Posts by Bart Janssen
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Hard News: Kitchen Hacks, in reply to
why people love heavy fry pans
Thermal mass.
You can get a thin light pan just as hot but the moment you take it off the heat it loses it's temperature fast. That may be an advantage in certain situations but for a lot of cooking you don't want fast temperature changes until you decide.
Cast iron is just the cheapest way to get that mass, any chinese supermarket will have a full range of sizes and there is very little value in paying more for cast iron. So for a student with no money a $5 pan lasted me 15 years.
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Hard News: Kitchen Hacks, in reply to
Kale is oddly sweet when it is juiced with other veges. It’s a superfood too.
It's slightly less a superfood when you drizzle the leaves with oil and bake in the oven on one of those circulon baking trays until crisp. Sprinkled with seasoning (salt) it is yummy but by then you are mostly eating salt and oil on a crunchy surface mmmmmm
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And stealing one of Alton Browns hacks.
Need oven mits? Don't buy the stupid ones from the kitchen shop - go to your hardware store and buy a pair of welding gloves. The big ones that go halfway up the arm are great for working with a blazing hot BBQ!
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Hard News: Kitchen Hacks, in reply to
Alton Brown is another cook who write about the science of food and what's happening in the kitchen as you cook.
What I like about him is that he takes the science and applies it to the dogma of recipes often rewriting the recipe as a result. He's also a gadget nut but loves to find simple solutions rather than expensive ones.
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Not so much a hack but a bit of geeky science info
Tomatoes must never ever ever be chilled!
Tomatoes are alive, they keep producing flavour on the bench at room temperature. This is really important because many of those flavour components are volatile, they just float out of the tomato and are lost over time. Because the (living) tomato keeps producing more of those flavour compounds you don't noticeBUT
Some of the enzymes responsible for producing tomato flavour are very cold sensitive ... so if you chill a tomato the enzymes die and the tomato stops producing many of the flavour compounds. Those that are there at the time you chill the tomato will slowly disappear.
So never store tomatoes in the fridge and try not to buy from suppliers that chill store their tomatoes.
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Hard News: Kitchen Hacks, in reply to
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Hard News: Kitchen Hacks, in reply to
how does one actually use a preserved lemon
finely dice a small amount and add to aioli - goes amazingly well on pan fried fish
BUT the amount you use should be small when you first do it since it is very taste dependent and it's easy to use too much
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Hard News: Kitchen Hacks, in reply to
juicing a huge number of lemons, and freezing the juice in icecube trays
This also works very well for Limes. This is an incredibly important hack because limes ripen in winter (and are cheap then) and margaritas are best drunk in hot summer (when limes are very expensive).
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Hard News: Kitchen Hacks, in reply to
Me and your food processor need to have a knead-off.
There is a small triangular shaped cartilage in your wrist that as you age becomes somewhat fragile. After about 9 months of being very careful with my wrist I can almost knead dough again. For now we let the breadmaker's dough cycle (45 min) do the work.
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Hard News: Kitchen Hacks, in reply to
A device: We don’t have gas
Not an easy hack but definitely a kitchen hack:
We couldn't afford to get city gas up the driveway but I really really wanted to cook on gas. So we got a gas hob and connected it (registered gasfitter reqd) to an LPG bottle outside the house. It's just a 10 kg bottle and it lasts about 10-12 months between refills!