For safe boiling water canning, can I substitute acidity requirement using lime juice instead of lemon juice? is lime juice as acidic as lemon juice and therefor uses 1:1 substitution with lemon juice to ensure low acid food is acidic enough for boiling water canning?

Yes, for the most part, limes and lemons can be used interchangeably in recipes. However, it's important to note that lime juice is more acidic than lemon juice, so you may need to use a little less of it than what your recipe calls for. The general rule is 3/4 cup of lime juice substitutes for 1 cup of lemon juice.


Browning beef for beef stew? I'm following this recipe.

When they say "brown it," are they saying to just brown the edges....or all the way through? Assuming I just sorta brown the outside (but it's not cooked all the way though), is this safe?

Like the inside of my stew meat won't be cooked, is simmering it for 2 hours or so enough to cook it all the way through? I'm concerned about E. coli and all that nasty stuff.

Thanks!

The idea is to brown the outside of the meat in order to develop the flavour via the Maillard Reaction. This flavour will add to the richness and meatiness of the stew as a whole. Go ahead and give it a good crust. Don't overcrowd the pan or you will just end up steaming the meat in its own juices and it will never brown up: fry it in small batches instead.

Two hours braising in the stewing liquid will easily be enough to cook one-inch cubes of beef all the way through and will easily see off most nasty stuff.


How do I prevent my bread crust from drying out? When I make bread pizza or toasted sandwiches in my oven, the outer crust dries out. Which elements should I use for baking to prevent it from drying out?
My oven is 35 liters with convection.

Personally I've always found the best way to ensure a soft crust after baking is, while they are cooling on the side, to throw a clean damp cloth over the top. Only for a little while say 5-10mins and ensure the cloth is only damp, not soaking.


What's the correct way to store fats? What are the decision parameters, when you have rendered fat to store? Glass or plastic? Refrigerated or not? I'm not looking for long-term storage; just what's the best-practice way to store it for use over a month or two?

To store fats, you should always use glass as plastics react to fats by absorbing some and perhaps discoloring or transferring flavors to your fat.  Depending on use, I prefer to work with cold fat at the start as it has a much broader possible use and I don't like to wait when I make biscuits, so I keep mine in the fridge.  However, you gain very little extra life out of keeping it in the fridge and if you don't keep it in a sealed container you run a very real risk of flavor transference there to.  If you don't make pastry dough or other such, your counter top is a perfectly acceptable place to store, as long as you use it up before it goes rancid.  One thing to keep in mind is that fats can sometimes have very different shelf lives, so make sure you taste or smell before use, regardless of storage method.


How can I make melted chocolate set faster? I am going to be operating a stand selling frozen bananas (just like in Arrested Development), and we dip the bananas in chocolate. I bought some milk and dark chocolate wafers that can be used in fondu fountains, however we have no fountain. We will just be dipping the bananas in the warm chocolate.

My question is, how can I decrease the setting time of the chocolate? That is, I want the chocolate to solidify into a shell around the banana as quickly as possible so that the chocolate doesn't drip off the banana. Is there something that I can add to the melted chocolate wafers to decrease the set speed?

Edit: Just found this question, thanks to rumtscho's comment.
No-melt chocolate coating on ice cream bars

Modifying the chocolate mixture will be more delicate and time consuming than just keeping the bananas cool. If it were me, I would just look into that. Not too cool, mind you, or that would obviously affect the banana, but certainly cooler than the ambient outside temperature. In Arrested Development, it was a FROZEN banana stand. The chocolate would set very quickly in that case.


Enlarging from a home bakery to a commercial bakery I am presently a dessert baker in my licensed home kitchen and am moving to a retail storefront location with a commercial dessert bakery. My proprietary recipes for cheesecakes, layer cakes, brownies, cookies, and quick breads are adapted to produce excellent desserts in my 3 home ovens. I use radiant heat for baking them. Now, I'm scaling up. I have a HUGE concern about using a commercial convection oven to bake my products--especially the cheesecakes because they are so delicate. Some of my recipes require a water bath. Some do not. Are there any issues about which I need to watch in order to have my cheesecakes turn out with the same appearance and quality of product that I'm producing in my home ovens? Any tips please? Thanks much.

Much would depend on exactly what ovens you are either getting for the new location or that come with the new location. The particular commercial natural gas convection ovens I get to play with sometimes have blowers that can be high, low or off - but you risk more unevenness than a home oven if the blowers are off.

Mostly you need to experiment. Initially probably with less than a full batch, and then with a batch that fills the new oven(s) or is as large as you anticipate making in the new kitchen.

For bread, I find that the CNGCO's (as expected) cook quite a bit faster than my home non-convection oven at the same temperature. You may need to adjust both temperature and time to get similar results in new equipment. If you have 3 ovens in the new space, you will probably find that each one is somewhat different that the others, even if all three are the same make and model. (Edit, Add:) While I have never baked cheesecake in those ovens, it occurs to me that the regular kitchen staff (which I am not) do that with some regularity. I happen to be more prone to making yeast bread...

Don't expect to move in and start churning out perfection right away - it would be lovely if it happens that way, but surprising.


Sweet sauce for Peking Duck? I've always wondered what sauce they served with Peking Duck at various Chinese restaurants (at least in Australia anyway). Whenever I order Peking duck as takeout, they normally provide a cute little container with a dark liquidy sauce which has a rather sweet taste.

I'm inclined to believe that it could be sweet bean sauce as suggested at various places on the internet but from what I can tell, it's supposed to have a thick consistency. However, this is not the case here. Any ideas what it could be?

It's consistency and colour is very reminiscent of soy sauce but the taste is sweet, like black bean.

In America that sauce is hoisin sauce or possibly (very much less likely) duck sauce or plum sauce. Any of these can be found for purchase easily, or they can be made from scratch.


Thickening with flour I've been making braises and I'm intrigued by the different methods for thickening the sauce with flour. I've come across five strategies:

Coating browned meat with flour and cooking the flour before adding browned vegetables and liquids.
Coating the meat with flour before browning.
Coating the vegetables with flour after browning and cooking the flour before adding the browned meat and liquids.
For certain braises, Escoffier recommends mixing in roux before adding the liquids.
Whisking in beurre manié before reducing the sauce. (I suppose that the flour cooks as the sauce reduces.) Some recipes use a slurry with cornstarch or other starch instead.

What are the relative merits of each approach? Are they interchangeable?

Unless you are making a vegetarian braisé, I would suggest not browning the vegetables.

If you brown the vegetables and add them too early in the pot, then they will cook too much and be mushy in the end product.

I prefer not using flour when browning the meat too early because I tend to burn it; so I brown the meat, and after that, do a roux and re-add the meat and add liquid.

As for using beurre manié, for me it is just a thickening agent and is done at the end and should not really add additional flavour to the dish.


Are can openers like the original Swing-A-Way sold under a different name now? Swing-A-Way can openers used to be made in St. Louis, MO. After the family sold out they finally ended up being made in China. The quality went away. I thought I came across some info that the possibly former St. Louis factory/equipment was acquired by someone else and that a new company was making can openers with the same quality again but I can not document this now. Is that true? Is there another brand name selling them now?

Perhaps: http://www.ez-duz-it.com

St Louis, claims to be only one made in USA, Seems to fit time-wise.

per one of several catalog sites (http://www.sierravalleytrading.com/JOHN-J-STEUBY-CO_c_815.html)

John J Steuby Company
of Hazelwood, Missouri, has purchased the equipment used to manufacture the original,
MADE IN USA, SWING-A-WAY
can opener and now uses that equipment to manufacture the
EZ-DUZ-IT
can opener.


Extracting colour out of strawberries Are there any techniques which I can use to get the colour of strawberries condensed in a way that doesn't contain the flavour?

I am looking to colour cakes in particular with a more natural alternative to bottled colouring agents without affecting the flavour and thought strawberries might be a good place to start!

As the comments seem to suggest, making food coloring from strawberries is generally not done because there is not enough red pigment in the strawberries to develop a concentrated red dye.

Food dyes generally need to be really concentrated to provide the coloration without introducing too much liquid(especially in baked goods). It seems unlikely or at least very impractical to concentrate the pigment enough to be useable as food coloring (unless you want a pale pink).

In this article, someone makes a dye from strawberries to dye yarn: http://knitting.about.com/od/dyeingyarn/ss/Dyeing-Yarn-With-Strawberries.htm by boiling strawberries and then simmering for 20 minutes. But the concentration of the dye needed to dye yarn is much less than what would be need to dye cake. The dye would introduce way too much liquid in the cake before it can really dye the cake the vibrant red. It seems likely that if you boil down the strawberry liquid enough, you might be able to produce a dye that gives a light pink but nowhere near the bright red that you seem to want.


How do I leave fried eggs intact? Note: I looked through to see if there were any similar questions, but it appears that most of them were about eggs done over easy.

I like having my fried eggs over hard. Unfortunately, it seems that I am incredibly bad at producing a final result that is in one piece. What usually happens is that when I try to turn over the egg, it breaks apart and I am left with fried egg that's in a few different pieces. How can I prevent this from happening?

I usually try to cook fried eggs as follows:

Crack egg(s) into pan with oil.
Break yolk by poking it with a turner.
Wait until egg(s) solidify somewhat, attempt to turn egg(s) (and fail miserably).

It's possible that my pan is too small, but I've had this problem in the past as well with much larger frying pans, or that I'm not waiting long enough.

The easiest way is just like this. What's the best approach to get runny-yolk sunny side up fried eggs? but with broken yolks and more time.

This pan would would be perfect if it had a lid that fits, but this lid will be do the trick. Your pan should be non-stick with sloping sides, 8" is perfect for 2 eggs, but larger is fine too. I set the heat to one click below medium [YMMV*], and give the burner and pan a good 2 minutes to heat up. Add the butter and let it reach the point that it stops sizzling. When the butter stops sizzling, add the eggs. To keep track for this answer, I set my timer at this point. Let them cook uncovered until the bottom is opaque, about 1 minute. Add about 1 tablespoon of water and cover.

