Do Parathas, Naan, and Roti have to be burnt a little?

The charring is crucial to both the flavor and the texture. The charred part itself brings a bitter note to the flavor. If you don't like it, you can cut it out, but many people would miss it. It's also crunchy, which provides a pleasant contrast to the chewy parts of the bread.

It's also incidental to the way it's cooked. In order to get the flavorful Maillard reactions (the brown spots), you need to subject it to very high heat. Because you're cooking it without fat, some parts are closer to the pan than others. So some parts become brown, while other parts remain white, and a few spots become black.

Similarly, that high-heat cooking is important to the texture. It's what gives you a crispy outside without drying out the inside. If you cook thin breads like this at lower temperature, they will eventually become brown without burning, but they'll also become hard.

If you don't like it, discard it.


1) Because the meat is ostensibly higher quality and 2) because of the relatively high cost of refrigerated shipping.

Your local butcher is probably a better option for bulk buying. Tell him you plan on regularly buying a large amount of beef and he should be willing to cut you a deal. If not try another butcher!


Why is soba not entirely buckwheat flour?

Buckwheat flour is gluten free.  The small amount of wheat flour gives it more stretch, and helps it stay together a bit better.  For more information, check out this article.


Non-spicy flavors for a spicy-hot food lover?

It depends on the medical reason. If it's a sensitive esophagus or stomach caused by GERD, replacing the capsaicin with pungent components, like mustard or black pepper, or strong acidic or base components, like vinegar, wine or citrus, may be out as well. Even alumvarics like onions and garlic may be out. By contrast, ginger can provide intense heat on the tongue, but is also recognized as a remedy for stomach upset. They will need to check with the doctor or nutritionist to see what's OK.

Used well, the boring old residents of the spice rack can provide strong and piquant flavor profiles without the irritation hot peppers in all their incarnations can introduce. Many traditional Continental, African, Near Eastern (Including Greek) and East Asian recipes that don't rely on heat for flavor are "adapted" for a mid-20th century Anglo-American palate - they're blander and less complex than the originals. Seek out traditional recipes and techniques, or 21st century interpretations, rather than rely on outdated Anglicized recipes. Don't be afraid to explore uncommon cuisines as well - Afghan cuisine, for instance, is very mild yet intensely flavorful - a mix of Near Eastern and Indian flavors that doesn't rely on heat.

Here is an article on intensifying and improving the flavors of commonly used spices and herbs. In summation:

Use fresh and freshly ground whole spices (I use a "magic bullet" style blender) rather than stale pre-powdered preparations.
Use fresh, green herbs rather than dried flakes - oregano is the exception.
Toast whole spices in a pan on low heat before they're ground, or bloom herbs and spices in hot oil, and use the oil as the flavorant.

Here is an article on common techniques to build strong flavor in dishes without introducing spiciness. In a nutshell -

Bloom the spices (as above)
Roast vegetables rather than sauteé, steam or stew.
Don't neglect the aromatics, such as sofrito or mirepoix. (Here is another article on selecting and using aromatic components)
Confit (poach in oil) powerful aromatics like garlic.
Use hygroscopic seasonings (salt or sugar especially) to draw out water and intensify flavors.
Brown butter before introducing it to the recipe.


Substituting Dried Shiitake Mushrooms for Fresh

I answered a question like this previously. How to work with Dried Mushrooms?

Cold water - the best way to keep the original flavour.

It will take at least couple of hours.

I would soak them in cold water for about 15 mins
Pour all the water out. Put in fresh water and keep soaking it. I will do this step couple of times. Remember you may retain the water as flavour, but you have to clean the mushroom and make sure the bitterness is gone. Also, I must say the imported Chinese mushroom must be handled carefully as there have been reports their process may contain some chemicals.
After a couple of hours, make sure the mushrooms are soft and take them out of water and drive them thoroughly. You may keep the water if you wish. The mushrooms are good for steamed and stir-fry.

Hot water

If you are in rush, then you may use hot or warm water. You still have to go through the cleaning process, but the time required will be less.


If you have a stove: Put a pan on the stove and use low heat to "toast" your cake.
If you only have a rice cooker: The rice cooker is only for "wet-cooking" like cooking rice or steaming. I don't know whether toasting food in the rice cooker breaks the cooker. Therefore I don't know how to fix the cake then.  :(


How to prevent chocolate covered items from sticking to the cooling rack?

The simple approach is to skip the wire rack and place the dipped confections on parchment paper, waxed paper or a silicone mat. (Some use plastic wrap or aluminum foil, but this may stick as well. Oiling helps.) After cooling, they should come off easily. However, there’s a chance of them developing “feet” when the runoff pools on the parchment, especially if the coating is on the runnier side.

If you use a rack (which reduces the “feet” by letting the excess chocolate drip down), you should lift the creams up once they have mostly, but not fully, solidified and transfer them either to the above mentioned parchment or a clean spot on the rack. You can also oil the rack very lightly, but the effect is not too much.

In any case, make sure you let all excess chocolate drip off well before actually placing the creams on whatever you choose for the cooling phase.


Using steam to make a dry version of turkey juicier

Brining is a better solution as it gives you juicy meat and extra flavour. Steaming would result in rather a bland taste.

Brining is essentially marinading the meat in a saltwater solution (usually with some extra flavourings like peppercorns etc) overnight. You then roast the meat as normal. Super juicy, super tasty results. There are lots of guides online.


You can eat kimchi at any point.  More fermentation/time simply means more funk.  It is more likely that things are floating, your only risk is mold forming on the surface.  You can add a weight of some sort to keep the exposed ingredients under the liquid, but if you are going to keep them sealed like that, mold formation is less likely, unless you remove kimchi with fingers or non-sanitary utensils.  You can also add brine, but I don't think that is as common in a kinchi situation, as it is in other pickling situations.


What is the effect of poaching fish in milk?

The milk sugars will add a sweetness to the dish. Also, after the fish comes out, the milk can be reduced/thickened to make a bechemel sauce.


What is the use of a convection broiler?

You might be warming something under the dish you are broiling


My bone broth dehydrated in slow cooker overnight

The temperature will have been high enough to be safe, so don't worry.

What you'll get is a darker, quite tasty stock. It's not suitable for everything (it's likely to be cloudy as well as dark) but can be very good. When I first got my new slow cooker it tended to do this, because it runs a little hotter than my old one. Running it on low instead of high (starting with boiling liquid) solved that.

You can also use the concentrated stock you've made, just remember to use much less than you would of normal stock.


An important part of practicing food safety on your own kitchen, is looking out for any "red flags" in raw ingredients that may have the potential to sicken.

If something doesn't smell right, doesn't look right, or as in your case, doesn't feel right; it is a red flag that you should pay attention to. It might be safe to eat, but why take any chances?

Supermarkets have been known to treat expired meat with ammonia or bleach, and then repackage it with an extended expiration date. Such despicable practices are hopefully rare, but pre-seasoning soon-to-expire meats and poultry, and repackaging with a later date is quite common.

You don't need to save the meat itself, but keep the package label (and receipt if you still have it), and bring it back to your store for a refund. Most stores will give you your money back with no hassle.


preserving leftover cooked rice from Chinese takeaway for processing in a cold salad afterwards

We often do the same thing, saving the rice for another use the next day. Or sometimes I will ask my husband to pick up takeout that I can heat up for lunch the next day. Here's what I recommend.

Immediately upon returning home with your takeout, remove the rice from the take out container, placing in an equal size airtight container. E.g., if you have one pint of rice, place in a pint container. Don't break the rice apart any more than necessary. Press the rice so that it holds tight together in the container just as it was when you removed it from the takeout container. Put the lid on right away. Refrigerate to store.

By placing in an airtight container right away, you are shortening the amount of time that moisture can evaporate. By using the same size container there shouldn't be an excessive amount of airspace in the container.

I follow this procedure and the rice comes out the next day just like it went in, still moist. Plus it doesn't really require any excessive time or effort.


You can roll your own XO sauce by stir frying (of couse, everything chopped) shallots, chili peppers, garlic, Jinhua ham, dried shrimps, dried scallops (conpoy), and cooking Shaoxing wine, approximately in this order.

A good alternative to Jinhua ham would be Spanish jamón serrano (or ibérico), or essentially any dry cured ham. If you don't have dried shrimps and scallops, anchovy paste plus fish sauce will work fine. The standard substitute for Shaoxing wine is dry white sherry, but Japanese cooking wine will work too.

XO sauce is fascinating and one of its charms is that the recipe is extremely flexible, so enjoy experimenting!


What regular maintenance is best for a Japanese knife?

As I am sure you can tell by looking at it, your Japanese knife is primarily sharpened only on one side.  As a result, the cutting edge is angled more steeply.  Japaneseknives on Wordpress has some simple pictures illustrating this.  This asymmetry is why you can't reliably use a honing rod on it, which relies on swipes to both sides of the edge to keep the blade smooth and free of burs.

The steeper angle makes the blade sharper, but you could say it is a double edged sword that can also make it prone to wearing more rapidly, depending upon how it is treated.  As a result, sharpening only once a year may not cut it.  There is another page on Korin's website that might be more helpful to you, including an informative video.  L'Ohira's Knife Care & Sharpening page has some good tips on the type of kit you might want to use, including 3 grades of water stones, though you may or may not need the course all that much:

Arato: A coarse grit stone used mainly for damaged edges and for creating new sharp edges.
Nakato:  A medium grit stone used for minor repairs and creating  sharp edges.
Shiage:  A fine grit finishing stone.

Much of that information is also covered in the Korin sharpening video.
Also, since the knife is carbon steel, it can rust.  Based on your question, it sounds like you probably take good care of your knives anyway, but you should especially make sure you clean this one promptly when dealing with acids.


I am pretty sure the acidic sauce reduction attacked the seasoning. Short cooking time of acidic elements does not have much effect, but longer cooking times are usually harsh for the seasoning.
It's not a real problem though. It will come back easily. Just continue cooking as usual.
To avoid this, usually Chinese cooking adds the sauce at the end, and uses some starch instead of reducing in stir-fry dishes.

