The Cooking Thread
-
@Polygeekery said in The Cooking Thread:
in the Midwest there are really only two grades of Chinese food. It will either be spectacular or spectacularly bad.
The locals claimed it was the best Chinese restaurant in the city. It's depressingly possible they were right.
-
@HardwareGeek said in The Cooking Thread:
The locals claimed it was the best Chinese restaurant in the city.
It's probably similar to the discussion about French cars that we've had in the .
-
@Polygeekery Merde!
-
@Polygeekery said in The Cooking Thread:
He was also about 6'8" tall (about 47 meters for you metric types)
What a little dwarf.
-
-
In general, I prefer a bone-in cut, because I enjoy the elemental experience of tearing the bits of flesh and fat and gristle off the bone with my teeth, smearing fat and juices all over myself while I grunt and moan and chomp. Never mind that I will need a shower afterward.
Whether it cooks better is open to debate. I like grilling steaks (no cast-iron on the stove except during rainstorms and blizzards), and balancing the steak on the bone to finish it seems to work well, because the heat penetrates the bone and cooks the yummy stuff along the inside of the bone. Sort of. But the boneless steak seems to cook more evenly, especially if you tie it and make it a nice tight circle of even thickness.
Hmmm...TIL. Never thought of doing that with a bone in steak. Will have to try it next time I grill one.
-
@boomzilla I've seen experiments trying to confirm whether the bone actually makes a flavor difference. They've all been negative.
-
Who is Justin Wilson?
I have no idea, but I love this video of him making biscuits. How To Cook BiscuitsI grew up watching Justin Wilson. My dad watched it every Sunday night and would frequently make his recipes.
-
I'm cooking some BBQ for tomorrow. As a result I need a little bit of dry rub for the pulled pork.
A quart and a half should do. (Approximately 1.42 hectoliters for you metric types)
-
@Polygeekery What's that in the bowl? Fresh forest ants?
-
-
-
@Polygeekery said in The Cooking Thread:
Approximately 1.42 hectoliters for you metric types
That's about 37 US gallon. How big is that pork?
-
@TimeBandit said in The Cooking Thread:
@Polygeekery said in The Cooking Thread:
Approximately 1.42 hectoliters for you metric types
That's about 37 US gallon. How big is that pork?
About 28lbs. Which is about 61.6 decigrams for the metric types.
-
@Polygeekery @TimeBandit 28 lbs per 37 US gallon makes about 3/4 pound per gallon (I'd expect about 10 times that amount).
Is thatPork Light
?
-
-
Protip:
-
Had neighbors over for dinner. (These are the neighbors for whom we dog-sat while they were out of town. They brought us back many nice things from Venezia.)
Grilled chicken. Brined in salt, brown sugar, black pepper, garlic, onion, and ... um ... some herbs. Seasoned with Lambert's Sweet Rub O' Mine. Online grocery order included both breasts and leg quarters. They ran out of one. I thought I remembered they had run out of breasts and given me only the legs, but it was actually the other way around. They turned out to be some of the biggest chicken breasts I've ever seen, each one enough for 2 people.
Roasted corn on the cob.
Spicy black beans.
Green salad.
Garlic-herbbreadgluten-free ciabatta rolls with garden-fresh oregano, basil and rosemary.
Iced tea — peppermint (caffeine-free) and cranberry-blood orange black tea — prepared as sun tea this afternoon.of the day: I bought 3 of these for the iced tea (and lemonade, which I wound up not making, mostly because I just ran out of time). The spigots work exactly the opposite of what you expect. The spigot is closed when the handle is in line with the spigot, and open when it's perpendicular. Except for the one that didn't shut off at all. Tea mess all over the counter and floor.
-
@HardwareGeek said in The Cooking Thread:
of the day: I bought 3 of these for the iced tea (and lemonade, which I wound up not making, mostly because I just ran out of time). The spigots work exactly the opposite of what you expect. The spigot is closed when the handle is in line with the spigot, and open when it's perpendicular. Except for the one that didn't shut off at all. Tea mess all over the counter and floor.
We have a set of similar beverage dispensers that we load up when we have people over. I had to swap out the nozzles because the ones it came with would lock open if you moved them all the way one direction. Which led to children inevitably dispensing lemonade all over the serving table.
-
-
@HardwareGeek said in The Cooking Thread:
@Polygeekery said in The Cooking Thread:
Which led to children
This needs to be a QooC, but .
That isn't caused by the lemonade dispenser.
Possibly the margarita pitcher.
-
When Dad makes a sandwich:
-
One thing that really annoys me about butchers and meat counters is when they play games with naming the packages of meat. For instance, here in the US there is a cut of meat referred to as "country style ribs". It is a cut of pork that comes from the shoulder area of the pig where the shoulder meets the loin. They are typically mostly shoulder meat, but can contain some of the transition meat where shoulder becomes loin. They are great for slow cooking and what I usually prefer to use when I make Char Sui, as I was making last night.
So I go to our local Walmart and I do not specifically see "Country style ribs" in the pork section. But I do see "Boneless country ribs". I should have known fuckery was afoot but I was in a hurry and didn't stop to think about it too much. They really just looked like short sections of country style ribs, like a butcher cut the bones out. But they did look a little lighter than I expected.
