There are three courses of action for producing sourdough with a bread machine:

Use the bread machine just for mixing dough, then rise and bake it separately.  This will produce the best result, defined as the best texture and strongest sourdough flavor.  In this case, you get to monitor the progress of the sourdough as it is rising, which gives you better control over the results.   With this course, make sure to  start preheating your oven early, because it has to be fully ready when the dough is.  It's heartbreaking to watch helplessly as beautiful sourdough loaves collapse while your oven preheats.  Also, you can throw a handful of icecubes into the oven a minute or two before the bread, to get steam, which gives maximum oven spring and a softer crust. This helps prevent the common problem of dense sourdough.
Do a "cheater" sourdough that incorporates both yeast and sourdough starter.  This is the most hands-off approach, but it won't yield as strong a sourdough flavor results as option one.  Basically, you take a standard bread recipe that uses a poolish preferment, and you replace the poolish with equivalent-hydration sourdough starter, but retain the yeast.  So, you're getting leavening primarily from the yeast, but flavor from the sourdough.  Up to half the flour can come from the starter.  You can gradually reduce the yeast amounts and increase rise time until it's approaching a true sourdough. See recipe below!
Do true sourdough with a bread machine that allows you to program VERY long rise/proofing times.  This is the worst option, because sourdough rise times vary greatly, even with the same starter.  The leavening power of starters also varies from almost as fast as instant yeast, to over 12 hours for a full rise.  I think you'll have a hard time finding a bread maker that can be programmed for the longest times, and because you're relying on a fixed timer, the dough will inevitably be either under-risen or collapsing.   Sourdough can go from under-risen to over-risen and collapsing in as little as 30 minutes.

Cheater Sourdough Recipe derived from Pain Sur Poolish:

Ingredients:

425g/15 oz sourdough starter, fed the night before with equal volumes all purpose flour and water (or about 6.7 oz flour per 8 oz water)
227g/8 oz bread ("Strong") flour
227g/8 oz all purpose flour
200 g/7 oz warm water
1 tsp instant yeast (SAF Red Label)
2 tsp salt
Optional: 1 tsp diastatic malt powder
Optional: 1/4 cup dry milk powder

Procedure:

Mix together dry ingredients, then mix in wet ingredients until incorporated.
Knead about 8-10 minutes on stand mixer speed 2, or until the dough is soft and stretchy. It should be a little wet, but not too much.
Rise dough for ~45 min-1.5 hours, or until doubled.  If using a bread machine, rise an extra 30 minutes or so, and skip to step 9.
If using oven: start preheating to 500F/260C with a pizza stone in the lower rack
Divide dough in half, and shape into two loaves, making sure not to handle too much as this will remove gas.
If using oven: coat an inverted aluminum 1/2 sheet pan with pan spray and corn meal, then transfer loaves to pan.  Cover with plastic wrap with the bottom coated in pan spray.
Proof bread 45 minutes to 1 hour, until it stops rising and a finger leaves a dent in the loaf.
If using oven: throw a handful of ice cubes into the oven to generate steam, then slash the loaves and load into oven.
In oven: Bake @ 500F/260C for 5 minutes, then reduce heat to 435F/225C and bake for a further 15 minutes.  In bread machine: bake at about 375F/190C for about 30 minutes.  If not using diastatic malt, crust may still be somewhat pale.

This recipe (with slight modifications) is now my standard bread, which I bake frequently.  I'm still tweaking the exact time to bake at the reduced temperature; if the top is browning excessively but the interior is underdone, it may help to flip the loves over for the last few minutes of cooking.


How to peel boiled quail eggs without breaking

Start with eggs near their sell-by date, not ones you only just bought. The shell gets less attached to the egg with age & air builds a gap.
Boil as desired [hard-boiled is easier, of course].
Use the pan lid to drain off the water, then hold it tight & shake the pan to smash the shells into smaller [still mainly attached] pieces. Hard enough to break the shells, not hard enough to mince the contents.
Fill the pan with cold water. This will rapidly cool the eggs & as the water seeps in between, will aid separation of egg from shell.
Once cold, pull one at a time, roll gently on a hard surface - your aim is lots of tiny pieces, no large areas remaining - & pick an easy start-point. The shells should come off in one go.
I found backup to this, from a quail egg supplier…
How to easily peel quail eggs


Desiccants eventually saturate with moisture, making them ineffective. This can be reversed, usually by heating the packs - various "recipes" for reheating are quoted, depending on the kind of desiccant pack; for those filled with silica gel temperatures of around 130-140 degrees celsius in a well ventilated (eg slightly opened) oven (moist atmosphere does not help) seem to be common, with time dependent on the packet size.

Some types seem to have a color indicator built into the material to indicate when it is dry again, with others weighing the packets (they get heavier when having absorbed moisture) can help.

If food use is intended, be extra careful there are no plastic parts or coatings in the packet construction that you could melt or burn with oven heat.

Microwave based methods are sometimes mentioned, if you want to try them, make sure you are prepared to handle the situation safely in case one of the packet/s (the paper, not the silica gel inside) catches fire. Also, if the model of microwave is not allowed to run empty, add some food or other load (a mug of water might create too much steam inside).


There are two keys to this. First, work right on the pie and start in the middle. Second, fold strips back to make it easy to do the over/under.

This picture, from  http://localfoods.about.com/od/preparationtips/ss/latticepiecrust_8.htm, is kind of the aha! moment for me. Fold half of the vertical strips back, lay a horizontal strip, unfold the folded strips and fold the ones that weren't, repeat.

Trim extra length from the strips, and use eggwash to glue them to the bottom part of the pie, where it comes up at the edges.

You'll have extra dough what with the trimmings and all - just use it to make a freeform gallete or the like. If you have no extra pie filling, use jam, or butter/brown sugar/raisins. Way less trouble than trying to make exactly the right amount of dough for the lattice.


Why did my omelette turn out different than usual?

Bubbles on top while cooking - If you beat air into your eggs before you pour, air would naturally come to the surface.

Develop tunnels - The only explanation I have for this is that you didn't beat the eggs enough, and the mixture was not homogenous. But based on the physical characteristic of bubbles, it would seem that you did beat the eggs, so I'm not entirely sure.

Grayish - Overcooked iron/sulfur compounds in the yolk. Overcooking usually involves heat, which is a chemical reaction from a more reduced state to a more oxidized state. This usually brings about a change in the transition state of an element (sulfur or iron). A change in transition state causes a color change.

Rubbery - Overcooked. The proteins have coagulated very tightly due to prolonged heat exposure.

When I cook omelettes I usually use Jacques Pepin's method, which gives a creamy inside. Youtube "Pepin omelettes," and it'll probably show up.


What can I use in Thai curries instead of cilantro or coriander root? (Allergy)

Just leaving it out is unlikely to result in a disappointing curry - some commercially sold panang pastes omit the coriander root too. What they do not usually omit, though, is the ground coriander seed that is common in all except gaeng kua paste (which is the simplest form of red curry paste, has no dry spices at all, and makes for a great curry still) and some specialty pastes.

Some recipes suggest adding "ginseng" - what they likely mean is krachai/fingerroot, which indeed has a "medicinal" taste that could make a good addition to a coriander-less paste.

Avoid a "broken window" effect to the flavor profile - don't make more "convenient" substitutions (eg using ginger in a red curry paste like this one, using onions for shallots, or using plain lime zest without also adding some kaffir lime leaf.), so the flavor profile is left as intact as you can leave it. Maybe you could also roast your own peanuts freshly. Long cooking time, topping with red bell pepper and chiffonaded kaffir lime leaf - get the other elements done really well.


Dry roast the nuts in a pan or skillet until golden, keep them moving at all times. Let them cool completely on a paper towel. Grind them to the right particle size you need. Spread them thinly and evenly on an oven tray and bake at somewhere around 140-160C. You will likely end up with some parts a little burnt. Or do whole nuts in a coffee roaster.


Complete list of terms used to describe cooking methods?

I think any "exhaustive" list here is bound to be arbitrary.  Some of your own categories overlap (e.g., frying, plus several subcategories of such); so, e.g., is "slow cooking" a cooking method or is it the same as simmering?  Is frying in a wok (aka. stir frying) a distinct method from what you call "shallow-frying"?  I would say it is, which makes me think of your other question regarding "frying in water": Could it have a distinct name as a style of boiling or streaming?  I don't see why not, but I do not think there is one.

Anyway, here's a few:

Roasting
Basting
Smoking
Blanching
Sous vide
Pit barbecue
Reducing as in a reduction

Finally, although it does not involve heat and thus might not be "cooking", marinading ceviche, since it achieves the same denaturation via acid, still seems like a form of cooking to me.

I'd think baking has a lot of distinct subcategories too -- what does a waffle iron count as?


Does steeping the same amount of tea in different volumes of water lead to the same or more caffeine?

TLDR: Yes.

The amount of difference is a complicated question as there are many variables involved. There is an osmotic pressure differential and there is also an equilibrium that will be reached between the tea compounds in the leaves and the water, so technically speaking tea steeped in more water will have more caffeine and other compounds, but there are many factors that will affect how much more.

To do an experiment correctly you'd need to have two bags with the same concentration of tea per volume unit and the same surface area exposed to the water and two cups of the same size and material with the same amount of water at the same temperature. Putting a tea bag into a larger vessel will introduce other factors (such as fluid dynamics and temperature).

Here are some of the variables that would have to be taken into account:

volume of water
temperature of water
surface area of tea:water
turbulence of water
type of tea
pH and other chemical properties of water
infusion time
surface area of water:volume of water
permeability of tea bag (if any)
type of tea
loose leaves vs in a bag; stirred loose leaves vs. clumped loose leaves


What is the right temperature for deep-frying?

325 to 375 for fries...

Most recipes shallow-fry their schnitzel, if you want to boldly chucks them in the deep-fryer instead, it presents two problems; it makes them super crisp, which is usually not what we're after, and it excludes the possibility of using butter, which, I think, is a must. I find the richness of butter unbeatable. Obviously frying it in just butter would present practical problems, as the schnitzel requires more fat than a mere splash, and butter burns easily. You could use a great dollop of clarified butter, but a mixture of that and neutral oil imparts flavour at less expense. The secret to great schnitzel is to "trap air in the crust when you cook the meat by moving and shaking the pan". It works – the coating is noticeably lighter.


