Sour Dough Starter - proofing in less than 24 hours?

24 hours is above average but not unheard of, 24 hours is a realistic time. I'd say you have a healthy starter on your hands.


Why does the temperature of resting turkey increase for a while?

Not at all.

If we measure the temperature of a “lump of meat” that’s to be roasted, we place the tip of the probe at the center or the thickest part of the roast. Oven temperature is usually way hotter than the temperature we are trying to reach at the core, which means the outside will be nice and crisp (see Maillard reaction).

Meat is a relatively bad conductor of heat, so you get a quite steep temperature gradient, or plainly said, the outside starts browning while the center is still cool. Part of the art of roasting meat is to achieve the balance between juicy and cooked interior and browned, but not burnt exterior.

But back to your question: When you pull your turkey from the oven, it will have the aforementioned temperature gradient. As we all know, this will tend to even out and for the coldest spot (where the probe is), it means getting warmer (while the outer areas get cooler, just as stipulated in the first law of thermodynamics). For a cook, it also means to factor in this so-called “carry-over cooking” and pull the bird slightly before the desired core temperature is reached. Note that in cooking and baking, temperatures of dishes are typically given for the coldest spot.


Aside from the notes in SAJ14SAJ's answer, if he didn't run the canning process long enough, there may have been residual bacteria (or spores) that remained active.

The failed cannings I've seen due to insufficient heat took exactly one week to pop their lids.


Used old chicken broth in a stew, but washed it out. Will it be safe to eat?

Toss it.
Old chicken is risky business. What with salmonella and other bacteria.
Next time
Note if this happens again, or for anyone else, that you don't need beef or any other kind of broth to make stew. I use plain old water, and some seasoning, salt, pepper etc. And a bay leaf or two. Always tastes great.


Why do so many cheeses have artificial ingredients?

Here in the states it depends on where in the grocery store you look. Usually behind the deli counter and in the dairy isle, yes most the large commercial cheeses are loaded up with additives and preservatives. In a store like Whole Foods (increasingly in traditional grocers too), there is usually a devoted cheese section. If you look at those cheeses, you'll often find the only ingredients to be milk, enzymes, salt. There are also local farmers markets that often have a variety of handmade cheeses that are less likely to have additives/preservatives as well.

Question 2 Is subjective and depends on what the consumer is after. The mass-produced stuff is more homogeneous in color/taste, can have a longer shelf life, and is generally cheaper than the other offerings. As far as health concerns, many customers feel that you are better off avoiding unnecessary additives though I don't believe there is much subjective evidence supporting one side over the other.

Roux has it right on for point number three. Safest assumption for why a company does something a certain way is cost.


I think they usually make them medium at the restaurants, but you could get rare if you like.

Anyway, with a .7 pound lamb, you could probably warm the oven up at 120C for 10 minutes, then put in the lamb, and turn the thermometer up to 180C for round about half an hour, and it should done to a turn.

Leastways, that's what I did.


Is it true that even quality knives with wood handles can warp and be contaminated with bacteria?

Knives are very hard-worked tools in the kitchen, and need to be easy to clean and maintain.

At all quality levels, unless resin impregnated or otherwise treated, wood does not stand up well to harsh treatment, such as frequent trips through the dishwasher.  Even if washed by hand, you want to wash it and then dry it, so the water doesn't soak in and lead over time to cracking and warping, plus a rough, unpleasant feel in the hand as the fibers expand and separate.

As to sanitation, wooden handles are much akin to cutting boards.  If treated properly, it is not an issue.  You can even, occassionaly, use a mild bleach solution (followed by rinsing and drying) to sanitize them.

If treated with reasonable care, by handwashing and immediate drying, wooden handles will perform very well, and of course they are very attractive.

Still, on balance, wooden handles require more care than some of the resin, plastic, or metal handles.  Choosing among the options is about balancing the feel and beauty and maintenance to your needs and desires.  For me, personally, I choose the resin handles as they are very durable and low maintenance.


How to successfully make candied ginger?

Boiling the ginger will help to make the ginger less spicy - the longer,the less spicy. I like my ginger with more of a bite, so I boil it for only 10 minutes. Then strain it through a collander, the way you would a pot of boiled pasta. Put the ginger back into the pot with equal portions of sugar and water - enough to fully cover the ginger - and boil to 225F. Lift the ginger out of the syrup with a slotted spoon and place it on a cooling rack. Coat in sugar. For greater detail, see this link: http://www.makeitlikeaman.com/2013/12/07/candied-ginger-2/


What are best practices for using Yoghurt as a Marinade?

To answer part 1. I recently watched the Chicken Tikka Masala episode from Blumethals "Further Adventures in Search of Perfection". The recipe calls for  marinading the chicken for quite a long time. A transcribed recipe says 10 hours: http://www.dominicsayers.com/documents/ChickenTikkaMasala.pdf.

They also go on to compare the results of a yogurt marinade and a yogurt-less marinade on chicken under an MRI scanner. I don't know if this is valid, but the yogurt apparently had an effect.


How to make professional style burger buns?

The stretch and fold method is great for making breads, but most buns like this are made using something closer to the Chorleywood Process (or No Time method). Instead of resting time with stretches and folds and bulk fermentation time, this method relies on combinations of dough conditioners and heavy mechanical mixing. This usually means that the dough is mixed with a relaxer such as l-cysteine and an oxidizer like ascorbic acid. The dough is fully developed mechanically and shaped immediately, then proofed and baked.

This will be very hard to achieve at home primarily due to the conditioners used. L-cysteine and it's precursor, glutathione, are both extremely potent. A batch of hundreds of pounds of dough may require less than an ounce of conditioner, so it would be virtually impossible to scale this at home. You may be able to achieve similar results using a deactivated yeast, such as brewer's yeast, or by deactivating yeast on your own. The results will be slightly different though, as the amino acid profiles will be different.

Equipment used in a professional bakery will also make an identical result harder to obtain. Bakeries use enormous mixers that can provide more power than a home mixer, as well as special pans to help hold the shape of the bun as it proofs. Professional ovens also allow much more precise control of air flow and moisture retention than a home oven.

You may be able to achieve a good enough result with an enriched dough (like challah) and some tweaking, but it will be very hard to make an identical bun.


The vacuum-packed-ness of vacuum-packed foods can help keep food fresh by reducing oxidation, but it doesn’t have any effect on safety. If it were originally vacuum-packed but then gas developed from putrefaction then that would be a bigger concern... but there would be absolutely no question whether that was the case once you smelled it.


Does teff flour destroy gluten, and what do do about it?

Teff is probably one of the oldest domesticated plants so doesn't lend itself well for modern processing:

Normally the seeds are boiled just like rice
If you insist on making bread with it, you can make Injera (an unleavened bread)
For baking a "standard loaf of bread", it's not really suitable for that due to its high protein and mineral content, but you can still generously dust your bread with teff as you're using a small % anyway


How to distinguish between silicone and nylon spatula and judge their quality

They look like nylon, but as you actually have them in your possession, the simplest test is to squeeze them. Silicone is soft & 'rubbery', nylon [or anything similar you can put in a pan] is hard & 'plasticky'.


Gelling agents closest to normal gelatin that set at room temperature

There are lots of hydrocolloids, all with their own characteristics. To achieve the characteristics of gelatin you'll probably want to use a system that combines multiple hydrocolloids to take advantage of their synergies (as mentioned by @sourd'oh). Gelatin's hard to beat when it comes to flavor release.

A gelatin substitute system can be created by combining a relatively brittle gelling agent with gums to modify the texture. For example, use agar, a carageenan, an alginate, or gellan as your gelling agent, and locust bean gum(LBG) (and optionally xanthan gum) to modify the texture. This Gelatin Replacement [patent] by CP Kelco (hydrocolloid manufacturers/specialists) should be useful for you, it describes a system of an alginate, LBG and xanthan gum. It also discusses previous patents for other gelatin substitutes that you might find useful. One such alternative is the patent Low-Acyl Gellan Gum Blends [patent] that describes a system of gellan, LBG and xanthan gum.

The article Gelatin and its Hydrocolloid Alternatives describes various approaches to reproducing the characteristics of gelatin. The alternatives covered are: pectin mixtures, modified starch/wheat fiber, high-acyl gellan, and carageenans.

Here's some nice info on LBG. In particular it mentions the use of a 60/40 combination of kappa carageenan/LBG as a gelatin replacement. It also mentions the combination of agar and LBG, and the synergistic relationship between LBG and xanthan gum.

For more info on hydrocolloids:

Dave Arnold's Cooking Issues Blog and Podcast, he talks a lot about hydrocolloids, and his Hydrocolloids Primer is really good. You can also ask him questions on Twitter.
Martin Lersch's Khymos blog has his free ebook Texture: A Hydrocolloid Recipe Collection, it's awesome.
I've also heard good things about Andrew Hoefler's book, Hydrocolloids: Practical Guides for the Food Industry from Eagan Press, if you really want to get into it.
TIC Gums (another hydrocolloid manufacturer/specialist) also has a phone hotline for hydrocolloid advice, the phone number is listed on their website.


pre-soaking tea in cold water prior to brewing

I don't think the couple minutes of soaking is actually doing anything; it'll pull a bit of stuff out of the leaves, and get them wet, but what really matters is the hot water. It sounds like this is a way of getting lower temperature water, similar to your proposed "protect the tea from hot water" explanation. This is indeed good for green and white tea, and maybe oolong, but essentially unnecessary for most other teas.

You don't actually always want boiling water for tea. Joe provided this table of temperatures in his comment. Some temperatures for common types of tea, in decreasing order of temperature:  maté, rooibos or herbal (208F / 98C); black (195-205F / 91-96C); oolong (195F / 91C); blooming (180F / 82C); white or green (175F / 80C). So for some teas (black, maté, rooibos, herbal), it's pretty close to boiling - by the time the water's poured in, and transfers some heat to the cup, it'll be a few degrees below boiling, so you don't need to worry about it much.

But other kinds of tea (green or white tea), you ideally want to add somewhat lower temperature water. If you have a way to get water somewhere around 80C - for example, some electric kettles can automatically turn off at a lower temperature - then just do that. But if it's easiest to make boiling water, then if you fill your cup a bit less than 1/4 of the way with water at room temperature (20C) then fill it the rest of the way with boiling water, the result will be around 80C, just right for green tea!


