How do you recover if you lose track of what you're measuring? I was making a lemon meringue pie, which called for 1/3 cup of corn starch and 1 1/3 cup of sugar, added to some quantity of water. Silly me, I put the water in the pot first, then the corn starch, and then — since I already had the 1/3 cup measuring cup out — I decided to measure the sugar as 4/3 cups. Problem is, I got distracted in the middle of measuring out the sugar, and I got to a point where I had no clue whether I had added 1 cup, or 1 1/3 cups, or possibly even 1 2/3 cups. Ooops.

Is there any way to recover from something like this? Preferably without throwing out everything and starting over?

(Obviously, the best way is to prevent yourself getting into such a situation in the first place: measure each ingredient into a separate vessel before you start combining, go ahead and dirty two measuring cups, don't get distracted, etc. But I'm sure we've all been there...)

For the record, for the pie in question I decided to quit while I'm ahead and proceeded with whatever mystery quantity of sugar was in the pot. I haven't actually tried the pie yet, it's still cooling, but it looked OK.

Going forward, as you say, it's best to use either a separate bowl/ramekin/etc. for each ingredient, or to save on dishwashing, use one larger bowl and put each ingredient in its own spot in the bowl so you can see them and figure out what's missing.

In this specific case, though, where you've forgotten if you're at 1/3 or 4/3 cup of sugar, you could weigh the existing mixture and try to figure out by weight how much is already in there:
1. Tare an empty pot.
2. Pour mixture into empty pot and weigh it; pour it back into original pot.
3. Weigh (using tared pot) an identical amount of water (then pour it out).
4. Weigh 1/3 cup of cornstarch (and pour it back into the box).
5. Weigh 4/3 cup of sugar (and put it back).
6. Add the weights from #3, #4, and #5, and subtract the weight from #2.
7. Weigh out sugar to match the total in #6.

This is a silly process unless you've already added something expensive (or inconvenient to replace). I've gone through exercises like this when I've added saffron to some stock, or it's midnight and I don't want to go to the grocery store for a new box of baking soda.


Should I crush the spice for Chai Tea Latte? After having a cup of Chai Tea Latte from Starbuck,I decided to make a cup of Chai Tea Latte by myself.

I've bought the spice from India store, however, they are not in powder simply because they don't have label on the powder so I can't identify them. However, I recognized their original shape so I bought them in the raw shape.

I don't have a grinder or mortar/pestle. I really don't want to buy them for occasional drink.

Is it common way to put the spice directly into the boiling water without grinding them into powder?

Below is the recipe:

I got cinnamon stick, cardamom pods (green cardamom) and cloves in raw shape.

  1 1/2 cups of water

  1 1/2 inch stick of cinnamon

  8 cardamom pods

  8 whole cloves

  1/4 inch fresh ginger root (sliced thin)

  2/3 cup of milk

  6 teaspoons sugar

  3 teaspoons of Darjeeling Tea leaves

The way we make Chai in India ( there are lots of variants of the spice mix) is to use the spices whole while brewing the tea and to strain the tea before drinking.

Though for cardomom you should crush it to release the flavor. I would suggest using your hand or the broad side of your knife blade.

If you decide to use ginger, it might be a good idea to grate it to increase the surface area so that the flavor is absorbed quicker. (Ginger chai is really good in winter :))


How to remove the bitter taste from green bell pepper? Green pepper has a more bitter taste than red or yellow pepper.

Are there tricks to remove or diminish this bitter taste? A special way of cooking, or adding a bit of sugar or something maybe?

Green peppers are green because they are unripe.  Unripe fruits and vegetables are naturally more bitter and less sweet than ripe ones.  By far the easiest/laziest path is to just use a red pepper.  It's essentially the same food, just ripe.

Sugar won't really do anything to the bitterness other than mask it. Salt will.  Khymos has written that in parts of Asia, unripe fruit is commonly eaten with salt, salty spices, or soy sauce.  These are all excellent options for peppers, as they reduce the bitterness and enhance the taste.

Finally, cook at low heat if possible.  Pan-fried peppers tend to be a fair shake bitterer than slow-grilled or oven-roasted peppers.

(P.S. Removing the skin obviously works as well - I personally prefer them unskinned, but if you want to skin them, have a look at this Chow video on it - it's simple to do, you just char the outside and shake it in a plastic bag.)

Also, the interior white part and skin (not the big obvious part, but the sort of interior skin of it) are rather bitter also. Remove it be sliding your knife carefully and parallel to your cutting board slowly and shallowly.


How to cook Brussells Sprouts and sweet potates in one oven? I need to roast the Brussels sprouts at 350 for 40" and bake the sweet potatoes at 425 for 60" in one oven.  How should I do it?

I have this problem frequently of needing to cook different things at the different temperatures in the oven at the same time. I tend to get around it by choosing the average temperature of the two (in your case ~390F) and adjust my cooking times appropriately. At 390F, I would cook for roughly the following times for your foods:

Brussels Sprouts    35"
Sweet Potatoes      70"

They should could in a pretty similar manner to your recipe, but I'd keep an eye on them to ensure they come out perfect.

Hope that helps!

Mike


Can I use the stovetop while a dough is leavening in the oven? I usually use my (turned off) oven as a safe place for leavening doughs for hours.
I always get amazing results and never had any issue with that.
But... what if I need to use the stovetop?
Will the oven heat up and ruin my dough? Or the temperature change will be imperceptible, having no effect on the dough?

Do you have a thermometer?  Place it in your oven.  Check temp.  Turn on your burners/use stove for a bit.  Check temp.  You will then know for sure.


Keeping consistent quality of marinated meat throughout the day in a restaurant The issue I need help with is knowing how to serve marinaded meats consistently to customers. I have found that for my recipe, the marinaded meats taste good after three hours of marinating. Of course, this is not possible to have the meals served after three hours consistently to patrons. For example, if I place the meats in the marinade at 6:00pm and start serving at noon the next day, they will have one texture and taste. If I start them in the morning, 9:00am, they are ready at noon.

Bottom line, what is the best practice for a food establishment that serves marinated meats on the menu (chicken, pork, lamb) without having different tastes and textures for patrons?

Your question is actually a more general topic under food quality.

The concept is either called stock rotation or just-in-time(for manufacturing).

You simply need to anticipate the need for the item and prepare it ahead of time, multiple times throughout the day.  If you need 10 portions an hour starting at 6pm, you need to begin marinating 10 portions at 3pm then 10 portions at 4pm and so on to satisfy your needs for the day.  Your work day begins when prep time must begin, not when your restaurant is open for customers.

Many restaurants do this with any product that doesn't hold well.  These items need to be prepared several times throughout service and rotation is a good way to do it.

Bakers don't go to work in the wee hours of the morning for no reason.  They do it to ensure their products are served at their peak of quality.


Should these be placed in refrigerator: tomatoes, and banana? Should these be placed in refrigerator: tomatoes, and bananas, just like green leaf vegetables?

You generally do not want to refrigerate tomatoes; they will will get mealy in texture, which can be unpleasant.

Bananas are more complicated.  Once you refrigerate them, ripening will stop, and it will not recommence when they are brought back to room temperature.  So you never want to refrigerate unripe bananas.

Ripe bananas can be refrigerated to make them last a few days longer, but the skins may darken, which some people find unacceptable.


Flour is many years expired but still looks good I have a bag of flour in my pantry that expired 3 years ago, but it looks and smells perfectly fine. Is it still safe to eat?

EDIT: To clarify, today is July 3rd, 2018, and the flour best before date is "2015 SE 04"

Question is different from other existing questions on the topic because the duration of time passed is more extreme (other questions describe a few months).

I am using flour that expired in 2018. I had to use some of my emergency flour due to the corona virus shortages. Its pretty good but not as good as fresh. Id say 90% as good tasting. Yeast on the other hand is different. Ive had a one pound block of yeast in the freezer since 2014 and it still works. Not very well but it works. I have to double up the amount and wait twice as long so the bread tastes very yeasty but it is good to know it can last this long.


What fruit pair well with spinach? What fruit pair well with spinach? This is for a cold spinach-based salad rather than cooked spinach, but I'd be interested in warm spinach too.

You might consider citrus or other tart fruit with citrus -- mandarin oranges segments are fairly common to pair with spinich; even if you didn't use whole fruit, consider making a vinagrette using orange juice.

I've also seen recipes for spinich salads with strawberries or cranberries;  I've also had a pineappe and avocado salad before that might work well with spinish instead of romaine.


Do beignets have to sit overnight? I made beignets and I want to hurry and bake them before going to sleep tonight. Do I have to let them sit overnight or will they be fine if i just put them in there for a few hours then fry?

This is the recipe:

  1 cup warm water
  1/4 cup sugar
  1 Tbs active dry yeast
  1 egg replacement
  2 Tbs vegan butter
  1/2 cup soy creamer
  4 1/4 cups all-purpose flour
  1/2 tsp salt
  Oil for frying
  Enough powdered sugar to choke out an army

  In a stand mixer or mixing bowl, combine the water, sugar and yeast. Allow to sit until the yeast gets bubbly and happy, about 5 minutes. Add in the butter and the egg replacement and beat until combined. Add in the soy creamer and half the flour and beat for 1 minute. Add in the salt and the rest of the flour and finish with the dough hook. If you don't have a dough hook, knead the dough by hand.

  Spray cooking spray or a light bit of oil into a bowl or dish with a lid. add in the dough and turn to coat. Cover and allow to sit in the fridge for 8 hours, or overnight.
  Heat your cooking oil to 360 degrees. On a lightly floured surface, roll out your dough to approximately 1/4 to 1/3 inch thickness. 1/2 inch thick is too thick.

  Cut the dough into 3" x 3" squares or diamonds. Place into the hot oil carefully, making sure not to crowd the oil. The beignet should float to the surface almost immediately. Cook on each side for about 20-30 seconds, or until a rich golden brown.

  Once golden brown on both sides, remove from oil and allow to rest for about 1 minute. With a sieve, sprinkle the powdered sugar generously onto the top of the beignets. Enjoy, traditionally with a cafe au (almond) lait.

