Brava. But I wonder if it would be possible to score the shortbread, break it into bars, wait until the caramel is mostly cool and use a pastry bag to pipe a thick line onto each bar. And then, as you say, put the bars on a wire rack and pour the chocolate over. Because Twix is just not Twix unless it is in fully enrobed bar form.
To hell with making exact replicas, Alameida. I demand you pimp your Twix. Surely your Twix will be more Twixian than these.
Alas, non-Canadians have had little opportunity, but let it be noted for the record that Coffee Crisp is the best candy bar evah.
CoffeeCrisp.org, a group of people petitioning Nestle to bring Coffee Crisps to the US, claims that they're now on sale by some American retailers.
To anyone contemplating working with caramel for the first time, I offer the following wisdom gained from making a croquembouche a couple of weeks ago: if a recipe tells you to use a dipping fork, it's not because the culinary-industrial complex wants you to buy a dipping fork, it's because molten sugar is seriously fucking hot and sticks to your skin like napalm is meant to.
I saw something once on making homemade Reese's Peanut Butter Cups and the key was that the peanut butter part actually has chocolate mixed in. That's how it gets that weird texture.
Ooh, this sounds good. Why the coffee, though? I've never noticed Twix tasting like coffee. Is this 'coffee-flavored Twix', or does the flavor of the espresso powder disappear somehow?
Bake shortbread for 15 minutes, till lightly tanned
If an oven in unavailable, use a can of this to achieve the same.
This recipe is also an opportunity to use real chocolate, an ingredient missing in so many Murrican candy bars. Which is why I pay outrageous sums for imported UK KitKat bars.
This recipe is also an opportunity to use real chocolate, an ingredient missing in so many Murrican candy bars.
The Hershey's bars in Germany seemed much better than the pallid crap they peddle Pacificside.
"CoffeeCrisp.org, a group of people petitioning Nestle to bring Coffee Crisps to the US, claims that they're now on sale by some American retailers."
Yeah, actually my co-blogger discovered it at a drugstore near my old apartment in Seattle. In NYC, I've come up with bupkis, though.
This post resulted in my girlfriend saying "Get me some Twix, boy!" and then pulling on my ear and yelling "Twix! Twiiiiiix!" into it. Thanks a lot.
Peanut butter Twix: Fine but pointless. You could be eating a real Twix or a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup, both of which are superior. Instead you're eating some inferior hybrid of the two. Why?
Coffee Crisp: I have it on the authority of a CC-addicted dual citizen that these have indeed become available in the US (mere months after she moved back to Canada). I tried my first one a while back and it was...okay. I haven't felt the urge to buy one myself.
Bad chocolate: So I know that American soda sucks because of US corn subsidies/sugar tariffs (I've paid outrageous sums for imported Indian Fanta). Is there a Libertarian around who can explain how government has ruined American chocolate?
Is there a Libertarian around who can explain how government has ruined American chocolate?
I'm no libertarian, but I suspect corn subsidies are to blame here too.
8: Coffee is often used to enhance the flavor of chocolate, and I'm guessing that's all it's doing here, not making coffee-flavored chocolate.
10: Yup. They're my personal favorite candy bar.
1. Peanut Butter Twix
2. Whachamacallit
3. 100 Grand
4. Regular Twix
13: I'm no Libertarian, but I'll take a stab at it! Hershey, which makes "sour" chocolate (a process developed by Milton Hershey) became the official G.I. chocolate supplier with their Ration D bar. If it hadn't been for the market skewing presence of the federal government, we'd all be eating delicious Lindt today and speaking Deutsch.
100 Grand is a great, great candy bar, but I've recently become a fan of the Baby Ruth.
17: I doubt it. Hershey apparently sells candy with "real" chocolate in it overseas (see 11), so their influence probably doesn't explain the quality of American chocolate.
the coffee is there both to add flavor and to make the caramel nicely colored; it doesn't actually cook long enough to earn the appropriate amber shade. if you started from scratch on the caramel (i.e. used sugar and water rather than condensed milk) you probably wouldn't need the coffee.
also, I read a recipe for reese's-style peanut butter cups in which graham cracker crumbs were added to the peanut butter, which also sounds promising, texture-wise.
My sister makes chocolate-dipped peanut butter and Ritz sandwiches every Christmas. Those are fucking-A good.
I think that in Germany at least, in order to bear the label "chocolate", a candy cannot contain any vegetable fats other than cocoa butter. So it's the government's fault that Hershey's Bars are better in Germany than the US, but not in a way to libertarians' liking.
I think this was changed recently to allow cheap-ass lame-tasting vegetable fats to be used in confectionary labelled "kinderchocolate".
Of course, German purism about beer and chocolate is the kind of thing that led to Holocaust.
Enjoy!
Ah, not kiddy chocolate, but "family chocolate". Stinkin' Brits.