Cooked chicken stuffed with a can (of soda)?

There has been a belief, at times wildly popular, the using a half full can of beer (or soda, or other beverage) as a base when barbqecuing or roasting chicken helps keep it moist, and imparts flavor.

This is pretty much debunked.  As Meathead says in the linked article:

  No way the beer adds moisture. The method is supposed to add moisture to the meat. But the can is inserted half way up the cavity and blocks the meat from contact with moisture. It acts like a condom. so any vapor that escapes the top of the can, and there isn't much, will only come in contact with the upper half of the cavity. The surface area of the exterior of the bird is vastly greater than the surface area of the cavity, and after blocking off half the cavity with the can, there is very little surface area for flavor to penetrate.

He also explains in detail why beer cannot add much flavor, if any--there are very few flavorful ingredients in beer as a proportion of the whole which is mostly water.  While I am not familiar with Irn Bru, I imagine that most or all of the logic still applies.


Are long brines neccesary for sous vide?

Typically brines are for tenderizing and penetrating flavour into the meat.

The use of the brine would be to break down the tough meat

Though a sous vide does tenderize mildly with the long cooking time you stated, you don't want to over cook it, hence the brine.

Nor would the sous vide alone add as much flavour as the 2 week brine.

The brine is more for a tenderization than to prevent drying out.


How did Cardinal Mazarin give name to a Swedish cake?

Well, it seems that Mazarin's predecessor (and at the time, mentor), Cardinal Richelieu, was instrumental in the creation of the Treaty of Bärwalde, which made Sweden and France steadfast allies (with the French basically funding nearly forty thousand Swedish soldiers). Once Mazarin replaced Richelieu there were already strong diplomatic ties between the two countries. Mazarin was also on amiable terms with Anne of Austria, the queen of France, and as they were both food lovers and promoters (Mazarin in particular worked to spread pasta throughout France) it would make sense that Mazarin, spreading some Italian pastry (perhaps crostata di mandorle?) to Sweden, would end up with the local variant named after him. In short, diplomatic ties brought a new pastry to Sweden, and the Swedes named their version of that pastry after the diplomat in question, Mazarin. I don't have any direct evidence of this happening, but it seems to make sense.

Sources:
http://www.cmariec.com/?p=9157
http://acuriouslittleblog.blogspot.com/2013/10/cardinal-mazarin.html
http://samples.sainsburysebooks.co.uk/9781134741274_sample_496911.pdf
My friend's mother is a Swedish baker and knew Mazarin was some sort of diplomat with ties to Sweden


When I use fresh onions, we store the unused parts for up to a week in our fridge in either a ziploc or a sealable rubbermaid-style container.  For particularly pungent onions they go in the crisper drawer to keep the smell from being too strong in the rest of the fridge, but usually they're just on one of the shelves.  Stilltasty says 2-3 days but my personal experience says otherwise.

Generally in our house, they don't last long enough for the flavor to degrade too much, but they will get a little dried and the smell will get stronger over time.  After a week, they shouldn't be bad in the sense that you'll get sick - but you'll want to use them in a meal where the onion is the star, as the aroma will take over the dish.

Another option that I'm a big fan of is to dice or strip the leftovers (or, a 5 lb bag at once!) and freeze them on a cookie sheet (instead of in a bag, where they'll turn into a giant clump).  Once fully frozen, dump them into a plastic freezer bag, and store in the freezer for easy access to a handful at a time.  For most applications, you can defrost them right in the pan/pot/casserole as you cook, so they're very handy and accessible.  We do the same with peppers in our house for convenience.


What is the secret of making a really juicy burger?

Use only good beef, salt and pepper. The beef should be a good fatty cut, with a ratio of 80% meat, 20% fat. Chuck is ideal. Any good butcher should grind it to order for you.
You need to keep the ground meat as cold as possible, to prevent the fat melting out of it before you cook it. Do not salt the beef prior to shaping, just use pepper. Shape your burgers, then put them in the fridge for a couple of hours.
Generously salt the outside of the burgers about 1 hour before cooking.
Get a good pan (preferably a cast iron griddle) really, really, really hot. Brush one side of the burger with vegetable oil, then slap it on the grill. DO NOT PRESS IT WITH THE SPATULA, EVER. You squeeze out all the juice.
Turn the burger and cook the other side. Timing will depend on how you like your burger. A good way of testing doneness is to insert a thin metal skewer into the centre of the burger from one side (not the top), leave it for a few seconds, then take it out and touch it carefully to your lip. If it's hot, it's just about done. Or if you have a good digital thermometer, use that.


How can I add a strong orange flavor to my dishes?

Orange zest is where most of the oil is. This can be removed with a grater and some patience, or a peeler if you have a light touch, but the best way is a zester. They are fairly expensive and only do one thing, but they are the best tool for the job. Mircoplane makes a nice line, and I have no complains about mine.

You want to avoid scraping the white pith from under the colored part of the skin, as it is bitter and doesn't contain the flavor oils.


Replacing whole egg beating process by separated egg white and yolk beating in a recipe which calls for the former?

the answer to both your questions will be yes. the cake flour will give you a lighter cake due to the lower protein content (less gluten=lighter and fluffier cake). separating the egg withes from the yolks in this recipe is not really necessary because you have already a good amount of rising agent in the recipe itself but is you wanna make the entra step fold the wipped egg whites at the end, they should lightened the texture even more.


What are the pros/cons of serving the salad dish before/after the main dish?

For a fairly typical thread on this, see:  http://www.thekitchn.com/cultural-differences-salad-bef-65008

The so-called reasons I see listed here are consistent with what I found in several different internet discussions of the issue, none of which are scientificially or academically credible:

Restaurants serve salad first because it is easiest to get out on the table
At home, eat the entrees first while they are hot
Eat salad last so that the roughage helps digestion
Eat salad last so that the stomach acids are not diluted for the entree

Note that the last two are kind of non-sensical.  They sound great as folk science, but in the course of a single meal, it will all end up together in the stomach, as the digestive process is not so fast that the courses end up moving through the system in sequence like cars in a railroad train in sequence over the track.

Then again, some like to serve it with the main part of the meal.

I am sure this is just a matter of cultural expectation.


Why aren't my chocolate chip cookies coming out the way I'd like them?

What you're describing is something that I'd consider normal in a cookie. Some cookies are more cake-like, some are chewy, some are crunchy, some are flatter than others - but they're all good. Almost any factor - from the type of fat, to the type of liquid, to the leavener, to the temperature of both the oven and the dough can affect the cookie's texture. I'd make two recommendations if you want your cookie less flat: 1) chill the dough for a few hours, or overnight. Then, form them and get them into the oven quickly, while the dough is stone cold. 2) Try a different recipe. Do a visual internet search for the type of cookie that you're after. Good recipes are hard to find, and sometimes you have to kiss a few frogs...


Yes.  Here's a specific example.  Asian cuisine also has a strong tradition of using a wide variety of organ meats, many of which are considered delicacies.

The bladder would be a particularly tough piece of protein to prepare, but you can make just about anything palatable with proper cleaning and a long braise.


What's the best way to clean a salad spinner?

I've never done this, but what about filling the bowl with water, lowering the spinning basket into it so the lettuce shreds lift off, then dumping it out?


The texture of kefir depends on many factors, so it's difficult to give a canonical answer. Based on the information you've provided, here are some possible reasons.

I'm assuming you purchased the grains rather than got them from a neighbor, as in the latter case you could simply ask the neighbor for advice. So your grains are quite new. New grains need some recovery time from transportation and some adjustment to a different climate, different milk, etc. Put about 1Tbsp of grains into 1 cup of room temperature milk and leave it for about 24 hours. The next day, filter out the grains and put them in a fresh cup of milk. You may need to do this two or three times before the grains recover fully. You will know they are recovered when they are more than double in size, float to the top, and cause the kefir to start separating into curds and whey. Once this happens, you can increase the amount of milk to two cups per tablespoon.
Even assuming healthy grains, 12 hours is almost certainly too short a ferment. Kefir is at its thickest and creamiest just before it begins to separate into whey and curds. This makes sense: the liquid has thickened to the point where the solids are not yet heavy enough to precipitate, so it is creamy, but once the solids get heavier, they sink and you get separation. So leave your kefir out for longer. Generally 24 hours is the norm, but you will need to experiment. Check at 18 hours. If you see small pockets of whey in the liquid, you are done. If the liquid is more separated, then 18 hours is too long; if you don't see any pockets of whey, leave it for longer. Basically, leave it out for just as long as you need for the texture to be right.
Grain storage. If you are straining out the grains at 8 or 9 am and adding them to milk at 8 or 9 pm, what are you doing with the grains in the meantime? To remain healthy, kefir grains need to be in milk all the time. They cannot survive well by themselves out on the counter or in the refrigerator.
Too much starter. If you have too much starter for the milk, new grains don't get enough sugar to grow and stay small. They then make the kefir gritty. You say 1Tbsp, but not how much milk. Once you are past the recovery stage with your grains, 1Tbsp is right for about 2 cups or a half liter.
Weather and temperature. Dom's super-useful kefir site says:

  Kefir can often turn out having a gritty mouth-feel. This may usually occur during mid-season, as the organisms are adapting to change in temperature [the microflora is trying to find its feet]. However, kefir with a gritty mouth-feel is not impaired in regards to health-benefit and nutritional value. Texture and consistency has more to do with the drinking pleasure of the beverage, and the majority of folks seem to prefer kefir with a smooth, creamy consistency.

It's possible that Singapore is too hot for your kefir grains to be comfortable. Using colder milk and a longer ferment might help. Make sure that wherever you leave the kefir to ferment, it is out of direct sunlight. Or of course, perhaps you're leaving the kefir in too cold a spot, but given that it's Singapore, that's pretty unlikely.

Of these possibilities, I think a combo of the second and third is the most likely in your scenario.

Making kefir really is trial and error, though. I too have had gritty batches sometimes. This was a particular problem before I managed to find a process and time-table that works well for me. I now get good results pretty consistently, but it took playing around to get to this point. Here's what I do:

Use the right amount of starter. I use about 3Tbsp for about 800ml of milk.
Use cold milk. If I use room temperature milk, my kefir is done quicker than I can drink it.
Add the milk to the starter and stir well.
Leave to ferment, covered, in a dark place for roughly 24 hours.
Stir well again.
Strain out the grains and immediately start the cycle again.
The grains keep growing, so every ten days or so, remove excess grains from the strained-out grains and refrigerate in milk.

