What is better for chilled cheesecake - pectin or gelatin?

Probably the jelly is something like the brand Oetker which comes clear or fruit-flavoured. It is indeed poured warm; cheesecake will survive if it's a cm or less layer.

Alternatively, boil up some apricot jam (or strawberry), take off heat a few minutes and sieve through a tea strainer over cheesecake.
Keep stirring the pot if you are slow.


When a recipe calls for a can of condensed soup, is the water implied?

In casseroles, pot pies and the like, condensed soup is usually added without additional water. It serves as a thickening agent and will pick up sufficient water from whatever vegetables etc. you also have in the recipe.
That's not to say you never add water along w the soup, it's just that the desired end result is more often some sort of solid casserole-like dish than merely a souped up soup. If you've uncooked, dry, noodles in there too, you will have to add some liquid beyond the condensed soup, so as to allow them to hydrate properly.


Found this article from a Montreal Pizzeria owner, hope its what you were looking for! :-)

The ingredients for Pizzazz Pizza (Montreal, 1989) sauce are:

  3 tbsp Pure Olive Oil 45 ml
  3 medium garlic cloves
  1/2 medium onion diced
  1 tsp salt
  1 tsp sugar
  1 tsp oregano
  1 tsp chili or one fresh halapino [sic] pepper
  5 basil leaves
  3 28oz cans san marzano tomatoes (whole tomatoes)

Also included in the link is crust, construction and an alternative sauce. Be aware that this recipe is par for 4 16" pizzas, so either adjust as necessary or invite over some friends to share!


Water is a great solvent for polar molecules. Sugar, table salt, and other small polar molecules are water soluble. When you put them into water, you get a sugar resp. salt solution.

Other molecules are not soluble in water. Most organic molecules with a carbohydrate tail are insoluble (unless they have a strongly polar active group, like the shorter alcohols). Starch and cellulose are not water soluble. Most plant matter is made mainly from starch and cellulose. (The exception are fruits, which can have more fructose than starch, but still lots of cellulose).

When you put non-soluble powder into water, you are not making a solution. You are making a colloid known as sol (solids dispersed in a liquid). If you wet salt, the water will dissolve the first layer, and the second layer will be exposed. If you wet a random non-soluble powder, the water will have to wash away the first layer before it reaches the second layer, so it is hard to make the suspension without vigorous stirring.

There are some special molecules which absorb water and swell. Starch, some proteins (gelatin) and some polysaccharides (xanthan gum) are common such molecules in the kitchen. When you wet them, the water gets absorbed by the first layer. This changes the viscosity of the layer, making it thick and clingy. This forms a clump. In the core are the dry layers of powder. They are held together by a bubble of the water-swelled substance. Outside of this bubble is the water. It can't wash away the bubble, because it is so viscous, it doesn't flow into the water. And the bubble protects the core of the clump from contact with water. This happens with starchy powders like flour, or also real cocoa powder. Tea powder is mostly dried cellulose, so it is also hard to dissolve.

You mention cocoa as easily solved in water. In fact, cocoa is very hard to dissolve, so I think you are speaking of a cocoa flavored drink. A cocoa flavored drink is a mixture of dextrose, cocoa powder, and other things (but mostly dextrose). In such a mixed powder, the water dissolves the soluble molecules (the dextrose), and the insoluble particles (the cocoa powder) which were suspended in the dextrose are now suspended in the water. No neighbouring cocoa particles to cling to. So, no clumps, but an instantly homogenous drink.


How to pack items that may leak liquids for lunch?

For your situation I would recommend packing the burritos individually (or 2 at once) so this does not happen.  You can achieve this by using foil, plastic wrap, or bags.  Alternatively, you may try putting a sheet of wax paper (or foil/plastic wrap - but remove before microwaving) between each layer of burritos.

If this does not work for you, try the following:

Here are two methods that can be used to try to preserve expected consistency:

The easiest, and most sure to actually work:

Store the components that are wet and going to leak liquid in a different container.  Unfortunately, this may involve you having to build your burrito when you want to eat it, yet this is sure to prevent a soggy burrito.

To do this you can use separate containers, bags, or however you normally package a burrito.  One can also purchase plastic food containers with multiple compartments specifically made for this purpose (separation of different food items).  For an example, here is a product listed on Amazon.

The second way:

This isn't a long-term fix nor is it as efficient as a multi-compartment food container.  One can strategically build certain food items so that they are less likely to make bread or tortillas soggy.  You have to place a food item, that will not let the bread absorb the liquid as quickly, next to the bread.  The best example I can give you is that when I make a BLT sandwich that I am not going to eat immediately, I place the lettuce right next to the bread instead of putting the tomato right next to the bread.  The lettuce provides a barrier between the two.  Like I said though, it will not be as efficient as multi-compartment food containers.


What can I use a tempered glass pot for?

I see two sides of this question. First, should you keep a redundant tool in your kitchen, and second, is there a specific purpose to this pot.

I may be biased because my kitchen is small, but my point of view is to get rid of any redundant clutter. Get a few pieces of quality cookware and use them every day. There is no sense in having 3 pots which do the same thing, even if one is half a liter bigger than the other one. (The worst situation is when the small one is decent, and the big one is bad quality, but sometimes you need the volume, so you still keep the big one around). If you don't use a thing, remove it from your kitchen. (Of course, donation/ebay is better than trash from a sustainability point of view).

The second question is, even if you don't use it now, is there an occasion where you might want to use it? It so happens that there is.

Generally, it is a bad idea to use Pyrex on the stove (see this question), and the handle makes the pot impractical to use in the oven (you don't give a size, but I bet you can't place it in the center, if you're able to close the oven door at all). But there is something else you can do with it. This thing makes an awesome double boiler.

If you don't have a professional double boiler, the usual way to "build" one at home is to find a bowl and a pot so that the upper rim diameter of the bowl is slightly bigger than the pot's diameter. You put water in the pot, put the bowl on the pot so that its bottom is suspended in the boiling water, and fill the bowl with your ingredients. It works with any moderately heat-resistant bowls (including glass, but don't use nylon), but I prefer to use glass.

First, glass is a bad heat conductor, which means that it heats more gradually and you have more time to work before your ingredients overheat. This makes it much better than steel. Second, glass is transparent. This means that you can see the boiling water and adjust the temperature according to how strong your boil is. You can't do this with a metal or ceramic bowl.

The drawback to this setup is that at some point, your ingredients are close to overheating. You have to remove the bowl from the heat, and do so quickly. Well, by then the bowl is very hot, it is slippery on the outside because of condensed steam, and your mittened hands slip on the rim withot findind purchase, while the hot steam penetrates through the cloth to cook your skin. The best solution would be a glass bowl with a handle, and that's just what you have here.

The problem in using the dish as a double boiler top is that its bottom is rather flat, making it less suited for small amounts of ingredients. Depending on how much you cook at once and how big the pot is, this may or may not an issue. The second problem is that you can't shock cool it to stop an uncontrolled overheating. But being as easy to grab as it is, you can just keep a cool bowl on the counter and dump the ingredients into it in case of emergency.

Conclusion: if you think you need a double boiler often enough to warrant the room occupied by this thing, you can keep it. But if you don't use it often, there is no point keeping it around as just another pot.


What to do with seized / split chocolate?

If you're not talking about very much water getting into the bowl, then these techniques should help.

Remove the bowl of chocolate from the heat source.
For every ounce of chocolate, add one tablespoon of one of these:   warm water, melted butter, vegetable oil, hot milk/cream.
Stir or whisk until smooth. Add a bit more liquid if needed.
Use the repaired chocolate for sauce, frosting, or a batter (like for your brownies!). It won't work well for coating candy.

You may also want to check out this discussion on how to melt chocolate without getting it wet.


Looking for ways to improve a keto no-bake lime cheesecake recipe

In order to make the texture not " rubbery and jello-y" let your gelatin mixture cool down and set up a little bit. By adding it while boiling hot you are melting the cream cheese, effectively making cream cheese jello. Make sure to whip well after the addition, not just to blend, but to incorporate some air and increase volume.

As far as flavor goes, I suggest that you use unflavored gelatin instead of lime Jello, you may want to up the amount of lime juice you are using and maybe adding a little lime zest. Adding at the end of the mixing process, tasting as you go. (If you do this, you will need to make up for the sweetener in the Jello. You can use your prefered sweetener mixing into the cream cheese along with the gelatin)


Am I overcooking whitebait in water by using scum as a measure for doneness?

Substantial visible albumin is generally a sign of overcooking. As fish cooks, it contracts and squeezes out protein (and moisture), so if you've done a lot of that, you're heading in the direction of dry, tight fish, not tender, flaky fish.

This should be obvious from eating the fish; I doubt it was fully tender and flaky. It's also obvious from what you describe: it took five minutes, which is a pretty long time for fish that small. I wouldn't be surprised if your fish were pretty much at the water's temperature after five minutes.

As for your argument about temperature, well, yes, albumin is released in the 140-150F range, and that's pretty close to the "done" temperature.

But it takes some time for protein to work its way out of the fish into the water; it's not like it all jumps out at once as soon as it hits a high enough temperature. Cooking in water delays things even more: the protein gets diluted, and it takes takes time for it to all get to the top and collect into scum, so it might take even more released protein for it to be visible. During that time, the temperature of the fish is still increasing.

Bottom line, if you're unsure how done is done enough, test the fish. Use a thermometer, or just flake it open with a fork or knife to see the texture.


The easiest way is rum or brandy extract. The flavor is milder, but satisfactory enough. (Rum extract is far easier to find than brandy extract.)

Most brands still have some alcohol (significantly less than the real deal, but still present), so it's important to consider whether you're just avoiding the intoxicating effects or trying to completely eliminate the alcohol (e.g. for medical or religious reasons). If work rules mean it needs to be completely alcohol-free, you'll need to get more creative.

A side note inspired by a comment asking if eliminating alcohol increases Salmonella risk: Alcohol isn't guaranteed to kill harmful bacteria, so nog should either use pasteurized eggs or be (lightly) cooked for food safety... regardless of how much booze is or is not in your recipe.


Is it safe to put a plate directly on a recently-on gas burner?

