slow cooker / crock pot temperature confusion (everything boils) On a whole I'd like someone to explain how slow cooker / crock pot recipes are
supposed to work?
I mean they tell you to cook xxx all day on high, or yyy for 6 hours on high
then switch to low, etc, etc, etc.
BUT, the actual devices themselves whatever name they go by (slow cooker, crock
pot, etc) are completely un-standardized.  So "high" for one brand might
very well be low for another brand.  How then can I trust or follow slow
cooker "recipes" (double-quotes intentional)?
To give a frame of reference, when a recipe says to cook under 15 PSI in a
pressure cooker or 230 C in an oven, it's much clearer what the inputs should
be and what results I can expect.
About a year ago, I tried to follow some slow cooker recipes and found that
the particular slow cooker I have (a cheapo Ronson one) would boil its
contents even on "low" setting.  Surely that wasn't slow cooking?  And even
with it boiling its contents, I still found that a longer cook time is needed
than the recipe states.  I'm not familiar with what the outputs should
look/taste like (it was a black beans soup IIRC); the impreciseness of the
whole experience just put me off slow cookers.
Recently I got a PID controller that holds my cheapo Ronson within 0.1 oC of
my specified temperature (for sous vide cooking).  So I'd like to try slow
cooking again.  What temperature should I use when I see "high" or "low" on
recipes? And where can I get some reliable recipes?
Wikipedia says 77 oC for "low" and 88-93 oC for "high".  But 88-93 is a
broad range.
I see this question is asking something similar, but got no answer.

It sounds like you were expecting slow cooking to be like sous vide. Well, it's not. The point isn't controlled sub-boiling temperatures, it's something on the border between simmering and boiling for foods that just need a long time to cook at that approximate temperature.

Slow cooker recipes are not supposed to be very sensitive. They're expecting to be approximately boiling for most of the time, and the difference between low and high is pretty much whether the boil is marginal or a bit more substantial. In many cases, this just matters because the quantity in the pot varies, and it takes more to keep the stuff at the top hotter if it's farther from the bottom, or if it hasn't all cooked down into the liquid yet. In either case, it shouldn't be a full rolling boil; it's just boiling on the bottom, so the rest of the liquid is probably a bit below the boiling point. And yes, this is still slow cooking. It's not boiling fast enough to lose a huge amount of liquid (or worse, boil over) with the lid on.

I wouldn't really try to assign temperatures to slow cooker recipes. Like I said, they shouldn't be that sensitive. If your bean soup recipe didn't work, maybe it was a bad one. But "reliable" in the context of slow cooker recipes doesn't mean "exact times and temperatures". They're generally things that will be perfectly fine if you cook them 25% longer. Not everything in the kitchen has to be precise and formulaic; slow cookers and slow cooker recipes take advantage of that fact. And even if you do try to calibrate, you'll have trouble, since there's a temperature gradient from bottom to top. Unlike sous vide, a slow cooker is not constantly well-mixed. In equilibrium it'll be boiling at the bottom, and 10-20 degrees cooler at the top.

If you really wanted to use a sous vide controller, I imagine something like 95-98C would work for basically every slow cooker recipe, no matter whether they say high or low. Of course, mixing thoroughly enough to make your controller actually work, you may be overstirring whatever you're cooking. But the point is, things you cook in a slow cooker aren't really going to care much what the exact temperature is; it just matters that it's hot, near boiling, and not boiling so fast that it sticks on the bottom or loses a lot of liquid.

Finding reliable recipes... Well, it's like anything else. If you're looking on the internet, you have to learn to judge for yourself and look for warning signs, or stick to sites with lots of reviews. You also have to accept that sometimes you have to test for doneness and be flexible about time. This isn't really unusual; baking recipes should always have some kind of test ("until golden brown") and the actual baking times will vary. (With something like bean soup, sure, maybe the recipe was bad, maybe you didn't soak enough, maybe the beans were a little different. A stovetop recipe wouldn't have been precise either.) If all that isn't good enough for you, buy a slow cooker cookbook; tons of those have been published in recent years.


Is less quality cream used in salted butter? My room mate's mom recently told us that butter manufacturers will use a lower quality cream in their salted butter because the salt will help preserve the butter. This sounds too intuitive to be true.

Is it common practice to use a lower quality cream in salted butter, and if so is it because the lower quality cream does not preserve as well without the salt or is there not even such a thing as 'lower quality' cream?

There is no such thing as "lower quality cream" although there are variations in taste.

All milk has a slightly different water to fat ratio. In general, animal milk is 80% water, 5% protein and 5% fat.

Cream is the fatty part of milk skimmed off. Cream will typically be 35% fat (though in different cultures it varies from 20% to 75%). Cream also has some protein, and the rest being water

Farmers are paid for the milk solids (protein and fat), not by the volume of milk produced. Therefore quality milk is often referred to by how high the solids level is, not how flavoursome it is. Hygiene and storage conditions are usually government mandated, and follow international guidelines, especially if the manufacturer ever wants to export the product

Butter is cream churned to remove most of the water and protein. Butter in most countries must have 80% or more fat content to be called butter. The water and protein by-product is called whey, and is processed into other products

The 1% to 2% salt added is a preservative and a commonly desired flavouring, regardless of the "quality" of the cream.

You can buy unsalted butter, just keep it in the freezer for long term storage. Freezing butter has no noticeable effect on it.


How much rice should I cook per person? I would like to know how much rice I should cook per person.
Preferably in some "fast" measurements - like cups, spoons, etc.

It would also be nice to know how much water should I add to the rice-cooker.

Edit: I want to have the rice as a side dish, usually with some kind of stew.

Edit: The cup I've been using is 300ml filled about 3mm below top edge (which is what i consider "full").

I usually use 1/4 cup per person for a smallish portion, and 1/3 cup per person if you're a bit hungrier. You'll probably want to check the instructions for your rice cooker to check exactly how much water you should add as different manufacturers vary. I believe the one I used in the past needed an equal quantity of water to rice.


Safety of room-temperature soaker from Reinhart's *Whole Grain Breads* One of the “tricks” used in Peter Reinhart's Whole Grain Breads is to soak various whole grains in water, at room temperature, for 12–24 hours. For example, in his “Multigrain Stuan” formula, he calls for leaving 2 oz whole wheat flour, 6 oz mixed grains, .14 oz salt, and 6 oz milk, buttermilk, yogurt, soy milk, or rice milk out, covered lightly in plastic wrap, at room temperature, for 12–24 hours.

As to which grains to use, there is a note to see the comment. The comment talks about which grains to cook vs. use uncooked. It mentions using brown rice, cooked.

But rice can contain B. cereus spores, which are heat-stable and will survive cooking; and it seems like this room-temperature soaker would be a nice environment for them to grow. The pH isn't low enough (less than 4.3) to stop them, for example. And B. cereus produces heat-stable toxins, which would assumably survive baking.

Is there something I'm unaware of that makes this recipe safe?

If you use yogurt (or cultured buttermilk) it sounds like the creator of the recipe is trying to get the Lactobacillus in the yogurt to start metabolizing some of the components of the mixture. Otherwise, it sounds like they want some random yeast to start the fermentation for the bread. There is definitely a risk of other potentially pathogenic organisms growing also as there is a source of moisture and food with those ingredients and a suitable temperature.

For buttermilk or yogurt specifically:
From a safety standpoint, you would need to consider what the load of pathogenic bacteria is compared to the intentionally inoculated Lactobacillus as the Lactobacillus may interfere with the germination of B. cereus due to creation of an acidic pH.

In general:
As per http://smas.chemeng.ntua.gr/miram/files/publ_77_13_1_2004.pdf it takes approximately 20 hours for a 2-log increase in concentration of B. cereus (1 bacteria dividing into 100 offspring), and as per http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/pdf/wk/mm4310.pdf it takes 10^5 B. cereus per gram of food for symptomatic illness, so your initial concentration in the ingredients (assuming the growth conditions in the first paper) would need to be 10^3 per gram overall of viable organisms to get to the toxic level in this time frame (potentially meaning that your ingredients carrying B. cereus in and of themselves would need to be relatively close to the toxic range to start since not everything would be presumed to be contaminated). Since it takes time for spores to germinate, if we are talking about no viable organisms and spores only it would take an awful lot.

Regardless, I trust cultured organisms (yogurt, yeast, etc.) more than the naturally-occurring ones I might find at home (particularly since I work at a hospital and might track some nasty stuff home with me). I would inoculate it with some trusted microorganisms if I was making the recipe.

With that said, the standard caveat of if it smells bad after letting it sit out it probably should be thrown out would apply. Also, although I have a degree in biochemistry I am not a microbiologist, toxicologist, or pathologist.


Bread maker - is this even a collapse or did it not get started? I have used the machine successfully several times but something went very wrong today. My machine is an Oster. The top surface is powdery and underneath it is as hard as a rock. Almost looks like power was lost part way through. We did hear it operating for quite a while. What went wrong?

That looks like a measurement error.  Not nearly enough liquid.


How Do I Fix Curdled Mascarpone Cheese? I made a mascarpone mix for a Jamie Oliver cheesecake and it has curdled.

The ingredients I added to the mixture include:

full cream milk,
vanilla essence,
and icing sugar.

Why would this mixture curdle? There is no acid in any of the ingredients.

And what can I do to fix this curdled mascarpone mixture?

Mascarpone is very prone to curdling in mixtures like this if any of the ingredients are different temperatures. Generally, you whip the cheese to soften it and it warms up a bit in the process, then if the milk you added is colder than the cheese, the fats in the cheese will solidify again, causing it to appear curdled.

The best way to avoid this is to make sure everything is room temperature, and to add the liquids very slowly. To fix it once it has already curdled, generally you would gently heat it over a double boiler (or microwave it a few seconds at a time) while whipping it until you've whipped the lumps out. Once it's smooth, let it cool back to room temperature, stirring regularly, and rewhip it once it's cool.


Can you eat acorns picked from the street? The streets and parks where I live in New York City are littered with acorns. Can I pick them up and cook them?

Is it safe? Are they any good? (Taste-wise, nutrition-wise.)