What conditions must a product meet to bear the label "Schokolade" in Germany?
Why would anyone listen to the british about chocolate?
27: We shouldn't. We should listen to the Swiss and the Belgians. And then we should take all of their chocolate and keep it for ourselves. [But I should note that the same KitKat Fine Dark is sold in Germany and in the UK, so you may choose to trust the Germans. Or not.]
yep, because cocoa solids are worth money on their own as ingredients for hair- and skin-care products, the cheap-ass bastards at Hershey's sell them and then replace them with crisco. as sales of actually good chocolates like Ghirardelli have grown, though, Hershey's has come out with a new line of baking chocolates that are 55% and 65% percent or so--the 'chocolatier' line. hopefully, eventually, that will trickle down to the candy bars. until then, we have Lindt. anyway, I shouldn't complain because I think I own a bunch of Hershey's stock.
I own one share of Hershey's stock. It was a Bar Mitzvah present.
Second try! Libertarianism means stockholders are happy about the crappy chocolate and everyone else can pound sand.
Pretty much all newstand chocolate in the US is appalling.
The British position was all about Cadbury's, I'm led to understand. EU regulations wouldn't allow Cadbury's to be called chocolate, which is kinda like NAFTA coming along and saying ok, we have this definition of peanut butter, and Jif & Peter Pan don't meet it so they can't be called peanut butter anymore. The Brits have been like WTF for 25 years, as one can understand.
Jif and Peter Pan do not meet my definition of peanut butter. Alas I have no regulatory authority.
(cf. Peanut butter standards of identity, at the bottom of the page.)
Newstand chocolate? You New York Liberal.
33: If only NAFTA would do something constructive.
Jif is nasty. Choosy moms suck, apparently.
Hey Scott: it's a couple of years old, but this Chowhound post has a couple of reports of Coffee Crisp sightings in NYC. Worth a check.
Ack! Sorry -- Correct link.
My sister is a Cadbury officianado. The Cadbury chocolate sold in the Unites States is said to follow the same recipe as teh British version, but it does not taste the same. My sister refuses to eat it. Cadbury cream eggs, however, are imported from the UK, so she awaits them eagerly every Easter.
Cadbury Cream Eggs are teh disgusting.
also: "officianado" should be the name of a sitcom about a gourmand working temp secretary jobs.
Choosy moms suck, apparently.
In an ideal world, this would be true.
I've only tried a Cadbury Cream Egg once. Very sweet, rich, and nasty, all at once.
You guys are sound on the Cream Egg question. There is a reason why there are no Belgian Cream Eggs.
Cream Eggs are sort of a vulgarization of the truffle, right?
44: Your wistful reaction is totally missing the point of the modifier "choosy".
47: Wash your mouth with soap! Cream Eggs are an invention of whatever presiding deity your faith assigns to the regions of the damned. In Britain, they're actually called Creme Eggs, which says all you need to know.
Maybe the word I was looking for was "debasement".
I wouldn't think so, regardless of the word you choose. Truffles are a stiff ganache with flavoring: chocolate and cream. Creme Eggs are filled with some pure sugar/no chocolate horror.
(I probably like them even less then they deserve on the merits of how they taste because I vaguely expect them to taste like raw eggs.)
"Might as well go whole hog and spray the bottom of the lined pan as well."
Careful with this.
I recently read an article on culinary illiteracy in the US--i.e. the increasing ignorance of the populace about even the simplest matters of cookery--and how it is affecting the cooking-directions that are printed on e.g. cake-boxes.
They mentioned one guy who was calling Betty Crocker or the like to complain that they had caused a serious fire in his kitchen. The instructions said to grease the bottom of the frying pan, so he had greased the...underside.
Just when you think dumb can't get dumber.
Coffee Crisp is the best candy bar evah.
Teh yuck. Nasty texture. PK is really pissed, though, about not being able to get Kindersurprise eggs down here, so if anyone ever goes up to Canadia and wants to ship us some, he'd be most grateful.
53 -- Kinder Surprise are possibly available at Shoop's European Delicatessen in Santa Monica. That and a couple of other possible sources here.
I don't like Cadbury Creme eggs either, but the chocolate in them is better than the chocolate in the Hershey-Cadbury bars. When I've had them, I pour out most of the egg part and eat teh chocolate with a bit of the goo.
There is pretty good British chocolate. Green & Black's 'Maya Gold' is great. Very dark, very rich.
You can get good toffee and other sweets too. My experience of most European chocolate is that, with the exception of good quality Swiss and Belgian chocs, none of it is consistently better than the better British sweets. Everyone produces a lot of crap.
Creme Eggs are fecking disgusting, though.
re: 52
It's noticeable when you google for recipes that if you find a recipe for foodstuff X on some US sites it usually begins with something like:
'Open can of pasteurised X-precursor goop'
Although, saying that, culinary ignorance is widespread. When I first moved in student accomodation (over 12 years ago) I was amazed at how little some of my flat mates knew. Some were literally unable to cook anything except for beans and toast.
