The Cooking Thread
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@jazzyjosh Unsure, but everything I've read says it happens reasonably fast. It's a risk though.
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@benjamin-hall said in The Cooking Thread:
That's one of the fun things about cooking with recipes from other countries. Just because it has the same name does not mean it's the same thing =)
One time while I was in Argentina, we knew this older American couple, and they invited us over for homemade apple pie. It looked great, but the flavor was off because the cinnamon they put in there was really bland compared to what you buy in the USA.
The next time they made it, they put in three times as much cinnamon. It tasted great, but it made the pie filling come out black!
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@masonwheeler Cinnamon is one of the prime offenders--what we call cinnamon in the US is a different species than most of what is used elsewhere. They're similar, but different.
Another example is when I tried to make wacky cake in Latvia some years ago. For those who don't know, wacky cake has no eggs or butter--it's leavened with the baking soda/vinegar reaction. If you use the appropriate amounts of acetic acid and sodium hydrogen carbonate, everything's great. It's a simple, easy recipe that can be mixed in the baking pan.
White vinegar in the US is standardized to 5% acetic acid. In Latvia, this is not true. Using an american recipe (again, calibrated for 5% acetic acid) and certain brands of latvian vinegar (this particular stuff was 70% acetic acid) just doesn't work right. Not even the birds would eat the result.
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@benjamin-hall said in The Cooking Thread:
70% acetic acid
Latvians must be made of incredibly stern stuff!
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@masonwheeler said in The Cooking Thread:
@benjamin-hall said in The Cooking Thread:
70% acetic acid
Latvians must be made of incredibly stern stuff!
Yeah...my only thought is that we accidentally got the stuff designed for cleaning, not cooking. Hard to tell when you only read English (and Russian, poorly) and the labels are in 97,000 other languages (and usually not Russian or English).
Edit: other brands had the more normal 5% or so concentrations.
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@masonwheeler said in The Cooking Thread:
@benjamin-hall said in The Cooking Thread:
That's one of the fun things about cooking with recipes from other countries. Just because it has the same name does not mean it's the same thing =)
One time while I was in Argentina, we knew this older American couple, and they invited us over for homemade apple pie. It looked great, but the flavor was off because the cinnamon they put in there was really bland compared to what you buy in the USA.
The next time they made it, they put in three times as much cinnamon. It tasted great, but it made the pie filling come out black!
Two things: First, cinnamon also loses potency pretty quickly, so if they were using old cinnamon that could account for the discrepancy. Second, what we purchase in most stores is not actually cinnamon. It comes from cassia. Similar flavor profile, but a lot cheaper to produce.
But, now we have been using cassia so long that for all intensive porpoises, it is now cinnamon.
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@benjamin-hall said in The Cooking Thread:
certain brands of latvian vinegar (this particular stuff was 70% acetic acid)
That would be considered a hazardous material in the US.
@benjamin-hall said in The Cooking Thread:
Yeah...my only thought is that we accidentally got the stuff designed for cleaning, not cooking. Hard to tell when you only read English (and Russian, poorly) and the labels are in 97,000 other languages (and usually not Russian or English).
That seems likely.
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@anotherusername very much so. It's pretty much glacial, which is scary stuff.
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@benjamin-hall yeahhhhh... I looked up an MSDS...
I wouldn't get near the stuff without PPE and a fume hood. That's not even cleaning solution strength, it's just nope. Combustible liquid and vapor... acid?!
I prefer to stay away from acids that have a flash point...
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@anotherusername I must be misremembering the concentration. It wasn't that apparently different. No fuming. That incident was 16 years ago, so...
On the note of scary acids, I once opened a bottle of 12M HCl. Not thinking, I didn't have it in a fume Hood. Even the little breath of vapor cleaned out my lungs and sinuses pretty darn well.
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@benjamin-hall said in The Cooking Thread:
Even the little breath of vapor cleaned out my lungs and sinuses pretty darn well.
Since we are in the Cooking Thread, I have an old home remedy for sinusitis: Eat a big spoonful of good horseradish. Have some Kleenex handy. It will clean out your head in seconds.