Hope this helps!


What was the mysterious ingredient in making of Japanese sweet bean paste (an or あん) from the movie?

The ingredient is Mizuame (水飴), a Japanese sweetener. It adds sweetness and gives a luster.

When they need large amount, professional cooks usually scoops it with their bare hands, as she does in the movie.  I'm not sure of the reason, but Mizuame is very sticky and it is troublesome to handle with tools.

And this behavior explains that she has long experiences in making read bean paste.


How does the food industry know the expiration date?

Just to clarify:

"Expiration dates" (or sometimes "Best if used by" dates) are the dates when a product may no longer be of high quality.  It is not a safety indicator.  It is a quality indicator, and it is just a guideline.

Companies determine expiration dates during storage studies or stability tests.  More detail can be found here.

The reason why manufactured food items often last longer than home-prepared items is that companies add ingredients to prolong shelf life.  This is simply for economic reasons.  You could add the same ingredients, but it is often not necessary because of the scale of home cooking.


Food quality isn't binary; it doesn't go from perfectly good to perfectly bad in an instant. Even if it did, the time it would take depends on the storage temperature. And for non-liquid foods, it's possible that only a part went bad (how well does it mix?).

So, you don't get a precise date, but a rough interval at which time the decay starts to set in. As a result, the manufacturer will just pick a rounded date from that interval.

Example: the engineers might calculate that under reasonable circumstances, the product may start to noticably deteriorate after 52-75 days, and become dangerous after 81-112 days. They manufacturer could then say that the expiry date would be 60 days.

(The other answers explain why you'd use the first interval, but not why they're actually intervals.)

:edit:

The likely reason why they're all the same 60 days is probably also engineering. How much preservative do they use? As noted in the comments, the primary preservatives are the acids, but you need quite some sugar to compensate. It seems 60 days is a commonly accepted balance.


I'll come out and say "no, you can't make microwave popcorn in a conventional oven."

For popcorn to pop, the kernel must reach a temperature well above boiling (which builds up steam, causing the kernel to explode). It must do so very quickly, otherwise the moisture will just slowly evaporate out, simply drying the kernel rather than popping it.

Microwave popcorn works because the microwave is primarily heating the kernels directly (because they contain the most water), and quickly. Air poppers don't use the oil, but they do get very hot, and the forced air heats the kernels very fast. And stovetop methods use the heat built up in the oil to heat the kernels quickly. Even fire-popped corn (a fun prospect) relies on fast heat.

Unfortunately, ovens are anything but fast. In the time it would take to heat the kernels, they would just dry out, and possibly start to burn the bag.

If you want popcorn without a microwave, stovetop popcorn is quite easy, and very tasty. I like using a wok, because it's shape is well suited for popcorn (sloped sides keep the kernels in the hot spot, while allowing popped kernels space to expand).


How can I make a chocolate syrup that can be frozen?

The most common methods to create chocolate coated ice cream bars, with or without a stick are to:

Use truly tempered chocolate, which may be more trouble than it is worth
Use a mixture of chocolate thinned with vegetable oil.

See for example, this recipe from Serious Eats.


Is there a downside to tenderizing meat?

Almost any cut of meat can be pounded--very thin steaks commonly called cutlets or scallopini are made from tender cuts being pounded thin.   This is most often done with chicken or pork, but you will also find, for example, medallions of beef tenderloin pounded to get them into a uniform shape and size.

Obviously, this is work to do, and changes the shape (and thus the cooking properties) of the cut involved, but does not really have a negative effect.

Your butcher did not pound the meat. Instead, he ran it through a commercial version of a jacquard meat tenderizer.  The home version looks like this, with many small pointy blades or needles to penetrate the meat:

Picture from Chef's Catalog

They are used to create many, many small cuts in the meat, physically severing the connective tissue and making it more tender.   The most frequent home use is to make cube steakl; they are also often employed in making chicken fried steak.

The many small holes may also help the steak absorb some seasoning from a marinade.

Is there a guide to which types of meat work better with which types of tenderization?

Tender cuts like chicken breasts, beef filet, pork loin, and so on don't need any tenderization.  THey may be pounded to reshape them, but there is no real requirement.

Tough cuts, typically beef, may be physically pounded or subjected to the tender mercies of the jacquard tenderizer in order to render them easier to eat and more succulent when they are being used for a rapid cooking method like chicken fried steak.  If they are being used in a low and slow method, like braising or barbecuing, there is no point and the many small holes would be a detriment as they would allow more moisture to be expressed.

Can you over-pound or over-slice a cut of meat and damage it or cause it to toughen?

Yes, eventually you will reduce it to shreds, or make to thin and unattractive.

Does manual tenderizing conflict with other types of tenderization (e.g. brasing, enzymatic, brining, marinating etc.)?

Firstly, neither brining nor marinating tenderize, ever, unless there is acid or an active enzymatic ingredient in the marinade to do it.

Braising (and other low and slow methods) work by converting the connective tissue protein collagen into gelatin, thus making the cut succulent and tender, despite being very well done.  IF you are going to do this, there simply is no point in mechanical tenderization.

Enzymatic tenderization works by denaturing the proteins in the meat, and if over done will turn them to mush.   It also works only at the surface, unless left long enough to penetrate--but then the surface will mushy.   Using a jacquard might be helpful in getting an enzymatic marindate to penetrate and act on some of the interior of the cut, but I personally do not like the outcome from enzymatic treatments, and never use them.


Do cooks in the US measure volume using 'traditional' or 'legal' units?

Great question Chris!  I'm a US baker who has been baking for a LONG time and never gave it any thought whether my measuring utensils are "legal" or "traditional" - they say "1 cup", "1 Tsp", "1 TBSP", etc.

In practice, all this has meant to me is that when my US recipes call for 1 cup of flour, I measure 1 level measuring cup of flour.  Same for teaspoons and tablespoons.  My European cookbooks refer to ingredients in weight (250 grams, for example).  In those cases, I would either convert those measurements into my more familiar cups, tsp's, TBSP's, etc., or use another set of utensils with measurements marked on the side.

While I've used the written measurements for a guideline, I've always also depended on the preparation instructions to determine the correct consistency of the dough or batter.  This is particularly true for flour and liquids.

Regarding uniformity in the measurement tools, unfortunately for the home cook, there is no one monopoly.  Every grocery store, dollar store and cooking store has an assortment of measuring cups and spoons.  Some of the better measuring cups, like those from Pyrex, have volumes written on the side of the cup to use as guides.


What is the relationship between salt and iodine?

Iodine is commonly added to table salt, hence the term "Iodized".

This is purely a public health issue, much like fluoridation of water.   The human body needs small quantities of Iodine for good health, and salt was the method chosen to give it to us.  Just as fluoride is added to water, and Vitamin D is added to milk.  It actually has nothing to do with the product, it's just a convenient carrier.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iodised_salt  for more information.


Can I use lye as a leavener instead of baking soda?

I got a pretty thorough answer to my question on the Chemistry sister site to this one.

https://chemistry.stackexchange.com/questions/43896/can-i-use-lye-as-a-cooking-leavener-instead-of-baking-soda

In short, lye, while caustic, will not create a chemical reaction producing CO2, which is what baking soda does during leavening. So lye is at-best an inferior leavening approach, and in most cases, won't work as a leavening ingredient at all.


How do I make a "baking powder" substitute in a pinch?

On the off-chance that you have no baking powder, but you do have baking soda and cream of tartar, you can make your own baking powder:

1 teaspoon baking soda
2 teaspoons cream of tartar
1 teaspoon corn starch (optional)

Mix it all together and use it immediately.

Reference: http://frugalliving.about.com/od/condimentsandspices/r/Baking_Powder.htm


Ceramic non stick pan, light scratches after first use?

There are two different substances that are known as "ceramic nonstick". One is a coating of ceramic material and silicone, offered as an alternative to PFTE (Teflon), and the other is actually a PFTE coating with tiny ceramic "buttons" that protects the PFTE against abrading off when you use metal utensils.

For either coating, one possibility is that you're not actually scratching off the coating.  Instead, your plastic utensils are themselves scraping off tiny bits of plastic from their edges on the ceramic material and leaving a "smear" of plastic on the pan.  This is similar to scraping the edge of an American dime on granite; it leaves a mark, but that's the metal scraping off on the stone, not the other way around.

The way to verify if that's the case would be both a touch test of the "scratches", and trying some utensils made from other materials (like wood or fiberglass) and see if they also leave marks.

The second possibility is that your plastic utensils in fact have fiberglass, bamboo fibers, or something else extremely hard in them.  This could actually scratch the underlying nonstick substance (PFTE or silicone), which is quite soft, especially if the plastic untensils consist of something like fiberglass encased in relatively soft plastic.


Advantages of glass:  you can see the product....the container does not pick up any flavor or color from the product...other than that, in this case (refrigerator pickle) there is no reason not to use your plastic.  In fact, the only reason to use glass, that I can think of, is if you we going to can your pickles for extended shelf life. Then, of course, would would need Mason jars or equivalent.  Fermenting, doesn't have much to do with this question either.  I often store homemade sauerkraut and kimchee in plastic quart containers without issue.


Why would gluten-free chicken meatballs involve pre-cooking 1/3 of the chicken before frying the formed meatballs?

Ground chicken can be very soft and sticky, and difficult to form into balls without everything sticking together or going "squish". If you tried to make balls from completely cooked chicken, though, the balls wouldn't stay together. So, cooking part of the chicken gives the mixture some structure so they can be formed, and will stay together when you put them in the pot.


Every pressure cooker comes with a safety valve.

So even if not most of the CO2 is lost during pouring and heating, the safety valve will make sure nothing bad happens.

That you should always make sure the valve is in good condition and working is a general pressure cooker rule independent of the liquid used.


What's the best way to cook very large chicken breast filets?

It really depends on what types of meals you plan to make with them.