What is meant by "cook until the oil separates" in Indian curry recipes?

Oil is separated in curries normally after you have cooked spices or sauces for ~10-15 mins. You can tell by seeing "bubbles" appearing and the oil by making a thin layer on top of your sauces/curry.
It varies, but normally after 10-15 mins the oil separates from your curry.
Normally after cooking for 10-15 mins most of the water dries up which causes the curry (mostly made of thick sauces) to separate from the oil.
It's always good to let the oil separate from your curry because of two things:

Extra water dries up
All spices and curry get cooked properly

The food tastes much better if spices and the curries are properly cooked.


How can I compare heat levels from burners?

It is not a property of the stove (or the markings on it). Words like "medium heat" actually refer to the speed at which your food is cooking, and there are a lot of factors which contribute to that. Beyond the energy output of your burners, there is the type of stove (electric, gas, induction), the thermodynamic properties of your pan, the relation of pan size to burner size, how you preheated the pan, the amount of food you put in the pan, the quality of your raw ingredients, and other such stuff. So you cannot calculate it or compare it.

The only way to "calibrate" is to observe how your food is cooking. I can only give you very rough guidelines, since the words are not (and cannot) be defined precisely. "Slow heat" is the setting at which the food can be left alone for at least several minutes without much risk of burning. "High heat" is the setting at which you end up with a very crisp/charred outside and raw-ish middle. "Medium" is somewhere in the middle between the extremes.

Any of these will tend to correspond to a somewhat narrow range of stove settings, because when the same person cooks in the same kitchen, there is rarely too much variation in the other variables of the process (which make it so diverse in general). So you have to be able to recognize the current level of "heat" when you cook (I was tempted to say "by looking", but it actually also involves smell and hearing and sense of time). Once you see that your food is cooking at "medium", you can see which setting you are using, and after a few trys with your own stove you will know which setting to try the next time you cook.


The measure of firmness has to do with how much water is pressed out during processing. If you are making regular (non-silken) tofu, you will simply press the tofu longer to squeeze more water out of it. If you're also making the soymilk, I suppose you could make the milk thicker too to cut some of the pressing time.


Pyrex that can be used in an instant pot

That is commonly done, and yes, any pyrex is fine for it although metal has an advantage in that it wouldn't require extra time. Anytime you use glass, pyrex, ceramic or any other heat absorbent material for "pot in pot" cooking, add ~5 minutes to the time under pressure. Anything that is safe to use in the oven is safe to use in the Instant Pot.  Whatever you use inside the liner of the Instant Pot as your cooking vessel, use the trivet and add water (at least 1 1/2 cups or so) to the inner pot of the Instant Pot, and be sure there is some room (it doesn't need to be much) to allow steam to pass between your inner pot and the Instant Pot liner.

Here's more on the subject of 'pot in pot' cooking.


What is the best standmixer 350 wattage or higher

Opinion-based questions aren't a good fit, but I can at least give an answer that's a good fit!  How about some things you can use to evaluate a stand mixer?

Check the fit between the attachments and the bowl.  Does the whisk reach all the way to the bottom?  If not, you'll have trouble whipping egg whites as liquid pools up underneath where the whisk can reach.  Does the paddle reach all the way out to the sides of the bowl?  If not, you'll have trouble creaming and need to stop to scrape the sides of the bowl more often.

As for power, forget about wattage.  That just measures power usage.  A combination of horsepower (the force the motor is capable of generating) and torque (which is rotational force specifically) tells you about how powerful the mixer is.  Some mixers have high horsepower, but generate comparatively low torque due to the design of the transfer gears.  You may have to go to the manufacturer's web site for these numbers.

Check the capacity.  If you want to make double batches of dough, you'll probably want something 4.5 quarts or larger.  Most high-end mixers have a 6 or 7 quart capacity.

Look for a model with a bowl lift versus a tilt head.  That makes it easier to use the mixer without worrying about where it sits with relationship to your upper cabinets.

Hope that helps!


Italian style likely just means Roma (plum) tomatoes.  It's a marketing ploy since there are lots of different types of tomatoes in Italy and no one 'style'.

Roma tomatoes (along with most other types) grown without proper plant nutrition, and limited sun can be especially bland if picked early as well.  They don't have to add anything to make them bland.  Keep in mind that tomatoes have a lot of water (like watermelons) and can easily end up bland if they're just given chemical fertilizer and water.

Try different brands.  Even San Marzanos can be fake (about 2/3 of the export is fake) but they'll still taste better.


What would "Disintegrant", "Ammonium", or the units of measure "glass" or "gl" mean in a non-American book?

"Ammonium" is probably "baker's ammonia" or "ammonium carbonate" -- this is an old-school leavening agent, which has mostly been replaced with baking soda & baking powder in modern cooking.

A "disintegrant" is the opposite of a binder. Without context, knowing what it is specifically talking about is hard to say. In pharmacology, a disintegrant is used in oral tablets to make them rapidly break up when they get wet. Most "chewable" oral tablet medicines have a disintigrant to help them quickly break up when you put it in your mouth.

Edit: Based on the example recipe that you added, I'm going to guess that it's also reference to some kind of leavening agent. Whether it's intended to be baking powder, baking soda, or is also a reference to baker's ammonia, I'm not sure. Seems like it would be necessary to experiment a little bit to determine--but I think it's safe to say it's probably one of those leavening agents.

I presume that "gl" is an abbreviation for "glass" and both refer to the same unit. This other question indicates this is a common Russian unit of measure (is your cookbook Russian?). There is no accepted answer on that question, but the answers there all indicate that it is somewhere between 200ml and 1 cup.


Can you substitute capers for green peppercorn?

Capers are generally very salty, and not what you want as a peppercorn substitute.

I think that black/white/red/madagascar peppercorn would be a fine substitute. The distinction between the different pepper flavours is very subtle, and not one to worry about much.


Help with a chili recipe: need help on fruit/sweet selection

Traditional Cincinatti chili calls for half a square of grated baker's chocolate.  I don't know how set you are on fruit, but given the gaminess of venison, this might be less of a flavour clash than actual fruit.

Unsweetened chocolate is usually used in the former, but if you want something sweeter, then you could substitute bittersweet chocolate here.

If that idea doesn't turn you on, I would stick with a mild unrefined sugar (i.e. brown sugar) or maple syrup.  The notion of chili peppers, beer, kidney beans, venison and a sweet fruit in the same stew sounds like a risky combination to me (but then again, I can't claim to have tried it).  Personally, I'd have to recommend a subtler sweetener.


I've always heard the "meat" of the nut, or "nutmeat". Alternate terms include "kernel" or "seed" or, well, "nut".

If you were to ask a botanist, the edible part is the embryo and the endosperm, though it varies depending on which type of seed you're referring to. Also, for a few seeds—not sure if any of them are called nuts—we eat the seed coat as well (e.g., beans).


What is the best way to thicken the liquid in this recipe?

If you are making a tortilla filler then you probably don't want that much sauce in the end product, so rather than thickening it you might want to consider reducing the amount of liquid that goes into it in the first place. Peppers and onions both shed water as they are cooked, and canned tomatoes have water as well. You don't want to lose your peppers, so I would suggest adding less canned tomato and substituting it with some tomato paste. How much to do depends on the quality of the canned tomatoes, as there's a big difference in quality out there. You get what you pay for - cheap canned tomatoes have water added to the end product, you'll typically get a thicker result and richer flavor with good canned tomatoes as there's more tomato in the can in the first place. That may be all you need to do.

My go-to thickeners are roux, cornstarch and arrowroot powder. A roux is flour fried with butter which is then added to the dish and cooked to a temperature that activates the thickening properties. The good thing about roux is that you can cook it to different levels to add flavor to a dish, but in this case you don't probably don't want that flavor. Cornstarch is relatively flavorless and needs to be heated to a certain temperature to activate it's thickening properties. Arrowroot is a plant product that thickens at a very low temperature, so you can add it after cooking to warm food and it will thicken it without more cooking. In fact, cooking it too much will break down it's thickening properties. It thickens almost instantly too, so there's less guesswork, you just add and stir until it thickens to the consistency you want. Both cornstarch and arrowroot should be mixed with a small amount of water into a slurry before being added, adding directly in powdered form tends to cause clumping.

Another option would be to add a small amount of gelatine at the end of the cooking process, this would thicken up the sauce when it gets cool, and has nice mouth feel.

So first you could try adding a bit of tomato paste and less tomatoes, or using a thicker brand of canned tomato. Or you could thicken using cornstarch or arrowroot depending on whether you plan to cook the sauce additionally afterwards. Experimenting with gelatine might be more work than you want to do, but it has nice properties.


Put pork in crock pot and accidentally set to warm

There are a number of related questions regarding crockpots and food safety on this site but I found this informative link that will help explain why you may not want to risk keeping that roast that has been in a safety danger zone (below 165 F) for more than an hour.  The meat becomes a bacteria breeding ground, in essence.

http://culinaryarts.about.com/od/safetysanitation/p/slowcooksafe.htm


Three different-colored Thai curry pastes, how are they different?

Thai curry pastes can have a variety of ingredients, depending on the style and region. Some of the most common components, however, are shallots, garlic, chiles, lemongrass, galangal, fermented fish/shrimp. The chiles give the color: a red paste is made with dark red (dried) chiles. Green is made with fresh green chiles, and yellow with light red (dried) chiles. The only other pigmented ingredient in curry pastes is fresh turmeric, which gives a brighter color, and makes the paste yellow when combined with bright red chiles.

Green is usually the hottest.


How do you prevent veggies from burning in dishes that take longer to cook?

In a simmered dish, there should be little risk of burning.  Brown your chicken first, then remove from pan.  Add veg. and use it to help release the fond.  When the veg. begins to color, add liquid. Stir and scrape. Use more liquid in your simmer; that is, as it reduces, add more so that the veg does not burn. Return the chicken to pan, and be sure enough liquid remains to avoid burning.


Pancakes behave like high-fat bread. They go stale rather quickly.

Your recipe doesn't need to be altered.