There's no tradition of nasty processed food based cooking in the UK? I'm shocked.
Less so. I think. US recipes are noticeably more based around tinned goods than UK ones.* I presume that's partly to do with the geographic nature of the US food distribution system, or something.
* To the extent that people cook at all, of course. People here eat a lot of shite, too.
Cadbury Creme/Cream Eggs would be a lot better if there were less goo inside. I, much like BG apparently, can only eat at most 1/2 egg's worth of goo.
Cadbury chocolate sucks. Green & Black, on the other hand, is pretty darn good stuff.
Green and Black
Isn't that the drink with ½ Guinness, ½ crème de menthe? That you order in Irish pubs on St. Paddy's Day to display your authenticity?
Tell me that isn't a real drink, please.
No, it's not -- just playing on the "Green and Black"/"Black and Tan" assonance. A nice idea for a drink though, right? (Thanks for half-falling for it.)
US recipes are noticeably more based around tinned goods than UK ones.* I presume that's partly to do with the geographic nature of the US food distribution system, or something.
It has more to do with the relative affluence of the postwar US and corporations brainwashing the baby boomers' parents into believing that canned and convenience foods were a signifier of that prosperity.
I love Creme Eggs, can't wait for Boxing Day (which is about when they usually go on sale).
And ttaM is exactly right about weird American recipes that involve mixing together tins of soup and various frozen foods. Or Bisquik. Recipes here involve "from scratch" ingredients, or else you just buy ready meals from the supermarket.
Man, you Brits must get a warped view of American cooking. It's not like we all eat Bisquick and canned beans all the time. What, has someone been leaflet-bombing the UK with ads from Good Housekeeping or something?
It's not like we all eat Bisquick and canned beans all the time.
Speak for yourself.
Yeah, I associate the 'heavy use of products' cooking with the 70s and earlier. These days most people are either eating straight packaged food (frozen dinners or whatever) or cook with actual ingredients, I think. Not so much with the mushroom soup casseroles topped with cornflakes.
54: Ooh, teh thank you! PK will be thrilled if I can track these down.
56/61: Trust the Brits not to have anything like a palate to know the diff between good and bad chocolate. Green & Black *sounds* good, but it's gritty and snaps like plastic. You people are crazy.
Recipes here involve "from scratch" ingredients, or else you just buy ready meals from the supermarket.
And from what I've seen, the latter strategy predominates. Most UK supermarkets devote about 5% of space to "from scratch" ingredients. Thinking about Farmfoods (admittedly an extreme example) still gives me the willies.
And plenty of US recipes are from scratch. But there is a large category that require some variation of a can of Campbell's cream of mushroom soup and those crispy fried onion things on top (I call it "1950s Home Ec Cuisine" but it's still quite popular in a lot of mom-focussed magazines).
These books on the subject by Laura Shapiro are really interesting, if you're into that sort of thing.
You've got to know how to cook your year's supply of food when the Millenium begins. So, there's a good reason to practice with those canned ingredients.
Green & Black *sounds* good, but it's gritty and snaps like plastic. You people are crazy.
I've only had it in the UK, and only this bar. I've seen it here in the States but never bought it. I remember it being good quality chocolate though.
I had the Maya Gold. I really do think that any chocolate labelled "organic" or "free trade" is probably pitching itself on pcness rather than on quality, but then, I'm cynical.
Even the mom-focused magazines aren't really selling much of that type of food any more. You'll mostly see it in the ads and for desserts and sugar snacks. The food articles are usually about quick healthy recipes from scratch.
The Rice Krispie treat will never die, but for the most part this type of food is considered really old-fashioned in a bad way.
(What Americans eat when we're NOT cooking is a whole different story, but that's a subject for another thread.)
75: Organic chocolates may be giving a PC pitch but that doesn't mean the quality isn't there. Case in point: Dagobah Xocolatl hot chocolate, which has the dippiest instructions ever on the back of the can (you must stir it X times clockwise and X times counterclockwise, just like the Aztecs did!) but OH MY GOD SO GOOD.
Yeah, Dagoba is some fine fine quality chocolate. Their Conacado bar is my current favorite, and will completely blow the circuits on your chocolatometer. It's even better than dolphin sex.
69: If I could find that thread where we talked about salt intake, I would totally link to it with a witty comment about your canned and bland lifestyle. But alas, both yahoo and google find nothing. Curses!
re: 72
You must have been in a supermarket in inner city Glasgow or something.
Most supermarkets here devote (I'm guessing) about 20% or more of their floor space to fresh ingredients. In the reasonable sized supermarkets it's pretty rare that I'll look for some foodstuff and not be able to find it -- and I have fairly eclectic tastes.
Definitely, smaller ones or inner city ones, less so. In some cases, of course, much less so. I have lived in areas in the past where decent fresh food was a subway journey away rather than local.
