting.

For example:

alcohol smell hints for the presence of yeasts, the most common agents responsible for the alcoholic fermentation.
vinagre smell is associated to acetic acid, which is the subproduct of the fermentation of glucose by bacteria of the AAB (acetic acid) family.
acetone (nail polisher) smell is usually associated to the presence of ethyl acetate, the esterification of ethanol + acetic acid. Thus my guess here would be the presence of both bacteria from the AAB family and yeast, which produces the ethanol via the usual alcoholic fermentation.
sour taste / smell (like yoghurt) is usually associated to lactic acid, byproduct of lactic fermentation which hints the presence of bacteria from the LAB family.

These are the most obvious examples, but you could go fancier and try also to identify more subtle notes like specific fruits tones associated to some esters, etc. A good place to learn about those things are the ressources in brewing websites, specially in what concerns wild beer (lambic) - a process somehow similar to cultivating a sourdough starter. See for example this thread or this wiki.

Note that it is very likely that what you actually have is a combination of these processes. And as the acetone smell example shows, the combination of two processes can lead to more than the simple sum of their byproducts. It is also important to keep in mind that some of these molecules can produced by both bacterias and yeasts (like ethanol, although yeasts are usually more efficient). This is what makes a sourdough culture complex and unique. Changing the hydration of your culture, you also change the balance of bacterias and yeasts, since certain strains are more or less hydrophilic.


More potatoes and another apple - dilute (assuming "too strong" is really too strong, and not a just an unfamiliar flavor you would not like even if it was reduced. Parsnips can be polarizing.)

Or add garlic and/or ginger until they overpower the parsnip and parsley (assumes you like garlic and/or ginger...) I guess chili might be another similar approach, but I wouldn't do that as I don't like it. I might add black pepper, though.


How do I make a cookie with a cream filling (similar to an Oreo filling)?

A filling made with butter will melt at baking temperatures, and probably spill out of your cookies, or at the very least stop the cookie dough from baking properly (it will either soak the dough with moisture, break open the cookie with steam, or both) and not reform into the filling you want.
Instead, you should look into making hollow cookies and piping or injecting the filling once baked and cooled, or if you want filled cookies then find a recipe for filled cookies (but the filling will have to be something substantially different).


Day 8 of Sourdough Starter, is it still alive?

It depends on the temperature of your room, but you may still have enough left alive to save it. Is it still bubbling at all? You should throw most of it away and feed it and see if it changes and bubbles in the next few hours. I'd try keeping just a few tablespoons (maybe 100g of the starter, throwing the rest away) and add 500g of flour and 500g of 75°F water. If your flour is precious right now, you can use 250g and 250g instead.

You probably know this, but keep it in the fridge in the future if you're not going to be able to feed it for a while. Depending on the type of starter it can do well for a couple of weeks.


How to place nuts on top of the cake so that they stay symmetrically?

Many cakes have the nuts applied after cooking, held down with some sort of glaze. That will keep them where you put them so long as the top is reasonably flat. It will also prevent them burning, as nuts are often used to top cakes that cook for quite a long time.

If nuts are going to be baked on top of a cake, I'd expect to need a dense recipe that doesn't rise much, as the rising will be what causes them to move. The classic Dundee cake (which uses almonds) is such a cake.

This Dundee cake recipe takes an interesting approach: the nuts are added when the cake is part way through cooking. You couldn't do this with a sponge cake, or it would sink, but a more robust cake, cooked slowly, apparently works.


I do it all the time it should work fine with a single charger. But keep in mind that, you always have an (almost) fix amount of waste of cream (or other product); the lower your starting volume is, the higher will be the ratio of wasting the product.


There are many small hand operated espresso pump that could be used instead of a full fledged espresso machine or mocha pot; you only need hot water.

Once you have your coffee, you can follow the steps needed to create a Cuban Coffee.


How can components of a packaged food item exceed the net weight?

As Zanna said, you can't just add all the values together, some items are a fraction of others.
In this case, "total carbohydrates" already includes the "sugar" and "dietary fibre" items, so the total is "fat" + "total carbohydrates" + "protein", which adds up to 27g out of 30g. That leaves 3 g for water, ash (inorganic salts, like table salt, basically) and minor components (like vitamins).

But keep in mind that all those values are rounded to the nearest whole number, which causes the energy stated to be different from that obtained from the ingredients weights.


Black Vinegar is basically what it's called, and has a smoky and mellow flavor. It is made from rice, sometimes from glutinous rice and is sometimes used as a full-flavored but much cheaper balsamic vinegar.
Hope this helps! :)


How much sugar and vanilla extract should I use in 1/2 gallon of ice cream?

You're making what is (at least to Americans) called Philadelphia-style ice cream. The name makes it fairly easy to find the ratios. Checking three recipes:

http://www.culinate.com/books/collections/all_books/The+Perfect+Scoop/Vanilla+Ice+Cream
http://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2014/12/30-minute-philadelphia-style-ice-cream-recipe.html
http://www.williams-sonoma.com/recipe/philadelphia-style-vanilla-ice-cream.html

all agree on ¾ sugar for 3 cups of dairy. So you'll likely want thrice that, or 2¼ c. sugar. (Sugar in ice cream isn't just for taste, it's also very important for texture.)

Then you'll want somewhere between 1–3 tablespoons of vanilla extract. This is a wide range, but actually vanilla ice creams available commercially in the US vary widely in the amount of vanilla flavor in them. I would recommend, if you remember what the melted ice cream tastes like (not frozen, as freezing will lessen the flavor somewhat), that you start with 1T, taste it, then mix in more as required.

Consider also a little bit of salt. Also, a 2:1 recipe of heavy cream to whole milk is common—saving you from having to purchase half and half.


Is there any advantage to combining spices before applying them to meat?

If you premix to make a rub, it's easier to apply spices evenly. Otherwise, you must individually apply a small amount (for example, 1/4 tsp) of several spices evenly. With a rub, you make the spice mixture with the desired proportions, and there is a larger aggregate amount to spread.


Is there a significant difference between Indian and Chinese star anise?