Warning: this answer isn't about traditional beignets, but about New Orleans beignets, which are actually made from yeast dough, like donuts. It refers to this recipe which the OP is most likely using.

For yeast dough, the difference between long and short rising times is that longer times give you more flavor development. Beignets are so chock-full of sugar and fat that they don't need the subtle flavoring of long fermentation. They can be made with very short rising times.

I don't know why the recipe tells you to refrigerate overnight and then forgets to tell you that the dough should come back to temperature. There are some rich doughs which are baked from cold in order to hold their shape (brioche and other butter-rich relatives), but due to the physics of deep frying, you don't want fridge-cold dough in your pan. But there is surely no need to get it thoroughly cooled; the recipe is probably advising the long stay for fermentation or convenience reasons, not because you need chilled dough. One possibility which comes to mind is that the soft dough might be a bit hard to roll when warm, but a combination of non-stick mat, clingfilm and flouring usually takes care of that.

If you keep your dough out of the fridge, it will be ready much earlier, and you can fry it as soon as it is properly risen. But because this recipe has such an insanely high yeast ratio (equivalent to 7.5% fresh yeast in baker percentages), you have to watch it closely, it might rise very soon.


How to add banana flavor to my cookies? I want to add the smell and flavor of banana in my cookies. I'm not sure whether I should substitute APP-flour or butter with banana. Thank you.

Banana adds structure & moisture to baked goods, so you'd actually have to replace some egg, some butter, and some flour. When doing complex substitutions like this, it's usually best to find a recipe that's actually for the kind of cookie you want, in this case banana. Otherwise, you could just add some banana to the recipe as it is and go from there.

Of course, an easier method would be to use banana extract, which would replace the vanilla or other flavoring in your cookie.


How to stick oreo biscuits together to make a tower? I am attempting a castle cake with a dragon on it. I also want to make a tower to stick and stand up on the castle. The general idea to create the tower is to stick Oreo biscuits together and then to fondant the outside to make it look like a stone wall tower.

Can someone please help me figure out how to stick the biscuits together? I tried to Google but couldn't find much.

I'd recommend that unless you're just stacking oreos on top of each other, that you use something else for structure and then afix the oreos on using icing as a mastic.

Typically, you'd use one of the following:

A hollow structure made of gingerbread sheets, fastened together
A bit of dense cake (eg, pound cake), cut down to the proper size
Rice crispie treats, formed into the size you wanted

Personally, I'd go with the rice crispie treats, in part because you can just use that without any oreos.  (you can either take a handle of a spoon or similar and press in the texture you want once it's mostly but not fully set).

... but you can also deal with the texturing on the fondant ... just roll the fondant out a bit thick, apply it, and then use something appropriately sized and smooth (no sharp edges) to press in the grout lines.  If you have clay working tools, use those, but also the back edge of some table knives will work.   You have a longer working time than trying to do this on rice crispie treats, you just have to be more careful about not tearing or cutting the fondant.


How to get Grill/Sear Marks I've made some very tasty steaks on the grill. I use an entire chimney's worth of charcoal, probably 3-4lbs, let the grill get extremely hot, thrown on the steak and still not gotten nice pronounced sear marks.

To prep the steaks:
 1. Coat in kosher salt.
 2. Let sit at room temperature approx 1 hr
 3. Rinse excess salt
 4. Lightly season
 5. Throw on grill

I generally only let it sit for at most, 3 minutes, I like my steaks blue rare. But, I recently cooked for family and they like theirs medium. So I let the steaks sit for 6 minutes on each side, still, no pronounced grill marks. I have the same problem when I cook burgers, no matter how long I leave them, never seen any pronounced grill marks.

Grill marks are a sign of a really hot grate. As in really, really hot and well pre-heated.

You want your grate to sit over the hot coals for at least five, some sources say fifteen minutes. If your gril has a lid, close it!

Next, you need to ensure a proper heat transfer from the grate to your steak / burger / other food. You have two factors here:

a) Water will in fact insulate by forming a "protective" steam layer, so dry your meat. Use paper towels or whatever you prefer, just remove any surface liquid. This includes wet marinades, too.

b) Oil aids in the heat transfer, this is the reason we use some oil in a frying pan, too. You should always oil your food, not the grates, because you avoid flare-ups and the oil helps any seasoning - if used - stick to the meat. A light coating is sufficient.

Once you set the stage, you need to let physics and chemistry do their job:

Place your meat on the grill and wait. A proper grill mark needs some time to develop. Your meat will release itself from the grate once the "lines" are seared well. Do not rush this or your grill marks will remain on the grates as sticky residue, not on your steak. Optional: Turn your meat 30° or 45° to create a diamond- or cross-hatch pattern.
Flip, repeat on the other side.

Some practical hints:

For those who love rare meat and thin steaks, there is simply not enough time to create a proper cross-hatch on both sides of the meat, possibly not even for a 45° turn. So rather aim to create one nicely defined set of marks than going for a mediocre pattern or a dry steak.
On the other hand, there are those who prefer a well-done brick of meat, which will not be at the desired doneness after searing both sides. Use indirect heat on the side of the grill to finish your meat until it reaches the proper temperature.
For everything inbetween: Note that every steak has two sides and one will be towards the plate. So serve your meat with the better looking side up ;-)


heavy cream and half-and-half substitute I am trying to make ice cream and it calls for 3 cups half-and-half and 1 cup heavy cream.

I don't have either but I do have one gal of 2% milk

If I can make some half-and-half and heavy cream out of it that would be awesome or if you know a good substitute for both that would be nice too!

UPDATE :
Full recipe

"Ingredients

3 cups half-and-half

1 cup heavy cream

8 large egg yolks

9 ounces vanilla sugar

2 teaspoons pure vanilla extract

Place the half-and-half and the heavy cream into a medium saucepan, over medium heat. Bring the mixture just to a simmer, stirring occasionally, and remove from the heat.

In a medium mixing bowl whisk the egg yolks until they lighten in color. Gradually add the sugar and whisk to combine. Temper the cream mixture into the eggs and sugar by gradually adding small amounts, until about a third of the cream mixture has been added. Pour in the remainder and return the entire mixture to the saucepan and place over low heat. Continue to cook, stirring frequently, until the mixture thickens slightly and coats the back of a spoon and reaches 170 to 175 degrees F. Pour the mixture into a container and allow to sit at room temperature for 30 minutes. Stir in the vanilla extract. Place the mixture into the refrigerator and once it is cool enough not to form condensation on the lid, cover and store for 4 to 8 hours or until the temperature reaches 40 degrees F or below.

Pour into an ice cream maker and process according to the manufacturer's directions. This should take approximately 25 to 35 minutes. Serve as is for soft serve or freeze for another 3 to 4 hours to allow the ice cream to harden.

Recipe courtesy of Alton Brown, 2005
"

edit

i don't want a full substitute like almond milk and coconut cream
i can use butter ect

Cream has a high fat content, fat adds elasticity, flavor and a smooth mouth feel to ice cream. You can use 2% milk in ice cream instead of cream and it will work, however it will not have many of the desirable properties you get from cream. It will be harder and taste "weak" for lack of a better term.

If you want to make a lower fat ice cream then you can make up for the lack of milk fat somewhat by using more egg yolks and adding stabilizers like xanthan gum, guar gum, etc. See my answer to this question for a bit more detail on gums in ice cream.

It is possible to make a cream substitute by mixing 1/3 cup melted unsalted butter with 3/4 cup milk, but this would only work for recipes where the emulsion of fat in the liquid is not required - all you will get from this is milk with fat floating around in it. This may work in some baking applications, but it won't whip and it won't make ice cream you'd want to eat.


How can I soak cake in cheese? I can make cheesecake and I can make cake, but it occurred to me recently that cheesecake isn't cake soaked in cheese, Ala tres leches.

So, is it possible to get cheese liquefied enough to be able to soak into a sponge cake?

My initial thought was to mix mascarpone with cream/condensed milk and bathe a vanilla sponge in it.

This could then be topped with meringue and pretty much any fruit.

But would that work or is even mascarpone just too thick so be absorbed?

The thing is mascarpone doesn't really have much flavour. If you dilute it and a little soaks in, you won't be able to taste it at all. The much runnier liquid used in lemon drizzle cake doesn't soak in very far. Maybe you don't want too much cheese flavour, but something like mascarpone or ricotta would be better as a filling or topping than trying to flavour the cake itself

For a real cheese flavour I reckon you'd be better off mixing cheese in before baking. I have tasted a dark chocolate and blue cheese cake. Delicious and very rich. The concept came from Heston Blumenthal.


bread flour: is it all just branding? That I know of, there have been 3 recalls of all-purpose flour in recent months: by King Arthur, Aldi's, and General Mills (Gold Medal). All 3 cite e-coli contamination. The KA & Aldi's notices both say the source is ADM Milling (Buffalo NY). (General Mills' notice doesn't say.)

Would I be reading too much into this coincidence to infer that everybody is selling the same exact stuff, and I might as well be buying Aldi's, instead of paying a premium for KA?

Yes, it would be reading too much.  ADM is a food processing company, and it operates a number of mills.  King Arthur doesn't mill its own flour (and I assume neither does Aldi).  The commodity wheat market in the U.S. tends to move huge amounts of wheat to centralized mills, where it is then packaged (and perhaps branded).

That doesn't mean branding means nothing.  King Arthur, for example, requires very specific standards for its wheat, milling process, and final flour characteristics.  Aldi flour is cheaper partly because it probably doesn't require the kind of close tolerances that King Arthur specifies.

Is it possible that some wheat from the same fields ends up milled at the same place and packaged as different brands?  Yes.  But again, each flour brand will have their own requirements for their flour.  If I buy King Arthur flour, I know that my flour will have protein and ash percentages precisely specified to a tolerance within 0.2%.  (For years, I could find an easy summary of those specs and tolerances on the King Arthur website; I don't know where it is now, but I assume the numbers are available on request.)  Most other flour companies don't provide such numbers, or they specify much wider tolerances.  That likely means their batches perhaps aren't as rigorously tested at the mills and/or the requirements the flour brand demands of farmers producing wheat aren't as rigorous.