So far everything is just like the prior answer for sunny side up eggs.

Let the eggs steam until they start to get a bit of white on top, about 1 more minute. Now poke the yolks and use a spoon to baste the top of the eggs with hot butter, replace the lid. Let them cook until they are as hard as you like them. Mine looked just about done at 3.5 minutes. Had I just let them cook one more minute, covered, they would have been fine and ready to plate.

You don't need to flip. If you do choose to flip, don't do it until they eggs are very close to being done. You can use a spatula if you like, but I much prefer the pan-flip. He demonstrates it here at 3:05. Egg Flip Just be sure that your eggs are easily sliding around before you flip. The guy in the video makes it seem harder than it is. Since your yolks are already broken, it's really super easy if you have a non-stick pan with sloping sides and plenty of butter. So I flipped at 3.5 minutes, then covered and let them go for 30 more seconds.

Pro trick: before you plate the eggs, use a paper towel to wipe any extra butter out of the pan, then just tilt the eggs out of the pan onto the plate, that makes for a tidy presentation. I never touched a spatula to these eggs.

*YMMV Your Mileage May Vary


How important is the creaming process while making a cake? A few of the chocolate cake recipes I read always start with the step - mix butter and sugar until creamy. I've tried a couple of times but failed to create anything near to creamy. But a few recipes completely eliminate the creaming process, wherein the wet ingredients are added directly to the dry mix. I'm looking for a cake which has a light and moist texture. What should I do? All my previous cakes were either too airy or grainy! On a side note, no matter how much time I mix, I'm not getting the sugar to completely dissolve in the butter. Should I be adding more butter?

The purpose mixing the butter and sugar until creamy is to distribute air through the batter that will help leaven the cake in the oven. Skipping this step can create a denser cake.   You want to add the air into the batter before adding the flour in order to prevent over mixing, which creates gluten; causing a tougher texture.

Beating the eggs until foamy and folding them into the batter or adding the eggs to the butter/sugar and beating until fluffy will also create a lighter texture.

The sugar does not need to dissolve in the butter, but it should be evenly distributed. This site gives a good visual on how creamed butter & sugar should look.


Alternatives to acetate? What are some alternatives to using acetate strips?  I'm not interested in a specific application here, so feel free to give ideas for all types of techniques.  Under what culinary circumstances, if any, can they be substituted with a silpat?  Parchment paper?  Other types of plastic?

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


How to make the sour cream that some restaurants serve with quesadillas? I live in Belgium and I can't find where to buy SOUR cream, which is amazing with quesadillas.

Is there a way to make it myself?

http://foodies.blogs.starnewsonline.com/files/2010/05/cosmic_quesadilla.jpg

There are many variants of sour cream. I am not quite up to date on the naming of dairy products in Belgium, but don't you find sour cream labeled as "zure room" (Dutch) or "crème aigre" (French)?

Mexican sour cream (Crema Mexicana) has however a higher fat content than the sour cream commonly available in European countries. A close approach is crème fraîche, but it might not be just as sour. If you want to make it yourself, you can add living bacteria culture (e.g. from yogurt) to heavy cream (fresh cream with >35% fat) and keep it at roughly 37°C until it reaches the required thickness.


Is mixing coffee with milk directly unhealthy? Scientifically speaking, is there a reason not to mix coffee with milk directly?

I remember reading once, that milk is like the antidote to coffee and there is a bio-chemical reason why this makes an unhealthy mixture.

A reference would be appreciated.

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

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

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

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

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

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


Is burnt ceramic frying pan safe to use? I've been using a Bergner ceramic frying pan for a month and it has been ok up until today when I decided to cook beef burgers on it. After I was finished the ceramic coating was pretty burnt out. I've follow a cleaning method I found online with boiling water and baking soda, which cleaned it a lot, but there are still burnt bits here and there that won't go away.

Is it still safe to use?

The frying pain is still safe to use (unless the ceramic chipped or cracked badly as well). A bit of vinegar (white) and a soft scrubber may get the rest of those burnt bits out as well. Either way, though, as long as the ceramic is intact, you can still use the frying pan safely.


Why is my bread so dense and moist? I have been trying to make bread using a bread mix and my mixer.  I read that the amount of water you should add can vary on the humidity at the time.  The mix instructions say that I should add 300ml of water to the mix but I find that by the time I have added 250ml it is already quite wet, so I never add the full 300ml.  There are no instructions on how long to knead the bread if using a mixer but a recipe for bread in my mixer book suggests around 5 minutes.  I have done this but I think that maybe it needs longer.

My question is:  Could my bread be too dense and moist due to:

Too much water?
Not enough kneading?
Not leaving it to prove for long enough?

What is a "warm place"?  How warm is warm, without killing off the yeast?  As you can see, I'm quite a beginner with baking!

I was watching a Lorraine Pascale (British baker / chef) episode on TV before. She had a saying which was "when it comes to dough, the wetter the better". Don't get tempted to add more flour if your dough feels wet. She also used a mixer with a dough hook AND allowed the machine to knead it for 5 minutes.

After kneading, gently shape the dough into a rough ball shape and with a floured finger press into the dough. If it's ready, the depression in the dough should spring back so you can't see where you pressed in.


What kind of nut is this? Nuts are not very popular in my region, this is the first time I have this kind of nut, can you let me know what its name is?

Thank you.

Looks like roasted chickpeas which are actually a legume (related to peas & beans), but you can toast them up and eat like nuts (like you would peanuts/groundnuts which are also legumes).


Horseradish substitute in creamy chowder I would like to cook a pot of seafood chowder today but it's Christmas, the stores are all closed and I forgot to pick up horseradish. Is there a good substitute for horseradish in a creamy chowder?

I figured wasabi and mustard might work and those ingredients do turn up in a Google search but I'm not sure that they would work in a chowder. The flavor would be fine, I think, but I'm worried that the final product would be tinted green or yellow depending on the substitution. I could see wasabi and especially mustard working well to replace horseradish in something like crab dip though.

Any other ideas?

If the wasabi is pure wasabi powder, it's only a pale yellow color, not neon green like wasabi you get at a sushi restaurant. A lot of wasabi actually has food coloring in it. Similarly mustard powder is bright yellow... but in either case if you only use a bit of powder (which can be quite strong) it might not impart a lot of color on the final dish.

If the soup needs to be spicy you could try ginger. I also see here you could try black radish, which does have a very spicy taste but apparently it requires advance preparation.


Sticky aluminum half sheet pans - Self cleaning oven - What would happen? I recently cleaned my broiler pan with great success in my self-cleaning oven. Great. Now I'm looking at my aluminum half-sheet pans. They're sticky, they're discolored, I only have so much elbow grease to spare. I'm soaking the pans now to apply precious elbow grease in the morning, but I just don't want to. What if I ran the self-cleaning cycle again, this time with the cheap aluminum sheet pans? (They are of the "hotel" variety, not the disposable kind) I know they'd get clean, sort of, but would it ruin the pans?

This is pretty close to what I have (or what I used to have before I loaned them out): pans

I'd be mighty cautious about putting aluminum pans in your oven's self-cleaning cycle. It's melting point is 660 degrees C, and although your oven isn't going to reach that it will probably get to the point where they will warp.


How do I trap lateral bones that run down outside edge? Can someone please simplify Step 1? What does "trap lateral bones" mean?

Seafood Basics: 86 Recipes Illustrated Step by Step (2012) by Abi Fawcett,
Deirdre Rooney.

The instructions are specifically for flatfish, which generally have boney fins which run around the sides of the fish.
I think the instructions are telling you to use the blade of your knife to snag these and literally drag them away from the body.
A cooked flatfish is a very soft thing and you want to work delicately. There will be very little resistance when you drag the bones away so trapping them between your knife and the board beneath gives you enough grip to pull them gently away without messing with the fillet that you are trying to keep whole.


Uses for leftover potatoes from a pot-roast I made a large pot-roast with sweet onion, carrots, green beans, mushrooms and Yukon Gold potatoes (all cooked in the same pot).  All the vegetables except for the potatoes got devoured, so now I have a lot of leftover, slightly beefy, potatoes.  What would be a good use for them?

Turn into mashed potatoes for tomorrow night's dinner?

If you have some roast left, too, cut it down into bite-sized bits, add back in some more vegetables, and turn it into a sort of shepard's pie-type meal.  (stew-like dish covered with mashed potatoes, then baked)


What type of Paprika If a recipe calls for "paprika", what type should I use? Does it mean Hungarian, Spanish, California? Also, what type, Hot, Bittersweet, Sweet?

If the recipe is just asking for "Paprika", they want generic paprika labeled as such. Like this:

According to the McCormick website, this is "sweet" paprika.

  The dried, ground pods of Capsicum annuum L., a sweet red pepper.

Similarly, the Spice Islands site calls it sweet

  Vividly red in color, paprika is made from ground Capsicum chili peppers. Although, it doesn’t pack the punch you’d expect from a chili. Instead, it has a sweet flavor and a delicate aroma that can vary from fruity to sharp.

You certainly do not want "smoked". Both of these companies sell this specifically.


slow cooker pot roast with carrots and potatoes Slow cooker recipe for above says 6 hour on high,but I prefer to do it on low, go to work and come back with dinner being around 6:30.

How many hours on low should I set the crock pot for?

If it's a joint of pork, you shouldn't - they have to be cooked on high to get a high enough internal temperature.

For other meats most of my books say you should roughly double the time if cooking on low, so 10-12 hours, with the lower end assuming a good preheat on high and browning the ingredients first. But there's no need to set a timer. A stew will keep well indefinitely on low, and this will stop it cooling down too much if you're delayed.


Why does storing bread in a plastic (grocery) bag keep it fresh longer? I accidentally stumbled upon this 'trick' a week ago when I forgot about a baguette that I bought for a party and never used. It was half-covered (loosely) by a plastic grocery bag. When I took it out after the week period, the top half (not covered by plastic) was rock hard, but the part inside the plastic bag was still relatively soft.