If you would typically serve people a whole breast, then I'd cut each one down into more reasonable sizes (slice vaguely across the grain ... I usually start at the more bulbous end and slice diagonally through it so I end up with a chunk that's mostly from the thin end)

For the size you're starting with, you might want to cut each one into 4 to 6 pieces.  If you're planning on pounding them, I might even go with 8 to 10 pieces.

Once they're a more reasonable size, you can then brine and bake them or pound them out, them like you normally would.

As you mention boiling them ... I would recommended poaching them instead.  If you cut them up first, go with my original recommendation of an hour.  If they went in whole, I might give it two hours.  The technique that I mention is more like a slow cooker -- it's more forgiving and doesn't tend to overcook the outside before the middle is done  (although, it can get fall-apart tender, and start breaking up as you try to fish them out with tongs.


What is the point of mustard-frying burger patties?

I did various tries and ate a lot of smashed cheeseburgers lately. Here is what I found:
The best option is, in the case of smashed burgers, to fry the first side without mustard, and the second side very briefly with mustard. This tastes better than frying without mustard at all, frying both sides with mustard, frying just the first side with mustard, smeering mustard on the patty after frying or adding more mustard into the sauce or elsewhere on the burger.
I cannot say why, but I can say that at least for my palate and my wife's palate mustard frying only the second side very briefly is best.


Accidentally microwaved stainless steel travel coffee mug. Still safe to use?

Normally you don't put metal object in a microwave because it can make sparks and ruin the object, the microwave, and be potentially hazardous (though pretty nice, check https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_yg5eKjA4U for example).

Plastic doesn't absorb as much heat when metal does (induction  phenomenom), so local heat started melting the plastic. As with any melted plastic, it's not necessarily good, but once cooled and washed I don't remember having thrown away melted bowls or plates, nor do I think it was specially advised in the past.

About this dioxin polemic, it's rather the fact that you shouldn't heat something directly in a plastic that may release dioxin when heated, which is not your case since I think your cup has had time to cool down since yesterday.


Roasting an eggplant for "Neapolitan Eggplant Parmesan"

For a recipe like this, that uses roasted eggplant slices, that you then top with some extra stuff, does not require much additional preparation. If you do it like the recipe you link to, you can just:

slice the eggplant 1/2-1  inch thick, place it on oiled baking sheet (you can brush the slices with some oil on top too, sprinkle with some sea salt - ifyou haven't salted them earlier - and add some finely chopped garlic if you want)
put in the 400 F preheated oven for 10 - 15 minutes or until they start slightly change color (thicker sclicew will take a bit longer) - you definitely want to preserve the texture (as you already guess you don't want them to turn mushy, but rather a bit crispy - so a broiler is a good way to go)
then top with the stuff from recipe and bake for another 5-10 mins

Note: The texture of the cooked eggplant also depends on the variety - many Asian varieties tend to get softer and creamy, where most European varieties stay firmer and meaty (McGee, Food&Cooking).

For my eggplant parmigiana I usually flour and panfry the eggplant with a tiny amount of olive oil until golden on both sides, top with tomato sauce and cheese and broil for 5 minutes, sprinkle with fresh parmigiano and serve.

Salting and draining/washing usually helps getting rid of some bitterness. However, I have grilled and baked eggplants for years without doing that and it never tasted bitter ... I think many modern varieties are already way less bitter than eggplants used to be decades ago. But that might also be a matter of taste. So this procedure is always optional and mostly depends on the bitterness of the variety.

Bon appetit!


Depending on what you're going to cook, there are a few ways you can freeze them.

For most uses, I find the simplest method is just to peel, core, and slice them.  First, you want to keep the slices from browning using one of the following methods:

Dip them in lemon juice.
Dip in a salt water dip (2 tbsp salt to 1 gallon water)
Quickly steam/blanch (1-2 minutes) to stop the enzymes that cause browning,
Pack them in a sugar syrup (usually used when you plan to serve the apples as-is after defrosting, see link referenced below).  A good ratio is 2 cups sugar to 3 cups of water, plus 1/2 tsp of ascorbic acid to prevent browning.  You'll want to make about 1 cup syrup per quart of apples.

Personally, I prefer the lemon juice method, it's proven to be quite effective for me and I always have lemons in hand in the house.

Freeze apple slices on a single layer on a cookie sheet (in the bottom of the freezer) then transfer to a Ziploc bag when solid.  The sheet method allows them to freeze as fast as possible in the typical home freezer, and prevents them from sticking together so you can portion them as you need them.  If you're going to be storing for a long time, wrap them in plastic wrap and then foil before putting in the bag.

Some people just wash and freeze them whole, though I prefer do to the prep before freezing so I can just pull them out of the freezer and use them.  They will freeze well whole, however I find that the ruptured cell walls cause them to be harder to peel/core after defrosting using this method.

If you're going to make a pie, you can also freeze them with sugars and spices etc (prepared just as you would make a pie filling) in a pie pan.  You can then take them out of the freezer like that, drop the prepared, shaped mixture right into a pie crust, and bake your pie with a slight increase in baking time.

As far as how long they'll last, they'll be safe indefinitely, but will lose flavor after a few months, I wouldn't recommend going past 6.  Stilltasty says 2-4 but I've pushed it further than that and there wasn't a ton of flavor loss.  Might depend on variety of apple as well.

The suggestions on this page are in line with my personal experience (and expand upon them!)


The vibrations will have an effect:

On you, because it will be harder to judge the "ripeness" of your refreshed sourdough. You often want to catch the point "just before its starts to go down again" - which will be hard to do when the shaking machine bursts the bubbles all the time.

I doubt that the yeasts and bacteria in the starter will mind - they won't get seasick.


Make stock: Take the entire carcass, brown it in the oven, put it in a pot with some carrot, onion and a bay leaf. Cover with water, bring to the boil and let simmer for an hour or so. Then you can strain it and reduce if you like.


What species of red round watermelon is this?

Minis are seedless. Looks to me like a Little Baby Flower or maybe Otome. The agricultural term is "variety" or "cultivar".


Cooking time for steaming vegetables "Al Dente'?

Here's a guide to steaming times for vegetables.

From that guide your ingredients take:

peas, sugar snap, whole pea pods, trimmed - 5-6 minutes
beans, whole - 6-10 minutes
broccoli, trimmed stalks split in half or florets - 5-7 minutes
leeks, trimmed, cut in half - 5-8 minutes

As you can see, there's a bit of variation here in time but (assuming you're not talking about shelled peas or snow peas), it looks like 5-7 minutes should be a good starting goal.

You might be prepared to pull the peas out early or maybe start them a bit later. Unfortunately, it's a matter of taste, so times really are very flexible. With a mix like this, you're likely going to need to be willing to have some of the vegetables a bit soft and some a bit hard but some textural variation should be nice as one texture can get a bit monotonous after a while anyway.

Note, though, if your leeks are cut smaller than this, particularly if they fall apart into rings or half rings, they will likely take considerably less time to steam.


Is the meat curry powder mentioned for use in Malaysian curry puffs similar to western chili powder

Store brands of curry powder sold here in the UK (and I assume most western countries) don't usually contain chilli powder at all. Chilli is generally added separately to taste, because many westerners can't handle the heat of a hot curry mix. The typical yellow colour of these mixes is because they contain turmeric.

However it looks like the Malaysian curry mix in the photo does contain chilli.  After looking at the bright red colour, perhaps it contains Kasmiri chilli powder which is very red, but quite mild, or perhaps it even has red food colouring in it.

Chilli powder alone doesn't make a curry, it needs the other spices commonly found in curry mixes such as, corriander, cumin, clove, cinnamon, black pepper, fenugreek, etc, etc.

When I want to make my curry extra red, I use Kashmiri chilli powder together with either regular curry powder or garam masala. It not only has a wonderful vivid red colour, but it's fairly mild and yet still flavourful, so I can afford to put more in the curry without making it totally inedible.

I have had a couple of Malaysian curry mixes given to me by a friend, and when I checked the ingredients I did notice food colouring was an ingredient, also their curries also have a distinctive star anise/fennel seed taste, so it might be worthwhile adding these spices too, if they aren't in your store bought curry mix.


Grapeseed oil's high smoke point is good for dishes like stir frys where other oils might burn. However not as high a smoke point as Sunflower oil. Canola oil has a relatively low smoke point which will limit its applications.

In addition, Grapeseed oil has a clean flavour where as Canola sometimes has a bitter edge to it. Other oils will have their own flavour characters. Which you use is partly personal taste and partly dependant on what you eat.

For deep frying I'd go to sunflower. It's not the cheapest but not expensive either. It gives a nice crisp finish to most fried foods. If the oil is to be used cool, such as a dressing, olive oil would be my choice, simply for flavour. Since olive oil, like canola, has a low smoke piont, I wouldn't fry with it. For a high temperature frying such as a stir fry, your Grapeseed would be ideal. Also look at rice bran oil wich has a very high smoke point and clean flavour. Ideal for stir fries.


Tips for cooking a classic French omelette in a carbon steel pan

The main issue in cooking a french omelet in carbon steel it'll stick too much. As I was taught you should just try to use a different pan but if you must use that kind then be sure to properly lubricate the pan with fat before adding egg. Then again if and when the eggs absorb it. Then to change it on to a lower heat than typically then making a french omlete so that it will not burn or get stuck as easily. Be sure to cook it long enough so that the bottom is firm enough not to break before moving it. With the excess fat it should release from the pan much like meat does. Once it has released from the pan be sure to keep it moving so that it will not stick again.


If you only use tomato paste infrequently, then you could do as I do: when opening a can (typically only to use a tablespoon full for a recipe), I divide the remainder of the can into tablespoon-sized portions, wrap them individually in plastic wrap, and freeze them until required.


Chicken stock in slow cooker - danger zone?

It sounds like something is wrong with your slow cooker. On low, it should hit somewhere in the 190s, on high in the low 200s. On high, I'd expect it to get there fairly quickly—within two hours. Both should get you to 140 within an hour.

That said, the actual safety temperature (with a good thermometer) is 130 or 131F. 135 or 140F leave some safety margin for not completely accurate thermometers, maybe missing the coldest part of the food by a little bit, etc. And the standard is you have 2 hours to get there (used to be 4).

So, unfortunately, "it seemed like 2–3 hours" makes it really hard to answer if you exceeded that. I'm not qualified to tell you exactly how much risk (if any) you'd be taking if it took 3h.

