Forum Replies Created
-
AuthorPosts
-
I'm a medium to medium-well done person, as long as there's still a little pink in the middle it is fine with me.
My wife used to eat beef blood rare, like her father, until one day her older sister looked at a steak and said, "Ewwww, sanguinary!". After my wife looked it up a dictionary, she couldn't eat beef unless it was well done. I've slowly gotten her back to the point where medium is acceptable again, and now she complains if her steak doesn't have some pink in the middle.
Interestingly enough, Kenji Lopez-Alt has done blindfolded taste tests where people couldn't see how done their steak was, and they overwhelmingly preferred medium-rare, even the blood-rare crowd.
One of my favorite episodes of Master Chef had the contestants cooking 3 steaks, one rare, one medium and one well-done. As Gordon Ramsay noted, it is possible to cook beef to well done without totally killing both the flavor and the texture, but it takes a deft hand. Sadly, few chefs take the time to even try it and many restaurants have disclaimers in their menus saying that they will not take responsibility for meat ordered 'well done' Cowards!
Hamburger is a different matter, it need to be well-done for food safety reasons.
Sadly, the bat was not repairable, the wings kept falling off. But it was still tasty, even though the spray painted black cocoa butter tries to come off on my fingers.
I had to look up 'Brunswick stew', that's one I had not heard of.
There was a soup course as part of lunch at the Chocolate Academy every day. (The lunches were catered in, not prepared in-house as I had assumed.) The soups we had during the 4 days I was there: Corn chowder (very sweet, almost a dessert), ginger-carrot, broccoli cheddar (best broccoli cheddar soup I've ever had, several of us had more than one bowl of it!) and onion.
Of these, the onion soup was the most pedestrian, I thought the onions were a bit under-caramelized. The broth was good, but I wasn't able to identify what it was made from, chicken stock and something else, I think. Might have included veal stock. It was well-seasoned, so often onion soup is so salty it's hard to eat.
I make my own croutons, especially for potato leek soup.
The Double Crusty bread recipe makes great croutons. (I make it Vienna-style, using butter instead of oil.)
Then I just cube it (we like them fairly large, 3/4 of an inch or so), spread them out on a tray and put them in the oven on the lowest setting for about an hour. We prefer them crisp on the outside but not completely dried out.
I used to coat them with a little butter about half way through, but that takes time and the croutons don't keep as well, so these days I just add butter to the soup when dishing it out.
I make chicken stock starting with a whole chicken (or two), so there's plenty of boiled chicken for soup. I use this recipe:
Nancy's Homemade Jewish Chicken Soup The parsnips are the key, if I leave them out, the stock is too bland.
I wish I had an inexpensive source for chicken backs for making stock. In older cookbooks they always say 'ask your butcher'. There hasn't been a real butcher shop in Lincoln in the 40+ years we've lived here. I've seen them in the store for around $2.00 a pound, that's ridiculously high! But I still remember when chicken wings were 5 cents a pound, before they became an 'in' food. I've been known to buy a 10 pound bag of legs and thighs on sale and use it for stock.
I will have lots of chicken to use up if I'm making some other kind of soup.
So, what to do with the 'excess' chicken? Sometimes I shred it and add barbecue sauce and let it marinate for a day in the fridge, other times I make the Chicken Salad recipe I have posted here (which came from a friend.)
I don't do chicken cacciatore and lately I haven't done many chicken and pasta or chicken and rice meals at all, because of the carbs and my wife's low-carb diet.
I find when making a two-layer Celebration Challah that the smaller strands for the top need to be a bit shorter than the ones for the bottom were, because they don't have as far to go to get around the other strands. And if you make the top layer a little short, you can gently stretch it.
I collect old editions of the Joy of Cooking, the ones from the mid to late 40's had some recipes that got dropped in later versions. (True first editions are expensive, but it has been reprinted.)
The sheeters are fascinating to watch, throw in a lump of dough and out comes a perfectly round crust.
We average less than a load a day, since there's just two of us now. I'm probably more inclined to hand-wash pots and pans, so that lowers the average some. When our younger son was still living with us, we probably averaged about a load a day, when our older son and his family are visiting we probably do two loads a day.
Of course when I do serious cooking (or as I call it, committing kitchen), I can create a couple loads of dirty pots. I made Boeuf Bourguignon on Sunday, with braised pearl onions, mushrooms, and spaetzle, so that takes at least 5 pans and several bowls, plus more bowls for the leftovers. The cast iron pot doesn't go in the dishwasher, everything else usually does.
Well, the ever-shrinking tuna fish can makes up for the super-sized veggies. 🙂
I'm not an expert on no-knead recipes, but I think the gluten develops, just not in as controlled a fashion. Bread flour tends to be high in glutenin, which contributes to elasticity. Although I didn't know it at the time I started doing it, adding semolina increases gliadin, which contributes to plasticity.
Several of the 'thin crust' recipes in the Great Chicago-Style Pizza Cookbook add semolina.
The 'hand stretch' fanatics would disown you for using a rolling pin. 🙂
October 24, 2016 at 3:50 pm in reply to: Did You Cook Anything Interesting the Week of October 16, 2016? #5235I think they look OK for home-made candies, I suspect Chef Russ would say they might not look so good in a display case. If I want to take Chocolate 2.0 some time next year (Chocolate 3.0 is the course I really want to take, that's where you redesign ganache recipes), I need to hone my skills, those courses are geared for working professionals.
I'm not looking to make show pieces or fancy plated desserts, though the chefs at the Chocolate Academy presented several examples of their wares at lunch, and they were all restaurant-worthy.
Mine usually start out pretty close to the same length, but don't always stay that way, I guess I stretch some of them while braiding. I use any extra at the end to fold over and pinch together to make the end hold together better, I hate it when the braid unwinds at one or both ends. Whether that would work as well on a >3 strand braid is something I'd have to do a bunch of them to find out.
The Dutch Crunch topping recipes I've seen have been mostly rice flour, so they don't have much of a flavor to me, just crunchiness.
I've tried making a four-strand braid and a five-strand braid, but I haven't tried a six-strand yet. (I've seen instructions for eight- and nine-strand braids!) Anything beyond three-strand would take a lot of practice, I suspect.
A suggestion I've made before to practice complex braids is to get some thick macrame yarn.
-
AuthorPosts
