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SubG
Aug 19, 2004

It's a hard world for little things.

MAKE NO BABBYS posted:

Buddy, literally every Negroni is 1oz vermouth, 1oz Campari, 1oz spirit.
With gin, Campari, and red vermouth I use jigger:pony:pony.

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SubG
Aug 19, 2004

It's a hard world for little things.
more like boner broth

SubG
Aug 19, 2004

It's a hard world for little things.

bartlebee posted:

Bought a ravioli press to do dinner on Christmas Eve or New Year's Eve since we can't go anywhere. What fillings should we do? Saw one online that sounded good with I ground beef, a little bacon, Swiss chard, garlic, and parm. Excited!
My go-to easy ravioli is equal parts ricotta and mozz, with some fresh thyme or oregano and enough microplaned parm/pecorino so it tastes right (I get ricotta and mozzarella from local dairies via CSA and how sharp/salty/whatever varies a lot, so the parm/pecorino is how I adjust for it).

Pair it with simple red sauce: can of tomatoes + 5 Tbsp butter + half an onion + simmer for 45 minutes, done. I usually add some oregano (I use Mexican oregano because I pretty much always have it on hand), a squeeze of tomato paste, and adjust the salt using fish sauce.

If you want something more fancy pants for a holiday dinner, you could go with something super finicky like Ramsay's lobster ravioli, or some less fussy version.

SubG
Aug 19, 2004

It's a hard world for little things.

bartlebee posted:

Definitely saving this sauce. Sounds straightforward and good.
Yeah, the basic form of the recipe is Marcella Hazan's. She kinda did for Italian cooking what Julia Child did for French cooking--she didn't invent it and wasn't the first to talk about it in English, but she's the one that really made it part of the everyday conversation.

SubG
Aug 19, 2004

It's a hard world for little things.
Buy cognac, use some to make pâté and the rest to make sazeracs.

SubG
Aug 19, 2004

It's a hard world for little things.

Helith posted:

If that is the case, then I wonder why you want to cook this recipe.
Helith, meet Cheese Thief. Cheese Thief, this is Helith.

SubG
Aug 19, 2004

It's a hard world for little things.
What was the name of the pre whirled peas regular who used to melt the gently caress down whenever anybody talked about this?

SubG
Aug 19, 2004

It's a hard world for little things.

angerbeet posted:

Mommie Dearest? They liked a good meltdown.
Nah, it was one of the regulars that cooked for a living and one of Mommie Dearest's meltdowns was over being a home cook. I want to say it was one of the regulars that got a callout thread from mindphlux. Magnetic?

SubG
Aug 19, 2004

It's a hard world for little things.
Eh. I've been making duck ramen about once a week since the start of the pandemic and while it's a multi-day thing, if you've got a freezer it's not like you're investing a day's worth of prep for one meal when you make stock.

And noodles are one of those things that takes a little practice to get the basic mechanics down, but once you get a feel for it, it's mostly just doing it.

I mean not trying to talk you into it or anything, but holy poo poo am I glad I wasn't scared off of trying it because of the perceived difficulty because now it's a favourite for both me and my girlfriend.

Really I think the stuff where I'm more likely to say gently caress it and just get it from a restaurant is the stuff where it requires a bunch of ingredients that I don't already use for a bunch of other stuff, like pig's knuckles and congealed pig's blood for making Bún bò Huế. Which I could also eat a bowl of every loving week until it fuckin' killed me.

SubG
Aug 19, 2004

It's a hard world for little things.
Small, medium, large.

SubG
Aug 19, 2004

It's a hard world for little things.

BrianBoitano posted:

I normally avoid lifehacker's cooking content but I may actually do this one:


I've never used one like that (filling up the funnel first) but I use a canning funnel all the loving time when I'm transferring stews and that kind of thing into another vessel with a ladle. It's also aces for when you're portioning leftovers into delitainers or whatever.

