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I got my recipe down pretty much, tested in wood fired oven it worked great. But at home in the oven at 520F (270C), the edge crust is just unbelievably hard. I bake it on pizza stone at the bottom for about 4-5 minutes. Everything works out great except the crust. I tried pulling it out half way to soak with water but it didn't help.

You can try high hydration flour. go to 75 percent hydration dough. It will be harder to handle but will be more fluffy. Another thing, heat your oven as high temp as possible. use around 2% yeast as well.

I've tried cooking it in various ways, but it always ends up tasting bitter. What am I doing wrong? I'm using fairly young chard (homegrown), using the whole leaves.

Your chard most likely tastes bitter because chard is bitter. You can't really change that with cooking technique alone, but you can: Use older chard, which tends to be markedly less bitter than the young chard you're using; Avoid bringing out the bitterness, by cooking at lower heat; Mute any remaining bitterness with salt, which is pretty common for leafy greens.

I melted chocolate chips and a small amount of oil and coated cookies. Here's the problem: the chocolate won't harden up. Is there anything I can do NOW to help the situation, or is this just a sticky, melty, lost cause?

The problem is the “small amount of oil”. If you measured wrong or just eyeballed it, you now have a chocolate spread instead of a solid coating. Storing the cookies in the fridge may or may not be enough to solidify the chocolate coating, but apart from that, there’s nothing you can do to change the chocolate. Depending on what matches the cookie flavor, dipping the sticky part in something like grated coconut or ground almonds may at least protect your fingers somewhat.

What are the Pros and Cons to each one? Most of the time I am making vegetable soup. Thanks

It's hard to generalize them since within each category there are vastly different qualities. Read the ingredients list carefully. Bouillon: With some exceptions (buy these ones), you'll find most cubes contain little if any meat based stock, and are mostly salt, yeast extract, and dehydrated vegetables plus a load of MSG. The best ones are the ones that are low in sodium and contain little fillers. They also tend to be more expensive. The good ones may allow you to provide a lift to the dish but not base a good dish on them. Powder: Here you'll mostly find corn starch, MSG, salt and some powdered vegetables plus thickening agents. The chicken ones may have some real chicken broth based powder, and it's very hard to actually find beef stock in powder form. While many restaurants use this type, the professional chefs avoid them and typically shake their head at dishes made using these. Canned: you might get some honest stock in this form. Again, read ingredients and check for salt. frozen stock: you can typically find honest beef and chicken stock in frozen tub containers in the freezer section. They won't be as cheap as buying some soup bones or making your own. Tetrapack: In North America, you can find Pacific, and Imagine brand of broth in tetrapack form. They (and a handful of others) do offer low sodium organic broth which tend to produce the best result from any store bought product and contain little fillers. The 'major' brands also have organic lines but when you read the ingredients you'll know how little actual stock you're getting.

I have a bag of pink curing salt (Prague powder / instacure) #1 that has been in a cupboard since November 2019. It has been stored in its original packaging: a zip-lock style bag, which I have opened and resealed several times. The seal has been reinforced with a clip. The powder has now turned yellow, and I can't figure out why or whether it is still safe to use. Curiously, a plastic container containing a mix of the curing salt with sugar and 'regular' salt has kept its color, while being stored next to the bag of discolored salt. I know the pink color comes from food coloring which could oxidise or be affected by light, but why would this only have happened to one of the two containers? The discolored salt: The mix of curing salt with sugar and regular salt:

That's our brand "Home Curing UK" or "Surfy's". The colouring used at that time was a natural colouring. Unfortunately the colour deteriorates over time due to the action of light and the nitrites, however the loss of colour does NOT in any way affect the efficacy of the product, 100% guaranteed.

If I want to simmer or braise a piece of beef for a few hours, how do I choose suitable meat? Which of the usual cuts are great, which are adequate, and which ones will just turn tough? It would be great if you could, beside giving a list of the good cuts, also give some advice on visually recognizing the good meat, in case I am faced with a supermarket selection with no labels (or misleading labels) and no qualified personnel.

It doesn't matter if it is covered or not. The inside of the slow cooker will be warm enough to cook the meat. Braising (not submerged) and simmering (submerged) are two methods which both can lead to good results. The "very chewy" result sounds like choosing the wrong type of meat for slow cooking. If it was a real roast, then this is the obvious problem. Roasts should be roasted, not slow cooked. If it was an actual slow cooking cut sold under a bad label (these things happen), then probably it was cheap meat from an animal grown up without movement and slaughtered too young. You have to choose tough meat with lots of fascia streaking for slow cooking.

I am trying to make bolognese kosher for my family and struggling. Here is the list of ingredients I hope to find a substitute for: Pork Pancetta Heavy cream Milk Parmigiano Reggiano

There are many bolognese variations out there, some which have milk in them, but there are many which do not as well. My understanding is that a traditional bolognese does not have milk, but as always with Italian food what's traditional is what Mama makes. In any case, you can drop the milk products without substituting anything for them. I don't think that adding soya or anything else will give you the same effect. As for the pork you can replace it with ground beef or turkey, beef has more flavor than turkey but turkey is generally leaner. I make bolognese with a mix of beef and turkey because I find it's less greasy while still flavorful, but that's subjective. Pancetta adds richness, but is not essential. Some people, myself included, use bacon in a bolognese. If you want a substitute for that there are turkey bacons out there in some places but to be honest the ones I've tried generally haven't been very good substitutes for the real thing. Bacon has fat, salt and smoke flavors (presuming it's smoked), so you could try and substitute any kosher cured and smoked meat sliced into thin strips. You could just leave it out entirely as well.

I tried making Emeril's quiche lorraine this evening. Made the dough using the ingredients specified (including 7 tablespoons of butter), but forgot to freeze the crust after putting it in the tart pan. It went straight to baking. My crust while baking became exceedingly greasy... downright inedible! There were pools of butter forming in my oven since butter seeped through the cracks in the pan, and my oven started to smoke. I took the crust out of the oven at the indicated time, and it was really moist looking. When I pressed my finger into the crust, all this grease surfaced (yuck). Question: Is the greasy dough due to me having forgotten to refrigerate the pie crust for 30 minutes, or could there have been another reason for this grease-fest? Any guidance is greatly appreciated. I struggle with crusts... this is just another fiasco in a long line of fiascos! Thanks in advance for your help!

I don't know what it is, but I can tell you it is neither the ratio nor the temperature. I needed dinner anyway, so I made a small experiment. I made half a batch of crust using the ratios from your recipe, and baked it in three small tartalette pans. I used butter so soft that I had to spoon it out, I couldn't cut it (it sits on the counter as a rule). The water was also room temperature, it had been sitting for 1-2 hours in the filter jug. For the first tartalette, I placed a small ball in the middle of the pan and pressed it outwards with the fingers. Beside giving it a worse-looking shape, this made sure I had no additional flour sticking to the surface. I didn't roll it between sheets of foil, because it was too sticky for that. While I am probably more experienced at crust baking than you are (but by no means an expert), I purposefully disregarded the usual advice just to exclude the possibility that you missed something of it. The second and third one, I rolled in sufficient flour to not stick, so the surface had quite a bit more flour, which I figure could bind excess butter. Then I baked number 1 and 2 straight from the counter, as-is. No preheating the oven, no docking with a fork, no filling in weights or beans. The third went into the open ice compartment of the fridge, which hovers about 0 Celsius (but isn't cold enough to keep ice in a plastic box from melting). I baked that one after a bit over 90 minutes, by that time the oven was cold again. The crust was solid. The left lower one is the "press with fingers" crust. The lower right one is the one which got floured and baked immediately. The upper one spent time in the fridge. The foto is not perfect, but I can tell you that none is greasy, and none has pooled butter. This is another phone camera picture, this time of the unwashed pans directly after removal of the crust. None of them contained a visible pool of butter, although it was obvious all three have been in touch with fat. The constellation is the same as in the above picture. The lighter stuff you are seeing is flour, not chafed teflon. The only difference I saw was that the non-floured one had some obvious tiny (pinhead sized) bubbles of fat while baking. Nothing large enough to drip, and it did not look unpleasantly greasy in the oven or afterwards. The crusts are crisp and nice, nothing moist or soft or greasy about them. (Using "greasy" as perceived fat content here, because of course they are full of butter, and an experienced cook can tell it). My conclusion, whatever happened, it was not the fault of the recipe, neither was it the "didn't cool" part. If it was due to too much butter, you must have also mismeasured something by a significant amount.

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.

This question is the flip-side of the commonly asked food temperature safety concerns. I'd like to know, if a meat-based soup stock (chicken/pork/beef/etc) were to be held constantly at a safe hot temperature of 165F/73C-180F/82C, how long could it stay at this temperature and still be considered safe to eat? Obviously, it would reduce over time, but suppose it's reconstituted with water regularly so that it could continue being held... Is there ANY sort of time limit (even completely unreasonable spans like, months, years, etc)?

Just to provide an official source, the USDA's National Advisory Committee on Microbiological Criteria for Foods (NACMCF) says this (unit conversion added): Question 4: What minimum time/temperature parameters for hot holding would ensure food safety? . . . For non-continuous temperature and time monitoring, a minimum hot holding temperature of 130°F / 54.4°C for a maximum time of 4 hours, based on information provided by FDA regarding the limitation of growth of Clostridium perfringens to no more than 1 log_10 in food, would be adequate to ensure food safety. In addition, the Committee concluded that a minimum temperature of 135°F / 57°C for a maximum of 8 hours, or a minimum temperature of 140°F / 60°C indefinitely also would be adequate to ensure food safety. . . . You can read further details in the link and the detailed report which is linked on that page. But, basically as long as your food stays above 140°F / 60°C, according to this report, it should remain safe "indefinitely." I would say that the main issue arises in the fact that you might add things to this endless soup/stock. It would only become potentially dangerous if the additions are below 140°F / 60°C when added (and thus cool parts of the food into the danger zone before they recover) or if the additions already contain toxins that might then be concentrated as the liquid evaporates off. Food above 140°F / 60°C should not be producing new toxins (from bacteria at least), but whatever is in there already may not necessarily be destroyed. Adding water though shouldn't pose a problem as long as it's heated before adding or is only added in a small quantity which wouldn't reduce the temperature below 140°F / 60°C. My main other concern would be that any cooking vessel or utensils used be VERY non-reactive. Elevated temperatures will make it easier for metals or other substances to dissolve more quickly. A pot or pan or other vessel that might be fine for simmering for a few hours could leach more significant quantities of metals or coatings over days or weeks. If your cooking vessel AT ALL reacts with the liquid inside of it, this could pose a long-term issue. (It's possible that some foods themselves might break down into less desirable components, but this will mostly be a quality issue than a safety issue at temperatures below boiling. At much higher temperatures -- which would be impossible in a liquid stock -- you could also potentially produce carcinogens over time as things break down, but this is probably unlikely for food kept in your proposed temperature range. If you were to let the stock reduce at some point to the point that it went past the demi-glace stage and became drier and temperature began to rise significantly, this could theoretically pose a problem. But in that case you'd probably get smoke and bad smells that would be a clue that your endless soup should be tossed because it had... well, met its end.)

I manufacture commercial chapatis. It is packed in 25nos together in a butter paper and lastly in a polybag. These are marketed. However, the chapati becomes brittle and crumbles after 14 hours. I am interested to know how to keep the chapatis soft, chewable and non brittle for more than 3 days. Daniel

I found they last longer if made with boiling instead of room temperature water. Which is not surprising since you will get far less long-stranded gluten formation this way (and since it is not leavened with yeast, you don't need any either). It seems some (but not most of the) chapati/roti recipes found on the internet also specify boiling water.

Some friends and i would like to poach a whole salmon, weighing four to five kilograms. There are two ways we could do this: in a fish kettle, or wrapped in aluminium foil in the oven (is that "en papillote" when it's a whole fish, wrapped tightly?). I raised the possibility of using a dishwasher, but that was not well received. What are the relative merits of these approaches? Using foil means we don't need to find a kettle, and we don't have to wash it up afterwards, which are nice practical benefits. But is there an effect on the actual cooking and eating? Does one take longer? Does one risk not cooking the fish properly? Does one make it harder to add herbs and so on?

A whole salmon of 5 kg is going to be about 75 cm long. Very few, if any fish kettles are going to able to accommodate a fish of that size whole. If you find one big enough, it is likely to cost several hundred dollars (US), hundreds of GBP, or hundreds of Euros. Are you going to want to spend that large an amount of money in relation to how often you with use it? The next problem you need to answer is, will a fish kettle of that size fit in your oven? I just measured mine, my oven won't accept anything much longer than 58 cm maybe I would opt to cook it wrapped in aluminum foil.

I would like to know the ratio for using sodium benzoate as a preservative in our jams and relishes. We state on our product that it's home made and no added preservatives are added, would this be wrong when sodium benzoate is added?

Well yeah, adding a preservative is ... just that. I'd just stick with the "homemade" part; there is so much misinformation about preservatives that get so quickly spread without research. You can use it to rinse/sterilize containers without mixing it in but not as effective. Recipes I've used are ¼ teaspoon per litre (mix with 1 tsp hot water to dissolve). Also can be used to sterilize jars by making a hot water rinse (use similar ratio). Read Wikipedia on Sodium benzoate if anyone is worried about it as all the hype has been debunked and it's safer than the "natural" potassium sorbate used.

My question is similar to this one, but about store-bought jam. What is the shelf-life of store-bought jam – i.e. commercially prepared major brands – if not opened? Are the processes or ingredients for preservation of mass-produced jam superior to at-home sterilization of home-made jam? Quite simply: I have an unopened jar of jam purchased 18 months ago. Good to eat now, or not?