What biological mechanics are causing plastic grocery bags to keep bread fresh longer? This Q/A discusses storage methods, of which plastic bags are one, but doesn't actually explain why it works the way it does.

I also stumbled up this video where a guy mentions that he also keeps bread in plastic bags, so this isn't an isolated incident.

Water, water-vapor or moisture can't penetrate the plastic bag. Nice tender bread contains a lot of moisture. That moisture, all of it, will evaporate into the relatively dry air in your kitchen if it can. Bread (especially a baguette) depleted of moisture becomes rock hard, as you know. If you cover your bread with a plastic bag, a little moisture still escapes into the air inside the bag, but it can't get out of the bag, and after that you get an equilibrium between soft bread and slightly moist-ish air, and your bread stays pretty nice for a little longer.

The down-side is if you keep it too long, you may get mold taking advantage of the moist conditions in the plastic bag, and you will get moldy bread. Mold doesn't tend to grow in a dry environment (rock-hard bread).


Coconut bread dough is crumbly and does not come together to knead So I followed the following recipe once and the bread buns turned perfect. Today I decided to make it more coconut-ish so that it tastes and smells like coconut even more than the previous batch. I substituted half of the flour with coconut flour, added more coconut flakes and substituted the butter with coconut butter (that is what I did the first time, using coconut butter)! It seems that I messed it up and it is so crumbly that I cannot knead it! I came up with the idea that I might make small buns  that look like cookie but then I added yeast, how to fix it? Or what to make with this crumbly dough?

4 cups flour
3 eggs
4 tbsp coconut flakes
50 gr butter
water
2 tsp yeast
vanilla 1/2 tsp
salt 1 tsp
sugar 1/3 cup

You can't substitute a non-wheat flour for a wheat flour and expect similar baking properties; bread doughs rely on gluten for their structure which is why gluten-free baking is difficult.

The simplest way to fix this would be to double the recipe, look at what you've already added, and add more ingredients up to the correct amounts. You can freeze bread dough which helps mitigate the 'too much' problem although I appreciate it might get you through your ingredients faster than you'd want.

If you're dead set against that, add more flour in small quantities and try to knead the dough until it has a workable consistency, and see how it comes out.

For your broader desire for the bread to have a stronger coconut flavour, consider buying coconut extract or essence and adding that to the original recipe.


How to tell the difference between stamped and forged knives I know the difference between the process of making these knives, but if you saw two knives -- one stamped and one forged -- how do you tell the difference simply by looking at them?

I guess you could also look up the brand and the model, but shouldn't there be a visible difference between the two types?

I read that if the knife has a bolster, it's probably forged, but that doesn't seem to be a very good indicator if you still can't tell for sure using that one criterion.

Any tips?

Stamped knives are stamped from a sheet of steel- therefore the metal is all one thickness (or thinness).

Forged knives will be thicker at the back and taper to the front.

So- a stamped knife will never have a bolster, a forged knife may or may not.


What causes Béchamel Sauce to get so clumpy? Possible Duplicate:
  How not to mess up Béchamel sauce

Just starting to learn how to create cream sauces for dishes; as it's foreign to me. Most the sauces i know start with a slurry and soy sauce.

I tried creating sauces from this recipe.

  Béchamel Sauce:

  2 tablespoons butter
  2 tablespoons all-purpose flour
  1 cup heated milk
  salt
  white pepper
  freshly ground nutmeg (optional)

It seems to get lumpy. What is the trick? I think i may have added the flour too quickly or the milk had to be much hotter

Normally, in industry, you combine the butter and flour, and cook it for a bit (usually gets a nice nutty aroma). Then, you heat the milk to a boil, and add some of the milk to the cooked roux (fat and flour). This will be VERY thick. You can easily whisk the lumps out of that. You then add this back into the other milk, which thickens the milk.  Also, in industry, there is often just a big pail of roux, and a shortcut is to heat the milk, and then add the roux in a bit at a time, whisking like hell to get out the lumps. You can control the thickness of the sauce better that way.  When you have the desired thickness, you then season.


How do I steep mint for mint ice cream? My garden is brimming over with chocolate mint, and I want to make mint chocolate ice cream with it.  The general plan is to use cocoa, as opposed to melting chocolate, and steep the chocolate mint in the cream.  I have two questions:  1) how long should I allow the mint to steep in the cream, and 2) is it preferable to steep it cold or hot (over heat)?

Thank you in advance :)

You want to make a "mint infusion". Googling this will give you many recipes.

Basically you brew the mint like herbal tea:
Remove stems,
Bruise the leaves a little,
Add the leaves to a cup of very hot water,
Let steep for a few minutes,
strain and throw away the mushy leaves and use the liquid for your flavoring.

The liquid will be brown as you are destroying the chlorophyll that makes the leaves green. In most applications I add food coloring to fix this. As you are making chocolate mint ice cream this should not be a problem.

Save some of your mint leaves to use as a garnish.

I love chocolate mint and I am very excited for you having a bumper crop of it.


What is the proper technique for torching a creme brulee? Should you ever have your torch face downwards? When I do that I get huge flames. I try to torch it from the sides, but the sugar caramelizes very unevenly.

There are good videos on the internet showing how to properly caramelize the sugar; are you doing things differently ?

Most of them just have the torch a couple of inches facing down over the sugar and in a slow side movement, caramelize the sugar.

The torch flame needs to be "blue" so that it is at its hottest.


What effect will this have on my french fries? While making french fries earlier I began to wonder what would happen if I changed my process in a few ways.

My current method:

Peel potatoes and cut into thin slices
Pan fry until golden

Simple enough. But I was wondering what would happen if I did the following after my initial pan fry:

a. Cook fries in a pan with little or no oil

Or

b. Bake fries

I would reverse those two steps -- bake first and then pan fry. By baking first the potato will cook through in the oven without necessarily crisping or burning, then the frying step will add the crunchiness and texture that you want on the outside when you're ready to serve.

Frying first would be the same as searing, which you would only do when you don't want the inside of the food to be cooked as high as the outside. Either one of two things would happen: a) the middle of the fry won't cook all the way through and you'll be left with raw potato on the inside and perfectly cooked on the outside, or b) you'll have to change your timing to leave the fries in the oven long enough to cook in the middle, but that will increase surface exposure to heat and you'll burn the fries.


What is a reasonable temperature for slow cooked beef spareribs? I understand from a little bit of reading that too low of a temperature with beef spareribs will make for very tender muscle but fat that is not rendered (http://www.insearchofheston.com/2014/03/how-to-make-heston-blumenthals-72-hour-rib-of-beef-recipe/).

On the other hand, too high will leave the flesh falling apart and stringy (personal experience, braising for 3-4 hours).

I would think barbecue people and smoker people would have this cut of meat fairly well figured out, but in a quick search of barbecue sites I do not find anything. (well what I find is generally 95˚C to 100˚+C which I think is unreasonably high)

I have an accurate oven thermostat so I often sous-vide cook dry in the oven. Can someone suggest a temperature to try, which has worked well in your experience?

I wasn't intending to answer my own question, but there were no replies and so I went ahead with 24 hours at oven set to 80˚C (internal temperature is 74˚C which is lower than what I was expecting.

There is a little bit of water in the pan and the ribs are snugly wrapped in foil. They were rubbed in sugar, salt, smoked paprika, allspice and oregano/rosemary.


How do I infuse cappuccino with real vanilla bean during brew? There's a question that touched on infusing espresso beans with vanilla flavor during roasting, I'm doing something a little different. Recently, I managed to get some real vanilla beans (a rather hard find where I am), and I'd like to flavor a double espresso shot with one of them.

In the question I linked, a comment sort of hints that you might be able to just scrape the beans and make them part of the puck, and the flavor might come out in the pulled shot. I don't have much room for experimentation here, each wasted bean adds 33.33% to the probability that I won't get this right and won't be able to enjoy the tasty drink I'd like to make :)

I have:

3 whole vanilla beans
A bag of great Arabica coffee beans
Highly purified water
A nice grinder / cappuccino machine, pretty much like you'd find at any coffee shop except it's a single boiler

I want:

A double shot of espresso infused with natural vanilla goodness

How do I accomplish this? Should I use one entire bean, more .. or possibly less? Can I just scrape the bean and pack the seeds in the puck with the grinds? Is simply pulling the shot with them in place going to be sufficient to extract the flavor?

Should I be looking more at the milk than the coffee here for best results?

I know I could just try this and figure it out (or just waste three perfectly good and rare vanilla beans), I'm really hoping someone has done this and can give a more precise method.

I would go with cutting a small piece of vanilla bean then scrap seeds in milk add vanilla bean skin in with milk as well and steam, the steam will bring out the vanilla flavor.


How should block cheese be stored for maximum shelf life? Just like it says in the title, how can I store blocks of cheese for max shelf life? I will be making a grilled cheese sandwich and shredding 3 varieties of cheese (cheddar, swiss, parm(?)) and I am afraid that I won't be able to use three whole blocks on one sandwich.

Hard, aged cheeses like cheddar and Parmesan are fine to freeze, particularly if you're going to be melting them when you get around to using them anyway. Freezing causes ice particles to break up the molecules of the cheese, and when they thaw, they leave holes in what was (prior to freezing) a pretty smooth cheese. So you might notice if you freeze blocks of cheese, they are more crumbly when you unfreeze them than they were when you bought them. The cheeses you're working with should be fine if stored properly, but softer / creamier cheeses (brie, harvarti, etc.) might become somewhat unpleasant if you freeze them.

As far as storage is concerned, you can actually do one of two things:

Grate the cheese before you freeze it. All you need to do for this method is grate your cheese and put it in a ziploc freezer bag (thicker than a regular zip-top bag). Just make sure to squeeze the air out before sealing, and seal it well.
Freeze the cheese in blocks. Wrap them in plastic wrap and then put then in a ziploc bag, and you should be all set; it'll keep for 4-6 months. (source)

No matter which method you use, you may notice a slight change in texture. Make sure you thaw the cheese before using it. (Though I've put frozen shredded mozzarella on pizza and frozen shredded Mexican cheese blend - a blend of cheddar, monterey jack, queso blanco and asadero - on tacos and not had any trouble.)