On a side note, I think that your "patina" looks more like burned oil/whatever than seasoning, but it may be because of the quality of the picture. Is it smooth ?


I have read a couple of experiments (in Dutch so I will not link them here) where people cooked the same dish from the same shrooms, with one batch brushed and the other washed.

The washed batch did need higher temparature to actually fry, instead of just boiling in their own moisture and the texture in the finished dish remained different. There does seem to to be some merit to the culinary traditions here.

As for the safety aspects, perhaps this will ease your mind somewhat:

Research minimizes effects of federal produce standards on mushroom industry:

  But a new study shows that heat generated during the traditional composting process -- originally developed to kill insect and fungal pests of mushrooms -- is adequate for eliminating human pathogens that might be present, according to researchers in Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences.

If you got sick from eating a dish, the cause may not have been in the nutrition beds the shrooms were grown on.


The only thing that is even remotely possible in my mind is to use it akin to buttermilk or sour cream (which are intentionally fermented products) in baking.

However, since the culture that fermented the milk was uncontrolled, I would not do so.  I recommend discarding.


There are some recipes available on a rare fruit website, it also offers a link to an organic cherimoya orchard in California where you can order the fruit.

http://www.rain.org/~sals/eat.html


Short answer: No.

Long answer: No - because the free radicals are very short lived and highly reactive - each free radical will generally only interact with one other molecule before being destroyed. This could cause degradation of reactive nutrients such as vitamins and other nutrients in the oil, but is unlikely to cause much problem with other foods (I would guess). They also have a very limited interaction with the food which the oil is covering (surface area only), so they have a limited chance of causing damage. You are much much more likely to have bacterial or fungal degradation of the food than free radical.

I would have thought that you are more likely to throw the other food out because it is coated in unpleasant tasting oil rather than be worried about the degradation of the food.

Note that rancidification is the production of smelly compounds, mostly aldehydes, from the long-chain fatty acids found in fats and oils. This is a property peculiar to fats and oils and is generally not a problem for other food types as they do not contain large amounts of the fatty acids, so can't get "rancid" as such, though they can be considered spoiled if the fats within them (e.g. fat in meat) go rancid.


Sugar is not really a wet ingredient, it's just treated as one in certain types of baking (i.e. cakes).

When making a cake or other "fluffy" baked good, you want a fairly small amount of gluten to be produced, otherwise you'll get a chewy texture instead, and you definitely don't want a cake to be chewy like bread.

Dissolving sugar in the water inhibits the gluten-forming proteins.  It's a method (actually, the method) of adding more liquid to the mix without getting a tough, chewy cake.  It is for this reason that sugar is considered a "wet ingredient" - because the process only works properly if you add it with the water, not with the other dry ingredients.

It's even possible for sugar to be a dry and wet ingredient in the same recipe; you might add just enough sugar to the water to get the right texture, and add more to the dry ingredients for further sweetening.


Substituting for Madeira wine in a mushroom stuffed with sausage recipe

I would say dry sherry was the closest equivalent to Madeira wine. I sometimes use dry sherry in place of dry white wine in cooking, I just use slightly less of it.


When cooking Chinese ribs, they are usually boiled down... (I am a cook from Hong Kong) We usually cut the ribs bone-attached into small cubes before cooking, quite unlike the western cooking style.

stir-frying: Usually we stir-fry the rib with a sauce of choice; black bean and chili is my favourite. One can also use the sweet-sour (sometimes with the ribs sort of diced with bone attached, fried with a flour dip), and chinese preserved vinegar (This is often an unpleasent flavour for most foreigners who aren't familiar with it IMHO)
steaming: You can marinade the rib, either with black bean and chili or sometimes plum-sauce and a little bit of salt to taste. Then just throw it in there and steam it done. The resultant meat is nicely done and we mix the sauce with the rice to make it great tasting (sort of a good idea when i'm out of money and need to eat more rice, and less meat... The sauce is then quite rich in pork fat though, unhealthy, pardon me...)
braising: this one is often done with five spice, sometimes red preserved-tofu (nam-yu, as we call it in cantonese).

or you can make your own homemade marinade by using different amount of (1) soy-sauce, (2) salt, (3) pepper (white) and (4) sugar. Then stir-fry it, or saute it, then optionally you can add little bit of starch-water to get the 'sauce' thickened, and serve.

Sometimes we use the oyster sauce to marinade the food as well, but mind you that the quality differs, if you want the best, I would suggest 'lee-kam-kee' premium, old-style oyster sauce for this purpose, for best result, add sugar.


If the exterior of the gnocchi you had at the restaurant was crispy in the sense that it had a crunch to it, then they probably dropped it in a deep fryer for a minute or so to crisp it up.

I usually saute mine in clarified butter to brown the exterior and form a crust but it's not necessarily "crispy".

Regardless of what you're frying and whether you're shallow or deep-frying it, the problem of absorbing oil and turning out greasy is due to not having your oil hot enough, or adding too much food at once and dropping the temperature too much.

You usually want to fry between 350 and 375 degrees.  If you're using a thermostat controlled fryer or electric skillet, then I suggest setting the temperature at 365 degrees so you still have room for up to a 15 degree drop in temperature without detriment to the food.

When food is fried the oil heats up the moisture inside the food product which then turns to steam and forces its way out.  As the steam pushes outward it creates the visible bubbles we see.  It's the force of the steam pushing outward that keeps the oil from going in to the food.  As the temperature drops and thus the pressure from the steam, or the moisture has cooked away and food isn't removed when its done, the food starts to absorb the oil and turn greasy.


You could make it beforehand, store it in the fridge, and warm it up in the microwave when you want it. You'll only get problems if you add cream - then it may split.

It really is not worth the risks of having it sitting around. The alternative is to have your roux prepared, and work the sauce up quickly.


Soak first, then debeard.
I'm not sure that there is any real difference but everyone I've worked with, from grandmother to chef, from fisherman to fireman has done it that way. And there is something to be said for an amassed amount of experience.
One last to add though (and this is why I say that I'm not sure there is any real difference) is that while I get most of my mussels diving out with friends (so wild-caught and with beards and frequently barnacles to clean), most that I've seen in the past few years are commercially grown on ropes and usually don't have beards at all.


How to substitute beetroot for other ingredients into a cake recipe?

There isn't a substitution formula, since beets add moisture, structure, and flavor to the batter.  Any substitution would therefore be complex and highly recipe-specific.

Instead, I suggest that you start with the BBC recipe and make use of the techniques in Stella Park's recipe, such as the brown butter, the foamed eggs, and the double chocolate, all of which could be added to the BBC recipe.

FWIW, beets are an excellent addition to baked chocolate desserts, making them moister, richer and darker.


what is [flavor-wise] the closest nonalcoholic substitute for white wine and red wine?

I depends on the recipe, but generally no, white wine vinegar is a very different product than white wine. Vinegar is produced when bacteria eat alcohol and produce acid which changes the flavor dramatically. If the recipe calls for acid already (for instance lemon juice) then it can work, you just reduce the additional acid. The result will still be different though.


Your fish didn't "bind" because cooking fish actually breaks down the muscle fibres. Some fish have denser flesh that holds up better to frying and grilling. Tuna and swordfish are two common examples. Other fish have a flakier flesh such as haddock and red snapper.

Haddock is a good fish for deep frying.  You can also bake it to have it maintain its form. If you wish to fry it you need something thicker than a coating of flour to help it hold together.  You can coat it in batter or do a flour/egg wash/corn meal coating. If you really want just a flour coating you should probably start by cutting the fillets in half.

In terms of equipment and technique you should have a wide fish spatula and, with the fish lying lengthwise across the pan, you flip the fish away from you. You can even stabilize it with your fingers as it rolls over.

Alternatively, you could pan fry a fish more suited to the application.


Adding fresh fruit to a non fruited banana bread

If you add chocolate and nuts, no. They can be added without any adjustments, as they don't tend to affect the rest of the cake at all. Fresh fruit is a bit trickier, since it tends to release a great deal of liquid when cooked which can make the result soggy. In general, if you add fresh fruit to a cake you want to toss it in some starch (eg corn starch or potato starch) to absorb the liquid it will release. Each piece of fruit should be completely coated and then just folded into the batter.


I see two possible reasons for such a statement. First, it could be that traditional home cooks are accustomed to salt vegetables on a very rough basis, using some homemade rule like "a teaspoon for one pot of soup", and potatoes being blander (less sour, less aroma) than many other vegetables, they prefer to add more salt to potato-heavy meals to achieve a similar level of seasoning-ness.

The second could be a logical derivative of the idea that adding potatoes fixes oversalted soups. If they are an antidote for salt, they need more of it to reach normal saltiness when added deliberately, right? Only the problem here is that they are not a magical anti-salt thing at all. They don't really "fix" the soup, they are just a convenient way (cheap, bulky) to provide dilution in the salty soup, reducing the average saltiness of the chewed potato-stock mixture in the mouth.

Both are not really good reasons to stick to the rule. The second one is plain wrong, and the first is overly simplistic. The better way is to adjust your seasoning based on all factors of the recipe, not just the presence of potatoes. And always taste test when adding seasonings.

So, to sum it up, there is no such reason at all. Your assumption is based on misunderstandings and kitchen myths.


How to make pie filling which tastes like yogurt icecream?

I'm not much of a pie baker, but I am something of a chemist.  So, I can tell you that the yogurt is pretty sour (pH around 4.4.-4.7), but the acidity comes from lactic acid, which tastes different than the acetic acid of vinegar or the citric acid in citrus fruits.

I think it's the flavor of citric acid you want, and are missing, not the actual acidity (with cream of tarter in there it should be quite acid).  In this case, lime is a natural partner to papaya. Rather than flavoring the yogurt with vanilla, why not use a healthy jigger of lime juice and its zest?  The juice has a pH of around 2, so it will also increase the acidity some.  The zest gives the essential oils of the fruit, giving a stronger lime smell and flavor (without actually impacting the acidity).