According to the Smucker's web site, their products will last 24 months from the date of production. They should also have a use by date on the label. According to Shelf Life Advice, it should be good at least one year from the purchase date, although they recognize that it's not exact. I'd say that you could probably try it -- if it's unopened, the sterilization as well as the high sugar content should work in your favor. (It's also better if it's stored in a cool, dark place -- you weren't keeping it on your windowsill, were you?)

Let me start by saying this is my first attempt at using a bread maker. I just wanted to know if the temperature of the liquid used in the bread recipe matters? Cold vs room temp or warm?

With a bread maker, it's important to follow the recipe closely, at least until you've got a reliable result , when you can start experimenting. Mine, for example, expects "tepid" water for most programs, which the book defines as 20-25°C. The super rapid program requires 46-51°C. Cooler and there won't be time for the yeast to get going, much hotter and the yeast will be killed before it starts to work. This also means the super-rapid program can't be used with a delayed start, as the water would cool. As a very general rule, slower programs will be more forgiving on temperature if you don't have a suitable thermometer and don't trust your estimation. You can get a very good idea of the temperature of the water if you mix boiling with room temperature, in known proportions, taking a weighted average. For example that super rapid program could use 2 parts room temperature to one part boiling, mixed before it reaches the yeast. If room temp is 20°C and you mix it with actually boiling water, the resulting temperature will be (2×20+1×100)/3 = 140/3 = 47°C. Ths is at the bottom of the acceptable range for my super rapid program, so I use a little over 1/3 boiling (handily it wants 260ml, so 90ml boiling made up with cold is good).

I want to do some cheese steak at home. I was wondering what kind of meat should I buy. What part?

There is no single cut of meat that is universally used in Philadelphia. Top round is common, and it may actually be the most traditional given the sandwich's Italian origins (top round is what is used in braciole and Italian beef sandwiches). It is becoming more and more common to use rib-eye, though, which is what is used in some of the most popular Philadelphian establishments (e.g., John's Roast Pork and Tony Luke's), which makes sense given its higher fat content. As lazoDev mentioned, you should be able to get your butcher to slice the meat into thin (~1mm) pieces. If that is not possible, though, you can put an entire rib-eye roast into the freezer for a half hour or so. This will harden the meat without actually freezing it solid, and will make thinly slicing by hand much easier.

When attempting to cook bone broths, what is the correct technique of breaking up long bones which do not fit inside the crock pot? I can think of hammering or sawing off hand, but both seem to be rather messy techniques. Is there any good method to break off large bones (relatively) safely?

A hacksaw (used for cutting metal) is a relatively inexpensive hand tool. Keep a blade set aside for food use only, or buy a new one if you don't use it frequently for that purpose. That's good for more even, straight bones. I'm not sure how that would work on a knuckle bone like others are talking about. A farmer at the outdoor market had a beef femur that he sold me for $3 (whether he should bring it and try to sell it was obviously the cause of some family disagreement/discussion, as his pre-teen son freaked out when he heard that his dad actually sold the darn thing). I used the hacksaw to get it into the stockpot. When I was done making stock from it, I hung the two halves from the tree in our front yard as part of Halloween decorations.

Recently I found that popcorn is a fantastic snack, and incredibly cheap if you make it yourself. There is only one problem... it seems that some of the popcorn pieces have a jaw shattering hard pieces hidden within them. Is there a way to easily separate these or even preventing them whilst cooking them?

Shake the bowl containing the popcorn, the un-popped kernels should tumble to the bottom of the bowl. Warning,there might be slightly popped kernels that should be eaten at all cost (the best part IMO).

I have made countless recipes from popular Indian books and when I taste the end result, I always feel like the dish needs more spice. For example, I tried a recipe for Sri Lankan Dal with coconut found below and thought it could use more spice and it's usually too late by the time everything has been cooked since the dal needs to simmer with the spices. How can someone gauge the needed spice level of a recipe before hand? And how can someone amend the spice level after the dal has been cooked? Fry the spices in some oil and add it back to the dal? Recipe: 450g red lentils 3 cardamom pods coconut oil 1 cinnamon stick 3 whole cloves 2 brown onions, thinly sliced 4 cloves of garlic, crushed 2cm ginger, peeled and grated 2 green finger chillies, finely sliced ⅓ teaspoon ground turmeric 250g kale 200ml tinned coconut milk salt ½ teaspoon mustard seeds 2 tablespoons desiccated or fresh grated coconut juice of 1 lime Recipe taken from Fresh India: 130 Quick, Easy and Delicious Vegetarian Recipes for Every Day by Meera Sodha.

Firstly, it has to be said - the way you learn to judge quantities is … practise. However, there are several factors at play here… "Indians" [sorry, I'm generalising a whole continent into one word for convenience] don't eat mouth-stingingly-hot food at every meal. Some food is mild, some is 'go-for-it'. Some is rich, some is bland, some has heat, some has aromatics. There is a North/South divide on 'spiciness' or 'heat' with the Southern continent going for hotter examples, Northern more dependant on aromatics. Western "Indian" restaurants have tainted our view of what "Indian" food is. Dal can be pretty bland anyway. Your recipe is towards the bland end of the spectrum of possible dal recipes. The 'Sri Lankan-ness' in it is really only the coconut & perhaps the mustard seed. So, that done with, in a broad sweeping generalisation kind of way, to your issue. The recipe as written is missing a lot of what I would consider a 'basic' dal. For a whistle-stop basic chana dal… Boil dal with turmeric for half an hour Fry cumin, garlic, onions Add tomato, ginger, green chilli Add chilli powder, turmeric, garam masala [or supermarket 'curry powder' depending on availability], asafoetida, coriander powder, dried methi Add to dal mixture Simmer until happy. If you want to trick this up to feel more Southern or Sri Lankan, substitute coconut milk for some of the lentil boiling liquid, sub coconut oil for the ghee, add curry leaves & black mustard seed. Chillies, fresh green or ground red to taste. Some of the ingredients you can add more later. Chilli powder, garam masala or 'curry powder' if you want a quick boost. Other aromatics such as cardamom & clove, if you cheat & use them in powdered form, you can boost at any point. They're not as potent as whole, but they're a quick fix. Another cheat is garlic powder, which is used by many restaurants rather than fresh - again, not the same as fresh, but can be used as a pep-up at any time [watch it doesn't go lumpy, make a thick slurry with water first to be safe.]

I find creamy soups and many other thicker liquids too fluffy for my liking after blending. I could do it the old fashioned way by forcing through a mill/sieve; must I? Any other tips to knocking out a few more bubbles besides a few bangs of the pot. I tried whisking and bubbles were at the surface but not sure if whisking indeed created them.

Use a vacuum pump. People who pour liquid rubber into moulds use a vacuum chamber to get the bubbles out; I've heard of people degassing wine with a vacuum pump (see these youtube videos, for example); I wouldn't know why it wouldn't work for soup. The question is of course where you get a vacuum pump. If you're doing this in a commercial kitchen I'm sure there are channels where you can get a professional one. For the home cook (like me), one option (inspired by one of those videos) would be to pour it into a wine bottle and then use a wine saver; Vacu Vin is a well known brand. You probably won't want to fill the bottle more than half full, especially if the liquid is very thick; the bubbles in the liquid will expand a lot if you lower the pressure, and it will raise the level of the liquid.

So yesterday I made my first ever home-made jerky. It tastes great (I suppose I followed a good recipe). However, it is quite salty. I thought I didn't use a lot of salt, but I did use a lot of soy sauce. I heard that the saltiness is important for curing the food. What should I do then?

You can also crust the meat with salt, removing the crust after dehydrating (or smoking). The goal is to pull the moisture out, and to season Note that traditionally, some bacons and hams are preserved by burying the meat in coarse salt, then hanging + smoking. You can jerk in the same manner, by using salt to pull out the moisture, then remove from the salt (or remove the surface salt) and dehydrate. The trick is in balancing the need to remove the moisture, and the desired flavour.

I have some green cardamom and would like to use it in dishes such as Indian-style rice pudding. Can it be used in place of the standard ground cardamom bought in an American grocery store?

If by green you mean green cardamom pods, the short answer is yes. You will have to remove the outer green shell and grind the black seeds inside. The black powder available in stores is made from the same black seeds. It is always preferable to grind cardamom seeds fresh because ground cardamom tends to lose flavor with time. I get an acceptable result if I grind the seeds with a mortar and pestle.

Does it change the taste, the texture, or anything else? And no, I am not referring to potatoes or anything specific. I am talking about vegetables in general.

This is my personal experience. It takes sometime to reach the boiling temperature (again) when you add colder water. As a result, vegetables get cooked for a longer period than anticipated. This makes some vegetables becoming mushy and not tasting as good as otherwise. (Example: Egg Plant) Therefore, I make sure to add the right amount of water in the first place.

I've seen filets served both ways. I personally feel that fish - especially trout - should be served skin down. I want to use a fork to pick the flesh away unimpeded. But I've seen Jaime Oliver and one of my favorite restaurants in DC (Le Diplomat) serve trout skin side up. Is there a best practice here?

I think it depends on which fish, and the way it's cooked. If it's steamed,poached, or en papillote, fish skin can be quite unappealing to some diners, and, as you say, the conventional way to eat the fish would be to lift the flesh from the skin, especially if at the same time you are parting the flesh from the bones. But if it's an oilier or meatier fish, pan-fried or grilled, the skin can be deliberately crisped, in which case it's intended to be eaten. (This, again, is much easier to eat if the fish has been filleted from the bone before cooking.) In that case, it is sometimes more attractive, and keeps the skin crisper, to serve it skin-side up.

Got it from the local co-op, no idea what it is! I assume it's some sort of squash. It's about the size of a medium-large orange.

That's a cue ball zucchini. It's similar to a one ball zucchini (yellow), and an eight ball zucchini (dark green, almost black). All of them are round and great squashes to stuff and roast. Hope you enjoyed it!

If you could not use rice vinegar (for reasons of food allergy, perhaps), what could you use instead in sushi rice?

I would probably use diluted white cranberry juice, as being the flavour closest to rice wine vinegar. I am not sure if the acidity would be sufficient, however; you may need to add lemon juice. A substitute for soy you will not easily find, as the development of those sorts of flavours requires fermentation.

I love pearl onions, but I'm always put off by the idea of peeling every single one. Are there any shortcuts to peeling pearl onions?

Dump pearl onions (with skin) into boiling water (on high heat) Bring water back to boil After 1-2 mins, take the onions out, and dump them in cold water (or ice bath) After 1-2 mins, take the onions out of cold water Take an onion, hold it between your index finger and thumb, and squeeze. The onion will pop right out of the skin. Repeat this step for each onion. Hope you find this useful...

All recipes call for simmering a dish if you wish to reduce. I know that if for example if I wish to reduce wine, it will take me double the time or even more if I simmer instead of just cranking the heat up to a boil. But there must be a reason for this - what is that? There is only a 6c difference between a simmer and a boil. I also presume boiling is more permissive in some cases than others, so an ability to distinguish the importance of simmering is necessary to know when you can crank the heat up to save time.

There's another reason for not boiling liquids, besides the possibility of making a mess (boiling over) or ruining it (scorching, etc.). You actually reduce the amount of flavor by boiling. As Kenji explains on Serious Eats : But here's the deal: when simmering, water is not the only thing escaping. Ever notice how when you come home to a pot of sauce simmering on the stovetop or perhaps a beautiful pot roast braising in the oven, your entire home smells of it? Guess what: if those flavorful aromatic compounds are reaching your nose, it means they are leaving the pot. So ... if the only goal was to make there be less liquid, boiling's fine. But if you actually want to concentrate the flavors, you want a slow simmer. The article also goes into more details about reducing alcohol, and some problems with boiling tomato sauce (which I believe applies to most pectin & other hydrocolloid thickened sauces).

We use ground Chuck for the meatballs when making meatball subs. No spices or chopped onion, just meat and the meat sauce is a basic tomato based concoction. Then we cook the meatballs(raw) in the sauce in a crackpot for about 10 hrs! When we serve it, the sauce has cooked away by 95%. What I need to know is can you overcook meatballs and/or sauce (on low setting)? They always have a terribly strong and bitter taste that ground beef shouldn't have.

That long time in the crock-pot sounds bad to begin with. Ground meat should be just cooked to a safe temperature -- any more and it will lose moisture and get tough. The bitterness could come from prolonged exposure to the acidic tomato sauce. If you've ever made ground taco meat and over-seasoned it with lemon or lime juice, it will often taste bitter or astringent.

In German supermarkets, minced meat is usually sold in a plastic box under what’s described as a “Schutzatmosphere” (protective atmosphere). It looks like this: Not visible in this image, the meat is always placed on a sheet of paper. Why is that done? I haven’t found the meat to stick to the plastic more than to the paper, and I can’t think of a reason why the meat would go bad faster without the paper. Also, the plastic boxes usually have a grill-shaped bottom, so the meat would probably not sit in any liquid coming from it.

The paper isn't for you. It's for the robots. Packaged ground meat like that is ground, portioned, and packaged automatically. The blocks of ground meat are formed by extruding them into an endless strip which is chopped into blocks and moved around on conveyor belts. To prevent the meat from adhering to the belts or falling between them, the strip is formed on a roll of waxed paper, which is sliced with the rest of the meat and remains on the bottom of the blocks through the remainder of the processing. It's not important to remove the paper, so they don't bother. You can see an example of the technique at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wPRea1f8sg4 .