In any case, the ADM mill probably processes lots of food from lots of sources for lots of branded goods.  Hence the potential for cross-contamination.

Also, it's important to note that "all-purpose flour" is typically a blend of different wheat varieties.  Those wheat varieties may be grown in different locations and/or in different seasons of the year.  Different flour brands will have various requirements for that blending, so I suppose it's possible for a batch of wheat from some farm of some variety to end up in the AP flour blends for multiple brands.  Or perhaps some wheat that was grown on the farm wasn't up to the King Arthur specs for one reason or another, so it ended up in the Aldi flour, but all the wheat from that farm is under suspicion for contamination or something.  In any case, the final AP flour blends will still be quite different.


What can I replace pineapple with in a cherry dump cake? I would like to make a cherry dump cake, but some kids are allergic to pineapple. What can I replace it with?

The recipe I am working with is:

  1 (20 oz.) can crushed pineapple with juice, undrained
  1 cup chopped pecans or walnuts
  ½ cup (1 stick) butter or margarine
  1 can Duncan Hines Comstock® Country Cherry
  or 1 can Duncan Hines Comstock® Simply Cherry Pie Filling Topping
  1 package Classic Yellow Cake Mix

  Preheat oven to 350ºF. Grease a 13"x 9" pan. Dump pineapple with juice
  into pan. Spread evenly. Dump in pie filling. Sprinkle cake mix evenly
  over cherry layer. Sprinkle pecans over cake mix. Dot with butter.
  Bake 50 minutes or until top is lightly browned. Serve warm or at room
  temperature

Any canned Apple Pie Filling (such as the Duncan Hines) would provide a similar flavor and texture to the pineapple you want to replace. You might want to mix in some apple juice (or cider) to the apple pie filling to thin out the liquid in order to get the right consistency and volume.

Of course you will want to make sure you aren't simply replacing one allergen with another.


Storing temperature for cooked omelette Is it okay to store cooked omelette for 1 week?

Secondly, at what temperature it should be stored ?

You could keep it frozen for longer than a week, but by the time you reheated it, it would be like rubber.
I wouldn't attempt more than a couple or three days in the fridge.

The only way I can think to keep anything omelette-like would be like a Spanish tortilla - maybe it's the potato & onion that changes the texture, but that is fine after being cooled then re-heated.


Why did my pound cake turn out dry? I baked a pound cake in an enamel glazed fluted pan and it turned out dry. Was it the pan or what could it be?  I followed the recipe. Any help on this would be appreciated.

Does it have something to do with the heat ? But how and why ?

Have you tried baking it for a shorter amount of time? Cakes become dry if they are baked for too long. if you use a tooth pick, it should not come out clean, but with crumbles attached.
Clean = dry.
Crumbles = moist and done.
wet = not baked enough


What is the difference using plastic or bronze mould for pasta maker? I want to understand the difference in using plastic or bronze mould for my Philips 200W pasta maker.
There is option to get a bronze or plastic mould for my machine. I have read the bronze will give more texture so that the pasta can absorb the sauce better.
I am wondering: is the difference so significant? When using a hand wound pasta machine I remember the pasta being good enough and taking on the sauce well enough. Further the bronze can only be cleaned by hand.

I don't know how robust the plastic mould for your machine will be, I have had issues with plastic parts breaking on Philips kitchen appliances (always outside of warranty, naturally), so I can't really comment on that. However, depending on the type of pasta you intend to extrude may have a bearing on your choice. The bronze dies were traditionally used for the harder "higher quality" durum semolina pasta that has much more "tooth bite", hence using metal rather than plastic due to the stresses involved. Nowadays, manufacturers use Teflon dies as they are cheaper, but this results in a smooth pasta.
If you are intending on making dense pasta such as penne or conchiglie, semolina flour and a bronze die would be a good choice. If you are looking to make a finer pasta such as vermicelli or spaghetti, the use of 00 flour and a plastic mould would probably be fine.
I would also consider the amount of use the pasta maker will be exposed to. If you are only occasionally going to be making fresh pasta, a brass mould is probably overkill. If you are going to be making penne regularly with semolina rather than 00 flour, the bronze die is probably a better long term investment.
https://www.epicurious.com/ingredients/what-is-bronze-cut-pasta-and-is-it-worth-it-article
https://fabulouspasta.com/guide/best-pasta-flour/


Boiling potatoes with vs. without skin It seems I got me thinking ...

When boiling potatoes in water or a steamer, what, if any, is the effect of peeling the potatoes before vs. after the cooking process?

Does it matter at all whether they are peeled before or after?

wrt. to taste in general
wrt. to "texture" of the boiled potatoes, when post-processing them further.

I almost never peel potatoes. I like the flavor and texture of the skins, even in mashed potatoes, and unpeeled potatoes are less prone to becoming waterlogged.

According to Tablespoon.com, the Idaho Potato Commission recommends that you leave potatoes unpeeled for boiling for reasons of flavor and texture, even if you intend to peel the potatoes after boiling.


Grinding coffee beans in the Olde Time Nut Grinder, now sold by Hampton Farms? Has anyone tried to grind coffee beans in the Hampton Farms peanut butter machine? It seems to me that it would work well.  Thanks. Larry

I would not expect it to work well.  It might not even work at all.
Nuts are very oily, relatively difficult to crush, and when crushed do not immediately become powder, but tend to require extended pressure and grinding to reduce them to a paste.  Once pasted, they need to be pushed out of the machine with some force.  Presumably the Hampton Farms grinder does all of these things.
Coffee beans, on the other hand, are moderately oily to dry, are delicate and crushed easily, and can be reduced to a fine powder in seconds.  Once powdered, they fly out of the machine on their own.
You can see some of the difference in the burr mechanisms.  Here's the peanut grinder:

And here's a conical burr grinder:

As you can see, those two grinding burrs are very different in design.


How to keep caramel from hardening prematurely? Let me be clear: I am NOT making a recipe where I want the caramel to stay soft and gooey. The end result is supposed to be hard like toffee or peanut brittle. But everything I search seems to be for how to keep caramel in a soft and gooey state, so I just want to be clear that's not what I'm after.

I decided to shake up my recipe, by pouring it into holiday-shaped molds instead of breaking apart a giant slab. The problem is my molds will not hold all the caramel at once, so I'll have to mold it in batches.

So can anyone tell me how to keep the remaining caramel from solidifying before I'm ready to pour it? Ideally without turning it into a lump of charcoal?

I'm sorry, but what you are asking for is not possible. Caramel is a hard substance (I mean pure caramel here, not the stuff which has added dairy or acid and never hardens). You cannot even keep it melted the way you can do with water, because its decomposition temperature is lower than its melting temperature - at temperatures at which it is liquid, it is not staying chemically the same, but progressing to charcoal.

So, you have to buy more molds, or make your recipe in several batches. But you can't just keep liquid caramel around until your molds are ready to reuse. This would be breaking the laws of physics.


Brisket: separating the flat from the point prior to smoking Is it possible to separate the flat from the point prior to smoking whole brisket without messing either piece up? I have a limited time to cook before an event and I'm thinking if this would work, I could smoke the point for burnt ends on a different smoker at a hotter temperature.

This is indeed possible and not really hard to do. Just look up some tutorial videos on youtube to see where to cut.

Be careful with the reduced cooking time, though. Brisket needs it's time to denaturate/melt the fat and collagens. Maybe pre-cook it sous-vide for a few hours if you have limited time on the smoker.


Rice Cookery in water containing sugar versus plain water I need to have a scientific explanation of why rice cooks faster in plain water than water containing sugar.  I know the sugar interferes with the gelatinization of the rice, but I would like a scientific explanation - such as how the elements within the rice respond to the water with sugar in it to interfere with the gelatinization.

I had some fun with this one. To start: Gelatinization is when the intermolecular starch bonds break, see Starch Gelatinization

I originally thought it had to do with the sugar changing the boiling point of the water. I thought this would increase cooking time, but turns out that's wrong. A higher boiling point means the water can get hotter before turning into water vapor. Therefore shortening cooking time. The mystery continues.

Under the last paragraph in section 8.2 of Thermodynamics of Water it talks about impurities.

Shortly after that I found help in this paper Effects of Sugar on Starch Gelatinization. It says that there are two reasons that I'll summarize here. 1) Sugar bonds with the water making it less available to bond with the starch. This makes it so that the water needs to be hotter to bond with the starch. 2) The sugar bonds with the starch holding them together a bit longer.


Crisping Chicken Without Skin Most of the recipes that call for crispy chicken mention that you must leave the skin on. That's what crisps.

Is it possible to make crispy chicken without skin?

It depends on how you define crisp.

You can definitely have a different texture on the outer side of a piece of chicken. In fact, you can't have the same texture as on the inside, unless you are making it sous vide. It will be browned, and drier than the inside. But you can't make it go "crack" when you chomp down on it. You can compare it to the outside of a good steak. So if you want the chicken to be crisp, you really need the skin.

If you don't insist on the chicken itself being crisp, and just need the texture, you can bread the chicken with breadcrumbs, or froth it with batter. Breading is the usual option and works well with pieces shallow fried in a pan, such as chicken breasts or boneless backs. If you are making a whole chicken, you'll have to be creative, and frothing may work better. In any case, a breading or batter cover needs fat to be crisp, so if you are removing the skin for the calorie content, you don't gain anything.


How long is the cooking time for pork roast? How long should I cook 2 three pound bipork sirloin roasts for? I tried cooking one before for 3 hours at 400° but it came out real tough.

As in all meat cookery, it is not possible to give an exact time, as that depends on too many idiosyncratic variables:  the size of your roast, the temperature it starts at, the temperature of your oven, and so on.

Instead, you want to cook it to a particular temperature as measured with an instant read thermometer in the thickest part of the roast.

A lean roast like this should be cooked approximately to mediumish, which is 150 F or 66 C.  This will probably take about an hour, to an hour and quarter at 350 F / 180 C.

