We mostly use them in beef stews and tomato sauces. We dice them up as fine as possible and add them. They seem to disintegrate into the sauces and just add nice umami.
Personally, I use anchovy paste a lot. It comes in a tube like toothpaste. I never need that many, so it’s nice to not have to open a whole can. It does really dissolve in pasta sauce. I also use it for caesar salad dressing. I think every culture has a way of adding MSG to things, whether it’s pure powdered msg, miso, vegemite, soy sauce, fish sauce, parmesan, mushrooms, or anchovies. For me, it’s really just an msg source with a little extra flavor of its own. I never really use enough that something tastes like anchovy.
Yeah, I use MSG and soy sauce in almost everything, but I cook a lot of Asian foods. I didn’t even think about anchovy paste. That’s something I keep forgetting to do with tomato paste as well instead of buying cans. But I don’t really make a lot of tomato based stuff, and when I do I use homegrown tomatoes. Mushrooms I use a lot as well. Thanks for the tip!
Cold proofing is a great way to develop flavor, but the down side is that it’s hard to tell if something is ready to bake. It’s also easy to overproof for the same reason. It just requires baking the same recipe multiple times using the same fridge until you get a handle on the proper amount of proofing time. Another way you could develop the flavor is by using a preferment like a bigga.
Undercooking can be avoided by taking the temp of the bread using a thermometer. It should be 200F inside, minimum.
But yes, you can def save a bread that hasn’t come out quite right! Toasting is a great way to do that.
I’m saying that I do all those things on purpose when I am baking a sandwich loaf. I always will toast the bread first unless I’m making grilled cheese.
Any other type of bread is baked the way it should be, proper rise times, etc. The exception to that is when I am playing around with very long cold ferments (5+ days), or alternative leaveners like rice, chillies, beans, whatever. They’re much more unpredictable in behavior.
This is a guess, but maybe butyric acid produced by anerobic bacteria? Butyric acid is ‘buttery and unpleasant’ vs Diacetyl which is a lot of the smell in good butter, and should be in Cheddar (and many other cheeses).
About smell being unpleasant, içm not really sure, because i’m not sure how cheese really should smell. For fresh cheeses they just smell like milk, but how should hard cheese smell when drying, after drying, etc
Also, in any case, if it’s that bacteria, and it smells weird, tastes bitter, should I discard it?
Hopefully someone with more cheesemaking experience will reply. I don’t know enough about it to say. I would not eat anymore of it without knowing more about the cause.
There are cheeses that are very strong and ‘bad tasting’ to many people, Casu Marzu and Époisses for example, but the smell and flavor is more of Ammonia, not at all what you are describing.
As a general rule, I would discard any product where an unpleseant and/or bitter aroma is not exlicitly expected. Our senses of tase and smell are very good at distinguishing “good”, that is energy dense and clean, food from " bad", that is mostly rotten or contaminated, food. I have little experience with cheese making but if any doughs or yoghurts I make start to smell or taste bitter or otherwise off, it is usually because the microfauna got out of hamd and malign bacteria started overproducing.
Ribeye. Salt with kosher salt, let rest. Sous vide for about 2 hours at about 132 to 134 Fahrenheit. Let rest. Sear on cast iron skillet, ideally with butter, shallots, and herbs if you can manage not to burn them.
I used to never wash my rice, but did notice the rice sludge in the rice cooker so figured, why not, let's wash it, and no more sludge, go figure. I even bought one of those two piece rice washing bowls from amazon which makes it so much easier. I'm a rice washing convert. Also, rice cookers are the greatest invention since sliced bread.
Here are my findings for both, which are interesting, if you're counting calories and on a diet:
Cooking for consistency, initial consistency of rice cooked in Instant Pot is better, but yields much less rice, Rice Cooker yields almost 25% more rice per oz of dry rice.
1280 calories for 2 cups of uncooked white rice + 4 cups of water. Rice Cooker White Rice recipe yields 48oz of white rice .
1280 calories for 2 cups of uncooked white rice + 2.25 cups of water. IP White Rice recipe yields 32oz of white rice.
Now, of course I used less water in the IP than I did in the rice cooker, but it's the consistency of the rice I was testing.
I've also found if I cook a big batch in the rice cooker, and it's gloopy, I freeze it in individual sized meal weights of 8 oz, and when it defrosts, I can break it up in the plastic bag with my fingers, put it in the microwave for 3 minutes at 50% and it's perfect.