How to prevent/slow down fava beans from turning to darker color? I usually make fava beans from dry beans, I simmer them in plain water for hours.
Right after they are cooked they are bright green and have a very fresh delicious taste, but after letting it cool the color will change dramatically to a darker grey colour and as time goes the taste will change to the worse, Canned beans usually don't have this issue, I guess they add something to it, so what is causing this change and how can I prevent it?

Edit: I made an experiment by separating three bowls of beans and their water
one was topped with oil, one was rapidly cooled and then refrigerated and the last was the control left to cool down slowly in the open air, the rapidly cooled one was on the best in terms of colour then the oil covered one and last was the control

Your observation is interesting in that fava beans contain high levels of oxidants.  Persons with genetic susceptibility can get very sick from eating them.  This illness is called favism.

https://www.hematology.org/Thehematologist/Diffusion/8304.aspx

  The problem is that the bean’s protein content can include as much as
  2 percent vicine and convicine, which are converted in the gut to
  divicine and isouramil. These highly redox proteins are likely to
  retard rotting of the bean, but produce reactive oxygen species (ROS)
  including the superoxide anion and hydrogen peroxide, which rapidly
  oxidize NADPH and glutathione. These molecules are normally detoxified
  by catalase and glutathione peroxidase, in enzymatic reactions that
  depend on NADPH. Because NADPH levels are very low in G6PD-deficient
  red cells, these undergo severe oxidative damage. A characteristic
  feature of favism is that intracellular and extracellular hemolysis
  coexist.

Let us assume that color and flavor change described is due to these oxidants acting on the bean.  How to prevent?  I can think of one of 2 ways.  1: add antioxidants  2: prevent exposure to air.

The antioxidant that comes to mind would be lemon juice.  The experiment is easy: a batch of fava beans, then treat half with lemon juice and the other leave alone.  Does lemon juice prevent the color change?  Lemon juice works to prevent browning of sliced apples by this mechanism.

The other method would be to exclude air.  One could do this by tossing the fresh cooked beans with olive oil, which should produce an air barrier on each bean.  Submerging beans in oil would be a surer way to achieve the same purpose.  A third method would be to contain them in an airtight bag or container and exclude air first before sealing.  Again, testable.

*Note that submerging cooked beans in oil is not a way to keep them indefinitely.  Different and possibly more dangerous types of spoilage can happen.  Both of the above ideas are to keep your beans good for a couple of days at most.  Both sound delicious to me.


How do you protect a pizza peel? I got a pizza peel that feels like it is just plain wood. How can I protect it? I thought I heard somewhere to use some sort of oil.

I don't do anything for my peels.  I only wash them if they get sauce on them, and then only with hot water and a gentle sponging.  Never soak them with water.  If you want to add a bit of water resistance, you could use some cutting board oil (a.k.a. mineral oil) to add some protection.


Pie with 2 different fillings Good evening all. I am going to try something tomorrow night, I wanted to see if anyone had done anything similar to give me some hints.

Background:

I enjoy making a buttermilk custard pie.
I enjoy making shoofly (molasses) pie.
I enjoy eating them together- they sort of give a "buttermilk biscuit with molasses" flavor combination which is tough to beat.
However, serving 2 slices of pie at one time is tough. If they are big enough not to fall apart, then they are too big to eat in one setting.

Solution:
Tomorrow night, I am going to make a deep dish buttermilk/shoofly pie, but keep the fillings separate...? The theory is that both pies are cooked in a partially prebaked shell, at the same temperature, for the same amount of time. When I prebake the shell, I am going to

Build an internal circular wall in it, approximately the height of the pie dish (so I have an inner "crust" circle inside the shell).
Figure out some way to arrange the pie weights and bake it off
Cool crust, leaving 2 separate locations for filling.
Pour a half batch of the custard on the inside, a half batch of the molasses on the outside (or vice versa), and cook

I imagine the very tops of the 2 fillings will sort of merge into each other, but if all goes well most of the fillings will stay separate.

This is a wild experiment- thoughts and suggestion (especially if you've tried anything similar) would be appreciated! I'll update this thread tomorrow with pictures.

Frankly, I'd be too lazy to fiddle with a "separating wall" shell - partly because unless very well supported its likely to collapse during blind baking anyway.

My tool of choice would be a small cake ring or, in a pinch, a strip of aluminum foil, folded a few times and shaped into a circle.

Place the ring on the prebaked shell, pour the fillings into the inner and outer compartment. Then you have two choices:

Place the pie in the oven, carefully lift the separating ring, bake. The key is that the pie shouldn't be moved after you took out the separation. (Unless you are ok with some "merging"). This is the method I'd choose.
Bake the pie with the ring in place, remove just before it sets. This will give you a clearer separation, but may leave you with a "scar" on the pie. And depending on your filling, it might stick to the ring.

As for the fillings, I recommend that you put the "less runny" one in first, that will prevent a more liquid filling from "creeping under" the ring too much. For very liquid fillings, you might have to hold the ring down a bit, but don't "cut through" the shell!

Finally, note that geometry plays a role: if you use equal parts of fillings, the outer ring will seem narrower than the inner circle.

For equal amounts of filling, the diameter of the inner circle should be 70% of the whole diameter.
Alternatively, you could use 1/4 + 3/4 of a recipe to get an inner circle that's half the diameter of the outer.
For every other case, do the math yourself, remembering that the area of a circle is Pi times radius2. Or that the area grows squared - twice the radius means four times the area or volume. (Height can be ignored, if we assume that this should remain the same.)
The hacky solution would be to bake two pies and swap the position of the fillings - no math, no need to find or craft a specific ring size. And possibly a nice gift for a friend or neighbor.


Lunch meat is slimy on outside? Sometimes when I buy lunch meat cuts, from the supermarket, they quickly get slimy on the outside. Regardless of the date which is indicated by the sticker.

I perform taste, smell, and visual checks for discoloration, but the cuts of meat seem to pass all those criteria.

Is this a sign that it's about to expire? Also, why does it get slimy?

FYI: This happens on Dietz BBQ chicken, and this other chicken cut I get from Costco.

The rate of slime of a piece of food has to do with amount of surface area it has. At each point a food's surface is an entry point for bacteria. Since there is always bacteria on any cutting utensil or machine every cut piece of meat has been seeded with a bacteria culture. Although it might not kill you or make you visibly sick, the slime is coming from microbes which will stress your immune system that might be fighting other things instead. Unless it's Nato beans or oysters slime on food is no good. If the cold cuts are sliming quickly it might be because the grocer is not cleaning the machine properly or somebody's refrigeration is not cold enough, 5 to 10 degree f too warm.


Advice on getting my arepas to "puff"? I just made arepas for the 2nd time ever.  Here's the abbreviated version of the recipe I used:

1 cup masarepa
1.5 cups hot water
pinch salt

Mix together dough.  Knead, then let set 5 minutes.  Roll in to balls and flatten into 1/2" by 3" disks.  Fry on a griddle until crusted lightly on both sides, about 6 minutes per side.  Finish by baking in a 350F oven for 15min.

These were decent enough, but they didn't "puff" up like I'm used to tortillas doing.  As a result, they were pretty dense, and were hard to split so that I could stuff them.  They were definitely more dense and fragile than I'm used to restaurant arepas being.

I'm wondering what I can do to make them a bit more airy and easier to split, while still sticking to a traditional recipe.

hotter griddle?
more time on griddle?
make sure they don't cool before baking step (they did)?
this is just what arepas are like?

Advice?

Hmmm...

You can try baking powder. Personally, I am not used to puffy arepas, they are usually dense, and different totally from tortillas; but if you want to try, it would go better with baking powder than with yeast.

Try to precook them in the oven (low - mid) before putting them in the 'budare' / griddle.

Sumito Estevez is a well-known venezuelan chef, I would suggest you to check this one.

http://elgourmet.com/receta/tres-desayunos-arepa-granola-y-omelette


Egg safety. When to eat and when to not eat I have a question about eggs and when it is safe to eat them.

I've read online that there are 2 ways to test if an egg is safe to eat or not (without cracking it open):

Float test: Get a massive bowl, fill it with water and place the egg inside. If it sinks to the bottom and lays on its side, it's "fresh" (not old). If it bobs up slightly then it's a few weeks old and if it floats to the top throw it away (too old).

Those sites also say that test is no indication of whether or not an egg is rotten, it only indicates the age of the egg and that eggs can be rotten before they even expire.
Slosh test: Gently shake the egg near your ear. If you hear a distinct sloshing sound, the egg is rotten and should not be consumed.

Is the above true? Are they old wives tales/myths?

I've also read that egg shells covered in crap and blood are not safe to eat because they more than likely have bacteria. Why do most eggs have crap and blood on them?

I've also read that eggs with dark colored spots all over them should not be consumed. Why? Why do most eggs have weird colored spots all over them?

Sometimes when I gently shake an egg, it does not slosh but I can feel the insides moving around (it kind of feels like a big ball inside rocking back and forth) - is that normal? Is it safe to hard boil and consume those eggs?

I guess my question is, what are the guaranteed ways to determine if an egg is safe to consume without cracking it open? And please, if you can provide any official sources that would be great.

If the shell is undamaged, and the eggs are not past their expiration/best by date, they are safe to eat. Official source: your government's food safety agency, unless you live in a place with really really lax food regulation. But your profile says Australia - I'm sure things are fine there. If there are problems with salmonella outbreaks, it's not anything that you can detect. A salmonella-contaminated egg will look exactly like an uncontaminated one - that's why governments generally recommend you cook the egg, which will kill the salmonella and make it safe. If you're eating raw/undercooked eggs, you'll have to decide whether the risk where you are is low enough.

In practice, they're actually safe for a while after the best by date, just not as fresh, and if the shell is cracked without damaging the membrane or they were very recently cracked, they're also safe. But no damage and before the date is the most absolute guarantee you can get.

The two tests you mention will help you get some idea how fresh the eggs are. Neither has anything to do with good vs. rotten. As eggs get less fresh, they dry out a bit, forming a larger air pocket. So they'll slosh more, and start to float.

