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enki42 posted:If you grab a random can of tomatoes off a supermarket shelf, you're probably going to be disappointed. Maybe this is different in different countries, but in the UK, pretty much every can of tomatoes is serviceable, I have never given the type of tomatoes in my tinned tomatoes any thought, I’ve only bought branded tins when supermarket own brand has been out of stock, I make tomato sauces all the time and I have literally never been disappointed by the quality of the tomatoes.
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Nov 23, 2020 23:07
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Edit: I probably need to calm down about posh tomatoes
Scientastic fucked around with this message at 23:17 on Nov 23, 2020 |
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Nov 23, 2020 23:11
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I could totally buy that the average UK quality of tomatoes is comparable enough that you don't need to worry. I'm actually making tomato sauce right now, and I had to use plain jane Unico tomatoes (they scaled up Covid restrictions today so everyone went completely insane on the weekend and our grocery store was low on stock). It's not like I'm not going to eat the sauce or anything, they're perfectly serviceable, but they're noticeably worse than the tomatoes I usually get. For the relatively small premium, I think it's worth it. It's not like pasta with a marinara sauce is going to be a pricey dish even with bougie tomatoes.
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Nov 23, 2020 23:42
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Any recommendations on a meat grinder/stuffer? I'd like to start making sausages but I don't want to spend more than $200. I have a kitchen-aid mixer but I'm not against getting a standalone.
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Nov 23, 2020 23:53
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For the sausage-dabbler, the metal KitchenAid attachment works great for grinding, using it for stuffing is rough though. It's pretty awkward and can be slow going, although you can get perfectly fine sausages out of it if you're patient. Even when I felt like I was getting the hang of it it was still frustrating to use pretty much every time. I upgraded to the LEM 5lb hand cranked vertical stuffer and never looked back. If you look around you can probably find them both for just under $200 total. I also would recommend Homemade Sausage by Chris Carter and James Peisker, which has recipes for all your classic styles plus some more modern styles (kimchi sausage, winterwurst, etc.).
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Nov 24, 2020 01:18
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Thanks for the info, I was really hoping I could get a single device that was capable of doing both. I might slum it with the attachment for a while to see if this is actually something I want to pursue then bite the bullet on something nicer if my wife decides my sausages are worth the expense 
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Nov 24, 2020 02:04
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two_beer_bishes posted:Thanks for the info, I was really hoping I could get a single device that was capable of doing both. I might slum it with the attachment for a while to see if this is actually something I want to pursue then bite the bullet on something nicer if my wife decides my sausages are worth the expense That's what I did. I got the LEM stuffer because I wanted to try using sheep casing, which is smaller and more delicate than hog, and knew I'd probably literally cry trying to manage that with the KitchenAid. If you decide to stick with it the 5lb LEM is a must-buy. But it's not all bad, I did manage to make these with the KitchenAid on my second or third attempt. 
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Nov 24, 2020 03:17
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I wanna eat your sausage.
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Nov 24, 2020 03:18
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How clean do you keep sheet pans? At some point I got in the habit of using non-stick foil with my sheet pans for easy cleanup. Talking with friends it seemed like nobody else did that and maybe I was being needlessly wasteful. So I tried baking a potato right on the pan and it seemed to make a huge mess that took tons of scrubbing to clean up. But maybe you don't need to scrub off the baked on oil? Is this just how sheet pans look after they've been used a few times? 
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Nov 24, 2020 16:14
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McCracAttack posted:How clean do you keep sheet pans? I used to use foil on my sheet pans as well, but I really feel like it was keeping the stuff I was cooking on from achieving the browning I was looking for so I stopped. It does make it a bit more time-intensive to clean, but the two tricks I've found are to 1) wash the pan as soon as you're done cooking on it before the bits left behind have a chance to really dry and stick onto it, and 2) Bar Keeper's Friend for any hard-to-remove stains. On the pan in your picture, there's a ton of baked-on oil that I'd definitely try to remove. It may also depend on the type/quality of the sheet pan you're using; I switched over exclusively to Nordic Ware half sheet pans, and I find them much easier to clean than the previous sheet pans I had of unknown provenance. YMMV.