When you suspect the roast is close to being done, insert your instant read thermometer in the thickest part of the roast, as near to the center as you can.  When the temperature stop rising, that is your reading.  You should check several spots, and assume the lowest of them is the temperature to watch.

When the roast is uniformly cooked to the target temperature, it is done.


Principles of full flavour in dishes I have become interested in learning how to cook better, and how cooking works.

I prepared a dish, a kind-of pie made from tortillas as the base and top, with potato, feta cheese, sauteed soft rings of onion, mushrooms, garlic and spinach in olive oil with pepper as the filling ingredients, and baked until crispy. A pretty simple recipe.
A lot of my meals so far seem to be based on this base of onion, mushroom, and garlic.

When eating the dish, I found that certain ingredients on their own were too much, mainly the spinach (bitter) and feta cheese (overwhelming), and that certain combinations of the ingredients were good, potato and feta, or onion and garlic, but when I ate full slices (ie. containing nearly all ingredients) they all faded into each other and lost sharpness and therefore seemed bland

I know without going into the specifics of my preparation of these ingredients, it may be hard to come up with suggestions, and this is a very general question but I am trying to understand the bigger picture of combinations of tastes, and cooking techniques to make food that tastes really good, so I am wanting suggestions of further ingredients, or techniques to refine this base, and add more flavour and quality to my dishes.

I appreciate any input or suggestions.

Thanks

One of the most important things to consider when designing a dish is the balance of tastes in the dish: salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and umami.  Remember that certain tastes can combine with each other to cancel each other out, enhance one another, and sometimes even create new tastes.  Here are three rules of thumb that should help:

Sweetness can complement and even suppress bitterness.  As an example, think of beer.
Saltiness, in general, enhances the other tastes, and can often be masked by them.  Sweetness, for example, can suppress saltiness and, at the same time, saltiness can enhance sweetness.  That's why many baked confections contain salt.  Also, that's one reason why a classic pairing for salty feta cheese is sweet watermelon.
Sourness/acidity can make fatty foods seem less fatty.  That's one reason why fatty meats are often served with vinegar-based sauces.

It is important to think about what each ingredient contributes to the dish in terms of taste, flavor, texture, and color.  If two ingredients are serving the same purpose, then chances are you don't need one of them.  In your specific case, here is what some of your ingredients contribute in terms of taste:

Feta: Salty.
Onion: Sweet.
Mushrooms: Umami.
Spinach: Bitter and slightly sweet.

The other ingredients are mostly just adding flavor and texture, which may not be necessary in your case.  Also, keep in mind that the oil, feta, and tortillas (assuming you are using flour tortillas) all contain fat, so you may want to bump-up the sourness a bit.  Also, if you found that the spinach was too bitter, you could offset it by reducing the amount and perhaps caramelizing your onions a bit more to add sweetness.  You could also add some balsamic vinegar to your onions as they caramelize which will both make them sweeter and also add some acidity.

As a final suggestion, make sure to write everything down!  That way, then next time you try this recipe you will know (1) how much of each ingredient you used before, and (2) what ingredients you'd like to alter.


How long can I store Cooked Turkey in Refrig before Freezing? How long can I store Cooked Turkey in Refrig before Freezing?  I bought an Organic Turkey early for Thanksgiving and cooked it.  It's been in my Refrig for a week and I'd like to trim and freeze parts and also make a soup.  Is my timing on this acceptable?

I'm going to say no.

We chill food in the freezer or refrigerator to slow bacterial growth. In general, the refrigerator will slow the growth enough that cooked meat can be kept safely for 3-5 days, and the freezer enough that cooked meat can be stored for 2-3 months. If you've already kept the meat in the fridge for a week, it is already unsafe to eat. Freezing it now will not reverse that.

In general, if you want to freeze food you should do so ASAP after cooking to maximize the amount of time it will keep in the freezer. After it's already unsafe is too late.


How can I ensure food safety if my cooking utensils have touched raw meat? Twice in the past week or so, I've wondered whether my cooking utensil was still clean enough to cook / serve with. Here were the situations:

Cooking ground sausage (no casing). While breaking the sausage up, raw sausage clearly got on the back of the spoon. Over the course of cooking the sausage and later adding veggies, all visible traces of the raw meat disappeared. I finished up cooking, used the spoon to stir in some penne, and then served.
Candying some bacon. Put some bacon in the oven with some brown sugar on it. Used a fork to flip the bacon half way through. Then used the same fork to take the cooked bacon out of the pan and on to a rack.

Is this safe? When do I need to worry about contamination on my cooking utensils? What is sufficient to make the utensil safe again?

It depends on where you live. Each country has different meat diseases and bacterium that you have to be careful about

Traditionally in many western countries most meats are relatively safe raw though poultry is often not. But the definition of safe is not universal. Fresh chicken may have some salmonella etc, but unless this is allowed to grow to large numbers of spore it will not be dangerous. There are some bacteria that are dangerous in even minute amounts, but these should be vary rare, and even the cleanest cook will probably still transfer them

So to answer question, when cooking meat (or anything for that matter), you have to consider the amount of food adhering to the utensil, and the time it is exposed to a temperature in which bacteria can grow etc

If there was a formulae it would be something like

  food type (risk of bacteria) * temperature * time

In general ground meat has been processed but not overly preserved, so time starts becoming a factor. How long has it been in a warm environment? Bacon is heavily preserved and not a great bacteria home, so you have more time before it becomes a risk. I small smear of bacon juice on a fork is not going to create a dangerous level of bacteria in the 20 minutes it takes you to cook the dish. But I wouldn't risk it for Chicken (in my country due to campylobacter still being a problem)

In the home environment I give anything that has touched raw food a quick rinse under the tap (Which just happens to be collected rain water and therefore full of bird poo :-) ) and sometimes a mechanical scrub with the dishes brush before using it again in the cooking process

There are lots of old wives tales on kitchen cleanliness, but the end result is that bacteria needs water, food, and temperature to grow. If you remove most of these they can't multiple to dangerous levels

From my experience in food technology laboratories, the often overlooked problem is surface oil and fat. These trap water, food and bacteria (the perfect storm). Simple mechanical scrubbing will remove vast amounts of these for short term (period of cooking) cleanliness

This of course does not apply to food that must be cooked for non bacterial reasons, and food known to be unclean. Chicken again is typical of this, and I would hot water scrub everything used with raw or partially cooked chicken


Should I use self-rising flour or all purpose flour for two ingredient pizza dough? I'm planning to make a simple pizza using the two ingredient pizza dough method. I've been doing some reading on it and I see two variants of this:

(1) from Kinda Healthy Recipes which uses all purpose flour, salt, and Greek Yogurt; and

(2) from Sweet Savant which uses self rising flour and Greek Yogurt (I guess the salt is in the flour already).

My question is - which one is correct/better? If self-rising flour is the way to go, I'm going to need to make my own which I'm happy to do - that part is insanely easy.

Thanks in advance!

Self-rising flour is just flour with the addition of baking powder and salt*. So, it doesn't matter whether you use self-rising flour or make your own by combining these ingredients yourself.

* note: not all countries include salt in self-rising flour. There is no salt added in the UK "self-raising" mixture for example, but there salt added in the US and Canada.

Because of this, if you live in the US and are using a UK recipe, you will need to omit some or all of the salt in the recipe since self-rising flour already contains salt.

Conversely, if you are living in the UK and following a US recipe, you will need to add salt if using self-raising flour where it calls for self-rising flour.

Otherwise you could end up with no salt or more than you intended. It sounds like in your case your recipe assumes that self-rising flour has salt added.

One of our devoted readers also found that US self-rising flour has less baking powder than UK self-raising flour, raising doubts as to whether additional baking powder may be needed for some recipes.

Note: A good clue will be the spelling of "self-raising" vs. "self-rising" to determine whether salt is expected in your mix. And Brits also have a lot of other weird spelling, grammar, and nomenclature differences, such as calling desserts "puddings." Be cautious when dealing with these people. They are very suspicious.

In the end, I would suggest just using normal flour and adding salt and baking powder yourself. If you are using a recipe that calls for self-raising or self-rising or pulling-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps flour, just find a similar recipe that calls for normal flour to see how much salt and baking powder should be used.


What does a meat thermometer display if the meat temperature is uneven? Let's say I'm cooking a piece of meat and the whose outside temperature is higher than its inside temperature. If I stick a meat thermometer through the piece of meat so that part of the needle is at the center and part of it is at the surface, what reading will the thermometer report?

the temperature in the center (minimum temperature)
the temperature at the surface (maximum temperature)
some average temperature

Also, would the reading be skewed if most of the needle is not touching anything? Should I stick the needle through a second piece of meat so that the whole needle is covered?

(Background: I'm thinking of food safety)

The sensor in your thermometer is located at the tip of the needle, so you're measuring wherever the tip of the needle ended up.

If the tip of the needle it not touching anything (or is touching the pan or cooking surface) your readings will be skewed.


Can I use a plastic tub to ferment sauerkraut? I have always used glass jars, crocks, etc. but found a nice plastic tub....will this work okay?

I ferment in plastic tupperware all the time. As long as it's a food-safe plastic (BPA free is what you want I think), you should be fine. That said, if it's just the one tub, I'm not sure it's worth it, unless you devote an entire shelf of your fridge to kraut and the tub fits perfectly. (And even then I'd recommend getting a set of smaller, stackable containers instead. That way you could take one out at a time and not disturb/introduce outside air to the rest of your kraut.) Here are some things I know about fermenting in plastic tupperware. I hope you like text.

One is that you will likely never be able to use that tub for anything else again, ever, unless you're okay with whatever else you put in it smelling like kraut. One time I whipped some cream in a tupperware I had stored kimchi in. That was a mistake. (That said, you get a really interesting texture if you fold whipped cream into egg and scramble it.) Seriously, I scrubbed with baking soda, dish soap, clorox, hydrogen peroxide, rubbing alcohol, and everything else I could think of afterwards just to see if I could remove the smell. I couldn't.