Is it safe to use an enamel/cast iron Dutch oven with small cracks and worn enamel

I see bare metal that is partially seasoned -perfectly fine
Crazing of enamel is also fine. Rule of thumb: if you can feel cracks with fingernail then that's too much a trap for pathogens.
An occasional soak in borax or vinegar to be 100%


What is this brown deposit at the bottom of my Oil can?

This is just fine material from the grinding process that got through the filters and settled over time. It's pretty normal, it just means this company's filtering process isn't as effective as your previous brand. There shouldn't be any food safety considerations with that, my only consideration would be that suspended fine particles will lower the burn temperature of the oil some. There doesn't seem to be that much in there, if you are having no problems using the oil then you look good to go.


Mixing a banana with homemade sunflower butter turned into a horrible, leathery substance. Why?

I suspect the textural change you experienced is analogous to the seizing of chocolate (which is also a ground, fatty seed--in that aspect similar to a sunflower seed).

Sunflower seeds are fairly dry.  The consist mostly of fat, and starches, and protein.  When you add a small amount of water (from the mashed up banana), the starches in the sunflower hydrate and absorb the water, making it thick and giving the textural transformation you experienced.

If this hypothesis is correct, adding enough additional water to fully dissolve and suspend the starches will give you a smooth fluid, or paste again.

As to the taste perception, that I cannot comment on.


There are people that are going to argue that yes, you do.  And if you're immune compromised, that's probably best.

However, if it had been boiling, and there's a layer of fat to seal the top, then it's at a lower (although not non-existant) risk.  You have to judge for yourself if it's worth it.

Personally, I'd bring it back up to a boil for 30+ minutes, then use other techniques to cool it back down:

Pour into shallow pans, without lids to maximize surface area & evaporative cooling.  Stir every few minutes until it starts to cool down.
Place the pot in a sink filled with cold water & ice, and stir every few minutes, possibly changing out the water & ice if necessary
Put ice, freezer pack or similar into a ziplock bag, put it into the pot, and stir

If you're ever in the situation where it's getting late, and you have a large pot to go into the fridge, I'll either leave it on warm overnight.  (making sure there's nothing near the stove that might be dangerous.  But I have an electric stove, not gas), or I'd do what cooling I can (pot in sink ice bath + stirring), move it into multiple smaller containers, and put them in the fridge without lids on them (so we have some evaportative cooling in the fridge)


Can cooking in a larger than intended vessel be disadvantageous in some way?

Every pressure cooker has a minimum amount of liquid which it must be filled with, in order for that liquid to evaporate and provide the pressure increase.

Check the manual for your pressure cooker to ensure that the small quantity of lentils you want to cook is at least the minimum.

If it is not, you can either prepare more lentils (hopefully you can use the leftovers), or perhaps get a smaller pressure cooker.

Of course, it doesn't take very long to cook lentils conventionally, so when you want only a small amount, you might consider cooking it in one of the traditional stove top or oven methods.


Are there cheeses that are not suitable for making for macaroni and cheese?

I can think of three general reasons why some cheeses are better than others for melting:

Age:
The age of a cheese often determines how well it'll melt.  For instance, a 5 year old cheddar will (generally) not melt very well into a bechamel sauce.

Texture:
You may find that stringy cheeses like mozzarella make the mac'n'cheese more difficult to eat, as it's a little impractical to have strands of cheese hanging from your spoon.  At the same time, cheeses like parmesan or feta may not melt the way you'd expect for a cheese sauce

Taste:
As for flavour .. I don't think many people would line up for macaroni and blue cheese :o


How significant is the Pickle Spice blend to a corned beef?

The exact spice blend for any 'Pickling Spice' varies from maker to maker, from region to region, from season to season, etc...

It sounds like you found substitutes for each of the basic flavor components, so this plan looks good so far. The 'corning' process traditionally is a long, slow process which is usually approximated by a spice blend that gives a similar flavor, and a long, slow cooking process that cooks but leaves the meat tender.
There is more about the history, and how 'Corned Beef' is not a traditional Irish dish in this article.

Your use of pork loin is another substitution, and be careful, as the loin is relatively more lean that the brisket that corned beef is usually prepared with. Check on cooking time, as a several hour simmer, which is great for a 3# brisket, could make the pork very dry.

The cloudiness from the ginger will resolve as all the spices simmer together, and protein will come out of the meat. You aere on the right track, just know that you are making an interpretation of the dish, as a number of variables have changed. Cook, enjoy, take notes, adjust.


I’m a huge dairy lover but I recently found out a couple years ago that I am lactose intolerant and had to make the switch over to non-dairy almost everything.

If continuing to use butter isn’t a problem for you, keep that one. I bake a ton and butter is still the best option for popovers (my grandma was British, I make them every Christmas) and any sorts of breads. If not, subbing in margarine or a vegan butter (basically margarine) works well too.
For 90% of what’s on your list, unsweetened original flavor almond-milk is my go-to, oat milk would work well too. Both of those have the mildest flavor and bake well too. Any sauce that needs to be thicker or richer, sub out soy milk instead for chowders or say a bechamel sauce, which could work with almond-milk as well if you just added a little cornstarch and non-dairy or goat cheese, thickens it like a charm!
-Non-dairy yogurts and cheeses have come leaps and bounds in the last 10 years! For cooking I’d recommend using either goat-milk yogurt for the tangy-ness or a Kite hill, Silk, or Lavva (which has a really tangy unsweetened one I just used to make a tzatziki sauce the other day, came out great!). For non-dairy cheeses, the best are from Lisanatti Foods (almond-milk mozzarella block), VioLife (their cheddar slices and Parm block are great), or Chao (great slices of cheese for sandwiches).


What is a substitute for half-and-half cream?

When I am substituting in a recipe, I usually use coconut cream instead of cream or half and half if called for in a recipe. (There is a question posted here that covers how to get the cream from a can of coconut milk.) Sometimes I use soy creamer, but sometimes that can be hard to find. I'm sure you could experiment with a mix of soy creamer and soy milk.

My ideal solution is to use vegan recipes to start with, because they are formulated without milk or eggs. Maybe in your case, just look up dairy free cake recipes, if you don't mind eating eggs. There are a lot of cookbooks and blogs out there with a ton of vegan cake and dessert recipes.


Turmeric is a plant, and therefore is made up of many different chemicals. Most of the aromatic compounds in turmeric are either water-soluble or disperse well in water, and are too small to be strained out.
The rest is the actual plant matter -cellulose, proteins etc., which is not and can not be water soluble.

You are not the only person to experience this, and there is no such thing as soluble turmeric.
One thing you may want to try is turmeric flavouring (e.g. http://www.epigenetics-international.com/product/24/Turmeric_Root_Flavouring_100ml/) . This is an alcoholic solution of natural turmeric extract, which you may be able to make yourself if you felt so inclined.


Is it safe to boil frozen vacuum sealed chicken without thawing?

I mostly agree with moscafj's answer, but I do think that it needs to be qualified since we don't know what sort of plastic packaging the chicken is in.  A lot of vacuum packaging for food is perfectly safe to put in warm or even mildly hot water, but some types of plastics will begin to degrade if heated too much.  Most food-grade plastics aren't going to be a safety concern in terms of leaching chemicals, but I still wouldn't heat food in a plastic bag to boiling without knowing the type of plastic and whether it was designed for that type of heating.  More likely, it might begin to degrade and fall apart/rupture.

As moscafj said, sous vide is the best option, assuming your plastic is good for that type of long-term heating.

If you don't have a sous vide circulator, I'd too recommend thawing, but you could perhaps use a variant of what you intended to do to quick-thaw your chicken.  I know the link in the other answer is critical of the "hot water thaw" method, but it is perfectly safe for relatively thin foods if monitored and is probably the best quick-thaw method, achieving much better food quality than microwaving.  Food scientist Harold McGee has advocated it with the approval of studies done on safety by the USDA, and Cook's Illustrated has approved it as well.

Basically, put your sealed chicken in hot tap water, or water heated to around 125-140F.  It will probably thaw in 5-30 minutes, depending on thickness, and then you'll be able to remove it from the packaging and cook it as you usually would with little quality degradation.  (Again, note that this method is NOT for foods that are very thick, as they will take too long to thaw and could risk bad bacterial growth.  If your chicken is more than a couple inches thick, another method for thawing would be better.)  Note also that (1) you need to monitor the chicken, not just leave it in the hot water for long periods of time, and (2) you should cook the chicken immediately after it thaws.

I usually use this method only for foods I can easily thaw within 20-30 minutes, but I definitely wouldn't go for more than an hour in an uncontrolled water bath before cooking the meat.  In any case, a hot water bath is usually the fastest way to defrost frozen meat, then allowing you to cook it normally.


You cannot calculate it, you can only measure it.

Scoville is a subjective scale. Wikipedia tells you how it is measured - by testing with human panelists, using a certain protocol.

As all subjective scales, Scoville is ordinal. Even though it is expressed in numbers, these numbers are best understood as ranks - you cannot assert that "1000 SHU is twice as hot as 500 SHU", for example, or that "the hotness difference between 500 SHU and 1000 SHU is the same as between 1000 SHU and 1500 SHU".

If you take statistics, you will find that many methods are treating ordinal scales as if they were interval, and go on calculating averages and whatnot. This tends to work well enough for some applications. But in your case, you are dealing with human sensory perception. I am not 100% sure for the specific case of hotness, but typical human responses to a stimulus are logarithmic, not linear. So if you try to simplify your life and make a linearity assumption for Scoville, your estimates are likely to be so far off as to be unusable.

If you really need an exact Scoville number for your sauce, it is not math you need, but the resources to conduct proper testing in several iterations. I fail to see the relevance of such goals for the home cook though. You eat sauce, not numbers.


There are actually two kinds of tonghao (as it's called in Mandarin). The one that looks like arugula is called shantonghao (mountain tonghao). You can saute it with garlic. The 'regular' tonghao has rounder leaves.

Both types of tonghao are used in hotpots - you just cook them for a short while and they're done. Similarly, they're used in savory tangyuan soup. Tangyuan are small glutinous rice flour dumplings - some are filled with ground meat, some just plain. The savory soup has tonghao, tangyuan, and shallots.

