The Cooking Thread
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@remi said in The Cooking Thread:
I guess the prep time of 45 min is because of taking care that the thing is smooth enough (peel tomatoes etc.). If you don't care that much about having a silky-smooth texture, you can just chuck everything (tomatoes, cucumber, bell peppers...) into the blender and blend for longer.
Agreed. That's something else that I changed. I don't bother peeling the tomatoes. Fuck that. That's too much like work. I also don't care about the tomato skins. It is not a textural difference that matters to me.
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@izzion said in The Cooking Thread:
Much simpler to just over/underseason and then blame
your favorite whipping demographicaliensThe comments section of everything is awesome if you have the right sense of humor. Check the comments section on any random recipe and you will almost certainly find someone saying that they changed almost everything about the recipe and still bitch about it and rate it 1-2 stars.
I want to swat those people on the nose with a newspaper and yell "NO!!!!". The recipe may be shit, it might be something that would cause Gordon Ramsay to say "Fuck me!" in a good way, but those morons wouldn't know because they made an entirely different recipe and have no idea.
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@dkf said in The Cooking Thread:
The one thing I hope for from global warming is that the climate here gets good enough for growing tomatoes. I've tried a few times and they just can't produce fruit worth the effort.
You live in Siberia?
We grow tomatoes here in Canada
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@TimeBandit Tomatoes don't like humid or cool weather. And the UK has a temperate oceanic climate pretty much all over, so I could understand how it goes wrong.
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@JBert said in The Cooking Thread:
the UK has a temperate oceanic climate pretty much all over
Not to mention that it is perpetually overcast. I'm reminded of a YouTuber I watch who painted a project a shade of gray and described it as "somewhere between battleship gray and a British suntan".
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@JBert said in The Cooking Thread:
@TimeBandit Tomatoes don't like humid or cool weather. And the UK has a temperate oceanic climate pretty much all over, so I could understand how it goes wrong.
Exactly. Especially round here, we really don't get much sunshine (skin cancer isn't a big killer in this area) so tomatoes just don't ripen most years, and the cool damp weather encourages mildew and aphids strongly. Yes, you can spray against them, but do you really want to do that for something you plan to eat? It's just so much easier to not bother when at least some of the tomatoes in the supermarket have at least a bit of taste. (They've not bred flavour back into the larger varieties yet it seems...)
But raspberries and blackberries grow well, like weeds (in fact, exactly like weeds if you don't keep things trimmed). Our apple tree also does well. It's the season for fruit crumbles...
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@dkf said in The Cooking Thread:
It's the season for fruit crumbles...
Grunts and galettes are also easy and tasty.
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@TimeBandit said in The Cooking Thread:
We grow tomatoes here in Canada
Everybody else preserves tomatoes by canning, not freezing.
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@HardwareGeek Is there anything left of a tomato after freezing and thawing?
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@PleegWat said in The Cooking Thread:
@HardwareGeek Is there anything left of a tomato after freezing and thawing?
Spaghetti sauce.
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@dcon Or gazpacho?
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Wallace said in an interview with Chris Wallace
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The great thing about interviewing yourself is that you're sure there won't be any embarrassing questions.
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@boomzilla said in The Cooking Thread:
https://www.outkick.com/al-michaels-vegetables-not-eaten-knowingly/
(did not read TFA) but I thought ketchup was a vegetable?
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@dcon said in The Cooking Thread:
@PleegWat said in The Cooking Thread:
@HardwareGeek Is there anything left of a tomato after freezing and thawing?
Spaghetti sauce.
Back in the construction days I hired a young guy who his last job was working at a tomato packing plant. I like learning about other industries and was asking questions and what I learned that day was that they essentially grade tomatoes into three categories. A grade, B grade and (technically) C grade. The plant workers just referred to them as A, B and "salsa".
Which means that if you buy jarred salsa it was probably made from the shittiest, half rotten, bug infested tomatoes. Frozen and thawed tomatoes that they didn't get processed in time before winter would probably also fit that.
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@Polygeekery Back when I was in university, one of my friends was from California's Central Valley (major agricultural area and source of a significant percentage of the US food supply). She, too, had worked in a tomato packing plant. She said, you do not want to see the tomatoes that go into ketchup.