By the time it's been frozen, thawed and microwaved, wouldn't rice cooker rice lose water weight and quite possibly be more in line with IP rice initial values?
the weight doesn't change all that much post freeze, and the ease of having readily available frozen rice i can leave in the fridge to thaw overnight for the next days meal, beats having to use the rice cooker or ip each time. it works for me, and feels like i'm cheating in how simple it is. one rice cook sets me up for a couple weeks of meals that i use rice with.
I don’t understand what you’re trying to say with the yield. The rice didn’t go anywhere. The nutritional value of that pot of rice is the same regardless of how you cook it. Different methods just produce rice that absorb different amounts of water, so the weight is different.
Mine uses 1.5 c water per cup of rice and takes 15-20 min with an Oster $20 unit. U telling me a pressure cooker is faster, and uses less water than that?
Just over 1 cup water to 1 cup rice (pretty much 1:1, plus the residual moisture from rinsing) for most white rice. 4 minutes at pressure, but probably comparable in practice. (have to wait for it to come to pressure and lose pressure after)
Really, it's been about consistency for me, but I've only compared to a basic Aroma rice cooker. I really liked my rice cooker, but side by side the IP was just better. Seemed like the grains were more consistent all the way through, like the rice cooker grains had a bit of hardness/density at the center and weren't as fluffy, from what I remember.
Interesting. I don’t have the hard in the center issue with my rice at all and it comes out the same way every time. What kind of rice do you use most? I use jasmine.
Jasmine and basmati, usually. Sometimes, calrose or something else.
I never would've said it was hard centered per se by itself, just in comparison. Before trying rice cooked both ways side by side, I really liked my rice cooker. But, after getting the pressure cooker, then trying both freshly cooked, this was my impression.
But, it's been years since I switched over, now. I remember looking into (the Bacillus cereus issue also came up in reading), comparing, and finally getting rid of the rice cooker as the pressure cooker could more, better.
Pressure cooker is better than a cheap rice cooker, but a higher end rice cooker is about the same. You can do more stuff with the pressure cooker though.
Pretty well. Some might argue better than a rice cooker.
Modern pressure cookers usually change to a warm setting, similar to rice cookers, once the specified cook time has elapsed. Additionally, there are certain pathogens in rice (Bacillus cereus) that can survive in spore form to about 100C, but have been shown to be destroyed in the slightly higher temperatures that can exist under pressure. So, arguably, pressure cooker rice is food safe for longer at 'warm' settings than rice cooked in a rice cooker. There's less chance for pathogens to grow if the food has been better sterilized to begin with, provided no subsequent cross contamination occurs.
What pressure cooker do you use? I just tried today with an Instantpot and the bottom completely solidified after a few hours with the rest of the rice turned into mush. This is with the keep warm setting.
I use an instapot. A few hours might be too long to leave rice in there. I don't know. I usually at least turn mine off within the first hour or so and do something with it. Pretty sure food safety guidelines don't recommend leaving rice on warm for hours in any case.
Ah, okay. When I said “throughout the day”, I actually mean throughout the day. As in making a large pot of rice in the morning and eating from that same pot for breakfast lunch and dinner. One of the main appeals of rice cookers is the ability to do that. It may not be recommended by food safety guidelines, but it’s standard practice in any household that consumes a lot of rice and it’s never been a problem.
The biggest benefit of a rice maker is that it takes care of itself. I pour in the ingredients and click to start. Then it’s just ready when the rest of the meal is, and I have to worry a lot less about timing that or about doing as many things at once.
But if you read the article you’d have seen that prewashing to remove starch makes no difference. That’s literally the point of this article.
“Culinary experts claim pre-washing rice reduces the amount of starch coming from the rice grains. … Contrary to what chefs will tell you, this study showed the washing process had no effect on the stickiness (or hardness) of the rice.”
And traditionally it was washed for cleanliness. The new wash to remove starch is a modern concept some people clearly started to say to sound smart with no evidence or science and it took off. Read the article
Prefacing this with this is my anecdotal experience, while the results are the same I find it much easier to clean up if I prewash the rice first. I don’t bother presoaking most of the time although some recipes call for it. I pretty much only have basmati and jasmine rice on hand so maybe it also depends on the variety?