However, even in the small neighbourhood place near me, which services a small village rather than a large area, I can expect to find all the standard fresh veg, dairy products, cheeses, creme fraiche, cream, cold meats, deli products, etc.
The selection of fresh meat and fish is less good, though. Basically, a couple of cuts of pork, chicken breasts and cod, and that's it.
I endorse the first book linked to in 72, and I'm happy to see that she's written another book mining the same delicious vein of fattening, disgusting meals. (Seriously, I thought "Perfection Salad" was a really interesting piece of feminist of scholarship.)
I associate the casseroles craze (mushroom soup + crunchy onions) with my grandmother's cooking, actually. She was an excellent cook, except for this curious class of recipes involving mushroom soup and other processed goodies, most of which she associated with fancier cooking. So she might make her homemade apple pie or cabbage rolls on an everyday, but that godawful marshmallow ambrosia creation graced the table at Thanksgiving. It's got to be that the recipes were in a ladies' magazine or something.
There's an Annie Proulx short story about a woman who discovers a magic wishing kettle among her dead mother's effects, and there's a moment of horror where she realizes that her mother could have wished for whatever cuisine she wanted, but always wished for processed casseroles and the like for dinner.
I have no idea where the phrase 'on an everyday' came from, but I think I'm going to adopt it and give it a home next to the little apples.
That style of cooking also flourished in the UK for a while, associated with a particular style of post-WWII cooking during the period when food was still rationed -- lots of powdered and processed ingredients. However, you never see those recipes today except in antique cookbooks.
Then again, I also have an original 50s edition of Larousse Gastronique, and I'd never cook about 95% of that either.
81: I was thinking mainly of Edinburgh. I could find plenty of great food there, but most of it wasn't from the Tesco, Sainsbury's, or Marks & Spencer's, which seemed to devote a huge portion of their space to ready-meals and the like (5% was definitely an exaggeration, you're right).
And Farmfoods was downright depressing, not just because it contained no fresh foods despite having the word "farm" in its name, but especially because it was the cheapest source of food and heavily trafficked by folk who deserved access to fresh food but couldn't afford it.
Yeah, Farmfoods and Iceland are both like that. Frozen stuff or tins, and that's all.
When I lived just 'south of the river' in Glasgow our local Co-Op had a pretty poor range of fresh produce and the only other local places were either 'ethnic' grocers -- great for coriander, not so great for carrots -- or Farmfoods or Iceland. There was a decent local veg shop but it was never open at times that working people could get to it. That meant a tube journey every week to buy fresh food and I'd imagine most of the poorer locals just never did that.
Tesco and Sainsbury's aren't generally that bad for fresh produce, though. It's pretty rare, as I said, that I won't find what I need.
I'm basing my cream of mushroom soup and Bisquik ideas on what I've seen on Allrecipes or similar - these are mostly recipes sent in by real people, so I've assumed that's what at least a fair proportion of them eat! I haven't yet found any "normal" British recipe books or websites that are quite the same. And I really didn't mean to start a "who eats better" argument - from previous foodie threads here, I'd be more than happy for any of you lot to cook my dinner any day!
Been thinking about why anyone would jump at Bisquik or the canned soups as they don't taste as good as home cooking, and I'm guessing, given that my grandmother said that when my dad was little, they only had fresh vegetables when they were in season (just like Alice Waters, but delightfully post-WWII), and meat was more expensive, that some of these processed wonders must have been great cheap sources of calories & flavor not easily available otherwise. Casseroles are a good way to get two chicken breasts to serve six people.
re: 89
Yes, I am basing my impressions on the same source, and the probability that any given recipe will contain canned-X rather than fresh-X, which approaches 1 on certain recipe sites.
90 - well yes, that makes sense, but surely post WWII things were even more so in the UK? Rationing didn't *start* to end here until 1948, and took 6 years to be done with completely. I get the impression that food was generally far more abundant in the States than the UK during the war, and I guess stuff like tinned soup is easy to send round the country - whereas it just wasn't getting made in great quantities in the first place here.
Anyway, would love to have recipe website recommendations that aren't full of weird hybrid ingredients.
92: Epicurious.com is nice. They're reasonably fussy recipes, but you can either make them as written and they turn out very nicely, or you can simplify on the fly and get decentish results.
There's a pretty good discussion about cans n' casseroles cuisine here.
75: I don't think that organic necessarily means bad quality, by a long shot; I'm just saying that I'm suspicious of the big organic claim when I'm looking for good chocolate. If it's good *and* free trade/organic, awesome. But I want those things in that order, basically.
Re. American food. It's hard for me to realize, with the crowd I travel in, how little a lot of people know about actual food. When I got here, my dad and his wife and my mom had been taking care of PK for a few weeks and doing all the domestic crap, and I ended up throwing out just tons of so-called "food" like margarine, nonfat "sour cream substitute" (???), sugary cereal crap, and the like. It's hard to imagine that people actually eat that stuff when real cooking actually isn't that hard, but, well, they do.