SubG
Aug 19, 2004

It's a hard world for little things.

um excuse me posted:

Not sure in which direction you mean granular, but sticking with stuff common to super markets would be nice to have some consistency.
All salts that are just salt (as opposed to flavoured salts--garlic salt, celery salt, or whatever) are just salt. They are equivalently salty by weight. The differences are due to grain size--bigger grain size means, on average, lower density, which is to say less weight per unit volume.

So all kosher salts are "less salty" than standard table salt because they all have a larger grain size and therefore a tsp (or whatever) will weigh less. Different kosher salts will vary among themselves depending on the size and uniformity of the flakes.

SubG
Aug 19, 2004

It's a hard world for little things.

Hawkperson posted:

Yeah same. I miss being able to feel free to vaguely wander around the grocery store looking for inspiration, now I feel the double pressure of 1) not spending more time in there than necessary and 2) making sure I've got enough poo poo to last me at least a week so that I'm not making too many trips
Same here. In the Before Times 90% of the time I'd be stopping by the store to pick up whatever I was planning on cooking that night, and most of the time I wouldn't have a plan before looking through the produce section to see what looked good that day and then looking through the butcher counter if the produce section didn't decide it for me. Nowadays I'm getting about 3/4 of my produce from the CSA (instead of maybe 25% before), and I'm always micromanaging what's in each delivery beforehand. I'm also getting a lot of stuff like dairy and some meat/fish from them (it's all local producers and availability of everything is limited, so it's pretty much a crapshoot except, as I've commented before, for ducks. they always have had ducks). That's every other week. The majority of my animal protein has been coming from a meat CSA that delivers once every 6 weeks, so that's even more long term planning. And the last like 25% of the produce (not counting what I get from gardening) I've been getting delivered. My girlfriend or I had been making trips to the local grocer's no more frequently than once a week to get stuff that we couldn't wait for the CSA delivery for (mostly some dairy stuff, tomatoes--which the CSA hasn't had since they were in season--and stuff like toilet paper, toothpaste, and so on). Since the big spike around November/December we've been doing curbside or delivery for everything because of the number of no-maskers, dicknosers, clerks that pull down their mask to talk, and so on. Anyway, that's still no more frequently than once a week.

And haven't seen bread flour in stock locally since like last summer, so I've been buying all my flour online from mills that sell direct to consumers, and that means planning ahead and storing a bunch so as to not get killed on the shipping costs.

Which all means that I've had to more or less completely change the way I plan meals. And, you know, I'd rather go back to doing it the other way but holy poo poo I've always known where my next meal was coming from and haven't had to deal with any major power outages or anything so I'm counting my loving blessings.

SubG
Aug 19, 2004

It's a hard world for little things.

um excuse me posted:

Here's another dumb question. Where do y'all get wasabi or saffron? I'd love to explore both but the cost makes it intimidating to play with.
Penzeys has a couple grades of saffron and Penzeys generally a good answer on where to get spices if you're not super price sensitive and if you're looking at saffron and wasabi you almost certainly aren't.

For wasabi I doubt many people seek out real wasabi because the coloured horseradish is what is almost universally used, to the point I think most people would find the taste of real wasabi weird in e.g. sushi. Could be wrong about that. I don't know a supplier for real wasabi as a bulk spice, but if you're real serious about it and live in a reasonably cool environment you can grow your own. Like most edible rhizomes, if you have the conditions it likes they're pretty easy plants to take care of.

SubG
Aug 19, 2004

It's a hard world for little things.

Enfys posted:

The rhizomes take about two years to mature, and they're very finicky plants prone to dying unless you have conditions exactly right, so you're better off buying some from a commercial supplier unless you're really invested in long garden experiments.
Yeah, "you can grow it in a garden" wasn't intended as a short term/quick fix. On the other hand two years is downright zippy compared to growing an immature fruit tree or something like that. I've got a Sichuan peppercorn plant that's going on four years old and I haven't gotten more than a handful of peppercorns out of it yet.