In my experience, star anise is star anise.  I don't think the origin matters much for your recipe, but there might be a marginal difference.  I've never paid much attention to the origin of my star anise.


How to clean non-sticking pan from burnt pepper juices

I don't want to disappoint you, but I have never been able to remove burnt-on pepepr juices - and in my case, they are on stainless steel, which can be cleaned with much harsher methods than non-stick. Most of the stuff went away, but small spots remained on my pot too.

I would advise to leave out all scrubbing. It is not very efficient even on steel, and it can easily damage a non-stick surface. Non-stick happens to be a chemically inert molecule, but it is very susceptible to physical damage.

The nice side of "chemically inert molecule" is that it can withstand a lot of chemical solvents - and these are better for burnt-on stuff anyway. I would go in there with concentrated acid first (citric acid solution at around 2 pH - try it in the same way as decalcifying a kettle, but use a higher concentration than written on the sachet), then, after a really good washing, switch to a base (for example a very concentrated baking soda solution, I would be afraid to use lye on a non-stick pan because it could seep through scratches to the interface between alu and non-stick surface and start corrosion spots). If that doesn't help, probably nothing will.

And I would strongly recommend to not roast peppers in a non-stick pot. Roasted peppers need very high temperatures. Non-stick coatings start changing their properties at around 250°C, this is a low-to-middle hot setting on most stoves (my resistive stove goes from 1 to 9 and 4 is already too hot for non-stick). The best method is a broiler in the oven, but if you don't have that, you can consider using a steel or iron pan which you don't mind accumulating some discoloration and spots (they are not too problematic on steel), or putting alu foil directly on the (resistive) hob and discarding it after the roasting.


The reason that people talk about "proper" trusted recipes in canning is that with anything less than that, all bets are off. Might keep, might not.

That's definitely true of your suggested process: they might keep in the fridge that long, might not, and as a bonus, if you get unlucky, there might be nasty undetectable botulism in there! Tomatoes aren't quite a low enough pH to avoid that, boiling isn't a high enough temperature to kill it either, your process won't even seal the jars, and refrigerator temperatures don't stop it from growing. You're really just using the jars as containers; there's nothing about the process that's actually "canning". You'd get the same results from putting tomato sauce in plastic containers.

And, honestly, a proper recipe is not even much more work than what you're talking about. For example, here's a trustworthy recipe for canned crushed tomatoes, pretty similar to what you want. It's pretty much:

blanch and remove skins
cut into quarters
mash some of them a bit and heat to boiling
add the rest
add acid (citric acid or bottled lemon juice)
put in jars and process (essentially, boil the filled jars for the time specified in the recipe; exhaustive description here)

So basically, that's your process with the addition of acid, and boiling the jars after filling, and it will make them keep at room temperature.

They have a bunch of variations if that's not exactly how you want them prepared.

If you aren't willing to put in that much effort, then I'd really suggest freezing. That removes all of the safety concerns with no complications at all. You can just prepare however you want, put into hopefully smallish containers so you can get at a manageable amount without thawing, and pop in the freezer.


Is there an easy way to french trim a rack of lamb?

Alton Brown demonstrates using a piece of string to scrape the bone clean.  First he cuts and trims the bulk of the meat down to where he wants it.  Then, he uses a string tied to a garage door handle (very cheap at any hardware store).  Loop it around the bone a couple of times and pull, and it cleans it right up.


How long is marinated raw chicken breast good for after it's been vacuum sealed?

I think vacuum sealed raw chicken breasts in the fridge behave like not-vacuum-sealed chicken breast in the fridge because the meat is neither sterile nor less contaminated with bacteria than the non-vacuumed meat and there are surely bacteria that grow under anaerobic conditions. The meat will be safe for 2 days.


What is the padding with red substance inside of steak packaging?

That "padding" is an absorbent pad made of paper and plastic; the "red substance" inside is the juices (often mistakenly believed to be "blood") that have seeped out of the meat; the purpose of the absorbent pad is to absorb this liquid and keep the interior of the tray dry. Without it, the liquid would pool up and potentially spill out when the tray was opened or handled. Because the "red substance" came from the meat itself, no, it is not poisonous; the packaging is regulated to prevent toxic components from being used, so it too is not poisonous.


what is a required temperature of water for foaming of yeast??

Lukewarm-- which is warm enough so that you can dip your hand into it without damage, but not so warm that you put your hand in and immediately have to yank it back out again. On my thermometer, when I use one, that's about 110 degrees Fahrenheit.


how to tell if a whipping cream dispenser is overpressurized or underpressurized?

There is no pressure gauge on these devices, nor is one available even on the professional line according to iSi's website. I don't think it is possible to determine the pressure inside


How do you properly clean a cutting board and knife to prevent cross contamination?

Your primary defenses against cross-contamination include proper planning in the order of what you're cutting and proper cleaning between uses.  In the case of your stew, simply cut the vegetables first and then cut your meat.  Doing so in this order you won't need to wash the board between the vegetables and meat.  If you want to expedite the cooking process, then either use a separate board for the meat first so that you can start browning it while cutting the vegetables, or simply wash and re-use the board.  A good scrubbing with hot soapy water is fine for your knife and board (including wood boards).

As mentioned previously, if you're still concerned about bacteria you can rub the board with lemon juice or vinegar which will kill any residual bacteria.

Using separate boards that are relegated to specific meat vs. vegetable duty isn't necessary as long as you're properly cleaning your boards.  A board only used for meat items is just as liable to transfer bacteria to the next item being cut on it if it isn't properly washed between uses.  That being said, if you're properly cleaning them then it's fine to cut vegetables on a board that's also been used previously for meat.

As for cutting boards, your best bet for the care and maintenance for your knives are either wood or composite materials (usually a laminated product of paper and resin - "Epicurean" being a prominent brand.

Never use a tempered glass cutting board or other hard surface (granite, marble, Corian, etc.) as these are heavily damaging to the edge of your blade and unsafe for you as there is nothing for the knife to bite and grip into and it's much more likely to slip and cut you.

