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What have you been eating, drinking, and cooking?
What food and drinks have you been enjoying (or not enjoying) recently? Have you cooked or created anything interesting? Tell us about it!
What food and drinks have you been enjoying (or not enjoying) recently? Have you cooked or created anything interesting? Tell us about it!
Fried rice.
I've been working on my technique for a year or so now. This time, I may have achieved my optimal.
I don't have a wok burner just an underpowered stove. Instead, I used a butane torch to simulate wok hei, per Kenji's guidance. Worked great!
A crucial part of the cook is not to crowd the wok. This means that there are many different ingredients cooked in small batches and mixed together at the end! It also allowed me to give more "wok hei" to some ingredients than others.
For the torch, I realized that it's likely important to only have the very tip of the flame touch the food. Anything else and there will almost certainly be more
uncommitteduncombusted butane in the food!AMA ;-)
I have also started my fried rice journey, about a year and a half ago. While I haven't gotten to the point of using a torch, I'm quite happy with the results of my gas stove.
One technique that I'm eager to try is creating "golden" fried rice, from a recipe in "The Woks of Life". It involves combining the rice in a mixture of egg yolk, shaoxing wine, salt, and white pepper a few minutes before cooking. The egg yolk should give it a golden sheen.
Done this with JustEgg. While it worked well the couple times I tried it, I prefer the "typical" egg fried rice.
I tried using the Wok Mon but it didn't help much and only caused me to make more of a mess of my stovetop.
How do you set up the torch?
See https://www.seriouseats.com/hei-now-youre-a-wok-star-a-fiery-hack-for-stir-frying-at-home for more.
Oh it's not a set up. I wave the torch slowly over the ingredients in the wok. Then toss/stir with spatula. Repeat until adequate Maillard/blistering occurs.
I have an Iwatanj handheld.
Second time I can contribute, yeah!
I tried a paneer recipe (with spinach, one tomato, one jalapeno, onions and spices) served on rice and it was fabulous. It made for a pretty good vegetarian curry.
I've also tried cooking gnocchis for the first time with a friend. The recipe is pretty much just make a roux, cook sausages with onions, add them with the gnocchis, the roux and a buttload of cheese, add sliced cherry tomatoes and green onions at the end. It was also very good! Feels like gnocchis recipes are just pasta recipes but with a better bite? Every bite is soft and mushy, it's pretty fun.
Finally, I tried making a simple focaccia recipe and it was a total disaster, it didn't rise much during the proofing... feels like I fucked up somewhere, but also, I think my yeast was just not good. It sucks because it happened this year when I tried making pizza and I bought a new yeast bottle and it still doesn't work. :/ not sure what to so.
After a long time of wanting to but not having the energy to start, I started to make a batch of dairy-free yogurt for the first time. It's not the first time I've made yogurt, but it's the first time making a dairy-free one. I had known for a long time that high-protein milks are the best options and that you should use one that has few if any added ingredients. So I decided to do another first, and make my own soymilk.
soymilk is a plant milk I've been ignoring for a while because it's kind of a pain to make. You have to soak the beans ahead of time, rinse them, and then you have to boil the milk afterwords because raw beans can make you sick. But damn, for a first time, the soymilk turned out excellent! I think I didn't use quite enough water so what came out ended up being more like soy cream, and it had a pleasant herbal grassy nutty smell to it that the bottled stuff doesn't.
Of course, once you've got soymilk you're literally two steps away from making tofu, so I'm considering doing that next. I kind of regret not using the okara for something, but I don't know any recipes that work well with it.
Have been on a green tea journey for the past year or so. Got a handmade kyusu (a type of japanese clay teapot) and a bunch of high quality sencha leaves. If you've never had actual good green tea, the kind that doesn't come in teabags and isn't steeped in boiling water for 5 minutes, you're missing out. I used to roll my eyes whenever people said this about anything, but honestly it's better than any drug out there. I now have a little tea-making ritual in the mornings which just makes every day better by default. I am unfortunately extremely sensitive to caffiene so any more than two cups makes me jittery and anxious the whole day, but those two cups are the best part of my mornings now.
This is the precise brand & type of tea I've been drinking recently. It's a light-steamed green tea which has a lighter flavour, I also really enjoyed this deep-steamed green tea from them but I generally prefer the flavour of light-steamed teas (though I am in the minority apparently).
I've recently purchased some white teas to try, and I'm probably going to buy some fancier teas in the future as well. Tea is good. Drink more tea.
I don't like green teas usually. A lot of the time it has a vaguely fish-like smell to it that I find unappealing unless I have it with some specific food flavors that I haven't really identified yet. Funnily enough I went to a sushi restaurant recently where all the sushi was terrible but the green tea was excellent.
I do like it when mixed with toasted rice to make genmaicha.
But the world needs more tea drinkers. I find it a much more social drink than coffee because there's always a tactile experience as long as it's served hot.
Green tea is definitely one of the more finicky beverages to get right especially in comparison to the likes of black tea of coffee. It's super easy to brew it for too long or at too high a temperature or with too many or too few tea leaves, all of which will impart bitter flavours or a distinct fishy aroma on the final product. Great if you're a weirdo who likes making everything with a thermometer and a timer like me; less so if you just want a hot drink with no fuss. Green tea is all fuss.
Absolutely down for genmaicha in all its forms! Green tea sellers will unfortunately just see it as something that they can put their old/lower quality tea leaves into (which it was traditionally designed for to be fair), but I like to make it at home from time to time with any leftover tea leaves I end up with, or sometimes just using a freshly opened box to make a load in bulk.
I've been tasked with providing the bread for christmas, so I did a trial bake of an untested recipe to see if it was good enough to bring and to work out any potential kinks. It turned out pretty great! Oven was a bit hot, so will probably bring the temperature down a bit and bake for 10 - 15 minutes longer, but otherwise it was a success.
It's a rye and wheat bread, using porter instead of water as the liquid, spiced with bitter orange peel, cloves, fennel seeds, anise seeds & caraway seeds and sweetened with some syrup. The recipe produced two loaves, so in one of the loaves I added some raisins (loved by some, hated by others). It also called for coating the loaves with a syrup/water mixture before baking, which I forget, but they got a very nice crust anyway, so it was probably not needed.
So I'll probably have to do (at least) two more batches of this bread, and possible some other bread as well, as I know some people are not into the darker variety. I have a pretty good (and very simple) recipe for a wheat/durum bread that's been a favorite as of late.