SubG
Aug 19, 2004

It's a hard world for little things.

pile of brown posted:

I've always heard much the opposite, that real wasabi is extremely difficult and expensive to grow and that's why the green horseradish is so ubiquitous. I remember reading something about how the only domestic producer of wasabi in the us (in oregon) had an electric fence and a loving moat to ward off espionage.
The thing it's most picky about is temperature--too hot or too cold and it'll give up on you. It's also somewhat picky about watering--it likes frequent watering, but needs well-drained soil. It can be the case that wherever you live is just too hot, too cold, or too inconsistent for it, in which case I dunno. But for a lot of people all of the problems can be solved by just growing it in a container: if your nights are too cold in spring, just bring it in. Too hot in the afternoon during summer? Bring it in. The plant wants full shade so it won't miss a couple hours of sun.

But while this is perfectly workable and isn't even particularly arduous as far as home gardening gymnastics goes, it isn't really workable at commercial scales. And it probably isn't optimal for producing the largest possible yields, and so on. Which also isn't really a problem if you're not trying to juggle factors to min/max your cost/value curve or whatever. There are a lot of heirloom cultivars that are commonly grown in home gardens but are seldom if ever found on commercial farms just because of peculiarities of their lifecycle or growth habit--low germination rates, slow maturity, narrow growing season, reliance on hand pruning, difficulties in harvesting, poor keeping characteristics of the resulting crop, or whatever. This kind of poo poo can kill profitability of a commercial crop, but if you're not worried about your garden supplying all your food or making you money it's no problem.

SubG
Aug 19, 2004

It's a hard world for little things.

Mr. Wiggles posted:

What else would you do when you run out of Flavacol?
You can run out of Flavacol?

I think I'm about halfway through the carton I bought in 2011.

SubG
Aug 19, 2004

It's a hard world for little things.
Could be MAP instead of just vac sealing as well. A lot of cheeses, even things like sliced sandwich cheeses, can last for months in an atmosphere that slows the ripening processes.

SubG
Aug 19, 2004

It's a hard world for little things.

Flash Gordon Ramsay posted:

My girlfriend bought some sort of sprouted whole grain bread (I think that’s what she called it) and when she finally opened it it smelled like alcohol or acetone or possibly both. What happened?
Fermentation.

SubG
Aug 19, 2004

It's a hard world for little things.

mediaphage posted:

they may have just bagged it hot, too, i suppose. one of the major smells of baking bread is the alcohol being driven off.
And/or the dough was over-yeasted.

And there's the possibility that it fermented again after baking, either from a fraction of the yeast surviving baking or subsequent contamination from the environment. I guess you could try making prison kvass/pruno using a slice of the bread to find out.

SubG
Aug 19, 2004

It's a hard world for little things.
Undergoing meatosis my blood and urine are full of meat.

SubG
Aug 19, 2004

It's a hard world for little things.

therattle posted:

We had Beyond Burger hamburgers for lunch today. They’re better than about 95% of hamburgers I’ve had, including higher-end burger chains like Byron, Honest Burger, Gourmet Burger Kitchen, etc. I don’t ever feel the need to eat a beef burger again. They are pretty pricy though.
Not related to veggie burger chat but hamburgers are one of those popular foods where the overwhelming majority of them are just terrible. And not just in terms of snooty that's-not-a-real-[whatever]-ism or anything. Just from the standpoint of technical execution or whatever you want to call it. Like I don't get fast food burgers not because of any ideological position or whatever, but most of the times when I have gotten one they're just soggy messes, or someone has assembled the bits sideways, or something like that.

Same with pizza. Pizza is hugely popular, but an astonishing number of pizza places produce pizza that's just execrable.

Not quite as popular but still common, and to illustrate it's not just American food staples, sushi is also a hugely hit or miss genre of food. Good nigiri and/or a good bowl of chirashi is among one of my favourite things to tuck into, but most randomly sampled sushi places are just kinda bad. This could be amplified by the fact that sashimi is one of those things where the drop-off from "great" to "good" is pretty narrow and the drop off from "good" to "bad" is much, much wider.