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@dkf said in The Cooking Thread:
It's the season for fruit crumbles...
#DearJournal:
This weekend we were walking in the countryside close to our home and went past a quince tree, and sometime later a walnut tree. We know they are there and regularly forage from them so we were a bit disappointed to not find much below either of those.
Later in the day, I was chatting with the next door neighbour who gave us a whole basket of quinces from their tree (), and since I know they also like foraging I mentioned both trees I went past in the morning. They immediately told me that they knew of them, and actually had been foraging from them the days before!
This is how neighbourhood wars are started...
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@TimeBandit said in The Cooking Thread:
@dkf said in The Cooking Thread:
The one thing I hope for from global warming is that the climate here gets good enough for growing tomatoes. I've tried a few times and they just can't produce fruit worth the effort.
You live in Siberia?
We grow tomatoes here in Canada
You may be , but those tomatoes are grown in green houses ecofriendly located next to data centers where they can suck up the excess heat produced by annoyed electrons.
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@dcon How do you even force it to build up that much pressure? Pressure cookers I've seen and used have a pressure relief plug that will blow out before structural failure.
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It kept going off while in use so they plugged it.
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@HardwareGeek said in The Cooking Thread:
@dcon How do you even force it to build up that much pressure? Pressure cookers I've seen and used have a pressure relief plug that will blow out before structural failure.
: It just kept whistling so I made it stop. And then that!
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@Zerosquare said in The Cooking Thread:
The great thing about interviewing yourself is that you're sure there won't be any embarrassing questions.
Pffffffffbt. Speak for yourself. I bet I'd fuck it up.
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@Polygeekery said in The Cooking Thread:
@Zerosquare said in The Cooking Thread:
The great thing about interviewing yourself is that you're sure there won't be any embarrassing questions.
Pffffffffbt. Speak for yourself. I bet I'd fuck it up.
Embarrassing to whom?
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@Polygeekery said in The Cooking Thread:
@Zerosquare said in The Cooking Thread:
The great thing about interviewing yourself is that you're sure there won't be any embarrassing questions.
Pffffffffbt. Speak for yourself. I bet I'd fuck it up.
Pro-tip: when interviewing yourself don't pour drinks for both the interviewer and the respondent.
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@boomzilla said in The Cooking Thread:
Embarrassing to whom?
If we look at historical trends......probably my wife.
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@Zerosquare said in The Cooking Thread:
: Who's ? Oh, you mean that guy over there? No, I don't know him.
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@Zerosquare said in The Cooking Thread:
: Who's ? Oh, you mean that guy over there? No, I don't know him.
She just needs some of those "Shut the fuck up,
Jeff" laminated cards
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@Applied-Mediocrity said in The Cooking Thread:
@Zerosquare said in The Cooking Thread:
: Who's ? Oh, you mean that guy over there? No, I don't know him.
She just needs some of those "Shut the fuck up,
Jeff" laminated cardsAIUI, she already has a look™ that means the same thing and is just as effective as the cards would be.
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Confession: I like cauliflower rice.
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food status: I've now had dairy 4 times in a week and a half with no bad reactions. 3 of those had at least some lactose (cheese), the last was lactose free milk. Maybe that secondary allergy has vanished? Still not going to tempt fate with pizza or ice cream though.
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@Benjamin-Hall my son's lactose intolerance seems to be abating a bit lately, too.
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@dcon said in The Cooking Thread:
Air Fryer works well for that too.
Meh. Not as well as a deep fryer. Air fryers are a compromise but as far as density of the temperature carrying media are concerned you're almost three orders of magnitude difference. But the air fryer is a fair bit healthier to use.
"Air fryer" is a dumb term, but I guess it beats "small capacity high output for size overpowered convection oven".
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@Polygeekery said in The Cooking Thread:
"Air fryer" is a dumb term, but I guess it beats "small capacity high output for size overpowered convection oven".
I agree. When we decided we should buy one, I was confused as to why there was no oil involved anywhere, until I realised they're "small capacity etc."
Still, it's quite a neat thing, especially when cooking small portions.
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@remi said in The Cooking Thread:
@Polygeekery said in The Cooking Thread:
"Air fryer" is a dumb term, but I guess it beats "small capacity high output for size overpowered convection oven".