This is in Taiwan at least - I'm not sure whether people do different things with tonghao in other areas.


What general rules should I follow to ensure that my measurements are accurate?

When does it matter?

Only worry about highly accurate measurement when it matters.   This is generally when two ingredients or aspects of a recipe must be held in a close ratio to be successful.

This occurs more normally in baking than in savory cooking (except for modernist or molecular methods, where accuracy is extremely important).

The classic example is balancing the amount of baking soda and lemon juice in a recipe, so there is enough acid for the baking soda to react with and provide good leavening.

In savory cooking, many ingredients just provide bulk, flavor, or texture, but are not reacting chemically with other ingredients in a significant way.  In this case, you generally do not need highly accurate measurements.

Volume versus weight

The goal when measuring ingredients is that you want to have a reproducible amount of the substance.   The only true way to ensure this in the general case is to use an accurate scale, which measures by weight.

The reason is that some foods are compressible, and can be squeezed or fluffed to different densities.  The classic example is flour:  depending on how you measure (sifting into a measuring cup and then leveling, to dip and sweep, for example), a single cup could weight as little as about 4 ounces at the low end to over 5 ounces at the high end.  That is a variance of over 20%!

For ingredients which are highly compressible, or whose density can change, measuring by weight is simply going to be more accurate, and more repeatable.   4.5 ounces of flour by weight is always, well, 4.5 ounces.

Economical kitchen scales are available that measure digitally down to 1 gram (about 28th of an ounce).

Switching from Volume to Weight:  Common Conversions

Switching from measuring primarily by volume to primarily by weight is somewhat scary.  How much flour should there be in a cup?  What does a cup of sugar weight?

A quality cookbook for baked goods will give you ingredients by weight, or if not, in the front matter, will tell you what weight they are using for a standard up.  Similarly, the quality websites for baked goods will tell you what weight they use for a standard "cup" of flour, or they will simply provide weight information as part of the recipe.

If you don't have recipes specified by weight, and cannot find a specific conversion or standard cup size for your recipe source, here are some good values to get started for the most important ingredients.

Flour - 4.5 oz / cup
Sugar - 8 oz / cup
Brown Sugar - 7 oz / cup
Cocoa - 4.25 oz / cup
Water - 8 oz / cup
Vegetable oil - 8 oz / cup (surprisingly, it is not that much less dense than water; you would need to measure 10 cups worth to be off by one full ounce by weight)
Sour cream - 8.1 oz / cup (in most cases, rounding to 8 would be fine)

Web searches, such as Online Conversions can be very helpful in finding conversion factors.

As a side benefit, once you are measuring by weight, you may actually find it is more convenient, and has less cleanup, as you can measure each item into a common bowl (pressing the tare or zero key each time).  No more little pile of bowls and measuring spoons to wash!

When is measuring by volume okay?

Things that don't compress, and are not mixed with air are fine when measured by volume.  The scientific reason is that their density is constant, so a given volume will always have the same weight.

Examples of items that can be measured accurately by volume include:

Liquids of almost all sorts - water, oils, juices, extracts, milk, and so on
Fine, solid powders, like granulated sugar

Spices are another exception.  While measuring by weight is in fact preferred and more accurate (if you have a scale accurate to below the gram level), they don't usually participate in the chemistry of a recipe, and are adjusted to taste in any case.  Therefore, the inherent inaccuracy of measuring them by volume is less troublesome.

Salt: the Gotcha

Salt is an unusual ingredient.  Depending on how it is crystalized, it can have surprisingly different weights per volume.

For this reason, if you can, measuring salt by weight is always more accurate.

Still, it is often used in small quantities, and it is fairly in-compressible, so measuring by volume should be okay, as long as you always measure the same type of salt.

Be aware that different salt brands and types have differently shaped granules, crystals, or flakes, some of which have air inclusions, so the weight to volume conversion depends on the particular type of salt.

While all granulated table salts are fairly similar, kosher and specialty salts can weight as little as half as much per unit of volume in comparison, and can vary by brand.

Common US salt volume to weight conversions:

Granulated (table) salt - 10.3 oz / cup
Kosher Salt, Diamond - 5.01 oz / cup
Kosher Salt, Morton's - 7.68 oz / cup

Dry volume

If you do measure by volume, use the right type of measuring tool.   A measuring spoon or dry measuring cup is appropriate for, well, dry ingredients like sugar.  To use it properly, overfill the bowl of the spoon or the well of the cup, and then sweep off with something straight (like a chopstick or the back of a knife) to make it level.

Liquid Volume

Except for very small volumes like measuring vanilla extract, where measuring spoons are used (and some accuracy is sacrificed), for liquid measurements, use a liquid measuring cup, which typically is transparent and has graduations marked up the side.

When you fill the measuring cup, you will notice that the liquid curls up or down at the edge of the cup.  This curve, called the miniscus, is a result of how the surface tension of the liquid interacts with the material of the cup.  For the most accurate measurement, you would read at the center of the miniscus, where it is level, not at the edge.

The measuring tool you use should be about the same size as the amount you want to measure.  It would be very hard to measure a teaspoon of vanilla correctly in a 10 gallon drum marked off in quarts.  Similarly, measuring a gallon one half cup at a time is no fun, and an invitation to inaccuracy.

Measuring cups are available in many sizes, from shot glass sized (suitable for measuring teaspoons and tablespoons) to very large ones that can measure gallons.  A home cook should probably have at least 1 cup, 2 cup, and 4 cup versions.

A cone-shaped measuring cup like this:

is a nice tool, as it is very accurate a range of scales.

For this reason, if you do measure liquids by volume, it is best

Reading the recipe

Recipes are a code, telling you how to recreate the dish in their author's minds.  Sometimes, the code is fairly crypic.

Do you measure, for example, the nuts before or after chopping them?

Well, if you are measuring be weight, it doesn't matter—just one more example weight is easier.

If you are measuring by volume, then the way the recipe phrases the ingredient and its preparation is key:

One cup, hazelnuts, chopped — measure a cup of hazelnuts, then chop them
One cup chopped hazelnuts — chop hazelnuts, then measure one cup of the resulting product

Temperatures

One of the most important things we measure in the kitchen is temperature.  It tells us when a steak is done, when butter is at the best plasticity to make croissants, and when milk is at an unsafe temperature, among many other things.

Temperature is very tricky to measure because it is local.  One part of a chicken thigh in a sautee pan can be much hotter than another.

The right thermometer

The most important factor in getting an appropriate temperature reading is choosing the right thermometer for the job.

The most common themometers used in the kitchen are:

Instant read thermometers (the kind every chef and professional cook should have in their pocket):  the generalist of the kitchen thermometer world.  Useful for measuring almost any food temperature, except for sugar work.

Every cook should have one of these.

To use them properly, stick the probe into the center of the food item (if it is solid) or stir a liquid and then insert the probe.  Weight for the temperature to stop changing rapdily, which could be 2-20 seconds depending on your model.

This is your reading.
Probe thermometer.  These are convenience for roasts and items placed in the oven for a long period of time.

Insert the probe into the thickest part of the meat, and set a temperature.  The probe goes inside the oven, and the main unit sits outside.   Most have an alarm that will go off when you reach a set temperature, making it very easy to target a particular temperature for doneness.

Probe thermometers can only check one spot on a roast or dish.  You should then verify other spots with your instant read to confirm the dish is fully cooked everywhere (this is most important with poultry which is oddly shaped, and where you have a safety issue in terms of bringing it to temperature).

Sugar or deep fry thermometer.  These are often marketed separately, but they are the same type of thermometer, and are generally inter-changable for either use (although sugar thermometers may be more accurate).

They clip to the side of your sugar pot or deep fry pot.  They are accurate for temperatures in at least the 200 F to 400 F range, where deep frying and sugar work is done.

Some instant read thermometers are accurate at these temperatures as well, but they should not be left immersed.  Read your individual manual.

Don't worry, be happy

This answer stresses the most accurate ways to measure.  In some baking, and in molecular gastronomy applications, this matters.

In practice, even in most baking, recipes are remarkably forgiving.  10% more or less vanilla, or 15% variance in the amount of eggs is not going to make or break a recipe at the scale used by home cooks.

So use good practices, which will give you better consistency in your recipes, but don't stress out too much.

Some things, like spices or vanilla extract, are just easier to measure by the spoon, even if a gram scale would be more accurate.  That is okay.


If you want it fluffy, you'll need air. The easiest way to accomplish this is to crack the eggs in a bowl, whip them (with a whisk or a fork) for a couple of minutes. If you have a homogeneous-ish substance, add them to the onions and potatoes in your pan.


In Melbourne, Australia, there are several types of flatbread termed Lebanese and one I know is stretchy-like.  If you check out Australian chefs for recipes - Donna Hay, Greg Maloof and you'll need to check others online. If I find out what the brand is I'll put up another note.


Does water that's been left to sit and then reboiled taste different from fresh water boiled once?

Yes, it is different. Two things happen: the dissolved oxygen boils out, and whatever mineral solids are in there become concentrated as steam evaporates.


What makes it possible to store this uncooked fish product in the fridge for up to a month?

I feel I must offer a contradicting opinion to @rumtscho's answer.  The product you seem to have is indeed shown in the catalogue at the page of "smoked salmon" products, but note that it is the only one not being named "cold smoked", but "marinated".
And just by the looks of it I assume this is actually Gravlax: raw salmon, preserved by "pickling" in a marinade of lots of salt and sugar (and traditionally dill, but that's only for taste).  It will not taste like smoked salmon at all, because it isn't.   The marinade will be enough to prevent immediate bacterial growth (all the fluids go out by osmosis, and will turn into a highly saline brine), although in industry there are probably additional substances involved.
Gravlax is also easy to make on your own, in comparison to smoked salmon.  Just get a raw salmon filet of good quality, google the right proportions of sugar, salt, and dill, and massage them onto the meat.  Then you pack it in foil and leave it in the fridge for a couple of days.  (I wouldn't leave it for a month, though.)  You'll notice that the meat doesn't really cure, but gets stiffer, somewhat darker in color, and a bit "glassy".