But I can make some suggestions for keeping the time to 140F down:

Start with warmer water. There is a trade-off; hot water is supposed to make a more cloudy stock. If you simmered the water on the stove first (or in a tea kettle, etc.), then your time to 140 will be very short. Even starting with room temperature water instead of cold water is ten or twenty degrees closer. You could also, as Joe suggests, start with less water and add hot water later on to bring it up to the desired quantity (but don't underfill the slow cooker).
Make sure your ingredients are defrosted (in the fridge). Melting something takes extra energy; this is known as the enthalpy or heat of fusion. For ice, it's a lot of energy—going from ≈32°F ice to ≈32°F water is about as much energy as it'll take to get it from there to 175°F.
If nothing else works, bring it to a simmer in a stock pot then transfer it over. Unfortunately you'll have to wash a second pot.

Or, finally, you can make very good chicken stock in a pressure cooker, in under an hour total cook time. But of course you need to keep an eye on that.


Marinades are generally surface treatments, especially in thicker cuts.  With the exception of salt (if any in the marinade), I doubt your chicken has absorbed any marinade. So, your issue is the higher quantity of liquid, and flavoring of the wine.  I think you could go either way...remove some, or reduce.  If it were me (so as not to be wasteful), I would just cook as normal, reduce longer, and taste and re-season along the way.


How to cut a crumbly baked item (e.g. cereal bar) without it disintegrating?

I suggest that you try to go against your habit! :) Cereal bars and the like don't really need to cool on a rack: just put the baking tray in your fridge when you're done baking the bars. That way they'll set much better, as the heated (and thus very soft) sugary components can cool down and firm up. You will find that it's much easier to cut the bars once they've been in the fridge for a while.
It also helps a lot to use a sharp and wet knife when cutting. That way you will slide through the bars more easily and the bars won't stick to the blade of the knife.


What is this teapot and where can I buy it?

I think that I found the patent for the teapot, but was unable to find anything else about it.  Here is what I have found so far:

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/6655261.html


What's the origin of the name of the "Chinese Cookie" found in Jewish deli's in the US?

The recipe for Jewish Deli "Chinese Cookies" seems awfully similar to the recipe for Chinese almond biscuits, except that the lard is replaced with shortening (to keep it Kosher) and chocolate is added.  A recipe for Chinese almond biscuits was printed as a "standard Chinese cookie" in The Thousand Recipe Chinese Cookbook as early as 1984, and this exact same recipe was reprinted in From Lokshen to Lo Mein: The Jewish Love Affair with Chinese Food.  Given that love affair with Chinese food, I am guessing that at some point in time a cook at a deli decided to recreate the beloved Chinese recipe, either due to his or her own love of the baked good or by request.

I know a Jewish guy who owned and operated a Chinese restaurant in the 1970s (staffed with Cantonese cooks), so the intercultural culinary collaboration is a definite possibility.  (Almond biscuits are very popular in Hong Kong, which is the epicenter of Cantonese cuisine.)  A Glatt Kosher Israeli-style restaurant close to where I used to work recently converted to a Glatt Kosher Chinese-style restaurant (under the same management, and likely with the same cooks)!

Edit (more speculation): If the "Chinese cookie" is in fact a descendant of the almond biscuit, it may have been originally motivated by its almond content: It wouldn't be hard to replace the small amount of wheat flour in the recipe with something like almond flour, thus making the cookies Kosher for Passover.

Edit (even more speculation): About 95% of the ethnic Chinese are lactose intolerant.  Therefore, almost all Chinese confections are dairy-free.  If you think about it, there aren't many Western cookie recipes that don't call for some form of dairy.  The laws of kashrut prohibit eating meat alongside dairy in a single meal.  In other words, if someone who keeps kosher were to eat a meal with meat, he or she would then have to follow it with a non-dairy desert.  Therefore, Jewish delis may have adapted a Chinese cookie recipe to provide non-dairy desert options for their kosher clientele.


How can I make this curry given my list of ingredients?

I don't know if this is how it is done at Alinea, but considering that it is geared towards a modernist dish, not a traditional Thai curry, this is what I would do:

(1) Pound the lemongrass. Toast and then then grind the coriander. Bruise the kaffir lime leaf. Leave those to infuse in the lime juice for at least one hour and up to overnight.

(2) Remove the lemongrass and lime leaf. Combine the infused lime juice with all of the other ingredients, including the coconut milk without heating. Puree. Salt to taste. Strain very thoroughly. If needed, thicken slightly with xanthan gum or ultratex (as they don't require heating).

I suggest this because I know @gachatz's philosophy is to avoid diluting or muddying flavors, and I think this approach would keep them very fresh and distinct.


The secret to a nice chewy crust on a bagel is to dip them in lye. Lye is sodium hydroxide, and quite caustic, so gloves and glasses are recommended when using it. There are plenty of instructions online of safely using lye with bagels and pretzels.


Is liquid seeping from the fish normal when making gravlax?

Yes it is normal.

The salt (and sugar) will "extract" the water from the fish meat.

[...]On a technical level, what both the salt and sugar do is draw moisture out of the fish through osmosis. This decreases the moisture level of the fish, which in turn makes it less hospitable to microbial life. The salt, meanwhile, also helps ward off bacteria that would otherwise hasten spoilage. This extends the edible life of the salmon, but only for a short amount of time—gravlax is not cured in any long-term sense of the word. [...]

Taken from : http://www.seriouseats.com/2015/04/how-to-make-gravlax-cured-salmon.html


What can I do to fix store-bought mayonnaise that split?

Your mayonnaise probably got a little too hot in transit.

Mayonnaise is an emulsion of oil and water. That is, an emulsifier is added to a water-based ingredient that effectively coats droplets of oil and allows those droplets to dissolve into the water instead of coalescing and floating to the surface.

Lecithin is the most common emulsifier used. It is found abundantly in egg yolks.

The emulsion can be damaged if the mayonnaise is heated. When this happens the oil coalesces and you are left with a vinegary base with oil floating on top. Yum.

To fix it you have to reform the emulsion. There are many answers here about how to make or fix homemade mayonnaise.
Briefly: You beat an egg yolk well with the water-based portion and then slowly drizzle the oil in while beating like mad until the mayonnaise is thick and white again.

The whole point of making homemade mayo is to use better quality oil and vinegar or incorporate different flavors. It really isn't worth your time trying to save commercial mayo.


Are those black spots on the inside of kaki safe to eat?

I'm a big fan of Kaki. And among some strains, this is commonly observed. The tree my grandfather had in his garden used to have the same patterns. I don't think this should be causing any food-safety concerns.


Choosing a Flavorless Oil with Specific Qualities

You could try Rice Bran oil. It is virtually flavourless and I've used it for anything from salad dressings to frying. It has 37% polyunsaturated fats. The smoking point is 232 Celsius.


Can flavoring extracts be added to inverted sugar?

It should work, but the notion is that the flavoring should be intense so that just a little would need to be used. You don't want to substantially dilute the syrup. So a teaspoon to the two cups of water used to make the syrup would be fine.

The other thing is that the flavoring must either be a liquid or completely dissolve in the sugar solution. What you don't want is any solid particulate matter in the cooked syrup since particles will be nucleation points upon which crystals would form.

It is just some sugar you'd be wasting if it doesn't work. Experiment...


What wine(s) would you substitute for sweet red vermouth?

I'd say sherry or marsala will have the closest flavor profile in terms of sweetness, with obviously some nuance of the herbal qualities of vermouth lost. But you could add some spices and herbs to make up for that (cloves, cinnamon, dried ginger, star anise, maybe bitter herbs like mugwort, which is easy to find where I am, or something like thyme or sage). See this article for a rough rundown of what might be in a typical vermouth.

That being said, fruit compotes are amenable to quite a lot of variations in alcohol. I sometimes used a white wine when making rote Grütze, a German style berry sauce/compote, but it's common to add a splash of something like cassis liqueur and fruit juice, but the one that went over the best I made with tart verjus. Brandy could work in moderation. If I went that direction, I'd use a fruit juice in roughly 90% the volume of vermouth intended and 10% in brandy.


Any round piece of something that's reasonably solid will provide a start for a lid (think, arts and crafts store). Then trace around the top of the blender to see where the top of the container meets the lid. Then glue a foam-rubber gasket (DIY home store... windows) just inside the line and it should create a tight seal between the blender and the lid.

This will provide a makeshift but usable hold-while-in-use lid.


Why is my fragrant rice pudding (Gordon Ramsay recipe) dry?

He uses Pudding Rice.

When using Risotto rice, if one wants it more starchy and to cook into a creamy texture, one usually needs to stir for like 15 minutes.

If at the end the result seems too dry, stir in a bit of milk at a time until you get the consistency you want.


It's just rounding. The Hellman's nutrition matches the USDA generic mayonnaise nutrition very closely for the single serving size (1 tbsp, 13.8g), but the USDA one also includes amounts per 100g. It's 0.96g protein per 100g, and when scaled down to the serving size that's only 0.13g and gets rounded to 0.


Tried making gel-type candy, it recrystalized as it cooled?

Try using sugars that even in concentrated and cold form do not crystallize much - like honey, industrially or home made invert syrup, thick jam...


Mold doesn't grow that fast in a refrigerator overnight. I'd bet some ingredient reacted with your baking powder or baking soda. I've seen something similar before in three separate circumstances:

instant oatmeal that turned blue when mixed with iodine-treated water (day after day on a camping trip);
garlic mixed with yogurt turns blue when heated;
blueberry pancake batter turned green overnight.


After some thought on this, an isolating form for baking seems to be counterintuitive. It is about heating the dough, isn't it.

From an insulating standpoint, your best bet is probably a silicone baking form. Aluminum conducts heat about 300x better than glass, and silicone insulates about 4x better than glass. Also, the thicker the material, the better the thermal insulation generally.

Here are a few values of thermal conductivity in W/(mK) for typical kitchen materials

400 Copper
235 Aluminum
50-ish Steel
15-ish Stainless Steel
2-ish Stone
0.8 Glass
0.2 Silicone

As rumtscho points out, pyrex may be a bad choice, because it is transmitting infrared light so well. Also, it is unclear as to how well silicone transmits infrared. Silicone materials can vary wildly in physical and optical characteristics.