I was reminded of this curiosity just moments ago when I got a craving for coffee and couldn't find any normal coffee beans/grounds (owing to the fact that I don't normally drink coffee at home anymore). I unwittingly purchased this so-called espresso coffee at a supermarket in the heart of the Italian district here, and most of the writing on it is Italian; I didn't even realize my mistake until after I had used it three or four times to brew normal coffee and saw, in very tiny letters, the words "espresso coffee" written on one of the sides. So I shelved that coffee until today; even though it seemed fine, I figured I might have been using it inappropriately. After my act of desperation today I decided to look this up. According to Wikipedia: Espresso is not a specific bean or roast level; it is a coffee brewing method. Any bean or roasting level can be used to produce authentic espresso and different beans have unique flavor profiles lending themselves to different roasting levels and styles. This is what I had always believed. The answer to What factors lead to rich crema on espresso? does hint at a possible difference, though: It says that darker roasts are better for producing crema. However, the coffee I have does not seem to be particularly dark a roast; it's dark, but I've had "normal" coffee that was darker. Needless to say, I'm a little confused, and the internet is helping me a whole lot. Maybe it's because the caffeine hasn't kicked in yet. Is there an appreciable difference between coffee beans or coffee grounds labeled as "espresso coffee" and plain, ordinary coffee? If so, what is it? Perhaps more importantly, is espresso coffee suitable for use in a normal coffee maker or press?

It IS the roast that is the difference. The only real difference in the beans is that some beans taste better at a higher roast than others, so they are more appropriate for espresso. Your Italian grocery coffee company may be using the espresso label for marketing purposes, but in general, espresso coffee beans can be the same beans that are used for "regular" coffee, but roasted to a French or Italian roast level, which is darker than City or Full City. Since the advent of Starbucks, many roasts are much darker than they used to be. Dunkin' Donuts coffee, which is a Full City roast, used to be the norm, but now a French seems to be what you can buy. I roast my own coffee and take it to just into the second crack which is, generally, a Full City roast...a point where the character of the coffee predominates rather than the flavor of the roast. There is more information about roasts at Sweet Marias where I buy my green beans, and reading through the site will give you way more of a coffee education than you probably ever wanted. So, yes, you can use the coffee you have to make brewed coffee. It will probably be roastier than you would normally have, unless it is just a marketing ploy, in which case it will taste normal. Consider how long you have had this coffee; if it has been shelved for a while "normal" probably won't be all that great, since freshly roasted coffee is, generally, way better than old coffee. But as long as the oils aren't rancid, it is more likely just going to be bland.

I love pan-fried breadcrumb chicken, but I don't know how to get the breadcrumbs to brown evenly. I dip the chicken breasts in egg, then cover them in breadcrumbs, melt butter in the pan on medium heat, and then put the chicken breasts in the pan. By the time the first side finishes, however, all the butter has burned off and when I flip the chicken breasts, the other side cooks very unevenly. I could add more butter, but it seems like I'm using too much already. What can I do to get the breadcrumbs on each side to brown evenly

I would try to solve this with a couple of extra flips early on in the cooking process. When perparing similar dishes I put the product in the pan for about 30 seconds, then flip them over and slide them along the surface of the pan to pick up the butter remaining on the pan's surface. It does mean having to flip your meat four times instead of two, but in my experience it works. It's quite likely that the breadcrumbs on the side you cook first absorb more butter than they strictly need to cook and brown nicely. By distributing your butter more evenly you can get more consistent browning without having to increase the amount of butter used.

I am not sure if this is on topic but was wondering if there is some "trick" to cooking this pasta. That is my question in a nutshell. The package direction say to boil for 10 min. which I did, however, as I was cooking the pasta it was foaming very heavy and I could not see the actual pasta. I stirred it in order to keep the foaming down which seemed to help. When the time was up and I drained the pasta it was about a third of the amount I originally started with. There was a heavy film of what seemed to be melted pasta at the bottom of the pan. I assume these ingredients just melt. So maybe this is why wheat is the most used ingredient for making pasta.

I've been gluten free for two decades and have probably cooked every kind of GF pasta available. The first challenge is to not expect it to look, behave or taste like wheat pasta ;-) Use a big enough pot. Like wheat pasta it needs space. Add a little oil to the boiling water to keep it from sticking together. If the water is boiling like crazy, bring the heat to a gentler boil. GF pasta can be fragile. If it's spaghetti the ends are probably sticking out of the water so patiently and gently immerse it. Once it's swimming in the pot, stir a bit with a wooden spoon or silicone utensil to make sure it's not sticking together, same as with regular pasta. Usually the package says 8-10 minutes. You have to taste it to know. Remember it will cook a bit after drained so keep it a little bit on the chewy side. Personally I prefer combinations of quinoa and corn as opposed to rice. "Ancient Harvest" in a turquoise box is my favorite, with Barilla a close second. Just my opinion. There is definitely a learning curve with GF cooking. You will succeed, even if it takes more than once to attain perfection!

I haven't made beef and noodles in a while but I have this beef stew seasoning packet and wanted to try that instead of beef broth or the beef cubes. Would this work? How much water would I need? I am just making a regular amount with one package of noodles and a can of shredded beef.

So you have this seasoning mix, as per comments. Ingredients are, with my comments: Corn Starch thickener Salt obvious Onion goes well with beef, found in most "beef noodles" recipes I glanced at Sugar a bit of it does wonders to beef taste, in my opinion Spices (Including Paprika, Black Pepper, Thyme) that's what I add to my beef, too Tomato questionable, but I see how it can be good Hydrolyzed Corn Gluten thickener, mouthfeel Soy Protein and Wheat Gluten as above Caramel Color obvious Citric Acid Xanthan Gum (Thickener). So will this make a beef noodles as a stand in replacement? I think not. It doesn't have any beef taste on its own. And if you will try to boil canned beef with it long enough for taste to mix in, you will overcook your beef. Consider either using these ingredients separately, as they were probably meant to be used, or treating it as an experiment. Personally, I like beef overcooked in sauce to the point there are no longer visible beef pieces, just one smooth thick sauce. But that's quite far from what you would usually call beef noodles.

I bought a wooden (uhh, stained bamboo?) mortar and pestle today at an asian supermarket. I liked it because it looked nice and it was pretty large, especially for the price. I was also thinking that the larger size would help with peppercorns not flying out of it -- and landing ... somewhere... wait where did that go anyway? I have to wonder though: are there any downsides to an MP set made of wood?

There are at least three potential downsides: wood is quite light, so you will not get the benefit of added weight of the pestle for crushing; many wooden mortars have a smooth texture, which will not aid in the grinding as much as, e.g., a coarse ceramic mortar; and wood is porous—increasingly so as it dries over time—so it may have the tendency to pick up the flavors of its contents.

I've tried a few different methods of caramelizing onions - several combinations of butter, olive oil, medium heat, low heat, occasional/constant stirring. It seems that no matter what I do, they dry up and turn crispy as they brown. The flavor is there, but the texture is more like onion straws than the soft, juicy onions I'm trying to make. Am I cooking too long? Not stirring enough? I'm sure it's something simple I've just missed. I am aware of this question. I've followed similar techniques, I'm just not getting the results I'm looking for. I hope that's enough to constitute another question.

Without seeing the result and knowing your exact technique, my best guess is that you're not using enough liquid, or that you're using heat that's too high. High heat will essentially fry the onions, like you would expect by dropping chicken or potatoes into a pan full of hot oil. Properly caramelized onions should take at least 20 to 30 minutes, I try to go for an hour whenever time permits. I actually stir as little as I can without allowing them to sit long enough to burn. Over-stirring shouldn't be a problem; under-stirring may be. To start, you want the bottom of the pan to be covered with a thin layer of oil, and then make sure you stir the onions very well to coat them completely right after you toss them in. Begin with the pan on medium-high heat to get the oil up to temperature, once it ripples and you put the onions in you can lower it quite a bit. I rarely put it above 5 (out of 10, glass-top stove), and if I see things going crispy, I'll often drop it to 4. I'd rather take more time and have softer onions. Are you adding any liquid along the way? Sometime, when doing large batches, 15 minutes in I find that I don't have enough oil in the pan, and I can see them starting to crisp up a bit more than I'd like. When that happens, lower the heat a notch, and add a touch more oil (or, as I prefer, a cube of homemade stock) to the pan. It'll take some practice, but eventually you'll be able to know how much liquid to use instinctively. The reason I prefer stock for my "second add" is because I know the stock will evaporate off, as mentioned in the question you linked to, you don't want to be pouring off flavor at the end of the cooking time, so evaporation is a good thing! If you're using cast iron, I recommend trying stainless steel, I get much better results with the latter than the former. I'd guess that it's because I can dynamically regulate the temperature better with the stainless steel - with cast iron, once you realize you're at too high of a temperature, it's hard to lower it quickly. If you need a step by step guide to start you off until you get a feel for everything, there is a great guide here and another here. The difference is that one recommends 1 teaspoon of oil per onion; the other uses 3 tablespoons per onion. I find that for my kitchen, it's somewhere in the middle (I just eyeball so I can't give you an exact number, unfortunately) - but if you try both methods on your stovetop you should be able to use that data to determine the right amount for you.

When I do anything on the stove - boil water, make rice, make a stew for 3 hours - I always wonder whether I should be using the lid. The conventional wisdom is that the lid makes water boil faster. Is this true? Sometimes I have oddly-shaped pots which don't have a lid so I try to find a substitute (a plate, a sheet pan) if the recipe says to "cover". Do I have to cover? When I use a lid with rice, it always boils over, leaving me wondering why I even bother with it. When do I use the lid? Does the lid have to be tight-fitting, or can it be something loose that mostly covers the top? How do I decide whether I can ignore the "cover" directive on a recipe? How does the use of a lid affect the food itself? I realize this is a very silly question but it has always baffled me, and caused me no small amount of consternation when a recipe says to use one and I don't have a way to cover.

Covering a pan slows down evaporation of the water. As evaporating water takes a lot of heat, covering a pan will make the contents boil earlier. If the recipe tells you to cover the pan, it's to make sure there's enough moisture for the full duration of the cooking; without the lid, you might end up with a dry (and usually burned) mess. When cooking rice, the proteins and starch dissolving in the water will cause the bubbles that form on boiling to be more resistant, so they form a foam that lifts up the lid and escapes. Usually after the first foam is destroyed, you'll have no more problems (but do keep the fire low). And for at least one method of cooking rice, you want to keep the pot well covered, as the amount of water you add is just enough to fully cook the rice (the water is absorbed by the rice and makes the starch grains swell, without water the rice would stay very hard). It all boils down to how fast you want the water to evaporate.

I've got basic electric hobs in my kitchen which do a fine job - but a lot of cookbooks suggest that certain things would be best done on an open flame/gas hob (i.e. anything involving a wok). My flat isn't piped up for gas and I can't afford the expense of replacing my hob with a better one than it currently has anyway - so I was wondering - would a decent gas camping stove/hob be a suitable and sensible supplement to my electric hobs? If so, what sort of thing should I look out for on buying one?

Camping stoves are generally not safe for indoor use. They can produce fumes or carbon monoxide that would be fine outdoors, but dangerous indoors. Check the warning labels before buying anything to use inside. As for the actual cooking, I don't think that you'll get the results that you expect. My experience includes an MSR Whisperlite International backpacking stove (white gas), and Coleman two-burner stoves in both white gas and propane variants. Anecdotally, the backpacking stove has limited control, while the two-burner stoves don't quite have the oomph of a real gas stove. The Coleman links that I provided indicate that the white gas stove has burners that put out 7,500 and 6,500 BTU, while the propane stove puts out 10,000 btu on both burners. Using the REI-provided time for boiling water, I calculated that the backpacking stove puts out about 4,500 BTU (and other backpacking stoves indicate similar times, regardless of fuel). By comparison, my consumer-grade natural gas-powered kitchen stove has two burners that put out 15,500 BTU, one that puts out 9,500, and one (the simmer burner) that puts out 5,000. Viking offers normal burners up to 18,000 BTU, and a wok burner of 27,000. However, white gas stoves aren't okay indoors. They're fine while they're burning, but lighting them is a bit dramatic, and once you shut them off they'll put out half-burned fumes for several minutes. Similarly, propane camping stoves usually put off too much carbon monoxide to be safe indoors.

I've been hungry for a light oxtail soup, and managed to find some (around 1.5lb) frozen at the butcher. I'm aiming for light flavor to go alongside leeks and bulgar, so I figured I would simmer the oxtails until they fall apart, pull out the bones and simmering veggies, and then add sweated leeks and bulgar and reheat. I let them thaw for 2 days, and then earlier today put them on a baking sheet for 10 minutes at 400 degrees, turned, and did another 10 minutes to lightly brown. Afterwards I put them in a slow cooker with some veggies, 4 cups of water, 2 cups of beef bullion, and 1 cup of cream sherry, and set it to a low heat. to start simmering. I am planning to simmer for around 20 hours, but at about 5 hours in the oxtail chunks are still very tight - think the texture of a steak that's been cooked, put in a refrigerator and then reheated. I know I have another 15 hours to go, but still, I would have thought I'd see it breaking down a little bit more by now. I didn't try and slice off any of the meat from the bone, so maybe that is it? Did I do something wrong, or am I jumping the gun timewise? Candid feedback is appreciated!