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@benjamin-hall you can get "industrial strength" 30% vinegar on Amazon...
https://www.amazon.com/30-Pure-Vinegar-Garden-Gallon/dp/B00VVMTM14
That sounds plenty nasty.
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@anotherusername that could be it.
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@polygeekery said in The Cooking Thread:
Since we are in the Cooking Thread, I have an old home remedy for sinusitis: Eat a big spoonful of good horseradish. Have some Kleenex handy. It will clean out your head in seconds.
Years ago at a corporate party, they had wasabi out for the spring rolls. And chips. but not me!!!
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@dcon said in The Cooking Thread:
wasabi out for the spring rolls
Wasabi on spring rolls? Who does that? Is this some weird Asian-fusion thing gone wrong? Like...fusing together vastly different Asian foods?
While on the subject of spring rolls: Years ago you used to be able to order "Spring rolls" from the menu and get this:
Now, unless it says "Fresh Spring Rolls" you get this:
Deep fried spring rolls are an abomination. That is all.
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@polygeekery said in The Cooking Thread:
Deep fried spring rolls are an abomination. That is all.
That's what they were...
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@polygeekery said in The Cooking Thread:
Deep fried spring rolls are an abomination.
USA, where you can deep fry almost anything !!!
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@timebandit said in The Cooking Thread:
USA, where you can deep fry almost anything
Almost? Canuck please. Here we even deep fat fry our fats.
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@polygeekery said in The Cooking Thread:
Almost? Canuck please. Here we even deep fat fry our fats.
Watermelon
Twinkies
Margaritas
Cadbury Creme Eggs
Shoes
And to be really American...
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I've never understood the whole "spring roll" thing. No matter which axis you drop them on, they don't bounce. So calling them springs is totally false advertising!
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@polygeekery As I understand it, they're slightly different things. The fried ones are a more Chinese-style spring roll. The ones with rice wrappers that aren't fried are Vietnamese spring rolls.
@TimeBandit deep fried nothing: funnel cakes.
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@timebandit I was almost disappointed when it didn't blew up when putting in the fryer. I guess the coating was thick enough.
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@polygeekery said in The Cooking Thread:
Almost? Canuck please. Here we even deep fat fry our fats.
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hot beer
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Eh...wat?
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@dkf said in The Cooking Thread:
@boomzilla said in The Cooking Thread:
Eh...wat?
Peas can be nice in salad.
I get the feeling that you didn't watch the video.
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@polygeekery said in The Cooking Thread:
@dcon said in The Cooking Thread:
wasabi out for the spring rolls
Wasabi on spring rolls? Who does that? Is this some weird Asian-fusion thing gone wrong? Like...fusing together vastly different Asian foods?
While on the subject of spring rolls: Years ago you used to be able to order "Spring rolls" from the menu and get this:
Now, unless it says "Fresh Spring Rolls" you get this:
Deep fried spring rolls are an abomination. That is all.
I had tried French fries with wasabi mayonnaise before, and the taste is surprisingly good.
The sauce removed the oily feeling of deep fried food and I suppose it will work for other kinds of deep fried food as well.
Since there is lots of oil (mayonnaise also contains oil), just make sure you don't eat too much...
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@timebandit You forgot deep-fried ice cream:
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Not sure if this should go in the Bad Ideas thread, but it's food, so I'm dropping it here.
The oddest food combination I've ever tried is a donut with maple frosting and sprinkles, dipped into honey-mustard barbecue sauce. It was kinda weird, because I could distinctly taste every separate flavor, but they were all at the same time. They didn't mix to form some strange in-between or new corrupted flavor from being mixed, like a citrus juice and milk (blekh!).
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@djls45 said in The Cooking Thread:
The oddest food combination I've ever tried is a donut with maple frosting and sprinkles, dipped into honey-mustard barbecue sauce.
At our state fair they have bacon cheeseburgers where the bun is made of Krispy Kreme glazed donuts. Sounds disgusting, is amazing. It is the one fair food that I have every year.
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@djls45 said in The Cooking Thread:
@timebandit You forgot deep-fried ice cream:
That's more of a Mexican thing.
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@polygeekery said in The Cooking Thread:
@djls45 said in The Cooking Thread:
@timebandit You forgot deep-fried ice cream:
That's more of a Mexican thing.