89/91: It could be that those recipes use canned stuff because they're based on older recipes or because the authors live in parts of the country where it's hard to get good produce year-round. I've occasionally used stuff off of allrecipes.com if I'm Googling for something specific, but it's easy enough in most cases to substitute fresh ingredients for the processed stuff. (If it's not, then the recipe's probably something I don't want to be making.)
it's easy enough in most cases to substitute fresh ingredients for the processed stuff. (If it's not, then the recipe's probably something I don't want to be making.)
Very true!
95: Yeah, I cringe (non-visibly, I'm not rude about it) a lot when visiting other people's houses and seeing what's in their fridge and cupboards. People eat a lot of crap, mostly.
Especially teo.
I think you would actually be surprised by a look at my cupboards.
At pie contest this year, the winning pie was a chicken pot pie. Everyone RAVED about it during the contest; when he won, he announced a recipe based on Bisquik and mushroom soup. My friends don't usually eat like that, but when they were surprised with it, they loved it.
My dad's cabinets make me sad. We didn't eat like that growing up, but he's got a different wife now. Dad does all the shopping and cooking, but I think her Midwestern tastes have changed his menus. Boo.
Violet Crumble is the perfect candy bar.
One of my new roommates brought home the AWESOMEST old school cookbook ("The New Good Housekeeping Cookbook"), and here is the receipe that cracked me up most on an initial flip-through:
Frankerfurter Casserole
--2 12-oz cans vacuum-packed whole-kernel corn
--1 16-oz. package frankfurters, cut into bite-sized pieces
--1 16-oz. can cut wax beans, drained
--1 10 3/4-oz. can condensed tomato soup
--1 3 1/2-oz. (drained weight) can pitted ripe olives, drained and rinsed.
Preheat oven to 350. In 2-quart casseole, mix all ingredients. Cover casserole tightly with foil and bake 40 minutes or until mixture is hot and bubbly. Amazing, no?
Also, I like Bisquik pancakes and I don't care who knows it.
Canned soup is a little bit weird, but there's nothing horribly wrong with canned tomatoes. Beats not having tomatoes during the cold months when it's all supermarket beefsteak crap, at any rate.
I don't quite get Bisquik. Not that it doesn't have a comfort food taste, but I don't get exactly how it was a wonderful timesaving flour of the future as it must have been marketted at some point. It's just as hard to make pancakes with Bisquik as it is flour.
102: It's science and progress!
Canned soup makes sense, as do canned tomatoes, because they do save you quite a bit of time. Making soup takes a while, and while grilling tomatoes really doesn't, peeling them (if you dislike peels) is a hassle. Plus fresh tomatoes from grocery stores aren't really very good anyway, so it's not like you're missing out.
Yes, but canned soup tastes like the can.
Bisquik has the baking soda already in it, so it saves you that step.
Bisquik blows. Get a proper pancake mix from Bob's Red Mill.
http://www.bobsredmill.com/catalog/index.php?action=showdetails&product_ID=97
The problem with having the baking soda already in the flour is that sometimes you run out of flour, and all you have left in the cupboard is that damned pancake mix. And since the actual amount of baking soda mixed in with flour is a proprietary secret, you can't exactly reverse-engineer it out to, say, bake bread with.
Which is what happened to me this evening.
Peeling tomatoes is easy.
0. Prepare a bowl of ice water.
1. Make a small "x" at the bottom of each tomato.
2. Put a tomato in some boiling water.
3. Take it out of the boiling water after "not too long" (how long is too long? If the peel starts coming off all over the place, that was too long. Practice!) and put it in the ice water.
4. Repeat 2-3 for each tomato.
5. Removing the peels is now super-easy.
104: Parmalat's boxed "Pomi" tomatoes are just like canned tomatoes, only cheaper than non-reactive lined can organic tomatoes and tastier than Hunt's.
111: That works well for peeling peaches, too. And it's surprisingly a lot of fun when the peaches go foomp right out of their skins. (So much fun that when I blanched peaches the first time I called my mom and excitedly told her how the skins came off.)
(I need to get out more.)
Peeling tomatoes is easy.
Six steps isn't much easier than
1: Use the can opener.
2: Dump out the tomatoes.
Especially when step 4 of your instructions is to repeat steps 2 and 3 once per tomato.
I love Bisquik things. And I love go foomp right out of their skins. And I love eating from a can; and running away from what I don't understand.
111: I know that trick, and for peaches. It's still a li'l hassle when you're trying to get food on the table quick with some damned rugrat clinging onto your legs.
Bisquick--like all "mixes" for baked goods--is teh lame.