Pure silicone forms only work for some geometries, too. Soft form sides don't work well with rectangular geometries, for instance. Round forms work fine, though.

On further thought, with forms that do not transmit heat along the perimeter, the forms should be turned in the oven more often, because no oven heat is truly homogenous.

A compromise would be a silicone coated metal form. Cant say anything about these.

Personally, I hate baking in thin-walled glass containers, being scared of breaking them when any amount of prying is needed.

I love my soft silicone muffin forms.

But for cake, I go metal.


What specifically makes microwavable frozen food taste so delicious?

You were advised to not cook your pasta at once, because we assumed that you are going to keep it in the fridge. With liquid water, your pasta will grow mushy or dry, depending on how wet you store it. If you freeze it, these processes will not happen, and the pasta will not degrade.

The pasta in the supermarket frozen packages tastes good for other reasons beyond just not being mushy. It has exactly the right proportions of fat, flavoring agents and the like which will make it both cheap and tasty. Nobody can tell you the exact recipe, it is the company's secret. Their food technologists have created it after years of empirical research backed by theoretical knowledge and the availability of industrial ingredients and instruments. (If they list "modified starch", then something was done to the starch to ensure it has some characteristic; we never know what exactly was done, or what characteristic was created).

You can try to make it for yourself, by making a sauce you like, freezing it together with the pasta and see if you like the result when defrosted. If you like it well enough, you've won. If you don't, it depends on your skill of analysing food shortcomings whether you will be able to improve it substantially. You are welcome to ask us concrete questions about concrete faults once you've done the experiment.


What's the difference between hollandaise, mayonnaise, and aïoli?

Mayo, at its most basic, is egg yolk and oil, with a little vinegar, whipped into an emulsion.

Aioli starts with oil and garlic, and sometimes vinegar or lemon.  Some versions (French-Provençal, apparently) add egg yolk for an end result close to mayonnaise, but the yolk is not required.

Hollandaise is a cooked sauce made from egg yolk and butter, sometimes flavored with lemon and pepper.  I think it must have a much larger ratio of egg yolk to other ingredients in it, since it remains brightly yellow and thick.

Bearnaise is a variation of hollandaise, which uses white wine vinegar to emulsify the egg yolks and butter, and flavors the resulting sauce with shallot, chervil, and tarragon.  Like an aioli, it is not defined by the emulsion but by the flavoring agents.  Adding terragon and capers, or tarragon and shallots, to a hollandaise (or other egg-yolk emulsion sauce) will produce a 'faux-bearnaise'.

The garlic defines the aioli, which is also the only one that can be made without egg yolk. The choice of butter rather than oil makes a hollandaise, and it is cooked as a sauce to set the yolks (which neither of the others require). The yolk and oil combination itself is the central concept of mayonnaise, while it can be flavored, it doesn't have to be.

The sauces are quite similar, though, and an emulsion of egg yolk with seasonings might be called by any name.  The difference between a garlic mayo and a french-style aioli are likely to be pretty subtle.  Likewise, a mayo flavored with lemon and pepper will be hard to distinguish from a hollandaise which uses oil - although hollandaise is usually cooked to set it, so the texture may be different.  And a aioli with butter will be very similar to a hollandaise with garlic.  Adding tarragon and shallot to any of them is likely to produce a bearnaise type sauce.

All three recipes are very loose and broadly defined, since they can be tweaked a lot depending on preferences - so it makes it hard to pin down other factors like ingredient ratios that might distinguish the recipes.  The sauces that add flavorings or substitute ingredients will tend to be named one or the other based more on recipe origin, familiarity, and marketing rather than any clearly defined difference.


Can I store extra pizza dough in fridge?

Yes, the colder the fridge, the longer you can keep the dough in the fridge. It will overrise after a day or two. Take it out of the fridge for an hour or two until it happily rises.

Pizza dough can also be frozen. I freeze mine immediately after finishing, and thaw it in the fridge for a day. Supposedly you can thaw it in the microwave.


First, a little context...botulism is extremely rare...only 145 cases in the US in 2015, and of those, only 15% were food borne according to the CDC.  You do need to be aware and careful, but not fearful.  There are lots of easier ways to get sick and die.

Secondly, the risk is higher in low acid vegetables (4.6 or higher) than high pH.  Garlic is an example of a low acid vegetable, but canned tomatoes range from 3.5 to 4.7 on the pH scale (the lower the number, the higher the acidity). Adding lemon, of course increases the acidity, but also impacts the flavor.

Third, colstridium botulinum spores are very heat tolerant.  You need at least 241 degrees F to kill them.  So, boiling, or a quick saute, would eliminate any toxins present, but would not eliminate spores. Cooking your tomato sauce makes it immediately safer (you have eliminated potential toxins), but not from the standpoint of eliminating the spores, because you will never get it to that temperature on your stove or in your oven.  That is why pressure canning (where you can achieve higher temperatures) or pickling (higher acidity preparations) or high sugar preserving are used. These techniques all reduce the risk.

Even with all of the risks accounted for, a week in the fridge, makes sense...probably not much more.  I would make that sauce and feel comfortable with it for about a week...even better if it was being cooked, such as on your pizza.  I would probably discard after a week or so.


If you make homemade strawberry ice cream, the color is likely to be very, very pale, approaching white.  Green food coloring in your mix should do the trick.

It would be very difficult to retroactively turn commercial ice cream a different color.  The pink is almost certainly from food coloring, and mixing in another coloring would be very difficult without adversely affecting the texture of the ice cream--essentially you would end up having to melt and rechurn, to get any kind of decent result, in which case you might as well simply make homemade ice cream.

You can get recipes very easily by googling.  You will, of course, need an ice cream maker.  The frozeen barrel kind can be had readily and for a reasonable price.


How can I make my sourdough crust chewier?

How do you store your bread after baking and cooling it? Because I live in a desert climate, I can't keep it uncovered or in a bread box, so I put it in a big Ziplock bag. This tends to soften the crust into a chewier texture for me when I go to slice it the next day.


How to coat gummies with beeswax/carnauba wax and coconut oil/palm oil?

From what I understand the way waxy coatings are applied is actually by adding your candies and powdered wax to a tumbler.
Claire from bon appetit tried to accomplish it by abusing a salad spinner to make gourmet jelly beans and m&ms. Ann Reason from How to Cook That used a children's toy rock tumbler to apply a cocoa butter coating to some jelly beans.
https://youtu.be/Vn8-p_Gi2fU


What is the difference between a brie and a brie de meaux?

From cheese.com:

  Brie de Meaux, named after the town of Meaux, is a French cheese produced in the region of Brie, located 50 kilometers to the east of Paris. [...] Brie de Meaux, an AOC cheese should be matured in the regions of Seine-et-Marne, Loiret, Aube, Marne, Haut-Marne, Meuse and Yonne.

See also Wikipedia.

So it's primarily a regional indication. Since it's an appellation d'origine contrôlée (AOC, "protected designation of origin") brie made in other regions can't use the name:

  Under French law, it is illegal to manufacture and sell a product under one of the AOC-controlled geographical indications if it does not comply with the criteria of the AOC. AOC products can be identified by a seal, which is printed on the label in wines, and with cheeses, on the rind. To prevent any possible misrepresentation, no part of an AOC name may be used on a label of a product not qualifying for that AOC.

Brie de Meaux is an unpasteurized brie, with an average weight of 2.8 kg (6.2 lb) for a diameter of 36 to 37 cm (14 to 15 in). As for all other bries: they can be made from pasteurized milk, and they can be made anywhere (globally), so it's hard to make distinctions with them all. Usually, cheeses from unpasteurized milk have more flavour. As e.g. 'Life and cheese' writes in Beautiful Brie – raw versus pasteurised?:

  Immediately you’re hit by the extra power of the raw milk. It has oomph. It intoxicates with its caramelised vegetal flavours, which relax into a savoury, umami tang, ...

Note that according to the New York Times (1981 post) Brie de Meaux in the United States is rarely the real thing:

  But French restrictions on Brie labels do not apply in American markets, and cheeses labeled that way are probably not the same as they are in France. The United States Food and Drug Administration prohibits the import of cheeses made from unpasteurized milk that have aged less than 60 days. Since Brie de Meaux, the most popular type, is usually aged only about five weeks, the likelihood of any authentic Brie de Meaux being legally available in this country is virtually nil. Still, some of it manages to find its way to select shops and restaurants in this country.

Interesting read, confirming the US FDA rules anno 2016: Inside the World of Black Market Cheese


Types of tofu that can be used in a crock pot

There's a lot of variance in tofu, but there's usually a significant difference between firm and extra firm. The soft tofu will not hold up, it will probably dissolve after 6 hours. The firm tofu may possibly hold up, it really depends on how firm the brand makes their firm tofu, I suggest you try it and see.


Does adding olive oil in pasta while boiling make it sticky?

Some people think adding olive oil to pasta water will keep the pasta from sticking, but in reality it does absolutely nothing. Adding a tablespoon of oil to pasta water won't affect the outcome in the slightest, doing that is a waste of a good ingredient.

Adding olive oil to pasta after it has been drained on the other hand will keep the pasta from sticking. It will also make it oily, which may not be what you want.


Are there food safety issues at a teppan restaurant?

Food safety is primarily related to the environments that bacteria live in, thrive in, and are killed in. Temperature and time at that temperature will determine if a bacteria is able to survive. For example, if chicken, or other food items that come in contact with raw chicken, reach an internal temperature of 162F or greater, all salmonella is instantly killed.

In the situation you mentioned, and as Jefromi mentioned in their comment, the rest of the food in question is being cooked on high heat so it will reach a high internal temperature as well to kill the bacteria, eliminating the food safety concern.

Another factor would be velocity. The (cold) food gets cooked immediately after getting cross-contaminated by the dirty knife. This means that potentially harmful bacteria do not have time to multiply.

The USDA has a nice document on the time/temperature required to kill certain bacteria and safely eat poultry products.

TIME-TEMPERATURE TABLES FOR COOKING READY-TO-EAT
POULTRY PRODUCTS


Does fat as opposed to oil distribute flavour better?

Saturation doesn't effect the extraction or distribution of flavors, your beef stew was just more flavorful than your chicken stew. Any fat (and that includes oil) will do the job, the difference is in the flavor of the fat and texture differences you would get from the different oils. Beef fat will be richer than olive oil, giving the impression of flavor distribution when it's actually the amount of flavor that is different.