I don't recommend it. I have had a plate crack before after being placed on a recently turned-off burner, and on another occasion ended up with burned fingertips when I totally forget that I had done so. I have in the past used a cooling rack over recently used burners that gives you a bit of elevation, and an automatic work space/storage space. Hope this helps.


The term "dog" has been used as a synonym for sausage since 1884 and accusations that sausage makers used dog meat to at least 1845.

According to a myth, the use of the complete phrase "hot dog" in reference to sausage was coined by a newspaper cartoonist in 1900, but there were several earlier references, but no specifics on the origination of the phrase.


Substitutions for "European style" butter in croissants

A mix of clarified and ordinary unsalted butter works well.

I used clarified butter that was simmered for a long time to be sure the water was thoroughly removed, just to the point where it stops sputtering, and the solids in the bottom begin to brown.

If the unsalted butter has a fat content of 80% and clarified near 100%, then a 20% clarified to 80% unsalted ratio results in 84% fat.

I let the two warm to room temperature, then beat them thoroughly with an electric mixer to combine.

Immediately after beating I transferred the now very soft butter to parchment paper. Folding the paper over, I squished the butter into a nice slab for laminating, wrapped it tightly with the parchment, and put it in the fridge to chill until the dough is ready.

I'm still experimenting with the flavor of croissants made this way. Obviously this won't reproduce the complex flavors of a cultured butter.

However, the workability of this combination is great: no shattering even when chilled in the freezer, unlike 80% fat unsalted butter alone.


What can I make with vinegar-soaked chilli peppers?

This sounds like it would be an excellent condiment on deli-style sandwiches, serving a similar role to giardiniera.  Just make sure to be careful with portioning, as vinegar/salt/spicy is a combination of flavors that could easily take over if you use too much.


If a recipe calls for Pectin NH can I use other pectin?

No, you can't.

Different pectins set under different conditions. Some require calcium, others require a high percentage of sugar. All have their own optimal pH range.

When a recipe is optimised for one type of pectin, other types won't set properly. Normally, you cannot substitute in any direction.

The linked question from Jolenealaska's comment provides further information.


Are there any dishes that utilize burnt garlic?

I've seen a handful of different recipes that utilize burnt garlic as a main flavor ingredient.

One that seems particularly interesting is "Burnt Garlic-Sesame-Chili Oil", which can be used as a condiment in ramen noodle soups. I haven't tried making it, but I'm pretty sure I have eaten something like this before. It has a spicy and smokey flavor.  I'm not sure if I should paste the whole recipe here, but here is the link:
https://www.seriouseats.com/recipes/2013/09/burnt-garlic-sesame-chili-oil-for-ramen-recipe.html

Enjoy!


What's the best way to defrost ice-cream/sorbet quickly?

Don't.  Ice cream is hard.  It melts slowly.  Instead, focus on scooping.

Get the largest spoon you have, or ideally, an ice cream scoop.  Fill up a cup with boiling water, or as hot as your faucet will get it.  Dip spoon/scoop in the water.  Scoop.  Dip.  Scoop.  Shake off excess water as you go.

Like a hot spoon through ice cream.


Duck, turkey and goose eggs are larger in size. One duck egg could be the equivalent of 2 chicken eggs. I would think you would need to determine the difference by weight, once out of the shell.
The taste would not be discernable, except in an omelet or alone cooked for breakfast. The flavor would then be stronger. Hope that helps.


The extra eggs help to make a more cake like consistency. Other wise it's just a stack of crepes!

To remove the eggy taste, remove half of the egg yolks. They will still cook more or less the same, and will be the same eggyness of a three egg batch


Typically, hearts of palm are canned with citric acid, giving the sour taste you are referring to.  Unfortunately, there isn't an easy way to remove most of the acid they are canned with.
You can try soaking them in a mild brine (water and salt) which can help reduce the concentration of the acid in the heart.  Salt also counteracts perceived acidity in an ingredient - not actually changing the PH of the ingredient but it makes the acidic taste less noticeable.  A light sprinkle of sugar will also help reduce the perceived acidity and can add to the flavor when grilling (think of Brussels sprouts cooked with a bit of brown sugar).


Suggestions for Brie + Bread + Preserves

Contrasting flavors and textures will bring out more excitement on the palate.

The rich buttery flavor of brie works well with crisp acidic fruit like apples,  or pears.  Consider salty items like various cured meats such as various types of ham, salami, sausage.  Smoke-flavored almonds and salty nuts (marcona almonds).

Other preserves:  Fig preserves & mango chutney

Breads:  Dark breads like pumpernickel, yeast breads containing dried fruit & nuts (especially when first toasted and then broiled to soften the brie and toppings of choice).


Margarine vs Butter in cinnamon roll schmear

The claim is probably based on the higher melting point of hydrogenated vegetable oils. While butter melts between 90F and 95F, hydrogenated oils can have melting points up to 120F. This can give an advantage when baking as proteins begin coagulating at around 120F and starches start to gelatinize around 130F. This is easily observed in cookies: cookies made with all butter will spread much more in the oven than cookies made with shortening as the butter has completely melted long before the starches and proteins begin to catch up.

In something like a cinnamon smear using butter, if your oven temperature is lower than expected it can cause the butter to melt out the bottom of the cinnamon rolls, carrying a lot of the sugar and flavorings with it. This leads to empty rolls and a layer of toffee on the bottom of the pan.

To say that one fat is better than another is very subjective though. While hydrogenated fat has an advantage in melting point, butter has much more flavor. You can also counteract the low melting point of butter by adding a starch or protein to the smear to help bind it, or by mixing butter and shortening together for the smear. Since margarine is usually a blend of oils, this also means that your baking results will be dependent on the blend of oils in your specific product.


How do I preserve my mushroom stuffing for freezing?

But, as Catija indicates below its not clear whether you are stuffing mushrooms or whether the stuffing contains mushroom. Based on the other stuff used I am going to go ahead and guess that you are stuffing mushrooms with this, but I am going to make this and if/then answer to cover both cases.

If the stuffing contains mushrooms:

you have to decide whether it's ok for the mushroom to get mushy, then you don't have to do anything special, just make sure it's in a freezer bag and get all the air out. However, If you want your mushroom to stay firm, then don't freeze it, and wait until you get closer to the day you need to use it, then you can refrigerate it for a day or two.

If not:

I think you'll be just fine to freeze it. I might freeze the portions on a cookie sheet first before putting into a bag, it will make thawing swifter and more painless.


How to save Omelette from breaking while keeping the oil quantity low?

You don't necessarily have to increase oil quantity, you have to reduce friction. There are a few variables to consider:

Tools - What type of spatula are you using? If it is a thin spatula, I have found that this increases the likelihood of breakage. I prefer one of two methods;

use a wide rubber spatula or
Use a fish spatula

Method - There are numerous methods of omelet making out there. Some chefs, myself not included, add the egg mixture to the heated, oiled pan and then whisk the product to speed cooking time. While I understand the allure of this method, I don't prefer it. Personally, I use what I call the "lift and drip" method whereby I use the spatula to slide the omelet away from the side of the pan, lift the pan toward that side, and allow the egg mix to drip into the void created. It makes a slightly thicker omelet, which reduces the likelihood of tearing.

There are other variables that may come into play, as well, but I don't want to divert too far from your question. So, that being said, my personal method is:

Heat pan to just over medium heat, approximately 105 C (220 F)
Add lubricant (Personally, I use vegetable oil because it's cheap, but I keep it in a spray bottle for better coverage and less pooling)
Allow the egg mix to sit unfettered for forty seconds, or so
I use the lift and drip method mentioned above until the omelet is about 70% cooked
I add any other ingredients (chilies and onions since the salt should be mixed into the egg already)
Then I finish the omelet under the broiler/salamander until 95% done
Remove from heat, plate by sliding one side out and using the pan + gravity to fold, and serve

Be advised that this is indeed for an American bi-fold omelet, not a French tri-fold.


What type of rum to use when making vanilla extract?

I've been making rum-based vanilla extract successfully at home for years. Here are my recommendations. Your basic ingredients are 80 proof rum, sugar and vanilla beans. At the recommended proportions, the rum and sugar are plenty effective preservatives.

You can use either light or dark rum, but it should be a good "call" 80 proof rum and not a bargain bottom shelf rum. I most often use Ron Rico. If you use a golden rum, your extract will have a warmer taste suitable for spicy treats such as pumpkin pie or spice cookies. If you use a silver rum, your vanilla will have a purer taste suitable for whipped cream or custard sauces. I get rum that is bottled in glass, because I think plastic imparts an off flavor.

Your basic recipe will use a fifth less about a 1/2 cup of rum, four vanilla beans and 1/2 cup of organic sugar. We'll go through that first, and then talk about variations.

Place your vanilla beans on a clean, flat cutting surface. Using a small, sharp knife, cut them first in 1/2 crosswise at the middle. Then take each 1/2 bean and insert the knife tip just 1/2 to an inch below the uncut end and carefully slice lengthwise to the send. Repeat this process gently and carefully on each piece unti each piece  has four lengthwise quarters attached at the uncut end. Some recipes will tell you to scrape some or all of the paste out of the beans, but this is not necessary. The simply split beans will infuse the rum just fine.

Pour out about a cup of rum from your fifth and set aside. Put your sliced vanilla beans into the rum. Use a funnel to add 1/2 cup of organic sugar. Use the reserved rum you set aside to top the bottle back up. Recap the bottle and give it about 20 shakes to encourage the sugar to dissolve. Set aside in a dark cabinet or pantry. Take it out and give it a few shakes every week or so. Your vanilla will be usable but not fully extracted in about two months. It will continue to strengthen in flavor out to about 6 months of age.

Once you are satisfied with your extract, you can decant some and bottle it up in smaller bottles. It's a very popular gift for bakers.

Once you have tried vanilla extract made this way, you will never want to go back to store-bought. The difference is indescribable.

You can vary the type of rum you use, silver or gold, and you can vary the sugar. I mostly stick with light organic sugar, because I think the taste is better. I like the combination of dark rum and brown organic sugar very well. You can also increase the sugar up to about 2/3 cup in a fifth bottle, but I wouldn't go above that. Sugar gives the extract more body and mellows the flavor.