But it doesn't mean they're rotten. An actually rotten egg would be completely obvious by smell - they're sulfurous, a lot like the smell that's added to natural gas. If you're getting eggs that float in water on the day you buy them, with really obvious sloshing, yes, it means they're not fresh, so they're certainly not good as fresh eggs from a farm. So if that's the case, your supermarket isn't selling you good quality eggs. It doesn't mean they're unsafe, though.

As for "Why do most eggs have crap and blood on them?" ... "most" is a huge exaggeration, the places I've seen - they get washed. And as rumtscho pointed out in the comments, the eggs are coming out of a chicken, so some ugly stuff is natural. You never actually said what your eggs look like, but if you live in a place where they're not cleaned (even before selling in a supermarket??), then it still doesn't mean they're unsafe, just that you should probably clean them before cracking them.

And dark spots? Some eggs are naturally speckled - that'd be fine. If it's something else, I guess it would be helpful for you to provide a picture.


Can I remove frost from frozen chicken breasts and re-package? I bought a large package of chicken breast several weeks ago. Usually we break down the bag and package in food saver bags to keep frost at a minimum. For some reason we didn't do it this time. I just went to get a few for tonight and noticed it's all iced up inside. Can I run them under warm water to remove the ice and re-package them in our food saver bags now or is it too late? Anyone know of any other tricks? They don't seem freezer burned yet.

I'd recommend just cooking them sooner rather than later. If you had to do anything, I'd consider cracking & brushing off the surface ice without thawing them, then vacuum sealing them ... but still try to use them quickly.

If the texture is a little off, or the flavor a little lacking, you can always use the rest in either soup or a casserole, where the texture isn't as much of an issue and there are other flavors to help compensate.


First time dashi doesn't taste much I tried making dashi for the first time today, but I think it wasn't very successful... I didn't have kombu so that might be a problem. I ended up adding a lot more bonito than recipes say to use. Still it tasted like water. So I fixed it up quickly with some nice soy sauce and squid sauce (I didn't want to use salt).

Any ideas on what would cause dashi to be tasteless, or is it just how it is? I've never had any in a japanese restaurant so it's hard for me to tell.

Dashi is almost never used without adding additional seasoning, generally some combination of mirin and/or sake, salt, and soy sauce or miso, and often a small amount of sugar. If your flavor isn't strong enough, most likely your culprit is inadequate salt.

I never make dashi without using konbu, but I'm vegetarian, so mine is typically based on konbu and dried porcini, or just konbu alone for certain applications. I'd probably only consider skipping konbu if I was making a dashi based on niboshi, also called iriko (dried sardines), as is common in Kyushu and some other regions. Iriko are pretty aromatic and apparently contain enough glutamates that at least some people skip konbu.

It's not unheard of to leave out konbu in katsuodashi, but unless you're using thick or freshly shaved katsuobushi, you'll end up with a basically bitter, uncomplex version that's mostly suitable for use in dishes with lots of ingredients. I might use a konbu-less dashi in a dish that has cabbage in it, because cabbage provides its own source of glutamate proteins.

Dashi is the analog of stock, not the analog of broth. Stock typically contains minimal to no salt, and therefore the primary contribution is aroma, which is only perceived as flavor once you add something salty to it. Once you add seasonings, dashi becomes "kakejiru" if it's at the right saltiness level for noodles. If you make it saltier it's a "tsuyu" or dipping sauce.

If you're going to cook Japanese food, you'll need to get over any issues you have with salt. Actually, if you're going to be making any kind of soups, I'd say the same thing regardless of cuisine. But Japanese food uses salt, or salty ingredients like miso and soy sauce, in relatively large quantities.

Usually, your main dish won't be incredibly salty (except sometimes at breakfast), but most of the sides and soups are fairly high in salt content. The source of the salt varies, as there are two common salty ingredients (miso and soy sauce), and regional things like shottsuru (Akita's fish sauce); wet sea salt is used to adjust seasoning, even when fermented salty ingredients are present in a dish. Most meals include some fairly salty pickled vegetables; the rice balances out the rest of the salt.

One of my Japanese friends lamented that her husband's salt-sensitive hypertension was a big problem for her because she can cook low fat, or low salt, but not both, and low-salt was a much bigger problem for Japanese cuisine, as even high-fat dishes tend to have a fair amount of salt.


Why is my cupcake brownie like? I’m exploring different recipes and tweaking a few things to make a result I’m happy with. I finally found a perfect ratio for a vanilla cake but when I tried to alter it to chocolate I got a very brownie like result. How do I fix this?
Recipe contains: AP flour, CoCoa, BP, salt, milk, oil, butter, sugar and 2 eggs

Baking powder contains both a chemical leavener (baking soda) and the acid required to activate it. It is normally used instead of baking soda in recipes where there isn't enough acid to activate baking soda. Cocoa powder is very acidic. What may have happened is that the combination of cocoa powder and baking powder contained too much acid for the baking soda, which produced too much leavening, inflating your batter so much that it then fell, resulting in the dense, brownie-like product you got.


Which end of the cucumber should I save for later? When using only half of a cucumber, which end of the cucumber should I save for later use - the stem end or the blossom end?

There's no difference between the stem or blossom end, you should save the end which looks and feels in the best shape.


Why is my dough sweaty? I have been making kouign-aman (my favorite recipe:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxwgzzErW1w) for several years, playing with different recipes, making minor modifications, but can not seem to prevent the dough from "sweating" when I add the sugar.  The latest thought was maybe when I put it n the refrigerator to rest, the temperature of the metal cookie sheet was the culprit, so I put the wrapped dough on a towel - no change.

This happens whether it is 66 in the winter or 72 in the summer with max humidity of around 35%.

Then, whenI cut it into pieces the layers separate, it sweats even more, sometimes giving the impression the butter is melting - which it may be.

The end result is a pastry that is more bready than layered (like a good croissant).

Any ideas why this is happening?  Or how to prevent it?

I'm fairly certain the sugar, being hydroscopic, is drawing moisture out of the dough as well as the air and dissolving, which produces the sweat you've noticed. It doesn't help that kouign-amann dough is chilled before rolling with the sugar, which means you could have straight-up condensation happening as well. It's not just the metal pan, but the dough itself that's chilled.

I don't think you can avoid it-except by working very quickly once you've started rolling the sugar into your dough.

As to your texture being breadier, it's hard to say. It could be you need to do a couple more folds to get thinner layers. It could be that they're overproofing before you toss them in the oven. Or the ovens not hot enough maybe... Like I said, it's hard to say. But when I've made kouign-amann, they were very soft in the center, with crunchy outer layers and a salty caramel shell. So it's equally possibly that there is no problem. Breadiness is subjective after all.

One thing I do know is that if you want a more crisp pie crust, you can replace part of the butter with shortening or lard, both of which are lower moisture than butter. I don't know if it's even worth considering for kouign-amann, but it might be an interesting experiment anyway. A pie crust is different from a yeast bread obviously, so I'm really not sure what effect it would have overall, but my guess would be that the outer layers would be a hot flakier/crisper.


Substitution for beef (veal) in a stew I have a recipe for an Italian stew that is pretty much just caramelized onions and juice from tomatoes plus veal.  My partner does not eat veal so we've substituted stewing beef to good effect, though it takes longer to cook and is not quite as tender.

I'd like to make the dish for some friends of ours, but they don't eat beef of any kind.  We've tried it with chicken in the past but the chicken came out tough; we probably cooked it too long.  The veal cooks for 1.5-2 hours over very low heat, the stewing beef is more to the 2 hour end, if not a little more.  Can I successfully substitute chicken or pork and not have it come out tough?  Any pointers on how long to cook it, or how to know when it's cooked but not overcooked?

Thanks!

I'd suggest skinless bone-in chicken thighs, as they have plenty of fat and collagen to keep them moist and tasty. I've cooked them in French-style wine-based stews, not to mention cacciatorre, for 2-3 hours before now and they just fall off the bone.

It is virtually impossible to overcook them, unless you boil them mercilessly for hours. Just get a nice gentle simmer going - not only will this make the meat tender, but it will improve the flavour of the tomato sauce as well.

Do not use chicken breast - it is far too lean.


HELP! My Crock-Pot lid was Slightly askew while cooking my roast! I started my pot roast on low at 6:30a... I just realized the lid was askew, just a bit. I have cranked it up to high...with it be done by 6:30p It is not a big roast...maybe 2-3 lbs.

We don't know from your question how long it was on low with the lid askew (we don't know your time zone) so it's hard to say for sure.

But usually a small crack on the lid isn't going to really really drastically reduce the temperature. You're in a better position to tell than we are:

If it was still bubbling and steamy inside, even with the lid offset, then you're probably fine. Maybe it took a little longer to come up to temperature and will be done slightly less quickly, but it's unlikely to be a disaster.
If it wasn't, then you have to worry about food safety too: if it was like that for more than 4 hours, it may have been in the danger zone (under 140F) for that long, and thus be unsafe.


Why does my horchata have too much sediment? I've tried a few times to make horchata.

My process is as follows:

Put 1 cup of long grain rice, one cinnamon stick, and 4 cups of water in the blender.
Blend briefly to break up.
Let soak for 3+ hours.
Blend thoroughly.
Strain through a fine mesh strainer.
Sweeten and chill.

The flavor is fantastic but there is a large quantity of rice sediment and the texture overall is gritty.

This sediment is fine enough to pass through my muslin so I don't think more straining will help much.

What do I need to do to improve the texture of my horchata?

One technique which seems to be effective at straining out fine sediment is gel clarification with gelatin or agar. Dave Arnold's research on agar clarification culminated in an approach which uses agar, an ice bath, a whisk, a cheesecloth or muslin, and about an hour.

Measure out 0.2% agar by weight (as a fraction of your total liquid quantity).
Whisk it into 1/3 of the liquid to disperse, then bring to a simmer while stirring and hold it there until the agar is hydrated.
Pour in the rest of the liquid slowly while whisking, keeping the temperature about 35C.
Leave to set in ice bath.
Gently break up the gel with the whisk and then sieve through the cheesecloth.

