Mike Nolan
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November 20, 2016 at 12:00 am in reply to: Did You Cook Anything Interesting the Week of November 13, 2016? #5616
I tried what I think is a significant improvement on my Chicken Mirepoix recipe, topping it with fontina cheese and sauteed mushrooms and red peppers.
I made another Celebration Challah, it came out about as nice as the one I posted a photo of a few weeks ago. We took it to a dinner party and brought maybe half of it back home, so I'm looking forward to a little French Toast.
The question still remains, what kind of baking powder are they using, does it use aluminum or not?
It may depend on when and where the chef/baker was trained. Some cooking and baking schools were late to the party on 'rediscovering' whole wheat breads. The artisan bread movement started in small bakeries and home kitchens.
I was interested in his $6000 flour mill, which looks like it is made of wood, I wonder if it was custom made?
Many sea salts are naturally high in iodine and other trace minerals. Himalayan sea salt is said to be especially high in iodine. (There's the makings of a joke there.)
Foods other than seafood that are said to be rich in iodine include:
Navy Beans
Bananas
Strawberries
Turkey
Milk and milk products, including yogurt and cheese
Prunes
Eggs
Green Beans
Corn
Potatoes (especially baked, other forms of cooking may leach the iodine out)However, fruits and vegetables may not be as high in iodine if not grown in iodine-rich soils.
Followup: This article seems to suggest that most processed foods do not use iodized salt.
Perhaps the most useful information in this article is the sentence that notes that if a food manufacturer uses iodized salt, it must list it as iodized salt on the list of ingredients.
I'm not sure whether prepared foods use iodized salt or not, either. I might have to make some inquiries.
I grew up in a small town in NW Illinois in the 50's and 60's, farmers with goiters were not unusual, especially among those who mostly ate 'off the farm' all year long.
Sams brands vary over time and possibly by region, it's usually who they can cut deals with. (A company I used to work with dealt with both WalMart and Sams, the folks in Benton Arkansas are tough negotiators, a point they drive home in the sales rep waiting area, where there's a coffee vending machine rather than free coffee.)
Sams used to carry Cabot cheeses here, now they have Tilamook cheeses. They're good cheeses (we even took a tour of the Tilamook plant in Oregon years ago), but the Tilamook cheeses at Sams don't include a low-fat cheddar and the Cabot cheeses did.
I believe the only advantage that kosher salt has over ordinary table salt is that it isn't iodized (some chefs claim the iodine has a bitter taste), but you can buy non-iodized table salt.
Most of us get so much salt from other sources these days that we probably don't need to worry about an iodine deficiency, I know several doctors who went through their entire medical training without once seeing a patient with a goiter, one result of iodine deficiency.
I have a sea salt grinder by the stove that I use when cooking, though I use ordinary iodized table salt when baking.
According to the food historians, the original recipe for Alfredo sauce used just Parmesan Reggiano cheese, very slowly heated so that it doesn't break. Cream was added by other chefs both because it's cheaper than Parmesan Reggiano and because it makes the recipe less likely to fail.
I've never used egg in an Alfredo sauce, though I do use cream. I actually prefer using a 4 cheese blend (parmesan, romano, asiago and provolone), Sams Club sells an excellent blend.
My wife used to order the Crab Alfredo at Red Lobster, but they discontinued it for a while, and when they brought it back it had garlic in it.
My usual rant about using garlic where it DOES NOT BELONG goes here.
I wonder what kind of leavening commercial self-rising flours use? If it's an aluminum salt, that could explain the metallic taste.
If a recipe calls for kosher salt (which Morton Salt says is a bad idea when baking, but the foodies are in love with kosher salt), you're using ordinary salt, you should cut it by 1/3 anyway.
The eggnog cakes sound interesting, what recipe do you use? Do you make your own eggnog for that?
I like the cheese biscuits/rolls at Red Lobster, but they have garlic in them, so my wife can't eat them.
At home, we tend to have biscuits as something you put things like creamed tuna on, so cheese would kind of get in the way.
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