Blogs : General Topics Digest
General Topics Digest Weekly highlights from the most interesting Chowhound posts on the General Chowhounding Topics board, such as the best frozen pizza, how to store chicken breasts, what restaurant to pop the question at, and where to find your mail order meats.
Powdered Condiments
Ohio’s Barry Farm sells unusual products like honeydew jam and rhubarb ketchup, but what greygarious found most enticing was the unusual selection of powders. Cheese powder, sour cream powder, dehydrated tomato powder, and granulated toasted shallots make interesting and unusual condiments.
Mixed into homemade macaroni and cheese, the cheese powder “added a little of the addictive ‘blue box’ flavor whose appeal is a guilty pleasure,” says greygarious. “I combined the sour cream, cheese, and granulated shallot on popcorn–yippee!” Johnathan Sundstrom, winner of the 2007 James Beard Award, has taken powdered condiments into high cuisine with things like ham powder. So if you feel like it, sprinkle instead of saucing.
Board Link: Interesting powders and jars from Barry Farm
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Tagged with: general topics, food and cooking, powders, powdered, condiments, vegetables, tomato, cheese, barry farm
Premium Ice Cream: What Makes It Special?
You can buy cheap ice cream by the gallon; premium ice cream comes in cute little expensive quart containers. What’s so special about the expensive stuff? One essential difference is that cheaper ice creams tend to have more air whipped into them—the term for this is “overrun”—while the premium ice creams tend to be denser, says babette feasts.
“Some manufacturers take a quart of base and churn it into a quart and a half, others will churn it into a half gallon,” she says. “Same amount of product, different amounts of air.” Premium ice creams have more butterfat (and also more fat and more calories) per ounce than cheaper, aerated ice creams. So you have to choose: Do you want ethereally light ice cream that melts away instantly in your mouth, or rich, heavy ice cream that sticks around for a moment?
Querencia explains the difference in quality this way: “To me the luxurious quality in more expensive ice cream is that it is smeary rather than puffy. When you smear it with your spoon against the dish, it doesn’t fluff.”
Jon Snyder, founder of NYC’s Il Laboratorio del Gelato, would call that fluff “feathering,” and would say it’s a sign the ice cream’s too airy. For more on ideal ice cream qualities, see CHOW’s “How to Judge Ice Cream.”
Board Link: You scream, I scream…
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Tagged with: general topics, food and cooking, ice cream, premium, overrun, air, butterfat, feathering
Yellow Watermelon
Yellow-fleshed watermelons are “totally legit,” says schrutefarms, who got one by accident. It turned out to be “the JUICIEST watermelon in the world, to the point that it dripped all over my kitchen cabinets and floor.” They’re also “really, really sweet,” with a fleshier texture than their pink cousins. “The yellow watermelons I’ve had have a more muted / delicate flavor and thinner rind than the red watermelons I usually buy in the states,” says cimui.
CDouglas likes a watermelon variety with orange flesh called OrangeGlo: “The flesh tastes almost like tropical orange sherbet. Truly amazing.”
Board Link: Whoa! Yellow Watermelon!!
Image source: Flickr member zilupe under Creative Commons
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Tagged with: general topics, food and cooking, yellow watermelon, orange watermelon, orange glo, orange glow, orangeglo
Aged Boerenkaas Cheese
There’s nothing wrong with young Gouda cheese, with its soft, creamy texture. bulavinaka likes Beemster Graskaas, aged only one month, which has a creamy mouthfeel and slightly nutty taste.
But aged Gouda is a different beast. “My favorite is boerenkaas (the name means farmer cheese),” says Caitlin McGrath (who also writes for CHOW’s Home Cooking Digest). It’s aged for a minimum of a few months, but starts to get brilliant at about five years of aging. “These aged ones develop strong caramel notes and the salty crystals that create intense bursts of flavor (as in Parmigiano-Reggiano),” she says. “I’m not a huge fan of Gouda in general, but I like the aged ones, and love the older boerenkaas.”
moh also loves aged boerenkaas, with its delicious characteristic salty crystals. “This cheese is one of my favorite breakfast cheeses, served with a good crusty artisanal bread smeared with really good french butter, and served with stone fruits like cherries, plums, apricots,” she says. “Such a lovely way to start the day.”
jumpingmonk loves super-aged cow’s milk Goudas. Such finds are rare, says jumpingmonk, but the best are 12 years old or older, a rich brown, and so “hard and brittle that the easiest way to ‘cut it’ is to hit it with the meat tenderizer and let it shatter.”
Board Link: Waiting for Gouda - what’s your favorite?
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Tagged with: general topics, food and cooking, gouda, cheese, boerenkass, aged gouda
Japanese Fried Chicken
Chicken katsu (pictured) and chicken karaage are both Japanese fried chicken dishes, says almansa, but they are distinct. “Chicken katsu is sliced breaded breast, while karaage is usually leg marinated in soy and sake before frying,” says almansa. “Katsu is more like chicken tenders from a box, while karaage is more like what we think of as fried chicken.”
Chicken katsu is a variant of the dish tonkatsu, says trolley, which is breaded pork cutlet. It’s usually served with rice, shredded cabbage, and a thick sauce made from apple purée that resembles Worcestershire. Chicken karaage, on the other hand, is not sauced as much. It’s usually served with mayonnaise and lemon, says almansa. “My mom usually uses cornstarch to make it super crispy,” says trolley. “We eat ours with a lemon wedge and sometimes a dash of shoyu. No mayo here,” he says.
Board Link: Ckicken katsu vs chicken karaage
Image source: Flickr member adactio under Creative Commons
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Tagged with: general topics, food and cooking, fried chicken, japanese, chicken, katsu, karaage
Taiwanese White Gourd Juice
There are many brands of Chinese white gourd juice, but Taisun brand, from Taiwan, tastes just like cookies, says Jim Leff. The stuff is “every memory you have of cookies transformed into juice,” he says. “This isn’t what they were trying for. And there’s really no reason for it. But that doesn’t mean it’s not true.”
Board Link: Taiwanese White Gourd Juice: Perfect Evocation of Cookies
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Tagged with: general topics, food and cooking, white gourd juice, tai sun brand