Let them cool completely so you don't freeze condensation. Wrap them tightly to keep out air. If you really care about them you can use the paper between layers but I haven't found it to be necessary. If they freeze together they can be easily pried apart.

I have never tried recooking them in the pan so I can't speak to how well that would work. I reheat mine either in the microwave or toaster depending on how much time I have. The texture is not exactly the same as fresh but not worse, just different.


Without further qualification, if someone refers to themselves as vegetarian (in America), the general assumption is that they are lacto-ovo vegetarian. That means they don't eat animal products that require killing the animal, but eggs and dairy are fine. Gelatin comes from a dead animal (unless they start harvesting it with arthroscopic probes :), so it is not a vegetarian ingredient. There are many other hydrocolloids, such as agar, that can be used to produce similar textures if needed.


What about seitan (wheat gluten) (also available in dried form as e.g. chips)

or fried (and dried, not shown in the picture) tofu bits

or tofu skin?

Pro: All these kinds of food are dryable and rubbery.
Con: I suspect that you can't make this at home - it would be very time-consuming. (Hm, except the tofu. Buy fresh tofu, slice them into little cubes and fry them. Anthoer con: this might by much more expensive than baking bread :-)


Do coffee and tea need to be agitated while brewing?

Tea and Coffee contain a spectrum of flavour compounds and most certainly, not all are pleasant.

If you've ever had an over steeped tea or over brewed coffee you'll know that the optimum extraction point is long before maximum extraction. Where you are no longer extracting just pleasant compounds and picking up higher concentrations of things like caffeine, bitters, etc.

Agitating tea or coffee runs the risk of (or facilitate) reducing the time it takes to extract the unpleasant part.  On that front, experiment with not yo-yo dunking tea bags and squeezing the tea-bag with the back of the spoon (mild forms of agitation) to see the taste difference.


How many standard cake boxes will i need if i'm baking 3 or 4 9 inch round cakes?

If you are in the US, a standard box of cake mix makes two round layers. So you will need 2 boxes to make 4 layers. Outside the US, I think the same applies, just read the box.

I recommend 3 layers if this is among the first few cakes you have made. Bake the two boxes (4 rounds) then choose the best three of the four rounds out of the oven.


Why are my tangzhong bread doughs so wet?

I make the milk bread recipe almost every week: the proportions are not off (unless, perhaps you have an extremely humid kitchen). The usual advice to measure carefully by weight applies, of course. But I will assume your measurements are correct. Then I don't think the issue here is the tangzhong, but rather the butter content of the dough. Each of those recipes calls for at least half a stick! Because butter is liquid at warm temperatures, it can certainly lead to wet, sticky dough. I have two tips to deal with this.
During mixing and kneading: combine all the ingredients except for the butter, knead using a stand mixer until smooth, about 5 minutes. Then add the butter, unmelted, in one tablespoon chunks. Continue kneading until the butter is incorporated.
For shaping: stick the dough in the fridge for 10 minutes before shaping. Always shape on an oiled surface; do not add extra flour. If the dough ever seems too wet or greasy, return to the fridge to "firm up".
Very buttery enriched doughs are quite different to work with than straight doughs. As you work with it more, you should get a good sense of the correct consistency to look for and how to manage the temperature. Should you attempt something with even more butter, like a brioche, these differences will be even more extreme.


What is the ratio of tomatos/onions to egg when making omlette?

In most styles of omelette vegetables are optional. The obvious exception is the Spanish tortilla, where sliced or grated potato (and possibly onion) adds strength, but that's cooked more slowly and not turned.
Tomatoes in particular are tricky, as they're so wet.  The same would apply to courgette, for example. Large quantities of veg also make it harder, as the egg will be too deep to cook through, so you end up breaking it up.  You can try finishing it off with top heat (grill/broiler) but I've never bothered as it means heating up another appliance.
Cooking small quantities of veg in with the egg is possible for some things (onion, mushroom, pepper, for example) but it's not easy to get it cooked just the right amount, and too much will lead to collapse.
Instead, what I do is pre-cook the veg by frying in the same pan, then drain and reserve.  After that I cook the seasoned egg into a nice flat omelette, return the veg and any other fillings such as cheese to one half, and fold, for a filled omelette.  This way you can put as much or as little veg as you like. You can also microwave the veg.


Why would a baking recipe call for both cake and bread flour?

The author of this recipe probably happens to keep in his pantry (or more professionally speaking, dry store) just those two types of flour, and so has specified a mix to get a mid-level flour with moderate protein levels, tailored to his preferences.  Given that the author is Jacques Torres, this is almost certainly a scaled down translation of a professional recipe, where that is not an uncommon practice (the very odd measurements support the idea of scaling and rounding; the weird flour measurements are probably the closest volume equivalent to a weight based scaled recipe).

Two commercial varieties (all purpose, and the less common pastry flour) also have protein levels in between cake flour and bread flour, with pastry flour being somewhere between cake flour and all purpose, typically.

If you happen to have all purpose (and you almost certainly do) I would suggest using it in the recipe for the total of both specialty flours.  Very few cookie recipes are so fussy that it will actually matter very much.


How can I learn to sharpen my Japanese knives properly?

The Japanese Knife Company has a couple of good tutorials on their website. http://www.japaneseknifecompany.com/sharpening-guides .

Update from Joe:

They have videos on many different ways of sharpening knives (diamond steel, wheel, water wheel, stone, water stone, single sided blades).  If you check their YouTube channel Japanese Knife Company, they also have videos for maintenance of your knives (stropping using newspaper), storage (magnets or blade up in knife blocks; advantages of different blade protectors)

It's almost impossible to describe the process only with text, especially as some of his advice has to do with the sound of the sharpening or stropping, or showing undesired movements of your arm, so videos are the best way to explain the process online.  But even with that, you might not be aware of mistakes that you're making, so you may want to look to see if there are knife or kitchenware stores in your area that offer classes.


Water came out cloudy after steaming chicken, is it cosidered a broth?

Broth is usually defined as having had bones/meat/veg boiled in it, so the dictionary says no.  The lack of flavour also says no, and I doubt reducing it would make much difference.  You could use the water to make broth or stock, if you have bones/vegetables to hand.

What's more likely to have happened is that condensation dripped into the water. This will always happen unless you take steps to prevent it, as the chicken is cooler than the steam, causing water to condense on the surface (more obvious with steaming green veg).  This water dripping would carry small amounts of protein (e.g. myoglobin from dark meat) into the water, and it doesn't take much of many proteins to make water cloudy (this is why milk is white, or a few drops of milk make water cloudy).  Small particles of fat will also contribute if they run into the water.


Resting meat - room temperature and bacteria

There is a rule of thumb

This is not the full story

A cooked turkey should be at 72C. When you take it out of the oven it will start cooling down. As it cools into the 40s bacteria will have good conditions to grow. The turkey is sterile because of cooking but bacteria can attach to exposed surfaces. Cutting the turkey will expose more, and probably your hands will spread bacteria.
It follows that a whole turkey is safer, especially if it is covered, since the inside of the bird will have no bacteria, only the outside.
So the 2 hour rule, which states a turkey rested for 3 hours must be eaten and not refrigerated is not really a one size fits all fact. But it's a rule of thumb when you don't have a lab and culture tests. Ignoring such rules is at your own risk but you can use common sense.
At home you might happily rest a turkey for 3 hours but in a commercial setting this could violate local laws if you kept the leftovers and someone got sick, you wouldn't have a defence and could be criminally liable for failing to follow defined rules. Most commercial health and safety rules err on the side of being more conservative than is necessary, because a dry turkey is better than people getting sick and suing you. Remember that bacteriology is about numbers and we might talk about 6.5D reductions (10^6.5) and McDonalds might use a higher level, and an expensive restaurant is almost certainly on a lower level as shown by many food poisoning cases in fancy restaurants. That's because McDonalds have a huge number of customers so even 1 in 10 million getting sick might be too much for their lawyers, whereas if you are cooking at home then you won't even eat that many meals in your whole life, so probably follow less stringent standards and get sick rarely.


How to preserve homemade fresh cream for about a week in a freezer?

Assuming the milk is pasteurised, frozen cream made with it should last for months in a clean, sealed container in the freezer. I would put each batch in a separate container though rather than putting room temperature cream in with already frozen.


How do you determine whether a coconut is young or not by knocking on it?

Shake it gently and listen for and feel the slosh. As coconuts age the liquid level decline to zero

An unripe coconut is nearly full and can hardly slosh. A good slosh sound is a generally ripe coconut (about 150 to 300 ml's of liquid). As the liquid get less and less the flesh get softer and tastier to eat raw

There are many different types of coconuts, this may not apply to them all?


Is it safe to use unwashed barbeque grill utensils?

You know I attended the BBQ Camp at Texas A&M, which was sponsored by Foodways Texas and conducted by the faculty of the Meat Science Department, and the first module of the workshop was food safety.  One of the faculty discussed an experience he had when he was invited to a friends house for dinner.  His host made steaks on the grill and carried the uncooked steaks to the grill on a plate, and when he finished he put the cooked steaks back on the same plate.  Bad idea, exposing cooked food to a surface contaminated with raw juices.

Leaving the tongs and/or forks in an unclean state is very similar.  While there may not be as big a risk in handling or placing raw foods onto the grilling surface, since they will be exposed to the germ killing temperature while cooking, there is a problem in handling the cooked foods with the utensils that have been exposed to raw foods and may have remnants of older bacteria.  In addition a bigger problem occurs when using a fork, as the fork pierces the skin and can carry bacteria inside the meat which may or may not reach a germ killing temperature.

So clean your utensils, clean your dishware, avoid cross contamination, and keep hot foods hot and cold foods cold.

I stuck a food safety link to the Texas A&M website for more information.  Cheers.

http://bbq.tamu.edu/food-safety/


Go get a $15 probe thermometer. There is really no point in cooking turkey or any other roast without one.

The actual answer is- there is no good way without measuring the internal temperature.
Any time-based approach will be a guess at best.

The built in thermometer in some turkeys is a spring with some epoxy that melts a specific temperature. They are somewhat unreliable and either way they spring at 180F or so. This is well overdone for white meat but covers the turkey seller's liability.

Really- it's worth it to just get the thermometer and take the guess work out.