Check out Wikipedia to learn more about the various kinds of vanilla beans available. I use the organic ones from my food coop, but different kinds can be ordered online or found at specialty food stores.

A number of cooking blogs have instructions on making extracts or tinctures of other spices. There is no reason not to create combination flavors.


How long should I let durian ripen in a freezer bag?

It's a matter of taste. Since your durian is already cut, as it continues to ripen (which it will, although much more slowly than uncut fruit) it is also rotting/fermenting (which is desired by many). You don't say where you are from, but durian season is long over in the northern hemisphere. Most durian sold in the US this time of year has been frozen. Previously frozen durian rots more rapidly and ripens less rapidly than fruit that hasn't been frozen, some sources say that previously frozen durian won't ripen at all, only mature (rot).

So the bottom line for you is that you should taste your durian every 12 hours or so and put it in the freezer (or consume it) when it has matured to your liking. The ripening (not rotting) of durian is accelerated by the ethylene it produces. Since sources are not in complete agreement concerning additional ripening of previously frozen durian, keeping the pieces in a bag with ethylene may help. Most of the ethylene is produced by the husk, not the flesh of the fruit. If your fruit still has the husk, it is worthwhile to keep it in a closed bag for that reason. Whether or not the Durian still has the husk, it wouldn't hurt to add an apple to the bag for more ethylene.

If you can, store your durian with an apple in a few separate bags, so that "tasting you go" doesn't release all of the ethylene available to all of the durian.

Some durian lovers go as far as to keep ripe, cut durian on the counter; rotting away (and producing alcohol) for 3-4 weeks. Others prefer durian under-ripe and freshly cut.


How do I make my sourdough crust thinner?

Use less sourdough, and stop adding humidity to the oven?

Both sourdough cultures and increasing oven humidity are ways bakers use to increase the crust thickness and crunch.  If you want thin-crusted, soft bread, then you're doing all the wrong things.


How do I achieve a crust like this fried chicken?

I do not know about the chicken in the photo, it appears certainly crunchy, but not very appealing to me...
anyway, the first dredging you do in buttermilk is useless: normally you have three phases for perfectly breading food for frying:

dredging in flour (wheat flour, starch or anything else, even a mixture of flour and powdered spices that also make the meat tastier) is important because it "dries" the chicken surface and consent a better coating of the liquid;
dip in a sticky liquid to coat:  the support for the crunchy finish. can be buttermilk, beaten eggs, milk... the denser the liquid the thicker the coating
the "breading", that can be made of flour, breadcrumbs, sesame seeds, natural rolled oat, crushed cornflakes...

For juicier meat is better to marinate or brine it the night before
for crispiness the frying temperature must be controlled and well kept at around 165°C


How do I hand-roll homemade pasta made with egg?

Pasta dough has to be sufficiently moist to be rolled properly.

Rolling the pasta (in a pasta machine) aligns the gluten strands so they stretch out and become parallel to each other. If the dough is too dry, it is more difficult to align them. This is why it's a good idea to coat unused dough in a thin coating of oil and cling wrap if you're not immediately working with it (a damp tea towel over the bowl will work as well).


Can I replace brown sugar with white sugar without using molasses in cookies?

Many recipes require both brown and white sugar. It is possible to substitute the brown sugar for the white sugar 1:1 but several things will change in your final result.

Taste - Brown sugar is essentially white sugar with molasses. The molasses adds a malty thick complex sweetness. With just white sugar your cookie will have a less complex flavor.

Note: To combat #1, you can add a little bit of: honey, dark corn syrup, maple syrup, brown rice syrup or barley malt syrup to make up for the flavor loss.

Texture - The white sugar will melt at a lower temperature meaning it will not be able to hold the shape of the cookie before the gluten sets. The sugar will melt and cause the dough to spread out. When using brown sugar, the dough will be able to set before the brown sugar melts. So when baking cookies, using all white sugar will result in a flat/thin crunchy cookie while using more brown sugar will result in a thicker, softer cookie.

Note: To mitigate #2 you can chill your dough before you bake the cookies to help prevent your dough from spreading too thin during the baking process.

If however you do have molasses, you can easily create your own brown sugar by mixing 1 cup white sugar with 1 tbsp molasses.


Bananas are imported unripe and then ripened in the country of sale. This ripening is achieved by forcing ethylene gas through the bananas in special pressurised rooms.

Bananas naturally produce ethylene as they ripen, so you could just put them in a sealable plastic bag to contain that gas. Tomatoes also produce ethylene, so you could pop a couple of those in as well, but be aware that they'll also ripen faster too.


How to cook rice & chicken simultaneously?

There are many dishes where chicken and rice are cooked mixed together in the same pot. Look at Arroz con Pollo for example, it's an easy classic and there are loads of recipes. There's also some types of Biryani, Jambalaya, and other traditional recipes from across the world that would work.

Chicken pieces and rice cook in about the same time as you say, if you want to get vegetables in there it's a bit more complicated as you want the vegetables to be cooked, but not overcooked. I've generally made them separately to put put as a side as it's more attractive, however large carrot chunks cook about the same time, and you can put in pureed vegetables or even vegetable juice. One my mother makes uses crushed tomatoes instead of water to cook the rice in.

As for having the chicken mixed in or on top there's no right answer, I like to brown the chicken and lay it skin side up on top of the rice as the rice will cook up around the chicken and the visual effect is good when the pot is put on the table. Visuals aside there's little difference in the method.


What is the difference between custard pie and custard tart?

Pies originally were specifically to denote enclosed items (the crust sealed the item that was to be eaten).  In many cases, the crust wasn't actually eaten -- it was a nasty charred thing that was discarded.

In time, pie crusts improved to the point at which you'd eat the whole thing ... but the star was the filling, not the crust.

Tarts, on the other hand, are closer to a shortbread cookie with some sort of a topping.  The crust is typically a critical part of the item, rather than just being a container for something else.  (which in part is why people mention tarts being more shallow; there's a higher proportion of crust to filling).

So, my best attempt at determining if I should call something a pie or a tart.  Note that these are in order.  (as I'm trying to make sure that 'pizza' is a pie, not a tat)

fully enclosed by crust : pie
full bottom crust, with a crumb or lattice top : pie
no crust at all : not a tart, but not a pie, either.
has no sugar or fat in the crust : pie
chewy, flaky or crumb crust : pie
not structurally sound enough to be picked up and eaten one-handed : pie
was cooked in a tart pan : tart
baked without a pan : galette
over 2" / 5cm tall (not counting whipped cream or berries) : pie
less than 6" / 15cm across : tart
shortbread crust : tart

... I have no idea what I'd categorize thing that didn't match something already.


Is it safe to use plastic wrap in boiling water?

Agree with ceejayoz that melting isn't the issue.  Melting is just the upper bound for problems.  The common concern is about leaching, the diffusion of chemical toxins from the plastic into the food.  It's known to be accelerated through fats and at heat, hence the concern.  There seems to be consensus that "some" leaching occurs; the issue is that it's unclear how much, from which plastics, whether the body absorbs or excretes it, and if it matters.

Alarmists will tell you that the chemical run-off is toxic and causes everything from cancer to birth-defects.

Governments have looked into the issue but not come out with a hard no.  Industry groups are fighting the issue, but losing public opinion on things like waterbottles (see nalgene, which removed Bisphenol A (BP-A)from their formula).

Chefs generally care more about results than fringe chances of non-lethal toxicity and they have been using plastic wrap for as long as it's been around.

What should you do?  It depends.  Weigh fear with convenience.  Use good quality products if you do use it.  Don't do it too often. Or just enjoy it.


I take it you're a fellow NY'er :)

The classic Phrostie consists of just 4 ingredients: Kool-aid mix, sugar, water and Everclear. First, mix the Kool-aid, sugar and water until everything is dissolved. You want to use about 1/2 to 1/3 the amount of water that you would normally use and the rest (1/2 or 2/3) would be Everclear.

Here's my Phrostie interpretation (uses 1/2 everclear and 1/2 water):

3 (6g) packages Kool-Aid, your favourite flavour
1 3/4 cups sugar
8 cups cold water
8 cups Everclear

This should make a little more than a gallon total. Portion it out in capped bottles, then put them in the freezer for a few hours.

I've also poked around with a "fancy" Phrostie:

3 cups Marino's Italian Ices
8 oz Brugal Anejo
5 oz Brugal Especial Extra Dry Silver
1 can frozen pineapple juice concentrate
1 can frozen orange juice concentrate
8 oz grenadine syrup


Focaccia dough stretched and rolled thin, painted with olive oil, sprinkled with fresh herbs and coarse salt then lanced about with a fork is a wonderful pizza with no need for any sauce or other toppings as a snack of side dish.  From there as a starting point you can start adding toppings, cheeses, even sauces to ones hearts content.  Herbs could be dried rather than fresh, but fresh basil or oregano are a good starting point.  I love a good sauce, but in no way is any sauce needed for a pizza.  If you want a sauce however, most anything that pairs with your toppings will work and there is no reason to skimp on creativity.  BBQ with chicken or shredded pork.  An Alfredo with shrimp or chicken.  A yogurt with fresh fruits for dessert.  There really are no rules.  Pizza is in my opinion defined by location and taste, not by some specific definition and is fully open to interpretation.  With a good base if needs no sauce.  With a lesser base, yes I want a sauce, but not to be limited to what some shop defined as appropriate.


Combining dishes that need oven temps of 450, 425, 400, and 350

If you're going to cook all three at the same time, something is going to be hotter than it should be or colder than it should be. If you're not making a soufflé, or something very small like cookies, you have a little flexibility and variation in temperatures.

if something is in a hotter oven than called for, it will cook more quickly and perhaps brown more than you wanted as well,
if something is in a cooler oven than called for, it will cook more slowly and perhaps brown less than you wanted as well.

You can adjust for the speed issues by having it in the oven for a longer or shorter time than called for. You can fix the browning by covering it with foil, or giving it some time under the broiler at the end - the latter being more reliable than the former.