A common braising time for oxtails would be on the order of 2-4 hours. Oxtails are a tough cut of meat, with a lot of connective tissue made of a protein called collagen. It needs to cook in a hot, moist environment in order to hydrate into gelatin. This process happens over time and temperature. Typically, braising is on the order of 200 degrees F (93 C), give or take, in order to get the expected tender product in the expected time. If your oxtails have not become tender already in the 5 hours you have already given them, perhaps your slow cooker's low setting is not hot enough. This is of special concern because you also want it to be at least 140 F (60 C) for safety. I strongly urge you to use an instant read thermometer and measure the temperature at several places within the pot. If it is not above the safety threshold, you should discard the contents, which would have been essentially incubating for the entire time. If it is lower than the desired braising temperature, you can try your high setting, or transfer your braise to the oven (if the crock is oven safe, or in another covered oven safe pot such as a dutch oven). Oven braising is usually done at about 350 F (180 C), which should bring the contents up to the desired braising temperature. In any case, an expected cook time of 20 hours seems excessive by a factor of about 4 times. Note also: if your goal is to produce beef stock for the soup rather than tender, delectable meat, you want the temperature up around a slow simmer, which is about 200 F (93 C), although at the end, the flavor will have gone from the meat into the broth. Even for stock making, I cannot imagine a cook time being required in excess of more than 8-12 hours.

I want to make a double or triple batch of of this Italian bread recipe that I have. It's for a bread similar to what they serve at Macaroni Grill. My problem is that I am using a pizza stone in the oven and I can only fit one loaf at a time and it takes 20-25 minutes to cook a loaf. My plan is to mix the dough and let it rise as one big batch. The punch down and separate the dough into individual loaves for the second rise. The main ingredients are water, all purpose flour, olive oil, sugar, and yeast. Is there a way that I can keep the additional loaves from continuing to rise while a loaf is baking? Or should I just leave them out?

I have read a couple of experiments (in Dutch so I will not link them here) where people cooked the same dish from the same shrooms, with one batch brushed and the other washed. The washed batch did need higher temparature to actually fry, instead of just boiling in their own moisture and the texture in the finished dish remained different. There does seem to to be some merit to the culinary traditions here. As for the safety aspects, perhaps this will ease your mind somewhat: Research minimizes effects of federal produce standards on mushroom industry: But a new study shows that heat generated during the traditional composting process -- originally developed to kill insect and fungal pests of mushrooms -- is adequate for eliminating human pathogens that might be present, according to researchers in Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences. If you got sick from eating a dish, the cause may not have been in the nutrition beds the shrooms were grown on.

So I have an iSi whipped cream charger. There are a series of recipes that sound really interesting, but I don't quite understand what ingredients you need in order to make a stable foam / mousse. Some common ingredients seem to be cheese, cream, and gelatin. But I've also seen recipes with chocolate and water (melted and combined), lecithin, or even scrambled eggs with sous vide eggs, skim milk, and butter. So what ingredients are a must for making a foam? How do they work? I must admit, I'm more interested in the "how" than the "what". The what seems to be pretty well defined in the list or recipes, but I want to be able to create my own culinary treats and understanding the process is invaluable in making things up.

A foam is just a liquid with plenty of air incorporated into it. You can incorporate air into any liquid; in order to be able to create an actual foam, however, you need to be able to incorporate the air faster than it escapes. What makes a liquid able to hold the air you're incorporating (and hence form a foam) is a foam stabilizer, also commonly called an emulsifier1. I know of no specific taxonomy of stabilizers, but the vast majority are hydrocolloids AKA gelling agents and belong to some family of protein. Agar, carrageenan, alginate, xanthan, and pectin are all types of polysaccharide; Lecithin is mostly a random collection of phospholipids; Gelatin is denatured collagen, i.e. animal protein; Whey protein is the prevalent protein in dairy products; And so on. Really almost any emulsifier will do. Basically everything in your list either is, or contains, one of the the additives mentioned above: Chocolate is almost always emulsified with soy lecithin; Eggs contain high amounts of lecithin; Milk and cream contain whey protein; Most "supermarket cream" also has emulsifiers like carrageenan already in it. ...you get the picture, I hope. The most basic answer I can give to this is that if you want to make a foam, you need to either use something that's already an emulsion (milk, butter, chocolate, etc.) or use an emulsifier/stabilizer additive (such as gelatin, lecithin, etc.) If you want a relatively complete list of all of the food additives that qualify, you'll want to look at the E number, and specifically E400-499 (thickeners, stabilizers, emulsifiers). 1. As commenter Erik very correctly points out, an emulsifier is not the same thing as a foam stabilizer. However, by convention, the terms seem to be used interchangeably all over the place, to the extent that I get blank looks when I refer to a "stabilizer" as opposed to "emulsifier". So, know the difference, but don't get too hung up on it.

I've heard that cooking "breaks down" carbohydrates such as starch. I also know that starch is a complex carbohydrate, which is essentially made out of simple carbohydrates (sugars). Potatoes contain a lot of starch, so I was wondering: is there a way of cooking potatoes that will break the starch down and make them sweet? Of course, I'm not expecting to be able to make them sweet like candy, but I'm wondering if I can get some amount of sweetness out of them. I'm just asking out of curiosity; I don't have any particular goals or dishes in mind.

If you are asking how to prevent the oil from smoking while making a good steak: you can't. The pan for proper searing of steak has to go hotter than the smoking point of any cooking oil. So, if you don't want to consume oil which has been taken above its smoking point, you cannot eat seared steak. You can make steak in a coldish pan (not hearing a sizzle will be a good thing then, or better, use an infrared thermometer to make sure your pan stays at low temperatures), or in the oven, or try some method which uses no oil - typically grilling, but the salt alternative in elbrant's answer is also interesting. If you dislike the crust on the steak on your picture: this is a well seared steak, and it is how most people like their steak to be. If you don't like it this way and want it less crusty, then you should not be following typical steak guides, since they are trying to produce what you got. Instead, try lower temperature methods, such as the oven, or sous vide without a finishing sear. If you like the taste of your steak, but are afraid that you broke some important cooking rule: you didn't. And there is no cooking police which will come for you if you don't follow some common piece of advice or other, even if sometimes online discussions make it seem that way. Continue making steaks the same way as this one.

Often when cooking rice a lot of it ends up sticking to the bottom of the pan and gets wasted. I'm using a frying pan with a non-stick surface. Is there a way to get all the rice out of the pan easily?

Other things you can try: add a tablespoon more water at the start reduce the cook-time by 2 minutes let the rice sit for a minute or two with the lid on, sort of "steaming in its own juices" The idea is that if the rice is just a bit damp, it won't stick.

I've recently begun sprouting my own grains but I've found (no matter the method I use) that they tend to be too...crunchy? My boyfriend described my last batch of black quinoa tasting like it had some sort of "husk" or "shell" on it that made the flavor and texture less desirable. I make sure to rinse the quinao thoroughly to avoid getting a bitter or soapy result at the end (rinsing at least three times). And rinse at least 2-3 times a day to make sure to avoid mold growth. So far I have tried the following methods, plus some (note: I do not have a sprouter, I use a large mason jar): WikiHow with a short rinse/soak period Ehow with a longer soak and a 2-3 times a day rinse Power of Food with a upside down container to make sure everything is drained off thoroughly I also have used paper towel, light cloths and cheese cloths as covers depending on which method and what it describes. It seems consistently I am getting a little better each time, but they are still a little hard. Is it my water temperature (I've used tap and make sure not to make it too hot or too cold). Any suggestions or tried and true methods to get a good result with grain sprouting?

As you stated above that you have used every possible method, i use simple method for grain sprouting. First i wash grain properly to remove dust and then soak them in normal temperature water for at least time mentioned in recipe.The first step in preparing quinoa is to remove the saponins, a process that requires soaking the grain in water for a few hours, then changing the water and re-soaking, or rinsing it in ample. So, continuously changing water after ever 3 hrs to keep them fresh. Then followed by your usual sprouting method. But for sure there must be the problem with the quality of grain batch which may be due to fertilizing,soil or any other reason. You better purchase from some good quality grains then follow the usual procedure of sprouting. It happens sometimes, i had been through same once but till that stock lasts in my kitchen. There after i went to have good quality grains and issue resolved. Hope it would help you out.

I live at a high altitude and love to use my slow cooker, but I don't think the meals are coming out as expected when I follow the recipes. Do I need to adjust the recipes for high altitudes?

It really depends on the length of time recommended. Due to the usual long length (>4 hours) of slow-cooker recipe cook times most elevation differences would be negligible. However if a recipe calls for a cook time of less than 4 hours you may see some foods not cooking as usual. Legumes might especially be sensitive to this as they take a very long time to cook completely. Below is a table from Wikipedia on elevation vs water boiling temperatures. Altitude, m Boiling point of water, °C (0ft) 100 (212°F) (984.25ft) 99.1 (210.3°F) (1968.5ft) 98.1 (208.5°F) (3280.8ft) 96.8 (206.2°F) (6561.68ft) 93.3 (199.9°F) (13123.36ft) 87.3 (189.1°F) (19685.04ft) 81.3 (178.3°F) (26246.72ft) 75.5 (167.9°F) You may need to experiment with longer cook times for foods that you are having trouble with.

I've noticed that a banana in the refrigerator will turn pitch black in just a few hours. Why is this?

Your fridge speeds production of polyphenols, which speeds the blackening process. Unrefrigerated bananas ripen by ethylene gas which will also eventually turn them black, but the cold short circuits that process.

How much, if any, alcohol is left when vinegar is made from alcoholic products? Does this differ between different types of vinegar, such as malt, red wine, white wine and spirit vinegars? The context is a desire to absolutely avoid alcohol. This includes de-alcoholised products that may contain trace quantities.

Yes, there is some alcohol in vinegar. Estimates of Ethanol Exposure in Children from Food not Labeled as Alcohol-Containing, Gorgus et al., Journal of Analytical Toxicology 2016 discusses a range of sources of alcohol exposure, some of which might be surprising. Among them is white wine vinegar, which is quoted as having 2.6 g/l. That's around 0.25% ABV (vinegar is mostly water, and acetic acid has a similar density to water, so close enough). I can see no reason for other real (brewed) vinegar to have appreciably less. Consuming a unit/standard drink of alcohol would mean drinking large quantities of pure vinegar (a UK unit is 8 g of pure ethanol, so that would mean drinking about 3 litres of vinegar), so for the majority of people this wouldn't be an issue; indeed the human body produces several grams per day (Wikipedia link, but see the cited source for this claim for a full review). However if someone is trying to completely avoid consuming any alcohol, vinegar would seem to be off limits. There are alternatives, such as "non-brewed condiment" a malt vinegar substitute made from industrially produced acetic acid, water, and flavours. Similar products may legally be allowed to be sold as vinegar in some countries - they should be cheap, and include "acetic acid" on the list of ingredients (see Wikipedia's article for links to other languages). It appears to be possible for consumers to buy food-grade acetic acid at high concentrations. This would need to be diluted significantly. One brand I found was described as 70% acetic acid; as common vinegar is no more than about 5%, you'd need something like 1 part of that 70% product to 12 parts water (or fruit juice, or a mixture of the two) and undiluted it should be handled as a nasty chemical rather than as a food (protect eyes and skin, avoid inhaling fumes). Industrial production is done directly, without the alcohol intermediate step, so can be assumed to be alcohol-free and would also allow some distance from the alcohol industry, if that's related to the motivation. Returning to the paper I linked at the start, some other foods may be surprisingly high in alcohol. Some breads, for example have over 1% by weight (though others have no detectable alcohol). Very ripe fruit has some, and fruit juices contain tiny quantities, with the highest figure detected in the juices around 1/3 of that in vinegar, at less than 0.1%, though of course fruit juices are often consumed in larger quantities than vinegar. Perhaps the natural level found in fruit juices could be regarded as a practical threshold to consider functionally zero, barring any medical reason to go still further.

I accidentally ate some packaged shredded cheese without knowing its expiration date. It expired in December and it is now February. it tasted fine, and it wasn't moldy. will I be okay? or should I worry about being sick? if so, how long would it take for me to get sick?

It may well be a can of worms, but your question is very valid when, according to Wikipedia: every year in the USA there are 76 million foodborne illnesses, leading to 325,000 hospitalizations and 5,000 deaths. That aside, it is worth pointing out the facts about hard cheese and its longevity. Firstly it is a high fat product. Fat goes rancid, not bad unless it develops mould. Therefore if it looks mould-free, smells and tastes fine, there will be no problem. Indeed, even if the cheese has developed a mould, it does not necessarily mean it will make you ill, as the human gut has been made to deal with many moulds which naturally occur. Historical facts: hard cheese was "invented" as a way of preserving a product made in times of plenty, to see over the times of hunger. The inherent properties and content (fat and salt) are long-life products which no amount of industrialisation can destroy. These cheeses include Cheddar, Parmesan, Emmenthal and Edam. My personal experience: I currently have cheese in the refrigerator bought abroad and three-four months past its "use by" date. This happens regularly every year, because I cannot live without my Extra Mature Cheddar. At no time have we ever been ill as a result of eating out of date cheese. HOWEVER, it is not low-fat nor grated. If grated cheese is nearing its best-by date and you do not intend using it in the near future, simply pop it into the freezer. Shelf Life A UK initiative to reduce food-waste may be of interest. WRAP (Waste & Resources Action Programme) is a registered UK charity working with "businesses, individuals and communities to achieve a circular economy through helping them reduce waste, develop sustainable products and use resources in an efficient way". It is pertinent that the whole "use by" labeling is being scrutinised. According to WRAP, 33% percent of all food produced is wasted along the cold chain or by the consumer. At the same time, a large number of people get sick every year due to spoiled food. Which brings us back to your question of how long will it take before you get sick if the cheese was "bad"? The incubation period i.e. the time between eating contaminated food and the onset of symptoms, can be as short as a few hours or as long as several weeks. Hard cheese is less likely to cause serious food-poisoning, but Salmonella and Listeria and other bacteria may be found in a range of chilled, ready-to-eat foods including cheeses such as soft blue cheese, Brie and Camembert. It will also develop and grow in a refrigerated environment more information here It is also worth mentioning most deaths from food poisoning are from E.coli and Listeria, with the very young, the aged and those with a compromised immune system at greatest risk.