From healthline.com:

In one study, sprouting wheat increased the absorption of iron by over 200% ( 16 ). Sprouted grains are higher in several nutrients, including protein, fiber, vitamin C, folate and beta-carotene. In addition, sprouting decreases antinutrients, making the nutrients in the grains more readily available to your body.

From
Cultures For Health:

How to Use Sprouted Wheat Berries. Add to salads, soups, bread, and other recipes. Ferment sprouted wheat berries to make Rejuvelac. Transfer to soil and grow wheat grass for making wheat grass juice.

From
Kitchn:

Sprouted grains, like wheat berries and rice, are super simple, don’t require any major equipment, and are fun for both adults and kids to make. To make them actually sprout, the soaked grains are then rinsed, drained, and kept moist inside a jar for a period of 1 to 5 days. Sprouted grains are often eaten raw, lightly cooked, or ground into flour.

Seems like sprouted wheat berries are a common edible food.


Can't stop eggs from sticking to stainless steel pan

If food sticks to a stainless steel pan it is usually due to either a) too high heat, b) not enough grease/butter/oil, or c) some amount of both a and b.


Where and how do I keep the extra buttermilk biscuits?

Biscuits are notorious for that; they're best eaten right away. If you want to preserve their original texture longer than 12 hours (yes, that short of a time), your best bet is to freeze them as soon as they are cool and eat them within a month or two. Wrap them as air-tightly as possible.

You can pop the frozen biscuits in a moderate oven or unwrap and give them an hour or so on the counter to defrost, then warm them. Either way, it's best to serve them warm, they will seem softer and fresher that way.

If you've found a recipe you like and think you might want to make them frequently, mix the dry ingredients for multiple batches. If you can weigh the dry mix that you have just mixed, then you're golden. You can make as many or as few biscuits as you want anytime just by using the same proportion of dry, fat and liquid as the original recipe. You can easily make a single biscuit that way or feed a crowd.


yes. That is the basic different between self-rising cornmeal and regular cornmeal.

From Food.com:
http://www.food.com/library/cornmeal-59

Self-rising cornmeal is a white or yellow cornmeal with leavening agents and salt added.
Substitutions: 1 cup plain cornmeal + 1 1/2 tsp baking powder + 1/2 tsp salt = 1 cup self-rising cornmeal


Is there a table that shows the cooking temperature and the duration for different meat types and its bones?

A table like you're asking for can't actually exist: doneness depends on the internal temperature and hold time of the food, not the oven temperature; your table is missing some columns.

So, there are a couple variables you're not accounting for—the biggest one being the shape and size of the meat. A ½" thick steak will cook much quicker than a 1" thick steak. The other one is the starting temperature—a steak that has been left to warm for an hour before cooking will cook quicker than one straight from the fridge. You could, I suppose build a table for all variations of size (steaks go from maybe ¼ through 2"), initial temperature, and desired doneness, but that'd be a large chart, just for a steak (and it'd be different for a T-bone or porterhouse due to the bone).

More reasonably, you could just use a food thermometer. Then you only need to worry about the temperature for desired doneness.


How to properly store a Chinese new year cake and how long will it last?

I hope you ate the Nian gao cake already. If you are going to eat it in less than 10 days, just leave it in the fridge, tightly sealed in a ziplock bag.  But for longer storage, say a month or so, you could wrap it in plastic wrap, then a paper towel, then inside a freezer bag.  I would also cut up the cake so it is easier to defrost when you want to cook it.  I would not eat it after about a month.  I think that the texture would be too different after that.  But best of luck.


When trying to fry onions, the edges burn instead of the onions frying up

This depends on the result you are looking for.  I'm not sure if you want onions that are crispy or caramelized. You describe wanting them to be crispy, but it looks like the attempt pictured was aiming for caramelized.
For onion crisps, you need to deep fry in plenty of oil, as the comments suggest. You should take care that your onion slices of pieces are the same size.  Deep fry until golden, then remove from oil and drain well.  You should be able to crisp onions in a few minutes.
However, deeply and evenly caramelized onions take quite a while...40 to 45 minutes.  The heat needs to be medium or lower.  Also, slice evenly.  Pieces of different size will cook differently.  You do not need an excess amount of fat, in this case.  2 - 3 tablespoons of butter is fine for 3 - 4 large onions.  Melt the butter, add onions and stir to coat.  Then leave them alone for about 5 minutes. Stir and scrape up the fond.  Repeat this every 5 minutes or so, reducing the heat if they are cooking too fast. They will not become fully caramelized and jammy until the 30 to 40 minute mark.  You should also deglaze the pan at the end, to release the remaining fond. You can add 1/4 cup water, balsamic vinegar, wine, broth...really anything here.
If you just want an evenly browned, pan-fried onion.  Begin the caramelization process described above, and stop when the onions are browned to your liking.  In general, from the picture you post, I would say your heat is too high.


It may not seem intuitive but adding salt is usually a better way to reduce bitterness than adding sugar.

I would also suggest that you do not sauté your garlic until burnt as that will add a quite unpleasant bitterness. Sauté until fragrant.


Can handmade pasta be more than just flour + eggs?

Traditional pasta such as you describe uses semolina flour and eggs, but many recipes also call for milk. Buttermilk or sour cream is often used in vareniki. Spaetzle recipes often call for nutmeg. Rice noodle recipes don't use either wheat flour or eggs, but use rice flour, water, and an additional starch such as tapioca. Some recipes call for butter or oils, some use different kinds of flour, some include leavening agents like baking powder. There are even recipes for sweet pastas.

In short, there are many different ingredients used in pastas around the world, and you should feel free to experiment with your own choices. The key is to maintain the correct dough consistency. if you add a liquid ingredient, you may need a bit more starch, and vice versa.


Why is tofu so popular compared to tempeh?

One possible reason is that Tempeh is uniquely from Indonesia, which is much less of a culinary influence on the US than China, Japan, and Korea - all of which use tofu in traditional dishes. There were an estimated 95,000 Indonesian immigrants in 2010, where Eastern Asian immigrants was over 3.9 million in 2014.

sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indonesian_Americans
https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/asian-immigrants-united-states
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempeh


Chicken gizzards have a tough membrane on the inside (the only part that gets in contact with the bird's food) that holds the stones + grit + food during the grinding part of the digestion process.

That membrane is always removed before selling the gizzards, so I don't believe there will be any residue there - I never saw one sold with that membrane.


First you need salt, then you need an acid. Some methods use flour because the paste with the flour is easier to control. For acid you can use vinegar or lemon juice; citric acid would probably work beautifully (from Ecnerwal in comments). One of the videos I'm posting here uses white wine vinegar. Their salt is probably Maldon Sea Salt Flakes, which would be even more ridiculous. Lemon juice or plain vinegar along with salt (coarser is probably somewhat better) are all you need to make your pans gorgeous.

Here's a video where he uses 1 TBS flour, 1 tsp salt, and enough vinegar to make a paste.

Dab it on and let it sit for 30 minutes.

Then wipe and rinse off the paste. Voilà!

This is another video where he uses white wine vinegar {rolls eyes} and coarse salt. He doesn't use the flour, and the technique is a bit clumsier without it. It's pretty much the same concept as the first video. He goes a bit further and uses a wee bit of elbow grease with a vinegar soaked scrubby sponge on the burn mark on the base of the pan.

Many other sources on the Internet, including The Kitchn use lemon juice or cut lemons instead of vinegar. It doesn't seem to make much difference, all of the related methods work.


For fermented pickles, I suggest using a salty brine similar to the one you started with.

If you are really lucky, enough lactobacillae are present to recreate a pickling brine, otherwise a 5% salt solution should help keeping the cucumbers for a bit longer.

Instruct the recipients to use the pickles rather quickly, I'd guestimate a week in the refrigerator should be ok.


Can I substitute white wine vinegar for balsamic vinegar in a steak marinade?

Balsamic vinegar is quite sweet, fruity and tangy, and not easily compared to other types of vinegar.  The substitutes will work better if you're replacing a relatively little bit, especially in a recipe that uses other strong flavors... but the more important the balsamic flavor is to the end result, the more the substitution will show through.  It still might be pretty good, just expect it to be different than the original.

One substitution I found that's a little more specific is one tablespoon red wine vinegar and half a teaspoon sugar, for one tablespoon balsamic, another one is a tablespoon of cider vinegar and half a teaspoon of honey.  It could be substituted with sherry vinegar and a little honey (though this recipe was "to taste" instead of specific ratios).  Your choice might depend on which vinegar or sweetener you have on hand, which one you like more, or which goes better with the rest of the recipe.

I also saw a substitute with equal parts lemon juice and molasses (or brown rice syrup) with a dash of soy sauce.  This is a little more work, but because of that I expect it's a closer match to the flavor profile (or else it wouldn't be worth the extra effort).


Try cooking tomato sauce in a cast-iron pan some time... You'll learn a whole new meaning for "irony".

A non-reactive pan is one that allows you to cook or store acidic foods without dissolving, leaching, or otherwise causing contamination. Good materials for such pans include glass, stainless steel, food-grade plastic, ceramic, porcelain, and hard anodized aluminum. Bad materials include cast-iron, copper, and aluminum.

Plastic bowls should be fine for most purposes, however keep in mind that small scratches in the plastic may harbor contaminants that will be freed by the acid. So clean them well, or switch to glass.


What is the difference between milk (simple) and milk drink?

If the milk is modified by removing the lactose, it is no longer considered milk, and must be sold under a different name, such as milkdrink. The fat content can be modified while still considering it milk however.

The swedish FAQ of Valio (the biggest dairy producer in Finland) is very clear on this.

http://www.valio.se/halsa/laktosintolerans/fragor-och-svar

I couldn't however find the same quote in the Finnish FAQ (Via google translate).

http://www.valio.fi/usein-kysytyt-kysymykset/

While the legislation could in theory be different between the two countries, I believe this is probably regulated on EU level.


What is the best way to store potatoes that were already cut?

I use a vacuum sealer for storing all sorts of food. If that is not an alternative, you can put them in the fridge in a moist plastic bag. Or you can have them in a bowl of water a day or so.


