OneEyedMan's Profile

I've seen more complicated recopies (How to cook Tapioca Pearls for Bubble Tea: that have scared me off because I rarely know an hour in advance that I'm going to want one. I wonder if these more complicated approaches involving resting and rising would give Michelle the desired texture.

I've heard that the method of cooking bagels has its origins in a tax on ovens. By making it more expensive to have ovens, people wanted fewer of them. Because boiling decreases the amount of time you need to bake an equivalent amount of dough from its raw state, you can good more bread in fewer ovens.

No idea if this is true.

Is it still solid when cold like regular butter?
I tried to do this the other day, and while it looked somewhat like this when I was finished, it looks just like butter in my fridge, and I wondered if I didn't do it long enough.

My Arab-American officemate says it is pronounced like freak, as in "what a freak".

I learned an entirely different distinction, that a stock was made from bones and was gelatinous while broth was made from meat and was not.

I'd love one. I learned about these knives in an article in Wired and there is also a making of video floating around.

Expensive but a premium product.

Alton Brown sometimes uses a small amount of corn syrup as a way of interrupting the crystallization process in goods with a lot of sugar. Might be worth a shot after you remelt it with a bit of extra water.

This seems better for determining when dough has doubled in size (e.g. 2 cups becomes 4) than for measuring volumes, because, as Eliah said, flour should be weighed.

If you are like my family and have too many groceries to go shopping with canvas bags, do what we do and reuse your plastic shopping bags as bags to hold your lunch. Usually the bags have little holes in them so they aren't sturdy enough to reuse for grocery shopping. However, they remain strong enough to contain a lunch within a backpack.

My second favorite tip is eating in. If you cook your own food you don't need to drive to restaurant. You get dozens of meals out of a single trip to the grocery store.

What's the deal with the folksy introductions to each issue? How did you come up with that?

How do you pick what gets covered in an issue?

Your pieces suggest you live in a very rural setting but the test kitchen is in Brookline, Mass which is solidly suburban. Do you have a long commute? Does it influence your ability to cook at home on weeknights?

What percentage of the cooking in your family is done by you?

What advice has come out of the test kitchen that you just cannot bring yourself to follow?