MikeG's Profile
Help! What is this thing called? (Tonkatsu holder / stand / grate thing)
The 18/8 probably refers to the (decent quality) type of stainless steel it's made of. Fwiw, for various reasons, $13 is not at all out of line for a Japanese product like that.
Password not recognized?
As of this AM, the site keeps logging me out and then doesn't recognize my password when I try to log back in. I can only get in by resetting my password (to the same one as before). But that doesn't last long, whereupon the site logs me out again and the cycle starts over again. I haven't changed any browser security settings or anything, so I don't think the problem is on my end.
Substitute Pastry flour for All Purpose? [moved from Greater Boston area board]
I'm sure you could make whole wheat work structurally, so to speak, but I would find the flavor really funky in something calling itself "cake"...
Sorrento lemons!
I don't know if they've been around before and I just missed them, but I saw (and needless to say bought a bunch of) Sorrento lemons at Manhattan Fruit Exchange in the Chelsea Market earlier today. I'm planning to make marmalade but if you're a limoncello fan, these are the lemons you've been looking for all your life. ;) I didn't think to ask, but I assume these are domestic; apparently there's a small but growing number of orchards out in California growing them these days.
ISO lots & lots of radishes -- without the greens.
Earlier this afternoon I saw radishes by the pound and radishes in little bags - both already trimmed - at Manhattan Fruit Exchange in the Chelsea Market...
Substitute Pastry flour for All Purpose? [moved from Greater Boston area board]
I think for a pound cake, pastry flour will be fine, possibly even an improvement, and definitely preferable to bread flour. The idea of whole wheat flour in a simple cake where it will really stand out sounds really unpleasant to me.
Italian 00 flour
Whole Foods, Columbus Circle (IDK about other stores), recently started stocking Caputo 00 for pizza
Garden of Eden, 14th near 5th, also has the Caputo 00, sometimes they also have the soft wheat variety for pasta.
DiPalo's on Grand St in Little Italy sometimes has it, but not always.
Oddly enough, I haven't seen it at Eataly, but maybe I missed it.
Chelsea Market
No else has mentioned Buon Italia. I consider it a useful destination but even if you don't have a specific interest in Italian foods, it's definitely worth browsing if you're already at the Market. No pretty displays to look at, but they have a lot of Italian imports you won't find elsewhere in Manhattan. Never tried their prepared foods, but they have some of those, too.
Chinese baking powder?
Aha - that thought vaguely crossed my mind because of the texture. So it's basically extra fine granulated sodium bicarbonate?
Chinese baking powder?
I mistakenly grabbed a bag of Lion Brand "Dried Baking Powder" in the store yesterday and didn't notice until I got home. I don't have a scanner/camera and can barely parse Chinese characters so I can't post its Chinese name, but it's slightly granular, like fine table salt, rather than the floury texture of Euro/American baking powder. Anyone know exactly what this stuff is, or failing that, for what/how it's used?
Storing Glazed Baked Goods
I vote for glazing the day-of. An ordinary glaze will harden up only so much in high humidity to begin with, and my experience with FL humidity says it'll turn to goo that starts to melt into the muffins if you do it the day before -- sugar is great at sucking moisture out of the air.
A Sour Cream Glut
Baked goods like coffee cakes, muffins, pancakes, etc. use up a lot quickly, assuming you have the audience for it or don't mind pigging out yourself (lol):
Also fwiw, in my exerience, unopened sour cream keeps in decent quality for a scarily long time - I've used it a couple of months past the its date (not sure if it's a use-by or best-by thing.
Looking for whole Katsuo to shave to make dashi
The only place in the NYC area I can think of that might have it is Mitsuwa, in NJ, but I believe Sunrise Mart is a subsidiary, so they may not have access to it anymore, either. You may encounter a strong language barrier if you don't speak Japanese, but it's worth trying them on the phone at least.
Turkish rice??? [moved from UK/Ireland board]
You'd probably get more responses on the Home Cooking board, but the rice I've eaten in Turkish restaurants here in the US is usually made pilaf-style, with, as you note, orzo or some other small pasta and a good amount of fat. The preferred rice, not always used due to expense, is called "baldo" rice which may be what you saw in the shop. Here's as good a basic recipe for the pilaf as any: http://www.aturkishcookinamerica.com/recipes/Pilafs/WhiteRice.htm
Passover
This is awfully vague - if "kosher for Passover" isn't necessary, what million questions would you have about the ingredients?
Chinese salt and pepper dishes: sichuan peppercorns??
Fwiw, based on personal experience, they weren't banned for decades, so you may well have been eating Szechuan peppercorns, at least some of the time. They were indeed banned a couple of times, but only for a total of a few years, until they developed heat treatment protocols to prevent the possibility of spreading citrus canker.
Can I freeze beer to cook with later?
Yes, freezing beer for cooking works just fine. Flatness is irrelevant for cooking, but as Roland Parker alludes to, you wouldn't want to put an unopened glass bottle in the freezer. Water expands when it freezes so the bottle might crack apart. (Likewise, whatever you store your leftovers in, leave enough room for expansion.)
I doubt the beer is doing anything in the bread that will be hurt by freezing it, it's probably just providing flavor and maybe a bit of carbs. Speculating wildly, even if it's unpasteurized beer and you're using it for some residual yeast, yeast survives freezing just fine.
Rice: which variety is the easiest to digest?
