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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 30th, 2023

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  • You don’t need a sous vide machine to do that, especially for something that only needs 30 minutes.

    Take a cooler, and fill it with water at the right temp. You can add boiling water or room temp water to adjust up or down. Depending on what you’re cooking, you can aim for a few degrees over to account for the temp of the food dropping the water temp. With 12 yolks, I don’t think it’s necessary. Then just stick your food in and close it up. Depending on how big your food is, how big/good your cooler is, you might want to check the temp a couple times throughout the cook.


  • That’s probably most similar to what we’d call “flaked corn”, but it’s not something that we see commonly in stores (in America, at least). It is somewhat similar to “corn flakes” which are different.

    It’s mainly used for brewing and distilling, and it’s made by taking dry corn, partially cooking it with water, putting it through a roller mill, and then drying it out.

    Reading about farinha de milho, it actually might be similar to “corn flakes”, though. It’s a breakfast cereal made by taking ground corn and cooking it in water, and then drying it out in little sheets. It is super common to use as an ingredient in things like fried chicken batter, or as a topping to things you want to be crispy.



  • For ground beef, especially, too many people try to chop it all up and get it “gray”. I don’t eat beef often, but when I do make ground beef, I basically treat it like making a hamburger: salt it immediately prior to placing in a hot pan, and don’t touch it until there is browned crust, and then try to flip it and get a crust on the other side. Only then will I break it up into little pieces. If you have too much meat to do that, you are better off getting a good sear on half of the meat, and tossing in the other half later, than trying to do all of it and basically just boiling the meat in juices.







  • Generally, for freezing anything, the faster you can freeze it, the better. Ice crystals grow as things freeze, and if they grow slow, they grow big, and they disrupt the structure of the food, and make the texture mushy.

    Something I frequently freeze is greens like kale. I’ll harvest more than I can eat from my garden, so I freeze it. I basically wash it, then lay it out on cookie sheets in a single layer, and put those in a chest freezer. After I’ve had enough time to wash the next batch, I’ll go down and peel the frozen kale off the cookie sheet and put it into a container of some kind.


  • I think I first saw it from Alton Brown, but he braises the beef the day before, then cools it down and uses any drippings from that the next day to cook the veggies/potatoes. Then when it’s ready to eat, you just toss in the beef and let it warm up.

    It works because you need high temp (simmering/boiling) for the collagen to break down into gelatin. That’s when the beef gets really “shreddy” for lack of a better term. If you cool it down, though, the gelatin solidifies and holds the beef together in good bite sized pieces. When you warm it back up, you don’t warm back up to a boil (or at least not for long), so all that gelatin doesn’t completely dissolve, and you still get those good chunks.



  • I think it depends on the oil/fat. I think the word “rancid” conjures up the idea that it would taste like pure garbage, but that isn’t really the case. What you are tasting is oxidation (and technically some other reactions, too), and not all flavors of oxidation are “bad” flavors. Sherry, for example, is partly defined by the oxidation.

    Most “refined” oils (e.g., soybean, peanut, canola) are going to be fairly resistant to oxidation because they don’t have many compounds that oxidize easily. Something like extra virgin olive oil or flaxseed oil, though, has a lot of compounds that can oxidize. That’s why some oils come in opaque containers, and warn you to keep them away from heat. Some, you even need to refrigerate. If you did side by side testing, you’d probably pick it up. Oxidation is one of the reasons you get rid of old fry oil; the heat speeds up the reactions.

    Whole wheat, I can definitely detect the difference, and I’ve definitely had rancid avocado oil before. Nuts, I’m not sure about, but I think the flavor of an oxidized nut wouldn’t really be bad, just not as good.

    The taste of oxidation is often described as “wet cardboard”, which I agree with for a lot of things. “Fishy” is another word I’ve seen for oil that’s gone rancid




  • Based on the wording of your post, there’s a few different questions it seems like you could be asking.

    • How to make this already existing syrup less sweet?
    • How to make future syrups less sweet?
    • How to make future syrups with less sugar?

    To make the current one less sweet, I think you could add something with bitterness or acidity. They literally make black walnut bitters, and you could look into adding some of that ino the syrup. Depending on how you plan to use it, you could serve it with an acidic component.

    To make future syrups less sweet, you could use glucose, which is less sweet than sucrose or fructose. To make them less sweet and have less sugar, you could use many different thickeners depending on how you want the texture. Xanthan gum, gum Arabic, maltodextrin, pectin, etc.


  • There’s basically a tree of operations that have been applied to a model. At any point, you can go back and edit what you’ve done at a previous step. For example, if you padded a feature out 10 mm, then added more stuff onto that feature, you could still go back and change that padding operation to 15 mm.

    I’m still super new to freecad, and I haven’t done anything too complex in it yet, but my understanding is that some types of those changes can result in the topological naming problem. The way I understand it, when you make a shape, the software numbers all of the segments, vertices, and faces. If later changes are applied to those numbered faces, etc, and you go back and redo the operation that made those faces, etc, in a different order, the numbering will be different, and it will break your model.

    There is a fork of freecad that fixes that whole issue, but the fix hasn’t been implemented yet in the main fork cause it’s pretty foundational to the working of freecad, so there’s a lot of things that can break




  • I don’t use ground meat for chili, typically I will use a braising cut. For that, I salt it, and let it air dry for a bit, then sear it. When it’s nicely browned, I’ll pull the meat out, throw in onions to deglaze the pan, then garlic, any spices that could use a toasting (like cumin), and some tomato paste.

    Finally I pour in my chile puree, which in my opinion is a non-negotiable part of what make chili, chili. That’s just a combo of a few different types of dried chiles that I’ve toasted, soaked in liquid like chicken stock, blended, and passed through a sieve. Then I slice up the meat, and put it back in.

    If I were to use ground beef, I would basically just do the same thing, but I’d skip the salting part and just do it all after I add the liquid. It’s hard to get good color on ground beef if you have a big hunk of it, especially if any moisture is pulled out of it. Sometimes if I need to brown a bunch of ground beef, I’ll do it in batches, basically cooking each chunk like a separate “burger”. If I’m lazy, I’ll do however much can fit in a single layer well spaced, then just toss the rest in after. I’d rather have half of the meat well browned than all of it “grey”.