Mozzarella. Obtaining buffalo milk from whole milk and heavy cream

According to Wikipedia, buffalo milk has 8% milkfat by weight. Cow's milk is listed on that same table as 3.9%, so I'll use that figure for consistency, though the number does vary both from cow to cow and by breed.

So, you need to figure out the portions in which you'd mix together whole milk and heavy cream to reach the same fat content as your buffalo milk.

What you want is a formula in which the amount of fat from the whole milk plus the amount of fat from cream equals the amount of fat from buffalo milk. The amount of fat from the whole milk would be 0.039x, where x is the amount of whole milk, and the amount of fat from the cream would be 0.3y, where y is the amount of cream. And finally, the amount of fat that you would have from the same quantity of buffalo milk would be 0.08(x+y). Putting it together you have 0.039x + 0.3y = 0.08(x+y)

Solve for y to get y=0.18 x, or 18% as much cream as milk. If your milk truly is 3% fat, this would be closer to 22%. Lets meet in the middle at 20%, since it's going to vary anyway.

What this boils down to is that, to approximate the fat content of buffalo milk, you'd use about 200mL cream for 1L of whole milk.


There are two types of razor clams.  Since you are in the US according to your profile, I am guessing you have the type from the Pacific Northwest, which look like this (picture from Washington Fish and Wildlife):

It is normal for the razor clam to not completely fit into its shell; in particular, the digger or "foot" will extend from the shell.

According to Piscatorial Pursuits (I couldn't make that name up):

  The neck tips are very tough and give off a very strong scent.

The Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife has a detailed page on cleaning and preparing the clams, with pictures.  Note that they indicate (emphasis original):

  During cleaning, you may find small "pea crabs" or flatworms inside
  the body of the clam. NEITHER OF THESE AFFECTS THE QUALITY OF THE
  RAZOR CLAM MEAT.


There are not that many uses for pollen tbh. one of the ways i used it is make smoothies with it or mix it into some ice cream, even perhaps a garnish or a topping for delicacies.
Bee pollen pairs particularly well with honey mustard dressings, poppy seed dressings or slightly sweet vinaigrette so mix it into your salads.


How does the way that I cut my garlic affect the taste of my food?

@Adam A is close -- it's not an issue of surface area on potency, it's an issue of damage to the garlic.  The 'strong' taste of garlic comes from a reaction as chemicals are released so they can mix (alliin and alliinase)

When you cook the garlic whole (as you would for roasted garlic), you will never get this reaction, as you'll break down the chemicals.  Also, the chemicals break down over long cooking, so even if you add a head of crushed garlic at the beginning of a batch of slow-cooked tomato sauce (4+ hrs), it's not going to have as strong a garlic flavor as adding a clove or two at the end.

One other way that the garlic prep can affect the taste is when you're sauteing, stir frying or other cooking over high heat -- larger bits can be cooked longer before they burn ... and burned garlic is bitter, acrid and will ruin any dish.  (if you burn garlic, stop immediately, trash everything, clean the pan, and start again -- there is no way to save it that I know)


Training on molecular gastronomy and sous vide

I'm not sure if you've encountered this in your research but it looks like it might be full of good information.

I would personally buy this book and fully consume it, but I personally learn better that way.

José Andrés Puerta has an M.G. restaurant in your area (minibar) that appears to be more experiential.  You could probably get a few good questions in during courses.


Perhaps I'm missing some nuance to this question, but the basic answer is that flavors are made up of various chemical components, and it takes time for them to migrate throughout the sauce/stew/curry/etc.  Flavor molecules are often rather large, too, which means they tend to move quite slowly when it comes to dissolving or diffusing throughout a liquid/sauce.

Even if your herbs or spices are in small parts, in chunks, or even ground up, it will take time for the various flavor chemicals to dissolve into the rest of the liquid and then intermingle.  When those flavor components are wrapped up in a solid piece of something (even a small powdery piece of herb or spice), it can take time for the flavor to migrate out into the liquid; similarly, some flavor components may be absorbed into the solids or various chunks of food, and that happens at various rates.

Eventually, the mixture will attain a rough state of "equilibrium," where the concentrations have evened out and flavor migration slows significantly.  For some mixtures, this could happen within a few minutes, and for others it might take hours or days.

There are some more complex phenomena which might have a minor role.  For example, there are also times that temperature cycling can change flavor and texture, as in the stews and curry examples which you mention.  Such sauces often contain various types of molecules suspended together, from plain liquid to fats (both liquid fats like oil and solid fats from animals) to gelatin (from animals) to starches and other ingredients.  When such mixtures solidify, they can cause bits of the components to separate into large globules or sometimes separate into layers.  Since different flavor components are more or less soluble in different things (some dissolve well in water, but others are more soluble in fat or other things), these larger globules can sometimes dissolve different flavors or cause them to migrate through the sauce.  When they are mixed together again the second day and reheated, the flavor can seem intensified.  The texture can also be altered since the way these globules and solid layers melt back into a liquid can be different.  They may not mix back together in the same way they were on the first day, which can change the texture and "mouthfeel," and that can change the way flavor is perceived too.

In other cases, particularly in uncooked foods like raw sauces that are just mixed together, there may be natural enzymes present which may cause reactions that break down more complex molecules into simpler components (like simple sugars) which can also enhance flavor.  A lot of these enzyme reactions can take many hours to occur at any noticeable rate.  With raw sauces there also may be some small amount of fermentation that goes on with microbes present as well.

Anyhow, there are lots of possible things that could be going on in specific cases, but in the most general sense, it just takes time for large flavor molecules to move around and intermingle.


I can see this as being similar to a sweet potato pie.  Best bet in that case would be to cook the carrots, then puree and mix with eggs, milk, etc. just as if it were a sweet potato or pumpkin pie.

Two alternatives that come to mind would be to treat it like a fruit pie, as you say.  Because of the texture of the carrots, I would grate them with the large holes on a box grater, toss with sugar, raisins, some tapioca and whatever spices your heart leads you toward.

An alternative would be to make a molded gelatin like pie, similar to a refrigerator lime pie.  Lots of gelatin and grated carrots.  I, personally, wouldn't like it, but I am not fond of jello with carrots in it either.

Happy experimenting.


Achieving a creamy sauce for cacio e pepe, and dishes like it (carbonara comes to mind) is not as straight forward as some would have you think. Fortunately, while we strive for the perfect emulsification, those attempts that don't exactly work are still delicious.

Here are some tips:
(1) Make sure your cheese is grated as finely as possible, and that it is at room temperature or warmer.  A microplane is perfect.

(2) The water you add can't be too hot.  Scoop some pasta water out halfway through the cooking process, allow it to cool, and use that to add later.

(3) Drain pasta and allow to cool a minute before dressing.

(4) Some find that combining pasta and cheese in a cool pan is better (so that you can control heating).

(5) Some combine the water and the cheese, then add that mixture to the pasta.

(6) The addition of fat (butter, cream, oil) helps the cheese to emulsify, but this addition varies and is sometimes not included.

It's all about practice and adjustment.  Much of this information came from here, and I can vouch for more success (sadly,not perfection) using these techniques.


What's the best way to store lettuce in the refrigerator?

It depends on what type of lettuce it is -- part of the issue is that if the lettuce is touching plastic, it will rot quicker, so I wrap it in paper towels, then bag it (but not sealed), and keep it in my crisper.

For whole heads of lettuce (iceburg, butter, red leaf, etc), I just wrap the whole thing in dry paper towels, then shove it back into the bag from the grocery store or farmer's market.  I then pull off leaves as I need it, and re-wrap it.  It stores for well over a week this way.

For mescalin mixes, arugula, or other individual leaves, I'll wash them, dry them, then unroll enough paper towels to spread the leaves on, then roll up the whole thing, and bag the roll (again, not sealed), and keep it in my crisper.  I can probably get a week out of it this way.

(all times assume you're not buying from a store where it's been sitting on the shelf too long before you buy it; I get my lettuce when I can from the local farmer's market)

So, to answer the specific questions:

keep the bag open; you don't want moisture to condense inside the bag, as it'll make the lettuce rot faster.
I get better storage time with heads of letuce keeping them whole.  If you're going to be eating it all within 2-3 days, it probably doesn't matter, and for loose lettuce, I find it more convenient to wash it as I re-pack it anyway.
You never want to store lettuce wet ... you might be able to store it completely submerged, but damp will lead to it rotting faster.


What term should i use to describe the taste intensity of a crop?


Can I sous-vide meat (at a temperature between 40ºF and 140ºF) for more than four hours?

This article may be a good starting place for some advice.  They consider a lot of the common microbes, not just Salmonella.  Assuming you get somewhere close to the 140F range for an extended period of time, you'll kill off most things.  Other things might only survive in spore form, so you might be okay eating the food while it's hot.

But care should be taken if you wanted to cool the food and heat at a later time, since a lot of spores means that they could become active again and multiply significantly if left in the so-called "danger zone" for very long.  Also, note that during the initial cooking, lots of bacteria will be competing, and the really bad stuff may not have a chance to grow much.  But after most are killed at higher temperatures, any cooling phase of the food will allow remaining spores to reactivate in an environment where they don't have to compete as much and thus often grow faster.  In many cases, it can sometimes be more dangerous to let cooked food sit at room temperature than to take a long initial time to cook.

Anyhow, the spores are not your concern for a long initial cooking time if you're planning to eat the food right away.  In that case, you need to worry about things that will generate persistent toxins.  The linked article mentions a couple: C. perfringens and S. aureus.

As the article points out, Clostridium perfringens will be killed in slow cooking by the time you reach 140F.  However, they don't seem to explicitly mention the enterotoxin produced by C. perfringens.  That toxin can be inactivated by further heating up to 165F, but that may not be desirable for all foods.  (That may be the reason why they don't mention the toxin -- they are assuming the turkey and stuffing will be at a minimum of 165F by the end of the roast.)  In any case, the article implies that you'd need to cook for roughly 10 hours to produce enough to be dangerous for "normal" C. perfringens.  (For the special quick-growing type mentioned in their source, it would grow twice as fast.)