I picked up two NY Strip steaks, about 6 oz each this weekend with the hopes of showing off how awesome my new sous vide circulator (Anova Precision Cooker) with a nice medium-rare steak. I pre-heated my water to 130 degrees, brushed olive oil on the steaks and seasoned them with kosher salt and fresh ground pepper. After that, I vacuum-sealed them (not touching) and submerged them for 2 hours. When they came out, they felt pretty tender, so I seared them in a heavy aluminum pan in hot oil, 30 seconds per side. They came out OK, but certainly not medium rare. They had the slightest of pink centers, so I would call them medium well to almost well done. I really want to master the art of the steak, so what did I do wrong?

130 degrees is certainly the temperature to aim for, I'm thinking that it's the pan sear that did it. 1 minute in a pan is actually quite a bit for a thinner steak (at 6 ounces I'm thinking yours were maybe 1/2 - 3/4 inch), certainly enough to add 10-20 degrees or so to the steak's temperature and make it medium well. As for how to avoid it there's a few things: Get a thick steak: a thick steak can take a minute in the pan without cooking much more Cook to rare: if you want to use a thinner steak cook it to 115 or 120F instead of 130F, that way the sear will bring it up to the perfect temperature Use a torch to brown it: A chef's torch would give a good, quick sear without cooking the steak as much as a hot pan Sear the steak first: it's not as good as searing after, but then you will get your perfect temperature Cook the steak, then let it cool, then sear it. Your steak will only overcook if the temperature goes over 135F

Okay, I received a nice stainless steel saute pan for Christmas and in looking around online there are people that say I need to season it. Most of the techniques I've seen involve oil and salt and cooking that for a bit and then wiping it out. Is this necessary? Do I need to do it every time I use the pan? Are there other techniques that you folks use? I had never heard of this for stainless steel, but I want to make sure I'm taking care of the pan correctly. Thanks.

I've never heard of doing anything other than giving it a good cleaning, as you would with any new item before first use. I've only heard of seasoning used for cast iron and carbon steel, not for stainless steel. Looking online, I did find instructions for seasoning stainless steel, but I'd be inclined to look at the paperwork that came with the pan -- if the manufacturer recommends doing something, follow their instructions. If they don't, just give it a good wash.

As I understand the technique, you put a food item in a plastic bag and dump it into warm water for some amount of time. What happens to bacteria growth inside the bag?

If you do it properly, no there are no health issues. A combination of two things are required to kill beasties: heat and time. The higher the heat you expose them to, the faster they die. Generally any temperature above 130 F is enough to kill most beasties, it just requires a significantly larger amount of time compared to a higher temperature. I go into a lot of detail regarding Salmonella in this answer of mine: Is it safe to eat a cooked steak that (briefly) touched the plate that was holding the raw meat? I have several tables there to show exact timings, etc. If you think I should copy/paste that here, then let me know in a comment

In Spain I had a wonderful tapa called Pimiento de Padron. Green chiles fried in olive oil and salted. What type of chile could I find in the US to replicate this dish? The chiles should be mild, with the odd spicy one.

Russian roulette peppers! Not sure if there is a good substitute you can buy already grown? If you live near a warm coast try growing your own. Good seed suppliers (Johnnyseeds, LocalHarvest etc - Peperone Padron in NZ from italianseedspronto) should be able to help, or check Ebay or Amazon

I've eaten both and except for the fact that sometimes polenta is a little bit more firm, they taste the same...Any southerners out there that can help?

True southern grits are made with ground hominy whereas polenta is simply ground cornmeal. The proper name for them is actually hominy grits. You can make "grits" out of untreated corn, but these are corn grits and not really found in southern US cuisine. Grits are typically a much coarser grind than polenta. Hominy is corn that has been nixtamalized, which means soaked and cooked in an alkali solution, typically lye or limewater. This process converts the niacin present in corn into a form more soluble in the human body. Early European importers of corn from the USA dismissed this process as unnecessary, and as corn became a subsequent staple a pretty nasty disease called pellagra took hold caused by niacin deficiency.

My mother regularly uses 1 tea bag for two cups or 2 tea bags for a teapot. I've read on several sites that one tea bag is ideal for one cup. So, how much should I get from a tea bag? Also, is the steeping time different if I was trying to get more tea out of the same tea bag? Some say that steeping it longer gets more flavour out of the bag. Somewhat more formal research suggests that releases the bitter parts and makes the tea bitter rather than thicker. I know you shouldn't reuse coffee beans when making an espresso, but does this apply to tea as well?

After looking into this much longer than a sane person should have, I've realized that the strength of the tea doesn't depend so much on the quantity of tea. Controlling the strength of tea is normally done by controlling the steeping time. As stated by paul, the best way to dilute the strength of a tea is by resteeping it. The steeping time of a tea is most determined by the coarseness of the tea leaves. Similar to garlic, finer leaves make the taste a lot stronger, whereas large, coarse leaves will be weaker. The instructions on the bag often say what's been tried and tested. Quite often, one tea bag can make quite a lot of tea, enough for a teapot. I'd recommend going for two tea bags only if you're planning to go for larger than a teapot, for tea suited to drinking by itself and with added ice, or with certain weaker teas. For black tea, the common steeping seems to be 2-3 minutes. There's little harm in steeping too short, but steeping too long will create a harsh bitter taste (though some people may actually want that). For cheap, harsh, unbranded teas, 3 minutes seems to be enough unless the leaves are finely chopped. Don't shake the tea bag or stir the drink while steeping it, because it will cause the harsh stuff to enter water faster, and black tea should be steeped at 98 degrees C.

Scenario: I have some nuggets, and thought it would be nice to dip them in some cheese sauce. I do not have that, but I thought I could make one with the ingredients I have. But I am not sure if there is a way to make a MORE OR LESS generic cheese sauce. This is the cheese I have: Ingredients in dutch: melk* (milk), zout (salt), zuursel (starter culture) and stremsel (which is Rennet, I am not sure what kind of cheese that is). My main idea was melting the cheese with an amount of butter, salt, and maybe some milk or cooking cream. (No need of quantities right now but more of the process to follow). I think that adding flour would be like making a cheesy bechamel, and I don't know if that is good to dip (or put on top of nachos, whatever is fine, as a cheese sauce, it's nice anywhere). But maybe flour is necessary for this process (specially if the cheese may be quite generic as well).

'Cheese sauce' is really anything semi-liquid that tastes a bit like cheese & can be poured or dipped, depending on how liquid. Some fast ideas:- Camembert, brie etc - put it in the oven for 20 mins. Cross-cut the top, dip. tbh, you can do this with most cheeses, just the French-style crusted cheeses provide a cool looking container. Generic roux - oil or butter in a saucepan, add the same quantity of flour. Combine 2 mins, add milk slowly, stir. Add cheese, stir, serve. Welsh rarebit - throw cheese, flour, milk, beer, worcestershire sauce in a pan, heat & stir until it's homogenous. There's not really much you can do to hot cheese to spoil it ;) The only two cheeses I can think of that don't work are haloumi & paneer, because they're both pre-cooked & don't melt.

I severly overkneaded my dough (I left it in the standmixer for over 45 minutes by accident). What can I do with this? Can I use it for starter? Any other use-cases?

In addition to @rumtscho's answer, there is another option: Dough that has active yeast in it can be used as a starter culture for future doughs. This is the method by which bakers used to propagate their yeasts before the advent of readily available dried or pure fresh yeast cultures. It goes under various names, such as poolish, biga and pate fermentee, though technically the poolish is higher hydration than the other two, so yours is more like a biga or pate fermentee. Given that you are just at the kneading stage you would need to ferment ("rise" - though yours won't; it'll just go bubbly) the dough. Then you can simply take some of the dough and add it to a fresh batch of ingredients. The amounts to add vary depending on what you actually want to do with the new bread and how fast you want it to rise. You can also take this and divide it up into smallish amounts; 15 -- 30 ml (0.5 -- 1 oz) works well and freeze, then thaw for usage when needed. Silicone muffin/cupcake trays work well for this, as you can drop the mix in, freeze, then pop-out for storage in a bag. There's some nice instructions here for how to use from fresh. For frozen the process is similar, just make sure that the "dough" is thawed and warm. You will most likely have to play with the amount you use, but given the poor nature of the gluten in your current batch, I wouldn't go over about 25% of the total future bake.

I boiled some beets last weekend but then had to travel unexpectedly. They have been in the fridge in a container. They have some light purple watery droplets on them now. Are they still edible? Here is a photo:

It's a vegetable. When you cooked it you damaged the cell walls and the juice is leaking out. I think this picture only seems unusual because of the beets' color. If these were carrots there wouldn't be a question because, of course, the juice would be less startling. If these beets haven't started to mold or ferment- and you'd know it from the smell- then they are fine.

Whenever I use the oven to prepare frozen French fries, the instructions tell me to pre-heat the oven to X degrees, and then put the fully frozen French fries inside when it's ready. But it's often a waste of time to stand around and wait for it to slowly get ready, so I tend to put them in before it's shown with the light indicator that it's at the right temperature. Also, I take out the French fries from the freezer at the same time as I start the oven, and spread them out on a thing, so they are ready to go into the oven. Maybe this make them thaw a little bit. Since the times specified on the package never seem to be accurate at all, it doesn't seem like it matters. But maybe it does? Why should I wait until the very last minute to take out the frozen French fries from the freezer, and put them into the oven only when it's fully reached the temperature specified on the package? Is there something about doing it in my "impatient" way which fundamentally ruins the food? Or have they simply timed it "directly out of the freezer, immediately at this degree" at the French fries research lab?

For fairly forgiving things like french fries, I've never found it makes a difference. Typically I turn the oven on, get the chips (which is what we call them here) out of the freezer, and the baking sheet out of the cupboard, put the chips on the sheet, put the rest away, then put them in the oven. Maybe 2 minutes of preheating. They take maybe 2 minutes longer. This is with a modern electric oven, that reaches the set temperature in about 10 minutes. It may use the grill element to start preheating, but it's not a fan oven. It saves a little energy, but not much, as for short cooking the majority of the energy is in preheating. Most cook-from-frozen things are probably OK this way, as they have to defrost and cook, and defrosting will start nicely at lower temperatures. I wouldn't do this for baking, or for anything thick, so not pizza (even pre-made frozen), and even chunky potato wedges are marginal (I'd be cooking those from raw room temperature potatoes).

I recently got my meringue game down and though I wouldn’t eat French meringue without baking it, I’ve seen numerous videos where it’s said that Swiss meringue is delicious straight out of the double boiler. I’ve not seen the same about Italian, but I thought that is cooked in the bowl, too? So which meringue is safe to eat direct from the bowl?

As you're in the UK, they're all safe. Raw egg is safe according to the NHS Because of improved food safety controls in recent years, infants, children, pregnant women and elderly people can now safely eat raw or lightly cooked hen eggs, or foods containing them, that are produced under the British Lion Code of Practice (regarding hygiene and especially salmonella). This doesn't apply to all other countries, but it's worth checking in many EU countries, where dishes containing raw egg are traditional (such as chocolate mousse and tiramisu). I've failed to find a single reliable source covering many countries, but Finland, Sweden, Denmark and Norway are essentially salmonella-free. I read enough French to make sense of some sources, but can't find anything definitive more recent than 2013 in which products made from raw egg are advised against for high-risk groups, but generally acceptable; in particular recipes assume that pregnant women will be avoiding raw egg.

I have drippings that have caked on to the botton surface of my oven. Now, every time we use the oven, they start to smoke and set off the smoke detector. What are some natural ways to clean the oven? There's probably some major scrubbing in my future. :) (Note: Someone at DIY Stack exchange https://diy.stackexchange.com/a/1890/672 suggested that I cross post here)

Using a bicarbonate of Soda paste is a good way to clean the oven and does not involve any nasty chemicals. Also, as you need to clean the base of the oven, it can help if you remove the door if it is a drop down door. This makes reaching inside much easier. Most doors are designed to be removed easily. Sometimes your manual will provide instructions on how to remove the door for cleaning. Otherwise this video on removing oven door may help as it covers four different types of hinge.

Food safety laws generally apply to most food you can touch with your hands at supermarkets - such as loose leaf spinach, bread rolls in the bakery, and anything at the deli. When handling these foods, you need to use tongs (or wear food safety gloves). But mushrooms seem to be 'safe' for everyone to touch with their hands. There are never tongs near them (at least at any supermarket I've seen) and everyone uses their hands. Why is this? What makes mushrooms special?

A major reason produce can be sold loose without tongs is that you're supposed to wash it just before preparing it anyway. You couldn't wash your baked goods. How effective this washing is, is of course another matter now we don't have to wash the mud off and a token rinse is probably typical. Some produce, including mushrooms but also strawberries etc., could easily be damaged by tongs anyway.

So I know you can't use UHT milk to make cheese, because of the way the proteins get denatured at that temperature. But can you use it to make yogurt?

UHT (Ultra High Temperature) processing kills all the pathogens in the milk, so it can be conserved for a long time. However to make yogurt you add bacteria (lactobacillus), so if there aren't other microorganism it should be even better.

I'm looking for a safe method to remove the skin.

If you have a gas range, just fire up a burner. Make sure to have some tongs ready if you can't rest the pepper at a good height above the flame. (You'll probably want them to turn the pepper anyways.) Once sufficiently blackened (and not on fire mind you) toss in a paper bag and close it. Let it rest and the residual heat inside the pepper will continue to steam it from the inside out. Once cooled, remove the skin. Feel free to use water to cool or help remove the skin, but you may wash away some flavorful oils. I prefer this method as it lets me keep an eye on the pepper the whole time instead of having to peek at a hidden broiler. Plus, you can make sure you get an even roast.