Plastic cutting boards and mats aren't very good on your knives and the boards in particular are either too hard and dull your blade prematurely or are soft and end up with lots of cuts and grooves which then trap food.  People often have a false sense of security with plastic boards believing them to be "non-porous".  As the board is used, food material ends up crammed into the cuts and grooves and while the boards can go into the dishwasher, that only removes the surface grime, not that which is impacted and over time you increase the potential for bacterial growth to occur.

Wood boards (including bamboo) are much better on your knives but to maintain them in good condition you need to properly maintain them.  Periodically, when they look dry (kind of like chapped skin) you need to oil them with mineral oil.  The mineral oil you buy at your local drugstore or grocery store pharmacy is fine, no need to buy fancy "block oil" in gourmet shops.  Don't use vegetable based oils as they will go rancid and transfer the flavor to your food.  I like to give the cutting board a heavy coating at night, let it soak in overnight, and then buff off anything that didn't soak in.  This will keep your wood fibers soft and supple so that the board won't split and crack, the fibers will swell back together making it more "self-healing" as you cut on it, and the oil in the wood will repel liquids that would otherwise try to soak in.  When a wooden board gets marred and nicked up you just need to take it to the garage and give it a good sanding before dusting off, rinsing and re-oiling.

Don't use bleach on boards (plastic or otherwise) as it will typically leave a distinct smell in the board.


Should ciabatta sandwich rolls be dry and dense?

Ciabatta should be crusty, with a chewy crumb and big air pockets. Neither "dry" nor "dense" would be adjectives one would associate with good ciabatta.

This is what good ciabatta should look like:

Source: Michael Ruhlman (highly respected recipe and author)

Sometimes the loaves may be flatter, but the chewiness, big air pockets, and crustiness are what define good ciabatta.

Source: Brown Eyed Baker

If you can't find good ciabatta at your store, would you consider making your own? Both of the above links have highly regarded recipes. The Brown Eyed Baker link will lead you to the same recipe as in the video I'm about to mention.

I have had great luck with America's Test Kitchen's ciabatta recipe and video, but it only shows the forming of loaves, not rolls. This recipe describes a method for shaping ciabatta rolls. I really appreciated the video since I had never before dealt with a dough so "wet" (80% hydration, nearly pourable). ATK offers a 14 day free trial, so I'd recommend trying it and checking out that video. These pictures are from my first ciabatta from ATK's recipe:

I was very pleased, I followed every little fussy step in the video. That broke it down into manageable chunks, and made it seem easy.


Cassolette Pans - Cooking on the Stovetop and in the Oven

A few ideas for you:

You can use cast iron.  Depending on what you are cooking this works quite well - but beware what you deglaze with, you might take your finish off or impart a taste to your food.

You can read the label on your rubber/plastic handle cookware.  Many are oven-safe to 350F or so, the label should tell you.

You can use stainless steel or other all metal cookware.  Paderno is my (Canadian!) favourite.  Alternately go to your local restaurant supply store - so-called professional gear can actually be quite reasonable, because a kitchen has to buy so much of it.

Good Luck!


The type of pan, how long it is on the heat, and whether or not damage occurs, probably matters here if there is nothing in the pan. If the pan has food in it as it is heating, you will almost always burn your food before you could possibly damage your pan.


Is there any way to remove stains (e.g. from curries and pasta sauces) from plastic containers?

After washing them, fill them with a mild bleach solution (one tablespoon for each cup of water) and let them out in the sun exposing the stain for a whole day.  Make sure children and animals cannot reach the containers with bleach.

There used to be a product called Cascade Plastic Booster that you could add to your dishwasher that would remove the stains.  It's no longer sold but its main ingredient was benzoyl peroxide at 5%, which you may buy in most drugstores.


How can I serve banana flambée for the next day?

Short answer:  you cannot reasonably make bananas flambee ahead.

While it would be conceivably possible to prepare your caramel and cook the bananas through the day before, you would then need to refrigerate them over night.

Reheating them would be tricky, and might even take more time than preparing them in the first place--and you would not want to serve them without reheating, as the dish would be gloppy and dissonant between the hot parts from the flambee, and the still cold parts.

This is a dish best served a la minute, that is, prepared at the moment of service.   There is little prep work that can be done the day before that will save you significant time.


That looks like a opening below a surface burner; I have seen stoves that vent that oven like that.Use the heat if you can.


How do I make a mold from a plastic container?

There are kits available for making your own custom molds from food-grade silicone. The finished molds can be used for various cooking purposes including candy making and baking.

The laboratory I work for has used products made by The Smooth-On Company for many years and they are of high quality:

http://www.smooth-on.com/Food-Safe-Material/c1387/index.html

Because you're starting out with a with a non-silicone mold, you would use it first to cast some other material such as plaster of paris. Then, use the silicone kit to make your actual baking mold from that.

This video shows a quick overview of the process:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HyVCVfZ_g8

It's not exactly a trivial undertaking, especially for making a mold big enough to bake a cake. With so many varieties of pre-made silicone bakeware on the market, it may or may not be worth the trouble. (unless the cat is truly Adorable!)


A French rolling pin is a real thing. It is also a very convenient thing. I find that I have much better control over my rolling using one rather than the foolish little pins with the handles that get filthy and hurt my knuckles.

As for the 'French' part of the name. I don't know, having never lived in France, whether they actually refer to that style of rolling pin as French. However, I find it extremely unlikely. Probably some English speaker coined the phrase to differentiate that style of pin as one commonly used in France. Hopefully there is a French speaker who can provide more insight. (If you didn't insult them with your question.)


Hiding the taste of cornstarch in gluten-free bechamel

In an answer to another question, someone else was looking for answers on dealing with thickening dairy. If you want to address thickening with corn starch, here are some beginning steps;

Use the right ratio of corn starch slurry to liquid: 1 tablespoon corn starch thickens 1 cup of liquid
Use the corn starch in a slurry: although you didn't mention clumps (which slurrying prevents), I mention this as a best practice for many applications - whisk the corn starch in an equal amount of cold water then pour in slowly while stirring the pot
Heat the corn starch through: you need to heat the liquid until you can no longer taste the starchiness. Unfortunately with a bechamel boiling isn't preferable, but heating it for an extended period of time at a high temp will cook away the starchiness

Although I understand you are looking for a common thickener, be aware of the possibilities as you may have one on hand one day from some other purpose. If the three steps above don't solve your problem, I think that you may be putting in more effort than just buying some more apt thickener. Even so, corn starch should do fine, it sounds like the problem may just be in the completeness of your preparation.