For peaches, you only need to do that step once. Never tried it with tomatoes because it doesn't seem to be worth it to go the effort for a supermarket tomato, especially since I mostly use canned tomatoes in spaghetti sauces and chilis where any tomato is going to have the hell boiled out of it. (Secret sauce ingredient: pure demon.)
Adding baking soda to flour is not hard, plus you don't have to buy an extra box, and really, it's pancakes. They're nearly impossible to screw up.
For peaches, you only need to do that step once.
You only need to do it once per tomato. If you had a big enough pot and swift enough removal action, you could do all the tomatoes at once.
Today in midtown I saw a Nestlé candy bar called Toffee Crisp -- is this some cousin of Coffee Crisp? I did not get it but did, intrigued by this thread, buy and eat a What-you-may-call-it, which I have vague memories of having at some point been a favorite bar. I was sorely disappointed.
110 -- I think even if you did know the ratio of baking soda to flour, it would still be difficult to convert the mixture back to plain flour. Do you have a technique I don't know about?
108: Not only is Bob's Red Mill great, but in a typical show of Oregonian ingenuousness, it's actually a red mill run by a guy named Bob. Even better for me, it's just down the road from the place where I dump yard debris.
I pity you poor, tomato-deprived masses. Later this week I'm off to our CSA to pick up a hundred pounds of riotously tasty, organically grown tomatoes. It's almost a sin to turn them into sauce.
I'm down with good canned tomatoes, and canned legumes, lentils, chickpeas, etc. can really come in handy sometimes.
Teo, take some pictures of your cupboards and post a link. I will then tell you how surprised I am by them, on a 1 (not surprised at all) to 10 (mindblowingly surprised) scale.
122: You are right to pity us. My favorite type of canned tomato is the ones I put into jars myself, but I haven't been able to do that this year. Alas.
And yeah, Bob AND his Red Mill rock, although I'm also a fan of Arrowhead Mills, right here in Texas.
"tomato is" s/b "tomatoes are", I think.
I was sorely disappointed.
I remember going through a phase as a kid where my favorite candy bar was a Zero bar. I had one a few months ago for the first time in probably 25 years and those things are disgusting.
I just don't like tomatoes that much.
Teo posted a photo of his cupboard.
Wait, we're posting pictures of our cupboards now? Perhaps this is just a way of building up to cock-fest '06.
Also, the tomato peeling technique Ben describes is very easy and well worth your time, but only if the fresh tomatoes you have are tastier than the ones in a can. This is only true a few weeks out of the year.
re: 130
Yeah, fresh tomatoes are rarely as tasty as the tinned ones if they are going to go into a sauce. Sometimes you can be lucky and get really rich tasting plum tomatoes at some times of the year, though.
Isn't the flavor of canned tomatoes enhanced a bit by the canning process and the brief aging? Obviously if they ferment they are bad; but I thought some kind of pre-fermentation bacterial intervention was happening.
(And of course their flavor is enhanced by the cooking that happens during canning.)
Plus, modern fresh tomatoes are often from flavourless varieties that stay firm and look good on the shelf, and which can be picked and shipped via centralised distribution schemes to shops and then still look good for a few days.
That process is fairly inimical to good flavour.
The point of Bisquik isn't pancakes (which it doesn't save much time or effort for) it's biscuits. Biscuits aren't hard, but the 'cutting the fat into the flour' step takes a little time, and if your lifestyle incorporates biscuits as a standard with dinner, Bisquik does save time and effort, and makes pretty good biscuits.
For some reason I do this on vacation -- if we're staying somewhere with a kitchen, Bisquik biscuits are fairly tasty and only involve buying one ingredient. At home, I either make biscuits properly or I don't make them.
Speaking of cutting fat into flour, do you use a food processor, LB? Because I've kinda tried to talk myself into it, but it just seems like washing the goddamn thing would be more hassle than doing whatever it is by hand was in the first place.
On the other hand, I'm kinda tempted to buy a juicer.
A juicer is almost certainly the wrong tool to use for making biscuits.
Nope. NYC kitchen with very limited counterspace -- I have a mixer, a toaster, and a coffeepot, but no room for other appliances. (Oh, I could keep it in a closet, but then I'd never use it.)
I just upgraded to one of those wire pastry-cutters from the two-knife method.
I'll be interested to hear if you're happy with the wire pastry cutter. I have one, but it just gets gummed up and bent. So I always use the two-knife method anyway.
My issue with the food processor is basically that I've long had the theory that most kitchen gadgets are pretty useless, and just create storage/cleaning problems. I've been convinced by the salad spinner and the stand mixer, though.
I find a blender/grinder pretty handy -- for soups and things -- but a full-on food processor, like you say, seems more work than necessary just to keep it clean.
I find that the combination of food processor and dishwasher is a happy one. This is how I have made literally gallons of salsa verde this year.