I don't know about your potatoes but I'll assume they need to brown. Here is how I would run it, for a 6pm dinner:

4:00 preheat the oven to 450
4:10 put the lamb in
4:30 turn the oven down to 400
5:00 put the potatoes in. They're going to get 15 minutes extra time to make up for the cooler temps
5:30 take the lamb out for a 30 minute rest (sure, your recipe probably says 15, but the extra time won't hurt.) Turn the oven down to 350 and put the beans in.
this final half hour is when you make the gravy and whatever other side dishes are involved, set the table, etc
5:55 check the beans. You can probably take them out and let them sit for 5 minutes. Check the potatoes. If you want them browned, now's a good time to put the broiler on above them.
6 pm serve

By the way, I wrote this timeline from the bottom up and you can do the same next time you're trying to work out timings.


Uses for meat that has been in the freezer for 2 years?

It's perfectly safe, even if not a perfect texture, so I'd cook it and eat it. The only question is how.

I suggest that you first mince or finely chop it (even in a food processor) then brown it and cook it in a sauce. Chilli would work well, or curry, or pasta sauce (perhaps in a lasagne). If just cut up small, risotto is another option. These are just examples of what I would do. I've done this quite a lot with meat that I've cooked and frozen, less often with raw meat but still successfully. If you're worried about the texture, you may want to spare your nerves by not planning to serve it to guests, but it will be fine.


What are the easy ways to skim off the scum and fat from soup & stocks?

Here are some options:

Chill and scoop off solidified fat.
Use a fat separator cup.
Use a ladle to skim.


How to wash pesticides from fruit skins?

A long term answer would be to grow your own if possible. That way you have complete control over your food. Or at least purchase from a local farmer that is willing to let you see how he/she grows their produce.

Even organics need to be washed. Most all commercial organics use a form of pest control (most likely diatomaceous earth), they also use natural fertilizers like manure and compost. None of those things are items you need to directly ingest.

The best advice I have is to wash then soak fruits and vegetables in lukewarm water. After a soak wash again. For foods with pitted surfaces, strawberries, potatoes, etc, use a soft bristled brush to gently scrub the food. That will get most anything off the outside.

Of course there will be trace amounts of anything that was sprayed on the item inside of the item.

Hope this helps.


What everyday ingredient will emulsify rapeseed oil?

I think you will have much better luck if you just wait to get an appropriate almond extract. Aside from the difficulty of mixing an oil based flavoring, you'll run into texture issues if you do get it mixed. Generally an emulsion will be thicker than the component liquids. Further, the flavor probably won't be what you want. If you're creating a water or alcohol based solution, an alcohol based extract will flavor it better. Oil based extracts are generally better for things with a higher fat content for the flavor to disperse into, ie: even if you get the oil emulsified, you won't have an almond flavored liquid, you'll basically have almond flavored droplets suspended in another liquid.

If you really want to go ahead, I'd recommend lecithin and/or a hydrocolloid like guar gum. Both will result in the end product being more viscous though.


Why is tin loaf bread not usually scored like other forms of bread?

If you look at your videos again, you will notice that the loaves did rise a lot during the second rise in the tin. They were fully proofed and therefore the oven spring (the expansion in the oven) is minimal. Plus, they are both baking at relatively low temperatures.

Bread can be baked at different stages of proofing, you may have heard of the poke test - essentially indenting your loaf and see how it springs back - to determine when a loaf is fully proofed. Catching a full proof is a tricky thing because on the other side of “full” lies “over-proved”, which for free-form loaves means essentially a collapsed bread instead of oven spring. So for many free form loaves, bakers will bake at a “well-risen, but not yet fully proofed” stage and slash to allow for the greater expansion of these loaves. Slashing a fully or even slightly overproofed loaf is a bad idea, it will likely collapse the bread. Steaming also helps to keep the crust pliable for a bit longer.

A bread in a tin can also be scored, but you can go for a full proof with less risk: If you overproofed slightly, the tin will still hold the bread together where a free-form loaf flows outward. If you look at your videos, you will notice that the bread rises a lot before going into the oven and only a bit during baking.

The type of bread is also a factor. Your videos show a classic white sandwich loaf. This kind of bread has a rather fine crumb structure with lots of small holes, achieved by kneading after the second rise. This type expands very evenly, which means less uncontrolled bursting. And finally, both bakers use rather low temperatures (180-200 C is low in bread baking terms), which means the top crust won’t set as quickly as at hotter temperatures and the oven spring is also a bit slower and more regular.


How to pasteurize lacto-fermented hot sauce?

According to the US FDA, normal pastuerization for fruit juice would be 160F for 6 seconds.  This should be easily accomplished in a hot water bath; just heat up the water to 160f, and dip the bottles.

However, a fermented sauce made with chopped peppers has poor circulation compared to fruit juice, and you are heating bottles rather than passing the liquid through a narrow, heated pipe. So more time would be required for the heat to penetrate, possibly as much as 5 minutes.  I can't find specific guidance for something like a chopped pepper sauce.

This would pastuerize the hot sauce, but not make it shelf-stable.

The criteria to bottle it, as mentioned in the comments, is how acidic the sauce is after fermentation, so you should add some form of Ph tester to your list of equipment.  If the acidity is 4.6 or below, then a slightly hotter hot water bath (say, 180F) for a few minutes you could not only pastuerize it, but make it shelf-stable.


Why is my meat still tough after hours of cooking?

When you're cooking something like a steak, or a prime rib roast and aim for a cooking temperature of say 135ish, you want it to be medium rare. The goal isn't to break anything down. Collagen starts to break down slowly above 160F, and will melt much more rapidly closer to 180F.

Further more, iff you have any cut of meat that requires breakdown of collagen, measuring the temperature is an insufficient indicator of done-ness.

  . Collagen breakdown is a function of temperature and time. The lower the temperature, the longer it takes to break down, but it will still eventually break down. This is what makes tenderizing a brisket in a 155°F water bath possible, given enough time.
  Taken from this article on Serious Eats: The Food Lab

Taking a look at a random sampling of short rib recipes (I'm assuming that's what you have), at 300-350F, cooking times are in the 3-4 hour mark. At 200-250F, I'd expect much longer.


Stainless nonstick, not vs, but both? What's the point?

Many stainless steels are ferric, so will work with induction cooktops. Aluminum cannot interact with magnetism, so cannot work on induction, so many companies offer stainless steel non-stick pans for the induction market.

You won't see much difference in performance, and since it's not what you want in the first place I'd send it back unused.


Substitute for a Standing Mixer using a paddle

A paddle mixes denser ingredients vs a wisk attachment that will aerate light ingredients. Things mixed with a paddle are always intended to be completely mixed- as opposed to folding or cutting which aren't done with a mixer.

This means that you can use whatever you want to thoroughly mix those ingredients (as long as it doesn't melt them): a stand mixer, a hand mixer, a spoon, etc.

Most hand held mixers have much smaller motors than most stand mixers. They can't handle stiff doughs and you can destroy your mixer, stripping the gears or burning out the motor, if you attempt to overdrive it. Better quality hand mixers can handle almost anything a stand mixer can.

That said- any hand mixer should be able to handle cream cheese and mayo with no problem.

TL;DR

Go ahead. Your hand mixer should be able to handle those ingredients just fine without spoiling the recipe or damaging your mixer.


Should meat be seasoned before or after cooking?

There are different 'camps' when it comes to seasoning but essentially If you season meat too early before cooking, the salt will draw out the moisture, meaning a less juicy piece of meat, however if you season just before cooking the seasoning will help to impart flavour into the meat. If you seal the meat and then season it, the sealed meat will not release any juice. Hence the two theories.


Why meat gets tough after soaking it in vinegar solution for more than 24 hours?

Vinegar is acidic thanks to its concentration of acetic acid. It thus has a low pH, somewhere between 2.5 and 5 depending on the type of vinegar. Acidic substances can affect the delicate amino acids which form the proteins that make up the majority of your meat (along with other fats and connective tissues).

The end result is not entirely unlike what happens when you apply heat. The proteins in the food change shape and coagulate, whether you're applying heat or acid, and that results in "cooked" meat. It's the principle behind many cures or preparations like ceviche that use chemical action to alter a food from its raw state. The end result often has less moisture; thus it appears firmer and can be perceived as tougher.

The other thing happening is that a strong marinade is much more concentrated than the water inside the cells of the food being marinated, and thus will tend to extract some water through osmosis. Again, you wind up with drier, tougher meat. Most marinades compensate for this to some degree because they contain salt, but 24 hours is a pretty long time for a strong marinade containing vinegar, so that may just be overdoing it.


Put in your food slowly, as you already discovered. If they are largish pieces, e.g. whole potatoes, you just need the patience for it. If you have a bowl of something small like beans, use a ladle to take scoops out of the bowl and lower it into the water.
In addition to 1, use a larger pot with higher sides, but don't fill it. A little bit of splash will happen, but it will not reach you or spill over your stove.

Also, I don't know what you mean by "boil something", but I suspect you may be blanching vegetables. If this is the case, I find it best to use a large sieve analogously to a fryer basket (boil in the sieve), else you can never get the whole amount in and out quickly enough to not undercook some pieces and overcook others.

For something almost "flowing" like rice or couscous, you can also find something spouted to measure them in, and slowly spread the food over the water from a low height. Basically, you really need the "slow" part, you cannot just throw everything and not get splashed.


How much liquid jaggery equals 1 cup jaggery powder?

Liquid Jaggery is not a terribly common ingredient, and I couldn't find any conversions for it ... but I could for a close relative, cane syrup to granulated sugar.  This recipe claims that cane syrup is equivalent to a 2:1 mixture of granulated sugar to water by volume.

So, reversing that, and using this question to find that sugar dissolved in water retains about 60% of its volume (and vice versa), 1 1/4 to 1 1/3 cup of liquid jaggery should be about equivalent to 1 cup of crystals.  Also, you should reduce the other liquid in the recipe by 1/2 cup.


Peel the rhubarb before cooking - you can strip off the outer skin from the stalks quite easily.  That helps.

EDIT: My wife told me to explain why.

In Yorkshire, the rhubarb capital of the world, you can buy "forced rhubarb", which has a tender pink skin because it is forced to grow up through dark tubes towards the light. Because "garden Rhubarb" is not forced, the "gritty teeth sensation" components accumulate in the skin, and an authority on the subject (my mother) told me many (>50) years ago that it was a good idea to peel it. She also taught me that it was a good way to divert children - show them how to pick a tender stem and dip it in sugar, then eat it raw -and that the sugar sticks to the stem easier if you peel the skin off first.