Two is that you might need to seriously reinforce the seal of the lid. Most plastic containers don't have a true airtight seal or airlock. You could have issues with contaminants down the way that you don't need to worry about as much with glass crocks designed for fermentation. You can fill your tub with water and tip it over to see how well it holds liquid, but that still won't tell you about air.

I only ferment kimchi in plastic because, hey, I can't use those tupperware for anything else now, and the brine also dissolves flour, kills yeast, and likely strips paint. It's powerful. But even so, I don't leave it at room temperature once it stops actively fermenting. Kraut is not as crazily strong as kimchi, in my experience, so I'd be even more careful about storage conditions if you use a plastic tub with a non-airtight seal. Even if the acidity of the brine should protect it, better safe than sorry.

Two and a half is never EVER travel with a plastic tub of fermented goodness that is NOT double-bagged, at least. Double-bagged in a cooler is better.

Three is to consider where you'll put the tub, physically. Will it fit in your fridge, and can you pack effectively around it? If you don't do cold-storage, or have a fermentation fridge, I'd honestly reconsider changing your container drastically to anything, especially a plastic tub not designed for it. If your current method ain't broke, don't fix it.

Four is that fermenting in plastic leads to a less-pretty presentation. I can use a bright red, bubbling jar of kimchi as a centerpiece at dinner if I want to. Or just tie a ribbon around the rim and say "Merry Christmas!" Sauerkraut looks cool too. So do pickles, if I break my fingers arranging them in the jar. The plastic tub, possibly wrapped up in grocery or trash bags, really doesn't have the same effect. Same delicious product, but the tub cannot be used for decoration. Plastic just lacks that kind of charisma.

So, again, yes, you can ferment in food-safe plastic, and it's cheap and great for cold-storage in a fridge because it stacks easily, but I would definitely take a good look at the seal, and think about your typical storage practices. I love my tupperware-kimchi and have no issues with it, but that stuff is nearly indestructible. Even with all my positive experiences using plastic for kimchi, my other ferments, such as kraut, dill pickles, carrots, squash, onions, garlic, okra... all get glass jars, just to be safe.


Does celery powder have any non-preservative use? Recently I've been seeing an increasing number of packages with labels such as "Contains no added nitrates or nitrites (except those naturally occurring in the celery juice powder)".  Does celery powder have any use other than as a method of sneaking nitrates into things?

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

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

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


Rodent droppings on cast-iron frying pan I recently discovered I have mice or rats in my garage, where I had some stuff stored for space purposes, including a barely-used newly-seasoned frying pan. I found a bunch of rodent droppings in it (blegh), and I scrubbed it hard, twice, with soap and hot water, and washed it out.

I also re-seasoned it (stove-top method, not oven method, where the oil smokes and burns) since the seasoning was not that well done. I thought the soap/water/scrub would damage it, but I didn't see any visible deterioration of seasoning.

I have young children (two under 5 years old), and I'm not a food safety expert. Is this enough, or do I need to do something more to guarantee the sanity of my cast iron pan?

Edit: After doing some reading, I've found a few things to verify:

Bleach dissolved in water, soaked for ~5 minutes, will kill everything rodent-specific. But what will that do to my cast iron?
Droppings themselves are easily discarded, if not green (from poison)
Rodent urine (which will exist anywhere droppings exist) will soak into the seasoning, even if it's sterilized now.
Baking it in the oven for a couple of hours is probably a safe way to sterilize it. 350F seems okay. Is it high enough?

Based on all this information, I think the best approach would be to strip down and re-season the pan from scratch. That'll remove anything soaked into the existing seasoning, and it'll sterilize the surface.

If it's cast iron, and you're really paranoid about it, just stick it in the oven, run a clean cycle, then re-season. Cast iron can withstand stupidly large amounts of heat: in traditional Chinese cookery, woks are cleaned by building a big fire, and throwing them in...When the fire burns out, you dig out your wok, re-season, and you're back in business.

If it's stainless, just stick it in the dishwasher.


How to clean up the smell of egg from a pot? When I cook eggs, the smell spreads to other dishes, such as glasses or cups. This is very embarrassing. I used hot water to wash them, but failed to remove the smell.  How do I clean them to remove it?

I've never heard of lingering egg smell from eggs. Is there a possibility that there is a certain amount of sulfur content in your water?

  Sulfur water (or sulphur water) is a condition where the running water contains a high amount of hydrogen sulfide gas that escapes into the air when the plumbing line is opened, giving a distinct "rotten egg" smell.

  The condition indicates a high level of sulfate-reducing bacteria in the water supply. This may be due to the use of well water, poorly treated city water, or water heater contamination.

Wikipedia: Sulfur water


How can I add flavor to green tea at home? I often buy green tea with different flavors like lemon, strawberry, and jasmine from the market. I want to add these flavors at home.  Can you recommend how I might do this?

Depends on the flavour I suppose. For the most direct route, I would try just steeping the fruit/flavour in the tea/water for a bit (ie: sliced strawberry, sliced ginger, lemon zest/peel, etc...). I make a ginger/lemon "tea" with thin slices of lemon zest by just steeping it in water. No reason you couldn't add some green tea leaves to that as well. Lemon Juice, I add before serving.

As mentioned finding an extract could work as well. No idea about amounts, you'll have to do some research as to what is safe/appropriate. I haven't used them.

For a Jasmine Tea, I would probably just find a good tea purveyor and find a proper Jasmine Tea.


How can I use these new findings on tomatoes to my advantage? A new study appears to suggest that the characteristics that make a tomato most appealing when choosing one at the store also make it the least appealing when biting into it. Apparently, it is the very same gene that can either make a tomato uniform or tasty, depending on whether it is "switched on" or not.

It sounds promising, if the industry picks up the study's suggestions. But not that I, the consumer, have this information, is there anything I can do to get a better product? Do I just look for uglier tomatoes?

Picking a tomato which is individually ugly isn't going to help you.  It's still the same variety and grown, stored and shipped under the same conditions as the other tomatoes in the pile.

Try looking for a store (farmers' and ethnic markets are good for this) which has a whole bin of ugly tomatoes; those are a different variety and/or handled differently.  Heck, here in California, there's even a hybrid brand which is marketed under the name "Uglyripe", which is quite tasty.

Also, just "ugly" isn't a sufficient description.  What you're looking for is irregularities in color, shape and size.  Bruising, blemishes, wormholes and brown streaks don't indicate a better-tasting tomato, just one which has been abused.


Oatmeal pancake deflates My wife's diet breakfast includes a pancake made only with:

one egg;
one spoonful of oat flour.

I also add two spoonful of water. I have tried different procedures to make it the best possible.

The best, so far, is to combine the yolk with the sifted oat flour and the water in one cup, whip the egg white with the planetary mixer for five minutes and finally mix all together. I cook the pancake on the electric crepe maker at 75% power, covered, until the top starts to dry, which takes about 10 minutes, then I turn it on the other side and cook for a couple of minutes.

It is still not satisfactory: if I cook it less, it deflates; if I keep it more, it is no longer soft. Maybe I should cook faster, but in this case the bottom burns and the top and the center remain too moist, flattening completely when I turn it. Using less water seemed to have a harder result. I still have to find the sweet spot.

I made at least 30-40 pancakes until now, but since the "search space" is so big, I need some directions: for example maybe when I used less water I made some other mistake, and dismissed an otherwise good idea.

Is the egg enough to keep the structure once the air cools down, or the missing sugar or gluten would have a role in it, so their absence is important, so I have to add some?

Maybe should I try to cook it in the oven?

I know the starting temperature of eggs has a role in whipping, but can it make the pancake deflating?

As it inflates correctly as is, would baking powder help? How much should I use?

Any advice would be appreciated.

P.S.: my wife is lactose intolerant, so I cannot add milk.

P.P.S.: excuse me for my English, it's the first time I write about cooking and I'm almost sure some words will be wrong: I would also appreciate corrections of them.

I've never made pancakes with this exact kind of recipe before (though I have made some that were similar, with eggs, no other leavening, etc.).  My limited experience with similar recipes is that I ended up with a rather spongy result, not really a "light" pancake.  Thus, it might not be possible to get a very light result without modifying the recipe a bit.

Nevertheless, here are a few thoughts:

Is the egg enough to keep the structure once the air cools down, or the missing sugar or gluten would have a role in it, so their absence is important, so I have to add some?

I don't think you're going to be able to get a very light textured pancake just using eggs, oat flour, and water.  Even when whipping the whites, at best you'll get something with the texture of a souffle omelet (that is, an omelet made by whipping the egg whites separately first), but it will be weighed down a bit by the oat flour.

Eggs can provide structure, but my guess is that the fine bubbles in the egg whites are simply not providing enough lift, probably because they aren't being trapped sufficiently in the structure of the pancake.  Yes, gluten and/or sugar could help reinforce the structure (as in angel food cake, for example), but I'd try leavening first.

Maybe should I try to cook it in the oven?

You could try this.  Puffy pancakes, puffy omelets, souffles, etc. can work better when made in the oven.  The bubbles have more time to expand as the batter bakes, and you don't have to do a flip, which may squash the structure.

I know the starting temperature of eggs has a role in whipping, but can it make the pancake deflating?

I doubt that's a significant issue here.  If you're whipping up the egg whites well, you will have incorporated a significant amount of air.  Having the eggs not too cold may help with that a bit, but there's only so much the egg whites can do.  Once they are mixed with yolks and oats, they will be weighed down a bit.

As it inflates correctly as is, would baking powder help? How much should I use?

If the problem you are having is that it seems to rise properly but then deflates when flipped, baking powder could indeed help.  "Normal" pancakes (with flour, etc.) tend to have an excess amount of baking powder in their batter to produce excess air.  Baking powder could continue to produce gas as the second side cooks and keep lifting the batter up.  I would start with a very small amount -- you'd probably only need a 1-2 teaspoons for a cup of oat flour, so if you're only using two tablespoons of flour, perhaps start with 1/8 teaspoon and see if it makes a difference.  If not, try 1/4 teaspoon or something in between.