Acorns from which tree?  Acorns from California live oak for instance are edible, but only after a painstaking process of grinding and soaking, without which they can kill you.  European oaks have acorns that are more amenable to eating, but they really can't be eaten raw.  And even the French don't as a rule eat them, which tells me they can't be that tasty :-)


What are certified synthetic colors? At Aldi where I shop (in the United States), there are many foods that have the label "No Certified Synthetic Colors":

What exactly are certified synthetic colors? And why would a company advertise that their products do not contain them?

The FDA recognizes 9. Here's how they put it on their official website:

Certified colors are synthetically produced (or human-made) and used widely because they impart an intense, uniform color, are less expensive, and blend more easily to create a variety of hues. There are nine certified color additives approved for use in the United States... Certified food colors generally do not add undesirable flavors to foods.

Clicking deeper, the FDA reveals the ingredients that are officially allowed to be called "coloring" on food labels.

FD&C Blue Nos. 1 and 2, FD&C Green No. 3, FD&C Red Nos. 3 and 40, FD&C Yellow Nos. 5 and 6, Orange B, Citrus Red No. 2, annatto extract, beta-carotene, grape skin extract, cochineal extract or carmine* paprika oleoresin, caramel color, fruit and vegetable juices, saffron (Note: Exempt color additives are not required to be declared by name on labels but may be declared simply as colorings or color added)

So these must be the actual 9 ingredients that are "Certified Synthetic Colors":

FD&C Blue Nos. 1 and 2, FD&C Green No. 3, FD&C Red Nos. 3 and 40, FD&C Yellow Nos. 5 and 6, Orange B, Citrus Red No. 2.

The rest:

annatto extract, beta-carotene, grape skin extract, cochineal extract or carmine* paprika oleoresin, caramel color, fruit and vegetable juices, saffron

are not synthetic, but they can still be called "coloring" on the ingredient list. BTW, cochineal extract and carmine are made from powdered bugs.
Definitely, artificial colors like Red 40 are high on the list of "scary because we don't know what they are" things. I do find that particular labeling odd because "Certified Synthetic Color" is not exactly a household term.
*EDIT March 24, 2017
As of 2009, cochineal extract and carmine are off the "natural colors" list:

Until 2009, cochineal was one of many dyes that fell under the umbrella term "natural color" on ingredients lists. But because cochineal provokes severe allergic reactions in some people, the Food and Drug Administration requires carmine and cochineal extract to be explicitly identified in ingredients lists.
Aside from its role as an allergen, cochineal has no known health risks, although those who keep kosher or choose not to eat animal products will want to keep their distance. In addition to food, cochineal is used as a dye in cosmetics products, including lipstick, and at least one person has reported a severe allergic reaction to a cochineal dye used in a pill coating.

-LiveScience.com


Gas stove + Wok Vs. Induction top + Skillet I have two questions regarding woks:

Can I achieve close to the same result with an induction top and either a kettle or high edge frying pan, or is a wok pan and gas stove paramount to achieving a great wok result?
Is there any point at all in using a wok on a flat cooking top, since they are initially designed for using on a gas stove with flames coming up along the sides and everything?

EDIT: Split food preparation part of question into separate post.

A wok is designed to put food in heat at the center and relax some of the heat as you move away from center, and you keeping the food moving in and out of that hot spot so you get an even sear all around.

To mimic this, use a wide 12 inch or larger skillet (depending on your quantity of food) with high walls, and make it hot. Continuously flip the food over and over and stir is so you get an even seat in the same way. This is called stir fry.

The reason why a wok is desirable is you can manage a lot of food in a wok and move stuff into and out of the hot center quite easily. You can do the same thing in a skillet, but you have to take greater care to not burn your food nor to make a mess throwing the food around.


How to make a berry gel? I have some agar agar powder to make a mixed berry gel using some berry coulee that I made. Lets say I want to make one cup of coulee to turn it to a gel, how much agar agar powder should I use. Keep in mind I don't want to turn it into a gelatin, just a gel so that it will still be liquid but very thick.

So I finally was able to test out making the berry gel using some berry coulis. I used one half cup coulis in a small saucepan and added 1/8 teaspoon Agar Agar powder brought it just up to the boil then put it in a plastic container and put that in an ice bath.

I checked in it a half hour later and it had jelled. I then blitzed it with my hand blender and magic. It's the exact consistency I wanted, thick and fluid but won't lose its shape on the plate. I took this picture ten minutes after I put the gel on.

** Update - Here is what I wanted to do with the berry gel ;-)


What should I do with a just-baked lasanga? I'm a complete cooking newbie. I just made a lasanga from a recipe - or something that looks like a lasanga. However, it will probably only be eaten 3-4 hours from now. What should I do with it in the mean while? Leave it in the oven (after turning it off, of course)? Put it in the fridge? Just lay it on a table?

And how should I re-heat it, if it will be required?

The lasanga will be even better 4 hours from now, but you definitely need to get it cold. Bacteria grow between 40°F and 140°F (often called the "danger zone"), so you need to get it cold now. I wouldn't put hot lasagna directly into the fridge, though, as it will raise the temperature of your fridge. Let it cool for a little while, maybe even let it sit on some ice, then refrigerate.

You can re-heat it all at once, in a low temperature (250°F or so) oven, or cut into individual servings and microwave it.


Is it safe to leave a broth simmering overnight on an electric stove? I am trying to cook bone broth in a pot on an electric stove like this one  and it needs to simmer for at least a day (so the stove is set to a low temperature). Is it safe to leave the stove unattended like this overnight? Assuming, of course, that there is enough water in the broth such that it won't all evaporate overnight. I know that a crock pot would be ideal for this but I don't have one (or the means to get one right now) and at this point the broth has already been simmering for a few hours.

Is it safe?  That depends on a lot of factors.  Generally, no.  It isn't.  A blog post from the Healthy Home Economist has the opinion of a firefighter:

One gal mentioned that her husband was a firefighter and that leaving
a stockpot simmering overnight or while they were out of the house was
completely out of the question.

Source.
The NFPA says the same, as this informational PDF sheet illustrates.
Since you cannot get a crock pot my only other suggestion is to simmer your bone broth in the oven.  If your pot is oven safe and you trust your oven's ability to keep a steady low temperature, then try it in there.
If you plan on making bone broth more often, a crock pot is a great investment and if you check out your local Goodwill or Salvation Army store you might find an older but still perfectly usable model for an excellent price.  It would also allow you to slow cook your broth overnight safely (and uses less electricity to do it).


Is there any advantage to cooking steak on the bone? My local butcher sells ribeye and sirloin steaks from Basque and Galician dairy cows on the bone.

All of their products are fantastic but I question what effect cooking it 'bone-in' has.

Is there any advantage - in flavour/texture/ease of cooking- to cooking steak on the bone, or is it simply a way for them to charge more?

Well, many steak experts have held for years that bone-in steak just tastes better, something about that marrow being good.
J. Kenji Lopez-Alt from Serious Eats tested that theory.
He found that the steak bones were too impenetrable for the marrow to actually flavor grilling steak, but that the bones provided beneficial insulation:

To test this, I cooked four identical roasts. The first was cooked with the bone on. For the second, I removed the bone, but tied it back against the meat while cooking. For the third, I removed the bone, and tied it back to the meat with an intervening piece of impermeable heavy-duty aluminum foil. The fourth was cooked completely without the bone.
Tasted side-by-side, the first three were completely indistinguishable from each other. The fourth, on the other hand, was a little tougher in the region where the bone used to be.
What does this indicate? Well, first off, it means the flavor exchange theory is completely bunk—the completely intact piece of meat tasted exactly the same as the one with the intervening aluminum foil. But it also means that the bone does serve at least one important function: it insulates the meat, slowing its cooking, and providing less surface area to lose moisture.

He also mentions that the bone provides a framework to protect the shape of the meat, but it's a pain to carve the bone from the cooked meat:

The best way to cook your beef is to detach the bone and tie it back on. You get the same cooking quality of a completely intact roast with the added advantage that once it's cooked, carving is as simple as cutting the string, removing the bones, and slicing.

(The quote says "roast" but in the article he seems to be talking just as much about steak)
You mention that bone-in steak costs more at your butcher than boneless. I have not typically found that to be the case. When I have purchased steak, the bone-in has been less expensive than a boneless steak of the same weight of actual meat, cut, and grade of meat. I would sometimes pay extra for the butcher's time removing the bone.


Can I store raw meat in the fridge after defrosting in the microwave? I had a frozen package of bacon. I only wanted to use half the bacon, but couldn't separate the frozen bacon strips, so I defrosted the whole package in the microwave. The bacon got quite warm - not fully cooked, but smelling like bacon. I used what I needed and put the rest in the fridge immediately. I'm planning on using the rest of the bacon in a few days. Is that a good idea, or should I just throw it away?

You can use it in a few days, that will be fine. Issues with food safety come into play largely when food is kept in the danger zone, around 40-140F for an extended time.

The texture of the bacon might not be quite as good since it's kind of like the second time you'll be cooking it.


Getting onion/garlic smell out of rice cooker I used my rice cooker for rice with pork, onion and garlic. I washed it well twice but it still smells of pork and onion. It seems like the fat from the meat permeated the teflon (slightly scratched). I cleaned the lid well too. I wonder if I should just cook rice with it and see if that works but not sure if the smell being there means there is any bacteria growing on it. Or boil water with it to clean it?

Nothing's penetrated the teflon, what's happened here is that you haven't got all the fat off, garlic smell is fat soluble so it's remaining with a small film still on the pot. Put some dish soap right into it, then rub it all over the insert with damp fingers, then rinse, that should get rid of the fat. Sometimes washing with soapy water doesn't get rid of it all; the fat floats to the top of the water and if there's not enough soap you end up getting it right back on when you pull the pot out.