What is this yellow "fat" thing on my bacon

That's a piece of the rind of the bacon, which is yellow because it was exposed to the smoke. The bacon shifted while being sliced, causing the strip to end up attached to that one piece rather than in bits on the others. It's fine to eat.


Any food safety risk eating cold refrigerated pizza?

Not really. Assuming that the pizza has been cooled down and stored properly (for which see here and here) then it most likely won't have developed a potentially harmful microbial load. Additionally, while reheating might kill off most of the microbes in the food (assuming that you reached and maintained a temperature sufficient for pasteurization, which isn't a given) that still wouldn't render the food completely safe, because even dead microbes can leave behind toxic substances that can make you sick.

Be warned that just because you haven't gotten sick in past, that doesn't mean your method is completely safe. Food safety is a science of relative risk, not absolute certainty, and getting lucky 99 times in a row doesn't mean that the 100th time won't be a miserable one.

But, bottom line: put your pizza into the fridge when you're done eating it, and don't keep it for more than a couple days or if it shows obvious signs of spoilage, and most likely you'll be okay. Reheating is not essential.


How long does it take to ripen tomatoes in a bag with bananas?

I usually harvest my unripe tomatoes the night before the first hard frost. Anything beyond hard green, and into the yellowish/red stage, goes in a cardboard box with a ripening apple.
That yields me a steady supply of ripe and fairly tasty tomatoes through Thanksgiving, and some years up until Christmas.

Cover the box with a towel. Some of the tomatoes will go bad, turning soft and squishy, so you need to sort every week or so, and consider drainage in your storage spot, but the majority will eventually ripen.
Bananas are ferocious sources of the ripening agent, ethylene, so the time frame with them might be somewhat shorter. Temperature also changes the rate of ripening. Cooler is slower; a fridge is too cold.

Ethylene is heavier than air, so a closed container with a lid is all that's needed to keep it in.


Anise Seed vs. Fennel Seed with Taste as No.1 factor

I thought this was an interesting question, so I went into the kitchen and had a comparative chew. Anise Seed (or aniseed where I come from) is smaller, darker and gives a more immediate anise hit, but it fades quickly. Fennel seed is two or three times larger and paler. When you chew it, there's little flavour at first, but then a wash of anise flavour comes in. I think fennel tastes a bit softer, smoother, "greener" and more rounded.

If I had to substitute anise for fennel, I'd probably use a third or even a quarter of the original quantity. Although you might just want to leave it out. I agree with bikeboy - the great joy of fennel in Italian food is biting on fennel seed and getting that green-spicy hit in a meat dish (oh! I have a pasta dish with sweet Italian sausage, tomato, cream and fennel that is to die for). I don't think you'd get the same effect with anise.


Volumetric conversion between frozen and fresh spinach

Best to use a scale. Measure how much fresh spinach you normally use and use the same weight for frozen. Moisture content for frozen spinach may be slightly less than fresh but it should not matter that much. There are very few occasions when volume measurements are actually necessary and a weight measurement is not appropriate.


What's an effective way to remove this stubborn burnt-on oil from a saucepan?

If your pan is truly stainless steel, you can get burned on brown and sticky oil off the sides with oven cleaner (US brand "EZ-off" or other brand). This product is definitely not recommended for other metals such as copper, aluminum, etc.. But true stainless steel, I have used it no prob. If you are in doubt, you can test a small amount out on an inconspicuous tiny spot at first.


What are the advantages of homemade pasta over store-bought?

The best part of making your own food is the ability to experiment!  Sure, you can get spinach or tomato pastas in the store, but is there something else you've always wanted to try?  Try some chili peppers for a Mexican flair, or ginger and leek for Asian foods.  I've heard that even certain fruits work well, and chocolate could form the base for a unique dessert.


Depending on how much salt is on them, and how it's been applied, you might be able to knock some of it off, and effectively decant it:

Place the peanuts into a hard-sided container at least twice the volume of the peanuts that you can seal tightly.
Shake the peanuts. A lot. Not too hard, though, as the goal is to knock some of the salt off, not to smash the peanuts up.
Finish by shaking the peanuts side to side, or placing it on something that vibrates (like a washing machine)
Open the container, and scoop the peanuts out, being careful to leave the excess salt at the bottom.

You save yourself some effort, you might be able to do the whole work on top of your washing machine, or leave the container in the trunk of your car for a few trips.  The larger the salt crystals, the easier this will be to remove.  If it was applied as a wet spray or while the oils were on the surface of the peanuts, it's going to bind more to the peanuts, and be more difficult to remove.

Although the diluting trick will work, you can also use the peanuts in a recipe that would have otherwise called for salt and leave out the additional salt.  You could also crush them up and use them as a topping for something that could use a little extra salt.  (ice cream, Pad Thai, etc.)


Cooking different meats on George Foreman grill

You should be OK as long as the grill stays hot.

IT is a bit like if you would pan fry some chicken and after that add a steak to the pan.


Cover roti immediately with a cloth to keep warm, and soft. Cooking too low a heat will make dry roti. Did you knead and allow the dough to rest - it absorbs the liquid better and makes a smoother dough.


Forgot to add Sugar in cookie dough . Is there any way to add sugar?

There are tons of things you can add to them after the fact:

Icing
Jam
Crème au beurre with lots of sugar
Whipped cream with 2 packs of vanilla sugar instead of one
Grated chocolate
Honey
...

With some of the above (like jam, chocolate and honey), you can put them into the oven again at a low temperature (50°C / 120°F) and get a unique cookie!


What is the difference between using only yolks and whole eggs in a curd?

The yolk also has a fair bit of protein but it is combined with a huge amount of fat as well. Whites, on the other hand, have only protein.