How to make a firm loaf from pancake batter mix?

Just use less liquid, that should work.  Since you didn't mention the brand, you have to wing it at first.  If you want to be a good cook, get am old cookbook and follow the directions, you can experiment after you've learned how.


Can jasmine rice and basmati rice be cooked together?

It shouldn't be a problem, since their cooking times are similar.


As the commenters have already said, it's hard to know exactly what happened from the information you've given but I'm going to try to give some direction.

First, I think the key is in this statement:
"the pastry was not all well creamed and looked oily as I placed in oven".

This sounds like either the oil (butter, in this case) separated out from the batter, or it wasn't well-mixed to begin with. Let's assume that you mixed it thoroughly to begin with until it seemed like a creamy, smooth batter and everything seemed well-incorporated.

So, what happened? I'm guessing that you left the eclairs-to-be resting on the pans for a while, maybe while you were piping out the rest of them.

If you let the batter sit for a while, oil can start to separate out, especially if your kitchen is pretty warm (which they can be, in summer when boiling water on the stove and pre-heating the oven). This shouldn't happen immediately, but I think it would explain what happened.

Next time, make sure everything is ready and laid out before you start. Start to pre-heat the oven before you start boiling the water. Once you start piping, move quickly, and if possible, work in a cooler part of the kitchen. Pop the trays directly into the oven as soon as you finish piping them all out.

There's a second thing you said that I think is significant. You said that the outside was rock-hard but the inside was too moist. I think the excess moisture is from steam.

It is normal for the eclair to have a bit of a crust to it (not rock-hard, of course, but there will be a crust) and this traps steam inside. You need to break a hole through the crust to let the steam out, and my guess is that either you may have missed this step, or the hole you made wasn't big enough.

BTW, it is also possible to have something get too hard and still be raw in the middle if you cook for too long at too low a temperature (it dries out instead of cooking) but you said you cooked for 30 minutes and that matches the recipe timing, so I don't think that was your problem here. But if you have a lot of problems with things not taking the right amount of time when you bake, you might want to invest in an oven thermometer and see if your oven is heating to the temperatures you expect. Not all recipes are very finicky about exact temperatures but some are.


Simmering lemons for hours, leaves them quite bitter?

One strategy to reduce lemon bitterness is to slice, bring to a boil, then drain.  Refill pot, and repeat.  Do this 3 or 4 times.  Then, proceed with your recipe.  This is a strategy employed when making candied citrus.  It could be helpful in your case.


A cheesecake doesn't need a hard base, or any base at all. The cheese part of cheesecake is sticky and will stick to a pan, although there's ways to get around that. A base (whether spongy or hard) also gives a texture and flavor contrast which many people find works well for them.

It's just tradition really, you can do what you want with it, I've seen cheesecakes baked in individual ramekins with no base, it's really up to you.


You have a few options, including what should have worked. Capsaicin will dissolve in high-proof alcohol, so if you have a bottle of 151 you might have a go with that. Vinegar can also be used to dissolve the oils. These are probably more effort and expenditure than they're worth though.

  You were on the right track; soap should have worked. In all likelihood, due to the concentration of the oils you simply did not wash it sufficiently. It requires quite a few passes (especially if the cutting board is porous) of hot, hot water and suds. As it is fat soluble you can try cleaning more thoroughly with most any soap with a de-greasing agent.

Moving forward, I have heard tell of spraying with non-stick spray to ward away the oils. I haven't felt some inordinate compulsion to do this and cannot attest to its efficacy, however with a slap chop and its nook and crannies you may find it a suitable use case.


How do I bake cakes in a gas oven without a temperature knob?

I agree with Jefromi that the easiest solution is just to get a cheap oven thermometer that you can put into the oven.  I'm not sure where you're from or the availability of them, but they are generally quite cheap.

Before such things existed, people had methods for testing oven temperatures for baking.  The most common one was to put your hand into the oven and count how long it takes until it's too hot and you need to take it out.  Depending on the number of seconds, you could tell the difference between a "hot" or "moderate" or "low" oven or whatever.  Such distinctions are sufficient to determine oven temperature to bake a passable cake, but they require experience to achieve even basic precision.  If you already knew how to do this, you could estimate the oven settings pretty quickly (though only in a general sense, but good enough for basic baking).

But without that sort of previous experience, I'd again just recommend buying an oven thermometer.


Shallower bowl or longer dough hook for Kitchen Aid 7qt Stand Mixer?

It is most likely that your bowl is simply too big for the recipe batch size.
I habe a 5qt KA Pro Model lift bowl style.

For Easter 2018 I made half a batch of my buttorn roll recipe. That size batch called for only 1-1/4 cups of A-P flour and I quickly learned that I was going to make those for dinner, I was going to have to mix then knead the dough the old-fashioned way = by hand.

Turned out great and added a note in my cookbook to avoid the extra cleanup.


Converting Peppermint Marshmallow Recipe to Raspberry

The easy way: Use raspberry oil (preferably) or a raspberry extract in place of the peppermint oil.

The (probably) much better way: Leave out the oil and food coloring and use raspberry puree as you suggested. Strain frozen or fresh raspberries through a fine strainer or cheese cloth. Weigh the resulting juice/puree and then put it on the stove an cook it until the puree is half of its original weight (roughly). This reduced puree will be more intensely raspberry, so it will get all of the raspberry flavor without having to add as much water to the recipe. You'll have to experiment with the amount of reduced raspberry puree to use.

I wouldn't increase the corn syrup, but you certainly could if you want them sweeter. I would personally go for the opposite effect and add a small amount of lemon juice to the raspberry puree to give a little tartness to complement the sweetness of the marshmallow.

As far as the chocolate, I would recommend a darker chocolate. 55% is quite sweet, especially around a marshmallow. You should also consider the type of chocolate. Cocoa percentage isn't everything in dark chocolate. Experiment with different types of chocolate and see what fits well with the marshmallows. Just like wine, chocolate should be paired with other foods according to the subtleties of the taste of the individual chocolate.


Yes to both questions. Lentils and barley can go together quite well in a soup. Here's a recipe for a lentil and barley soup as an example. Compare it to your soup recipe to see if there are any major differences (especially in cooking time or liquid to barley/lentil ratios). My hunch is that the barley will absorb more liquid than the lentils, so you may need to increase the water a bit. Just keep an eye on the soup as it simmers, and add more water as needed.
There's one caveat about your turkey, tomato, barley and lentil soup idea. Legumes take longer to cook when the cooking liquid is acidic. Tomatoes are acidic. Lentils cook quickly enough that they will get fully cooked even in an acidic broth, but it takes longer. (If you were using a slower-cooking legume, such as beans and chickpeas, I would recommend pre-cooking the beans.) Here's a recipe for a tomato, lentil and barley soup as an example. Notice that it simmers for an hour to get the lentils fully cooked, whereas the soup without tomatoes only has to simmer for 40 minutes. If you want the faster cook time, simmer the soup for about half an hour before adding the tomatoes. That will give the lentils time to get nearly done before increasing the acidity of the broth.


Sure.
I have done this dozens of times.  Beans are durable and super forgiving.  They might get a little mushy but that is fine for black beans.
For other kinds of food the risk is that the might get overcooked the second time and lose character you want.


Why is it suggested to freeze Chimichurri Sauce?

There is a risk of botulism growth.  C. botulinum grows in the absence of oxygen (an anaerobic environment).  It is possible that botulinum spores are present on the garlic, as well as the herbs. The spores exist fairly widely in our environment, but they don't grow and develop toxins unless the conditions are right. The recipe results in a sauce that places these ingredients in an anaerobic environment, significantly raising the risk of botulinum growth.  Colder temperatures reduce the risk.  That is why freezing and refrigeration (and the associated time limits) are recommended.


You can get better cooling with less dry ice by using a cooling bath.
Chunks of dry ice mixed with isopropyl alcohol (rubbing alcohol, isopropanol) will give you a liquid with a temperature of -77°C (-106.6 °F). The liquid will transfer heat to the botton of a metal dish far more efficiently than solid or granulated dry ice.


Can a broiler function as a grill substitute when making kebabs?

The first thing I have to say is kebabs and overcooked are synonymous. If you want all your meats and/or veggies to be cooked right, I would advise you to put each item on it's own skewer so you can take them off as they are finished.

As for a broiler and broiler plate functioning as a substitute for a grill, I would say that it won't be an exact substitute, but you will at least get the high temperature cooking and caramelization you would expect from a grill (you will just be missing the smoke flavor).


Making cream cheese from raw, non-homogenized milk, what to do with the cream?

In all cheese making and especially with young cheeses like cream cheese, fat adds a lot to the flavor and texture.

You can skim off extra fat but your cheese will be thinner and less richly flavored.

Shaking the cream in won't help if you are using a fermented method (as opposed to using boiling and acid to curdle the milk) because it will separate out again during the fermentation.

Your thickened, fermented milk will be richer on top where the cream rose. It will mix back in when you drain the cheese and form it.


It needs very even heat to cook through without burning (underneath if you cook it on the hob). presumably if you cook it on the hob you need to use a bain marie and for individual ramekins this is quite specialised and large.  In the oven you can just use a roasting tin for your bain marie for several ramekins.


Why does my chard taste bitter when I cook it?

Your chard most likely tastes bitter because chard is bitter.  You can't really change that with cooking technique alone, but you can:

Use older chard, which tends to be markedly less bitter than the young chard you're using;
Avoid bringing out the bitterness, by cooking at lower heat;
Mute any remaining bitterness with salt, which is pretty common for leafy greens.


As you have not posted a recipe I can't tell you how to fix it for next time. I can't tell you what is wrong with them though.

Brown, because the oven was too hot. I do mine by blasting in oven at 135c for 15min then turning it off and going home. Then when I get back to work in the morning they are perfect.

Flat, because... Many possibilities

Over/undrr whisked eggs
Too much/little sugar
Too much moisture
Time between whisking eggs and getting them in the oven was too long (5min maximum)
Fat has got into the mix. Possibly from a dirty bowl/whisk/bit of egg yolk or even your hands.