This was the question in the article. They did a test of unwashed, washed 3 times, and washed 10 times, then compared the rice. The scientists found no difference between the samples. They further speculate that the stickyness level of the rice has to do with the starches that leech from inside the rice.
The article goes on to talk about how, depending on how (and where) the rice is processed, you may want to rinse rice to remove bits of husk, dust, pebbles, and possibly arsenic or microplastics.
Now, having said all of that, take the results of the study with a grain of salt. Washing 3 times isn’t going to do much of anything, and 10 times doesn’t actually tell us that they washed the rice properly. As soon as the starch is wet, it’s sticky. You really have to rinse and agitate the rice, and wash until the water runs clear. Maybe that also leeches some of the more available starch from inside the rice, but the difference is noticeable to anyone who cooks rice on a regular basis. So I’m not going to question the suggested mechanism of action, but I know how to make rice that is and isn’t sticky.
Im glad they mentioned the debris. My mom always told me they (family when they were in Vietnam) used to wash rice because of the pebbles, dust and bugs that may get into it. The water makes the bugs move which made it easier to pick out. She does it now because of the dust or whatever that may be on it. Never heard of the starch thing until watching youtube videos.
Still going to wash my rice though. Its better this way.
This is the reason I wash rice. Empty hulls, dirt, and bugs naturally float so it’s easier to take them out. We use brown or red rice so it’s not as “clean” as polished white rice. Also, even if the study says washing doesn’t do anything, the fact that the water turns a different color when rinsing shows that something gets removed when washing.
Yeah, the study said it has no effect on the stickiness of the rice.
Which is bizarre, because I’ve…seen it. Like repeatedly. And it’s not a subtle difference. When I am lazy and don’t wash my rice, it comes out MUCH gooier. It’s not terrible but it’s significantly different than when I wash it well.
Is this going to make me buy a second rice cooker to compare side by side? Ugh.
The popular press report says that washing doesn’t make a difference. The actual, paywalled study says they did find a highly significant interaction between washing and type of rice, which is a level of statistical sophistication that a food writer might not grasp. In fact, even the scientific authors seem not to have commented much on the interaction.
In their data, it looks like washing 0-amylose glutinous rice makes it more sticky, while washing medium-grain 21% amylose rice even just 3 times makes it less sticky, and that 13% amylose Jasmine rice is just kind of all over the place or not systematically influenced by washing. They didn’t do a big table of adjusted post hocs, so it’s difficult to tell which specific groups are different from which others.
They also cooked the rices differently, using 1:1.3 rice:water for the glutinous and 1:1.6 for the medium and Jasmine, which obviously might confound their observations.
I've seen it, too. When I want fluffy individual grains, I rinse the rice first. If I want sticky rice, I don't rinse it. And it works for all different kinds of rice.
There's going to be powdered starch on the outside of the grains of rice. If you rinsed it and then added something like corn starch to the water you'd end up with sticky rice.
Only if you're concerned about removing dust, insects, little stones, bits of husk left from the rice hulling process, arsenic, and 20-40% of microplastics. The amount of those things is influenced by the region in which it's produced. Stickiness reduction from washing is nominal due to there being two different types of starch. The kind on the surface is different than the variety inside the grain, which is what affects the stickiness.
I've never bothered rinsing, but probably will now because of microplastics and arsenic. I've never seen impurities like what are listed, but I only buy rice produced in California.
Not Balkan specific but ‘The Cooking of the Eastern Mediterranean’ by Paula Wolfert is great. It’s older though so it isn’t Instagram worthy photos, just great recipes, and commentary about how things are done. Like baking/ cooking in large Tandoor in Georgia.
There is also ‘Croatia at Table’ by Ivanka Bilus. This does have the photos and explains about different regions, things like butter/ cream in the north, olive oil in the south etc. The recipes are fine, but no standouts to me at least.
I have Black Sea by Caroline Eden. It’s as much of a travelogue as a cookbook, so it does make for an entertaining read. You might guess that it doesn’t cover the entire Balkan region…just the parts around the Black Sea.
It’s certainly not grandmas secret, but everything I’ve made from there has at least been well received by Romanians. Then again, it’s as good of a starting point as an American BBQ cookbook if you read it with the understanding that similar ingredients might yield quite different results regionally.
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