Mike Nolan
Forum Replies Created
-
AuthorPosts
-
Our gut feeling is that the sweet potatoes would take longer to cook than white potatoes, mostly because sweet potatoes are usually cooked until they're really soft.
I made baked pork chops tonight with apples, cinnamon, nutmeg and a butter/brown sugar sauce, good, but maybe a bit too sweet for my taste. Pork chops are on sale through tomorrow, I may go get some more. My wife suggested an orange juice and cranberry/craisin combination.
The new generation of countertop cookers aren't really crock pot slow cookers any more, I saw an ad for one that claimed it made some meals in 30 minutes.
Have you ever had a blitz? Same ingredients, different toppings.
You can make a pretty good gluten-free crepe with cornstarch instead of wheat flour, but it sounds like the texture of these was unpalatable.
Yeah, pizza about once every two weeks is about as frequently as I want it, whether I make it or we order in. (Recently we've been ordering in a thin crust pizza with artichokes, cream cheese and tomato chunks.)
Mostly its a matter of limiting high carbs meals.
I made a small batch of cinnamon rolls today (4 rolls in a 7x7 pan)
We had superior pork chops tonight, breaded, fried and then baked in the oven after being covered by a can of chicken soup.
It's the sort of recipe our grandmothers made, but it's still tasty.
I think I'd leave it out for at least an hour before putting it in the oven. I tend to use low temperatures, like 140, for reheating breads and rolls, including sweet rolls, or drying out bread cubes. If it's wrapped in foil, I'd leave the foil on. 10-15 minutes ought to be enough.
I'm making Vienna bread today.
These days I tend to make an ultra-thin pizza crust, but this is a good all-purpose pizza dough recipe that I've made many times. It is best if made 3-4 hours in advance and given some time to rest: It works for single crust as well as Chicago-style stuffed pizza.
Made meatballs in marinara sauce to go with pre-made cheese tortellini from Costco.
It should come as no great surprise that the test kitchen staff at any food company are considered part of the marketing department. Their job is to create demand for their products. Even distributors like Sysco have chefs on staff who travel around to key customers and show them new products and new ways to use existing products.
More than once I've gotten the impression that the buyers at King Arthur don't talk to the test kitchen staff. PJ once told me that she had spent several weeks working on an article only to find out that a key ingredient in it had been dropped from the warehouse (which is just down the stairs),
The thing that has always fascinated me about baking is how you take 4 ingredients that are either inedible or uninteresting, water, flour, yeast and salt, combine them, and the magic of bread happens!
And as you bring other ingredients such as oil, sugar and eggs, you get everything from cake to waffles.
As to cooking, I think it appeals to the engineer in me, cooking is just altering the properties of foodstuffs, so it's applied chemistry and physics. There's a precision to it, yet also an art.
I once saw a well-known (Iron) chef take a jumbo shrimp and with a few knife cuts turn it into a dragon in front of our eyes.
I've seen shortbread listed as a 3 ingredient product, but that generally includes salted butter. Shortbread without salt would probably be on the bland side.
Vanilla, contrary to its reputation, is another way of avoiding bland, but it is also possible to have too much vanilla.
The Scottish Shortbread recipe that I use as the basis for an apple crisp has vanilla in it, but it is also a King Arthur recipe.
The NYTimes has a shortbread 10 ways recipe, one of the ways is to add vanilla bean, another is to add citrus, a third is to add maple syrup, a fourth is to add spices like cardamom. All ways of avoiding bland.
Several of those ways sound good to me.
Most edible fats/oils are lighter than water, but they're not all the same density.
Butter is a complex substance, in addition to butterfat it has water and milk solids. The dairy controls how much of the water in butter is pressed out, in the USA butter is generally between 15 and 20% WATER. European butters tend to have more of the water pressed out, some of them can have a slow as 12% water. I think Ghee has essentially all the water and milk solids removed.
Spice vendors would like you to believe you need to replace all your herbs and spices once a year, if not more frequently. I don't do that, and neither do any of the professional chefs I know. (There is a noticeable difference between fresh herbs and dried ones, but once they're dried, the rate of change seems to be quite slow to me.)
I do think the type of container and where it is stored affects potency, though. In particular, the 'flip open' jars seem to dry out faster than the screw lid ones. And if you store them at the back of the stove or in a cabinet that is close to a heat source, then I'm sure they probably do dry out faster.
I do think that Penzy's may do a better job of pulling out-of-date items from their shelves than your typical grocery store does, but that assume you can find freshness dates on them at all. (Not every herb or spice has them, though most have tracking codes.)
And if you buy herbs and spices that are stored in bulk and weighted out when you buy them, who knows how long they've been there?!
-
AuthorPosts