When egg whites cook in a custard they have to be mixed very well, cooked gently, and usually still strained, in order to avoid blobs of scrambled egg messing up the texture of the dish.

Egg yolks are much easier. Some recipes will still call for straining them, I expect to deal with the albumin and chalazae that cling to the outside however, this is not nearly as difficult to work with. Egg yolk have enough protein to gently set a custard and they mix and emulsify into the batter easily.

I will sometimes also include whites when making a recipe that calls for yolks- especially if I have a yolk break while separating and I don't want to throw the egg out. In this case I will mix the batter more thoroughly to ensure there are no undissolved whites. Don't mix the egg whites alone or they will foam and never dissolve. I will also heat the mix more gently and stir more often to prevent scrambled eggs.


Short answer: it will still rise just slower. Every week when I make bread I make the dough the night before, put it in the fridge (which is about 40 degrees) and use it the next day. The dough usually doubles in size by the morning.

There is a nice breakdown of the temperate range of yeast at https://www.bobsredmill.com/blog/baking-101/what-temperature-kills-yeast/


Baked beans still firm after soaking and hours of cooking

Since it's hard to know the age of your beans, it's best to cook them before you start adding sauce ingredients. My approach is:

soak them about 20 hours. Depending on how much water they soak up you may add more halfway through - if you set them soaking in the early evening, check them in the morning
drain, rinse, and then boil for about two hours, checking to see if they are soft. If they're not soft, don't move on, keep them boiling (a low boil, but more than a simmer)
once they're soft, drain them, add the sauce and whatever else (onions, bits of ham) and put them in the oven. I typically give them an hour in there but at this point it's about reducing the sauce, getting the flavours to mingle and soak in, that sort of thing.

My beans come from the local farmer who supplies all my fresh vegetables, but I don't always use them all right away. This week I cooked some cranberry beans from the late summer of 2013. They were creamy and soft using this technique.


How to keep cake soft when served frozen (Ice Cream Cake)

I don’t think you can achieve room temperature softness but, I think you can start with the following considerations:

Minimize the water content:
Eventually what will make your cake hard frozen is large ice crystals. For this you should experiment with the final water amount in your cake to minimize it. Resting the batter/dough overnight can help you hydrate the flour easier.

Increase the amount of ingredients that interfere with large crystal formation. To name a few:

Eggs (especially egg yolk) have various properties for  inhibiting  crystal formation.
Instead of sucrose (table sugar) use invert sugar syrup, which is pretty easy to make, that can help slow down the ice crystals forming.
Locust Bean Gum: this is a thickener known to reduce the ice crystals in ice-cream, and also has baking applications. This can be utilized as well.


How can I attach printed rice paper decorations to cakes / cookies?

When I've seen them used, they first frosted the cake, smoothed it out, then placeed the rice paper on top.

My understanding is that the moisture in the frosting can end up melting the rice paper, so that it basically disappears into the frosting, with the ink effectively transfering into the frosting.

As I've never done it myself, I have no idea if there are any special tricks to it, or if you need to use a particular frosting / icing recipe so that the paper will melt away.

update: after a little research, I have reason to believe that normal rice paper won't disolve into the cake but there are special 'frosting sheets' that will.  another recomendation was to leave enough white space around the image so that you can cover the edge of the sheet with a border if it starts to curl up.


The short answer: no. I cooked/baked commercially for years, and never used any sort of preservative/stabilizer. The cooking (baking) process is what stabilizes the product. The egg only goes 'bad' from a raw state, not cooked.


You've probably seen fried, marinated tofu in those Thai dishes (my best guess without seeing a photo). The red colour would be from a short soak in either chili/garlic oil, or sweet chili sauce. Many asian markets sell tofu packaged in a marinade or breading for convenience.


Should my chicken sit in liquid as it roasts, or not?

The secret to really crispy skin has everything to do with rendering the fat that lies directly under it.  Once that fat has removed itself from the skin, a little high heat will crisp it up perfectly.  If I am creating a roast chicken, I normally remove it from the packaging  and allow it to sit uncovered in the fridge for at least overnight, longer if I have the time. Then I start the chicken low to render the fat, you have to cook it at a minimum of 178F (80C) to remove the most fat. Once the fat renders out, which is going to vary depending on the temp you start the chicken at, you crank the temp to the 450 to 500F range and baste regularly.

To maximize the skin that will crisp you want to make sure that your chicken isn't sitting inside the fat while it cooks.  I normally use a inset rack to keep the chicken above the fat but you don't have to.  The other component to crispy skin is cooking the chicken uncovered.


how to prepare fresh sardines for bucatini con sarde

If you bought fresh sardines before to clean them and remove the backbone you should keep them in a bowl of water to get soft for an hour at least.

After you make the cut on the neck or simply remove the head with your hands.
Now there is the hole created by the head removal.
Enter your finger and open the sardina.
If you prefer to use a little knife cut from inside to outside the thinner part and open (thinner par is without the backbone).
Remove the tail if you are using them for the pasta, otherwise don't cut it (vertical nor horizontal) if you want to fill them (for "sarde a beccafico").
Now your sardina should be open and still with backbone and little spine.
Since it became soft in the water should be easy to remove the backbone and little spines all together picking the backbone from the head part and separating it from the rest of the fish gently.

If you use stored sardines clean under fresh water gently. Remove Silver skin outside part and interior part. Remove the white long chain of backbone and eventually spines.

If you have any doubt about other passages or ingredients let me know.

Buon appetito.


Yes. The standard method is to make 2 or 3 horizontal cuts (depending on the size of the onion), then 3-5 vertical cuts, then slice to form dice.


What is queso (the sauce/dip)? Is it short for Chile con Queso?

Google is correct, in that it can be a shortening of 'chile con queso' (most typically in the US to non-spanish speakers).  But 'chile' is not the same as 'chili'.

'Chile' refers to peppers, so the dip is 'peppers with cheese'.