I made some sorbet at the weekend, and realised just when we were due to serve that I had forgot to take it out of the freezer to soften, and so it was rock hard. What is the best way to bring it to a usable temperature quickly? We chucked it in the microwave and then hacked it with a spatula, but ended up with a lumpy texture as many parts were still very frozen. Any ideas to avoid a repeat in the future would be appreciated.

The best way? Plan better. :) The microwave is rarely a good plan for quick defrosting, as you found out. I would suggest putting the container in warm to hot running tap water. The warmer the water is the faster it will melt, but it will also melt more unevenly - though nothing like the microwave. The important part is that the water is running, and is at least room temperature. It's not going to be quick like a microwave, but it'll be faster than just letting it sit. Edit I've never tried this, but I imagine a hair dryer might work well too. It'll just be noisier :) The concept is the same, just moving air instead of water.

I'm decorating a two layer butter cake and I was thinking of adding a layer of sliced fresh strawberries in between the two layers together with some strawberry flavored Bavarian cream. I will be serving the cake in two days. Will the strawberries give out too much liquid and make the cake soggy?

I don't think I've ever seen peanut butter grow mold, natural or commercial, refrigerated or not. What will happen with natural peanut butter is that the fat (of which there's plenty) will go rancid over time. The oxidation process that leads to rancidity requires heat, light, and usually oxygen; keeping it in the refrigerator will therefore slow the process down significantly. Manufacturers are probably not required to put the "keep refrigerated" warning on nut butters because eating rancid food technically won't kill you or make you seriously ill. When a product says to keep refrigerated, sometimes that's for safety, sometimes it's just for quality - in the case of peanut butter it's typically the latter. Commercial peanut butter has a ton of sugar and other preservatives, which is why refrigeration is not necessary, even for quality purposes.

I like donuts but I don't make them at home because for a bowl of donuts I consume a lot of oil. The oil gets a sweet taste to it afterwards and can't reuse it for cooking something else than cakes. I also don't cook sweets very often and if I store the oil for a longer period of time it gets a somewhat of a stale taste. The question is for a way to make delicious donuts with a small amount of oil but I'm opened to any idea: change in process, changing the dough type, different type of donuts etc.

Donuts are a deep fried food. The texture of deep fried food is unique and cannot be duplicated by other methods. If you bake doughnut dough, you will get small rolls, which will have a similar aroma, but not the same combination of moist, soft inside and fat-crispy outside. You could bake it, as with any other yeast dough, only nobody will recognize it as a donut. Assuming that you want to get actual donuts, you must fry them. And no matter what you do to them, the more oil you use to fry them, the better your donuts will turn out. The physics of deep frying include throwing pieces of food with a starchy surface (potatoes, or breaded items, or dough pieces like donuts) in oil at around 190 degrees Celsius. At this temperature, the outer surface of the dough/vegetable/breading crisps immediately, preventing from any oil getting into the item and any vapor getting out of the item. This only works when the oil in the vicinity of the fried item stays within a few degrees of the target temperature during the first ~30 seconds of the frying process. Which means that you need a stable temperature in your fryer. Now, thermodynamics tells us that, if you throw a 25 degrees piece of food into a puddle of 190 degrees hot oil, they will exchange warmth proportionally to their mass. So, if you want the oil to stay close to the correct temperature, the mass of the donut has to be very small in comparison to the mass of the oil — which means that you need lots of oil. The options you have to do with less oil are all unsatisfactory from my point of view, you might decide to pick one of them. Put up with the quality reduction. Use less oil in the pan, maybe even shallow frying in oil up to the half of the donut only. The donuts will lose moisture and soak up grease. The less oil you use, the worse the grease soak will be. Also, you will use up more oil, because you will have to constantly add the amount soaked up by the already fried donuts. You may consider it well used instead of wasted, because you get to eat it, but from my point of view this is the worst option. Trade time for oil. You can use a small pot, and fry a single donut at a time. Frying 50 g donuts should go well with under 500 ml oil. You are still a bit constrained by the fact that the oil temperature will fluctuate more due to factors not related to the oil, but it should be manageable, if you have the patience. Note that if you place multiple donuts in the small pan, you are getting towards the first or third solution. Try to manage a stable temperature in a donut-crowded small pan by using a very hot setting and letting the oil get too hot before adding a new donut. This is a very complicated thing to manage, especially seeing that you are trying to not burn the other donuts in the pan at the same time. I don't think I could manage it, and if I could, the oil wouldn't be worth the stress. There is also the extra energy to consider — not as expensive as throwing out more oil, but probably worse from an environmental point of view. In the end, if you want good donuts, you have to use a pot/fryer where they can swim freely in oil. Any change you make to this setup reduces the quality of your donut, making it less donut-like.

We were trying to prepare a chocolate cake using a Panasonic Microwave. We set the oven to auto mode for cake preparation. There was a time for preheating (180°C) and then asked us to place the cake tin inside which would cook for 35 minutes, but when it was just six minutes after process started, the vessel started to melt. We first used the vessel provided by Croma which melted and then we tried using the vessel provided by Panasonic for microwave, that also melted. What was the cause for this and can we eat the cake that was in the melted vessel?

The cause is that the dish was not intended for use in convection mode. Plastic melts under heat, period. "Convection" as used by oven manufacturers means that the air in the oven gets heated to the temperature specified (actually, ovens are so badly calibrated that it can be considerably more - I have seen an oven overheating by 40°C - so a considerable safety margin is needed). Any solid objects heat to high temperatures in this hot air, with the surface coming close to the air temperature. You cannot put plastic in a 180°C oven. A microwave oven operates on a different principle. It heats certain types of objects from inside. Water (and some other nutrients, e.g. fats) get hot when irradiated by microwaves. Plastic or air don't get hot. Therefore, a plastic dish does not get hot when used for cooking in a microwave oven, and the air in the oven also stays cool and does not melt the dish. What you have is actually two ovens in one. They use the same heating container, but with two different heaters. The plastic dishes supplied with the oven, as well as any other specialized microwave cooking dishes, can only be used in microwave mode. The convection has to be turned off when you use them, else they will melt. If you want to cook with convection, you have to use a pan from a material which doesn't melt. For a traditional oven, this would be borosilicate glass, ceramic, silicone or metal. I would not use a metal pan. I have heard of combo ovens which don't turn off the microwave part when switched to convection mode (even if the user manual claims otherwise!), and even if yours does, it is still a safety risk because you might forget it and turn on the wrong mode. Metal gets much hotter than water in a microwave, up to the point where it can explode. Summary: use oven-safe glass, or ceramic. If your glass dish has a plastic lid, remove it before baking in convection mode.

I decided to make pad thai noodles from scratch. The recipe I found for rice noodles said to let the rice soak overnight then grind the resulting mixture in a blender. After that it called for steaming the batter in small batches then slicing into noodles. The problem that I had is that these noodles did not cook up in my wok correctly. They got extremely gummy and were grainy. I have experience with pasta, but I have no idea where I went wrong with such a simple recipe. Anybody have any ideas on how I can fix this? EDIT: the recipe was this 1 1/4 cup rice 1 1/4 cup water oil to coat steamer tray Place rice in water overnight, blend until smooth (smoother better than not), ladle into oiled steamer pan one ladle full every five minutes, remove noodle sheets and slice noodles.

A difference I see between your recipe and other alternatives is that you don't have any other starch besides your rice. Other recipes include a good amount of tapioca or potato starch. The other difference was that other recipes used rice flour instead of rice. You might also want to consider a change in technique. You can make rice noodles like a crepe rather than in an oiled steamer pan. Simply use a non-stick or oiled crepe pan, put in batter to crepe thickness, and let it cook until it begins to pull away from the edge of the pan. Invert and release in one motion onto a cutting board and slice.

Not long ago, my parents purchased a tin of lychees. They tasted ok when eaten straight out of the tin, but I was wondering: Is there a proper way to eat them (like rhubarb needs to be eaten in a crumble with custard) ?

No special way. You can eat them right from the can; they should be already peeled and without the big seed. You can add them up to a salsa, or a fruit salad; or even cooked dishes (curries).

My first cheesecake was too salty, particularly around the crust, and I want to know what could have caused it. One possibility is that I mismeasured the salt, although I do not make that mistake often. I doubt it was the use of sea salt as it is usually less salty. So I got to wondering if it could be that I used salted butter. (I buy salted butter because the ingredients are salt and butter, whereas the unsalted has natural flavors added.) Is this something I should adjust for?

You really can't un-ring that bell...you can, however, dilute the "extra salty" peanuts with other, unsalted, peanuts until the you get the desired saltiness in your peanut butter.

Let me start by saying, I am a good home cook. I have been cooking for a while with positive review. I decided to try something I had never done before. I made a Greek Inspired Pork Roulade. It required making a filling with spinach, cream cheese, feta, kalamata olives, artichoke hearts, lemon zest, and garlic. I tasted the filling and it was great. I pounded the pork to about 1/4 inch thin and spread the filling and rolled it into a Roulade. I didn't have twine so I rolled it in parchment paper. The final step was to baste the Roulade with mustard, lemon juice, garlic, and oregano sauce. So, after baked it for 15 -20 minutes, I basted. Everything looked and smelled amazing, but looks and smells can be deceiving...it wasn't great!! But, neither myself or my husband could finish it due to the tartness. Can anyone give me tips on how to fix this...I hate wasting food but can't seem to be able to figure this one out.

It won't look as nice, but it should be possible to rescue the flavour. As you've also got lemon in the filling, and feta is quite tart as well, I suggest you first remove the filling and dilute with extra cream cheese (and possibly olives and cooked garlic). Reheat enough to have with the pork and chill the rest too have with something else within a couple of days. Wipe the meat with kitchen roll (paper towel) while the filling is removed. If you're desperate you could even quickly rinse it (in boiling water if hot, chilled water if cold). Then reroll and reheat, or serve deconstructed.

I see all kinds of different dough recipes for Pizza. They all contain flour, salt, yeast and water. Some contain olive oil as well. The recipes are not consistent with the order in which ingredients are added to the mixture. So one recipe starts with the water and the yeast until it dissolves, then the flour is added and then salt. Another one starts with flour + yeast, then salt and water. Is there a preferable method? Can you explain to me the different considerations in each path? Thanks

I read two or three different questions here: Should I dissolve yeast in water? a. Should I proof yeast? Should I mix wet ingredients into dry, or dry into wet? 1) You don't need to dissolve active dry yeast in lukewarm water anymore (if you're using some other kind of yeast, this may not apply). You may have heard over the past year or so that active dry yeast (ADY) has been reformulated into a smaller particle size, and can now be used without dissolving it first – as had always been the requirement.... You don't need to dissolve active dry yeast in lukewarm water before using it. (Even though it still says you should dissolve it on the back of the yeast packet, if you buy your yeast in packets.) "Active Dry Yeast: Do you really need to dissolve it first?" King Arthur Flour 1a) Proofing yeast doesn't improve anything in the dough, it's just a means for you to discover whether your yeast is still active. If you bought it relatively recently, from a relatively busy story, you probably don't need to worry. Yeast packages often have expiration dates. I've found them to be not all that accurate. 2) Typically we add wet to dry: Order of combining wet and dry ingredients when baking The gist is, dry powdery substances tend to float on top of water and form a skin. Adding the water to the flour (better) prevents this and tends to allow the wet ingredients to be incorporated more easily. So, putting that together, you should mix the flour, salt and yeast (unless you think you need to proof it), then mix in the water (and oil, if you're using it).

I'm thinking about building a setup to make my own carbonated water. Should I be concerned that I'll be filling up my CO2 tank at Dick's Sporting Goods?

According to The Brewing Network, industrial and food grade CO2 generally come from the same plants: The slight difference between industrial-grade CO2 and food-grade CO2 is the type of tests that are done to qualify CO2 as beverage or beer gas-grade compared to industrial-grade. Currently, the FDA's requirement for food-grade CO2 a 99.90% purity rating. The other .09% is made up of impurities such as hydrocarbons or nitrogen. Industrial grade CO2 is 99% pure CO2, also containing impurities such as hydrocarbons or nitrogen. However, the nature of those impurities extremely important. They go on to suggest: One impurity that all homebrewers should be aware of is benzene. Benzene is a no-no for homebrewers. If the CO2 that you are purchasing has high benzene levels, it will leave you and fellow drinkers with terrible headaches. When I say high levels, we are not talking about much. Benzene is usually an impurity that is referred to in PPB. The benzene level should be around 20 PPB. They suggest you ask for a profile of the impurities, although I suspect that Dick's will be unable to comply. You will have to assess your own tolerance for risk, but you may better off seeking a more appropriate local vendor.

I like to make noodle soups. Chicken noodle, pho, k'tieu, soba, and so on; there are many different types of noodle involved. In every case, if the soup goes into the fridge, the noodles absorb all the broth fairly quickly. Typical fixes for this include: cook the noodles separately and add to the soup when serving; freeze the leftovers; eat all the soup right away! But when I buy canned soup from the grocery store, the noodles are never blown up and they don't seem to blow up even after opening the can and leaving summer in the fridge. What is the secret? Is it a special kind of noodle, something about the broth or a heavy duty industrial preservative at work?