Right, blender good. We even have an immersion blender, which we got free and I was dubious about, but there are fewer parts to clean than a regular blender, plus you can puree the soup right in the pot. Handy!
for soups and things
People seem to like puréeing their soups -- I never got the appeal of it. In anything except maybe a vichyssoise, I like lumps in broth.
salad spinner
Are you guys talking about the little plastic bowl with a crank on top? Agreed that these are very useful, but they hardly seem to me to rise to the same level of kitchen technology as blenders and food processors, which I agree with Bitch are more trouble than they're worth. If so, 141, why not get one? They are inexpensive and easy to find.
("generally" more trouble than they're worth)
I also find cleaning a non-immersion blender WAY more annoying than cleaning a food processor. Food processors come apart in a way that makes them really easy to rinse and clean.
142: Thought about it, but I hate taking up a quarter of the diswasher with what is essentially one bowl, so I always do mixing bowls and the like by hand, but then I resent that. So. But it is true that it would make salsa a regular thing rather than once in a while. Hmm.
I have a wire pastry cutter that I like that doesn't get bent because it's not quite wire; the cutting parts are maybe 3/8 inch long and fairly well attached to the sides.
re: 143
I used to have an immersion blender. Right now it's a jug blender which is less handy, tbh. It's good for blending up marinades and things though -- jerk marinade, or whatever.
In Czech, everyone has loads of kitchen gadgets. Particularly, these blender/heater/stirrer things that you chuck veggies in, set a timer and they stir and cook for you. I don't know what they're called as I've never seen them in the UK.
144: Get the kind that has a string, rather than a crank--creates more centrifugal force, dries the lettuce better.
All things that require storage space and only have one function count as "gadgets"--hence the hesitation re. salad spinner. But it makes a big difference in being able to wash & dry greens, which nothing else really does. Plus you can use the inner strainer as a colander.
146: You can often clean a blender just by running it for a few secs with hot water and dishwashing soap. Then rinse, et voila.
150 -- I have tried the string, prefer the crank. A job I had in 1992 or so was prep cook at Manhattan Plaza restaurant, where I dried a whole lot of lettuce using a large (but not that much larger than the home version) salad spinner, one with a crank. Much better suited to batch operation than a string.
Every time I see the title of this post in the Recent Comments section, 50 Cent starts playing in my head, but I can't come up with the rhyme for what he's going to let us lick.
My wife, who does almost all the higher-level and complex cooking, uses the food processor about 4-5 times a week. Since we've had one for over twenty years, probably we've made favorites of recipes that otherwise wouldn't get made. Someone just now thinking about getting one wouldn't be in the same position.
Since our division of labor has always been she cooks, I clean up, the cleanup burden referred to may not concern her as it would someone who cleaned up as well as cooked. Gadget storage is not a problem for us: a countertop in the pantry is given over to the blender, food-processor, mixmaster, etc. Food processor pieces are washed in the dishwasher, but I hand wash all pots, pans and mixing bowls because they would take up too much space in the dishwasher.
I've got a stick blender, a jar blender, a stand mixer, a hand mixer AND a food processor. (Go suburbs.) The stick blender is extremely useful for soups and sauces. The jar blender only gets broken out for pesto (because the food processor doesn't chop up the basil evenly) and margaritas. The stand mixer gets used a lot when I'm on a baked goods kick (mmm, meringue, mmmm, frosting) but these days mostly gets used for pizza dough. (Also, it looks pretty and shiny on my counter.) I've recently used the food processor for cutting fat into flour; it seemed to work well enough for my purposes, but a biscuit purist might disagree.
If I had to pick one, I'd probably keep the food processor, because if I cooked as much as I should I'd be using it all the time. Stick blender would be a close second. The hand mixer hasn't seen any use in years so I'm not even sure why I still have it.
Also, this is the only salad spinner worth having.
Anybody who makes pesto with a blender really ought to try sometime, making it with mortar and pestle. It will taste way way better, take about the same amount of time, and not create an annoying amount of cleanup.
Everyone loves OXO. But you know what? I don't.
Anybody who makes pesto with a blender really ought to try sometime, making it with mortar and pestle.
Expound on this? I've tried, but I think my mortar and pestle is much too small (say, a cup or so) and I never seem to end up doing the leaves any damage. By the time I'm frustrated, I have a cupful of limp, bruised leaves, but nothing like a paste.
1. Get a larger mortar and pestle -- Zabars has a big one made of marble (about 2 1/2 cups capacity) that is not too expensive.
2. Crush the garlic and nuts first. this gives a base for crushing the basil that is mush easier to work against than the bare mortar.
Also AWESOME and easy to make with a large mortar and pestle: nut/seed and roasted-vegetable dips like baba ganoush. I like making one with pine nuts, garlic, roasted eggplant or summer squash, and basil or mint. Oh summer, I miss you.
mmm, meringue, mmmm, frosting
You are not convincing me.