You're asking several questions at once, it seems to me so I'm not quite sure if these are the answers you're really looking for, while I'm no nutritionist, I would imagine that liquidy or soupy preparations like risotto and congee would make the most starch available the fastest, since you purposely cook the starch out of the kernels into the surrounding liquid. How much of a difference it makes when you compare methods with the same rice type, though, I have no idea.
If you're looking for fastest absorption of starch, you're probably best off looking at the glycemic indices of the different rice varieties. White jasmine rice has the highest GI of the more common rices; basmati, the lowest. But I don't know which has more total starch by weight. (There are lots of websites with GI info, it's not something I pay too much attention to myself.)
I don't think the method of preparation much matters as far as the starch is concerned, though germinated rice contains amino acids and vitamins not present in raw rice. (Google "rice" and "GABA".) If you're looking for maximum starch absorption, though, you probably want to avoid boiling rice in water (then draining and finishing in the oven.) I don't think it's any more or less digestible cooked that way, but you will lose a fair amount of starch in the cooking water.
Coke vs Pepsi Challenge! Who wants to try?
I drink very little of either so I'm not really interested in actually testing myself, but after a lifetime of experience of them, I can't imagine I could not tell the difference. It's pretty simple: apart from it being excruciatingly sweet, I like the basic flavor of Pepsi and I dislike Coke. Dislike it enough to avoid it. Granting that they're both "cola beverages", I think they taste very different and in general I definitely don't have a palate worth bragging about.
PS: This depends to some degree on just how cold they are, but then, if you make anything cold enough, you basically just won't taste it at all...
Freezing Food
Freezing milk/cream by themselves can be a little problematic, but freezing cooked foods containing them is usually no problem.
My Daughter's School Assignment: Dinner for 4 @ $4
First of all, it sounds like the project was to reproduce the experience of making do with what seems like impossibly little money, rather than reproducing a Depression-era meal. If broccoli had been available for a few cents a pound, I dare say a lot of people would've been eating broccoli. (sigh)
But as to shipping out of season, I don't think broccoli really is all that tough where shipping is concerned. It's physically fragile, and has to be kept cold or it'll deteriate in a few days. I don't know either when mass-market refrigerated transport became available, let alone cheap enough to become common for "ordinary" vegs, but I suspect the latter didn't happen until after WWII. Some items like tropical fruits were available pretty early, but they were still too expensive even for the safely-employed to eat as freely as we do today.
Fresh Coconut Milk Substitute
Somewhere in between fresh grated and canned is "freshly made" from frozen, grated coconut. If the frozen coconut hasn't been mistreated in shipping, it should taste better than canned.
But otherwise, yes, you should get more or less the same results from a good (no thickeners) canned coconut milk. I've found Chaokoh, Chef's Choice and Maesri brand coconut milks to be pretty good. I don't know how thick the milk your recipe calls for is supposed to be, these brands are all quite creamy - but you can always dilute them a little if they seem too thick.
Ingredient search
"Rice oil" is called "rice bran oil." I see it mostly at Japanese and sometimes pan-Asian groceries. Occasionally elsewhere, usually for a lot more money. Basically any Chinese or SE Asian grocery will have the rice flour. BTW, it is rice _flour_, not purified rice starch, which apparently is used for glue. It's also not the same thing as sweet or glutinous rice flour, so watch out for that.
I know they have liquid glucose, don't know about the dry, but the only place I can think of that might have it is NY Cake, on W 22d St. in Manhattan.
Hard Sugar Remedy?
There's no reason to throw it out - worse comes to worst you can break it up with a hammer or something and weigh it, or use it when measurements needn't be precise.
But instead of hitting the bag against the edge of the counter, try slamming it down on the long, wide face of the bag. Unless it was exposed to moisture or really extreme humidity, it should eventually loosen up. (You might want to put it in a heavy plastic bag before you really start beating on it, so it doesn't end up all over the place.) I had stocked up on sugar on sale at one point so I've been dealing with this issue a lot lately myself. ;)
Saltpeter (Brick and Mortar stores only) anywhere in NYC
I've bought it (potassium nitrate) at Chinese and Vietnamese groceries in Chinatown. Pretty sure Tan Tin Hung, on the Bowery just below Grand St, would have it. Far cheaper I'm sure than Kalustyan's, but on the other hand, less certain, since getting an answer over the phone about availability might be a problem in English.
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Tan Tin Hung
121 Bowery, New York, NY 10002
Cursor / Mouse loses "Focus" when editing post
Disabling the add-on seems to be working for the moment, but the problem hasn't been constant for me in the first place, so I can't tell if the fix is permanent. But thanks for figuring this much out, anyway, it was really starting to drive me nuts!
Cursor / Mouse loses "Focus" when editing post
And now it's happening to me when I try to write posts for the first time, too. Guess I'll have to do all my typing in notepad until this latest bug is shaken out...
Cursor / Mouse loses "Focus" when editing post
This has been happeneing to me since mid-February ( http://chowhound.chow.com/topics/834048 ). It is now, and has been, unique to Chowhound.
The "workaround" is that the cursor still "exists", it's just not visible. Mouse and keyboard movement commands work, you just don't see the cursor. So you have to constantly highlight and re-highlight some part of the text to see where the cursor is at any given moment. So far it's only happening to me when I edit posts, not when I post them initially, so it's not the end of the world, just an on-going pain in the ass.
LC burned my beans..grrrrr
As a matter of ill-defined principle, I dislike being stuck with (expensive) proprietary products like LC cleaner, but I have to agree, it restores the finish better than any other product I've tried. I don't use it often, but like to keep it around for cases like this. It even works well on seriously burned-on crud on the outside of the pans.