Canning I've been looking up canning, as I suspected it had much to do with the process of noodles not absorbing all the water. I've found this tangentially related post and quoting: You CAN can pasta yourself. It is not difficult but, like the commercial caners [sic] you will need to make sure it is high acid (they add flavorless citric acid) but using a red tomato sauce works just as well. I have also found this very interesting set of ideas: The idea is simple and genius: combine par-cooked noodles, a bit of vegetable base, some raw sliced veggies, and a few seasonings inside a jar. Partial cooking On an article about partial cooking which has some good ideas on par-cooking. I suspect this, combined with the above factors, as well as vacuum-sealed canning, is what allows for noodles, and vegetables/potatoes, to not absorb all the liquid. Dig deeper If you wish to dig deeper, I have found a scientific paper by American Association of Cereal Chemists specifically on the topic of liquid absorption by noodles: Noodles. V. Determination of Optimum Water Absorption of Flour to Prepare Oriental Noodles

I bought some Thomas English muffins and on the back it says for "Toasted perfection" the muffin should be split apart by hand or with a fork. Why does it not suggest to use a knife?

If you cut it with a knife, you'll tend to get a very smooth surface. If you tear it open, whether by hand or with the aid of a fork, it'll tend to break on more natural places in the crumb, giving a bit rougher surface. When toasted, that tends to result in more contrast of texture - the bits sticking up will brown more and get crunchier.

As far as I understand, frozen pizzas sold at the grocery store are par-baked and then frozen, to be fully baked when they are put into your oven at home. I noticed that some of these pizzas describe themselves as having a "rising crust." Those crusts get quite tall, an inch or an inch and a half (probably about 3-5 cm). My homemade thin crust pizza is maybe half that height. Yet these crusts have much more in common with a thin crust pizza than a Chicago style, or the not-too-tasty bread-y imitation of Chicago-style that passes in most Chicago-style recipes and at some chain restaurants. How do these pizzas work? I have trouble seeing how they could rise after par-baking, so are they not par-baked? How could I duplicate this crust from scratch?

I believe they use a combination of hydrogenated oils, yeast and standard leavening agents like baking powder and baking soda. My experience is that without hydro, the super rising crusts are just tougher to make. I have settled for a medium riser but an awesome taste. I like to use yeast in my pizza crusts. Generally, chemical reactions go faster at higher temps, so yes temperature does matter... However, since the reaction starts immediately, I would say it is more dependent on the amount and how long you let it work. The trick is the optimize the timing so that you bake the shape you want (i.e., fluffy and big) into the crust just as it gets to that point from the leavening (the most risen and fluffy). If you wait too long it will depress... I read a bit about this here as well: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baking_powder

I am searching for accurate stock photos to represent both products. While I really only need to figure out what visual differences there are (if any), I would like to understand why they are different.

Whipped cream is whipping cream after it has been whipped. Whipping cream is just cream with at least 30% fat content (that would be called Light Whipping Cream in the US). Heavy Whipping Cream contains at least 36% fat and up to 40% and rarely (in the US) even higher. Until these creams are whipped, they are just liquid. After they are whipped, they're fluffy. A way to know that whipped cream is "done" is that it holds "peaks", like in the first picture. Higher fat cream will thicken more readily, and hold its structure longer. Other countries use different terms for various levels of fat in cream. Wiki Whipped Cream: Whipping cream:

I was successful making a new ice cream recipe from Pierre Herme: 100g Milk 135g Cream 1 egg yolk 45g sugar 15g glucose I replaced the glucose by honey. After churning the ice cream, it was smooth and creamy, but it was too sweet. And who doesn't know Pierre Herme, he is one of the best pastry chef in the world. And his desserts are well balanced in terms of sugar quantities. Is it because I replaced glucose by honey which added the extra sweetness? I know glucose will help the ice cream to be smooth but does it add sweetness too? I think honey contains fructose and glucose. Glucose is a glucose, so the extra fructose in honey was the reason I guess? The overall result: Smooth ice cream but it melt as fast as it get out of the fridge because of the extra sugar in it.

Here is a quick answer: Fructose: Sweetness of Fructose depends on temperature: at lower temperatures (i.e. ice-cream) is sweeter. at higher temperatures (i.e. hot coffee or tee) is less sweet Fructose is always sweeter than glucose Amount of calories doesn't change: cal of 1g of fructose equals cal of 1g of glucose Here's a table: SUGAR | RELATIVE SWEETNESS ----------------------------------- lactose | 40 maltose | 50 glucose | 70 sucrose | 100 fructose | 120-170 As you can see, sweetness of fructose covers a range of values. Honey: Contains roughly as much fructose as glucose: fructose: 38% glucose: 31% other sugars: 10% water: 17% Composition varies from honey to honey Fructose and Ice Cream: Fructose sweetness is perceved faster than sucrose and it also vanishes faster leaving room for ice cream flavors like fruit, cream etc., whereas sweetness persistance of sucrose can mask them. Conclusions: "Is it because I replaced glucose by honey which added the extra sweetness?" Yes.

When making soy milk, I've understood that you should disable some enzymes and that you do that with boiling heat for minimum of 15 minutes. Since boiling soy milk usually result in a messy boil-over, I'd like to use a lower temperature instead but haven't found any information about what temperature/time to use?

According to this Lipoxygenase is a crucial enzyme to deactivate. And in this paper they use 60°C for 30 minutes after soaking the beans. But the pH may also be important. For normal water pH is around 7.

So im relatively new to cooking and im reading all the technique focused books I can. I noticed that for the same exact goal (ie browning a piece of meat) some books call for you to heat the oil until it shimmers (Salt Fat Acid Heat)) whereas others call for you to heat the oil until it is just smoking (ie most of the America's Test Kitchen books). Can anyone clarify which is correct? Or are there any guidelines for knowing whether your oil should be shimmering or "just smoking"? Maybe im overthinking this and the difference is negligible? Thanks!

It doesn't matter. All you need is for the oil to be properly heated. You can use the cue which is most convenient for you - shimmering, smoke, an IR thermometer, smell, throwing stuff into the pan, or your spidey sense that suddenly reminds you of the pan after enough time has passed. Go with whichever is most convenient for you, they are all correct. That being said, shimmering is usually visible in stainless steel pans, but more difficult to notice in pans with a dark bottom such as seasoned iron pans or PTFE coated ones, so it might not be the easiest one to pick.

Since I moved to my new flat, I have a problem when heating bread in any way. What happens is that if I put it on a plate, it gets very wet on the plate side. This is so acute that drops appear on the plate. If I put paper around the bread, both get wet. The only way I found to get dry heated bread is leaving it in the toaster/grill until it is cold... but then it is obviously cold! What can I do in order to get warm and dry bread?

An old classic option is the "Toast Rack": By maintaining air gaps between the slices, the toast rack allows water vapor to escape from hot toast instead of condensing into adjacent slices and making them soggy. However, this increased air flow can also mean that the toast becomes cold more quickly. My personal preference is to simply not heat up the toast until I actually want to eat it... and then pop it directly from my toaster into my mouth... with a quick stop for butter and jam on the way.

I have a forged iron pan, and I used linseed oil to season it in the oven. The resulting seasoning peels in places. Also, it is not really non-stick, once food burns even a little, it is stuck to the seasoning irreversibly. I removed and renewed the seasoning 2-3 times, but it didn't get better. Is forged iron harder to season than cast iron, or is it just bad seasoning technique? Also, is it easier or harder to season carbon steel when compared to cast iron or forged iron?

I can't speak authoritatively, but I do have all three types and have had good luck with my seasonings, so I'll share what I do. For cast iron, I use solid vegetable fat exclusively (Crisco). I did the original seasoning by coating it in fat and baking in the oven. To clean it, I use salt, Crisco and a paper towel to get any food bits off. I then get the pan hot and wipe it down with a little more Crisco. It's not PTFE nonstick, but pretty good. For my forged iron DeBuyer fry pan, I followed the manufacturer's recommendation for initial seasoning: put enough oil in the pan (I use canola) to coat the bottom. Heat to smoking. I swirled the hot oil around to coat the sides a bit. Let it cool, pour and wipe out the oil. The thing I've found is it takes quite a bit of use to develop the seasoning. Here's a picture after about a month's use - note how dark the sides are getting (the bottom is less dark because I learned a green scrubby pad (Scotch-Brite) will remove the seasoning entirely. Oops!). I did some scrambled eggs for the sake of science, without adding any extra oil to the pan. They behaved as nicely as any PTFE coated pan I've ever used. Today the entire bottom of the pan is that rich mahogany color, and a fried egg slides around in it like one of those goofy AS SEEN ON TV ads. EDIT: Used the pan for over easy eggs this morning and snapped a new picture. This is about 3 months after the last photo. Normally I can just wipe it out with a paper towel. If I've been cooking bacon or something that left residue, I'll run water into the pan while it's still ripping hot, then wipe it out gently with a sponge. After that I heat the pan up and add just a tiny bit of canola oil. I wipe the oil around with a paper towel and put the pan away. For carbon steel--like my wok--I treat it exactly the same as the DeBuyer pan. Clean gently, after each use get the pan ripping hot and wipe it down with some oil.

I'm finally going to advance my sous vide repertoire from just steaks to poultry. I know the safety issues and am familiar with the salmonella death rate chart. What I'm wondering about is the texture of the meat itself. I've been cooking chicken on the grill and in the oven and in the pan and have grown used to a particular texture for the meat. Most of these techniques end up taking the breast meat up to the 160-165 F range. With sous vide I have a much better control over what temperature I can safely eat the meat at, however I don't want the texture to drive me away from the experience. I was thinking of preparing the chicken at around 150-155. Does anyone have any experience with poultry at these lower temperatures?

Go for 145. 2 hours. Salmonella dies even at "low" temperatures (from 135) as long as you cook it for longer. 135 for at least 87 minutes, will kill salmonella. However, I like it best when cooked at 145 for 2 hours.

This seems a bit silly really, but every single discussion of cast-iron cookware begins with "Seasoning your cookware", yet I've never heard of seasoning a cast-iron teapot. Is there a reason for this? Should I have been seasoning the things this whole time? Assume they're not enameled, and I use them to brew tea but not to heat water.

You can season the exterior of the kettle to help prevent rust, if you like. The interior of a cast iron tea kettle is often rust-proofed through chemicals that accrue during normal use. One of these is lime scale. Repeatedly boiling water, especially hard water, will build a coating of lime scale that will keep rust at bay. Another set of chemicals that help reduce the occurrence of rust are tannins. The tannic acid in tea leaves will react with red iron rust on the kettle to produce a more stable, blue-black compound called ferric tannate. To "season" a brand new tea kettle you can save used tea leaves and bags then place several in the pot and adding boiling water. Allow the "tea" to sit for 20 minutes then discard and rinse. As other answers state, a traditional fat-polymer seasoning of the interior is unnecessary because you do not need to prevent food from sticking to the kettle.

I've seen some recipies that call for a can of beer to be added, but never have I seen them specify a specific kind or brand. That leads me to believe its less for flavor and more for chemical reaction. My question: why is no type or brand specified? Is it left to the cook to decide what type/flavor beer would be best, or is it simply a chemical process that any beer can facilitate? If the latter, are there other ingredients which could be safely substituted?

Beer, like wine or coffee, is often used when a reduction over a long cooking time is called for but water would be sub-optimal. I make chili a lot. Water is not your friend there, especially if you incorporate a lot of elements that have water in them to begin with (undried/roasted tomatoes in particular). Beer doesn't add the acidity that coffee does, but it is great for adding sugars and the maltier flavors. The sugars aren't precisely 'sweeter' but rather add depth of flavor. I'd be interested in the effect of carbonation on the cooking process, however since carbonation is supposedly lost faster at higher temperatures I'd imagine it's less than expected. Beer can be used to de-glaze and so on; its lower alcohol makes it much less reactive (than marsala or liquor) and the sugars make it as likely to glaze over. Still it imparts some flavor depending on the context. The type of beer you should use is largely up to you. They differ greatly in flavor and composition. For some suggestions on pairings check out this question. Another consideration is to look into Cicerones; it's a certification people get where (more for large scale operations than restaurants or personal use), in addition to knowledge of processing and manufacturing, they are sommeliers of beer. An additional consideration is how long the beer will be cooking down. The longer the cook down, the more the flavors will be less distinct. However, there are flavors that are frequently only found in beer; hoppiness, roasted malt, and (the effects of open fermentation with) wild yeast can do amazing things in a dish. Creating a side reduction minimizes the cook down and can preserve the flavors.

So I went to Subway™ and saw that their carrots are cut into thin strips. I can never do this with any knives. So what is the best way to cut carrots into thin strips (like french fries)?

The style of cut is called julienne. True, a mandoline can make a julienne cut, as well as thin slices. However, you can also use a knife to achieve a julienne cut. First, cut the carrot into manageable lengths--2 or 3 inches. Cut a piece into 1/8 inch slices lengthwise. Stack several slices on top of one another and cut lengthwise through all layers to make "matchsticks" or julienne-cut carrots. It works best to have a large slice on the bottom of your stack, not a small one or the round side of the carrot. A large slice on the bottom is more stable, so you're not as likely to julienne your fingers. Yes, cutting carrots this way is a lot of trouble, but this is the way to do it with a knife. There are also other ways to get a similar result without a mandoline. If you have a food processor, try the large grating disk. You can also use a salad shooter or other slicer/shredder--there's even an attachment for the ubiquitous Kitchen Aid mixer. Even a plain old box grater can be used to grate carrots. Grated carrots may not be as neat and tidy as the ones done commercially, but they're still a good addition to a salad. Oh, if all else fails, you can usually buy the shredded carrots in the produce section, near the bagged salads.