So we've got USA, Canada, and Mexico now. It seems to me that deep-frying things is more of a North American thing.
My wife: North American Fried Tableau Association?
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@djls45 there is a variation on fried ice cream that uses tempura batter. So the Japanese are represented also. But...that was invented in America.
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@polygeekery said in The Cooking Thread:
So. Finally made this yesterday (or rather, started the marinade Friday night and got to the grillin' Saturday around 4)
HOLY SHIT GUYS. "THIS PORK IS AMAZING" was the only sentence more common than "Uh. Are there any more bags of rice?" (we murdered about $3k worth of smart phones)
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@dcon said in The Cooking Thread:
@Weng said in The Cooking Thread:
The question is: What do I want to do with biscuits?
Hot out of the oven, slather with
butteravacado (obviously) and eat.FTFY.
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So on a lark, I bought the Bob's Burgers cookbook.
Oh. My. God.
My eyes are opened to the burger as a canvas.
Never more am I bound to the most adventurous burger having BBQ sauce, pineapple (autocorrect suggested Pomeranian) and bacon.
This space. Soon.
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@weng pick up the book "Meathead" also. I believe it was @Dreikin that suggested it to me. Lots of good stuff in there.
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@djls45 said in The Cooking Thread:
Don't ever mix orange juice and chocolate milk! Orange juice and non-dairy hot chocolate is really good, though.
Yeah, acids and milk don't tend to go well together unless you want that reaction.
And orange + chocolate is delicious
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@weng said in The Cooking Thread:
My eyes are opened to the burger as a canvas.
I love making burgers. You can do so much from "mush some mince together and fry it" right up to including all sorts of weird and wonderful things.
Some of my favourites are pork burgers with cinnamon and apple sauce mixed in, and hollowing out a space in a beef burger to put blue cheese in before covering it and cooking.
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@jaloopa said in The Cooking Thread:
"mush some mince together and
frygrill it"All the taste with less of the fat
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@dreikin said in The Cooking Thread:
@djls45 said in The Cooking Thread:
Don't ever mix orange juice and chocolate milk! Orange juice and non-dairy hot chocolate is really good, though.
Yeah, acids and milk don't tend to go well together unless you want that reaction.
And orange + chocolate is delicious
I wonder if you couldn't neutralize the acid well enough with a pinch of baking soda (or maybe a crushed Tums?) to avoid curdling the milk, without sacrificing (or changing) too much of the flavor...
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@anotherusername citrus is an intrinsically acidic flavor profile, so I doubt that would be possible. You can however keep the milk cold and slow the reaction to the point that it really does not matter. The curdling effect is highly dependent on temperature. That is how orange sherbet is made. At freezer temperatures the reaction is effectively completely stalled.
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Pulled 6 chicken legs out of the freezer Sunday night, drizzled them with a mixture of melted butter (about 3 tbsp?), vegetable oil, dried herbs, and a general-purpose meat rub, then left them in the fridge to defrost. Monday evening I laid them in a rectangular baking pan. The butter/oil mixture was solid, so I stuck the container in the microwave for a few seconds to re-melt it and poured it over them. Into the oven for a half hour, flip, a quick sprinkle of more herbs and the rub, then back into the oven, and started a cup of rice in the cooker. About when the rice was finished I got the chicken legs out; dumped the rice into the pan which the chicken had cooked in and mixed it all around to get all of that butter/oil/spices/chicken drippings mixed in, then added a dash of garlic salt and a few shakes of the rub mix.
Turned out good.
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The other night I made fried cauliflower rice. It was very good. I've been really impressed at how easy cauliflower rice is to make and it's always really good, even when I fuck up the recipe.
Of course, I'm lazy and tend to buy the stuff already processed into rice from the original, but it's not that difficult to make from "scratch."
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This weekend was our yearly BBQ/Bday for the youngest. I made pulled pork, baked beans, macaroni salad, baked mac and cheese ("baked" in the smoker, which was quite nice) and Tres Leches cake for dessert. Everything turned out amazing and multiple people told me I should start a restaurant, which was quite a compliment. My reply was, "There is one sure way to make a small fortune running a restaurant. Start with a large fortune."