'Chili' is either an alternate spelling for the peppers, but more commonly in the US, it's a dish made from meat, tomatoes and chile peppers (chili con carne, literally 'peppers with meat')

And as Cindy pointed out, 'queso' may simply mean cheese and not a cheese dip.  (typically of a central or south american variety of cheese; in the US typically queso blanco, queso seca or queso fresca).  As best I can tell in the US, this is the more likely meaning when used by Spanish speakers.

update: and to make things even more confusing from an entomology standpoint: it's quite possible that 'chile con queso' led to 'queso dip' and shortly after lost its 'chile' ... and it's actually 'queso dip' that's been shortened to 'queso' by Americans.


Is old Bailey's Irish Cream safe to drink?

Does it smell off? Has the bottle been opened? More than a year past the expiration date?

If not, cheers!
Else use common sense. If in doubt, ditch it.

But it WILL make you ill if you drink too much ;-)


Can I add "stars" pasta or very small soup shells pasta to boxed chicken broth & make in the microwave?

i's put the pasta in regular water and microwave them for a couple of minutes; try 3, 4 minutes and adjust for doneness.

Once they are done, add them to the already heated up soup.


What is the most effective method to prevent a soggy shortcrust quiche base?

In my personal experience, the freezing method has never worked well. I have a traditional quiche pan - white porcelain with vertical fluted walls - and it gets very cold in the freezer. No matter how I have played with temperature and top/bottom heater setting afterwards, I have never been able to compensate for the effect of the cold porcelain (a bit like the opposite of a preheated pizza stone) - I always got an underbaked soggy crust bottom with crispy to overbaked crust walls, and a gradient in the filling's baking.

I can imagine that the freezing method might work for people using American pie tins or similar, but it has a serious disadvantage with a porcelain pan.


Safe to leave 'new' chicken stock in rice cooker for three hours?

The packaged stock will be pasteurised, leaving it in a pan for a couple of hours is unlikely to allow a huge amount of bacteria growth from ambient air. Then cooking the rice will boil the stock and kill anything that has grown anyway, so it is perfectly safe. The only drawback sometimes is that the celery stick in a stock introduces a sour taste as it ages but that is with fresh celery (shop bought is likely to be powder-based) and then it only happens after about 5 days in the fridge...


This history of candy is rife with how to make candy from different sources of sweet, which also in turn means there is a huge amount of regional and cultural variety based on what is available to a local candy maker. The recipes are going to be VERY different with vast variations of end results.

Think honey based candies...Mary Janes, bit o honey are nothing like any other candy. Nougat is another platform for candy that can't be hardened. Hard toffees (like a brittle think Heath and skor) soft toffees, or baked seed candies have honey in them that isn't "hard" but it's stiffened by baking and drying.

Look for recipes that use your chosen primary ingredient. You might have to hunt a lot and learn new keywords other than "candy".


I'm assuming these rolls contain raw fish. If that's the case I'd urge you not to eat them raw the following day. It might be safest to just throw it out, but you could try deep frying them in a light tempura batter. Just a few minutes should be enough to cook the fish.


What is the liquid often ladled onto the grill top in restaurants?

What you describe is grill basting - where a liquid is poured onto the grill and covered (with a metal salad bowl or a basting cover) to more evenly cook the food and maintain its moisture. The liquid is added towards the latter half of cooking, as adding it in the first half of cooking has no real beneficial effect. Additionally, the steam will melt cheese more evenly if grilling burger patties.

Typically, this liquid is a stock (chicken or pork stock if cooking chicken, vegetable stock if cooking vegetables and beef stock if cooking beef) or water.

On a personal note, I sometimes dissolve a pinch of salt in the water if I don't have any stock available.


I've seen the same thing, and mostly just take it as an excellent excuse to improve my game with respect to gravies, au jus, and reductions.


Lasagna won't cook properly in oven with no lower exposed element :(

First, purchase an oven thermometer so that you can verify your oven temp.  Ovens can easily be off by 50 degrees or more.  Lasagna is pretty forgiving.  So exact temperature and time is not all that important. My process is similar...cook covered, then uncover.  Pasta turning to mush might be a result of overcooked noodles before the bake, or the lasagna being too wet. It also sounds like you might be getting uneven heating.  Try rotating the pan halfway through the bake.


What's the right way to add extra gluten to dough?

Making gluten per that video is useful for an experiment but not so useful as a recipe addition. As Steve points out, the right solution here is to buy Vital Wheat Gluten. I buy it in the bulk food section at two local stores (WinCo, Central Market) and I've also seen it in the specialty flours section (usually in a Bob's Red Mill package) at better grocery stores.
Vital wheat gluten is a powder. Just add it to your dry ingredients when making bread. I usually grind my own flour so I know exactly what level of protein and gluten are in my wheat berries. If I'm using hard winter wheat or I want a denser loaf with smaller holes (think: sandwich bread) then I don't add any gluten. If I'm making a whole wheat or mixed grain loaf, then I always add some. For a whole wheat loaf, adding a tablespoon of vital wheat gluten is about right.


Is it safe to thaw chicken to have it brined and then freeze again?

In this case I would err on the side of safety and advise against refreezing the chicken for one reason - it was thawed in water for a couple of hours. Had it been thawed in the refrigerator it would be perfectly safe to do so.
It is well documented that it is safe to refreeze both raw and cooked foods as long as they have been kept out of the danger zone. With some foods, however, there may be a loss in terms of taste and texture.
People refreeze food all the time without even realizing it. Here, in the US, 'fresh' meats are most often shipped to grocery stores in a frozen state and then thawed in the meat case or thawed before placing in the case. Chicken is most definitely one of those foods. Consumers buy it 'fresh" out of the case and take it home and (re)freeze it.
From  The New York Times :

The notion that you cannot refreeze thawed foods “is a myth,” said Tina Hanes, a registered dietitian with the United States Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service. Any raw or cooked food that has been thawed can be refrozen as long as it was thawed properly — in the refrigerator, not on the counter — and hasn’t spoiled. That includes raw meat, poultry, fish and seafood, Ms. Hanes said.
“It’s one of the most popular questions we get on our hotline,” she said, “but it is safe to refreeze raw meat, as long as it’s not spoiled.”