I've tried a (few times) to melt chocolate but am obviously doing something wrong: Put a pot of water onto the boil Place a metal bowl over the pot Put chocolate into the bowl Wait for chocolate to go off! (Obviously the steam is rising from the pot and going into the bowl) What am I doing wrong? I'm not against using the microwave, would that be a better way?

The way you've described is precisely how I melt chocolate. If you have a double boiler, that's even better, but a bowl on top of a pot is fine too. I can only think of two things that might be affecting the quality of your end result: Is the bowl big enough? The melting bowl should be larger than the pot if possible; you want the steam to be forced under and around it. Is the water temperature reasonable? You want it to be at a simmer. If it's rapidly boiling, the heat is too high. As long as you keep those two things in mind, your chocolate should melt fine! Edit: Thought of one other thing: It's possible that the steam is actually rising above the bowl, then hitting something (like your range), condensing and then falling back into the bowl as water. You shouldn't even be getting much steam with this method, but just in case, turn your fan on, to make sure you aren't getting any condensation.

I understand that I should put my hot leftovers straight into the fridge, to best avoid spoilage. And that if there are lots of leftovers, I should divide them into smaller containers to help them cool faster. My question is: Should I put lids on those containers? My two concerns are: Will a lid, that traps hot air around the food, slow the cooling down too much? Does sealing hot food "sour" it somehow? For reference, I store my leftovers in these 16 oz. deli containers

Part of the challenge here might be your definition of "hot." When I think of "left overs", I see what is left over after eating a meal. It is certainly not "piping hot", as in just off the stove. There is no problem packaging, covering, and refrigerating these items. As an alternate example, when I make a batch of chicken stock, once it is cool enough in the pot to deal with so I don't burn myself, I portion it into deli containers for freezing. I cover (but sometimes don't completely seal, depending on how hot), and leave on the counter for 30 minutes to an hour before moving to the freezer. These are just examples. It seems to me that (as at least one link in another answer here states) waiting until your food is room temperature might be problematic, as this could easily place it in the danger zone for some time. Putting a lid on a deli container is only a problem if the items inside are so hot that the lid bulges. The issues is not food safety, but that the lid might be compromised or unseal. Sealing does not cause spoilage. Spoilage bacteria do that under proper conditions of temperature and time. Bottom line: Place your leftovers in a container, seal them, and refrigerate as soon as you are able to handle them, and within food safety parameters.

Kurczak po Chińsku (or Chinesse Chicken) This is a very popular dish sold in Vietnamese restaurants in Poland. Is this an authentic dish? (I guess not!) What is its real name?

Even with sous vide, both overcooking and bacteria can still be a concern. In this case, it's about over-cooking. Consider the meat just under the skin you want to brown. If it starts at the ideal cooking temperature, by the time the skin is nicely browned in the oven, it will be overcooked. By cooling it first the oven reheats it rather than overcooking it. It's probably quite a thin layer that would overcook, but avoiding dry meat just under the skin is presumably why you're cooking it sous-vide in the first place. Chilling in cold water (ideally quickly) before putting it in the fridge or freezer reduces the amount the fridge warms up, protecting the rest of your food from loss of quality (or even spoilage if you put lots of hot stuff in there). Sous vide temperatures usually aren't enough to kill all bacteria, so even in a sealed container some can start regrowing if it sits around warm for a while. Rapid chilling avoids that, especially for whole cuts of meats where the surface is the highest risk. Then you can carry one cooling in the fridge if you're storing.

I have a jar of commercially-produced stuffed olives in garlicky olive oil. They're rather nice considering they were only cheap. On the jar it says once opened they should be kept in the fridge, which seems fair enough. However this makes the oil solid and opaque. It's not easy to get the olives out and they're not pleasant to eat with a thick layer of grease on the surface. Assuming I want to get out a portion of a few olives (rather than the remaining 3/4 of the jar) what's the best way to deal with them? I'd quite like to use up the oil when I've eaten the olives too -- having fried some onions in a sample of it, it has a good flavour.

Plan ahead...scoop out a few...let them come to room temperature. You could also experiment with the microwave...10 seconds or so. Finally, there are multiple recipes for roasted olives that would also solve your problem.

Just bought these cups from IKEA. Beside from being dusty, I asked myself whether I should put these once before usage into the dishwasher to "wash away toxics" that might be on the surface of the cups. On the other hand, this might be pure superstition. My question: Should I dishwash plastic cups/plates before first use?

Generally, yes, to wash off any chemicals that might have been used to finish the plastics or rinse any sprue away. If you're going to be putting the dishwasher on anyway, you might as well throw them in.

I have read a couple of recipes and descriptions of what needs to be done in order to produce alcoholic beverages such as vodka and rum. I was surprised to learn that basically all the sources use boiled potatoes, not raw, peeled potatoes mashed in a blender. I think that the act of boiling is ruining the organoleptic properties of the potato and lowering the quality of the finished product. Why are you suppose to boil the potatoes?

Vodka by definition is a flavorless distilled alcohol, retaining any of the organoleptic properties of the grain or potato could be considered as ruining the end product. Potatoes are a good source of starch, but brewers yeast has a limited ability to break down starch into usable fuel; its preferred fuel sources are relatively simple sugars like mono and disaccharides. In order to efficiently convert the starch in potatoes to sugar the potatoes must first be boiled so that the starches gelate. Once gelated, the potatoes are then Mashed-in with malted barley or wheat at a temperature around 150˚F so that the diastatic enzymes can break those starches into the sugars that yeast likes to eat. These same steps are used when making vodka from non-malted grains such as corn (maize). Boiling the potatoes also helps reduce the number of surface microbes that could end up influencing the final product. Bacteria and wild yeast strains can lead to moldy, grassy, sour, and other unpleasant flavors that may necessitate multiple distillations to remove. Making a mash of raw, peeled potato would likely yield something closer to a sourdough starter with a mix a naturally occurring yeasts and bacteria producing a small amount of alcohol along with acetic and lactic acids, as well as other compounds.

I do not have a meat tenderizor. I want to fry my chicken breasts but need to pound out the meat. What can I use instead?

This might seem silly but, . . . I use my fist. I always cover my chicken with plastic wrap to contain the mess before I pound it. You can also glove up instead/as well. I have found that punching it is just the right amount of force for the job. And the uneven surface of my knuckles acts as a meat tenderizer and breaks up the tissue just a little. (But not too much.)

We had an office chili cook-off recently (I didn't enter). Two of the chili recipes presented used cinnamon predominately, perhaps even overpoweringly (IMO). Given that they also heavily sweetened their chili with honey and sugar, both had a cinnamon dessert flavor profile mixed with a bland tomato/beef profile. In a word, "yuck!" In searching today, I've seen several recipes around calling for the use of cinnamon in chili. I could see it maybe being a background flavoring to add a mild spicy bite and a touch of earthiness. But, some recipes seem to be pretty heavy in it's use. I'm assuming the office cooks didn't develop the right flavor (unless going for a dessert chili was their objective). What kind of flavor profile would be the right one to develop when using cinnamon in chili?

Cinnamon adds a different spice profile than chili powder or red or cayenne pepper would. It is a common savory spice in Indian food and I believe it's also used in savory dishes in Chinese cooking. It's a very versatile spice :). We also use cocoa powder in our chili as it provides a real depth of flavor (dark bitter flavors which are quite good in chili). Both of these add some curiosity and difference to the chili without themselves adding sweetness. Usually they get added as a fairly safe way to add something "different" to standard chili.

Is there a way to handmake alphabet pasta? I want to make the small pasta the is shaped into letters that is sometimes used for alphabet soup for kids. It's usually about half a cm in length. And I cannot imagine that if I cut letters out they will keep their shape if they are that small. And it would take ages. I would guess there must be a device you push the pasta through so that it would get the right shape, but cannot find any reference of such a device. Thank you

That's the exact way alphabet pasta is made in industries, it is called extrusion (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_extrusion) Considering rheology specifications, I think you can repurpose a clay extruder for that, but not sure if there is an alphabet attachment for the tip. Mind that it is only productive if you are going to make a LOT pasta since you're going to make a lot of the same letter before moving on to the next. (Clay extruder: https://www.amazon.com/Makins-USA-35055-Professional-Ultimate/dp/B0018BOXWQ/)

I’m having a strange issue with the storage of ice pops (popsicles/ice lollies) in the freezer. I recently bought a new freezer and still have the exact same issue which we can’t figure out. Whenever we buy ice pops in our house, we put them straight into the freezer. We sometimes leave them in the box but usually remove them, which doesn’t seem to make a difference to their texture. However, even if they’re rock hard going in, they keep coming out soft, sometimes even melted. Every single time. Here’s the weird part: everything else in the freezer is rock solid frozen! No other foods go soft regardless of how long they’ve been in there. Also, as I mentioned, it happened in our old freezer and now our new one (which is 4* freezing). How much or how little we have in the freezer seems to make no difference. This only happens with ice pops (and ice cream cones) but no other food. This might sound silly, but the only change in my freezer storage habits since we first noticed this problem is that we bought silicone ice trays with lids a few months ago; two of them which we stack on top of each other in the very edge. Part of me wonders if there’s some kind of chemical (since they’re cheap trays that are no longer sold by the seller they’re purchased from online) that could be affecting the ice pops, since they’re usually the only food near the ice trays. Though I do switch foods around to check freezing is consistent in all parts of the freezer, which it is. But the tray idea sounds like superstitious logic even to me. Am I missing some kind of storage wisdom in regards to frozen sweet treats?

Your freezer is set at too high a temperature, probably just below the freezing point. Pure water freezes at 32°F/0°C so your meats and vegetables are freezing just fine, however adding sugar and/or salt to water reduces the freezing point. A 30% sugar solution freezes at around 28.5°F, salt water is about the same. The fact they are mushy means your freezer is almost, but not quite cold enough to freeze your popsicles. Frozen desserts aside your freezer is far above the recommended temperature, the FDA and virtually every other guideline I see says that freezers should be set to 0°F, which is -18°C, not because of the freezing point but because that's the highest ideal temperature for food to last long-term.

From beer making, we learn that the earlier in the brewing process we add an ingredient, the more it contributes to taste, while the later we add the ingredient, the more it contributes to aroma. Does this translate to other cooking, too?

Not directly. Many spices gain, change or lose taste when heat-treated. You must know given spice and when to add it. Fresh dill or parsley leaves, after a hour of simmering are worthless, losing all aroma. Add at the very end of cooking. Black pepper changes its taste and loses spiciness under heat. You can add it twice, the pepper added early contributing completely differently than added late. Paprika doesn't change much over first few hours, so it really doesn't matter - unless you leave it in slow cooker for 8+ hours. It will turn acrid and unpleasant. Fresh garlic is entirely different than garlic that underwent even several minutes of heat treatment - and garlic that was heat-processed, in order, doesn't change much in time, but infuses other products, so your choices are between fresh (sharp, spicy taste), thickly chopped cooked shortly (strong nodes of garlic taste, as ingredient, not spice) or boiled long (the taste infusing the food.) Salt doesn't change taste over time (although it may infuse foods deeper) but affects many processes. Water boils at higher temperature, resulting in pasta or potatoes cooked better; some meats get much harder so it should be added late; vegetables go soft very fast and "drop" resulting in more evenly distributed frying heat (so salt fried veggies early)... Cumin fried on clean, dry pan (no oil) in high temperature gets a significantly different, very strong, pleasant aroma. You won't obtain it by normal boiling or frying with other foodstuffs, no matter how long, as this requires higher temperatures than others. Fry it first, and only add other ingredients when it's ready. Each spice has its caveats concerning adding time. Sometimes you need to add them at the very end - especially fresh herbs. In other cases (like salt) the time depends on the foodstuffs - early for vegetables, late for meats.

I have read here that cocoa nibs can be used in place of chocolate chips, but what about the other way around? A recipe I want to try calls for cocoa nibs, but I am having a hard time finding them. What can be substituted for cocoa nibs (if anything)?

In this recipe, the nibs are being used as an accent ingredient, adding some crunchiness and a burst of chocolate flavor, as well as some bitterness. They are not essential to chemistry or overall outcome of the recipe. You may: Simply omit them Chopped or coarsely ground roasted coffee would have a similar profile, although not as fatty, and of course, coffee flavored Try another crunchy, possibly somewhat bitter ingredient like chopped nuts; almonds, hazelnuts, and (in some people's opinions, although I dislike them) walnuts have a particular affinity for chocolate.

I grew up putting this stuff on my popcorn and absolutely love it. I recently found out that you can also put it on salads that have a vinaigrette dressing and it's also delicious. Are there other common applications that I am not aware of? FYI - Brewers/nutritional yeast != baking yeast

If you have a septic tank, avoid using the garbage disposal, especially for anything like egg shells, bones, coffee grounds, and other things that the bacteria in the tank won't eat. Worst case scenario is that they can plug up your leach field for a very expensive repair.

I love cooking, but I hate dicing! I have a food processor that can slice really well, but it doesn't have any ability to do dicing. Does a device that can automatically dice various produce (peppers, potatoes, carrots, that sort of thing) exist?

Honestly, dicing is very quick and easy if you use a good sharp knife and the proper technique. I strongly suggest having a look through our knife-skills questions and in particular ones like How to dice tomatoes?. I guarantee that with a little practice, you'll get better, more consistent results than any overpriced kitchen gadget. A good chef's knife is the better investment. Nevertheless, on the days that I am feeling incredibly lazy or am running particularly short on time, I'll sometimes resort to using my Progressive Onion Chopper. Note that I'm on my 3rd one now; they're made of plastic and tend to break easily if you apply too much pressure (which you sometimes can't avoid doing if you want to actually make a clean cut). I really do not recommend these for heavy-duty or prolonged use; as I said above, they're useful for the occasional bout of extreme laziness.