So I get home and prepare the marinade/glaze, get the meat into it and go about my day for a few hours. When it got closer to dinner time I pull the meat from the marinade/glaze, put the glaze in a pot to boil it and sterilize it and fire up the pellet grill.
Char Sui usually takes ~2-3 hours to cook at 300F. At around the one hour mark I check it and it is already at ~170F. Hmmmmm, weird, it should have taken longer but maybe it is just the smaller pieces? I grab the glaze and start basting, fire up the griddle and make some Chinese style potato pancakes and get them on and the meat hit 190F very quickly even though I had turned the temperature down on the pellet grill.
Pancakes are done (simple recipe of shredded potato, Chinese five spice, green onion, salt, pepper and corn starch), meat plated, I crack open a beer and go to slice into the meat and it is as tough as shoe leather. Once it is sliced I see what happened. I thought I was buying "Country style ribs" but the absence of the word "style" from the packaging meant that I bought weirdly shaped pork chops and just cooked them to 190F internal temperature. Pork chops are long past the "moist and tender" phase at 190F. They left that behind ~40F ago.
At least the pancakes were tasty. I'm still craving Char Sui so now I'm on a mission to find actual country style ribs today and if not I am going to buy a pork shoulder and carve it into the appropriate shape and try again tonight. Last night's leftovers will be fed to the dogs when I need something to keep them busy for a while.
-
Fuck the Char Sui. It feels like a steak and potato night.
Plus some fried apples which are yet to go on.
-
@Polygeekery said in The Cooking Thread:
fried apples
-
@Polygeekery I can feel my arteries clogging from just looking at the grease on that griddle.
-
@HardwareGeek move it to a section that has been scraped down and let it sit for a moment and a lot of the grease goes away. Also, a lot of that is leftover bacon grease that I used to cook the potatoes.
Amazingly nothing turned out greasy.
-
@Polygeekery Well, if you have to have grease, at least
-
@HardwareGeek man, that photo does make it look like everything is drowning in grease. Trust me, it is an aberration of the photo. There wasn't nearly as much grease as that photo would lead you to believe.
-
@Polygeekery said in The Cooking Thread:
Trust me
Toby faire, if I were to trust anyone on TDWTF, you'd be at or near the top of the list, but you're still representative of TDWTF.
-
@HardwareGeek said in The Cooking Thread:
Toby faire, if I were to trust anyone on TDWTF, you'd be at or near the top of the list
With just cooking, or in general?
-
@Polygeekery Yes.
-
@HardwareGeek I feel blessed. I am one of the most trusted in a wretched hive of scum and villainy.
-
-
@Polygeekery said in The Cooking Thread:
With just cooking, or in general?
To set someone's house on fire with him/her inside
-
@TimeBandit If I wanted that done, @Polygeekery would be my go-to guy, although I understand he has quite a queue already.
-
@HardwareGeek when @Luhmann stops posting you will know that I'm freeing things up.
-
@Polygeekery
The is on my side on this one
-
@Polygeekery said in The Cooking Thread:
One thing that really annoys me about butchers and meat counters is when they play games with naming the packages of meat.
I remember the butcher shop from the olden days ( (1)). Part of the decor was a large poster on the wall with a schematic of a cow with the name of the various cuts on it. Well, there were actually two identical schematic next to each other, with different labels (and even different cuts!), one being "names used in Paris" and the other "names used in Lyon."
I don't remember the details but I think many were identical, but some names were totally different, and for maximum confusion some names were the same, but referred to different cuts!
(1) this was a time when a boucher was only selling beef (and sometimes lamb). For pork, you'd go to a charcutier, for poultry to a volailler etc. This is no longer the case, most bouchers nowadays should properly be called boucher-charcutier-traiteur-volailler-tripier-fromager.
-
@remi said in The Cooking Thread:
boucher-charcutier-traiteur-volailler-tripier-fromager
Careful! Next thing you know, you'll drop the hyphens and start making long compound words like those uncouth Germans (but even harder to pronounce).
-
@HardwareGeek said in The Cooking Thread:
@remi said in The Cooking Thread:
boucher-charcutier-traiteur-volailler-tripier-fromager
Careful! Next thing you know, you'll drop the hyphens and start making long compound words like those uncouth Germans (but even harder to pronounce).
Eh, 95% of those would be silent anyway.
-
@MrL said in The Cooking Thread:
Eh, 95% of those would be silent anyway.
And it all roughly translates to "Onward to Warsaw".
-
@MrL said in The Cooking Thread:
@HardwareGeek said in The Cooking Thread:
@remi said in The Cooking Thread:
boucher-charcutier-traiteur-volailler-tripier-fromager
Careful! Next thing you know, you'll drop the hyphens and start making long compound words like those uncouth Germans (but even harder to pronounce).
Eh, 95% of those would be silent anyway.
And the rest would be pronounced with a sneer while looking down le nez at les autres langues inférieures.
-
@remi said in The Cooking Thread:
and for maximum confusion some names were the same, but referred to different cuts!
Same here with names of german sausages. I use to point to the sausages I want to get...
-
-
@boomzilla More for me
-
-
@boomzilla it should be enough for a small side for the two of them. Sauteed spinach has an impressive compression ratio.
-
@Polygeekery said in The Cooking Thread:
impressive compression ratio
-
@boomzilla said in The Cooking Thread:
I've had steamed spinach once or twice, which compresses way, way less.