In comments, you also mention that bubbles are appearing and popping on the surface -- keep in mind that you don't want to wait until a significant number of them pop before flipping, or you will lose the lift provided by the existing air bubbles from the egg whites.  I'd try to adjust that first -- usually, taking so long to cook pancakes will cause too much gas to bubble out before they are flipped.

But since you've already tried cooking them faster and have not seen better results, I'd recommend trying the oven baking technique or try adding a tiny bit of baking powder and see if it makes a difference first.  I know I haven't narrowed down your options much, but it's tough to figure out how to make these better without seeing exactly how they are already coming out and trying a few experiments.

Perhaps others have better ideas.  Do let us know if you come up with something that works.


What qualities should I be looking for when making the best French Toast? Should it be a thick slice of bread? Should it be made with challah bread? Should it be slightly crispy and brown on the outside but mushy on the inside?

Great french toast starts with the bread. You're looking for two things: thick slices, and staleness. Why stale? Stale bread has enough firmness to stand up to the custard. If you don't have stale bread available, you can set it out the night before in a simple wire rack. At least 8 hours should be enough to stale it up nicely. They will be rather firm to the touch.

The ideal finished product is crispy on the outside and creamy in the middle. This might be what you mean by mushy, but mushy in my mind is kind of negative. The key to accomplishing this is to let your bread soak in the custard only 30 seconds per side, but then move it to a rack to sit for another 2 minutes further. This extra set time allows the custard to penetrate deep inside the bread, and be distributed much more evenly.

The final trick to getting a nice crispy crust, is to cook it twice. First in the pan/griddle as you normally would, but then 5 minutes in a 375 F oven on a rack. This brief oven stint crisps up the exterior nicely.

I highly suggest watching Alton Brown's Good Eats: French Toast episode. That's where I learned the oven trick, and his recipe hasn't done me wrong since.

Regarding challah, I've never had it, but based on the Wikipedia description it sure sounds like a good candidate. Just make sure you slice and stale it overnight.


What exactly is essence? The most popular is the Brand's Essence of Chicken, but there are also other products that are "essence", like "essence of fish" and even "essence of beef". There are also other terms that seem to mean the same thing like, "extract of something" and "essential oils".

What exactly are these essences and extracts? Where do they come from? How are they processed?

Edit: Chicken essence recipe

Based on the recipe you provided, it's kinda like concentrated broth. It's produced by cooking the chicken covered in a double boiler, effectively steaming it and collecting the drippings.

I have no idea if that's exactly what's being sold in those nutritional supplement bottles, but given that people think the homemade version is, well, the homemade version, it must at least be close.


Is it possible to resume baking brownies the day after? I was making brownies late last night and left it in for twenty minutes. Took the brownies out and left them on the oven top. I was going to test them for being done, but became otherwise occupied and simply forgot (but I did remember to cover it, so they're quite moist today). When I went to have one tonight I found that it's slightly under done-- it might need another 5 minutes in the oven. But I'm unsure if that's safe or if that will ruin the brownies.

It's unlikely to work very well. The outside, which is already cooked, would come up to oven temperature almost immediately. Then you have to wait for the inside to get hot enough to cook, by which time the outside is burnt.

I suggest you might be better off cutting them first (assuming you baked them in a tray) then cooking a little more before serving warm. This means less far for the heat to penetrate, but also gives you the chance to check whether they're just underdone or actually uncooked. That's not easy to test with a skewer, especially with something that's meant to be moist. The difference is that raw or even worse slight warmed brownie mix doesn't keep at room temperature overnight while cooked brownies do (for several days). You'd only be using doneness as a proxy for temperature but it's a good one in this case.


Can gravlax be hung to dry? If I cure salmon into gravlax as made in this video featuring a Gordon Ramsey recipe, what would happen if I hung the cured salmon for let's say a week after curing has been done. Of course, hanging it in a suitable environment away from lecherous insects.

Ultimately, I want to make a salmon version of bokkoms.

I'd strongly advice against that. A cure only works as long as the salt and sugar concentrations are high enough. And although Gravlax does a decent job of infusing the salmon with both the content in the salmon itself is not nearly high enough to keep it preserved, it is the crust on the fish itself that keeps it ok to eat.

It is not a problem to keep your salmon under its crust for a week, just make sure to keep it on a rack so liquid can drain away.

What you could try is making a version of Stockfish but you'll need a dry and cool environment (like Norwegian cool). Stockfish is usually made with very lean fish, I don't know how that would work with fatty salmon. But a casual google seems to confirm people are making something called "salmon jerky" so it might just work.


Does one have to occasionally put up with this kind of nasty surprise after switching to organic beans? First I diversified my source of protein by eating beans. Then I was glad to find that it's a lot easier to find organic beans than organic beef. Even better, I could stock on a variety of beans and reduce my visit to the health food store to once every six months.

Now the bad news. Before cooking beans, I submerge them in water overnight. I'm now finding that one kind of beans is infected with insects. These living insects float to the surface. This happened despite that I stored the beans in an airtight container. Given the airtight storage, I'm guessing that I purchased the beans already contaminated, possibly with eggs.

Is this one of the distasteful surprises that one must put up with once in a while if one chooses organic beans? I'm guessing that the very reason we humans are interested in organic food—the absence of pesticides—is also the reason why insects will get attracted to them. Although they may be present just as much in other non-organic food, except that they would have perished.

In the old days it was apparently not uncommon to buy apples from the store and once in a while find a worm. These days even organic apples never show these undesirable proteins, possibly as a result of food irradiation.

Especially if you are vegetarian, I'd like to hear from you whether it's possible to look around for better stores, or whether this is part of the deal.

Organic or not, there is always a chance that an item, especially a dried and stored item can become infested and any point in the cycle.  Dried beans, it seems most likely to be from a storage issue at some point, but it really could be at any time.  I would take them back to the stores, give them an opportunity to correct the situation, then decide from their response if they are a supplier and if the brand is one that I would continue to use.

Now, for the bad news.  I a assuming you are in the US, but the same or similar statements are likely true elsewhere:  I farmed for a time, and was often asked why I did not get organic certification.  The reasons were simple, I did not agree with the rules associated with organic certification, the extra fees and inspections for the right to label my items in a way that, in my opinion, misleads the consumer.  "Organic" is a legal USDA labeling and rule set in the US, which the general public reads as natural, pesticide, herbicide and fungicide free, safe and sustainable agriculture.  That is what was intended, but once regulations and marketing gets involved, it means something very different.  Unless you grow the item yourself, or use a local, known source and learn their practices, you can almost be certain that pesticides were used, herbicides and fungicides may have been.

There are lists of "organic" controls that are allowed, and are used, but fall within the rules of organics.  The main but not exclusive rule is that they are from a natural source, ground rocks, plants, roots, etc.  Many degrade much faster than the lab created chemicals most farming uses, some are less harmful to non-target insects, but others are actually just as nasty and damaging as those foul smelling petroleum based chemicals wiping out bees, earth worms, other beneficial, and are not very good for humans.  Since agribussiness learned that there was money to be made behind that organic label they got rules passed that allow them to sell inferior product for premium prices.

Sorry, I do not mean to be a downer, but, for most items I would highly recommend finding your local farmers market, and when you go to it, talk to the farmers.  Find some you trust and support the local guys who are doing it right.  End of my opinionated reply though.


How to do a beer-butt chicken? A friend of mine told me how great Beer-Butt Chicken is. Apparently you take a chicken and beer flavors it in well, the butt. How can I cook the chicken like that while keeping the beer in the chicken?

If you google beer can chicken, you will find many, many recipes and descriptions.

The basic idea is that you use a half-empty beer can as stand for the chicken, placing the chicken's cavity on top of the can before roasting or grilling.

The idea is that the aroma from the beer will transfer to the chicken, and the steam will help keep it moist.

You can even buy commercial racks to do the same thing without the beer can.

My personal opinion is that both of these ideas are bunk:

Very few if any aromatic molecules will transfer to the chicken, and even if they do, they will not penetrate past the surface
The steam will not keep the chicken moist, as the dryness of the meet is essentially a function only of the temperature to which you cook it, and very little else.  If the chicken is cooked to too high a temperature, then the proteins will tighten up and express water making the chicken tough, rubbery, and dry tasting.   The minimal amount of steam cannot change this fact.


What to do with browned butter after frying a steak I have cooked a steak Gordon Ramsay style (oil, butter, thyme and garlic).

Now after I have prepared and seared the steak, what can I do with the remainders in the pan?

Its brown butter with the seasoning in it, do I just dispose of it, use for some other meat (although I have an issue making it medium-rare, since the pan is supposed to be extremely hot before dropping the meat in, but that would burn the thyme and garlic completely).

Often, assuming they are not too burned, you would make a simple pan sauce from the fond and fat left after pan-cooking a steak.  Methods vary, but might include sauteeing some shallots or onions in the fat, deglazing with wine, and/or adding a slurry of flour to thicken.  You would then serve with the steak.

Other than this, there is no general purpose use for the left over pan drippings.


What is this plastic handle that is used for corn and watermelon called? I've seen these plastic handle things and searched for phrases like the one in the question title but failed to find it. What are they called? And where can I get buy them from?

They're just called corn holders, or corn skewers. I've never seen them holding watermelon before. As a matter of fact, they don't seem to me to be appropriate for watermelon. I don't see how they would make watermelon easier to eat and they're quite sharp. Especially for a kid, that seems kind of dangerous.


Can I get botulism by using 2 cups vinegar to 8 cups water when canning pickles - as most recipes require 1:1 ratio of vinegar to water? I recently canned pickles using 2 cups vinegar to 8 cups water ratio but I see that most canning recipes ask for 1:1 ratio of vinegar to water. My question is: Can I get botulism from using 2 cups vinegar to 8 cups water? (I boiled 10 min in water bath after).