The gel will trap the sediment, but leak liquid.


If one tomato had molded, is the rest of the pack safe to eat? Yesterday I bought a pack of cherry tomatoes and after arriving home I discovered that one of them had developed some impressive black mold (it was bigger than the tomato itself!). Of course, I tossed the offending tomato and the packaging, washed the remaining tomatoes and put them in a clean box. Now I'm hesitating though; are they safe to eat?

Yes - the mold is an indication that the spores have entered that tomato, but do not indicate any problems with others. Mold usually enters fruits like tomato through the stem site or damage to the skin. The bits you see outside the fruit are actually the fruiting bodies of the fungus (equivalent of the bit you eat on a mushroom - the rest is below the soil). These fruiting bodies produce tons of spores. You should use the others fairly quickly before any released spores have a chance to potentially start growing in them.
Edited to add:
The general advice would be to discard any fruit that are attached to the main one by the fungal body, wash the others well to remove any potential spores off them, dry well (wetness promotes fungal growth) and use within a short time frame.
The USDA has some good advice here (PDF) - with thanks to SnakeDoc for finding this one.


What is the correct onion to tomato ratio for North Indian masala sauce? What's the optimum — or, at least, the most widely used — tomato to onion ratio for making the tomato masala (sauce)? Masala is used as the base for a number of north Indian dishes. Onions are fried in oil and then tomatoes and spices are added and cooked down until the oil separates out.

I am not intimately familiar with the recipe but according to the recipes I have researched the ratio seems to run the gamut from 2-1 tomatoes to onions all the way to 1-1 tomatoes to onions. I would recommend starting at the 2-1 ration and adjusting according to taste.

Here are the recipes I reviewed:

http://www.food.com/recipe/onion-tomato-masala-194144

http://www.spiderkerala.com/kerala/recipes/ViewRecipe.aspx?RecipeId=162

http://nsushma.blogspot.com/2009/09/tomato-masala.html

I hope that helps! Ideally someone with more experience with this dish can eventually write a more comprehensive answer.


My cheese congealed and I don’t know why? I mixed up a salad in a glass container I added dressing and goat cheese crumbles and shook it up. The next day when I went to eat it all the cheese ended up in a big congealed lump in the bottom of the container.  Did I do something wrong?

I can't comment to ask a question yet, so I'll try to phrase it as an answer. IF you used a vinaigrette, it could be possible that the vinegar broke down the cheese and/or the oil congealed in the fridge, like someone else mentioned.


How to pasteurize eggs in a sous vide machine (in the shell) I have a Sous Vide Supreme machine and I like raw eggs (in the shell). I've made a few batches by simply boiling them at 134F for 2-4 hours, but I have 2 problems: some of the eggs crack and most of the eggs begin to coagulate. Are there better ways to do it?  There are commercially available Davidson's brand pasteurized eggs, but after checking 5 stores in Manhattan and Brooklyn where they were supposed to be stocked and weren't I've given up.

The definitive source for Sous Vide information on the web at the moment is Douglas Baldwin's wonderful A Practical Guide to Sous Vide. It has wonderful safety information and goes well beyond the 'recipe' side of Sous Vide. It's pretty much the bible (since Modernist Cuisine is too expensive).

Based on the information he has on pasteurizing eggs, I would suggest trying a shorter period of time. He says that 75 minutes at 135F will be sufficient. If you read through his stuff, you'll see that he doesn't play fast and loose with safety / times, so I would trust that time / temp. That's significantly shorter period than you are doing them. Hopefully that's your issue.

I'm not sure how much your white is coagulating, but this is what he has to say about it:

  While the properties of the egg yolk are unaffected, the egg white is milky compared to a raw egg. Whipping time is significantly longer for pasteurized eggs, but the final whip volume is nearly the same

Update: There was a culinary research paper released in January that I think resolves this issue (or see this blog post for a more accessible overview). It turns out that the protein coagulation in eggs is a function of temperature and time, rather than just temperature as was commonly assumed. So leaving your egg in to pasteurize for longer than the minimum required time will affect the texture. So use the minimum time of 75 minutes and you should see a significant difference.


What is meant by "bring to the boil"? A lot of recipes and videos say "bring the cream/milk/etc to the boil" - but to me this would be as in a kettle at the point it turns itself off. Clearly this is wrong for boiling things like cream, but what should the cream/milk/etc look like when it begins to boil?
Yes, I've screwed up my fair share of creme brulee, before you ask.

Just as simple as "When it starts boiling".
When a liquid is boiling, it starts making bubbles, at first, it starts with small bubbles, and those get bigger as the liquid comes to its boiling point.
When a recipe calls for that, you remove from heat when it starts boiling.


How to achieve tender or crunchy toasted lentil sprouts? A few days ago, I started sprouting a batch of lentils. This morning, I took some of the beans, now with 0.5-1 mm shoots growing out of them, tossed them in salt, pepper, and paprika, and spread them in a single layer on a pie tim, which I baked in a preheated 250F oven for about 20 minutes.
When they came out they had a lovely flavor, but were a bit gummier than I'd like. I'm going to perform the experiment again with the remainder of my sprouts tomorrow, but I'll probably change something.
What I'd like is something crunchier--I've had toasted chickpea sprouts that are crunchy and delicious, and I can only hope that a similar effect can be achieved with lentils. Does anyone have any suggestions? I could bake them longer, change the temperature, only add the salt after cooking (as one does to prevent beans in soup from toughening up)... Also, by tomorrow the sprouts will be more developed, with longer shoots. I suspect the chemical changes that take place will also make a difference.

If they're gummy, they might still have too much moisture in them. Try roasting them at higher temperatures or longer and see if they crisp up.


When canning strawberry preserves can you substitute lime juice for lemon juice? I am making strawberry margarita preserves and would like to substitute lime juice for lemon juice..  Would that present a problem once I can them?

No it won't be a problem.

For safe canning, time, temperature and sufficient acidity are the relevant variables. Neither is affected by your substitution.

Taste-wise switching from lemon to lime will change the results, but obviously that is exactly your goal. (Nice idea, that "Strawberry Margarita preserve" btw.)


What are the minimum spices I can use to remove meaty smell? I cannot eat rare meat. So, I need to cook it. Generally, in my country, we use garlic, ginger, turmeric, cinnamon, cardamom, cloves, oil, and salt to cook meats. But, I am just wondering what if I use only oil, salt, garlic and ginger to cook meat.

What are the minimum spices I can use to remove meaty smell?
Should those spices be different in case of chicken, lamb, and beef?

I guess they are ginger and garlic.

Any other idea?

Ok, I think I understand what you're asking for.

First, Oil is a method of transportation for flavour. If you infuse oil with herbs it will taste like those herbs and everything that is coated by this oil will smell like them. That's why we use flavour infused oils for cooking. Or why recipes call for frying garlic or onions in oil before you throw in your meat.

So it's not about what you use but in what order. If you cook garlic and ginger first they will release the smell and the oil will be infused with it. Then when you cook the meat will be instantly coated and won't release it's own smell (or it will be masked). Bonus to this is that you will sear the meat immediately (because the oil is hot) so the outside of meat will trap everything inside the chunk.

Any spice or herb will help you to mask meat smell. There are some herbs that go better with different meat. For me for example for chicken it's curry, ginger, coriander. For lamb it's cumin, nutmeg, paprika (sweet and hot). Beef goes well with black pepper and salt.

Now a piece of advice. If you want to minimize the chances of meat smell - marinade meats. Make or buy some flavour infused oils and use them in marinades with some extra spices and herbs (I have basic oils that I mix with fresh herbs for marinade) and then transfer that meat to a preheated pan with a spoonful of oil.


Sourdough Starter Very Runny I think I'm having a problem making a sourdough starter.
I'm using the technique from King Arther Flour
I started with 113g of whole wheat flour and 113g of water.
Every day, I retained 113g of the starter and added 113g of AP flour and 113g of water.
On the third day I started doing that twice a day.
After a week, I went back to once a day.
It seems to be fermenting. It gets bubbly, has a fruity, sour, floury smell.
The trouble is, it is extremely thin. Like crepe batter thin.
It bubbles, but doesn't "double in size" because it's really really thin. It doesn't look like any of the pictures.
What am I doing wrong?
Edit to answer questions in comments:
I'm in Manhattan and it's been very warm lately. With air conditioning, I would guess room temperature is mid to upper 70s. Maybe warmer.
I guess the flour is coarse. I no longer have the packaging, but it's just whole wheat flour from the supermarket. Probably Gold Medal.
The starter doesn't rise at all. It's too thin to hold any kind of structure. It does bubble and what not, and develops a layer of hooch. There is clearly fermentation happening. There's activity within an hour of feeding.
The water is just cool water from the tap. It's NYC water with absolutely no chemical smell.

Actually, reading further on the link you provided I found this:

Why does this starter begin with whole-grain flour? Because the wild yeast that gives sourdough starter its life is more likely to be found in the flora- and fauna-rich environment of a whole-grain flour than in all-purpose flour. What if all you have is all-purpose flour, no whole wheat? Go ahead and use all-purpose; you may find the starter simply takes a little longer to get going. Also, if you feed your starter on a long-term basis with anything other than the all-purpose flour called for here, it will probably look different (thicker or thinner, a different color) and act differently as well. Not to say you can't feed your starter with alternate flours; just that the results may not be what you expect.

So perhaps your starter is just thinner because you're using AP flour. If you can, try to add rye or whole wheat to your feedings. That should make the starter stronger.
Another thing I'd try is to wait longer between feeding and check the starter's behaviour: how long does it take to rise? How much does it rise? Start feeding after the peak (when it starts going down) and see if that changes the behaviour. If you see hooch it's past feeding time, try to feed your starter sooner.
You can also try using less water (instead of 100% hydration lower it to 80%) maybe there's not enough gluten to keep a strong structure at a higher hydration level.
In any case, make sure you use water that is warm enough (24-30ºC) and be patient! It might take longer to get your starter stronger (it took me 2-3 weeks the first time, with the wrong kind of flour).


