I am wondering if any of the knockoff brand enameled Dutch ovens are as good as the Le Creuset one because I tried my aunt’s once and it was pretty good but I can’t afford that.
Yep, like me. I normally like my food spicy, and can usually tell whether a dish needs pepper or not.
Also, at the nicer restaurants, the waiter offering it to you is part of the tradition and experience. It can be seen as the restaurant being attentive to the diner. It’s not just pepper, they may offer to grate cheese as well, and I guess customers have come to expect such service as those restaurants.
Even though this happened over 20 years ago, I will never forget the experience I once had of a waiter grinding all the pepper into my lap instead. It was an upmarket restaurant, but I think perhaps he was on something.
Doesn’t matter what level of culinary experience you are partaking in, the kitchen is probably partaking in something.
To the point where it’s actually a huge issue and there are organisations to deal with the drug abuse and depression experienced by chefs and other hospitality workers.
My employment is in tandem to the hospitality industry and we sponsor some of these charities, among others.
I can’t stop laughing. Did you tell him, or did he just sit there grinding more and more pepper into your lap?
My wife and I went to an Italian restaurant in Vegas a few years ago. The waiter asked if we wanted Parmesan, pulled the tiniest cube of cheese out and held it up like a magician, and then never broke eye contact while he grated it. It was unnerving.
The short answer is yes, you should worry about them. Are they ok in moderation? Sure. Are they ok when they are the main staple of your diet? Absolutely not.
For those that don't know what the term means:
Ultra-processed foods are made mostly from substances extracted from foods, such as fats, starches, added sugars, and hydrogenated fats. They may also contain additives like artificial colors and flavors or stabilizers. Examples of these foods are frozen meals, soft drinks, hot dogs and cold cuts, fast food, packaged cookies, cakes, and salty snacks. - source
Ultra-processed foods don't really contain any actual food. They are derived from food, but they have basically been stripped of all of their naturally occurring nutrients.
There are quite a few studies out there that show that while eating an ultra-processed diet people tend to eat a fair amount more calories (I've seen multiple places say 500 more calories) per day than when eating whole foods, or minimally processed. They also tend to gain weight (over a surprisingly short period of time), have higher incident of cardiovascular disease, had higher increase in fat and carb consumption, but not protein, and high incident of some cancers.
I'd also add that most people probably feel A LOT worse when eating ultra-processed foods. Just observation on my part, but people who eat terribly seem to lack energy, and seem to struggle more with things like sleeping, exercise, etc.
A lot of ultra processed foods are also ultra palatable foods so they’re high in fat, sugar and salt and very hard to stop eating. They’re also calorie dense so you eat past the point where you might become full with less calorie dense foods. I read this article earlier today and really liked it except that I thought the author went a little light on the judgement against this type of food manufacturing. Yes, we really do live in a world where it can be hard to both find and prepare “real” food, but the consequences of a western or specifically American diet have proven to be pretty intense.
For some reason I have a hard time with which knob goes to which burner on a range. Couldn’t tell you why. Got home from a 12 hour shift at work and my wife, who didn’t work that day, told me she expected me to make dinner. I go into the kitchen and it is a much bigger mess then how I left it the night before. So with my last bit of mental capacity I put things away enough so I can cook. But apparently there were some plastic lids under a glass lid on the back of the stove. Started a pot of water and went to the other side of the kitchen to chop some veg. The kitchen started to smell weird, and I’m looking around trying to figure what it is, and figure out I had turned on the wrong burner. Picked up the glass lid and my lungs were assaulted with plastic fumes. I’m coughing and hacking and wheezing and almost passing out on the floor. It was so hard for me to breath I felt like I was dying. This brings my wife in and she steps over my body and finishes making dinner. Serves herself some, and takes it into the bedroom just as I’m barely able to stand again. That’s when I realized, I had fucked up. Shouldn’t have married her. Been divorced 2 years today.
Eh, I got this once, too. It was specially face-palming because OP of that thread requested advice about a beef and vegs dish, and I suggested him to sub MSG with soy sauce. Typical witch hunting mentality, that’s what happens when you don’t kick out assumptive and context-ignoring people.
I like to cook pasta in MSG-water sometimes. I also tend to use wholemeal pasta, which I think is important (the wholemeal aspect) ^.^. MSG works best for me when I use it with things that already have a decent depth of flavour and/or variety of ingredients ;3. It doesnt work so well if your food doesnt have enough flavour.
Other cool ingredients:
liquid smoke (works really well in a lot of things including vegetarian chilis, but especially i’ve found its good in lentil soups when you also have mint e.g lentil and pea soup, lentil, potato, onion soup, etc. ^.^) - look for the industrial stuff, its like £5 per bottle but you only need 1 or 2 drops for litres of sauce and it will last you months, kinda like MSG. Add it near the end so you don’t evaporate away lots of the flavour, too.
yeast extract - this shit is delicious in tomato sauces and stews and chili, even if in the uk we typically have it on toast ;p, adds a meaty, mushroomy flavour
cinnamon - works amazing in tomato sauces, it sounds weird as fuck but tomato sauce without it tastes like its missing something to me now, its so fundamental to any tomato sauce i make ;3
bonus: yeast extract + mustard makes a really really cheesy flavour in various sauces, and its completely dairy free. I
I’ve tried this once, and I can’t say that I liked the result. I guess that my spice profiles simply doesn’t combo well with cinnamon, since when I use baharat instead (that contains cinnamon) it gets great.