To help control the whisking of eggs I mix about 1 part corn flour with my sugar. And an equal amount of white wine vinegar. So whisk your eggs up to stiff peaks, tip in your sugar/cornflour mix whisk a little till it starts to dissolve then add the vinegar. Keep whisking until all the sugar has dissolved and the mixture is really shiney (rub a little between your fingers if it feels grainy keep whisking).

As soon as it's whisked (use the old trick of holding the bowl upside down if it stays you should be fine) get it straight on a baking tray however you want and into the oven. This part is critical the longer it sits UN cooked the more likely you'll have a disaster.


Does celery powder have any non-preservative use?

Yes, it tastes of celery. Celery is one of the three ingredients of mirepoix, the vegetable mix which is ubiquitous in French cuisine and has spread to many others. Current large-scale food production rarely includes slicing fresh vegetables into small cubes and browning them in a pan, but they try to add the ingredients in more convenient form. So, if you eat powdered soup or similar, it can be used for that.

On the other hand, if you are eating cured meat, then the most probable reason are indeed the nitrates. If you are looking at a certain type of cured meat (e.g. bacon), it is impossible to produce the same cured meat without nitrates *, but there are customers who are scared of "chemicals" and are more likely to buy the food if the label states that the nitrates are coming from a plant source.

* And in general, most types of curing are done with nitrates. There are types done without nitrates, e.g. the prosciutto pointed out in the comments, but they are the minority. And it is more difficult to create a safe process which cures without nitrates, since they have a preservative role.


How to interpret the date on these eggs?

Check again, the date should be 'sell by' rather than 'eat by'. If you're in the US, you should have at least a couple weeks to eat them after the sell by date.


Try taking a very small amount of your lemon soup and see what happens if you do heat it to a simmer. It might work, but if it doesn't you won't have ruined the whole thing.

If not successful, then you might need to reimagine the dessert. My first thought would be to fill and/or saturate some dessert shells or angel food cake with the mixture, and then firm it up by chilling or freezing it.


How long do vitamins last in multivitamin juice?

If you drink up your juice within 3 to 4 days, the vitamin content will not decrease significantly. Usually, if properly stored, vitamis last for years.

Here is a link to some more information. Although not specifically talking about juice, I still found it informative: https://labdoor.com/article/do-vitamins-go-bad


Will chopping hard destroy my new knives?

Hard chopping will not destroy the knife, but it will dull the knife faster. The edge of a knife is extremely narrow. As a result, regular use will push the edge to the left or right, leading to burrs. Hard impacts accelerate this process, and can even cause the edge of the blade to chip. Knife blades stay sharp longest when they are used gently and on soft cutting surfaces.


How to make gingerbread more moist and fluffy?

The biggest issue's your facing is the lack of Gluten which helps trap the air created by the baking powder (Fluffy) and the lack of fat (Moisture). I also sure the sugar would be adding a little extra strength. However the Picture on the original recipe looks dense and dry anyway.

I'm assuming you're not using butter purposely, for much the same reason you're using honey instead of sugar.

Taking these two as a basis and working on the recipe you have provided. I think the following may work for you:

3 cups Gluten Free flour
1 cups Honey (Warmed to around 50°C)
1 Packet Instant Yeast <--Previously Baking Powder
1 teaspoons ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoons ground cloves
1/2 teaspoons ground nutmeg
2 teaspoon ground ginger <--- Not one
2 eggs <-- Stays at 2 instead of halving.
1 cups milk (Warmed to around 50°C)
1/2 cup maple syrup (Warmed to around 50°C)
3 tablespoons vegetable oil <-- Increases to 3 instead of 2.

Modified version of: Tasteofhome.com Gingerbread Loaf

Mix the warm Milk, Syrup, Milk, Oil and Yeast and leave to ferment for a while (15-25min)
Mix the dry ingredients, sieving to trap some extra air.
Beat the eggs until fluffy and pale (This would be easier with a couple of teaspoons of sugar if your willing to add a tiny amount?)
Mix beaten egg to yeast mix, then add to dry mix, mixing well preferably with a dough hook if you have one. It's going to be hard to do by hand as it'll be sticky as hell.
Add to baking dish(es) and leave to prove for an hour. Then beat it back down and leave a further 40min.
Bake as described in the original recipe. May need a little longer.

We're aiming for more of a brioche type dough rather than a soft batter or firm bread dough here so more flour may be needed.
The above recipe should work well. The only issue may be trapping the air, if this is the case adding 2tsp of Xanthan gum to the dry ingredients will make it work much better.
The texture will be much lighter (Fluffy), the additional Oil and Egg should increase the moisture side of things.

Hope this works well for you :), I see no reason it shouldn't.


What are some good gluten-free food alternatives?

I'm a coeliac from Australia and so my tips come from my experience here, but they should hopefully be useful regardless.

The first thing I suggest is joining your local society which can be invaluable in terms of support, information and even training. The training covers for example how to read ingredient lists to determine whether something is gluten free by ingredient.

As a general rule you need to avoid products containing [wheat, barley, rye, malts and triticale][1]. There are a few exceptions such as glucose syrup, caramel colour and dextrose derived from wheat where the ingredients are so highly processed that they contain no detectable [gluten][2].

Cross contamination and hidden sources of gluten can make it hard to ensure a gluten free diet. In my experience the hardest replacements are the bread based ones. They generally do not come close to the texture and taste of traditional breads. Baking your own bread may be the best option using gluten free bread mixes.

Eating out can become a bit of chore because many restaurants use gluten containing products such as sauces and fillers. I recommend contacting the restaurant beforehand.

The following products are some of the better gluten free alternatives I've found (couldn't post links because I don't have enough rep):

Zehnder Bread
San Remo Pasta
BuonTempo Pasta
Schar Products
Neumarkter Lammsbräu beer

References:

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gluten-free_diet
[2] http://glutenfreefamily.com.au/2010/07/glucose-syrup-gluten-free/


How to avoid flour lumps in the sponge cake?

Always fold, gently, by hand.  The more delicate the ingredient, the more critical it is; few culinary ingredients are as delicate as beaten egg whites.

The flour (you're using bleached cake flour, aren't you?) should be added in stages (about 1/4 to 1/2 cup at a time), preferably via a sifter.  Incorporate just to the point where the flour is mostly evenly dispersed and is wetted.  When transferring to the baking dish, keep an eye out for any unwetted or clumps and gently mix them in.

In addition, I always fold in all ingredients to beaten egg whites and would recommend you do the same when adding the yolk mixture.  You need fold just until it's mostly dispersed as you will be further folding when you add the flour.

If you are still having problems, you could try adding cream of tartar to the whites when beating to help stabilize them.  I don't use it generally myself, but 1/4 tsp should do the trick.


How do I ensure my puff pastry top stays puffed and crisp on my chicken mushroom pie?

Puff pastry puffs because of little pockets of gas form between very thin sheets of lean dough. In handmade (and better-quality commercial) puff pastry, these gas pockets are filled with steam, which forms when the butter (which is about 16% water) heats up. In a typical commercial puff, the pockets are filled with c02 released from a chemical leavener like baking powder. For this structure to be stable, some internal rigidity needs to form before it cools; that rigidity comes from the sheets of lean dough being cooked enough to become crispy. If you open the oven before this happens, or take your dish out too soon, the thin sheets of lean dough won't have had a chance to crisp up enough to hold their shape, the gas inside the pockets will contract, the pastry will collapse, and you'll be left with a greasy, gummy mess. Short answer? Make sure it's fully cooked before you take it out.

More specific advice:

Make sure that you don't open the oven during cooking, and make sure that you don't take it out too soon. If you have a window on your oven, try gauging the doneness before opening the door. If it looks like it's going to be far too brown for your taste by the time it's cooked inside, turn the oven off and let it sit in the hot-ish oven to crisp up a little without getting blasted by heat.
If you haven't tested your oven's temperature, get an oven thermometer to make sure that you're at the temperature you think you are. Internal oven thermostats are notoriously inaccurate.

As an aside, you CAN overdo it when rolling out commercial puff, but if it puffed up in the oven initially and didn't collapse until you took it out, you can rest assured that this wasn't the problem.


Is there a good reason not to add crushed tomatoes to chicken soup?

I added the tomatoes and it made the soup taste better. I tasted the soup without the tomatoes first. I think if I was better at making broth I would have wanted to preserve its flavor. As it was tonight, it needed something more and the tomatoes helped


Can I use granulated sugar instead of demerara sugar

Yes, it will work just fine, but it won't have the same color or the slightly molasses flavor of demerarra.  It also has a finer crystal size, usually, so the texture will be a little less distinctive.

The closest substitute for this purpose, if you happen to have it, is sanding sugar--but I imagine that not everyone keeps that on hand.  It has a large crystal size, and so presents a nice crunchy topping on muffins or shortbread or similar.


A search of the internet for "buttered sugar" comes up exclusively with variations of the this list on various websites that list alternative names for sugar.
Of these only one "Returning to nature" lists it as a synonymy for buttercream.

It is possible that site is correct and "buttered sugar" is a possibly rarely used alternate name for buttercream. I would suspect that it is more likely that there has been an error at some point in the past that has been copied between these sites.


A 'pinch' is the amount of powder/whatever that can be trapped between one's thumb and fore finger.


Eye of round is an excellent cut for braising. You can braise it in stock or red wine. An example recipe would be the classic Beef Bourguignon.

It's also a perfect candidate for slow-cooking in a crock pot, as well as simply roasted in the oven. If cooking it in the oven, use a thermometer and don't cook it past medium. An overnight marinade can be used prior to roasting for additional flavor as well.


What is this distinctive smell in some dry cured sausage?