On the other end of the scale I feel like the average bowl of phở I've had is always at least "good" (and phở isn't even my favourite Vietnamese soup).

SubG
Aug 19, 2004

It's a hard world for little things.

enki42 posted:

Another thing to consider is that you probably get more discerning about something the more you have it, or when you're exposed to better examples of something. As one example, we're probably the opposite on pho vs. sushi - I'm generally pretty unpicky about sushi, and don't have much of a palette for the really good stuff at all. I'll happily eat grocery store sushi, and while I can recognize that restaurant sushi is better, it doesn't feel miles away at all, and any time I've had really nice sushi, it hasn't registered as heads and tails above anything else for me. The only time I can think of sushi being unacceptably bad is at an all-inclusive in Dominican Republic.

Pho on the other hand I have a lot, and I'm pretty discerning. Toronto is rife with pho places, and there's one or 2 that I think are really great and a whole bunch that are passable at best. In most other North American and European cities I've had pho in, it's often not passably good at all.
I eat phở more frequently than I eat burgers.

I also don't think that finding a soggy fast food burger disgusting is due to me having some kind of highly developed gourmand sensibilities about fast food burgers.

SubG
Aug 19, 2004

It's a hard world for little things.

BrianBoitano posted:

For some reason now I want to insert angel hair into bucatini. Would that make me a Tik Tok chef?
pasta alla catetere

SubG
Aug 19, 2004

It's a hard world for little things.
Why do you think it's not technically fermentation?

SubG
Aug 19, 2004

It's a hard world for little things.

Guildenstern Mother posted:

I suppose it is, but I just associate that word with a funky smell
Well, it's both technically fermentation and fermentation by common usage. As in, in baking when you let the dough rise before shaping it's primary fermentation, after shaping final fermentation, and in a biga or poolish pre-fermentation.

SubG
Aug 19, 2004

It's a hard world for little things.

Force de Fappe posted:

so does that mean bread is technically beer
Specifically poor man's ale. Until fairly late, in mediaeval England everybody's diet was mostly grain. For the poorest this meant mostly pottage. A slightly wealthier family might consume most of their grain as pottage with a small portion consumed as bread, assuming they were on a manor with a miller and/or bakehouse. Those of higher social status (and increasingly large portions of the population later) would also consume a portion of their grain as ale.

There is a wealth of documentary evidence (mostly in the form of legal documents) through which the economic fortunes of different regions can be traced in terms of how much and what type of various grains people of different social strata were consuming.

SubG
Aug 19, 2004

It's a hard world for little things.

SubG
Aug 19, 2004

It's a hard world for little things.

bartolimu posted:

I usually browse YouTube for small channels I've never heard of preparing the recipe. It's not a guarantee of quality or whatever "authenticity" means, but it's more likely to be someone posting a thing they know and care about than some schmuck trying to make a quick YouTube dollar. It was really helpful when I was making albondigas to see how a few Mexican households did it, what the common ingredients across everyone's recipes were, etc. And when I struggled with getting pitas right, videos of home cooks talking about what works for them helped a ton. I mean, my pitas are still pretty mediocre, but they're way better than when I started.

Plus, occasionally when I do this I find a must-subscribe channel like De Mi Rancho a Tu Cocina.
This is more or less what I do. And I'll add that it's not just cuisines that are considered "ethnic" in America, this is true of "prestige" cuisines (like, e.g. French and Italian) as well. French cuisine is pretty much a canonical prestige cuisine in the US, and poo poo like baguettes and quiche are pretty much canonical articles of French-as-viewed-from-the-US cuisine, but none of the standard in-English references (stuff like ATK or even things like Keller's books) were as useful to me for e.g. baguettes as some random youtube video I found with lousy subtitles done by a guy in Paris who makes baguettes every day.