Staphylococcus aureus, on the other hand, clearly would take a long time to grow.  They estimate even in ideal conditions, it would take about 15 hours to produce enough toxin to worry about.  Also, in raw food, they state that S. aureus typically does not grow much, since it doesn't do well competing against other spoilage microbes (e.g., Salmonella) that grow better but won't produce the same levels of persistent toxins.

For some reason, Bacillus cereus doesn't get a mention in this article (it's more common on grains but small amounts are usually found in meats too), and I think it's a potential concern with some foods.  My guess is that again B. cereus usually doesn't compete well against things like Salmonella and Campylobacter.  Looking up typical growth rates, it may not be an issue unless you had a high concentration to begin with.

As with other microbes (e.g., C. perfringens, C. botulinum) the more typical cause of food poisoning with B. cereus is the spores that survive after cooking.  When food is held for a long time in the "danger zone" (e.g., in buffets below 140F, at room temperature before refrigeration), these bacteria have a chance to revive from their spore form and produce persistent toxins.  The particular problem with B. cereus is that normal heating below boiling will not destroy that toxin, making even normal reheated foods a potential danger.

I only mention the spore issue because a higher population of these bacteria (grown during longer cooking) will produce more spores, which can potentially make cooling food down and reheating more dangerous.  These bacteria typically don't grow fast when in the presence of things like Salmonella, but in the more sterile growth medium post-cooking, they can really get going.  If you slow-cook for a long time, be really sure to handle leftovers properly.

But getting back to the main issue: what if you just plan to eat the food right after slow-cooking?  In that case, I think the original article I linked above implies that you're almost certainly safe even if you take up to 10 hours or so with the food between 50F and 130F.  Since most of the bacteria that produce persistent toxins don't grow well when competing against things like Salmonella, you're probably safe for even longer.  As they point out at the end of the article, food kept even as high as 55-60F will generally "spoil safe," partly due to competition among spoiling agents.  However, as you get into the range around 100F in cooking, you hit ideal growth temperatures for some of the more nasty stuff.

Personally, after I researched this stuff a while back, I'm willing to extend the limit to about 10 hours between 50F and 130F for my own cooking, as long as the food is ultimately held above 130F for a significant amount of time.  So, slow-roasting a chicken or turkey at 250F should be fine, and even 200F may be okay.  With such a slow heating process, though, I'd generally want the final temperature of the food to get to about 165F at a minimum -- to further reduce bacteria count and destroy some toxins.  If I intended a lower final temperature (e.g., 140F), I would tend to use a cooking method that gets the food up above 130F more quickly.  (Sous vide should do the trick in most cases.)

But I'd really start to get concerned when you go much beyond 10 hours in the "danger zone."  Chances are that you might even be okay taking 12-24 hours to get up to temperature in many foods, but it could be very risky for some foods/ingredients.  And then, the food must hit a higher temperature standard (at least 165F), which will destroy some potential toxins.  Go much more than a day in your cooking in the "danger zone," and you could even be growing significant amounts of botulism toxin, so your safe temp would have to go even higher to destroy that toxin.  Also, by that point, you may be growing all sorts of nasty stuff.

Whatever you do, don't follow the advice of self-proclaimed experts like the authors of Modernist Cuisine, who want to throw out all of the USDA regulations and rebuild a theory of food safety from scratch, apparently based on the authors' reading of only a couple papers on Salmonella death curves.  Salmonella death curves may be a good guideline for normal cooking methods and sous vide, but with extended slow cooking that allows a long time below 130F, you can grow all sorts of stuff that leaves behind persistent toxins.

In sum, I think the 4 hour "danger zone" thing is a rough guideline with a built-in safety margin (for people who leave the meat in the car for 45 minutes, etc.).  With proper food handling otherwise, in most cases, you should be able to push it to 8 or 10 hours with little chance of harm.  But the longer you go, the more potential hazards.  Do it at your own risk.

(Please note that although I have a lot of scientific training, I'm not a microbiologist, so there may be things I'm overlooking here.)


How to make crescent rolls soft and fluffy?

First thought with any roll/croissant/ etc is the dough needs to be made with COLD ingredients.

This allows layers to be formed and this is what creates the magic.

If ingredients, especially butter, are not cold then they make a gloppy thick dough. Cold ingredients make nice, clean layers that lead to lighter finished products.


Will gum arabic stabilize a watery sorbet?

The base recipe for a sorbet is normally sugar water and fruit puree. Sorbets can also be made with juices or beverages like herbs or tea. The main cause of the "icy" texture is the high water content. To avoid that, you don't necessarily need a thickening/emulsifying agent (rather than a stabilizer per se). Normally those kind of additives are put in the base recipe to avoid the splitting of the sugar that may occur if the sorbet is kept for a long time, especially if it's made with a really watery juice (as lemon for example). On the market it's possible to find some sugar syrups made specifically for sorbet that contains pectin.
But even with a thickener introduced in the recipe the main things that keep a sorbet smooth and airy are sugar (for its anti-freezing properties, the higher the sugar softer the end product will be) and the air that gets incorporated in the sorbet during the mixing in an ice cream machine. Plus the trick to the perfect ice cream or sorbet is to mix it in the ice cream maker until it feel "dry" to the touch, this way it'll keep the proper texture longer.


What is the shelf life of gelatin sheets?

In a sealed package, (not getting into what date may be printed on it for "expiration") practically speaking, sealed and dry, it appears to keep "essentially forever."

Once opened, not nearly so long, though that is not something I've done much personal experimentation with.


What other meat can I use instead of pork in a Spaghetti Carbonara?

Bacon is often substituted for pancetta. While bacon is also traditionally made from pork, there are companies that produce bacon from turkey, beef, lamb, venison, elk, buffalo and even seitan. If you could find one of these bacons in your area, then you could substitute one of them for the pancetta.


How can I produce a more soggy Neapolitan pizza crust?

It sounds like you're doing several things differently than the recipe (different flour, different temperature, different baking surface...) though I don't actually see shaping/baking instructions on the recipe you linked. If you want to stick closer to that recipe (than the other answers...), here's a few other thoughts of potential problems and a few things to try to alleviate these potential problems.

Baking too quickly or overcooking. the baking steel will transfer heat more quickly than a baking stone, a perforated pizza pan, or a sheet pan. Try one of those other baking surface options if you have them, or preheating your steel for a shorter period of time, or cooking for a shorter period of time.
Different flour. doppio zero flour is (likely) much more finely ground and more highly refined than your bread flour; these differences will impact how your bread behaves, such as water absorption and retention (in addition to the temperature comment you made). You might want to try increasing the water, to see if that does something you like (this recipe is about 65% hydration, so you've got some room before the dough gets really sloppy). Bread flour and 00 flour  will (likely) have similar protein content, but you could check that from the respective producers, also.  Despite your cost and temperature concerns, have you tried 00 in this recipe just once to see if there's a difference?
Shaping.  Looks like you have a system, but perhaps you've got the dough just a bit too thin in the middle?  Might be worth making the center slightly thicker as a test.  Also might want to try making one a bit bigger.
If you're cooking one at a time, try cooking two at a time.  They'll each be absorbing some heat, so baking will happen slightly more slowly.

Other questions:

are you indeed letting the dough ferment and rest for this long? 8-12 hours of initial ferment seems uncommon for conventional yeast. I've seen this long initial mix-and-rest for a (no-yeast) autolyse step, or for (very) sour sourdough.  I wonder what the intended effect is...
I'm also surprised there's nearly zero kneading; gluten development will be... different. It seems like the dough will be lumpy, and the gluten development wouldn't be as uniform. Or, perhaps after 2.5 days fermentation this is enough time to have the dough work itself out on its own.  The "bread in 5 minutes per day" franchise also suggests multi-day fridge storage, so I think this is probably a good thing in this case.

Looks good; I think I'll have to try this.  Good luck!  Post back if you discover some improvements...


Pink curing salt turned yellow - safe to use?

That's our brand "Home Curing UK" or "Surfy's".
The colouring used at that time was a natural colouring. Unfortunately the colour deteriorates over time due to the action of light and the nitrites, however the loss of colour does NOT in any way affect the efficacy of the product, 100% guaranteed.


Like a lot of Caribbean cuisine (curries, rice and peas, chilli), these are based on the Indian equivalent, brought by indentured labourers from the sub-continent.

There's a recipe here: http://www.food.com/recipe/caribbean-trinidad-roti-288544 - generally fillings are vegatable-based and usually include sweet or regular potato, chickpeas and curry and chilli powder.

If you like them you may also enjoy Indian stuffed-parathas (here's a recipe you can try) - the original and IMHO, the best ;-)


How long to sous vide a tough cut of steak?

Collagen (type-1, for the scientific folks), one of the major connective tissues in beef, begins to dissolve into gelatin starting at 55°C (131°F) but very slowly, long enough for the meat itself to become mush.  The pace increases with rising temperature to about 71°C (160°F), at which point further rises in temperature don't accelerate the process much -- but that would be medium-well, a crime for ribeye.  Unfortunately, collagen begins to denature at 68°C (154°F), which is also when the meat begins to constrict/toughen substantially and release lots of its juices.  Cooks Illustrated suggests 54°C/130°F for 2-3 hours, but in my steak that didn't melt the collagen at all.  I find the best trade-off is medium, 63-64°C (145-147°F) for 3 hours. Yes, it isn't the deep rosy and extra-tender medium rare, but most of the connective tissue vanishes and is replaced with luscious gelatin.


Letting batter with baking soda wait before adding into the oven

I doubt the raw batter will survive 35-70 minutes out of the oven.
Many times when I made homemade cake, things like

forgetting to preheat the oven

taking too long to scrape all the batter into the baking pan

taking too long decorating the top of the cake batter when its in the pan

rewards me with a flat cake.
On the other hand, after adding the wet ingredients to store bought cake mix, surprisingly, letting the batter sit for a long time (like 30 minutes) before popping it into the oven, doesn't really change the finished product!
What I recommend you do is have your wet ingredients combined and dry ingredients combined all ready in two separate containers. For each cake, mix a third of the wet ingredients with the dry ingredients; this would be more practical then making the batter three times.


How long can melted salted caramel last?

Do you mean that you made salted caramel today or melted it into a sauce?

If you mean made it, keep it loosely covered in a cool, very dry place, not the fridge. Moisture is the enemy of caramel and if it's salted, the salt will attract even more moisture.