My grandmother had a lot of mysterious ways with rhubarb, including using it in ginger beer instead of the usual lemon. These are lost in time, but she always peeled it, whatever it was being used for, to avoid that sensation.


Cover them with hot oil, or pork or duck fat, then in the oven with the belly... you will have awesome confit potato. Add herbs or spices to the oil if you like...You could cut them or do them whole. Creamy and delicious.


Fried Chicken Thigh skin always ending up soggy? Why?

Tried making another batch today and here's what happened:

First Test: I used potato starch (was finally able to get hold of the starch), and used that instead of sweet potato starch, true enough the result was perfectly crisp and crunchy similar to that of potato chips!

Second Test: Used the same old starch (sweet potato starch) and skin turned out soggy like before.

Third Test: Mixed potato starch and sweet potato starch, it improved the crunch but still skin is soggy due to sweet potato starch.

Conclusion: The starch and not the marinade is causing the chicken skin to become soggy.


What would happen if I add wine to yeast bread?

The wine will bring several things to the breadmaking party:

Acidity
Alcohol
Water
Flavoring
Color (especially if it is red wine)

The biggest of these is the alcohol which is a yeast byproduct--they don't like it in their environment, and it inhibits their growth.    The acidity can do the same.  Proofing will be retarded, and you may need a larger starting quantity of yeast than for a wineless loaf.

You would also have to adjust the amount of liquid in the formula to account for that from the wine.  Your bread would probably take on a strange mauve color, after being baked, and may have some hint of winey flavor.

I think the lack of well known wine-loaves in the world's baking traditions indicates this does not generally work out very well, although there are some recipes for yeast raise breads containing wine such as Sourdough Cranberry Wine Bread from The Fresh Loaf.


That chicken has been "velveted". The technique is to briefly marinate the chicken chunks in a mixture of egg whites and cornstarch. The result is delicious, very soft chicken. It's a simple technique, great for stir-fried dishes and soups. There are several variations, so here are a bunch of them.

The simplest is to mix 1 Tablespoon of cornstarch into 1 egg white. Marinate thin slices of chicken (breast meat is most commonly used) in the mixture for 30 minutes. Drain the chicken by just letting the marinade slip through your fingers. Now just treat the chicken however you care to cook it; stir-fried, deep-fried or poached are all commonly seen. For something so simple, the result is really quite dramatic.


How to control temperature of a charcoal bbq

The temperature of a charcoal cooker is controlled by how much oxygen you allow to get to the fuel. I don't know what kind of grill you have, but typically there are one or more vents at the bottom, and one or more at the top. The bottom vents regulate oxygen supply to the fuel, while the top vents regulate air flow.

If you close down all the vents, the coals will eventually extinguish. If they are still holding enough heat, opening them back up will cause them to reignite. To regulate your temperature, open/close your supply vents (bottom ones) to varying degrees.

Also, consider setting up a zone on your grill surface where there is no charcoal underneath, to where you can move any food in danger of being overcooked.


Rarely. Acetates are usually used when you need a thin, flexible backing for whatever you're making. Silpats aren't nearly as flexible, and don't have a uniformly smooth surface; you will impart a texture to whatever you're making. And you can't really cut them into whatever shape you want. Parchment paper doesn't have the strength of acetate; you can't make rings out of it. Plus it will absorb some liquid, lowering its strength further.


How Can I Spread Crepe Batter Before It Cooks?

Your batter is too thick.  You say it's refrigerated, but if that's the case it's likely thicker than if it was at room temperature.  Also, as it sits it gets thicker, and if you're making a solid batch, for a few people, you need to keep thinning it as you go. Take the liquid you were using to begin with (milk), and add very small quantities at a time, on the order of tablespoons, stirring and evaluating the texture after each one. If you go too far, you'd have to add flour again and get into an overly involved cycle of correction.

Crepe batter thickening is a common problem in crepe establishments in the US. The crepes early in the day are fine but they get thicker and thicker as the day progresses because nobody thinks to thin the batter.


You can actually steam a lot of cakes. The basic idea is seal the cake pan tightly with foil (or even plastic wrap if your can handle the temperature) and then place it in your steamer insert/basket. I find it takes about 40 min for it to cook all the way through. Makes for a super moist and fluffy cake.
Here’s a random example I found online.
Paper in reference to streaming gluten free cakes (which is where I first got the idea)


You can soak them in hot water for 8-10 hours. And then pressure cook it(add salt and pinch of turmeric) for 4-5 whistles or until tender. If you don't have pressure cooker, you can cook in open vessel. It might take longer.


Slow cooker

If you have a slow cooker as Catija suggested, you can totally do exactly what you want. Search for slow cooker rice pilaf if you need a starting point. I know you don't want new appliances, but slow cookers are a bit more general purpose, so maybe you have one or would be okay buying one, and future readers certainly might.

Oven

I'm also pretty sure the oven will work, but it might require a little experimentation to get the timing right. There are again a lot of recipes for rice pilaf in the oven, but they normally start with boiling water then take perhaps 45-60 minutes for white rice or 60-75 minutes for brown rice, at 350-375F, so they'd be very overdone after three hours. But if you reduce the temperature, you can extend the cooking time and make it more tolerant of cooking past done. A slow cooker isn't really very different from a tightly covered dish in an oven at a low temperature.

So, if I had to hazard a guess, I'd take a normal oven rice recipe (with the water boiling before starting), and reduce the temperature to 250F, then see how long it takes to be done and whether it's okay after three hours. It'd really be best to do a trial run sometime when you can actually check on it, though.

If that doesn't extend the time enough, you can probably stretch it even more by starting from non-boiling water, but I unfortunately don't have a good sense of what combination of water and oven temperature would accomplish a three-hour cooking time.

Reheating

If you don't want to experiment, your fallback of reheating can work too. The key in my experience is to add a bit of water then cover when reheating, so that it steams and moistens again, rather than getting dry and hard.

For one to two servings I just drizzle a little water in, maybe a couple teaspoons, before popping in the microwave. For a larger quantity like your situation, probably a bit more than that - the idea is that it mostly but not entirely boils away by the time it's all reheated, so that the rice isn't wet, but has been surrounded by steam the whole time. You can always check on it in the middle and see if it's nice and steamy, and add a bit more if it's starting to seem dry.


Dos wine can go bad? It can't have mold (because alcohol), it's shouldn't have any EXTRA bacteria (because of alcohol).
In fact - the bacteria that turn vine into vinegar is acetobacter. So spotting that one in the brew is pretty easy. You start to have acid.

Wine (depending on type of course) is pretty safe to store for a long time. That's the added value to it. You store wine  for 200 years and cash a fat check afterwards.
The "best before after opening and store in fridge" date is usually there for two reasons:

The cork is not real one. And the alcohol will start to reacts with it.
The wine was made in such manner that the yeast didn't die (so not enough alcohol content and with that extra air after opening they will start to digest carbs again).

What can change the taste of wine is storage type. Like in the answer you provided. Bad storage will lead to bad wine. Or not bad WINE but some bad liquid.


What's the difference when smoking in a spherical grill and in a smoker?

No, it won't be different. It is, however, a bit harder.

The issues are mainly:

It's harder to get the heat away from the food. So you end up cooking with some direct heat. This can be avoided by using a small amount of well soaked, large wood chunks and get them smoking with some normal charcoal. You should also use indirect heat by stacking the chunks on one side of the grill. If you use wood chips, this won't work. They burn too fast and need too much of an ignition source.
Heat insulation isn't very good. The walls are thin and you have to remove the whole lid to tend your food. The heat dissipation can be a real issue for long low and slow recipes. Smokers either tend to be well insulated (brick or ceramic) or have small doors so you can access your food from the side.
Adding fuel can be a pain. It's made easier if you have a grill surface that is hinged. If you don't, I'd suggest getting one if you are seriously considering smoking. It makes adding fuel much easier. Of course, adding fuel causes the above heat dissipation issues, so add fuel as infrequently as possible.

That said, I smoked for years on a Webber grill, and it worked just fine. I did, however, upgrade to a Big Green Egg at the first available opportunity. The results are more consistent and the process is much easier. But you'll be fine getting started with the webber.


The method to make them is patented, and involves highly pressurized C02. Doubtful, you'd be able to find a replacement product. Online store maybe? shrug

However, you could try making a cheap home-made subsitute. Don't think it'd be an exact duplicate, might suffice for your purposes?


Here is Kenji Alt's in-depth recreation of the double-double animal-style burger.  The core of his technique is:

  The process is simple: Sear the patty on one side, and squirt some
  mustard on it as it sizzles. Flip the patty over so that the mustard
  cooks into the second side.

  The patties are covered with the cheese, then the caramelized onions
  are applied liberally to a single patty before topping it with the
  second, fusing all the elements together into a single cheesy, beefy, sweet, oniony, gooey, salty, oozy, crispy, meaty, savory, melty, delicious mess.

He uses basic yellow mustard, btw.

In response to the question from comments about how long to cook, here is what the recipe says:

  Add burger patties and cook without moving until well browned and
  crusty on first side, about 2 1/2 minutes. While they are cooking,
  spread 1 tablespoon mustard on raw side of each patty with a spoon.
  Meanwhile, top each bottom bun with up half of spread, 4 slices
  pickles, 1 slice tomato, and lettuce. Flip patties with a thin spatula
  so mustard side is down and continue to cook for 1 minute


Is it normal that cooking time of my pizza is 1 hour in oven with 230 degrees?

One hour sounds like a long time for a 1.5 to 2 cm thick pizza at that temperature, regardless of the style of pizza.  I would begin by locating an oven thermometer to check the temperature of your oven.


How important are olives in Ropa Vieja? Can I substitute/omit them?

I've seen recipes that stir in the olives at the end of the cooking time.  You can leave them out with no ill-effects. Olive and capers are not that easy to substitute for.   Maybe a dash of vinegar would add the acidity that the dish needs.


How common is it for people to not have the concept of certain ‘breakfast food’?

In Japan the word for rice is gohan, breakfast is asa gohan, meaning "morning rice". Dinner is ban gohan. You get the idea - rice is the traditional part of every meal.