In this case, I would suggest that you cook the extra chicken, cool it quickly, and then freeze it for later use.


Well, picking the best wine to complement a given cheese -- or vice-versa -- is a bit complex to fix into a stackexchange answer.  I recommend Janet Fletcher's book Cheese & Wine if you're really serious about this.

However, picking a wine which goes OK with the cheese is a lot easier.  Here's a few tips based on my personal experience throwing wine & cheese parties:

Robust red wines ( Cabernet, Zinfandel, Syrah ) complement no cheeses I know of; they swamp the taste of the cheese.
Fresh, lower-fat cheeses (chevre, ricotta, Nicasio's Foggy Morning) go well with light & sweet white wines, like a riesling or gewurtztraminer.
Brie goes well with fortified wines, like manzanilla or muscat.
Most hard aged cheeses ( manchego, cheddar, asiago ) go well with light, acidic reds like a lighter grenache, pinot noir, or tempranillo.
Blue cheese generally wants a very sweet fortified wine, like a ruby port or late harvest zinfandel.
Swiss-type cheeses ( emmenthaler, jarlesberg, St. George, etc. ) work well with medium white wines, like sauvignon blanc or unoaked chardonnay.

Really, what you're trying to do is to have some complementary and some contrasting flavors in the wine as in the cheese.  And generally you want to err on the side of milder wines unless the flavor of the cheese is very strong, since it's too easy for the wine to wash out most of the cheese flavor.

The other fun thing to do is pair cheeses up with wines from the same culture.  Manchego with sherry and almonds, Roquefort with sancerre and French bread, pecorino sardo with barbera,  cheddar with brown ale.

Hope that helps some.


It seems, acidity prevents pasta from being overcooked?

No, it has nothing to do with the acidity of your sauce.

It took a lot longer to cook because of the prevalent temperature throughout the pan, and the mass of the material being heated.

Sauce + Noodles is a lot to heat up, a lot more than just a pot of water. It's also unlikely you fully boiled the Sauce + Noodles as you would have with water (to a full rolling boil).

If you had left it cook long enough on high heat, eventually the noodles would get overdone and soggy, and if left even longer, the sauce and noodles would burn too.

If you've ever had an overdone Lasagna, you'll have tasted noodles cooked in sauce too long - they're mushy and unappetizing. (Traditionally lasagna noodles are pre-cooked before being layered into the lasagna dish and baked, but it would be a similar effect to cooking while in sauce)

Probably worth noting: by cooking the raw pasta in the sauce, you're adding a lot of starch directly to the sauce, probably making it quite a bit thicker than normal. This may or may-not be good, depending on your preferences.


What "begin to flake" means in the context of sauteing a fish?

When the fish cooks, the meat will start turning opaque; at one point, you will see that the fish will start to "split" into flakes or layers.

see this video (at about 2:15 and onward) you start to see layers in the fish.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gluRaUv88sk

For example in the following video, you see the salmon has "layers" of fat and meat; when the meat is just right, the layers will be easily "flaked" when the fish is cooked.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KLQnGS1TjQ


Is my Frozen solid Lamb ok to roast I am asking for food safety reasons

In general, roasting it from frozen to properly cooked in the middle won't cause any food safety issues. It's former frozen-ness and the speed of defrosting won't mean that it grows more bacteria.

The problem is, at oven temperatures, by the time the centre of a large roast is thawed (never mind cooked) the outside will be overdone by anyone's standards. It's one thing to braise meat for a long time, it's another thing to over roast it for a long time. If you go by the done-ness of the outside, you'll take it out while the inside is still undercooked, even raw or still frozen. And that will potentially be a food safety issue.

That's why you should defrost large pieces of meat before you roast them.

If your concern is whether meat that has been frozen for two years is still safe to eat, The consensus is that meat stays safe to eat indefinitely while frozen. It may been freezer burned (especially in a frost free freezer) or not taste as nice as it would have after a few months. I wouldn't use it for a critical meal, family celebration or the like, but thaw it and look at it. If it looks dried out and white on the surface, perhaps cut that part off. Then cook it and try it. If it's awful, throw it out and order a pizza. I wouldn't throw it out in advance just because of the length of time. Being double wrapped may well have protected it.


The main source of gluten in pierogi (the plural is pierogi, the singular is actually pierog) is the flour in the dough. You should be able to substitute regular flour for a gluten free version (eg rice flour) to make them gluten free. The same goes for whatever filling you are using, if you would regularly use flour as a thickening agent try corn starch or a gluten free flour instead. It's important to remember, however, that many gluten free flours do not bind as easily as wheat flour, and thus you may need to use more butter than usual.

EDIT

Pierogi dough, when made from scratch, dries very quickly, even moreso with gluten free flour. Be sure to cover the unused dough with a bowl and only take small chunks out at a time while you are forming and filling your pierogi.

Source: Was taught to make pierogi by an elderly Polish woman in my youth, have a niece and sister with celiac's disease


Can anyone identify this type of green tea?

In general, your description - dark green balls which unroll to full tea leaves, sounds like some variety of gunpowder green tea.  It is a quite common Chinese technique, as I recall.  Each pellet (also sometimes called "pearls") is a rolled and dried tea leaf, which unfurls when steeped.

However, it is difficult to get more specific than that without more information.  There are several types of green tea that can be rolled into "gunpowder" form, with differing grades of tea, amount of aging, and years or growing locations (given growing conditions) all contributing to somewhat different flavor profiles.  You might be able to use the terms and look to see how the information about which varieties of gunpowder green match your house mate's tea or your experiences (or your own preferences) - but without more knowledge I don't know how to pin down the same kind of tea.


Isn't moisture a problem when measuring flour by weight?

Here is a post on the subject I found interesting.  http://www.genuineideas.com/ArticlesIndex/flour.html

The findings may not be definitive, but seem logical enough to be at least close.  Basically, my paraphrasing, they find the difference between completely dry flour and very humid conditions for most of us to be real but much less than that from volume measure.  They get more technical on some of their justifications than some might prefer, but generally claim that weight should not vary by more than 3% for most of us, and that given most home scales are accurate to about 1% and we classify that as precise measuring, 3% is not huge.