Br/A/un makes a line of very small food processors, attachments to the stick type just mentioned, which are very useful for mortar-and-pestle jobs. If you've got the space for a mug you can store it.
("not too expensive" should have "if memory serves" appended to it -- it's been a long time since I bought mine.)
very useful for mortar-and-pestle jobs
Huh? Do you mean they do things well which could otherwise be done with a mortar and pestle, or something else? (Also, why do you googleproof the name of the kitchen equipment manufacturer?)
They're good for making pesto and other things that are halfway between a sauce and a chunky salsa.
161 reminds me of how bad a cook I really am. Waaaah.
Poignant! I feel sure you could learn how to do these things, however.
162: Not convincing you of the virtues of a stand mixer or the virtues of frosting? $300 is a bit much to spend on a frosting machine, though you'll note that the food processor, not the stand mixer, would be my desert island appliance.
If the virtues of frosting are not self-evident, however, there is not much I can do to help you.
But your food processor would not be at all useful on the desert island, is the problem. The lack of electricity would be only the most immediately obvious stumbling block.
(a mortar and pestle would be much more practical.)
Well, my other desert island items would be a chef's knife and a reeeeeeeally long extension cord. (Waterproof, needless to say.)
Frosting is a terrible thing to do to a cake.
I like the idea of meringues, but meringues themselves do not please.
My wife dislikes meringues, but the lemon pies my mom used to make, from those little pudding packages, were topped with meringue she'd whip up, and looked great. Part of my mom's family had spent time in the West Indies, and she added sugar and/or molasses to damn near everything. The outrage I heard expressed in the early seventies to the notion that sugar sugar! was added to vegetables puzzled me. I thought all foods were prepared that way. Her baking and dessert preparation stood far above any other kind of cooking she did.
175: Chocolate chip meringues? Those are good. Although actually I like them even without the chocolate. No flavor other than sweet, but that shattery-airy texture. Mmmm.
I'm always stealing the decorative meringue mushrooms off everyone elses serving of the yule log cake at Christmas.
What do you do with your frosting, then?
Yeah, great big strapping mortar and pestle is the way to go for pesto, hummus, etc. Dramatically better than when done in a blender or food processor: grinding/crushing > cutting when it comes to flavor.
For salsas, I like to use a molcajete, for the same reason as above plus it just seems so authentic, but a great big strapping mortar and pestle works fine too.
And I also do not like OXO one bit.
As for salad spinners, I like them, but I haven't had one in a good long while. I usually just use a great big light cotton dish towel. Put your greens in the center, gather up the corners well, and then fling it, hard, repeatedly at the sink or bathtub till it stops shedding liquid. It's a nicely violent ballistic action that is good for banishing foul moods. And then you have salad!
And I also do not like OXO one bit.
I like mortar and pestle for rougher salsas, but I like my salsa verde smoother than that. Also, I currently have 13 cups of it in the fridge awaiting prompt consumption, stowing in the freezer, and distribution to friends. I think if I'd tried to make that by hand, my arm would have fallen off. (And this was the last of the tomatillos until next year.)
My kitchen sink is far too high to comfortably fling greens at, and I'm not about to walk all the way to the bathroom in the middle of preparing my salad! The OXO salad spinner is pretty great, sez me, even if lots of other of their tools are not.
Her baking and dessert preparation stood far above any other kind of cooking she did.
This is because the addition of sugar and molasses is proper in (most) baking and desserts, where it can detract from non-baking/dessert food preparations.
My kitchen sink is far too high to comfortably fling greens at, and I'm not about to walk all the way to the bathroom in the middle of preparing my salad!
Walking out onto the back porch or balcony is also a pleasant option. But like a said, I've nothing against salad spinners, they're just pretty easy to do without.
Also, you can make an exceedingly smooth salsa with a molcajete (it has a more abrasive surface than most mortar and pestles), but it does indeed give your arm and wrist a serious workout, and is thus not very practical for turning out large quantities. But then, I'm the John Henry of the kitchen arts.
Oh, I use the cotton towel method of drying greens as well, but it's more of a hassle than the spinner and you go through a lot of towels.
What I want to know is if there's such a thing as a decent tortilla press that isn't made of fucking cheap-ass aluminium. And yeah, I know I could use a rolling pin or practice until I can flip 'em between my hands like a Mexican grandmother, but I want a tortilla press, damnit.
I've seen really cool looking big blocky wooden tortilla presses, B.
I'm like, three days late here, but Coffee Crisp is totally gross.
Ooh, thanks, Mitch! Now I just have to try to find one of those somewhere. Or actually, it would make an awesome project for Mr. B.
There are also cast iron ones available on the web. I'll leave the googling to you.
Ooh, no, wait! They make electric ones now, that cook the tortillas while they press 'em. Dayamn. What will they think of next?
Resist B, resist! Comals are for the stovetop, they shouldn't have a cord attached to them!! It's just WRONG!!!