Salumi are generally cured with the addition of starter cultures (Lactobacillus plantarum and Pediococus acidilactici, for example).  These cultures add to the sour, tangy flavor, but also to the aroma. In addition,  Here is a report on glutimate concentration in dry cured ham. (generally cured with salt alone). I am sure the mechanism in cured salumi is similar.  So, the aroma is closely related to fermentation and the concentration of glutimates, which increase umami.  Then there is the terrior.  Much like wine, cured meat products have flavor and aroma profiles that are distinctive to the location of their raw products and manufacture...what the animals ate, the environment of the curing room and its associated microflora. Finally, a favorable mold spore is either added (or naturally populates the curing room) for the purpose of keeping destructive molds off the drying product.  All of this contributes to both flavor and aroma.  Is there a name for the "cured meat aroma"? I have been unable to find one. I suppose, like wine, cured meats can be described by the flavor and aroma profiles that that are observed by the consumer.


Yes, they are the same cut of beef. Depending on the butcher it may or may not be 'trimmed' a little differently. A New York strip is cut from the sirloin primal, specifically the 'top loin'. If one looks at a typical T-bone (or Porterhouse) steak the 'larger side' of the steak (to one-side of the bone) becomes a strip steak once cut from the bone. After that the way it is trimmed and prepared makes the difference between New York and Kansas City strip steaks, but these too are the same basic cut of beef.


You want to use an oil that will handle the hotter temperatures of a wok. This list of oil smoke points suggests that most refined oils will work fine. Don't use unrefined oils or butter because they'll burn.

Once you've got an oil that will handle the heat, you want something that will taste good. I think that's the main issue with olive oil. There aren't olives in asian cuisine and I think that would taste a bit funny. I tend to use vegetable or canola oil for the majority of my stir-frying and then add a little sesame oil towards the end (generally when sauteing garlic and ginger). The sesame oil adds a strong asian flavor to the food. I've tried just using sesame oil, as a recipe sometimes recomends, but I find the flavor overpowering. Unrefined sesame oil is fairly common at the grocery store, and you don't want to use that as it will burn in the wok (but it could be drizzled on the food after cooking).


This is how you can do it:

Place your nuts into a super-strong plastic food storage bag and close it securely after squeezing out all air from the inside.
Put the bag flat on a hard surface like kitchen counter. Starting from the bottom of the bag, roll a rolling pin over the bag upwards and back.
Repeat untill the shells crack.
Take out the nuts and remove any remaining shells.


How many cups of flour are there in a pound?

The weight of flour varies immensely depending on how densely it's packed and the humidity.  If you've started with a weight-based recipe, I'd try to find a scale.

If that's absolutely not an option, I tend to approximate 100g = 1 cup.

Be warned, I've found some recipes that are really sensitive to the amount of flour and the difference between a lightly sifted cup and a scooped cup can really throw off the results.  You might do better to try to divide another kg package of flour evenly and use the approximation that 0.6 lb is about 0.25 kg (i.e. one quarter of the bag).


Why do you add sugar last when boiling soups?

To add onto Walter's answer, adding sugar towards the end for taste when boiling ensures that the sugar dissolves faster so that the results of your addition are more accurate and immediate.

If you added the sugar before boiling, you run the risk of adding too much sugar because you tasted it before all the sugar dissolved and you added more as a result.


It sounds like Chocolate bloom

My guess would be that when you observe this after cold storage, it is sugar bloom due to condensation cycling in your freezer & likely fat bloom when exposed to heat, though it could be both.

The chocolate should be salvageable by melting in a double boiler.

Further Explained from wikwpedia:

"Chocolate bloom is either of two types of whitish coating that can appear on the surface of chocolate: sugar bloom... and fat bloom"

"Sugar bloom is caused by moisture. Condensation on to the surface of the chocolate or moisture in the chocolate coating causes the sugar to absorb the moisture and dissolve. When the moisture evaporates, the sugar forms larger crystals, leaving a dusty layer. It is caused by:

Storage of chocolates in damp conditions
Use of hygroscopic ingredients (low grade or brown sugars)
High-temperature storage conditions of chocolate-covered confectionery, where the centers have a high relative humidity and the water vapor given off is trapped in the wrappings

Fat bloom in chocolate is due to the cocoa butter which has separated toward the surface.2It is caused by:

Poor (incorrect or incomplete) tempering of the chocolate
Incorrect cooling methods, including covering cold centers
Warm storage conditions
The addition to chocolate of fats incompatible with cocoa butter

Image Source


Microwaves do not kill bacteria, heat kills bacteria. The higher the temperature, the faster those bacteria will die off.

"Instant death" for most bacteria (including salmonella) is about 160° F (71° C). You only need a few seconds at this temperature. The notoriously strict USDA recommends 160° F for egg dishes but is considerably more lax about whole eggs and just says to cook until firm. Very few eggs are contaminated in the whites or yolks, so the risk is very low.

Pasteurization begins around 57° C (135° F), so many bacteria are killed before the egg coagulates (at 63° C / 145° F), which is why the USDA is not very strict about it; if an egg by itself is "firm" then it's generally already been hot enough for long enough to ensure safety.

Unfortunately, microwaves tend to heat (a) quickly and (b) unevenly, so if you are concerned about food safety and insist on making eggs in the microwave (not recommended), be sure to use short bursts and stir several times, otherwise you might end up with a combination of uncooked and overcooked parts, which is bad for food safety and for general taste and texture.

Note that there is not only a possibility but actually a certainty that some salmonella is still there, assuming that there was any to begin with. Cooking is equivalent to pasteurization and that does not kill every single bacterium, nor is it meant to; it just kills about 99.9999% of them which makes the cooked item safe enough to consume.


Is it OK to leave pans unattended on an induction stove that is turned off?

Last evening, I left one empty (but dirty) sauce pan unattended on the induction stove top as the dish washer was full.  The stove was turned off, but dirty as well, and the pan was slightly touching the controls.

During the night, there was a small power outage (2 computers were powered off this morning while one wasn't) and apparently, that was enough to have the stove turn on by itself, start cooking and burnt the left-over sauce completely black.

Moral of the story:

Even when you're tired after a late meal: clean the stove before going to bed.
Leave dirty pots in the sink and not on top of an induction stove!


Do I need to cook homemade brown beer mustard?

It is probably fine without extra cooking.

The recipes for beer mustard suggest that beer would likely be a third or less of the volume of the finished mustard (the major ingredients I saw being mustard seeds, vinegar, and any other flavorings).  Beer tends to be quite low in alcohol, as a rule, averaging about 5% (I've seen 3%-8%, and a few outliers with higher %s, but 5% is fairly common).  So your mustard is going to be, roughly 1.66% alcohol by volume - for comparison's sake, yeast brewed sodas are usually under 1% alcohol.  That is probably kid-safe, especially since mustard is usually used by the spoonful, not cupful, the alcohol intake will be likely be drops.  Now, if you pick a beer that's, say, 15% (among the highest I recall seeing), then your mustard might be as high as 5%, and if your kids take a cupful or more in a sitting, they will likely get buzzed - so some common sense should still apply.

On the other hand, it tends to take more time for alcohol to cook out than people think - like an hour or two.  Alcohol does evaporate faster than water, but not enough faster that they aren't being lost at the same time, so the going is pretty slow.  So a couple hours simmering will be needed to be pretty sure you got most of the alcohol out (and you will have to replace the water, or use more beer and deal with stronger flavor, something like that).  And if you're absolutely militant about not having any alcohol in your recipe, if for example you're dealing with allergies, you still won't be sure of getting every drop of alcohol out of the mustard.

If you want no alcohol at all, with no wiggle-room, you could probably find a non-alcoholic mustard recipe, or possibly experiment with non-alcoholic beer in your mustard.  But, if you're only worried about excess consumption - your beer mustard is likely safe even for kids, since the amount of alcohol consumed per serving is very low.


Does garbage disposal horse power matter that much?

I'd go for a more powerful one, in general, and I noticed that the higher powered disposals are sometimes quieter, which I really like.  I really learned that paying the extra for good plumbing parts (faucet, disposal) through our plumber was worth it, since they can be fixed, unlike cheaper big box store stuff, and that there was a real difference in the higher quality disposal.


Why does my steak turn out well done when the temperature probe says it's only rare?

This question is a little vague, but probably your temperature probe is lying to you, or you're not accounting for resting your meat. I would suggest a legit thermometer rather than one that gives you hints about the meat -- you'll have more control over the final product.

Temperature Guide:

Medium Rare Beef has an internal temp of 145F / 60 Celsius
Medium Beef has an internal temp of 160F / 70 Celsius
Well Done (ruined) has a temp of 170F / 75 Celsius

Remember that on resting your beef will rise roughly 10F / 12C in the middle as the heat distributes. So, if you pull the beef out at 160F / 70C, it will be well done by the time you eat it.

If you want Medium Rare, pull it out at 135F / 55C.


Is there any way to enhance the heat without changing the taste in a hot sauce?

There are a few things that might work. I would probably just add more seeds. The majority of the capsaicin where the heat comes from is in the seeds, while the majority of the flavor is in the flesh. You could just add some seeds from a hot pepper like habanero or cayenne or even more jalapeno seeds.

You could also add some chili pepper that has heat but not a lot of flavor. Some examples include cayenne and chile de arbol. Thai bird and african bird chiles are hot and also don't have a ton of flavor in my opinion.

Another option is to try a chili extract. For example, a habenero extract will have some flavor, but a small amount will add an enormous amount of heat. So you may be able to get away with an amount small enough not to add much flavor, while at the same time kicking up your heat to the desired level.

Personally I like habenero, esp in El Yucateco sauce, which I often add straight to hot sauces.


Malai Chicken Curry is curdling in the Pan

The cream and yoghurt will separate and curdle if you bring it up to a boil. If you cook the dish longer at a lower heat, you should be able to avoid this. Slow cooking will tend to make the chicken more tender as well.

You need to keep the temperature of the yogurt below 190F (88C) to avoid having the milk proteins (mostly casein) react with acidic ingredients in the recipe and curdle. The acid comes from the yogurt itself and the ginger-garlic paste (most commercial, prepared ginger-garlic pastes have citric acid or similar as a stabilizer). You need to cook the chicken (and marinade because of its contact with the chicken) thoroughly, until it gets to up to at least 165F for food safety, but you do not want the sauce to get to 190F or boil.

If you've made kadhi before (a curry from yoghurt thickened with chickpea flour), it is the same concept -- it will separate and curdle if you let it boil.