Tools used to spread oil for crêpes Making crêpes on teflon-coated cookware makes it possible to fold the fat (butter, ..) inside the mixture, and to use no fat while cooking. But some may want to avoid teflon, perhaps for health reasons, perhaps because they're partial to cast iron, etc. For any surface other than teflon (stainless steel, cast iron, ...) applying fat before pouring the crêpe mixture becomes necessary.
In this video at 2:00 and at the very beginning (and later on) in that one crêpe chefs are applying fat using what seems like a towel in the first and a foil-covered cylinder in the second.
What are these two tools? Are these tools accessible to the home cook? Are there substitutes that the home cook can use?
In the first (and other videos) I've seen what looks like an oiled paper towel. If the pan is already at medium heat (and adequately preheated), an oiled paper towel would surely burn quite quickly (not to mention possibly leave lint). Likewise any towel would burn.
The tool used in the second video seems to be some kind of aluminum-covered spreader, but it's unclear whether the handle contains fat or the instrument was simply sitting in a plate of fat.

Having now been able to watch the videos, they do seem like what I've seen. The first isn't very clear but looks like cloth rather than paper towel to me. The second looks a bit more manufactured, but again familiar. It's a (presumably cotton) cloth, possibly cheesecloth, rolled, and kept rolled with a crimped handle or foil. A cotton or linen tea towel (AKA dish towel) would work too. The handle also means less oil getting on the cook's hand. The only slightly odd thing is the foil at the bottom.
Cheesecloth is primarily meant for use in contact with food, and tea towels for contact with cooking equipment. Lint isn't an issue after a few washes.
The reason they don't burn is the very brief contact time, combined with a lot of the heat going into the oil; they're saturated by being kept in a dish of oil. This is a quick way to get a sufficiently even layer. If you look closely you may see that the spreader is used in a brushing motion so contact between any one part and the griddle or pan isn't continuous, meaning even less time to scorch. And after all, a cotton cloth can be used as an oven cloth.


Homemade yogurt hygiene; can the results be dangerous? I'm late to the Instant Pot homemade yogurt game, but have been having fun eating the results. I'm relatively careful about cleaning the pot and implements, but I assume that at some point I'll let some microbe(s) slip by, and end up with an unlicensed ecosystem.

Here's the question: if (when?) that happens, will the results be unappetizing or inedible, or could they actually be dangerous? For example, this answer states that he got food poisoning from his homemade yogurt.

And, if this is possible, and it happened, how would I know? Fuzz on the top? A mysterious green glow? The yogurt climbing out of the pot and menacing me?

Food safety for homemade yogurt works basically the same way as cooking: you are safe as long as you respect the needed time and temperature restrictions.

Yogurt food safety risks

The reason yogurt is safe after staying at room temperature is the same as in all fermented foods. It has a live bacterial culture of benign bacteria, and these fill all available ecological niches, or "spoil" them with products which humans can eat (lactic or acetic acid), so no pathogens can grow. The two risks are

if you have a large colony of pathogens before you introduce the yogurt culture, the yogurt culture cannot grow and overtake the ecosystem
if you start with small numbers of both yogurt culture and other (potentially pathogenic) microorganisms, but expose it to an environment that is not well suited to the yogurt culture's needs, it can happen that the other microorganisms multiply quicker and become the ones that overtake the ecosystem.
You can avoid both risks by simply following the proper process.

A nice thing about yogurt is that its fermented nature means it typically spoils by molds instead of bacteria (at least when kept in the fridge), and molds are visible. So, if you have old yogurt (that was safely made) and it's not moldy, you can consider it safe.

The safe process for making yogurt

Start with safe milk, don't try to "rescue" old milk by yogurting it. Not even if you can't detect any spoilage.
Pasteurize the milk (which has the double purpose of reducing bacteria and changing the milk protein structure) - if you leave that out, it is not safe
Let cool down to the proper temperature - for safety, don't let it cool down below that then reheat, continue as soon as it is cooled.
Add the culture. Here, the safety-relevant thing is to add sufficient amounts of culture - don't try to make 5 liters of yogurt with only a teaspoon of old yogurt. 20-50 g of old yogurt per liter of milk is a good amount, or if you are using industrially packaged culture, it will have the amount stated on the package.
Incubate at the proper temperature, for the needed time. Here, you can in principle deviate without much trouble safety-wise (although if you do it for too short a time, you'll still have milk instead of yogurt, which will have a shorter storage time in the fridge), but the taste won't be good if you go too short or too long.
Inspect for signs of improper fermentation.
Refrigerate the yogurt.

The proper temperature will vary with the culture you choose, the widespread ones are mesophilic (usually bifidobacteria, need 37-40°C, or 98-104°F) and thermophilic (usually lactobacilii, need 43-48°C, or 110-119°F). You have some leeway with temperature, obviously - else mixed cultures wouldn't be able to grow at all - but don't overdo it. If you were to incubate your yogurt at very low temperatures (say 30°C or 86°F) or very high temperatures (e.g. 55°C or 130°F), that would be unsafe.

Do inspect your yogurt when it is done fermenting. It is normal to notice some things which are not usual in storebought yogurt - it might have a skin of either fat or caseine, it might have visibly separated whey, it might have a slightly less smooth texture. But if it is very strange - very liquid, or smelly, or discolored, or has curdled into something closer to quark - then it is not safe to eat.

Hygiene when making yogurt

There is no need to go to extremes, such as sterilizing your equipment. You can still do it if you prefer, but yogurt is still good without it. If you use the same hygiene standard as you do for other cooking and eating utensils, that's sufficient for typical yogurt-making and yogurt-eating habits.

Stronger hygiene can help you in three ways:

to give you a larger safety margin (not strictly needed, but can make you feel better)
to give you longer shelf life. I can personally attest that for me, yogurt from the same culture made under the same conditions, resists mold for longer if made in individual containers (sealed airtight before fermentation) than when made in a large container that gets opened and closed to take yogurt out, about 3 weeks vs. 10-12 days.
to keep your culture pure/usable over more reinnoculations. If you reinnoculate with the same culture, it picks up wild bacteria over time and at some point, it's time to abandon it, because it has lost its taste and texture, or just doesn't work well. If you allow fewer wild bacteria to join, the culture will keep pure for longer. This is only a concern if obtaining fresh culture is difficult or expensive for you, or if you have some very special tasting culture you want to keep really pure for many innoculation cycles.

Instant pot yogurt

I must admit that I have not compared the Instant pot yogurt process specifications against industrial standards, I just trust the manufacturers to have chosen a safe process. The yogurt it makes turns out comparable to making it in a sous vide setup where I can control the temperature and time precisely. So, I think it should be a safe method. An advice that is unrelated to safety: use a separate gasket, else your yogurt will taste like stew.


What should I substitute for shortening: lard or butter? My recipe calls for shortening, I want to substitute lard for the shortening, will this work? Or can I just use butter?

Yes, and also yes. Moreso lard than butter, as butter has significant water content, but it often does not matter enough to worry about. Most recipes that have been around for a while probably started with lard.

For MOST things, you can simply pick any of the three and it will be fine, or you can mix them if you like.


Turning a sweet cake into a savoury one: What should I swap in place of sugar? I am looking to turn the following recipe for pumpkin bread into a savoury one. i.e. I want to get rid of sugar (which in this case is maple syrup). I think that sugar will add to the loafiness of the bread. I have thought of using eggs as this might add the extra moist and structure that sugar seems to facilitate - but I might be wrong, and I am still very confused by the research I have done. It also seems that sugar and eggs complement each other, so I am not sure if eggs alone are the solution.

As per above, I don't care about the cake being vegan (just gluten free). So all suggestions are welcome.

On King Arthur's site, they talk about liquid sweeteners.
One of their comparisons between the different forms is water content/acidity.
Maple syrup's water content/acidity: 34%, mildly acidic (less acidic than honey).
This led me to look up water content and acidity impacts on baking.
The Cake blog did a comparison of cakes based on level of acid used. The no acid cake (what I would assume would happen if you removed the maple syrup because it contains malic acid) still worked, it just wasn't as tall or fluffy as the ones with acid.
My suggestion is that if you want a loaf that is more cake-like, you should add a bit of acid (e.g., lemon juice or vinegar) if you remove the maple syrup. If you want a loaf that's denser, you can leave out the maple syrup and don't add in anything else.


What's the secret to making good turkish bread? (pide) I mean the flat but thick bread you get at turkish restaurants.  I've tried it twice now, with two difference recipes, and each time it's come out hard and crunchy, more like a thick pizza crust.

Seriously, two separate recipes?  Obviously I'm doing something wrong but I don't know what.  Can someone who knows how to do this ask me some questions about what I did to try and help me find out what I did wrong?

Edit: I can't find the first recipe I tried, but this was the second:

http://mediterraneanturkishfoodpassion.blogspot.com/2009/05/turkish-flat-bread-pide-ekmegi.html

Also: I used unbleached enriched flour from the bulk section of the health food store, if that makes a difference.

Three reasons come to mind why your bread may have turned out too hard-

1- If you didn't let it rise enough.
Flat breads often don't have a proofing step. The dough should double in size on the first rise and then after you divide the dough let it rest to make rolling out easier.

2- Working the dough too much without resting.
When rolling or stretching the dough be gentle. You don't want to force all the air out. If you do think that you overworked it, letting it rest for a while will let the yeast work a little more.

3- Too low of oven temperature
Traditional flat breads are often baked in large, wood-fired, brick ovens. Your recipe calls for 475F and I would say that that would be a lower bound. Since flat breads are so thin they dry out quickly. In general the hotter you can bake them the better. Try throwing a couple loaves on a very hot grill but indirect heat. Expect this to take less baking time than your recipe. If you get some charring that is ok and even desirable. If you get charring that goes all the way through then you rolled the loaves a little too thin.

Personally- I am skeptical of the milk basting. This would keep the surface of the bread moist but it would cool down the oven which would be horrible for the bread. I never saw turkish bakers basting their flat bread but maybe it is a regional thing.


How long can I keep peanut powder? I like putting peanut flavor in my sauces and wanted to make a big batch of crushed and pulverized peanuts.

I was wondering how long I could keep these, before they went bad.

There are no safety concerns here. Baked and shelled peanuts are shelf stable, no matter if they are pulverized or not. Just smell before each use and discard once it turns rancid.


Ratios in traditional Thai peanut curry recipes I tried to make a Thai peanut curry and used a highly rated recipe:
I have no experience making Thai food and have only eaten it in restaurants.