Or, you can wrap them really well and freeze them.

If it is a melted, salted caramel sauce, just keep it in a jar in the fridge and bring it to room temperature before serving it. Caramel will generally last a month in the fridge.


That scum looks like it could be hard water deposits interacting with the oils in the coffee, I get a similar scum on my tea when my brita needs replacing. I would suggest de-scaling your espresso maker and using filtered water.


If the recipe said to simmer them slowly with the meat, you might be pleasantly surprised as they could blend in with the other flavors. (Or not, but it might be worth a try with a smaller amount.)

But in the given recipe, a not-so-small amount gets added shortly before the end of the cooking time, which seems intended to keep the original olive flavor (a bit like adding fresh herbs at the end). The flavor of the stew has developed without the olives, a few minutes won’t make a real difference. If you dislike olives on pizza, salad or as appetizer - leave them out.


Why is my stevia-sweetened fresh whipped cream bitter?

I've been using stevia for years to control my carb intake and  I had to learn by experimenting with it. If you use too much, it will taste bitter. Just add a little at a time, and taste as you go.


Does eating foods made using transglutaminase pose any risk to your health?

Transglutaminase (TG) is a naturally occurring enzyme that butchers and chefs, particularly modernist chefs, have been using for a long time.  The enzyme bonds proteins, that is why it is also sometimes called "meat glue."  It is perfectly safe for consumption.  You can read a good primer here.


How does cutting a pork shoulder affect cooking time?

Cooking by minutes per pound is far less accurate than using a thermometer.  The challenge with a pork shoulder is that it is made of of different muscles.  So, timing could certainly depend on which you are cooking...and, when using the charcoal grill, obviously the cooker temperature is going to be a factor.  So, get a good thermometer and rely on that.  Use the shorter end of the time estimate for an indication of when to check the temperature.


Should I separate grape skins when making jam?

I did actually do two batches with the two methods within a few weeks of asking the question.

Just cooking it all together, then removing the skins and seeds with a food mill, is definitely a lot faster. Removing the skins first then pureeing, so that you only remove the seeds later... well, though it is easy to remove the skin from each individual grape, time-consuming is an understatement unless you're making small quantities. It took me a few hours for (if I recall correctly) 10-15 pounds of grapes.

Including the skins has a moderate effect on the texture - it's slightly thicker and more opaque. You get the feeling there's just more stuff in it. As long as you're cooking it fairly long, though, there's not a very noticeable difference in flavor. On the other hand, if you're using a recipe with pectin instead of cooking it down until it sets, I definitely prefer having the skins in, for both flavor and texture.

So there's some personal preference involved; I do rather like the texture with the pureed skins. But if you're doing large quantities, and the grapes are on the small side, and you don't have help, you might want to skip it.


Garlic: minced, crushed, chopped, sliced. When to use each one, and what is the difference?

Dice or slice when the garlic will be consumed along with the other ingredients.

Crush in order to release more flavor. If you add it whole it can be removed afterwards.

Make paste when you don't want it to be visible and all its flavor to be strong and evenly distributed in the dish (e.g. hummus as it is a paste itself, you wouldn't want it to have little lumps in it).

Use whole garlic cloves in slow cooker, and it will release its scent and flavor with time. You can remove it afterwards, the flavor will be there regardless.

Processing it before adding other ingredients, makes it release its scent and get mild-flavored.

All methods except processing will add strong flavor to your dish. The paste will be the strongest, as you consume all of the garlic.


How to correctly infuse cream into vegetables

I think you expected to get curry flavored squash chunks, but it doesn't work like that. Sliced up squash simply isn't going to absorb that much flavor. If you really want to meld the two you need to physically combine the two. You could either smash it all up, or use a blender of some kind, of the two mashing would be my choice as it would preserve some texture.

If preserving the chunked-up texture of the squash is important to you then try blending 1/4 of your cooked squash with all of the sauce, then reducing it down a bit in a pan before adding the squash back in, that will make the sauce much more squash-y.

Also, I'd recommend you use coconut milk next time, it has much more flavor than whipping cream and water, and flavor is what you need.


Can I make any modern improvements to this Russian cake recipe from 1971?

You do not need to update the recipe ;-)

Please remember that the way the ingredients are mixed / prepared might significantly influence the outcome: It does make a difference whether eggs are separated or not or whether eggs are beaten with butter first, butter with sugar or eggs with sugar or even everything dumped in the bowl at once (yes, there are examples for all these types!).

An anecdote: My mom - a proficient baker - had major trouble with a recipe she'd gotten from my dad's family. Should have been light and tall, was always only half the height as the ones the other family members served. It took her years to figure that it did not require separating the eggs and incorporating the stiff whites at the end. Well, it didn't say so in the recipe, but as she always did it that way, she'd just assumed...

Have you tried the recipe yet? If you did and have hings you'd like different, we might come up with more ideas.

As for the spices:
If you are grinding up whole spices (method doesn't matter much), be aware that the flavour might be much more intense than with pre-ground ones. And a teaspoon of cloves and star anise sounds a bit much - IMHO. I'd probaply aim for 1tsp cinnamon, 1/4-1/2 tsp of anise and not more than 1/4 tsp of cloves.

Regarding temperature:
In baking lingo, a "cool" oven is usually around 150-160 °C - that would be about 300-320 °F


What common household drink will remove burning from mouth?

You need something with fat or alcohol. The burning is caused by capsaicin, a molecule found in peppers, which is not water-soluble. If you go for the alcohol, you'll need something with higher percentage, not a beer, and it might result in more burning. It is easier to drink whole milk, especially because you might need lots of the drink if it is too strong.

You option beside a drink is eating bread. You want a soft, fluffy bread like a baguette. If you chew it for a longer time, it will absorb some of the capsaicin covering the inside of your mouth, like a sponge cleaning a pot. For best results, you can combine: bread first, milk afterwards.


If your jam has at least 1:1 ratio (1 kg of sugar per kg of fruit) or more, you do not have to can it. Then it is so overwhelmingly sweet that bacteria cannot live in it.

If the jam has less sugar (1:2 are popular, 1:3 are found sometimes), then you have to either can it, or keep it in the fridge and consume it within a few days, similar to any other cooked food. Else, you are colonizing bacteria in your jam, and at some point, some of them will happen to be pathogenic and cause some unpleasant disease in whoever eats the jam.

Canning is a process in which the jam is closed against any new bacteria (that's why you have to close the jar hermetically) and then heated enough that most old bacteria are killed. After canning, you can keep the closed jars at room temperature without any new bacteria developing.


Which parts of star anise to use for grinding?

Finecooking suggests:

  If you need ground star anise, you can grind the whole stars (both seed and pod) in a spice grinder or mortar and pestle.

Grinding seeds and pods separately and the respective olfactory sensation led me to believe that both parts contribute and are worth being used.


what is the correct consistency for cream cheese frosting

My current favorite cream cheese frosting recipe comes from Thomas Keller's book Under Pressure - page 218. The proportions of the major ingredients include:

cream cheese: 100%, butter: 68%, sugar: 132%

Your recipe uses:

cream cheese: 100%, butter: 24%, sugar: 80% (using the maximum recommended amount).

It may be that you just need a lot more sugar (or more sugar and butter), or it may be that the cheese being sold in your part of the world is not the "cream cheese" we know of here in the USA.


Ideally, of course, you'd be baking your pizza on a baking stone, which you would heat to 500F for 1/2 hour before putting the pizza in the oven.  However, you asked about baking a pizza in a metal pan.

In general, you want to get as much radiant heat into the bottom crust as possible in order to make sure the crust is fully cooked and not soggy.  This means that in an oven with a bottom baking element (whether gas or electric) you want your oven rack in the bottom position.  Again, make sure the oven is thouroughly heated to 500F (250C) (or more, if it'll go higher) before you put the pizza in.

If you have a top-heating oven, things get a bit more complicated.  You'll need to somehow ensure that the bottom of the crust gets cooked, which won't happen if you just put the pizza in the oven, regardless of position.  There's a couple of different ways to take care of this:

Blind-bake the crust until halfway done, flip it, put the toppings on top and finish it,
Do the pizza in a cast-iron pan first on the stove top, finishing in the oven.

In either case, with a top-heating oven, you want to put the rack close to the element ... in the middle or top position, so that the pizza is only about 2-3 inches (5-8cm) away from the element.


How you are popping your corn makes a difference.

Air popped corn with flavoring added afterwards may be healthier but it is difficult to make flavorings adhere.

Using an agitated oil popper and putting the flavoring infused in the oil will make the difference. The flavors will be part of the kernel and not just stuck to the outside.

Lately I've seen several table top, agitated oil poppers at places like costco for reasonable prices.


What's the best container to ferment vegetables?

I've used the harsch crocks myself - for longer ferments (3-8 weeks).  However I've used the giant glass pickle jars for beets when making kvas for borscht.

The thing with the harsch is it takes the guessing out - once you seal it you don't really have to worry about anything except keeping the little water lip filled.

Fermenting in glass jars, to me, has been much more high maintenance:  you need to top off water, skim the gunk, make sure that it doesn't go bad - but I've used them successfully for shorter ferments (7 days versus 6 weeks).  One thing I'd say about the jar ferments is you need to make sure that you've got enough salt in there - this method to me is way less forgiving and goes bad easier.

Good luck - fermenting on your own is soooooo worth it.


Does tempered chocolate remain tempered and only needs liquefying?

If you melt tempered chocolate it loses it's tempering completely and you'll need to do it all again. There's no point in pre-tempering chocolate for storage as there's no benefit if you're going to melt and re-use it.


You may consider using a small amount of Borax, Pinesol or some other form of pine oil, or even the kitchen-friendly, environmentally friendly vinegar.


How to rest meat but not let it get too cold?

Straight after it comes out of the pan it will usually be too hot to eat.  Regardless of resting or not, you can't fully taste things which are too hot, they need to come down to a comfortable temperature before you eat them.