I agree. When we decided we should buy one, I was confused as to why there was no oil involved anywhere, until I realised they're "small capacity etc."
Still, it's quite a neat thing, especially when cooking small portions.
And you don't have to deal with hot oil!
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@Polygeekery said in The Cooking Thread:
@dcon said in The Cooking Thread:
@PleegWat said in The Cooking Thread:
@HardwareGeek Is there anything left of a tomato after freezing and thawing?
Spaghetti sauce.
Back in the construction days I hired a young guy who his last job was working at a tomato packing plant. I like learning about other industries and was asking questions and what I learned that day was that they essentially grade tomatoes into three categories. A grade, B grade and (technically) C grade. The plant workers just referred to them as A, B and "salsa".
Which means that if you buy jarred salsa it was probably made from the shittiest, half rotten, bug infested tomatoes. Frozen and thawed tomatoes that they didn't get processed in time before winter would probably also fit that.
The same can be said of most fruit juices. Its actually a myth that fruit gets thrown away if it isn’t pretty enough. The majority of it gets used for something. Kind of makes you wonder about lumpy fruit juice. Does taste better though.
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@DogsB said in The Cooking Thread:
lumpy fruit juice
My family hates orange juice with pulp. I prefer it. Strangely enough when I buy OJ for both of us when they finish their juice before mine they're perfectly fine with drinking my juice that they would complain about if I didn't buy them juice without pulp.
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@remi said in The Cooking Thread:
@Polygeekery said in The Cooking Thread:
"Air fryer" is a dumb term, but I guess it beats "small capacity high output for size overpowered convection oven".
I agree. When we decided we should buy one, I was confused as to why there was no oil involved anywhere, until I realised they're "small capacity etc."
Still, it's quite a neat thing, especially when cooking small portions.
Last year my sister and I had a discussion on energy use by airfryers versus deep fryers. Since she'd received an appliance energy usage device we decided to put it to the test.
The conclusion was that over the course of an entire meal, with the devices in use continuously to produce a similar amount of fries and snacks:
- The deep fried products tasted better.
- We spent significantly less time waiting for the deep fryer.
- The deep fryer only used half as much electricity. The difference was large enough to account for the costs of changing the oil every 10 meals, even during the vegetable oil shortage after the war in Ukraine started, and without accounting for the fact airfryer-compatible food products are more expensive.
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@PleegWat that's an interesting test (truly!). SCIENCE!!
But there are a lot of assumptions, or rather it only tests one limited use-case.
I expect the deep fryer to have a large upfront time/energy cost to heat up, and by using the fryers for the whole meal you effectively reduced the impact of that cost (=spread it over several rounds of frying). For a single batch, would the result still hold? (both in waiting time and energy) (if you kept running totals of time/energy during the test, you might be able to find out)
The taste is important but more subjective (and probably depends on what you're cooking, I use the air fryer for stuff I would never put in a deep fryer, such as soufflés!), and the (in)convenience of oil is another subjective but important aspect.
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@remi This was our conclusion as well. The deep fryer has an up-front 2000W*10min cost to heat up; the air fryer barely needs heat-up time. After that, the deep fryer's heat element was active less than half the time, while the air fryer stays active continuously (at 1200W, if memory serves) and generally needs more time per product. If you're only preparing a single item, the air fryer may be more effective.
And indeed, comparing against a convection oven is a different test. The convection oven has a larger internal volume, and thus can handle larger batches at the same time. Also, the convection oven may have better thermal isolation. I suspect advantages of the air fryer remain with preparing small amounts.
Since I cannot as easily get at the plug for my convection oven, I am not going to test that.
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@PleegWat said in The Cooking Thread:
Since I cannot as easily get at the plug for my convection oven, I am not going to test that.
At one time my electricity provider gave me a gizmo to measure energy usage that worked by simply clamping it around a wire, without needing to actually open the circuit to plug the thing (they instructed to put that on the main wire so that you could see the overall house energy use -- that was before smart meters that tell you that were commonplace).
Then again, if your kitchen looks like most kitchens, it's unlikely you have access to the wire for the oven either, so this wouldn't really help you.
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@remi Indeed. The oven is plugged in. I know it's plugged in. I know where the plug is. It is about as easy to get at the plug as it is to get at the wire. This would involve removing the plinth and reaching ~60cm behind it.