It did occur to me that the peanut butter content seemed very high in that recipe. The resulting dish was in fact far too sweet and fatty and not nearly spicy enough. My first inclination would be to eliminate the sugar, reduce the peanut butter. The spiciness was easily remedied by the liberal application of sriracha. My goal is not just to make a tasty dish but to also be as authentic as possible.

What should I look for in an authentic Thai curry recipe? About what ratio of peanut butter should I expect? Should they add sugar as this one did?

Many Asian recipes, especially from the Thailand have large amounts of sugar in them.

Traditionally this would have been a more raw form of sugar, or just some sweet fruit paste

I would suggest first trying the original Asian dishes (i.e. go bush in Thailand, or find some recent Thai immigrants to hang with!), and then make you own sauces based on those experiences, but adjust ingredients to taste and sensibility


Can a Toddler Eat Food Cooked With Honey in it? One of the recommendations for enabling a young child to pick up some of the more slippery foods is to coat them with bread crumbs or graham cracker crumbs.  While looking for graham crackers at the store, we found honey graham crackers.  Considering that exposure to honey can cause infant botulism, I was wondering if the honey graham crackers are safe for him to eat?

That bit of the Wikipedia article is unsourced, but Health Canada confirms and says that spores may be present even in pasteurized honey.  (I never would have thought that.)

I wouldn't expect the cooking of the crackers to damage the spores significantly more than the pasteurization.  I can't say for sure that there will be live spores in the crackers, but it's a definite possibility and if you're concerned about this then you should not risk it.


How can I cut the flavour of Worcestershire sauce in a completed Asian dish? I was following a Chicken Yakisoba recipe that looked good. I ended up doubling the sauce because I had added extra cabbage and other vegetables. The sauce called for:

  1/4 cup soy sauce
  1/4 cup worcestershire sauce
  2 Tbsp ketchup
  up to 1 Tbsp sriracha hot sauce
  1 Tbsp sugar

I double all there except I kept the sriracha sauce to 1 Tbsp. I was wary of adding 1/2 cup of Worcestershire but I only really started cooking recently so I do not have experience to know better. The resulting sauce was powerful to say the least. While it is edible it is not something I am super proud of. Next time I will reduce the amount. After reading comments on this some other people had similar issues.

For now I have 4-5 servings of this dish that I do not want to throw out. I hate waste. However I would like to try and salvage the dish.

What can I do to try and cut the Worcestershire sauce in my already completed Chicken Yakisoba?

I have never encountered this problem but I would suggest making up a batch of just the sauce, omitting the Worcestershire sauce and maybe going a little light on any of the other ingredients that would contribute a high salt content. I would make sure to cook the sauce till the raw flavor is gone, then I would add that to the remaining Chicken Yakisoba you have. Good luck, I hope everything works out.


how to ensure carrot pieces stay longer in the refrigerator? I blanched a big carrot and cut them into pieces and stored them in a airtight container in the refrigerator. I ate them for about 5 days - one piece out of the container for each meal. But after that, they've gone stale - some sour liquid leaking out of the pieces, and sour taste and smell. I had to threw them out. What can I do next time to make them stay longer? What sauce should I sprinkle to the pieces for better preservation? Would it be better if I put them in the freezer? Would it be worse?

This is a big/thick carrot, so it needed to be cut to pieces before a human mouth & teeth can handle it. They don't sell thin weaponized carrots like in Shoot Em Up where I live.

By the way, that sour taste and smell, I encountered the same taste when I blanched nappa cabbage and stored it in an airtight bag in the refrigerator. I was probably making the same mistake.

Edit: I should mention that I haven't used salt when blanching them. I also forgot to put the vegetable in cold water after. Maybe the problem was I didn't blanch right?

Sounds like fermentation to me. Without some preservative (salt or acid like vinegar, for example), you're going to pick up some bacteria out of the air and they'll eventually have their way with your food. You can't expect cooked vegetables to last but so long in the refrigerator, especially unpreserved food that you're dipping back into regularly.

I'm curious why you feel the need to cook a week's worth of carrot in one go. As I'm sure you know, blanching doesn't take all that long. Surely you could just cook one or two days' worth at a time, and know that while you'll have to cook your carrot more often, you will also have a lot less risk of having to throw any spoiled carrot out.

That's the solution I'd recommend.


How to a prevent spoon from falling into soup? When preparing a soup, the spoon which I use to stir the soup with, often falls in. Is there any way to prevent the spoon from falling into the soup?

The obvious solution is to not let the spoon in the pot. While you may just let it rest on the pot, you can also use a spoon rest, as I do.

Spoon rests

I always let one of those on the oven so that I can avoid making a mess of my kitchen when I am finished using my ustensils.


How the heck did people in the olden' days learn to beat eggs and other laborious tasks? Did they have whipped cream in the olden days before electricity?  I think that they might have.  I'm sure I've seen a portrait of Henry VIII munching some of that creamy goodness before.

But what on earth caused someone to whisk cream for hours to see what would happen?  Is there any scientific basis to it?  For example, "Well I know if I whisk this cream, theoretically it should thicken up." Or was it just some super bored peasant folk who discovered it?  Perhaps an argument between a peasant wife and a peasant worker, "I am going to take this fork to this cream and stir it for ages to make an annoying noise!"

Another example is beating eggs - why bother when intuition would probably tell us we are wasting our time?

Accident and/or trial and error, with a bit of 'evolution'. Someone notices that cream gets a bit thicker when it's been stirred a while, they put two and two together and beat it. Then someone has the bright idea to use a whisk to get more air into it and make it even thicker, etc etc.

Though actually I imagine that whipped cream was actually discovered during the process of making butter (keep whipping cream and butter is what you get).


The whey of mozzarella or tofu Mozzarella, tofu come with a liquid, I think is whey. Is it useful in any way? has this any culinary value?

The purpose of this liquid is to prevent the cheese or tofu from drying out. Its main use is for storage, not for consumption. If you don't consume the cheese at once after opening the original package, you are supposed to transfer the liquid into a storage container, or replace/fill up with water.

There are people who drink the whey, because they like the taste. There isn't much to be said here; they pour it into a glass and drink, without further preparation.

Otherwise, any recipe which uses water can use whey instead. The taste difference for mild wheys such as mozzarella and tofu whey will be very slight, almost unnoticeable. There is nothing special to take into account, except a small probability that you won't like the taste and would prefer to use water instead. There is no way to predict whether you will find the taste harmonious: it is a personal preference.

A known use for the whey created during cheese making is to make ricotta. It will not work with tofu whey, and I don't think it will work with the liquid in commercial mozzarella packaging either; you'd have to make your own cheese to get the necessary type of whey for ricotta.


When should I knead with oil and when with flour? I have been experimenting with making bread and pastries and have tried kneading with both oil and flour. I have found that I tend to use flour with bread and yeast based loaves and oil with pastry dough.

I don't know what is best, though. I am slightly concerned that adding flour to a bread dough will mess up the flour water ratio, so is it better to use oil, and vice versa with the pastries (say a shortcrust pastry that already contains a form of fat)?

Is there some other factor that determines flour vs oil?

Both messes up the ratio, as you said, so you shouldn't use anything during kneading. You only need to use a little bit of something during shaping. With some pastries, the shaping is extensive and you get lots of the smoother worked into the dough; this is expected and desired (e.g. in strudel sheets).

Properly kneaded bread dough does not stick to anything, even if it started out very wet. So, if it sticks at the beginning, just continue kneading until it stops (I knead it between my hands then, not on a surface). When it is ready, it will not only stop sticking to your hands, but also pull the smear of the hand surfaces into itself, coming clean off them so you can work with it. (You will still have to clean your hands afterwards from gunk between the fingers and on the back of your hands).

When your dough is kneaded through, you want to form a good surface for the rising period. You can use flour, oil or water; you'll use so little that it doesn't really matter much. Just spread a thin film on your surface, shape the boule and put it into the rising bowl.

For the final rise, you want it to keep its shape when it's put into the oven. So, when you are giving it its final shape, you can use either flour or a starch to prevent it from sticking to whatever it is rising on. I knew somebody who swore by rice flour as producing the least stickiness, but use plain wheat flour myself. You can even lay it on a bed of flour; it is not getting pressed into it, so it won't absorb it and get hard. But you will have a layer of either raw or burned flour on the prepared bread.

An exception would be very oil-rich breads (at least half as much butter as flour). They do better when the final shaping is done in oil too.

For pastries and cookies, it depends on the type of dough. If it is supposed to be a hard dough, use flour. The strudel mentioned above is made in flour. If it is supposed to be a soft or tender dough, you can try shaping without any smoothening (for example many cookies will flow into a smooth shape during baking even if put onto the sheet as an unsightly pinched ball). Ugly sticky pastry doughs like pie crust can be rolled into submission if you roll them between two smooth silicone mats, but you can't get them very thin that way. If you need them at less than 4 mm, use flour, best in combination with the silicone. Plastic wraps also works, but you might have to use two pieces per surface when the crust gets wide.

If you have a dough which really feels half-liquid in your hands, shape with flour. Corriher's very light southern biscuits from Cookwise are a good example for such a dough.


How do people make fried onions as an ingredient as opposed to a snack? Should I coat them with flour, milk, and spices? A Pakistani dish I am learning to make calls for fried onions as an ingredient. The recipe says "golden fried onions" and later "fried onion paste", referring to the same thing. The video shows a clump of yellow brownish fried onion slices dumped into the pot. I don't think it is really a paste, more like clustered fried onions.
I know normally when you make fried onions you use spices and flour. Googling "fried onions" leads me to hundreds of recipes of fried onions as a snack or appetizer. Not what I need. Should I milk-dip and flour-coat them? How do people make fried onions as an ingredient in South Asian/central Asian cuisines? Simply deep fry?
Wikipedia's "fried onion" page has a picture of "Iranian fried onions" which I guess should be close to this ingredient in a Pakistani dish?