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Nov 24, 2020 16:28
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For a nonstick pan though I would skip the Barkeeper's friend. For nonstick stuff I think it just is what it is, you don't want to be abrading it too hard to get stuff off. Edit: and yeah, I got a nordic ware aluminum sheet pan a while ago and it's pretty nice still. I use it less than some of the cheap pans I have, but it roasts squash and veggies without much buildup over the years. Frozen potato stuff (and other frozen foods like that) seem to be the worst for the pans for what it's worth. Roasted veggies or even fresh potatoes don't seem to be as bad. Eeyo fucked around with this message at 16:54 on Nov 24, 2020 |
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Nov 24, 2020 16:51
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I switched over to plain jane aluminum sheet pans, and I find them a lot easier to deal with than the non-stick type, since I can just go nuts on them with steel wool / barkeeper's friend. I try to keep the actual cooking surface free of anything and still looking shiny and new (corners are sometimes a bit of a mess, I do the best I can), but don't really bother with the underside.
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Nov 24, 2020 17:08
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Seconding Barkeeper's Friend. If you don't have that, a dishwasher detergent soak works well. We use pods, so one of those dissolved in water worked a treat the other day.
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Nov 24, 2020 17:09
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How much liquid smoke should I put in a 24-hour (single) turkey leg sous vide? MY WIFE wants a smoked turkey and smoking it or getting a smoked turkey isn’t happening.
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Nov 24, 2020 18:25
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I feel like liquid smoke develops an off flavor if it's cooked too long (I've run into it in the crockpot, haven't tried it sous vide). I would add it before broiling. That works great for ribs and pulled pork, since they have so much surface area, but it might not be as great with a turkey leg. Have you looked for smoked legs? I was at the grocery store last night and they had vacuum-sealed two-packs of smoked drums.
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Nov 24, 2020 18:35
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i like nice words
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McCracAttack posted:How clean do you keep sheet pans? In my experience sheet pans all look like this eventually. You can scrub all day and there's still a patina on it that won't come off. It doesn't really matter, as long as you cleaned the actual food off then the discoloration is whatever.
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Nov 24, 2020 19:10
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two_beer_bishes posted:Thanks for the info, I was really hoping I could get a single device that was capable of doing both. I might slum it with the attachment for a while to see if this is actually something I want to pursue then bite the bullet on something nicer if my wife decides my sausages are worth the expense i am a sausage dabbler, i stuffed with the grinder attachment the first couple times, and imo its not worth the hassle. get even a super cheap stuffer, it will make your life much much easier. not only is the grinder attachment not great at stuffing, it's suspended way above your counter so you'll have to set up some sort of platform to extrude your sausages onto or you'll be fighting gravity pulling your sausage casing off the stuffer tube with one hand while feeding the grinder with your other hand
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Nov 24, 2020 19:16
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BraveUlysses posted:ive come away really dissapointed from a few brands of DOP san marzanos in the past 6 months, cento and Carmelina, where i found skins still on them, or spoiled portions of the tomatoes. gently caress digging through every can to carefully examine the contents, that's not what you should have to do with canned goods. Watch out for the ones labelled 'San Marzano' in big letters but actually grown in Texas tho
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Nov 24, 2020 19:21
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feedmegin posted:Watch out for the ones labelled 'San Marzano' in big letters but actually grown in Texas tho oh yeah i'm aware, i dont know if i actually care that much anymore if they're grown in italy or not, i just dont want lovely tomatoes
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Nov 24, 2020 19:44
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Grand Fromage posted:In my experience sheet pans all look like this eventually. You can scrub all day and there's still a patina on it that won't come off. It doesn't really matter, as long as you cleaned the actual food off then the discoloration is whatever. Same, most of my sheet pans look like this. For the most part it’s just a patina or an oil varnish, neither of which are harmful to the taste of the end product to the best of my knowledge. Will it give you cancer? Maybe, I’m not an expert there.