Resources for reheatable meals, specifically fish? I start work today at a new restaurant. One of my responsibilities will be to come up with daily fish dishes for the takeout counter servicing the lower echelons of office staff in our building. Easy, right? Not so much; these dishes will need to be easily reheatable in a microwave. Are there any recipe sites out there which focus specifically on meals which don't degrade when microwaved?

Alternatively, does anyone know of resources which discuss general principles for making food intended to be reheated in a microwave?

(NB: yes, of course, one solution is to make cold dishes. That isn't doable for ten dishes per week. The majority must be hot.)

A few principles for re-heatable food that I've found over the years:

Things with or in sauces heat nicely
Dry things don't heat as well (plain rice, for example)
Liquid distribution in the dish is important for even heating
Dryer things like meats heat better when they have glazes or toppings (keep steam in)
Things you can stir up mid-heat are nice for even heating
Flavours improve over time, use this to make reheated dishes better
Food continues to cook in the microwave (and dry out), so avoid overcooked.  This goes double for noodles (nothing worse than mushy noodles)
Thickened sauces (especially with flour) reheat thicker than when cooked


Make Ahead Quesadillas A few friends of mine are visiting and I wanted to make some Quesadillas (No meat). Ordinarily, I would make them, keep them covered in tin foil and serve hot in a few minutes. However, this time, I need to pick up my friends at the airport which would be a ~2 hour return journey. I was wondering at what point should I pause my recipe to go pick them up and resume.

I wanted to get as much prepared before hand so I can serve immediately after we return home. If I fry vegetables, tortilla, layer cheese and keep them ready to fry, would that be OK?

Yes, that sounds like a great way to do it!

Prepare all of the components ahead of time, assemble the quesadillas, and stash them in the refrigerator.

When you return home with your guests, all you need to do it warm and serve.

The only real consideration is the moisture content of your veggies. You may not want to include them inside the tortilla during the fridge testing period of they are in danger of making the tortilla soggy. It probably won't be an issue, but it's something to consider. You can always cook up the veg and keep them in the fridge separately from the quesadillas until you are ready to heat.


My hazelnut praline paste became liquid Today I tried making praline paste, specifically of the hazelnut kind. It was equal parts by weight roasted and skinned hazelnuts and sugar.
I caramelized the sugar dry, poured it over the roasted hazelnuts and after it set I cracked it and put it into the food processor.

I spent a bunch of minutes processing it, and in the end it became a smooth liquid, more pourable than spreadable. It's sitting right now in the freezer, so I expect it will thicken under the cold, but I wonder: is it possible to process the praline too far, and is that what happened here? Or should I expect it to behave like, say, butter, meaning that it became liquid also due to the heat of the processing, and that after cooling it should set firmer?

Hazelnuts have a lot of oil in them. Grinding the hazelnuts released that oil, resulting in a gloopy mixture.

The good news is, given a day or two some of the oil will separate out (at room temperature. Don't freeze it.) and you can pour it off the top. The result will be thicker when the remaining oil is stirred back in.


Uses for a sushi mat other than making sushi I recently tried sushi for the first time by making it myself. While I loved the rice and insides, I sadly did not like the flavor of the seaweed. I don’t think I will make sushi for myself in the future. (I will, however, be making lots of other ‘sushi’ like recipes!)
Because of this, I now have a sushi mat that I don’t have much use for. So is there anything I can do with my mat (cooking or otherwise) other than make sushi?

Jelly roll, spring roll, joconde, meat roll, etc.


Why did my bagels flatten? This weekend, I made Peter Reinhart's water bagel recipe from The Bread Baker's Apprentice. The bagels taste yummy, but they're flat wrinkly discs! What can I do next time to get nice puffy bagels instead?

The recipe is basically:

make a sponge and let it ferment for 2 hours
add more yeast, salt, flour, and sweetener (I used Wheat Montana all-purpose flour, which yes is all-purpose but has a protein content closer to bread flour...so I was hoping it would behave more like bread flour)
knead (I kneaded for about 20 minutes, until I got a nice smooth dough that passed the windowpane test)
divide, form into rolls, rest for 20 minutes
form bagels (after I was done forming them all I also went back and stretched out some of the first bagels I'd shaped a bit more)
let rest for 20 minutes and then do the float test (mine passed the float test after the 20 minutes)

Here's what the bagels looked like at that point:

put in refrigerator for up to 2 days (I had them in there for a little more than 24 hours)
take out of the fridge and boil as soon as they pass the float test (mine did right away), 1 minute on each side. This is where things started going wrong. Mine puffed up nicely in the water, but then they started to deflate as soon as I took them out.
bake. I saw my somewhat deflated boiled bagels and thought "they'll spring up in the oven!" but alas...basically no oven spring. You can see the result above.

The finished bagels are tasty and chewy, and the crumb is somewhat dense but not THAT bad:

But they're so flat!! The uncooked formed bagels almost look taller, like they spread out during/after boiling instead of poofing UP.
Here are my current hypotheses about what could have happened:

I think I added the extra instant yeast and salt to the fermented sponge at the same time, so maybe the salt killed some of the yeast? But the bagels did poof up and pass the float test, so the yeast must have been active enough for that.
I was using all-purpose flour instead of bread or high-gluten flour, and my understanding is that higher-gluten flour soaks up more water. So maybe the dough was too wet, using the same amount of water with all-purpose flour? I also didn't end up adding all of the flour the recipe called for - I was trying to pay attention to the dough foremost, so I stopped when it seemed to have a nice consistency with just a couple tablespoons of flour left to go. However, other bagel recipes (like this one https://cooking.nytimes.com/guides/81-how-to-make-bagels) say you can use all purpose flour yet have an even higher hydration, and my dough did feel quite dry.
Another potential downfall of that all-purpose flour: maybe there wasn't enough gluten development to hold up to the boiling. But I did knead it extensively, got the dough texture Reinhart describes, and have seen other bagel recipes that use all purpose flour without such flat results. Moreover, it seems like people recommend bread/high-gluten flour for "extra chewy" bagels, not poofier ones...and mine were chewy enough for my tastes.
It seems like some other bagel recipes call for only 30 seconds of boiling on each side, so maybe my 1-minute on each side boil killed too much of the yeast to get a nice oven spring? But Reinhart's book says you can boil it for up to two minutes if you want extra chewy bagels.

What do you think? What should I try next time to get poofier happier bagels?
Update
Per Johanna's diagnosis of overproofing, I tried halving the yeast and then otherwise making the bagels as I did above (just with a bit of extra rise time for the sponge), and they turned out so much better!!

I pulled out a couple after 4 hours in the fridge, and they puffed up well but were not particularly flavorful. The rest I took out and boiled after 24 hours, and those were great!

Bagels tend to flatten when you remove them from the water if the dough is overproofed or you boiled them for too long. Next time, let them proof for shorter time in the fridge (I find that doughs get overproofed in the refrigerator after about 12 hours, so 24 hours is a very long cold proof) and possibly boil them slightly shorter.


Jello Shots Techniques: Alcohol Concentration When making jello shots, what proportions do you typically use?

For hard liquor like Gin, Tequila or Vodka, I've been using 1 part hot water to dissolve the jello and then 1 part cold spirits.  Some of these seem stronger than others.

For a liqueur like Pama (only 17%), it froze in the freezer and I had to wait for it to thaw.  I used 1 part cold Pama, but the general consensus was that the shot needed to be stronger.

The Jello seems to gel just fine.

You are probably fine with the 1:1 ratio for your likely 80 proof liquors.  For weaker liqueurs just add more.  You probably want 2:1 if you can get it to work.


Effecient way to dab grease from dehydrating meat without paper towels I have read the question here but that question doesn't help me, since the options available in that situation, are not applicable in this situation (see "Limiting factors").

Problem
I love to make jerky with my dehydrator. The instructions for making jerky with any type of meat specify to dab off excess oil from the meat several times during the drying process.
The problem is that there can be a lot of excess oil on the meat, especially with fattier meats like beef. If I use paper towels to collect the oil, then I will soak at least 5 of them every time I dab off the drying meat.

Limiting factors

I must collect the excess oil during the drying process, and several times.

The meat must stay in the dehydrator during the drying process with the exception of being removed for a few minutes at a time for this de-oiling process.

There is no way to make the meat de-oil itself in the dehydrator. It is in an enclosed environment (as it must be for the dehydrator to work), and the meat is on racks with plenty of space for oil to drip off.

There is so much oil!

Possible solutions

A dishrag?

For some reason, I thought it was bad to wash things with lots of grease in the washing machine. Is that true?
I'm not sure if one dishrag would be enough for a batch of jerky, since there is so much oil. If I needed to use two or more rags per batch, it wouldn't be worth it to me.

Paper bags?

I've heard someone mention this, but they used it to place under their food to catch grease. I'm not sure the material is pliable enough for me to use it to dab the jerky.

I probably do it all wrong or completely unprofessionally, but here it is: I use microfiber cloths (silk before microfiber became available), so they don't leave any filaments or lint on the food. Then I rinse my microfiber cloths in an ice cream bucket full of hot, soapy water with Dawn antibacterial dish soap (the kind they use to take oil off of animals), then rinse the cloths with purified water. I dump the used dishwater and rinsewater in my grey water cistern, or I water my lawn with it once it's cooled off. That way I have no contamination of the meat or cheese, but I'm not wasting a pile of resources, either. It has always worked well for me, so I don't see any problems for anyone else using the method.


Salted baked potatos I'm trying to understand the purpose of salting a potato prior to baking it.
I've always oiled to skin to make it softer, but I don't see the purpose of salting it. What does salting the skin accomplish?

Seasoning during cooking always reduces the amount of seasoning needed when compared to seasoning at the table. That is the first reason, the second is that applying salt to the skin helps draw moisture out of the skin, and makes it crisper.