You might want to look up recipes for "Bawang Goreng", which are Indonesian fried shallots, which should also work for onions.  It's basically just thinly sliced shallots, deep fried until golden, and then drained.
You can buy containers of them at many international grocery stores.
If you're going to make them yourself, I would highly recommend purchasing a mandoline if you don't already have one.  This allows you to slice the onions very thinly (needed to make sure they dry out fully before they burn), and a consistent thickness (so they all cook in about the same time, and you don't have part of your batch burning before the rest are done).


Starting the Maillard reaction on ribs without a torch or gas stove Two months ago I made a homemade sous vide cooker and I've had great luck so far. Last night I started a batch of 72 hour ribs and I'm really looking forward to eating them in a few days. Until I realized a problem:

When I've made sous vide ribs before I've used a kitchen torch or a plumbing blow torch to start the Maillard reaction on the ribs after removing them from the water bath. This works great. However, because of work I've got two apartments 1000 miles apart and the sous vide cooker and the ribs are in the apartment without either of my torches right now.

If I had a gas stove I could turn on the burners and use a pair of tongs to take the ribs over the flame and start the reaction that way, however the stove here is a glass top stove. I'm hesitant to do the reaction in a pan because the shape of the ribs makes it difficult to get all portions of the ribs up to the temperature for the reaction to occur.

So, given that I've got a bunch of candles (unscented, thankfully), some matches, aluminum foil, access to an outdoor grill (but no charcoal), lots of paper, and assorted other things you might find in a moderately, but not well, stocked kitchen, what's the best way for me to go MacGyver on this and get that tasty reaction on Thursday night?

You need high, direct heat.

Option 1 (The practical): Don't think about the candles. Even if you lit enough candles in a pile to get it hot enough- candle soot tastes terrible. Of all the tools listed among your assets only the grill shows potential. Buy some charcoal for it, get it rocket hot, and sear your ribs to perfection.

The charcoal will also add a little flavor. Not much since they won't be there long but more than a torch would.

Option 2 (The MacGyver as requested): Use your paper to make a large (3-5' diameter) paper-mache parabolic dish. Line the inside of the dish with your foil with the shiny side out. Experiment with a sheet of paper to find the focal point of your dish. Move the paper toward the dish until the focused light is a couple inches across. Take your dish outside in the sun and wave your ribs in front of it. Solar blow torch.


Are dates still good if they sat in a sealed bag in the sun? I had some groceries delivered and the dates were packaged in sealed plastic bags -- they got pretty hot sitting in the sun, so it was kinda sweating inside the bag. Are they still good?

If these are dried dates you have no problem. Dried dates are often dried in the sun so having more sun on them isn't likely to be a problem. A bit of condensation isn't an issue, just air them out and put them in a cool, dry place.

If your dates are fresh they would need refrigeration as they aren't dried as much as fully dried dates, and it is harder to advise. Usually I would say throw them away but dates are pretty resilient so I would say to try a small bit of one and see if they still are good.

Your dates are probably dried by the way, most are. If they were fresh it would say on the store's website.


Can I oil a new board with olive oil? I just got myself a new wooden board. I have been told to put some olive oil onto it and let it sink in for a few hours first. But now I'm reading from sources that I should be instead using mineral oil. Which is true? Is it ok to use Olive oil?

Use food grade mineral oil
While one could use any edible oil (assuming frequent washing as many go rancid) to condition a wooden cutting board, food grade mineral oil or "butcher block conditioner," which is food grade mineral oil with waxes, is preferred because it will not affect the flavor of foods cut on the board.


cooked corned beef, "potted meats". preservation I cooked corned beef that is to be used as sandwiches or tortilla wraps, so
I chilled my freshly corned beef in a Ziplock bag  and was thinking about the method of "potting meats" for preservation.
So, what if I left the sliced corned beef in the "jelly" from cooking, (I make my own bonebroths. Hence, the jelly from the corned beef.lard), and topped it off with the fat from the same cooking liquid or, some fresh rendered lard?

Would this work to truly preserve my corned beef? It's coloring, texture, and taste?
(I steam my corned beef, and other meats, to reheat them, or wrap them in foil and heat them to the correct temperature.)

Traditionally, meats preserved in this fashion were cooked with lots of fat, then the entire dish was cooled quickly to allow the fat to rise to the top and solidify, creating a seal that kept out pathogens.  The entire dish, pot and all were then buried in a hole in the yard.

Although it is certainly possible to do something similar today, I would recommend instead following modern food preparation practices.  Cook in small batches that are cooled in the fridge (small batches to allow the dish to chill quickly and not overwhelming the fridge's cooling ability).  Then keep the dish in the fridge.

In the end, this means keeping the dish in the fridge and not in a hole in the yard, which in my mind takes away a lot of the appeal of this method.  However, modern practice helps prevent food poisoning, so there's that.


What is the optimal way to remove salt from cooked meat? I want to remove salt from marinated chicken thighs. What would be the most effective way to do this "reverse brining", if flavour does not matter?
I have seen these two questions:
How deeply will the flavors in a brine penetrate chicken? and How does rub or marinade actually seep into meat?
It seems like small molecules like salt penetrate throughout the meat, whereas larger molecules like food colouring stay on the surface. Since my main goal is to remove salt, would soaking or boiling the meat be most effective? I assume cutting the meat up smaller or even grinding it up will speed up the process, but with small quantities I would prefer not to have to break out the meat grinder. Also, the meat is fully cooked. Do changes in the protein affect how (much) salt can be drawn out of the meat?

Boiling in a large amount of water is probably the most efficient method. The water should be boiling to avoid spoilage and to promote fast diffusion, and there should be a lot of it to maximize the rate of diffusion. (Alternatively, you could replace the water one or more times during the process) Cutting up the pieces will speed up the process, but if time/texture/tastiness are not important then you can boil the stuff as long as you like.
As for the cooking process having affected how much salt can be drawn out: Possibly a bit. Chloride ions are known to bind to certain muscle proteins during the brining and cooking process. I would expect this to be a very minor effect, though. If you've ever tasted the meat left over from a long-cooking stock, you'll note how bland it can get.


Mold on homemade sriracha We found a recipe online for homemade sriracha hot sauce.

3lbs red jalapeños
1 cup brown sugar
⅛ cup salt

Everything was blended together, then set in a dark closet. The lid is not airtight but has an elastic band holding it shut. This was to let pressure escape as the recipe suggested.
It was supposed to be left for 2 weeks in a dark place. It has been one week but I am worried about the mold on the top.
After about 2-3 days it had a white layer. I read this might be yeast so ignored it. However, it now has fuzzy black mold and I am worried.
Most hot sauce recipes I see need vinegar or something to keep it from rotting but apparently this fermentation method works fine.
Is this sriracha still ok? Can we scrape the mold off after 1 more week?

Do NOT eat this. You figured out right that the stuff on top is mold. The thing that makes mold dangerous is the mycotoxins produced by it and these will likely remain in the sauce even if you scrape off the furry stuff. So eating this comes with high risk of affecting your health. Move it to the trash bin right away.
I would recommend to try again with a recipe with vinegar added and also to use containers that are more appropriate for doing fermentation. This means to minimize the amount of air in the container that could possibly contain any spores and to minimize the surface of the food exposed to the air. So using a bottle will serve your purpose much better than the only half-full glasses on your pictures.
Also be very careful to sterilize the containers and tools getting in contact with the sauce before starting the fermentation.


Residue from boiling pork sausage When boiling sausage, I notice a gray, foamy residue that floats on top of the water. I was told that this is unhealthy to eat and should be removed.  Is this true? Does anyone know what this foam is?

the foam is made of water soluble proteins from when you have cooked the sausages. It may not look nice, or even taste nice, but wont kill you.


How To Get the Popcorn effect on Pigskin Cooked on a Roast? I have been researching cooking skin-on pork roasts (for example Porchetta).

And what I have noticed is that the main difference between them is the skin texture. It does not matter if it is high or lower temperatures, cooking for 10 hours or 3. Some recipes I am looking at come out looking just like darkened skin, while others come out like light flaky popcorn.

So how do you cook a skin-on pork roast to produce this pork rind/popcorn effect?
(If at all possible only using an oven.)

It is certainly possible using the oven only.

For a good crackling you need to have several components - a good layer of fat under the skin, a nice dry skin surface before preparing, sufficient edges on the skin to help crisp the skin, and some salt and oil. There is a lot of debate around how to prepare the skin and the different methods for getting these things to work. Personally I prepare my roast by scoring into ~cm^2 grid, rub with plenty of salt and oil, then roast. This has worked well for me, but there are a number of other methods, including pouring boiling water over the skin before roasting that are advocated by top chefs from around the world.

The difference between the two types of crackling is down to how the roast has been prepared in the final stages. A darker roast crackling with little bubbling is due to roasting alone. This will cause the skin to harden and darken, creating a hard crisp skin with some bubbling, but not to the extent that a "popcorn" crackling shows. "Popcorn" crackling starts in the same manner and is finished by heating the crackling to a high temperature so that the fat under the skin boils and causes the skin to puff.

Basically all you have to do is prepare the skin as you would normally do for a roast of pork that you want to crackle. Roast the pork as you would normally so that the skin is crisp. From this point you have two options - either remove the roasted skin and "popcorn" it separately (works well for shoulder roasts, where it is difficult to spread the heat evenly) or "popcorn" in place. For both, turn off the bake function on the oven and turn on the grill/broiler. When the element is hot, place the roast/skin under the broiler/grill and let the heat do its work, rotating the skin/roast as necessary. This should only take a few minutes, and you need to be careful that it doesn't burn the bits which are close to the elements.


If I have too much fresh pasta, should I cook it up or store it as is? I overestimated the amount of fresh ravioli (cheese and wild mushroom, if it matters) I'd need when buying from the local pasta shop, and ended up only cooking half of it for our meal.

Assuming we'll have the rest sometime later this week, is it best to cook up the rest and put it in the fridge, or to leave it raw? And would it be better to put it in the freezer, or is the fridge okay if it's not going to be more than a few days?

I make a lot of fresh pasta, both filled and non-filled.  I always freeze immediately, even if I am going to use it a few hours later. Uncooked, fresh pasta (filled or not) freezes very well.  Do this in a single layer.  Once frozen move to zip top bags or other container.  I freeze because fresh pasta, especially filled, can get sticky...sticking to the plate it is on, or to itself. It's just easier to work with if you freeze it.  Quality is not compromised, and you can toss in boiling water in its frozen state when you are ready to cook it.