Are Farro (Triticum dicoccum) and Spelta (Triticum spelta) interchangeable?

According to Heidi Julavits' in the New York Times Sunday Magazine, the grains are very different in their cooking properties, even though they are both members of the wheat family, and despite claims that they can be used in the same recipes:

  Farro cooks in about 45 minutes; we cooked our spelt for four hours,
  and even then the result was extremely al dente. We threw in multiple
  sticks of butter, gallons of stock and $13 worth of grated Parmesan,
  but the spelt remained stoically flavor-impervious.

You should look for recipes specifically for Spelt, if this is what you have available.


Reduce the watering from tomatoes in a dish or sauce

Simmering

Let tomatoes simmer slowly for hours.

Pros: probably the tastiest solution.

Cons: time consuming, energy (gas/power) consuming, loss of "fresh" tomato flavor, if you want that.

Adding thickener

Add flour/bread/carrots/potatoes/whatever to add consistency.

Pros: quick and easy.

Cons: may change the flavour.  May require heating to near-boil to activate the starch.

Seeding

Remove seeds and gel/pulp with fingers or a spoon.

Pros: quick, and removes seeds, which may give a bitter taste.

Cons: removes pulp (which gives most of the 'umami' flavor) and juice.

Filtering

Use a strainer to remove the watery part.

Pros: ?

Cons: removes part of the juice.

Draining

Drain (without seeding) tomatoes before to bake them - a (very) light salting helps to draw out excess liquid.

Pros: Removing liquid before allows for less cooking time and preservation of fresh tomato flavor

Cons: waiting time, and removes part of the juice.

Roasting

Halve and place on a sheet pan, then bake until sufficiently dewatered for your purposes.  May have to leave oven door cracked open.

Pros : Easy.  Skins are easy to peel after roasting.  Adds some caramel/roasted flavors where the sugars burned.

Cons : Not quick.  Not good if you want skins on.  Loses the 'fresh tomato' flavor.

Dehydrating

Bake as you would to create a sun dried tomato (at low heat) but don't put it in olive oil.  Can reduce the time to not remove as much moisture.

Pros : Easy.

Cons : Very slow (we're talking most of the day slow).  Loss of the fresh tomato flavor.

Tomato Selection

Use a plum tomato, or other variant that has a higher flesh to gel ratio.

Pros : Extremely easy (if you can get them at your market)

Cons : Often have less flavor than beefsteak, heirloom and other varieties (but may not be noticeable if you're buying from a grocery store)


You don't need to oil it. Don't wash it, just wipe it as you suggest, and the oils it absorbs from pastry etc will do the job for you.

Your current one may smooth out a bit once it's absorbed some oil. If not, grab a new one.


Is it safe to eat potatoes that have sprouted?

Not safe enough for me to try it. Potatoes actually contain a very dangerous toxin called solanine. This toxin is concentrated enough in the green parts in the plant to cause solanine poisoning. This includes the sprouts/eyes, and the potato itself if it's green.

This article from the New York Times health guide indicates that it is something to be taken seriously. Per this article, if the sprouts have been removed, and the potato is not green then it is safe to eat as far as solanine poisoning is concerned.

However, a potato as far gone as you have described sounds disgusting. A soft potato is on its way to going bad. Where I am from, potatoes are cheap enough that it's just not worth the gross factor for me to eat a potato that has 10 cm sprouts and is squishy. I do eat potatoes that have little nub sprouts on them and that are slightly less than firm, after removing the sprouts of course.


You will not succeed in slow cooking your deer to a nice, flavourful dish.  There is not enough collagen or fat to do so; this is generally true of wild game.  It has occasionally worked for me with rump or brisket from an older moose, but even then, the rump would have been better ground.

You appear to have the backstrap (loin), which is one of the two best cuts for steaks (the other being the tenderloin).  I would suggest that you make medallions (e.g. venison steak Diane).  Also by the same author here is a general discussion of deer steaks.

If you really do want to roast it, it should be barded (surrounded in fat such as fatback or bacon) or larded (strips of fat threaded through it).  I prefer larding as barding reduces the Maillard reaction.  In any case, it should be cooked quickly.  E.g., an interesting recipe - which I have not tried - is here at Serious Eats combines roasting with post roasting browning.  I think this is as slow as you can do it.

Finally, a hacksaw with a medium blade can work as a meat saw if you want to try chops.  A wood saw can sort of do the job, but the coarser teeth tend to produce an excess of bone splinters.

Best of luck and don't forget to use your previous piece to make a great brown stock.


Is mixing coffee with milk directly unhealthy?

Not really, but there haven't been that many studies in to the issue. An abstract of the most significant one can be found here.

To summarise, the study tested people who had drunk black coffee, coffee with milk, and coffee with non-dairy creamer to see how much of the phenolic acid (one constituent of coffee that is supposed to have health benefits) entered the bloodstream in each case.

The study found that adding milk had no effect, but adding creamer affected the maximum concentration of the phenols in blood plasma, and the time it took to achieve that concentration.

This kind of toing and froing over the health of certain foods is rife today. One minute coffee is bad for you, the next it's good for you, and so on. For example, the study above assumes that the phenolic acids involved, being antioxidants, are good for you because they reduce free radicals in the body.

Free radicals in too high a concentration can indeed be harmful. However, they are also an essential part of the immune system - when a harmful bacteria is found in the body, phagocyte cells will surround it and destroy it with free radicals, for example. Things like this mean that there is rarely a simple answer to questions of food health.

Likewise, it has been suggested that people with a certain set of genes may be adversely affected by drinking too much caffeine, which may cause bone loss, unless they also have a source of calcium, like milk, in their diet as well, which would rather suggest that milk is definitely a good thing to have with your coffee!


I can't think of any downsides to adding more. The recipe I use calls for at least 8 beans per cup (more is better).

Usually it's recommended to cut the beans in half and scrape out the seeds, adding both the beans and the seeds to the vodka - at least, this is what I do, and I think it probably allows more flavor to be extracted.


By hunting chicken in a game preserve? ;-)

http://www.recipetips.com/kitchen-tips/t--324/poaching-chicken.asp

The essence of poaching chicken is a gentle boil in water, stock or other flavorful liquid. I really like poaching chunks of chicken in a thin sweet-and-sour sauce, then thickening the sauce, adding pineapple chunks, and serving over rice.


Adding chili powder to a dish makes it dark black

I make my own chili powder by drying (already dried) chilies in the oven till crispy. I then add them to a food processor and grind them to a rough powder.
The result is a very dark chili powder that will often darken what it is added to substantially. If I cover a steak with it the steak is blackened. Adding it to lighter soups and stews also darkens them substantially.
As you send your chili powder out to be professionally ground it likely comes out much more finely ground than my inexpensive, old, food processor. And because of that is likely to color anything you add it to more than mine.
Like @GdD said I would bet this is what is happening with your chili powder.


What are those little holes in some meat?

My experience comes from making salami sandwiches... In order to allow myself the luxury of eating something so grease-filled without guilt, I'll zap it in the microwave for 20-30 seconds to render out the fat.  Since packing the salami with ground up fat is part of the process. Cooking the meat melts the fat globules and leaves little hole where the fat use to be.  This more apparent when done with sliced salami and bologna.

In chicken and certain cuts of beef, I think the holes are the result of cutting across veins.  Also, I know that from preparing raw chicken for cooking, I am sometimes able to pull out lengths of veins that leave behind perfect little holes where they came out from.


Green and white mold on dry part of onion only. What to do?

Because nothing else is affected, your red onions probably acquired the mold spores before you purchased them. Perhaps they were stored in a humid area that facilitated the rapid growth.

Hopefully, you didn't store them in the refrigerator. Onions should be stored in a dry area of your kitchen or pantry in a manner that allows for good air circulation. Use a wicker or wire basket rather than than a plastic container.

I see a big red flag in your mentioning storing potatoes in the same container. Potatoes should never be stored in proximity with onions because onions give off a gas which will cause potatoes to spoil. Keep your potatoes in a separate area, preferably dark, and which also permits air to freely circulate.

Regarding what to do with the moldy onions now: wash off the mold and allow the onions to dry, and/or cook with them as soon as possible. After peeling off the outer skins, if the flesh of the onion looks good, with no mold or dark spoiled areas, then I think they'll be safe to use.

If you have too many onions to cook right away and are afraid the mold will progress, slice and/or dice the onions as desired, and blanch them in some boiling water. Then, seal the blanched onions tightly in one or more packages for freezing.


Understanding the steps to prepare sushi rice

Rinsing rice

Simple - rinse off the extra starch so it's not too sticky. This isn't magic. You're just getting rid of some starch before you go on to the next step. Some people advocate soaking the rice here as well. It's perfectly possible to make sushi rice without doing that, though, just rinsing. The soaking just helps make it easier to get the layer of starch off. If the rice is well-rinsed without it (not sticky, translucent, not white on the surface), don't worry about it.

Steaming rice

This is really pretty simple - you want to bring the water to a simmer (not a rolling boil) in order to fill the closed vessel with steam, keep it there until the rice is cooked, then let it rest in order to take up any remaining water.

The Serious Eats article you linked to is really perfectly fine here - it does not give a time for high heat, but rather says to bring to a simmer over high heat (i.e. as fast as possible) then simmer for 15 minutes on low heat (i.e. only enough to make it simmer). It doesn't matter at all whether the heat is coming from electricity or gas, and it doesn't matter that much how powerful your stove is - it might make a difference of a minute or two in how long it takes for it to come to a simmer, but that's not a huge deal. If the total cooking time is a little longer, it just means it'll have absorbed all the water a bit sooner.

Of course if your stove is very far from normal, like say a backpacking stove that takes 30 minutes to heat the water to a simmer, that'd be different. And if your stove is so powerful that even on its lowest setting it cooks the rice dry on the bottom and it sticks to the pot, that's obviously a problem. But I doubt that's the case. It will pretty definitely work. If it's a little off, you can adjust the cooking time a little bit. But no author can tell you exactly how powerful your stove is, and I doubt anyone has a table that says "if your stove puts out X BTU, reduce cooking time by 30 seconds." If you've tried many times and had trouble, or are really this worried about it, just get a rice cooker.