Likewise, if you're making paneer from milk you want to get it close to boiling so that it WILL form the protein bonds when you add acid in the form of lemon juice or vinegar.


Does the calorie count of these pistachio nuts include the shell?

In general, in most jurisdictions, the calories would be based on the edible portion (or the commonly eaten portion), so oranges without the peel, nuts without the shell.


It can be challenging to get recipes exactly right in different parts of the world, but not to worry - you can usually fix it with some modifications. This may require some trial and error.

There are a few things which could be going wrong:

too much liquid: this is a US recipe, and US large eggs are generally smaller than the rest of the world's large eggs, so you could be adding too much egg. You could also be adding too much butter - a stick is 1/2 US cup of butter by volume or 113 grams. Try weighing the butter to get the right amount. The recipe also calls for bread flour, which has a high gluten content, and gluten soaks up liquid. If you aren't using bread flour then there could be too much liquid. In any case the answer is use less butter and/or egg, or increase your flour content a bit
The dough is too warm: warm dough will spread out much faster, try sticking it in the refrigerator for an hour or so, and return the dough to the fridge while your cookies bake
The dough hasn't rested: most cookie doughs need some time to meld after mixing, to allow the ingredients to completely combine. Try letting it rest. Steps 2 and 3 are both accomplished by wrapping the dough and putting it in the fridge
Too cool an oven: Cookies stop spreading and rise when the mixture crystallizes and gains some rigidity. If the oven is too cool then the dough has more chance to spread before it crystallizes. If you can find one buy an oven thermometer, that will tell you whether your oven is the right heat. You could also try moving your cookies higher in the oven

What is isn't likely to be is too much baking powder or baking soda. Your spread comes from other factors.


Undoing the flavor effects of baking soda in cooking

You cannot remove a flavor that's been added to a dish once. There are very few exceptions to this, and I would say this isn't one of the exceptions.
You will find people telling you that baking soda is neutralized by acids. While chemically, baking soda can react with an acid, I would say that this won't help you here:

baking powder is a combination of baking soda and acid and I personally easily notice the metallic taste in anything made with baking powder. So the reaction products don't taste much better than the baking soda itself.
a tomato sauce likely also has fat. Some of the unpleasant soapy taste of adding baking soda to food happens due to its reactions with fat, and I don't think that the products of this reaction will react with acid.
your sauce has quite some acid already, through the tomatoes (and possibly more, if you used canned tomatoes or more ingredients which add acid, like vinegar). If acid was enough to prevent the bad taste, it would have happened already.

So, if you want to enjoy the effects of baking soda, you generally also have to live with its taste.


Microwaving raw meats is quite tricky, as its difficult to cook evenly. A different method would be best, sous vide probably being the most reliable. The machines can be pricey, but I've had good luck with a pot of water, a candy thermometer, and some ziplock bags (especially if you're only looking to par cook). You can find some great tutorials with a quick Google search.

If you have no option but the microwave, make sure that you  cook for short periods, rotating and flipping the meat often to prevent uneven cooking. I'd also recommend cooking in a container with a small amount of water and a cover of some kind (but not sealed) to take advantage of some steam.


Multi-layered brownies are certainly possible, however if you try and make it too thick it can be too dense at the bottom because the weight won't allow any sort of rise (most brownies do rise, just not much but it's still important). I make a triple chocolate brownie with a layer of salted caramel in between and it comes out really well, that's a single recipe split into halves.

Your idea is to make two boxes and then do 4 layers, it may work just fine, if it were me I'd do it in two batches and then place the top 2 layers on after they all cool.

As for what to put in between you'll want to choose ingredients that are markedly different from the brownie itself. Caramel contrasts as does white chocolate, but a layer of chocolate in chocolate brownie is less likely to be noticed.

As for the amounts of oils and eggs, follow the recipe to the letter, don't mess around with it as the consistency is already optimized. If you want to experiment do it in small batches so you can measure the results before committing to a big bake.


How to cook fried potatoes in a No Fry Cooker?

The reason to spread out oven fries into a single layer is to remove moisture from them more effectively, so they don't end up soggy. An air fryer's convective heating is much more effective at removing moisture, even compared to a convection oven. So piling them up doesn't cause much of a problem. If your air fryer doesn't have a stirring arm, you should still stir or shake the fries partway through cooking, to ensure even browning and avoid soggy spots.


How did rust appear on my cast iron in a matter of minutes?

The problem with your last step was the lid, I think.

If you had placed it on the hot coals, open, the heat should have driven the water off as you intended, drying the pot before it rusted.  With the lid on, the moisture was trapped inside, and had opportunity to cover every inch of the metal - and, as Joe mentioned, heat speeds up the reaction.  Sitting on the heat with a coating of water, and you have a layer of rust.  Not functionally different that if you'd tried boiling a pot of water before seasoning it.  The seasoning is, after all, supposed to protect the bare metal from water so it doesn't react like this when being cooked in.

How to fix it - go back two steps.  Scrub off the rust, or as much as will come off easily.  I agree with paparazzi, here, if it won't come off while scrubbing it will probably not come off while cooking - especially under the seasoning.  Once it's well scrubbed, dry it off.  You might use a towel or something first, but if you're going to put it on the fire, leave the lid off so the moisture can escape the pot.

You might have the lid drying to the side, leaning against the outside of the pot, or partially on (generously offset) if you want to dry the lid as well.  You probably don't need to heat it for long, either, just until it looks dry - and it will be evaporating water all the way until it cools down, too.  When I'm re-seasoning my frying pan, I heat it only 10min or so, and by the time it cools it is usually dry (disclaimer, I use the stove rather than coals, so your timing may vary).

After that, you can smear it with a layer of oil and re-season.  wipe it down with oil, and heat to re-create the layer of seasoning that got scrubbed away in the first place.

Beyond that, it will probably help to calm down a bit.  In the future, just remember to keep the lid off when drying, and that you don't need to panic quite as much.  Cast iron is pretty sturdy, and scrubbing down to the metal and re-seasoning is always an option until the pot is worn away to holes.


Moka coffee pots work well if you use them every day. This way the oils that the coffee leaves inside them do not have the opportunity to go rancid (all fats go rancid eventually) and impart that horrible taste to your coffee. If you use them every day, it is true that you don't really need to clean them, except to remove calcium scale buildup.

If you use it rarely, like in your case or the frequent Moka pot left at a vacation house, you need to clean it with dish detergent and a scrubby sponge, you don't need anything harsher. Make sure that you get all the coffee brown oils out. Yes, it is an unpleasant job. Make sure you rinse it well before putting it away to dry, you don't want to simply replace the bitterness with soapiness.

...and this is the Italian doctrine! :-)


Based on the information you've given, it sounds like what you're describing is not technically an allergy but histamine intolerance. In an allergic reaction, histamines are produced by the body as part of an immune reaction. Histamine intolerance is due to an underproduction of the enzyme that normally breaks down histamine. This means that foods that naturally contain histamines (such as aged cheeses) are poorly tolerated.1

Histamine Intolerance
If your problem truly is histamine intolerance, then there is not much that I can suggest. Any aged cheese, cow's milk or not, will contain histamines as well as many non-dairy cheese substitutes (such as soy cheese).2 Fresh cheeses -- ricotta, cottage cheese, queso fresco, etc. -- should be safe,3 however, they will not provide the same flavour and texture as Parmesan.

Since the exact degree of histamine intolerance varies from person-to-person, it is possible that you might tolerate some cheeses or cheese-substitutes better than others. Younger cheeses should have lower levels of histamines than older cheeses. Antihistamines may also be able to help you cope with histamine-containing foods. (Much the way that people with lactose intolerance can take lactase pills to help them digest lactose-containing foods.)
I would strongly recommend consulting with your doctor before trying any new foods, especially if you are prone to particularly strong reactions.

Allergy
If your problem actually is an allergy, then which substitutes are appropriate will depend on exactly which component of the cheese you are allergic too. The most common "cheese allergies" are protein allergies to either casein or whey protein1. If you are allergic to one or both of these proteins, then it is unlikely that any dairy product will be a safe substitute. However, it is possible in this case that non-dairy soy cheeses or similar would be perfectly fine to use.

Some cheese allergies, however, are specific to certain types of milk and some people who are unable to tolerate cow's milk products are able to digest sheep or goat's milk products.
Again, I would recommend consulting your doctor before experimenting with any dietary changes.

Information compiled from several online sources as well as my own experience as a cheese-maker.


What am I doing wrong with my pressure cooker?

I use a pressure cooker quite often and its all about the cut of the meat.  Much like slow cooking, using a often cheaper, fatty cut with lots of connective tissue - a chuck roast for example, yields much, much better results.  Lean cuts of meat are make for fast searing and that's about it.  If you try to coax them to be fall apart fork tender, you'll fail - those are the cheap, fatty cuts that go that way.


What's the difference between chutney and relish?

It depends on what cuisine it is, though all chutneys and relishes are used as condiments/sides. In European cuisine, chutneys tend to be jammier and involve fruit of some kind. Relishes, like Elendil mentions, are usually made from pickled vegetables. As far as I have experienced, the chutney moniker is used when non traditional ingredients are involved Mango chutney, ginger mint chutney) whereas a relish is used when it is made from slightly more familiar ingredients like dill, cucumber etc (This is with regard to non Indian cuisine).

In Indian cuisine (which is where the chutney moniker originated from), chutneys are thinner and are almost always  savory, even when they involve a fruit(eg., mango chutney will have chillies and salt in it). Indian chutneys involve herbs and chillies and sometimes even nuts/lentils. The texture difference comes from the fact that it is usually blended/pureed and usually water based. But then again, you would not have landed in this situation if the meal was Indian, as there is no concept of a relish there.


The feeding/maintenance of your starter is the same regardless of flour.  Remove and discard (or use elsewhere) half or more of starter.  Add fresh flour and water in the desired proportions.  Stir.  As your starter matures, it becomes acidic.  Too much acidity interferes with yeast activity in the bread making process.  That is why you need to remove a portion of the "spent" starter each time you feed.