While no one will tell you if you will get botulism or not, it's the acidity in pickles that makes them safe.  According to Douglas Baldwin
"Food pathogens can't grow below a pH of 4.0.  5% vinegar is 25% more acidic than this."  He goes on to talk about the pasteurization step.  You'll have to scroll a bit to read the section.  We don't know your vinegar's starting acidity, and you diluted it significantly....So, you would have to calculate the total acidity of your brine, beginning with the acidity of your vinegar, to determine if you are within the correct safety parameters.


Can I use oil spray as a salad dressing? I have been using organic, all natural no-stick cooking spray (organic canola oil) for cooking recently. I know it is good for frying but I'd like to know if I can extend the usage of it. Can I use it as a salad dressing?

It won't have much flavor: unlike Olive, Canola Oil is rather bland, which makes it good for frying and lubricating when you don't want to add to the taste. You'll probably just end up with oily salad.


how to make fruit-juice flavored gelatin firm vs watery? I have been mixing unflavored gelatin with fruit juice to make flavored jello dessert (to have a healthier and more natural, as well as cheaper fruit jello dessert).
I mix the proportions of gelatin to liquid according to instructions. I use hot water mixed with room-temperature juice (making sure proportions of liquid to powder are as needed), mix very thoroughly, and set it overnight in fridge.
However, I cannot seem to get a firm jello result - it's firm at the top but watery at the bottom, even after a night+a day of being in fridge.
Is the fact that I don't boil the juice I use an issue? Should I not be using water at all but just juice?

First of all, adding more gelatin is not something I would try. If the problem were too little gelatin, you would have a result that is uniformly too-soft or even liquid, not a difference between top and bottom. Also, adding more "just to be sure" is a bad idea in general, since extra gelatin makes for a rather unpleasant rubbery texture and also reduces aroma.
You don't give much information to go on, but I will assume that you meant

I use hot water mixed with room-temperature juice (making sure proportions of liquid to powder are as needed), mix very thoroughly, and set it overnight in fridge.

to be literally your full process. If that's so, then you didn't properly use the gelatin, and it is normal that you are seeing weird results.
The proper way to use gelatin is to bloom it.

Take the powder and let it soak in some tap water - 5% to 10% of the final liquid volume is common. You will recognize it's done when it has swollen up and formed a single wet mass, you can barely recognize the separate grains
Heat your juice to room temperature or slightly above
Stir in the bloomed gelatin into the juice
Warm up the whole mixture, without letting it get too hot, not even simmer. It should be between 50 C and 70 C when you take it off the heat. The gelatin will have dissolved before reaching the temperature, and you will have a uniform liquid.
Pour the mixture into a mold and put it in the fridge for several hours, best overnight.

This is the basic process for gelatin. It has a few variations (e.g. when you are making a whipped-cream mousse), but for your case, this is what will give you a proper juice-based dessert.


Why is my Bunn overflowing? We recently upgraded at the office from an old and cold Mr. Coffee 12-cup at work to an old but hot Bunn coffee maker. It is a 10-cup BX-B, and appears to have no damaged parts. However, when I brew coffee, it starts gurgling out of the top after the first thirty seconds of brewing.

After a taking-apart and cleaning of the basket and spray nozzle, the grind of the coffee was the first thing I tweaked. Initially it was slightly fine due to having been purchased for the colder pot. I got an appropriate auto-drip grind and it continued to overflow. I also tried a larger style of coffee filter to ensure it wasn't overflowing with grounds getting down into the spout.

  After about thirty seconds of a weak stream through the basket, water backs up to the point where it starts spilling, along with grounds, from the top of the brewing basket (where it meets the head of the base).

What should I do to counteract this behavior?

I can ask for a coarser grind from the local coffee shop if that would make a difference.
If it is a matter for concern, we are on the ninth floor of a building.
The taps in the building typically have signs of hard water.

I really would prefer to not go back to the colder pot since it brews less flavorful coffee, requires an excess of grounds to keep it from being watery, and takes 12-15 minutes to brew.

If I understand your description, it sounds as if water is flowing into the basket more quickly than it is flowing out. This could require adjusting the nozzle feeding the basket or the dispenser on the basket; probably the former, from your description of how soon after brewing the problem starts. Is there any way to slow down the inflow?

According to the Bunn troubleshooting guide, it is also possible that the coffee is too finely ground, or that the filter is not as permeable as it should be - naturally, Bunn recommends you use their brand of filters, and if you aren't, that's an easy thing to try. They also suggest that the sprayhead may be missing (it could also just be loose), and that you avoid finely ground coffee, decaffeinated coffee, and soft water.


Why do things smell good while cooking but have little flavour when finished While cooking, particularly things that cook slowly on the hob, it smells really good while cooking but when finished it never seems to have as much flavour as I hoped.

Am I doing something wrong or does this happen to everyone?

There are two components to flavor: aroma and taste.  The wonderful smells you get are the volatiles of the ingredients you have been cooking, and while they add a lot to dishes, aromas are just part of what makes food enjoyable. One also needs to worry about taste, and that may be the missing part.  When I decided to improve my cooking three years ago I was mystified by flavors.  I wanted to know how spices worked and how to use them better, but all the reading and experimenting did not help my cooking.

Then I learned the Remick Maxim (lower the temperature when possible) and the quality of what I made went up more than in the entire previous year.  I then heard Thomas Keller speak about salting and things clicked.  One has to get the salt, acid, and sweetness of the dish right or everything else amounts to nothing.  Once I learned to pay attention to taste, spices became easier.

The next steps have been:

Understand caramelization (the Maillard process or reaction), it is a great source of flavor.
The main ingredient needs to be rich in flavor. Even something as simple as rice will make a difference.  Try making rice with Basmati from India or Pakistan, where they age the rice before selling.
There are a lot of underdeveloped recipes out there.  Beware.
Use spices in groups that traditionally grow in the same region.  Cumin and coriander, basil and thyme.


Why does microwave popcorn burn? I've been experimenting some with do it yourself microwave popcorn, and some trouble getting the 'burn time' right has led me to a question that I can't find a good, definitive answer to.

What is the scientific explanation for the mechanism for how popcorn burns?  I'm not looking for "Because it gets too hot", but what gets too hot, how does it actually get that way?  Microwaves don't just heat everything up (like a stove does), so it's not as straightforward as that.  You can put many foods inside of a microwave and massively overcook them without burning.  So what's special about popcorn that causes it to burn?  I would prefer either a detailed chemistry/physics answer, or  a reliable, science-based source.  From looking around online, there are lots of semi-reliable opinions on this, none of which agree with each other.

For example, this very old Chicago Tribune article on Popcorn seems to say that it's a problem of "finding" the kernels.  Really?  Others claim it is the kernel overheating, or the bag overheating, or the oil overheating (yet no-oil still burns, though that may contain some oil from the corn itself I suppose), or gnomes lighting them on fire with matches (Well, no, but it's about as reliable as anything else I've found).

And related to this, what control do I have over this other than time.  On a stove, I can reduce the heat; for example, if I'm cooking on the stove with butter, if I cook at '3' I can cook almost all day without burning my butter, while at '4' it browns pretty quickly; so I can choose whichever setting based on that.  What in a microwave would be similar (in allowing me to cook the kernels more thoroughly - not just take longer - without risking burning).  What ingredients or microwave settings can I control?

I think most of your confusion comes from the paradigm of water.  Water (under kitchen conditions) will not get any hotter than its boiling point.

Oil has no such limitation.  You microwave will heat oil well past water's boiling point and all the way up past the smoke point to the flash point of the oil.  At the flash point, the oil will actually catch fire.

If you put a bag of popcorn in a microwave on high for an extended period of time you'll see this as actually burned corn.

Also, if a significant mass resting against the paper bag gets above paper's flash point (451 degrees F) it will also catch fire.

My little sister has proven this true time after time.


Beef stew was left cooling on the stove for like six hours I cooked a pot of beef stew...I slow cook the roast and vegetables until 2am I fell a sleep and woke up around 9am is it safe to eat?

Seven hours is not much, starting with a sterilised stew. Use you senses. Are there bubbles? Does it smell strange? Have a mouthfull, does taste off? If not, I would eat it. In fact, I wouldnt even give it a second thought after seven hours starting from fresh.. but US regulations, yes, would say it cannot be served. Good you are not running a restaurant, but this is just home cooking, er?..


cake baking problem (white lumps of flour) I have a cake recipe called oil cake that has been in my family for a long time. It calls for flour and sugar and to make a well and add egg, buttermilk, cocoa, pinch of salt, cinnamon, and oil. Then add 1 cup of boiled water to which 2 tsps of baking soda have been added. Sometimes I mix it first and then add the water w/ b soda and sometimes I add it all together. My problem is sometimes I have white clumps in the batter and they are still there when the cake is done baking. I can't figure out what the problem is. Is the water too hot? Which is the correct way to add it, before I mix the rest of the ingredients or  after? Help I love this cake but sometimes it comes out perfect and other times not. I am at a loss. thanks for the advice

How it's supposed to be done

The lump problem is straightforward: your mixing technique is failing.

When you are using a well, you have to sift the flour first. Then you add a little bit of the homogenous liquid. So, you don't pour oil, eggs, etc. into the well, but first get them all into another bowl (including the water), and mix them well, preferably with an electric mixer, until they are very homogenous. Ideally, the eggs will emulsify the oil a bit.

For the actual ingredients mixing, you now pour just a little bit of your eggy mixture into the well, maybe 50 ml. Then you take a spoon or other utensil and start stirring the egg mixture without touching the flour with the spoon. A little bit of flour from the walls of the well will stick to the liquid surface and start sinking in, thickening the liquid. Once it is noticeably thicker than the pure mixture, you add some more of the egg mixture to thin it back, then continue back and forth, thickening the batter with the flour then thinning it, until you are done.

When you feel more comfortable and know well how the flour and liquid acts, you can start carefully spreading some flour from the far side of the flour "volcano hill" (not the well edge) onto the liquid, to get it a bit quicker. But in general, it is a finely tuned skill which you have to learn from experience, by doing it slowly and with concentration. If you impatiently stir too much flour into the liquid, it forms the lumps you described.