Some of it is probably personal preference too. I really like cinnamon, which might influence why i like it particularly much in tomato sauce ^.^
Typically for tomato sauce I like it quite umami, so I add things like peppers (the fruit/veg and black pepper), soya sauce, salt, MSG, etc., as well as mixed “italian” (i doubt it actually is, but it’s sold as that, and I have limited spice cupboard space) herb and spice mixes (usually with stuff like parsley, basil, etc. in it), as well as sage, thyme, garlic powder, with amounts depending on what I want ^.^
Probably the only time I wouldn’t add cinnamon is if I was using the tonato sauce as a component of a curry, but a lot of that is because it would get diluted out and I don’t think cinnamon goes so well with some curry flavours.
Ehh, liquid smoke is def a lot better for you that actually smoking things, because there is a filtration step that removes a lot of the worse Volatile Organic Compounds that make smoke carcinogenic.
You’re probably right it’s not fantastic though ;p
And damn, idk what i’d do if onions made me ill… I use them in so much. Though i’ve found some ways of making them do make me feel ill , just i rarely make them that way so.
If you’d rather avoid liquid smoke try using smoked paprika instead. Store bought does the job but if you can find the good stuff at a local farmer’s market, it’s worth it.
Amen! I try to always prepare from dry beans. Canned beans are never as tasty and cost 10 times as much. The InstantPot makes it take under a minute of work and less than a 40 minute wait. If you can plan 40 minutes ahead there is no reason to bust into cans on the regular.
One of the worst parts of traveling is the difficulty of finding my daily helping of beans.
I just cooked dry beans in my instant pot for the first time this evening! (Well, technically, black-eyed peas).
It was super simple, came out a touch mushy though! This was with 8 minutes of pressure cooking and sitting until depressurization occurred. Do you have a heuristic on cook time?
I have the best results when I rinse dry beans in cold water, put freshly rinsed beans and enough cold water to cover plus an extra inch into the pot, add salt and a few drops of oil, cook on high pressure.
Depending the type of beans and how fresh they are the cooking time and release process is different. For black-eyed peas that are fairly fresh 6 minutes at pressure and waiting 10 minutes after the “keep warm” cycle is best for me. For older peas it can take an extra 1 to 2 minutes.
That’s for creamy mouthfeel. If you want firm ones for salads or whatever I find upping the salt and cooking an extra minute at pressure followed by immediately releasing the pressure and allowing to cool gives the best results.
I tend to buy 25 lbs at a time from the restaurant supply. Those are often extremely fresh and cheap. Like $0.60 per pound ($14-15 per bag). The first two or three batches don’t come out right but they teach me everything I need to know to cook that rest of that bag intuitively.
Because the food is almost always going to be salted several times during cooking, but pepper is best put on very fresh afterward and isn’t necessarily used on everything.
But also: Where do you have to ask for salt? I’ve never been to even a fancy place that didn’t keep salt on the table.
Is red wine not generally seen as vegetarian? I know about it not being vegan, but is there something else I don’t know?
I intentionally left out vegan specifically for the same reason.
I would still be interested, as a lot of foodstuffs are considered vegetarian even if some animal sourced ingredient or agent was used. I’m not a 100% vegetarian in the first place. Mostly, but not a 100%.
I mean, you see a lot of vegetarian food sites etc. still include recipes that use eggs and other ingredients that are animal based or -sourced.
edit: Wow, a surprising amount of wine is not even vegetarian and it isn’t just limited to red wine. I mean as a not-100%er it’s such a miniscule part of it, but damn, will keep in mind in the future. Spirits and beer it is!
edit2: Goddamnit apparently a lot of beers use the same fining agents used with wine. At least my spirits are fine for the vast majority at least.
I recently used an IKEA portable induction stove in an Airbnb, and did not like it at all. It was very powerful, but basically had only two settings: super high or off. You could adjust it, but that would just mean it cycled more often between super high and off
A reminder to be(e) nice; we all come from different backgrounds, and launching ad hominem attacks is ineffective in getting people to consider your arguments.
I actually use GPT-3.5 (the free one) for my meal planning, GPT-4 seemed like it was smarter than it needed to be and it works pretty well - Claude should also work. The trick with LLMs, as always, is to avoid treating them like people and treat them more like a tool that will do exactly what you ask of them. So for instance, instead of “What should I eat for dinner?” (which implies personality, desires, and preferences and can throw it off), you should ask “List meals I can make using (ingredients) and other common ingredients” and then “Write a recipe for (option)” which are both mostly objective questions. You can ask for a particular style, culture, etc too. Also keep in mind its limits, it knows cooking from ingesting millions of cooking blog posts, so it won’t necessarily know exact proportions or unusual recipes/ingredients/combinations.
I don’t know about a specific one, but i tried via Bing with OK results. It mostly pulled from one source that had 72 recipes, and then a couple from sources it didn’t link to in the body. There were links to the sites used at the bottom, but you would have to search for the specific recipes.
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