Do any non-commercial gas range models offer linear burner response? I don't understand why most ranges don't offer a linear flame response as you turn the dial up on a burner. They have "jumps" from low to medium-low, to medium-high, etc. The dials themselves turn smoothly, always, but the flame responds erratically. For example, on a numbered dial from 1-10, 1-3 might be low, and then suddenly at around 3.5 it jumps to medium low, where it remains until 5. Seems to me they should just have 4 buttons (low, med, etc..) instead of a dial that fools us into thinking we have fine control.

I really want to get a range with a straight linear burner response, and no "presets." Not only is the information nearly impossible to get from manufacturers (I've tried, and many don't seem to know their own products), but retailers obviously can't leave ranges hooked up in their showrooms, so it's impossible to test them. I'm tired of trying to get the "sweet spots" between the presets that the manufacturer has decided is optimal for my cooking.

I've heard that many commercial-style (Bluestar, Wolf, etc.) offer this. What about other non-commercial-style and less expensive models from other brands (LG, GE, etc.)? Thank you.

This must be a regional "feature". I have 3 different cookers / hobs, and all of them are linear. Ikea (hob), Smeg (hob), Bertazzoni (cooker).


Can one use butter to replace cream or milk in drinks? While many liquids exist that serve as an alternate to milk for the lactose intolerant, I'm wondering to what extent can butter melted and mixed with water serve as a milk substitute, even if an imperfect one.  Specifically I'm considering drinks, such as coffee, hot chocolate.  Drinks that often don't require cream of milk but which personal preferences often include adding some or replacing water with it.
If I'm out of almond milk or non-lactose creams for my coffee, would mixing in a little butter make it creamier?
If I'm making hot chocolate and want it creamier than when made with just water, would a little butter help?
I've read questions on here that there is limited success mixing buttermilk and butter to get cream but it doesn't work for all uses, but that seemed to be focused on baking and whipping cream and not drinks.

No, it won't help you at all. Butter won't mix with any drink short of vla*. You will end up with a cup of coffee with a puddle of greasy melted butter swimming on top, or a chunk of butter if you are using iced coffee.

I've read questions on here that there is limited success mixing buttermilk and butter to get cream

The only question I have seen here which claims successful mixing uses milk (not buttermilk) and butter, emulsified with a vintage hand-operated device. If you had the device, there would still be two big problems left:

it is made for milk + butter, not water + butter
having the emulsion be stable under heating is quite a requirement - after all, even real cream separates in coffee if it has been standing around several days (if yours doesn't, it probably has added carrageenan).

And if you find out that it works nevertheless - are you really prepared to search for that kind of device on second-hand markets, have it take up space in your kitchen cabinets, and then, just when you are frustrated because your morning coffee is brewed but you have no cream, spend half an hour cranking?
If I were you, I would store a few sachets of powdered non-dairy creamer.
* I am now expecting a number of comments listing drinks which will mix with butter after all. My hunch is that none of them will be the kind of drink to which people add milk after serving.


Pizza dough changed from usable to sticky Advice needed please.
My son has a small pizzeria, a family run affair.
Since 2011 we have made several thousand pizza, one size fits all.
A problem we are hitting now is inconsistency of dough mix. Hydration has been varied over the years starting at 59% and now at 56%. Even at this lower figure it seems the dough is now coming out too wet for our needs.
We use zero zero flour from the same supplier in 25 kg bags. Oil added at the end of the mixing. All ingredients have stayed the same for the last 3 years, no improvers are added.
Our local temperature while mixing the dough is between 29C and 35C and humidity from 65 to 75% based in central Indonesia.
All items into the dough are measured within one gram
We work accurately so I must assume that it’s the variation of temperature and humidity that is making the dough sticky.
I have cross checked the scales with gold scale weights and it’s accurate.
If my assumption is right about humidity and temperature being a factor; is there a table where I can refer to adjust the hydration?

Thanks for the replies. I have experimented a bit with hydration with a 2 kilo of flour batch. I found reducing the water by 25 grams to have 1100 gram of water gave better dough. That was at shade temperature 29.5C and 90% relative humidity. The reason I started the question is a friend’s son worked for a large pizza franchise and they had correction tables for temperature and humidity changes.
Yes it is possible the flour mix has changed but they are the only supplier available so I cannot try another brand yet. I have not measured the water PH. I do know it is high in calcium and magnesium salts. It’s from a bore 33 metres deep. It’s been used for pizza dough for 2 years but a change in its make up is possible.
I will try the longer kneading, maybe that will work. Our present system is ‘just in time’ dough making as we are running out of fridge space. Water at 40C is weighed out part is used to activate the yeast which takes minutes. When mixing of the dough is done it is proofed in covered stainless steel bowls. First rise takes about 40 minutes. It is turned over and punched down. Then it stays in a refrigerator up to 2 days. Using cold water is not an option as we sell thousands of pizza a year.


Is curry ketchup just ketchup with curry powder? We use both tomato ketchup and curry ketchup as condiments in Belgium. On the curry ketchup label, amongst other ingredients is "curry (1%)".

So I tried adding curry powder to regular ketchup to see whether I could end up with curry ketchup, but I think the taste was off. The colour was close though.

I know "curry powder" is a spice mix that can differ, but is curry ketchup really just ketchup with curry powder added? Or do they mean a bit of a real curry (the dish)? Or are there other differences? Is it possible to make curry ketchup with regular ketchup?

I suppose the Belgian "curry ketchup" is similar to the German varieties and no, they are usually not only seasoned with curry powder, but also other spices. There is no standard seasoning mix for curry ketchup, but common additional spices are ginger, black pepper, paprika, cayenne or other chili powders. I also think that some brands contain onions.

The brownisher colour of curry ketchup is mostly because of the turmeric in the curry powder, so just adding the powder to regular ketchup will get you a colour match even without the additional spices or ingredients.


Is it safe to eat chicken that is still frozen? I ate half of a pre-packed chicken sandwich before realizing it was still partially frozen. Is there anything to worry about, and can I eat the rest?

Aaronut's answer is fine, I'm just coming at it from a slightly different assumption.

Sandwiches like these are common in gas stations and convenience stores in the US. You can buy them in multi-packs at grocery stores or places like Costco.

In multi-packs they are sold frozen, in convenience stores they have often been defrosted.

They're perfectly safe still frozen as they were fully cooked before being quickly frozen and presumably stayed frozen until they were defrosted in the refrigerator before sale (if they're purchased thawed).

The only way these would pose a food safety risk is if they were thawed and left in the "danger zone" for longer than 2 hours, either somewhere along the distribution chain (highly unlikely), or after purchase. That's being very conservative, BTW.


How do I balance the bitterness of raddichio in soup? I made a big pot of soup and put a little of nearly everything I had in my refrigerator in it:

radicchio
fresh green beans
beets
potato
carrots
garlic scapes
scallions
tomatoes
yellow crookneck squash
swiss chard

I put a little apple cider vinegar & sea salt in it and it has been simmering. I just tasted it and it was so bitter that I don't think my family will eat it. I think it must be coming from the radicchio...

Can it be salvaged?

Was the radicchio fresh? I'm not a big lettuce fan but I know a lot of greens can be bitter fresh (mustard greens, collards, calaloo) and can benefit from steaming, boiling or cooking first.

Actually this website has a load of tips for reducing the bitterness in greens: http://www.justhungry.com/counteracting-bitterness-greens


How do companies find out how many calories are in their food? In the United States, virtually every food that I buy from a grocery store has Nutrition Facts on it that contain the calorie count on it. For instance, the label on a granola bar might say that it has 150 Calories.

According to Wikipedia, a Calorie (with a capital C, also called a kilocalorie) is the amount of energy needed to raise the temperature of one kilogram of water by one degree. However, it's not clear to me how companies would figure out how this translates to the Calorie count of their granola bar. I presume they don't just incinerate the food. Also, I'm guessing that they could ship off packaged foods somewhere to have it measured, but that wouldn't work for restaurant prepared foods.

There was a similar question titled How to calculate the calorie content of cooked food?, but it was focused on home food and relied on estimation. I presume that companies need to be much more precise in order to meet regulations.

So how do companies find out how many calories are in their food?

These days, mostly software. In the good/bad old days, by actually burning it (or having a laboratory do that for them). Software is much simpler (unless you are writing it, though it is probably more tedious than complex.)

Input ingredients and quantities, out comes calories. For a restaurant that assumes that the recipe used for calculation matches the actual recipe used.

Here is a USDA database, for instance. Tedious to use, but gives the idea.
http://ndb.nal.usda.gov/ndb/nutrients/index


Blue/green mold on sourdough starter I have been following instructions from KAF to start my own sourdough. On day 3, some small patches of blue/green mold appeared on the surface. The starter was fairly since the last feeding, increasing in volume about 30% or so. I carefully scooped off the moldy bits and went ahead with the next feeding.

So my question: is it safe to continue with this batch? In addition to the mold, it definitely smelled a bit tangy/funky. However, I've never worked with starter before, so I'm not sure what it's supposed to smell like at this point.

A well-developed sourdough should be able to generate a micro climate within his jar that supresses other growth like mold. This holds especially true for "old", well-established strains. We (1) use a sourdough strain that's been cultivated for at least 20 years. (After that, history becomes a bit murky...)

Young sourdough is the most susceptible to contamination and needs some time to develop a good souring/ leavening ratio. During the first weeks or even months, the baking properties of a sourdough might change quite a bit. So while a sourdough ist "working" after a few days, older lines are preferrable - the various yeasts will adapt to your conditions and develop a stable "society" (for lack of a better word).

As far as your mold problem is concerned, I'd just start over. You will have lost just a few days and your next batch will probably be fine. It's possible that in your moldy batch some "weaker" strains of yeasts grew that couldn't handle other micro-organisms. This happens sometimes. For old strains, I'd be tempted to try a "rescue mission" as described in the other post, but as the outcome is unclear, I wouldn't bother with a new batch. Just follow the instructions carefully, work with clean utensils and perhaps check your water -if it's heavily chlorinated you might be better off with bottled, at least in the beginning.

(1) "We" are a group of bakers that regularly bake and sell artisanal bread for charity.