Like I think that the "standard" references are better at sorta blocking out the basics of a recipe or whatever--okay, what kind of things am I actually going to need to make this--but for a lot of poo poo there's a stretch between "okay I can mechanically go through the steps and get something but it's not even close to what I want" and "okay this isn't exactly what I want, but it's basically correct". Getting from that initial "I know how to cook but I don't know how to cook this" to "I know how to cook this but I'm going to have to do it a several more times fiddling with things until it's just right" is almost always going to come from someone who does that thing all the loving time, instead of someone who's just a general how-to-cook-poo poo source. Plus, you know, that final portion that has to come from first-hand experience/repetition.

SubG
Aug 19, 2004

It's a hard world for little things.

signalnoise posted:

Deep fried eggs could be aight
Floaters are good, yeah. Fry off a shitload of bacon, draining off the grease into a dutch oven as you go. Keep going until you have enough grease to deep fry an egg, topping off with manteca if you don't have enough grease.

To make the floaters, just crack and egg and dump it into the hot grease. It'll sink, then puff slightly and float to the top. Fish it out with a slotted spoon, slap it onto a tortilla with a rasher of bacon, garnish with whatever else you like if you're feeling fancy, done.

It sounds horrifically unhealthy, but if the oil is hot enough it pretty much just crisps up the exterior of the eggs and if you let the excess oil drain off they're not greasy at all.

SubG
Aug 19, 2004

It's a hard world for little things.

therattle posted:

You and I have different meanings for the word “floaters”
Of the many other definitions, I believe the egg dish was named after the slang term for a body found in a body of water.

Guy I learned it from worked in food service in Texas in the '70s. For some time I thought it was just something he came up with, but I subsequently (in the '80s) worked third shift at a truck stop in east Texas and a version of it was something we served (fried in the fryolater instead of a dutch oven, served on toast instead of a tortilla). Dunno how common the name was, although a GIS for "deep fried egg" reveals several versions (in addition to a bunch of Scotch eggs, an entirely different thing).

SubG
Aug 19, 2004

It's a hard world for little things.

Mr. Wiggles posted:

I buy the Angry Lady brand mix when I want spicy hot pot, then add extra garlic and stuff on top of it.
Yeah LGM hot pot mix is aces, way more of a distinct Sichuan peppercorn note than any of the other hot pot mixes I've tried. I use it more for making dry pot than hot pot but w/e.

SubG
Aug 19, 2004

It's a hard world for little things.

Liquid Communism posted:

That's honestly the only thing that saves me.

If it wasn't such a bitch to clean up after deep frying outside of a commercial fryer and hood setup, I'd just make doughnuts whenever I felt like it and have to be wheeled out of the house on a pallet when my heart finally gave out.

Also, you haven't really lived until you've gone fully down the making perfect fries rabbit hole.

Slice the potatoes, rinse.

Let sit overnight in a cambro full of cold water to float off the excess starch.

Par-fry in peanut oil at 325 until pale. Freeze. Final fry to crisp at 375 before serving.
Best fries I've ever made at home I did by shallow frying them in duck fat in a fry pan. Way more labour intensive than using a deep fryer/dutch oven, though.

Made potato chips/crisps via a similar method a couple times earlier in the pandemic.

SubG
Aug 19, 2004

It's a hard world for little things.
Has something changed in the egg supply chain that results in eggs lower in lechtin or something? I make a small amount of mayo every couple weeks for sandwiches and so on, and starting like two months ago suddenly every loving time the mayo wants to turn into a soupy mess. I've been making mayo for roughly forever and I think I might've had the emulsion fail maybe twice. And now it's every loving time unless it's babied like crazy.

SubG
Aug 19, 2004

It's a hard world for little things.

BrianBoitano posted:

I'd wash and rinse the gently caress out of your bowl and mixing implements. Sounds like some soap hiding in a scratch mark or crevice to me.

What method do you use?
Once, maybe. But after getting the same thing consistently over the course of multiple months, naaaah.