You need a lid that fits well because if it's loose, steam will escape, preventing you from actually steaming the rice. There also won't be as much water left for the rice to take up.

What to look for? Immediately after cooking and resting, like Serious Eats says, the water should be all absorbed. If it's not, you didn't let it sit long enough, or maybe you even need to increase the cooking time a minute or two. (If it's way off, make sure your initial measurement of water was right.) The rice should also, well, look like cooked rice. If you try some it shouldn't still be hard in the middle. It should also not be mushy after absorbing way too much water. It should be, well, like sushi rice, except with a bit of extra moisture that you'll remove later.

Vinegar

Using a different vinegar would appear to be addressed by the question you linked to - as they say, it's just a matter of getting the same sweetness and acidity. Being off by a tiny bit will not hurt you, though. Taste it and see what you like. There's room for considerable variation in sushi rice anyway. I've had it with a very light touch of vinegar and sugar, and I've had it with more obvious flavor. So what to look for? It should taste right. "Right" is subjective, so no one can tell you exactly what it means for you, but it's something in the realm of slightly but noticeably sweet and tart.

Heating the vinegar is just in order to make it easy to dissolve the sugar and salt. There's no reason to bother bringing it to a boil - and if you do, it'll have a really intense (unpleasant to most people) smell from the vapors and you'll end up reducing and concentrating it.

Fanning/drying the rice

This is really pretty simple - you're just getting rid of excess moisture while gently mixing in the vinegar. If you destroy all the grains, you're mixing too vigorously. For the final product, again, look back at the Serious Eats article:

  If all goes well, your sumeshi should come out slightly sweet and tart, full of distinct grains, and have a texture that holds together when compressed, but is not overly sticky.

The fanning/drying is what helps bring it the rest of the way to that texture. The amount of drying it takes to get there will depend a lot on the conditions in your kitchen, and how much extra moisture was left in the rice, so just check on it now and then. Don't use it while it's still way too wet, and don't leave it for days and let it turn into hard little grains again.

Specifics for electric stoves

If your stove is strong and tends to retain heat, you do have to use a little more care when cooking. Electric stoves (including glass-ceramic ones) do this, but it should really be the same kind of thing you routinely deal with. So we're trying to steam rice, which means bringing the water in the pot up to a simmering/steaming temperature, and holding it there for a bit with the lid on. This is something which is quite possible on an electric stove (including a glass-ceramic one); you just have to know what you're doing. It's also not really at all specific to making sushi rice, but I'll go ahead and explain.

First, remember that you want to bring it to a simmer, not a rolling boil. This means there should be a few bubbles at the bottom of the pot, not a constant stream of large bubbles coming up everywhere, and the pot should be filling with steam with maybe a little leaking out, not spraying it everywhere and forcing it past the lid. If you're getting to a rolling boil, you've gone too far.

If your stove is absurdly powerful, you can start out by just not using it at full power. That'll make it easier to adjust down to low power later.

You should also be aware of roughly long it takes to come to a simmer (a little less than the time to come to a rolling boil), and reduce the heat to low before you get there. You should really be able to manage fine like this. If you still overshoot by a little, you can simply pull the pot off the burner then put it back on once it and the burner have cooled down a little. You can even repeat that a few times - just be careful not to leave it off so long that it's not at a simmer anymore. If you still can't manage to avoid boiling over, then you can just move the pot to another burner that's already on low.

These are the kinds of routine adjustments you should expect to have to make when using an electric stove, no matter what you're making. Rice is just one example. Your stove doesn't change temperatures instantly, so you have to help it out by changing the power early, so that when you want it at the lower temperature, it's there. To put it another way, when a recipe asks for low heat, it means low heat coming from the burner, not a low number on the control knob. So you turn the knob early, so that when you want low heat coming from the burner, that's what's happening.


Are countertop blenders with plastic jars dangerous?

Looking at it from a materials-science standpoint rather than a physics standpoint, I agree that plastic is safer than glass.

The difference is in how they break.  Glass is stronger than plastic, for any plastic that a blender jar is likely to be made out of, and is less likely to break from, for example, trying to blend a spoon you forgot to remove.  However, glass is also brittle.

When a plastic jar breaks, the most likely break is a single crack running up one side.  The rest of the jar will flex to absorb the energy of the break and then return to its original shape.  The jar will remain in one piece, without exposing any sharp edges.

When a glass jar breaks, it can't flex the way plastic can.  Instead, the jar will shatter into two or more pieces, and unless it was made from tempered glass (unlikely) or laminated glass (even more unlikely), those pieces will be sharp-edged, making for a dangerous mess to clean up.


Why do my pastries come out flat when I use butter instead of margarine?

How funny since I learned this same recipe when I first got married 40 years ago. Here are the secrets I've learned. Maybe the extra detail will help you find what went wrong with your attempts.

First, you need to have everything at room temperature, especially the eggs. Once you add the butter (yes, butter, not margarine!) to the boiling water that is boiling and it melts, add the cup of flour quickly to the water and with a big spoon mix it fast. It will form a ball. Get it off the heat.

Now, get a mixer and add each egg, one at a time, and mix it thoroughly after each one - but don't overdo it. Do it quickly.

Now with either a pastry bag or a spoon (I use a spoon), drop rounds of the mix on a cookie sheet with parchment paper. Use approximately a 1 1/2 to 2 inch spoonful, so you will have anywhere from 18 to 22. Do not play with these.

Put in preheated oven of 400 degrees for about 30 minutes. The baking time will depend on size. When you take out of the oven, they look beautifully puffed, but if not baked properly, will start to deflate.  So depending on the size, your oven and your patience, you'll have to adjust, but with practice you will master this. It's okay to open the door at the 20 minute mark to turn the cookie sheet, and get a idea if you need to go 10 or even 15 to 20 more minutes depending on the softness of the puff. Even if they deflate, it's okay.

Cool, cut then in half, fill them with a nice custard cream, top them off with the lid, either make a nice chocolate ganache or frosting or if you are lazy or tired, sprinkle with powdered sugar or cocoa powder.

You can also make whipping cream but once you make a good cream custard, no matter how badly deflated the puffs are, people don't usually notice with something on top. It's always been a hit and long ago I used to make only 12 and filled them up with my own special cream and they were the size of baseballs, topped with homemade frosting and I hope you try it.


Is-there any good way to make smoked chipotle pepper at home?

So just to be clear, a chipotle is a smoked red jalepeno, however chipotle is most often used and purchased in Adobo sauce so there are two flavors to this answer. To make the pepper itself, start with ripe jalepenos, by ripe I mean when they are bright red. Red peppers are a lot sweeter and caramelize better than green.

If you don't have a real smoker (I don't mean little smokers that use liquid smoke), then you can use a charcoal grill.

Soak your wood chips for an hour so they don't catch fire. Get your charcoal coals hot and once they've settled down toss some wood chips on top of the coals and close all of the bottom vents. Keep adding presoaked wood chips as necessary for fuel, keeping in mind you need to stay ahead of the fire going out so the wood can dry out and smolder rather put put the fire out. A smoker it better for this because you can manage the coals without moving the peppers out of the way.

Once the peppers have dried completely, they are done.

Then if you want, make Adobo sauce with the peppers which is mostly ketchup and garlic and purée of some of your peppers and adding some more whole. Use whatever Adobo recipe you like, but store the finished product in small containers that can hold only 2 or 3 whole jalepenos plus sauce, that's important. Why I am not sure, but it seems make a huge difference.


You can put a cup/bowl of water(you can also add some vinegar if you don't mind the smell) in there, heat it up to boiling, let the steam out. Then you should let it sit in the microwave without opening the door.
Wait for a few minutes, open the microwave, and wipe off the inside. All that steam should have soften any stains or food pieces left in there.
You may spray some natural cleaners or lemon/vinegar mixtures to wipe off the inside more.


Do oven door liners commonly need replacing?

I have never known anyone to replace them. Not me, not my mother (who used hers every other day almost). So no, that does not seem to be a normal thing. Contact the store!


How to dehydrate nuts using an oven for a short time?

Dehydration (low heat, long time) and cooking (high heat, generally shorter) are two separate things. Dehydration lowers the water content, whereas cooking changes the chemical structures in the food but may also dehydrate to a greater or lesser extent.
To dehydrate you need to gently heat for a longer time so that the water evaporates without cooking the nuts.
Higher heat for shorter times may or may not dehydrate depending on the temperature - you run the risk of burning or cooking the exterior making a soft interior and hardened shell. This may result in the interior of the nut potentially being able to grow any contaminating fungus or bacterium, which you might not be able to tell from the outside.


How best to store steaks in the fridge (for taste)

Beef ages, so it comes down to your preference, and the cut. As Tom Mylan, executive butcher and co-owner of the local, sustainable butcher shop The Meat Hook in Brooklyn, NY, explained in The Atlantic:

During wet aging, the plastic doesn't allow the meat to breathe, so it ages in contact with its own blood, which lends it "a more intense sour note and a more bloody/serumy flavor," according to the Department of Food Science and Nutrition at the University of Minnesota. This sounds a bit negative when you're talking about the flavor of a steak, but the fact that upwards of 90 percent of the beef taken home by American grocery store shoppers in plastic-wrapped foam trays is wet-aged seems to suggest that it can't be all bad.
Dry aging, on the other hand, allows the meat to breathe, lose water (which increases its "beefiness" since there is now less water and but the same amount of muscle fiber), and get acted upon by other microbes beside those of the muscle itself. Those other microbes are the long, threadlike mycelia of various airborne fungi that begin to digest the meat, giving an aged loin its distinctive flavor, aroma, and fuzzy exterior. So dry aging wins, right? It's complicated: while most meat snobs (myself included) prefer dry-aged beef, the American public actually prefers bagged beef according to a number of very expensive meat studies. Certainly you could chalk those results up to Americans preferring what they have become used to and choosing bagged meat over the funkier flavor of dry-aged beef.
Ultimately neither method of aging is the be-all-end-all: it is impossible to properly dry-age steaks like the flat iron, skirt steak, or chuck tenders because they lack the protective fat and bone that cover traditional aged cuts like rib and short loin. Once they are removed from the carcass, they simply begin to degrade and dry out, which is why I think everyone agrees they should go into plastic.