Traditional Japanese breakfast food would be rice, fish, miso soup, vegetables, pickles. Which is a lot like a traditional lunch. More recently western breakfasts foods have been taken up some, so the concept of separate breakfast food is more of a thing.


Three factors influence how well cheese melts:

The amount of moisture,
The amount of fat,
How it was set.

The meltiest cheeses have a lot of moisture and fat and were set with rennet and not acid.
Both moisture and fat leave space between the casein proteins that allows them to move. Otherwise they are packed together and don't flow as well.

Aged cheeses have lost more of their moisture to evaporation. This means that they have to been heated to a much higher temperature before they will melt.

To quote Harold Mcgee:
"Melting behavior is largely determined by water content. Low-moisture hard cheeses require more heat to melt because their protein molecules are more concentrated and so more intimately bonded to each other." (On food and Cooking, 64).

Aged cheeses with a high fat content will often leak some fat when they finally do melt- making an oily mess. J. Kenji Lopez-Alt had some good suggestions for dealing with this problem.

Acid set cheeses, such as Indian paneer and latin Queso Blanco, don't melt much when heated dry because the acid denatures the casein in such a way as to cause it to bind more tightly.(although they will dissolve into hot liquids sometimes.)


You can buy really large filters for this purpose.  It's how some restaurants filter their fry oil on the cheap.  We had two conical strainers and put the huge coffee-like filter between the two so it wouldn't slip down as much, also so we could skim out the large bits easier.  If you have a laddle you can sorta force it through faster by agitating in a plunger like motion but be careful the oil isn't too hot because it will splash at you.

Places that do alot of frying have a machine that will filter the oil while still really hot and pump it back into the fryer.

For home use I use coffee filters, the biggest I can find, and have a plastic 4 litre storage tub for holding the oil.  It takes awhile for it to pass but it keeps it cleaner than a cheese cloth I find.

The more particals you filter out the longer the oil will last before you have to toss it in your diesel truck ;-).


My cake batter always comes out sticky. Is this normal?

Again assuming you're using the same recipe...

I don't think you need to leap to different kinds of flours as in mrwienerdog's answer. You could be using the same type (probably all-purpose) and even the same brand, but purchased and stored somewhere else; it'll end up with a different moisture content, and perhaps fluffed differently, so your volume measurements might not actually end up getting you the same amount of flour.

If you're trying to follow her recipe exactly, there's really no harm in simply reducing the flour a bit to get the texture you remember.


Would baking a cake for 2 hours at 350 degrees F be safe to eat if it's still moist?

Unless you are very young, very old, or immunocompromised in some way (chemotherapy, leukemia, HIV, etc), slightly undercooked eggs are fine.


Instant pudding contains a significant amount of cornstarch. It also contains less significant amounts of disodium phosphate and tetrasodium phosphate. All three of these ingredients will have an effect on cake.

Starch absorbs water and gels during baking. This interferes with gluten formation to some degree. If you break down the starch in flour, which is, in part, how you make cake flour, the starches are more able to do this job. Cornstarch is nearly all starch. Adding it to your cake will make your flour behave more like cake flour, while increasing your cake's hydration.

The phosphates also affect your cake, but to a lesser degree. Depending on the other ingredients in your cake, they will act as a leavening agent that will help to prevent the addition of all that pudding from making your cake too heavy.

Many bakers rely on a secret trick that you might try instead of pudding. They replace two tablespoons of flour in any cake recipe with cornstarch. I do this not only in cakes, but in pie dough.


What to place beneath the vegetables before placing them on the baking tray?

I usually put tinfoil down and then lightly oil it. If done carefully, the tray stays clean and doesn't need to be washed and the foil can be thrown out (or used for a second batch of veggies if you have one).


Are Damascus steel kitchen knives worth it?

At the time of my engineering degree (mid-1990s), the knowledge for true Damascus steel was lost, much like the knowledge of the recipes for the concrete used in the Roman Colosseum.

It's possible that more materials analysis has been performed since that point, as there have been a number of groups who would like to reproduce the process to determine how it compares to modern steel.  (museums aren't willing to subject the known pieces to destructive testing).

With modern steel, they intentionally introduce small proportions of other metals to interrupt the crystals that form as the metal is cooled; this helps to improve the strength of the steel as there isn't a single sheer plane that could allow fractures through the whole item.  They're also better able to control the cooling process, so that they can control what crystal structure forms in the steel as it's annealed and quenched.

My understanding of true Damascus steel is that it's likely two different crystaline structures, one more ductile (so it can compress to absorb more energy without failing) and the other more brittle (which can hold a sharper edge).  The two work together similar to today's composite materials.

Most of the stuff sold on the market today is laminated from two or more metals.  In many ways, it's more similar to the folding process of high-quality Japanese blades, but with dissimilar metals.  As the sheets are mostly parallel to each other, I would suspect that the strength improvement isn't as high as the more erratic patterns in true Damascus, but this is likely countered by using metals that are independently stronger.

So, to answer the specific questions:

Do they have some better characteristics?  Probably.
Are they worth the additional cost?  Not likely for the type of forces they'd be subjected to in a kitchen.

Most people are better off getting some decent but cheap knives and replacing them more often.  Victorinox Fibrox regularly wins America's Test Kitchen's ratings of knives.


Heston Blumenthal has brought his unique scientific approach to bear on this recently. The main pointers for a perfect poached egg are as follows:

The egg must be fresh. A fresh egg has a thicker, more gel-like albumen. As it gets older, this becomes watery, and so just disperses throughout the water when you add it. To test if your egg is fresh, place it in a jug of cold water. If it floats, it's not fresh - the egg has had time to absorb air through its shell. A fresh egg sinks and stays sunk.
The water temperature should be 80ºC/176ºF exactly. You can measure this with a sugar or probe thermometer. The egg should be at room temperature.
The egg should not come into contact with direct heat, so put a plate or small bowl on the bottom of the pan, bottom up.

Once the water (in a medium to large saucepan) is up to temperature, carefully add the fresh egg and cook for 4 minutes exactly (for a large egg of the domestic chicken, Gallus gallus domesticus). Drain and serve - the white should be set but not rubbery (a drawback of using vinegar) and the yolk should be creamy and rich.


How do I prepare tofu so comes out like at Noodles & co

To make your tofu more firm, you can press it.  Before cubing it, place the block of tofu on a plate, put another plate on top of it and weight it down with something (like a can of tomatoes) and leave it for 15 minutes.  This will compress it further and squish out extra water.


How to achieve a flexible consistency on ice cream? (photos attached)

Ice cream is smooth because churning breaks up ice crystals, and sugar, fat and egg yolks prevent the ice crystals from re-forming. Pure ice cream can be relatively elastic when frozen just by having lots of sugar, fat, and egg yolks in it. However, you cannot achieve this sort of elasticity in ice cream when it's above freezing without stabilizers like Xanthan Gum and Guar Gum. These are more effective emulsifiers/stabilizers than eggs and work at a higher temperature than eggs do.

Many stabilizers are natural products, Xanthan gum is the product of bacterial formation and Guar gum is processed bean paste, so I personally have no problem with them and use them in my ice cream sometimes to improve the texture. Mostly I just use more egg yolks - my ice cream rarely last long enough to melt anyway.

I think in this case the creaminess you describe is more of a mouth feel thing rather than a flavor, if you want to replicate it I'd suggest getting more eggs in your recipe and consider adding some guar gum.


Try oven cleaner spray, let it sit for 30min. Wipe off and clean with water. A razor blade scrape might also be tried if its charcoal burnt in.


Can I use "spent" lemons (juiced) to preserve?

Here is a recipe that i tried a while back. I wasnt too impressed with the spicy one. But overall good method and clear explanation. And sure get your extra zest in there too!

http://awesomepickle.com/make-pickled-lemons-two-ways/


Can dried peppers get hotter with aging?

You could be just that lucky to get hotter peppers recently. Chilli peppers are known to have variable hotness, even when harvested from a single plant. Most of peppers on a plant may be mild, but a few very hot.

Also, you can remember them being milder than they are if you were used to eating them more then.


Usually, cream will help cut the heat from peppers, including crushed red peppers.  Not sure if your soup would work with dairy.  Yogurt or milk would work, sour cream too.  Cheese does not seem to help.


You don't have to go crazy, you just need to get all the grease and accumulated gunk off of it to make it safe to use. Bleach won't help you get it clean, it will only sterilize, and then only if the water itself is clean - there's no point putting chlorine in dirty water. If you want something to help you get it clean a heavy duty kitchen cleaner or something like simple green is what you are looking for, although lots of liquid dish soap and a scourer will probably do just fine. If you get it good and clean you won't need to use chlorine or bake it because you'll have removed anything potentially harmful, but if once you clean it you still want extra assurance then wiping it down with a chlorine solution or baking it as you suggest will work - both is overkill.


This is not safe. Lids "pop" from any temperature change. You could "can" anything this way but that would not make it safe. What you did/want to do is called "open kettle canning" and is not a safe canning method.

  Why is open kettle canning not recommended?
  In open kettle canning, food is cooked in an ordinary kettle, then packed into hot jars and sealed without processing. The temperatures obtained in open kettle canning are not high enough to destroy all spoilage and food poisoning organisms that may be in the food. Also, microorganisms can enter the food when it is transferred from the kettle to jar and cause spoilage.

Also, when canning properly (including a waterbath step of 10 minutes or more) sterilizing jars is an unnecessary step in the process as the processing step essentially sterilizes them along with everything inside them. (see below, same source as above)

  Is it necessary to sterilize jars before canning?
  Jars do not need to be sterilized before canning if they will be filled with food and processed in a boiling water bath canner for 10 minutes or more or if they will be processed in a pressure canner. Jars that will be processed in a boiling water bath canner for less than 10 minutes, once filled, need to be sterilized first by boiling them in hot water for 10 minutes before they're filled.