A more sensible alternative

This is how to execute the recipe correctly. It is a good, but very long method for even mixing. But frankly, there is no need to use it. Nowadays we have electric mixers, which will mix the flour for you into the liquid ingredients without creating lumps. And we have scales, so we can weigh the ingredients. So the second advantage of the well method - you stop mixing the moment the batter has the right consistency (which is necessary when you cannot measure the flour, or don't have a written recipe and are playing it by feeling) - is also moot. If you don't want to spend half an hour mixing your cake batter by your grandma's way, just emulsify the liquid ingredients with the mixer, then slowly add the sifted flour with the mixer turned on on low speed, and stop the moment it's mixed in. That's it.

Water temperature and boiling

As for the water, I see no good reason to boil it from a food science point of view. All the explanations I can think of make it seem unnecessary.

The recipe is so old, it comes from a time with bad water supply. The water was always boiled for safety and to precipitate scale, rust and other stuff present. Shouldn't be a concern today. (If your water is very hard, filter it instead).
The eggs and oil are meant to emulsify, to give you a smoother mouthfeel in the cake. It is like making mayonnaise, and works best when the eggs are warm - but fails completely when you make them so hot that they curdle. 72 Celsius would be optimal, but anything between 60 and 83 Celsius should work. If your water is warmer than that, it will curdle your eggs, doing more damage than good. So, if you are pouring the water in just after boiling, stop doing it (although it doesn't cause the lumps you described, it causes cruder texture overall). The best thing would be to warm it to 80 Celsius using a thermometer, then pour it into the eggs, beat, then add the oil. If you don't have a thermometer, take it off the heat the moment you see the first tiny bubble forming on the bottom, then let it cool for a minute before pouring.
The soda dissolves quicker in warm water. This is still not a reason to get it to a full boil - take it again to 80 Celisius, instead of boiling first and cooling it afterwards.
The whole ingredients are too cold when coming directly from the fridge, and the hot water is supposed to correct that. But in fact, this won't work well. Temperature shocks are not good for cake ingredients, especially for eggs. You should use room temperature eggs and buttermilk instead.


Used warm setting by accident I put some uncooked stew meat and veggies on this morning and left for 5 hours. When I came home I realized it was only set on warm. Is my meat safe to eat? I have now put it on the stove to cook.

jdev is right about the USDA's cooking temps, but I would be very surprised if a warmer setting got your food above 140 degrees F (60 C).  When food is under that temperature, bacteria reproduce almost geometrically.  Later cooking will reduce your risk but not eliminate it.  In your case, if you didn't spend quality time in your bathroom last night, you dodged a bullet.

Most of the bugs that make us sick don't grow well below 40 degrees F and are killed when heated above 140 degrees F.  In particular, E coli, Salmonella (various types), Vibrio (various types), and Listeria monocytogenes, which are the most common of the bacteria that give us food poisoning, are all killed by heat.  We tend to get sick from them mainly because we ate raw/undercooked food or the bugs got into the food after the cooking is done.

There are a few nasties, however, that can leave behind heat-stable toxins even after they have been killed -- most notably, Staphylococcus aureus.  Staph a is a very common bacteria, the source of many illnesses.  If your food was contaminated with Staph a before you cooked it, and they had time to multiply, then even though the bugs themselves would have been killed by the cooking, their toxins would still be in the food -- and you would have gotten to know your toilet very, very well (symptoms at both ends of the GI tract begin within about 1-6 hours after eating and are severe, but they resolve in 48 hours).

As a general rule, don't eat or use meat, dairy products, or cut fruits/vegetables that have been in the "danger zone" (40-140F) for over 4 hours, even if you planned to cook it later.  (Obviously, there are a lot of exceptions to this rule, but that's another long post.)


How to recognize that a hard cheese is mouldy? I have a piece of comte (French hard cheese) open for some time (1 week or so). How do I recognize that it's moldy and therefore not good to eat? There're a thin non-connected layer flour on the piece of the cheese which makes it quite difficult to visually detect mold.

This is what the cheese should look like.

Edges on a cheese like this are referred to as the rind. Any white on there is fine unless it starts looking fluffy, even then you could probably just cut it off. The rind here and on many hard cheeses is a quite hard layer of dried cheese and protects the cheese inside.

If the yellow section of the cheese had mold on it that would indicate the cheese had become moldy after being cut or if there was a blue or green mold growing anywhere on this type of cheese. This would normally indicate the cheese had been kept badly. If your fridge is clean and dry wrapped hard cheese should keep a couple of months.


What's the best way to store potatoes and maximize their shelf-life? What's the best place and way to store potatoes so they keep fresh longest?

Best thing to do is to keep them out of the light in an cool dark dry place. I usually put them in a hessian bag to try and keep the moisture away.

Don't store them in the fridge or anywhere that gets direct sunlight.


How long does unrefrigerated shredded cheese last? I left an unopened package of shredded mozarella cheese out unrefrigerated last night after going grocery shopping, and found it today, 16 hours later. Should I toss it?

No, it's fine.
It wasn't opened or anything? Then nothing is wrong with it.
If you already opened it, smell it.


When a recipe asks to add spices to the oil, can you add the spices directly to the sauce for the same effect? Many chefs add spices to the oil because the "oil brings out the flavors". But I want to experiment with different spices and quantities (which is hard because you can't taste the oil and predict the end result). My question - when a recipe clearly asks for spices in the oil, how can you add the spices to the finished sauce for the same effect?

The effect will be different for a few reasons.

When you add spices to hot oil, they cook at a considerably higher temperature (up to around 200°C) than in a simmering sauce (100°C as it's likely to be mostly water).  Important cooking chemistry happens at this higher temperature, so the flavour is actually changed (just as with onions and garlic).
Whole or coarse spices sometimes pop and break up (I often add whole or lightly crushed cumin seeds to hot oil and fry,  but if you add them after adding watery liquids they get stuck in your teeth).  This can be mitigated by using finely crushed/ground spices.
Even if the oil is cold, many major flavour compounds are much more soluble in oil than water, capsaicin being a significant example.  The flavour extraction will be affected.  Taking chilli flakes as an example, you can add them later, even at the table, but the heat will be concentrated in the flakes; adding them at the beginning of cooking allows the flavour to infuse the whole dish.  Again finer spices can help here by dispersing in the sauce.

On the other hand it's perfectly sensible to add black pepper to a simmering sauce, to taste.  Turmeric is also often added towards the end of cooking as too much cooking removes some of the best elements of the flavour.  Paprika is also sometimes added late (or even to the oil and at the end).

Bearing this in mind, experimenting is a good thing.  If you put a baseline level of spice in the oil, you can get away with topping up the flavour, with a little care.


How do they extract kernels from sunflower seeds in mass production? Every time I seed a gunny sack of sunflower seed kernels in a supermarket, I wonder how they are extracted from their seeds. It is very difficult to extract even one of them by hand without smashing its kernels, I really wonder the process that extracts mass of them.

How do they do it? Is there a documentary or Youtube video about it?

By using a dehuller machine. See:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hegzzj9Rzk
or
http://www.buhlergroup.com/global/en/products/dehuller-dgba.htm

How does a dehuller work? I don't know, but it seems that Google does:

  The most popular decorticator for sunflower is proposed by the Bühler
  Cie. It consists in a rotating blade that propels the seeds by
  centrifuge force against a wall. It functions on one impact. It is
  designed for partial removal of hulls because due to its principle, it
  is not able to carry out a good dehulling without increasing the force
  of the impact. The kernel oil content is so high in sunflower that
  under the violence of he chock, some oil can be transferred to the
  hulls and is lost. Moreover, increasing the rotating speed of such
  dehuller drives to increase the production of fines that are difficult
  to separates from hulls. Another mono-chock kind of dehuller is
  air-jet impact where the propelling of the seeds is done by a strong
  current of air. Multi-chocks dehullers like the Ripple mill improve
  the dehulling quality because they carry out several impacts on the
  achene with milder violence and enable en enhanced separation of hulls
  without generating an excess of fines.

See: http://www.creol.fr/CTMSite/creol/us/travaux/img/dehulling_3.pdf

See also: http://www.buhlergroup.com/northamerica/downloads/DGBA_Sunflower_Dehuller.pdf for some schematics of the inside of the machine and some insights about the way it works.


Is it true that bananas are radioactive? Is it true that bananas are radioactive, and if you eat too many it can kill you? If yes then how many bananas are good to eat at once.

Yes, it's true that bananas are radioactive, however, the amount of radiation that you get from eating a banana is negligible. It's also true that eating too many bananas can kill you, but if you manage to eat enough bananas to get radiation poisoning, you're going to die from something else long before potassium exposure comes into the equation - like, say, the death penalty after murdering the next person to bring a banana within 50 miles of you.

Source https://xkcd.com/radiation/

Bananas are on the left, third from the top. To better communicate the scale, the top legal (i.e. totally negligible) radiation dose for US workers is equivalent to eating 500,000 bananas/year.

There is actually a unit of radiation exposure measurement called the Banana equivalent dose. Suffice to say, there are about a thousand other sources of radiation in your day to day life that you should worry about before how many bananas you eat starts to become a real concern. You can safely eat as many bananas as you please, at least, from a radioactivity standpoint.


How do I catch drippings on a charcoal grill? It's time for me to buy a charcoal grill. I am looking into the Weber 22.5 inch.

I hope I will be able to use it to get smokey flavor as well with Alton Brown's "wood chips in aluminum foil method".

However, I am worried about durability. Since the the shape of the grill is cylindrical, I suspect I am going to have a hard time catching drippings effectively. Most dripping catchers are rectangular.

How does one go about solving this? I am thinking of just using aluminum foil, but I am afraid that it might melt.

The melting temperature of aluminum is 660C/1220F. It's extremely unlikely your grill will ever achieve that temperature.

Although a rectangular pan doesn't fit a cylinder very well from a geometric perspective, in practice on a grill it fits just fine. Your food is rarely circular in shape either, after all. The Weber grills have a very good reputation as smoking/grilling devices. I wouldn't hesitate.