What edible solution can I cover bread in to make it waterproof? My partner and I are working an entrepreneurial project for school, and we decided to make a sort of edible water bottle.

We decided we would make it out of bread, which we would cover in some solution and leave to dry to make it hard and waterproof.

We considered using honey, but it would be too sticky, sweet, and expensive.

Is there any good solution that will make this bread waterproof and hard easily? Something that is cheap and not bad-tasting?

also, if you think this question should be posted on a different stackexchange site, please tell me.

Thanks.

Carnuba Wax. It's edible and waterproof. In my childhood they used to sell a candy bottle made of Carnuba Wax with colored sugar water in it. You'd bite the top off, drink the sugar water and chew on the wax until you got tired.

http://chemistry.about.com/od/foodchemistryfaqs/f/carnauba-wax.htm


Cast iron meat grinder; first time used had black stuff in it I just bought a cast iron meat grinder; used it for the first time to grind a roast for hamburg.  When finished there was some black residue around the handle and meant had some dark spots in it.  Is this normal or should I throw away the meat?

If you did not clean and run an initial process through the grinder before using it for the first time, I recommend discarding the meat.

When the machine was packaged, oil was probably used to prevent sticking or corrosion during storage. Also, chemical residues from protectants and finishes may still be present in the machine. Before the first use, it is best to thoroughly clean the device and to put through a generous portion of raw meat fat to "sweep out" metal dust and filings and to clean up excess lubricant. Discard the raw meat fat where no animals will be able to scavenge it.


Can you help me identify this garnish? I recently visited a restaurant and was served this gorgeous lemon meringue tart. Can you help me identify which plant this green garnish belongs to?

The picture isn't from the best angle for identification, though it's very pretty, but it looks to be a pea shoot (picture).

These are common garnishes for savoury dishes, but much less common for sweet dishes, though not completely unknown (also a lemon recipe).


How to make chicken liver less explosive? I like fried chicken livers with onions quite a bit, and they are very quick and easy to make... unfortunately quick and easy doesn't translate to safe.

These livers explode HARD. And of course they splash big globs hot oil/fat everywhere as result. The splash guard is the obvious solution for the main part, except for when I need to flip/stir them, avoiding burns is a challenge. Even when reheating them in microwave they explode, splattering bits of liver and onion all over the oven.

Any tips how to contain their explosive nature?

You have a few options to lower their explosiveness:

Pierce the skin, like you do before baking a potato.
Lower your frying temperature can help a bit, but you'll probably always need to use a temperature higher than the boiling point to get any kind of crisping action.
Dehydrate the liver a bit before frying. You could use a dehydrator, a low-and-slow oven bake or a low temperature, low oil sauté to get them to release their juices (like you do for browning some mushrooms). I don't know which of these will work best for liver, but naturally you'll lose a little bit of the final juiciness.

You mention the splash guard, which I can't recommend enough. These numbers are cheap and easy to find.

But you can also protect your hands directly. I recommend something articulated, like this pair of silicon mold Storm Trooper styled oven mitts from Think Geek:

Source


Seasoning old non-stick aluminum pan? I have an old set of nonstick aluminum pans that have gained scratches and lost their non-stick coating over the past several years.
There's nothing physically wrong with them except for those few microns of Teflon that are flaking off.

I'm wondering if I can scrub off the non-stick coating and season the pan as I do my cast iron skillet (coat with oil, then apply high heat in the oven).

I'd need to remove the handle when seasoning it, but that shouldn't be a problem as they're attached with screws, not rivets.

I've found some opinions in a quick Google search (1, 2) but nothing very convincing or thorough.

So - can I get that beautiful dark glossy patina on my aluminum pan, or is it destined to be a food magnet?

I tried seasoning an aluminium kawali and was pretty successful doing this.
I cleaned it very well and then layered it with a bit of oil (use peanut or canola) and then baked it outside on the bbq (or oven) for 30mins each time and then reapplying oil when it’s cooled down to touch. Important and ensure your kawali is upside down when baking and remove any handles.
I repeated these steps 5 times ( see pics attached for result).
Before using the wok properly, I sacrificed onions and ginger and burnt it for seasoning and then did the same thing with chicken pieces.
To clean I used warm water, wipe it paper towel and dry it on stove top to fully dry the kawali. I then, apply some oil on it before storing on paper bag until next use.


Is it ok to use frozen okra in gumbo? I would like to make some gumbo, but I can not find fresh okra locally. Is it ok to use frozen okra sourced from a Indian supermarket instead?

Yep, that'll be fine. For other purposes, it might not be your favorite - sometimes it can get a little more of the "slimy" coating that people don't like - but since you're cooking it in gumbo, it's all just going to get taken up into the stew (where it'll provide some thickening, as intended), so no worries.

A little more, if you're curious: okra contains mucilage, which is thick and slimy or gluey. If it's cooked quickly, it doesn't have time to release much. But when it's cooked long and slow, like in gumbo, plenty is released and dissolved in the soup, where it acts as a thickener. Frozen okra sometimes releases the mucilage more readily, presumably because the structure of the plant has been disrupted by the ice crystals formed during freezing. This might make it unappealing when eaten on its own, but if you're making stewed okra or gumbo, where it would all have come out anyway, it doesn't make any difference. (I suspect that good quality frozen okra, which has been flash-frozen, might fare better, but I don't have the experience to say for sure, and it won't make any difference to you!)


What to do with a Sizzler? We were gifted a Sizzler yesterday - a sort of elongated shallow cast-iron pan on a wood base for serving and keeping warm at the table. I know these are supposed to be for helping things caramelise, but I'm at a bit of a loss as to what to serve in it and how to make use of it.

Any ideas?

My version of this ( http://www.amazon.com/Lodge-Logic-Pre-Seasoned-Fajita-Set/dp/B00008GKDP/ ) actually came with a set of instructions. It's not meant to be used for cooking, only for serving. Place the pan in a hot oven for about 30 mins to heat it up (while you're cooking), then put your fajitas on it to bring to the table. The cast iron will retain heat for a long time and keep anything you serve on it sizzling hot.

A cast iron pan would be a great way to cook fajitas, but the shallow sides and strange shape of the "sizzler" pan make it impractical to really cook on. The same instruction book also recommends using another cast iron pan (two, actually) to cook the fajitas.

If you want to use it for something other than fajitas, it would work just fine as a small griddle. You could probably cook pancakes, a strip steak, or chicken breast on it, but nothing that requires any stirring.


How much dried lemon zest to substitute for "zest of one lemon"? Most recipes that use lemon zest call for "zest of one lemon" or some such amount. To avoid the bother of organic lemons that invariably go bad before I use them and having to fiddle with zesting I'd like to use dried zest soaked in lemon juice instead.

How should I substitute the amounts? I'm guesstimating that drying would reduce the volume by about half, but how much good fresh zest is there on a lemon in the first place?

Use one teaspoon of dried zest for one tablespoon of fresh zest, which is about what you get from a lemon.

Most foods dry to about a third their original size, so I would use one third of the amount called for. Lemons vary a great deal in size, but the recipe probably means one tablespoon of fresh zest, which is normal for "medium" sized lemons.

Something to watch out for is that most cheap "dried lemon peel" products are actually made from the zest and a bit of the pith, which will both give you a bitter flavor and short you some of the lemon flavor you expect. Look closely at the zest you buy, if you can see that the individual pieces have two distinct layers, or a pale yellow or white color, steer clear of that brand. This is probably a "get what you pay for" situation, so spring for the higher end lemon zest.

I have also had great luck drying my own lemon zest. Unless your kitchen is humid, it will probably dry in a day or two just sitting on a plate on the counter.


Is there a name for this French Toast variation? Recently we made french toast for lunch at home.  However there was come miscommunication, and my better half made pikelet mixture instead of prepping the milk/eggs mix one would normally expect.

Pikelet mix would be similar to pancake or flapjack or perhaps even waffle mix, a somewhat thick-but-runny liquid, that can still be poured slowly.

So I dunked toast-bread slices in pikelet mix and pan-fried it like french toast.  We ate it with various toppings, like butter, syrup, or cinnamon-sugar.  Would have gone very well with Bacon too.

We jokingly called it "german toast" for no other reason than its next to french toast.

Is this pikelet/pancake-dunked fried bread known by an existing name ?

What you made is generally called batter dipped French Toast, which a lot of people say is better than regular French toast, and you seem to agree. I may have to try it!

There's one person calling the recipe German Toast, so you aren't alone, but it isn't a common name for it. German Toast is one of the alternate names for French Toast no matter how it's made.


Is water on the outside of an electric kettle dangerous? When filling our electric kettle with tap water, I’m carefully avoiding any water trickling down the side. Others in our household are less careful.

If we let water run down the side, will it damage the kettle and reduce its life? Is there any other reason it could be harmful?

Kettles often drip a bit when they pour, and that runs down the outside. So a kettle has to be designed for a little water on the outside (though clearly not for a complete soaking).

If you have a shiny kettle and like to keep it that way, limescale will be increased by getting it wet more often, but that's the only real harm, and anyway is easily fixed.

I prefer to turn the tap off before removing the kettle though, because it's convenient the way my kitchen is laid out. Otherwise I get a bit of splashing near the sink that I might not want.


Is there a significant difference between Turkish coffee and Moka pot coffee? Since the Turkish coffee and the Moka pot both work by boiling/steaming the coffee, so assuming they are from the same bean, is there a significant difference between the two? How would it be best described?

There is a significant difference in how the two operate.

Turkish coffee works by heating the water to a boil, with no added pressure. The coffee, with gronds, is then transferred into a cup to seethe, before drinking.

In a mocha pot, pressure will typically rise to as much as 1.5 bar, and the resulting liquid is free of grounds.

Given the radically different extraction methods, the end result of the two are likely to be radically different. My experience, taken from memory, follows:

Turkish coffee goes through a sequence of mouth feels, from completely clear, to grainy, almost muddy, with coffee grounds. This also affects the flavour of the coffee. At the beginning, it is much like a strong filter brew, but tends to get bitter towards the end of the cup, which is also, in part, why it is traditionally served in very small cups. In addition, it is often spiced with cardamom, and often sweetened with sugar.