Guessing here, but I would suggest that other ingredients may also be effected at least in this same range by humidity and this effect is less than altitude variations, and that volume measures are likely effected by humidity which would allow increases in compaction as much, maybe ore than weight.  Given 3% as a rough guide, I think this fits into feel and experience areas and normal variations in cooking.  For those outside the "normal" band, desert and high humidity coastal type areas, having lived in both, yes, it is one more curse of trying to get consistent results there.


What made these red lentils 'brick' together?

Red lentils have no skin and are thus more absorbent. They literally sucked up the wee bit of water clinging to them along with their neighbors. Surface tension of the water couldn't be broken by the light-weight pulses.

When crumbled apart, the brick doesn't feel pasty, no?

Next time maybe pour lentils into water; either way, no harm to finished dish.


I think the answer to your question lies in the etymology of the words.

Pan is actually coming from Germaic pfanne (in Dutch panne).
Which is from Latin patina (shallow pan, dish) and Greek patane (dish, plate).

On the other hand, pot also has Germanic roots it means vessel (also in Dutch) coming from pottus (drinking cup) for Latin.

So the difference as the etymology of the words put it, pans are shallow (akin to dish, plate) most suitable for shallow frying, and pot is a vessel for boiling, simmering or deep frying.

Note: Like all living things, languages can also evolve and words don't necessarily stay true to their origins. Saucepan should have been called saucepot, but that’s just how languages work; as people coining terms and words don't necessarily put much effort in the history and story of the words.


How do I add a strong "onion flavor" to the biryani (in restaurant style)?

The restaurants may be adding asafoetida, a ground root product that adds a savory, onion-y flavor to food. It's very concentrated stuff and smells awful, but once you cook it for awhile it's absolute magic.


I made salsa and washed jars but did not put in boiling water ? They all sealed? Is this safe

Quick Answer:

It's a gamble. I would reseal the jars. Just remove the lids, and do the full boil and seal process. Nothing is lost.

Reason:

As mentioned in a similar post, you really need to do the full boil process to ensure all the contents, including the salsa, are safe for storage.

One reason for that is, if you even breathe on the jars, bacteria and microorganisms could have landed inside. The full boil will sterilize all of that.

Happy jarring!


Ratios of saturated/monounsaturated/polyunsaturated fats, and ratios of which kind of polyunsaturated (omega-3/6/7/9) are different for each oil. While the ratio of polyunsaturated fats to each other will mostly be a health matter and out of scope here, the saturated/mono/poly ratio has an influence on consistency at a given temperature (eg the coconut oil mentioned is pasty to solid at room temp), freezing point, and heat/storage stability - poly will break down at high heat more easily, resulting in potential off flavours, and will also reduce room temperature shelf life of the oil.
Taste will also be slightly different, and more different if heat stressed (eg to me canola smells and tastes fishy if it has been fried with even without overheating it).

Also be aware there are unfiltered/unrefined varieties of canola/rapeseed oil on the market, these are rather unsuitable as a frying/sauteing medium.

"Vegetable oil" can be a refined oil of canola,corn,sunflower,soy,safflower,others (but not often since most other oils are just more expensive), mixtures of these...


A combination microwave/convection or microwave/infrared oven will have a special fan to cool the circuitry while the non-microwave heating is engaged. This can be quite loud.


How to draw peanut flavor into rest of dish?

If you want the full peanut flavour, use peanut butter; crunchy or smooth.
If you still want the texture effect of whole nuts, add them at the end.
It's a bit like using coconut oil to lift up the taste of coconut that you just can't get in any other way.


Applying a binder to chicken after wet marinating

This is a good tutorial: http://www.wikihow.com/Apply-Dry-Rub-to-Chicken

2 things from the above link:

Properly dry the meat before applying the rub.
Let the meat rest a little while with the rub so that the rub re-hydrate a little bit and that will help it stick more to the meat.

So you will need to adjust your timing between getting the meat out of the wet marinade and putting it in the smoker.


How one may recognize whatever fish fillet is fresh?

The usual answer is smell, but sometimes it is not possible to smell the fish if already packed.

If the whole fish is fresh, ask the fishmonger to filet the fish for you, or do it yourself.

It is not that complicated; there are tons of videos showing you how to do it; and is usually cheaper than buying pre-packed filets (except if buying filet from a large fish, it might not be practical!)

If you have only access to packed filets, check for packing dates, it should be, IMO, no more than 1 day.

If there are no packing dates, ask the people working there, if you are not certain do not buy it.

If you buy from a supermarket chain (I do sometimes), check to see if there is a high turnover of products; do people buy the fish, and do the employees re-stock the shelves on a regular basis.


Is ice-encrusted frozen shrimp ok to eat?

This is how shrimp is frozen for transit and sale. The packaging should have a weight that includes the ice aswell as the shrimp, and a weight that is shrimp only weight: The weight after they have completely thawed.

There will also be a size grading. No of shrimp per lb or per KG based on whether they are
HOSO Head On Shell On
HLSO Headless Shell On or
Peeled
Break down here

The ice coating prevents freezer burn to the shrimp, so they'll be juicy when you defrost them rather than dry and hard! If the have freezer burn they'll be a opaque white discolouration on the surface. They're still OK eat like this - they're desecated / dried - they're just really tough.

Having said all this I am assuming that the packaging they're in in undamaged, before I say that they should be fine!


What is the ingredient that makes a Spanish paella so particular?

The most prominent flavors in authentic paella are pimenton (smoked paprika), saffron, a sofrito of onion and tomato, garlic, and the broth.


Vitamin C is probably the most critical of the components of most bread improvers. It helps the yeast grow essentially - just like you need vitamins, so does the yeast. Apparently it also strengthens the gluten through a chemical reaction.
Lecithin is also good to add. At the quantities provided in a typical lecithin additive to bread it acts as an emulsifier - breaking down fats/oils supplied in the bread mixture and making them more available to the yeast, thereby enhancing metabolism, as well as improving moisture retention through better mixing of the fat/oil and water within the loaf.