Some things you can do to stop the meat being too cold when you serve it:

You can rest the meat wrapped in foil, this will stop it from getting too cool too quickly if you are not ready to serve once its had the time to rest.
you can rest it and then warm it again before you eat it, either under a hot grill for a little, or in an oven.
serve it with a hot sauce which will warm the meat
serve it on a warmed plate which will stop it cooling more too quickly on the table

Although I think you are worrying too much about nothing IMHO.  Even once rested the meat will still be at a good temperature, especially as you have not cut it yet and most of the heat will be retained in the middle of the meat.


Why is this croissant dough not behaving as expected?

I am afraid that you will never know the answer. At least, from your description, there is no obvious cause for failure, and there is just no way to guess what exactly went wrong this one time. The recipe and your process seem fine and should work in principle.
Typical causes can be:

You didn't wait enough. You say you only waited for 90 minutes - yeast doughs can easily need more, and I would wait for at least 6-8 hours before I pronounce a yeast dough dead. While this shouldn't be the case at 30 C, your estimation for your oven's temperature at this setting might be wrong. Or maybe the dial was visibly turned to this setting, but due to some mechanical problem, the oven didn't actually turn on.
The opposite of my last sentence may have happened - maybe the oven turned on to one setting higher, and you warmed the dough enough to kill the yeast.
You may have been distracted and made a wrong measurement without noticing.

If you are accustomed to high-hydration doughs, then this dough can be expected to feel on the dry side for you, it is at 60% hydration. Or maybe the original recipe assumes that people will proof the live yeast in some water additionally to what the recipe calls for.
The "stiff" part is likely because you apparently kneaded it for exactly one interval of 12 minutes with a stand mixer. You should have let it relax when you saw it becoming stiff. Also, consider transitioning from kneading for some amount of time to recognizing what properly kneaded dough looks like and stopping when it's done.
Anyway, neither the low hydration nor the unrelaxed gluten should interfere with rising. You eithr made a mistake (wrong measurement, wrong temperature or waited too short a time as explained above) or it was some weird fluke, these happen too.


My favorite chocolate mousse recipe uses gelatin as a stabilizer.  I've used it as a filling between cake layers and it works really well.  I don't see why you couldn't use it on the outside of the cake as well.

You'll want to keep the cake refrigerated.  I don't know exactly how long it will remain stable, but I've kept it in the fridge for several days without a problem.


What kind of paste do I use to form shapes to decorate a cake?

Not really healthy, but you should use "Fondant" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fondant_icing)

It is used for most/all cake decoration; it shapes well, and is stable at room temperature; and you can color it.


How can I make my almond buns rise evenly?

It sounds like your mold may not be sitting totally flat in the oven. Try putting it in the oven on a baking sheet.

One way to minimize doming, is to lower your baking temperature. There is a lot of good information in this answer to a similar question.


Weird white ball/crystal like formations on RXbar

That's most likely sugar or fat bloom which is fine to eat. It happens (most often on cheaper chocolates) when it's kept in warm conditions (like an shipping warehouse) and the sugars crystalize on the surface.  See more here: https://www.myrecipes.com/ingredients/what-is-that-white-stuff-on-chocolate


When the macaron batter sits on the sheet tray prior to being baked, the outside dries a bit and becomes solid and inflexible (at least relative to the rest of the batter).

During the baking process, the batter inside is heated, which causes some of the water to turn
to steam and expand.   This forces the interior batter to expand.  It lifts the dried outer shell up, because that is the only direction it can go to start.

Once the harder shell is raised,  some of the softer interior batter then can spread sideways as it expands.  However, it is now directly exposed to the heat of the oven, and quickly sets itself before it has gone very far.  That small bit that expanded sideways out from under the lifted shell is the foot.

This may be hard to visualize, so imagine a big restaurant style griddle, and a small disposable aluminum pie pan, upside down, over some unpopped popcorn.

As the popcorn pops, it cannot go sideways because the walls of the pie pan are in the way.  So it ends up lifting the pan.  Now it can spread sideways a bit, so there will be a rim or foot of popcorn around the pie pan, which will be an inch or two (or several cm for our metric friends) above the surface of the griddle.


Why does my chicken get dry skin in the freezer?

The name for what you're seeing is freezer burn. It happens because water sublimates out of the exposed part of the meat while in the freezer, leaving it all dried out and unpleasant looking. To solve the problem, wrap your chicken (or anything else) tightly in plastic wrap, or place in freezer bags and press out all the air before sealing, and then freeze.


Effect of adding whole egg or yolk to filo pastry?

In my personal experience, adding eggs to dough makes it softer, not crunchier. Adding an egg makes it an "enriched dough" that has the ability to hold onto moisture despite being baked.
Many apple strudel dough recipes include an egg or two in the dough, so you should just go for it.
Finally, while strudel dough is very similar to filo, it is not the same thing, which may be causing some confusion for you.  Per one baking blog:

So the difference is simple, it's the fat! In the Puff Pastry the butter is folded in, in the Strudel dough the oil is part of the dough from the beginning and the Phyllo dough is brushed with oil before being baked.

So per your question, strudel dough sometimes includes an egg, whereas filo (phyllo) never does.


In general ovens are not adjusted for the amount of food being cooked.  It really only matters if you oven is not good at holding temperature, if a very large mass of cold is being heated or if there is enough in the oven to block air movement.  An oven tends to act as a large heat reservoir with a relatively small food item being cooked.  Three small food items will tend to cook in about the same amount of time as one.  You might see a little difference, but it is unlikely to be a huge jump in time needed.  It is different when applied to something like a roast or turkey where a 20 pound item will take much longer than a 10 pound item.

When heating something in a microwave though, this is not true.  A microwave oven focuses the energy and the items in it take that energy without there being a heat reservoir. So, if you attempt to cook 3 items at once rather than 1 you need to provide much more energy, which is done by greatly increasing the time, or simply reverting to doing one at a time.

In the case of conventional oven, I would not really expect a need to increase time by more that a few minutes, if at all, but there cooking times are always approximate in any case.  The true answer to if the item is heated enough is always temperature, not time.


What N+ stands for in French and Dutch descriptions of a spread / cream cheese?

The edited question gives three numbers.

23.5 grams / 24.7% fat

This is the percentage of fat by weight.

V.G / M.G: 70%

M.G. is an abbreviation for  matières grasses (i.e. fat: think of foie gras!). I'd guess V.G. is the corresponding abbreviation in Dutch. Anyway, this refers to the percentage of the dry matter in the cheese that is fat. For instance the top line of the table in the second link shows that full-fat cream cheese is between 60% and 85% fat by this measure.

60+

I think this is simply a less precise version of the previous statistic, showing that the cheese is in the highest band for fat content.

Summary

100g of cheese has 35.3g of dry matter, of which 70%, or 24.7g, is fat.


How to substitute vodka in home-made vanilla extract?

Think about this question another way:

You are making vanilla infused liquor, you just happen to be cooking with it. And Yes, you can infuse any liquor

If you want to use a substitute for Wodka brand Vodka (i.e. use cheaper, off-brand vodka like Kamachatka), I would say that yes, you can substitute out one vodka for another with the caveat that you will want to consider the purity of the distillation you are using as it may impact the flavor of your extract. Substituting top-shelf vodka for "well" vodka may result in an inferior extraction.

If you are asking whether you can  use some other grain alcohol other than vodka, itself, the answer is that yes, you can. You can even use brown liquors and so on; bear in mind they will all extract the oils but will carry the flavors differently (vanilla infused bourbon doesn't sound half bad). In particular, I would recommend going with a neutral grain spirit like Everclear; I have used it in making lemoncello, orangecello, and homemade Kahlua and it is pretty effective in extracting flavor while having none of its own.


How do you freeze blueberries so that there are ice crystals inside?

Normally freezing processes try to avoid forming large ice crystals by freezing rapidly and maintaining a temperature well below the freezing point of the liquid in the product (not simply 0°C due to sugar and other solutes, which concentrate as some liquid freezes).

I suspect that the ones you are aiming to imitate have been through a thermal cycle in transit -- quite possibly as you take them home.

So you can try to do the opposite. Freeze fresh blueberries at home, in a single layer but fairly slowly (perhaps freezing them in an isulated container and/or adding large containers of room temperature water to the freezer at the same time). Allow to nearly defrost and freeze again. If you're starting from frozen berries, allow them to nearly defrost and then refreeze slowly.

You'll have to be careful about the quality of other things in your freezer doing this, and the goal is to stay cold enough that food safety isn't an issue, or at least no more of an issue than keeping fresh berries in the fridge for a few days before freezing. As a result I leave the mechanics at an exercise for you. A cool box with a thermometer inside may be useful.


I've got one of the professional series Kitchen Aids (and my parents have the traditional version to compare and contrast).  If money isn't a huge deal, then getting the professional series comes with a more powerful motor and a heavier base that will stop the mixer from "walking" around the counter if you put dough or something dense in the mixer.

One odd thing that I didn't expect is that the mixer is really inconvenient for small things.  It can whip up like a triple batch of whipped potatoes, but it has the darnest time whipping up a little bit of whip cream or a little merangue.

Kitchen Aide's attachments are pretty rock solid... One of our more "fun" attachments that we have is the ice cream bowl.  Freeze the bowl, dump the ingredients and set the paddle on low.  Again, with the professional model, the motor is strong enough to churn a bit longer than traditional other ice cream churns...

IMO, if you're a big dough cook, go w/ the stronger model, otherwise the smaller models should be great.

EDIT
In an interesting note, my sister has one of the smaller models and it did infact "walk" off the counter a few weeks ago... The whole machine went crashing to the ground... She picked it up, dusted it off, but the only damage was a small piece of plastic broke off... Gotta give it to Kitchen Aide


Sanitizing bottles/jars for homemade sauce

Yes.  Any part of the bottle that is not submersed may not reach the proper temperature for sterilization.


Is it safe to overcook beef or other meat?

From a food safety point of view, no. There is no danger, because the meat contains no pathogens after overcooking.

From a "healthy living" point of view, it might be a problem, because you can have created carcinogens by charring. But we don't discuss such topics here, because nobody in the world knows how much eating charred meat contributes to the risk of developing cancer.

From a cook's point of view, you are doing it wrong. Well cooked meat is juicy and tasty. Overcooked meat is tough as shoe leather. You can continue doing it, if you want to, it is just irrational, like saying "I let my salad wilt for at least a week before eating it, I prefer it that way."