And it isn't just a single egg supplier, it's definitely at least two different brands and maybe three--first time it happened I wrote it off as being due to the eggs being on the old side, and I think it was also a different brand than either of the ones I usually get. But I wasn't really paying attention until it started happening consistently.

And just doing the standard low-effort stick blender mayo thing: oil, egg, mustard in a delitainer, hit it with the blender, done. Made it probably literally hundreds of times that way with no fuss or bother, and like I said I think I've had it fail like twice. Now I'm having to start with the egg and slowly drizzle in the oil, like you would if you were doing it by hand. And if I forget to be cautious--like I did earlier today--it's just oily yellow egg soup.

SubG
Aug 19, 2004

It's a hard world for little things.

therattle posted:

Are your oil or mustard any different? I don’t know if that could affect matters.
Nooooope.

And I mean this ain't my first rodeo. I've dealt with egg emulsions breaking before, and like I said I can work around this and baby it to get it to work. Its just that up until a couple months ago the stick blender thing was always loving bulletproof. And I've probably made mayo using the same method, same gear, dozens of times using the same brand of oil, same brand of mustard, and one of a couple of different brands of eggs since the start of the pandemic. And it's not like it comes and goes. Before: never a problem. Now: always a problem.

SubG
Aug 19, 2004

It's a hard world for little things.

dino. posted:

Subg not to be funny but it might be possible that your blender is losing its mojo. Maybe try a new one and see if it helps? I sincerely doubt that it’s a technique issue.
It's a variable speed and I've hosed around with different speeds so I doubt that's it. But anyway I have (somewhat) independent confirmation, in someone else reporting the same thing locally. Maybe it's just a regional supplier who also happens to be the one supplying eggs for local supermarket store brands?

If more people aren't reporting it then it's probably not something like buttergate. I'm kinda suspecting something in handling or storage. Like it's a known issue that egg emulsions are weaker when you use older eggs. And, anecdotally, I've noticed that eggs have been more prone to getting floaty closer to their marked "best by" date. So maybe some change in handling due to the pandemic, if not on the production end, maybe subsequently--I've been doing mostly curbside or delivery since around November, so maybe something in the handling at the store/delivery end that's leading to eggs not keeping as well? I don't know any way of intentionally mishandling an egg to force this to happen, and it's happened with eggs that were less than a week old, so I don't know how plausible the "handling" hypothesis is.

I can definitely give it a whirl, so to speak, using the Vitamix instead of the stick blender to see if that makes a difference. But hearing that someone say she basically quit trying to make mayo because it suddenly kept breaking every time makes me doubt its a mechanical problem causing it.

SubG
Aug 19, 2004

It's a hard world for little things.
Eh. Giving consumers better information, and more of it, is an empiric good. But I think there's a semantic shell game hiding under calling any food "processed" as a way of differentiating it from a "natural" variant. It isn't like "natural" cheese is harvested from fields or gets secreted from the paps of cheese cows.

And the only differences worth mentioning between what you do when you make a modernist mac and cheese and what Kraft does when it makes a box of glow-in-the-dark yellow "pasteurized processed cheese food product" are differences in the quality of the ingredients, not the type or amount of "processing".

SubG
Aug 19, 2004

It's a hard world for little things.
And remember that there are plenty of things, like dal and congee, that are tasty and can be eaten without chewing (or be prepared to be eatable without chewing) without having to go all lol blender on it. Same with puréed veg soups. You can make a cream of whatever soup out of virtually anything that's currently in season by starting out with something like a basic potato leek soup as a base, adding seasonal veg, hitting it with a stick blender, and finishing with cream.

For a lot of human history, the majority of calories consumed by the majority of people was in the form of porridge of some sort. We've worked out a lot of ways to make it palatable.

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SubG
Aug 19, 2004

It's a hard world for little things.
Like right now is already prime gazpacho season. That's basically your blended pizza, only designed from scratch to be blended.

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