And lastly, canning is a science, not an art as cooking often is. It is not safe to just use any recipe off the internet/cookbook/granny. The ratio of low acid ingredients (peppers, onions, etc) to high acid ingredients (vinegar, citrus juice) to tomatoes (almost acidic to can on their own in a waterbath) is incredibly important to yield a safe product and is not something that should be guessed at. (See below, also same source as above)

  Can I can my own salsa recipe?
  Salsas are usually mixtures of acid and low-acid ingredients; they are an example of an acidified food. The specific recipe, and sometimes preparation method, will determine if a salsa can be processed in a boiling water canner or a pressure canner. A process must be scientifically determined for each recipe. To can salsa at home, use our recipes for Hot Chile Salsa or Mexican Tomato Sauce. Your county Extension agent may have additional tested recipes for salsas.

Of note and directly related to salsa is the requirement for added acid even when canning tomatoes plain. They are "borderline" acidic enough to can on their own in a waterbath, so additional acid must be added to push them into "definitely safe to waterbath". Many "pressure canner" times can be found for tomatoes and tomato products. For tomatoes this is a process that mimics the waterbath process under 5lb of pressure and is not a "true" pressure canning process. The tomatoes must still be properly acidified even if following the pressure canning directions for canning them.

  Acidification: To ensure safe acidity in whole, crushed, or juiced tomatoes, add two tablespoons of bottled lemon juice or 1/2 teaspoon of citric acid per quart of tomatoes. For pints, use one tablespoon bottled lemon juice or 1/4 teaspoon citric acid. Acid can be added directly to the jars before filling with product. Add sugar to offset acid taste, if desired. Four tablespoons of a 5 percent acidity vinegar per quart may be used instead of lemon juice or citric acid. However, vinegar may cause undesirable flavor changes.

I highly advise reading through this website to learn the basics of safe canning, it also has MANY fantastic and safe recipes designed for canning:
https://nchfp.uga.edu/how/can_home.html


is it ok to use parchment paper when baking cream puffs

Yes to your title.

No to the question body.

I always use parchment when baking cream puffs. It is just to make the cream puffs not stick to the pan and cleanup easier.

It doesn't insulate enough to affect baking temperature and has no effect on the cream puffs being wet and soggy or not.


Is it actually possible to send food to a lab to get the recipe?

As long as you have a list of potential ingredients, it would be possible to find out if these ingredients are in the sauce. For example, if you don't know what spices were used, you could start with a list of spices, find information on some signature chemical compounds found in each spice of the list, then tell the lab to find out which of these substances are present in the sauce. This would give you a pretty good list of substances (spices) you could use. You will need a curious chemist-food scientist who has experience with that kind of work and is willing to play a detective, I'm pretty sure you can't get to a general purpose organic chemistry lab and expect them to just plug it in and get a result.

Even that information won't be 100% certain. First, you would have to find substances which are present in one source ingredient but not another - and these are unlikely to be the main aromatic substances, since these tend to be shared between plants, for example eugenol is something you'll find in a lot of herbs. Second, you might have unusual combinations in which the plant may get into the recipe: for example, where the lab suspects the use of inverted sugar and hyssop as an herb, it might turn out that the recipe contained wildflower honey and the bees processed lots of hyssop.

And when you get the information, you still don't have a recipe. Both the ratio and the process are missing. A good cook (or food technician, for industrially produced food) can make educated guesses about possible processes, and with some work, they are likely to create some kind of replica, if the original recipe doesn't include surprising tricks.

So, you decide to do so, it is kinda possible, but it will be a long process involving experts, not a send-the-sample-get-full-answer kind of thing. If there are no businesses offering it as a service, it doesn't seem like a practical proposition.


Obviously hard to know for sure. The laws and guidelines dictate use of food grade equipment so if a piece falls off and ingested, it does little harm.  If you cooked it, then you have even less to worry.

As a precaution, I suggest taking it to the store and asking about it so other customers don't trip on the same issue. Harmless or otherwise. If they don't know for sure, then suggest to them to send in for a lab test.

In descending likelihood, it could be:

a piece of buna rubber broken off from a gasket (grinding machine, or other). Not a hazard. It's not far from chewing gum ;)
a piece of meat that came in contact with the lubricant oil in the machine. Also usually food grade. They turn dark after a while.
sometimes the meat branding ink on the outside ends up in the grind (also food grade). Though they are usually dark blue.
piece of old blood clot, liver or other organs.
not likely here, but I have heard Listeria shows up black. Though i'd imagine it would spread and look more fuzzy/furry. Most bacterium die during proper cooking.


Red spots in a starter are generally an indication of inedible mold; this has happened to me several times when a split of sourdough starter went bad.  My first thought would be that your yeast is contaminated at the manufacturer.


My sourdough starter split in 2 on the 3rd day. What should I do?

Sourdough during the first few days can show pretty erratic behavior. I wouldn’t worry, just stir and feed as planned. Continuing the culture with just the foamy top would probably also work.

Reasons to start over would be visible mold (fluffy or colorful spots) or if there’s no bubbling. Neither is the case here.


I would say that in most cases neither is that helpful.  I have great success with one steel, placed at the highest possible elevation in the oven.  Preheat for at least an hour, and allow the steel to recover for a few minutes after removing the completed pizza, and before adding the next one.  I have found minimal to no improvement with a steel or stone above the pizza.  Also, in my oven, turning the broiler on, means the heating from the bottom goes off.  I also need to keep the oven door slightly ajar when the broiler is on, so I lose a lot of heat this way.  I find I don't need the broiler with my set-up.  It is less convenient for marginal gains.


How should Dashi made with kelp and bonito flakes smell?

Since dashi is, after all, made with seaweed and dried fish, it will smell and taste a bit of the sea.  If you don't eat or prepare much seafood, this smell might seem quite strong to you; for people, like most Japanese people, who eat fresh seafood five times a week, the smell and taste are subtle.

The other possibility is that you made an error in preparation which caused the stock to become far too fishy.  Any of the following can cause this:

using very low quality kelp or "instant" bonito
using expired/rancid bonito
allowing the pot to come to a roiling boil with the kelp and bonito in it
forgetting to rinse the kelp first
adding too much bonito, especially instant bonito
letting the dashi steep much too long

I would suggest that you back off on the quantities of ingredients you are using, let them steep for a shorter time, and make sure the pot doesn't come to a boil.  Clearly, whether or not your dashi tastes like it should by Japanese tastes, it's fishy to you.

EDITED TO ADD: also, if you don't eat seafood regularly and are finding even good dashi much too fishy, consider making dashi with konbu and dried shitake mushrooms instead.  This is commonly done in Japanese Buddhist vegetarian cuisine and is quite good.

Also, you might go to a good Japanese restaurant and get some kind of clear soup so that you can taste what you're shooting for.


Seitan texture troubleshooting

Spongy when simmered

The classic Seitan problem- make a dough and boil it, anyone can do that right? Not with Seitan- either you get it just right or it's inedible. Here's two tricks.

use a container

The surefire way to avoid watery Seitan is to constrain it in some way- commonly used methods are aluminum foil, a freezable/cookable plastic bag, or a cheesecloth.

The cheesecloth is the most wholesome, but is finicky to clean. The foil is cheap and can be tossed, but you're sure to be extracting some aluminum and drawing it into your Seitan, especially if there is lime or vinegar in your broth. The cookable plastic bag is great because you can use a small amount of broth in the sealed baggie, so you won't have any broth waste- but you are also sure to have small amounts of plastic in your Seitan (no worse than store-bought).

I'm currently trying to find a good easy-to-clean cookable sealing reusable container to replace the baggie- stainless steel or tough glass. Maybe a jam jar- or event a small pan.
really, really, really, soft simmer

I was able to improve my Seitan with this, but it didn't get perfect- I'll update if it will. The idea is to boil your water, and then turn the heat down and wait until it just barely simmers. There should be no surface disturbance at all, and just the tiniest of bubbles. The bubbles you see in your water are going to poke holes their own size into your Seitan, so really turn the heat down. You also have to keep it almost at the boiling point though, or your Seitan won't cook properly. I'll see if I can post detailed surefire instructions once I've got the hang of it, these are the best known to me so far. I know others have done it.
Chill before cooking

This is as of yet untested, but I will update once I've tried this. Some recipes call for placing the Seitan in an ice bath for ten minutes before cooking. I have no idea what this does, I would guess something chemical about the gluten "development". The ice bath seemed like a lot of effort, so I just put my dough in the freezer. Results upcoming.
Roll while kneading

Kneading has the most impact on the Seitan texture. One technique to get a more fibry and interesting texture is to stretch out the seitan on one side, and roll it up. After rolling it will easily form right back into a ball, so you can use your kneading time to also texturize your seitan. When you're done, take the little part you didn't knead much and wrap it around your rolled ball. This aligns your gluten fibers in one direction. Will post back with results.
Age it

Seitan is always better the next day- this one is so true, even spongy seitan can become somewhat edible if you press the water out and let it sit there for 24 hours and then fry it. So once you've got some technique that's reliable, make your Seitan weekly and keep it chilled. Then eat cold, stew, or, especially, fry.
Compress before cooking

For unwrapped Seitan, add a step of compressing the dough after needing it- take some time to just press down on it with your hands and massage it into the shape you want, without turning it or changing the shape a lot as you would with kneading.

Dry when baked

Baking Seitan sounds too good to be true, right? No broth, no bubbles. Well, no moistness either- an overcooked Seitan O' Greatness tastes like rubber tires sprinkled with oregano. Yum.

The problem with not boiling boils down to not enough fluids. Kneading the dough needs about 1 cup of water for 2 cups of vital wheat gluten so you can handle it, but after that, the dough gets plenty more moistness from simmering or steaming. When baking, this doesn't happen- so you get a much dryer Seitan.

Soak, then bake

The most straight forward solution is to add an extra step of soaking your finished dough after you've let it sit there- try 10 minutes. This could be combined with the ice bath method above- just add a couple of ice cubes.
Reduce temperature

A lot of recipes call for 60 to 90 minutes at 350°F (180°C), and I never got that to work. 250°F (130°C) is much better. The cooking time of 90 minutes seems to be about right, though.
Water bath

Half-cover your seitan with broth in a baking dish and flip it over after half the baking time. This is just like slow-cooking a meat dish instead of boiling it.
Reduce time

I was only able to get good-ish results with this- okay, but too doughy. Use the 350°F (180°C), but only leave it in for 30 minutes- less if using smaller parts. I still found there was a propensity for this to taste like bread that also tastes like sausage and rubber bands. Some report success.