Coffee from a mocha pot has a consistent mouth feel all the way through the cup, as the grounds are left in the pot. Due to the pressurised extraction, the flavour notes are closer to an espresso than filter coffee.


Homemade Sausages Unlink I have recently taken akin to making my own sausages. The flavor and texture is pretty spot on, but when I cook them the links 'unlink'. I use a natural casing, and reverse twist every link at about 6". When I cook them I boild them for about 6-8 minutes before finishing in a pan. Typically in the transfer from the water to the pan the links unroll and turn into one giant link. How do I keep the links separate, do I need to tie off each link individually when stuffing them, or am I missing some crucial step? Also, when I cut the links apart I lose a lot of the juices.

One liner: How do I keep my homemade sausage links separate during cooking, and not lose their juices when separating them.

You need to let the sausages sit exposed to some air -- refrigerated, of course -- for a few hours (preferably overnight) so that the twisted segments of casing dry out and become tough again. Lay them out on a baking sheet, uncovered, and flip them at some point to make sure the whole surface is drying. If you have space, you can hang them up so that all sides are getting air at once. (Aside: this is also an important step for smoked sausage. See "sausage pellicle".)

If you don't have time for that, you can tie off each twist with a bit of butcher's twine (although this is also time-consuming and rather mind-numbing). One loop, cinched tight around each twist, will keep them from untwisting in the water. If you're really pressed for time, stuff the casings a little tighter and don't link them at all. When these full-length sausages have cooled, you can simply slice them into your desired portions.

Also, if you're losing "a lot of juices", you are either overcooking the sausage or not emulsifying it properly. There should be very little juice exuded when you cut into a link. You need to keep the ground meat quite cold during every stage up until cooking. The sausage should become quite tacky after mixing -- enough that it actually sticks to a rubber spatula (although some variation is possible for stylistic reasons). Don't boil the links, either, when it comes to that stage. Poach them in (salted) water in the 180-190˚F range, and check them with a thermometer -- they don't need to go higher than 160˚F (former "safe pork cooking temp" recommended  by USDA). I shoot for 145-150˚.


What happens with bread at >= 94˚C/201˚F? Or: Is temperature a reliable indicator of doneness? So I baked a rye bread last night (in a bread pan). It was a new recipe for me and I had to adjust some things in it due to missing ingredients, so I could not fully rely on the time and temperature recommendations. I therefore baked it until the bread reached the recommended 97˚C/207˚F (which actually took about the same time the recipe said). However, after cooling, I thought it to be too doughy and I would have liked it to be baked for maybe 20 minutes more.

This makes me think that you can't follow temperature as an indicator of doneness. Maybe it works with breads that have a certain moisture content (my dough was probably a bit wetter than it should have been), but not regeardless of the composition of the dough.

Most temperature recommendations tend to range from 94˚C/201˚F–98˚C/208˚F.

My questions then, is:

Is there anything particular that happens at these temperatures?
Are they reliable indicators of doneness?
(Optional question expecting just a simple explanation: What does it mean, technically, that a bread is done/baked? Not taking into account the importance of also forming a good crust.)

What happens to bread when it is done

Yes, there is something particular what happens at a temperature in the mid-90s. Not all details of it are proven, but the major outline is, and the hypotheses about the details are solid enough to make it into textbooks.

Starch is contained in tiny granules, a few micrometers in diameter. When heated in the presence of water, there is a specific temperature at which these granules burst. The molecules of starch come in contact with water and the water molecules get lodged in the nooks and crannies of the much larger starch molecules. This process is called gelating.

You can observe it easily on the macro level. Just cook a bechamel or starch pudding on stovetop, stirring constantly. The liquid will stay rather thin until all will thicken at once, just before you see the first bubbles of boiling. This is when the starch gelates.

The same thing happens in bread too. This is why you want to heat the bread to this temperature. If you don't, you will have raw starch inside, which doesn't taste well.

The exact temperature at which this happens varies a bit with the type of starch. It is not the same for rice and wheat, for example, and I think that it is also a bit different between different wheat cultivars. But the range within this variation occurs is not so wide, all references I have seen move somewhere between 94 and 98 degrees Celsius. So the recipe author just picks a temperature he knows to work for the flour used in the bread, maybe also accounting for some additional heat transfer after taking out of the oven.

 Can you use temperature as an indicator for doneness

The theory says yes. My personal experience also says yes. Why did you feel that your bread was too doughy? There are different reasons why this could have happened. You could have measured it wrong (with the probe being too close to the surface, where the temperature is higher). You could have cut it too early. (Bread is always doughy before the first starch retrogradation, which occurs maybe 1 hour after baking). It is also possible that the bread was actually done in the sense of gelled starch, but that the recipe produced a rather moist bread and that you have grown accustomed to dry breads if you normally bake your breads for a very long time, so your brain perceived the unaccustomed texture as "not right". Or it is possible that something went wrong with the leavening, making the bread too dense. Dense bread is always doughy, you cannot bake the moisture out of it.

 technical criteria for bread doneness

There are two big chemical changes which happen to bread while baking. The proteins in bread (the gluten) have to harden. Before that, they are soft and pliable. At some temperature, they become rubber-like. The hardened gluten gives the bread structure.

The second change is the starch gelation I explained earlier. When this happens, the liquid part of the dough (dough consists of a liquid phase suspenede in the elastic gluten mesh) thickens. Gelated starch gives bread a fluffy, soft body.

As the starch gelates at much hicher temperatures than proteins denature, bread is taken out of the oven when the starch is done.

The third step is the starch retrogradation. In retrogradation, starch loses the water which it took during gelation. There are three big stages of it, after each the texture changes drastically. The first happens at about an hour after getting out of the oven. This is when the bread is considered done by textbooks. In practice, there are many people (including myself) who like the taste of the moist hot bread just out of the oven, and they consider it done at the previous step. The second happens after about 24 hours; after it, the bread is considered stale. The third step takes several days, and after it, bread is considered inedible, because it becomes hard as wood.

So technically, bread is considered done after it has been baked to gelation temperature and then left alone for 1 hour.


Stewing beef - how long is too long? From what I understand, the cooking process melts the collagen, turning it into gelatin and making the meat more tender.  However, the process also tends to cook the meat itself, making it tougher.  So too long or too high and the stewing beef is too tough.

How long is too long?  Say in a slow cooker on high, where is the inflection point where the meat stops getting more tender and start to get tougher?  I googled the crap out of this but haven't found an answer?

I'm going to assume that you are covering your meat with liquid, because if you aren't that's the problem. Collagen needs heat plus water to break down, if you don't have liquid it will turn tough as old leather.

There is no point where meat gets tougher when being slow cooked, what happens first is that the collagen breaks down, then the proteins start to denature. Generally once the collagen is all broken down is the ideal time to take it out, any longer and the meat itself starts to break down.

Things to remember:

How long it takes for meat to get tender in a braise or slow cook method depends on the size of the cut, thickness of the cut, and the amount of collagen in it. Working cuts like chuck, rump, neck, shin, etc have lots of collagen and need a longer slow cook to break it all down. They also have more flavor. Non-working cuts like filet, sirloin, etc would need much less time, but to be honest you're wasting good money slow cooking cuts like that, roast them instead of grill them as steak! Bigger cuts and thicker cuts will need a longer slow cook as well as it takes longer for the heat and the moisture to get to the center
Some meat will never get tender no matter how you cook them. Low-quality, poorly processed meat that has been frozen and then quick-thawed is likely to be tough as old leather no matter how lovingly you treat it in the pan. It's the GIGO principle, Garbage in-Garbage out, you can't make bad meat good with technique. So it may not be that your meat toughened up after slow cooking, it may be that it never had the potential to be tender in the first place!
Moisture is critical with working cuts as it breaks down collagen, in a slow cooker the meat must be completely submerged in liquid. In the oven it's important to have a lid on your braising dish, or at least tin foil.


What are these sweets from 16th century? I keep seeing them in old European paintings from 16th - 17th century. I think they still must exist present days.

White irregular shaped sweets on the left hand side.

I think user23614's comment is correct. They're ragged comfits, sugar coated seeds or spices.

These two paintings by the German painter Georg Flegel, have similar objects depicted, and are described by two different sources (Sugar-Plums and Comfits, Sugar Plums Demystified) as being ragged comfits:

They're apparently not very common these days, surviving in the form Pistoia confetti, also known as birignoccoluto. They're apparently primarily given out as treats at weddings. Coincidentally the Clara Peeters painting you're asking about may be, according to one interpretation, depicting the ragged comfits as a treat at a wedding.


Can agave nectar be substituted for honey in baking? The only sweetener called for in the bread recipe I want to use is honey; can I substitute 1/3 a cup of agave nectar for 1/3 a cup of honey without throwing off the proportions of the recipe? When using agave nectar as a substitute for honey in salad dressing recipes, I tend to use less agave nectar than honey called for because I find agave nectar sweeter than honey, but I don't feel confident doing the same thing in baking.

You can use agave nectar instead of honey or sugar if you modify your recipe a bit by lowering the amount of liquids.   Agave nectar has more water than honey and is sweeter than honey (about 50% sweeter).

Honey
Fructose: 41%,
Glucose: 36%,
Water: 18%

Agave nectar
Fructose: 53%,
Glucose: 15%,
Water: 25%

As a starting point in modifying the recipe, keep the amount of water fixed by using less agave nectar than honey (amount of agave = 0.72 amount of honey).  Also, dishes made with agave nectar will brown faster than those made with honey because of the agave's higher fructose content.  Start checking a little earlier.


Garlic Overflow — Why won't my olive oil stay in its jug? I'm the kind of chef who chops up whatever the local bazaar has that week, adds a random amount of seasonings until the color suits my fancy and then cooks it. Somehow. Most days I don't go hungry.