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Nov 24, 2020 19:52
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Lawnie posted:Same, most of my sheet pans look like this. For the most part it’s just a patina or an oil varnish, neither of which are harmful to the taste of the end product to the best of my knowledge. Will it give you cancer? Maybe, I’m not an expert there. Well it's just like the seasoning on cast iron, so i think it will be fine. Whether it makes nonstick pans better or worse is another question though.
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Nov 24, 2020 21:14
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Eeyo posted:Well it's just like the seasoning on cast iron, so i think it will be fine. I don’t think it’s very likely that anything you could produce in a home kitchen would come close to the lubricity of Teflon, but I’ve been surprised by coatings before.
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Nov 24, 2020 21:35
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I can definitely say that using anything heavy duty (steel wool, barkeepers friend, comet) to clean up discoloration is a billion times more likely to be unhealthy from ripping up the nonstick coating.
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Nov 24, 2020 22:22
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Lawnie posted:I don’t think it’s very likely that anything you could produce in a home kitchen would come close to the lubricity of Teflon, but I’ve been surprised by coatings before. Oh haha I mean healthwise. Like does polymerizing the fat on teflon (or whatever they use these days) make it worse somehow?
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Nov 24, 2020 23:19
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Eeyo posted:Oh haha I mean healthwise. Like does polymerizing the fat on teflon (or whatever they use these days) make it worse somehow? Getting to a seasoned surface, however, produces a whole laundry list of nasty poo poo that you really don't want to eat (or breathe). And since e.g. the combustion and polymerisation processes that produce the seasoning are inherently stochastic, you're almost certainly going to always have a surface that has some combination of fully polymerised oil and e.g. volatile aldehydes. So in that sense the surface is almost certainly going to have some non-zero health risks associated with it that wouldn't be present in a e.g. clean ceramic (or other inert) surface. Buuuuut...since the source of this stuff is the combustion of cooking oils, you're likely to get some of them just from the, you know, cooking. So it wouldn't surprise me if this was all rounding error compared to the nice steaming plate of aggregate risk that whatever it is you're cooking represents. Don't know if anyone's actually produced numbers on the subject, though. That's sorta the punchline to a lot of questions about health risks in and around the kitchen: there are a lot of fiddly things you can fret about to adjust your risk by tiny amounts, but most of the overall risks are represented by a small number of comparatively boring things. You're way more likely to die due to a kitchen fire than you are to drop dead from polymer fume fever, but how frequently do people post to fret about the supposed dangers of Teflon pans versus making sure that you a) have a fire extinguisher and b) it's charged?
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Nov 25, 2020 00:57
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Jenny Agutter posted:i am a sausage dabbler, i stuffed with the grinder attachment the first couple times, and imo its not worth the hassle. get even a super cheap stuffer, it will make your life much much easier. not only is the grinder attachment not great at stuffing, it's suspended way above your counter so you'll have to set up some sort of platform to extrude your sausages onto or you'll be fighting gravity pulling your sausage casing off the stuffer tube with one hand while feeding the grinder with your other hand That's a good point I hadn't thought of. Looks like I can get a grinder and a 2.5lb stuffer for around $140 which will be tolerable for getting my feet wet with this stuff. I won't expect either to last forever but I just don't want to drop $600 on some really nice equipment if it's going to sit in my shed.
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Nov 25, 2020 01:10
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How does the kitchen aid grinder attachment work if I just want to grind steak into fresh burger meat?
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Nov 25, 2020 01:48
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Beautifully. You'll want the all metal one
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Nov 25, 2020 05:29
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poo poo POST MALONE posted:How does the kitchen aid grinder attachment work if I just want to grind steak into fresh burger meat? I’ve been using the plastic one for years with no problem. Couple of notes, you’ll want to chill meat in the freezer for twenty minutes or so before grinding it, makes it way easier to handle. Also, and I don’t know if this happens with the metal one, but you’ll infrequently get a bit of grey goo come out which I assume is a product of animal fat meeting a revolving metal spindle. Get in the habit of fishing those out.