Bursts when baked

Wrap it loose and thick

As with simmering, wrapping the Seitan is much less tricky. It will expand some, so it needs to be wrapped somewhat loosely. The tighter it is wrapped, the denser it will be- and the thicker and stronger the wrapping needs to be. 2-3 layers of foil worked for me wrapping the Seitan with just a little bit of wiggle room.

Flaky when baked

Age it

Baked seitan is a little bit less finicky but still tests better the next day. Seitan always tastes better the next day. This is proverb-grade wisdom, like "a Lannister always pays his debts".

Lunchmeat Texture

Lunchmeat texture is great if you want lunchmeat or meat loaf, and it doesn't matter if you are just going to grind it down. But if you want to make a version of unprocessed meat, as good as Seitan is, it doesn't make for a very interesting texture.

You can, however, fake the fibery texture by folding the Seitan into layers like puff pastry- but then you turn it and do the same thing. This results in an interesting, semi-meaty texture, and also does a lot of compressing for you, so it gets less spongy as well.

Make a moist dough, a little more than 1 cup water for 2 cups gluten
Mix until all the gluten is moist, but don't knead
squash it flat on the counter, and stretch until it is about a quarter inch (0.5cm) high
sprinkle a tiny layer of gluten to unstick it
fold it, or cut it and stack it
squash-and-stack about 10 times. You will now have about 1000 layers of gluten fiber and it shouldn't take longer than kneading.
gently massage-unsquash it back into a roundish cube, but don't knead
turn it around by a quarter
squash-and-stack about 10 times. You will now have 1000 fibers up and across, because you made layers across the layers
gently massage-unsquash it back into a roundish cube, but don't knead
place the cube into the freezer for 10 minutes

Recommended Procedures

Here are some procedures based on the above troubleshooting to get the results you want.

1. Cold Cuts

To get a good deli style cold cut, do the following:

Make a dryish dough, slightly less than 1 cup of water per 2 cups of gluten
Knead like bread for 3-5 minutes
rest covered for 10 minutes
knead like bread for another minute
form into a log shape and wrap snug in a cheesecloth (don't leave much room, but don't compress it either)
boil for 60-90 minutes
store for a day in its broth

You will know it worked when the outermost layer is softish, and the inside is a little less firm than a rubber eraser.

2. Steak

Make a fold-and-squash cube, as above
cut the cube into 4 pieces. cut so that you are cutting apart the fibers, and each steak has a short part of all the fibers.
flatten each steak to a quarter of an inch (0.5cm). keep pressing and condensing longer than needed to keep it in shape, until it feels like it got distinctly firmer than before
no-bubble-simmer each steak for 90 minutes
store the steaks in their broth for a day
press out the broth and fry

3. Chicken Wings

Do the same thing as with steak, but also cut each steak into 4 as well, somewhat unevenly.

4. Sausage

Do the same as with the cold cuts, but wrap into 5 or 6 small logs using the same cheesecloth.

5. Ground beef

Make a cold cut log as above, and grind it in a food processor in a couple of pulses, until the biggest pieces are about a quarter of an inch (0.5cm)

6. Stew cubes

Make a fibered dough as above, but cook it in a cheesecloth as above to get extra-firm, fibered texture. Then cut, fry, and stew, but much shorter than normal stew, perhaps 45min to 1 hour. Add some xanthan gum to the stew to mimic the gelatin that usually forms when slow-cooking stew meat's connective tissue.


Nutrient loss when baking in roasting pan

There are two major causes of nutrient loss during cooking:

Nutrients dissolving in liquid, when the liquid is then discarded.
Destruction of nutrients based on heat.

The first is not related to the cooking method directly, but rather to factors like time in and temperature in contact with the liquid.

The second is related to the temperature which the food obtains.

Neither steaming nor roasting have a lot of liquid in contact with the target food, so that modality is essentially out of play.

Roasting can conceivably achieve higher temperatures than steaming, which may in some cases result in higher nutrient loss.  In other cases, it would result in higher availability of nutrients.

There is no simple way to answer a question like "what is the best way to cook foods to retain nutrition."  It depends on the specific food, and how you treat it, and which nutrients you are interested in.


Many South Asian recipes use a (fairly weird) spice called "hing" or asafoetida powder. It's got a vaguely similar aroma.

Generally you add a pinch to hot oil before beginning a dish. A half-teaspoon is usually enough for a four- to six-serving preparation.

You can find it quite easily at South Asian grocery stores and online.

Oh, and it's "weird" because of the way it's gathered. Unlike other spices, it's not from a seed or seed pod or bark — it's sap, dried and ground. (Most hing powders are packaged with some filler.)


Making Banana bread but short on flour: can I use pancake mix?

Me think you could do it.

A banana bread is more a cake than a bread, and the additional ingredients (mostly sugar) in the pancake mix will not impact that much in the result.


How to triple the quantity of ingredients in order to make 12 standard sized muffins?

Triple means "three time". Multiply all the ingredients by 3.

To double a recipe you would multiply everything by two.

To halve a recipe you would divide all ingredients by two.

(and so on)


Heat the stainless steal pan on medium-high.
After its hot add your oil.
You'll know your pan is hot enough when the oil has wavy movment when you tilt your pan.
Now raise the temperature gradually until the oil begins become only slighty darker.
If you've reached smoke point you are done (the pan should only be SLIGHTLY smoking)
Remove any excess oil and add new oil.

Cook.

Small amounts of oil are needed for fish without the skin.  But if the skin is on and your trying to get it crispy all of the skin on the surface of the fish must be submerged in water to get an effective crust.


My mom has a glass top stove...hate it! I use a cooling rack over the burner when I'm trying to not burn a simmering chili. That should work for you.


It appears that a "cheese royale" is a fancy name for a custard made with combinations of soft cheeses, cream, eggs and seasoning. From this recipe:

Whisk together the cream and eggs and season with salt and pepper.
Fill the potatoes with the custard mix and sprinkle chives on top.

As for using other cheeses, I really don't see why not, or why it would be called something different. I would be curious to try it with a sharper cheese for a stronger taste, perhaps make a Spanish/Mexican version (kind of like cheese salsa) or with some finely minced onion and garlic. Use your imagination!
From looking on Google Images for "goat cheese royale" it appears it is most often used in two ways:
As filling for something like potatoes:

As topping for burgers and such:

I looked without the "goat" but all I got was pictures of cheese burgers and references from Pulp Fiction!


From a cooking perspective any imitation sauce or marinade is never going to deliver the quality that venison has to deliver. We have a massive deer farm close and the price is still ridiculous .
My suggestion is that you find a good butcher that will age beef for you on the bone ,or you could age it yourself if you have a climate control area to keep it at the correct temperature. Anything over 30 days on the bone will start to give you the gaming flavour you are craving. Nothing is going to match deer, but aged beef or really any type of cattle (eg buffalo etc) will give you the gaminess if it is aged. Restaurants are getting up to 180 days, which I could only imagine would melt in your mouth but the flavour would be intense.


Not sure if this is what you're looking for, but rather than trying to solve the problem, you can also just accept it. Bring it all to the table, and just make wraps as you eat them. It won't make it less messy, but it won't be much slower than eating pre-made wraps, and you'll be spending that time at the table with people instead of waiting to eat.

To reduce the mess at least a bit, go for leafier lettuce, avoiding the parts with thick, stiff ribs, and definitely avoiding varieties like iceberg. (I've seen people recommend iceberg for wraps, but it seems like an awful choice to me.)

You can also potentially use other greens. There's napa cabbage and blanched cabbage, but also things with a bit more flavor that you might find in an Asian grocery like perilla (shiso, kaenip, ...) - I'm not sure I've had all of them, but the leaves used for ssam are probably good ideas.


Is there a difference between seasoning and flavouring?

The problem is, both Sarge's and Carmi's answers are right depending on who is using the word. Some people use the word seasoning to just mean salt, some mean salt and pepper, and some mean "anything you want to use to bring the flavor to the desired point, including salt, pepper, lemon juice, spices, herbs, etc." If you are dealing with someone in person, it is best to ask. With a cookbook, sometimes you can figure it out from context or from other recipes. Otherwise, you'll have to make your own best call. In my own recipes, I will generally write "taste and adjust seasoning, adding salt and/or more lemon juice as needed".


Is bolognese better cooked with the meats being seared or just simply sweat without being seared?

"Better" is a matter of opinion.  Recipes for bolognese vary widely. Both methods are possible.  Try it both ways, see which one you prefer.  My practice is that the meat is not seared.  Because of the nature of the recipe, I usually have a lot of meat, it would certainly take longer to sear it in batches, as opposed to dumping it all in with the sweated vegetables.


U.S. Equivalent of French T80 for Sourdough Pain de Campagne

You would want to look for a high gluten bread flour, in the 14% protein area.  I found this helpful for understanding different flours.  In the Fresh Loaf Discussion Forum, a user suggests combining whole wheat and bread flour in a ratio of 80/20.

Here in the US, you probably have access to King Arthur flours.  Their whole wheat is 14%, white whole wheat is 13%, and bread flour is 12.7% protein.  I doubt you want to go 100% whole wheat flour, so you could use some of the information I provided to create a blend that would work well.

It looks like you could also order from French T80 here. Although, I should point out that this product description is a little confusing because it describes T45 flour below, and a protein content of 10%, but you might be able to contact them for the product you desire.


A question of Fishmonger basics and fish processing and handling?

It's common for a few bones to be left behind, so you should always check over the fish before cooking. I use a pair of small pliers to pull out any leftovers. It shouldn't take an hour to clean, though. Any leftover scales should come off with a quick rinse. If the fillet was supposed to be de-boned and scaled, and there were a lot of bones left and scales still attached, that's a bit of a problem.

Did the fish itself smell bad, or was it just the store that had an odor? Did the store just smell a bit "fishy", or did it smell like an environmental disaster? If you're not used to working with fish, you may be a bit sensitive to the smell. Once you get the fish home, you should not smell any off-odors on the fillets.

If you weren't impressed, I would just try to find another place and see if you like it better. It's not a bad thing to have high expectations, and you should find a fishmonger that you're happy with.