The other day, fresh garlic was really cheap so I bought a bunch. The housewares shop had some little jugs with corks, so I picked one up. Back at home I chopped up a few heads of garlic, stuffed it the jug, then filled the jug with olive oil. Bread for the next two days had had a great dipping sauce! However dipping bread in oil uses up a lot of oil and not very much garlic, so on the second evening when it was about half empty I topped off the jug with fresh oil. I corked it, wiped off the drips from around the top with a paper towel and left it on the table.

This is what I found in the morning. (click for larger)

I am certain when I corked it the level of oil was below the bottom of the cork because I tipped it to see how the garlic was getting an and remember the air moving around in the jug. I am also certain the top was clean having wiped it off, and of course there was no puddle. Even stranger, as I have left it there today it has continued to drip.

The only clew seems to be garlic mixture seems to be producing periodic bubbles that float up through the oil. This does not explain to me how the oil got out, but it does seem like it must be producing

I see three fields for questioning:

Casual kitchen tinkerer: How should I safely store my garlic and olive oil? Is there danger to storing this in something that seals better than a plastic cork? Is it safe to eat?
Amateur chemist: Is there a chemical reaction going on between the garlic and the oil? Would it ever explode?
Wannabe physicist: How did the oil get out? This seems like a gravity defying stunt. Note the current oil level is about ½" below the cork.

Somebody please tell me why my day's adventure at the bazaar made this much mess and how to make yummy things with garlic and olive oil safely!

I agree that fermentation from bacteria is the most likely explanation. So, to tackle your questions point by point:

It is unsafe, as the other posts already mentioned, due to botulism danger. Plant matter without access to oxygen is not shelf stable, unless it has been pickled with sufficient acid.

There will be some chemistry going on between garlic and oil, but not much of it. Most of it will be solubility stuff; some reactions will probably happen too, but nothing you will notice. Most important, there will be no oil-garlic explosions.
The results you are seeing are most likely caused by some microorganism (bacteria or yeast) gorging itself on the sugars in your garlic and burping out some gas, probably CO2. There is nothing strange about the gas building enough pressure to get a bit of oil out. Brewers can tell you that you never stopper a bottle or carboy in which something is undergoing primary fermentation, else your cork blows out or the whole vessel shatters. If you ever popped a champagne bottle, you know how much force you can get in there.

The gas from the fermentation could not dissolve in the oil (the way it would had happened with CO2 in a watery medium). It built up pressure against the cork. I suspect that the cork was not perfectly tight, else it'd have shot out. Instead, the foam probably pushed it up a bit until it could flow around it, and got out. The pressure fell, and the remaining oil stayed in the bottle.

As to making yummy oil with garlic safely, TonyArra already told you: you can keep it in the fridge and eat it up within a few days. Don't top it up with new oil! It is perishable just like mayonnaise or milk, but the ugly part about it is that you won't notice anything if there is a lively botulinum colony in there. No off smells, color changes or similar. Most bacteria which live in food don't survive without oxygen (c. botulinum is an exception) and the ones which make food smell bad will not be present even if you have botulinum in your oil.
If you want something which keeps, look into recipes which require pickling or freezing. You won't be able to get a garlic oil with them, but maybe a garlic spread will work for your bread too.


What's the difference between serving from a ceramic plate and metal plate? What's the difference between serving from a ceramic plate and metal plate?
I think the ceramic plate lasts longer, but suppose the metal one is in good condition for a long time.

It is completely a matter of aesthetics, other than the tendency of a metal plate to bring its contents to room temperature more quickly due to its higher thermal conductivity compared to ceramic.


Mircowave does not work after I used vinegar without water to clean it I forgot the water with the vinegar. I heard  a pop. Now it does not work. Can I do any thing, or did I blow it up?

Assuming that you were using the vinegar/water mix to clean the microwave...

No, it is unlikely that you have damaged the microwave with vinegar - unless you have pure or glacial acetic acid, you are using vinegar with between 4% and 8% acetic acid, the rest is mostly water. This is not typically very damaging to metallic surfaces unless left on for extended periods. Microwaves usually are coated in plastics or paints that are not susceptible to acidic degradation.

The pop you heard could be a couple of things - either an internal fuse has blown, or it could be the magnetron. Fuses, if present, would be found on the rear of the microwave near the power cord, and would likely be replaceable fairly easily by yourself. Magnetrons are replaceable but are usually more expensive than a new microwave when you include the labor costs of replacement.


How to dry Eucalyptus leaves (to later on make herbal tea from)? I recently collected Eucalyptus leaves that I'd like to dry out to later on make herbal tea from.

I've cleaned the leaves and scattered them on a grid, but I'm wondering if there are fast techniques to dry them (faster would also mean less bacteria or dust collecting on them).

I didn't collect the whole branch, just the leaves, so hanging them isn't the easiest way for me. I'm wondering if there's a solution involving using the oven or the stove to dry them out.

You can dry herbs, chillies etc. in an oven, if your oven goes low enough. A dough proving setting is good though you can go just a little warmer. If the door makes a tight seal the moisture can't get out, so it's worth opening the door just a little once it's up to temperature.

If you find you're making a habit of drying food, a food dehydrator is a good idea. This is especially true for strong smelling foods as you can put the dehydrator somewhere well ventilated - if you dry chillies in the oven they will make your eyes water every time you go in the kitchen, and it wouldn't surprise me if eucalyptus was similar.


4 lb Shoulder Pork Roast I took out a Pork Roast that was completely frozen solid (double wrapped) and set on counter. Forgot about it until 6 hours later but it was still frozen. Just started feeling a bit soft on top but not deep - just barely - just surface. Is it still safe to eat? I put it in fridge overnight to complete the thawing process.

Yes, it is still safe to eat. If the meat itself has been at room temperature for two hours, it is generally unsafe to eat. Your meat never reached room temp, even the meat on the outside.

It may take 24-48 hours for your roast to pork roast to thaw in the refrigerator. Another option you have to speed up that process is place the roast (still wrapped) in a bowl and fill with warm water. Once the water turns cold, change it for more warm water. Do this as many times as necessary until thawed, or do it 5-10 times and refrigerate overnight.


What types of cured meat are ethically sourced? I am looking for cured meat, especially ham, which I can buy in Germany and eat with a good conscience. There are two aspects that I am concerned about:

Animal maltreatment: I particularly wish to avoid products from intensive animal husbandry or any maltreatment.
Environmental efficiency: I see this less as a reason to avoid a product, than to moderate one’s consumption of it, in particular to reduce one’s CO2 emissions.

I enquired about Parma ham in German Wikipedia and was told of secret filming of maltreatment by the Italian animal rights organisation Lega Anti Vivisezione (see also 1, 2, 3, 4). Jamón ibérico sounds better, as they apparently prescribe extensive or free-range animal husbandry, but on German Wikipedia I read that Spanish TV had reported that extensive manipulation lead to 80% of co-called ibérico being factory farmed.

In his comment below J Crosby suggests trying local farmers, which may well be the best course, but I am also interested in what one can buy in supermarkets and/or on holiday and/or if time is short, so general guidelines are welcome.

Some people might claim that there is no such thing as ethically sourced meat, because animal husbandry is inherently unethical. But if you are looking for meat from animals which were treated better than usual, then you can look for certified organic products. The EU regulation on organic products mandates standards for animal welfare which go beyond what's requested by national animal protection laws alone. A product is certified organic if:

The product has the protected word "Bio" in the name (as in "Bio Schinken" for "Organic Ham").
The product has either the official German organic label or the official EU organic label on its packaging:

But perhaps the most ethical form of meat you can get is if you buy meat from a hunter ("Wildbret"). Hunted animals lived their whole life in nature. You won't get any more organic than that. But hunted meat is usually hard to find in a supermarket. Most game meat you can buy there is actually factory-farmed. So you might have to either get to know one or buy from a specialized store. Also, game meat is not necessarily as healthy for you as factory farmed meat. Factory farmed animals are fed with controlled food, wild animals ate whatever they found. They might also have parasites, which can infect you if you don't cook the meat properly.


Can raw eggs be frozen? If raw eggs are nearing their expiry date, can they be preserved in the freezer? Would there be any issues with them after taking them out of the freezer?

You have two options for freezing egg whites:

Use an ice tray and place one egg white in each of the wells
Gently mix the whites (don't whip) and place the mixture, either into ice trays or freezer bags.

Approximately 2 tablespoons of egg white mixture equals a single egg.


Fast way to cook steel-cut oats when no microwave is available I am looking for a way to prepare fast steel-cut oats.
I do not have a microwave, and I would like to have them for breakfast but I can not cook for ~40 mins to prepare them in the morning.
I have tried to cook them by simmering them ~10 mins till the water is gone but they did not taste good (were actually uncooked).
I have also tried leaving them overnight in a bowl of milk but they were not easy to eat either (was like chewing gum)
Note1: yes I know about instant oats etc but these are less nutritious than steel-cut oats so I am looking for a way to prepare them fast.

Note2: I don't care if the fast method suggested is for a warm or cold recipe. Either warm or cold are fine by me.

My low-effort steel cut is to set the bowl of steel-cut and water in a steamer and let it go about 20 minutes (or longer) - unlike (my experience of) cooking them in a pot, there's no stirring, boilovers, or other drama. IME the drama fully applies in the microwave and no time is saved by it. But you are not going to cook them in 10 minutes time (2 minutes active work, yes, 10 minutes time, no.) On the other hand, I don't see why you'd be cooking for 40 minutes in any case.

Edit: I begin to suspect from the comments that @Jim is not familiar with the concept of steaming. So, steaming, the short explanation: A small amount of water in a large enough pot. A rack set on the bottom of the pot to elevate the bowl. A bowl contianing food (in this case, steel cut oats and water in a ratio of 1:2) is set on the rack above the water. The lid is put on the pot, the water is boiled, the steam in the pot cooks the food.

Other method I haven't used in years but which worked then and should work now, is to put the oats and boiling water into a wide-mouthed thermos flask the night before. Given that the main reason I haven't done it in years was that I dropped and broke the glass on my wide mouth thermos flask, I would suggest a stainless-steel version rather than a glass version (my stainless steel narrow-mouthed flask is old and dented and still going strong, more than 3 decades after it was new. But I wouldn't want to put anything other than a liquid in it due to the size of the mouth.)