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Nov 25, 2020 05:52
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I'm also ok with the plastic one and I put the whole drat thing in the freezer with the meat for those 20 mins
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Nov 25, 2020 06:34
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I also have the plastic Kitchenaid grinder, and also put the whole assembly into the freezer with the meat. I actually permanently store the die and all metal pieces in the freezer, just because. One tip I have with it is to cut your cubes of meat slightly smaller than you think you'd need; just because it fits down the feed tube into the worm gear doesn't mean it's going to be happy moving a large, semi-frozen chunk of meat without protesting. After I started cubing the meat slightly smaller (ground chuck is the only thing I've ground thus far), it's gone much more quickly and easily.
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Nov 25, 2020 15:16
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Smokehouse chef makes a metal KA attachment. Really like it for not much more cost.
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Nov 25, 2020 15:33
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I have never frozen my meat before grinding, what am I missing out on by not doing so?
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Nov 25, 2020 15:43
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Scientastic posted:I have never frozen my meat before grinding, what am I missing out on by not doing so? It goes through easier and doesn't stick together and form a sludge
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Nov 25, 2020 15:54
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Scientastic posted:I have never frozen my meat before grinding, what am I missing out on by not doing so?
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Nov 25, 2020 16:03
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I have a recipe for bone-in beef short ribs, and long story short I have chuck roast instead. Can I modify the recipe to use chuck roast instead, and if so, how should I do it? Alternatively do I need to start calling around to butchers for tomorrow?
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Nov 25, 2020 16:33
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I am looking for cookware advice. I cook for my family daily, but am still using some old beat up pots and pans from target or some equally cheap mass produced stuff. My wife gave me the go ahead to pick out what I want for my birthday, but I really don't know poo poo about what is the best etc. I have no idea what a reasonable budget for a full cookware set is. I can afford to get something quality without going with the gold plated jeff bezos set. I use everything from various pots, pans/skillets of all sizes, baking sheets, etc so a full set would be ideal. I want to prioritize quality and ease of cleaning. I am hoping I can find a black friday deal as well, but if not that is ok. I would guess at a max budget of $500 although cheaper is always better without sacrificing quality? The goal is for these to last a really long time. Also, if I need to have a certain type of cooking utensils so they don't get scratched (I believe that is a thing with nicer stuff?) that is fine too. Our range is an electric one where the top is smooth if that matters. Can someone point me to the brand I should be looking at or even a specific set if there is a best in class option? Edit: Oh and I already have a cast iron that I break out when I am really wanting to cook something nice, but honestly I don't use it that often because I am lazy and it takes longer to properly clean so I don't need cast iron recommendations at the moment. Edit 2: Oh yeah is there any good recommendations for quality oven mitts? I am tired of burning my hand with our lovely ones if I hold something too long getting it out of the oven. D-Pad fucked around with this message at 18:02 on Nov 25, 2020 |
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Nov 25, 2020 17:58
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D-Pad posted:I am looking for cookware advice. Here's some reading on Wirecutter that should get you on the right track. The Best Cookware Set Build Your Own Cookware Set Building your own piece by piece would be better but if you don't really have strong opinions on cookware then a bundled set will get you 75% of the way there. Then as you use it you'll start to say things like, "Hmm, I wish this skillet was a bit deeper." and then you'll go out and buy exactly what you want from there. D-Pad posted:Edit 2: Oh yeah is there any good recommendations for quality oven mitts? I am tired of burning my hand with our lovely ones if I hold something too long getting it out of the oven. The Best Oven Mitts and Pot Holders They really should be paying me at this point.
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Nov 25, 2020 18:11
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I don't know enough about specific brands to say you should buy specifically this or that, but here's what's worked well for me as overall general advice:
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Nov 25, 2020 18:26
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What type of stove do you have? Is it regular electric, or induction?
Scientastic fucked around with this message at 19:32 on Nov 25, 2020 |
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Nov 25, 2020 19:26
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