See here we go! Grill them up or fry them, give them some nice crispy texture, and suddenly I'm not twitching and somehow picturing those mashed potatoes as cold
This buttery, chamomile tea-scented loaf is a sweet pop symphony, the Abba of cakes. A pot of flowery, just-brewed chamomile isn’t required for drinking with slices of this tender loaf but is strongly recommended. In life and in food, you always need balance: A sip or two of the grassy, herbal tea between bites of this cake counters the sweetness, as do freeze-dried strawberries, which lend tartness and a naturally pink hue to the lemony glaze. This everyday loaf will keep on the counter for 3 to 4 days; be sure the cut side is always well wrapped.
Ingredients
Yield: One 9-inch loaf
½ cup/115 grams unsalted butter
2 tablespoons/6 grams chamomile tea (from 4 to 6 tea bags), crushed fine if coarse
1 cup/240 milliliters whole milk
Nonstick cooking spray
1 cup/200 grams granulated sugar
½ teaspoon coarse kosher salt
2 large eggs
1 large lemon
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon pure vanilla extract
1½ cups/192 grams all-purpose flour
1 cup/124 grams confectioners’ sugar
½ cup/8 grams freeze-dried strawberries
Preparation
Step 1
In a small saucepan, melt the butter over medium heat. Add 1 tablespoon chamomile to a large mixing bowl. Pour the hot melted butter over the chamomile and stir. Set aside to steep and cool completely, about 1 hour.
Step 2
Use the same saucepan (without washing it out) to bring the milk to a simmer over medium-high heat, keeping watch so it doesn’t boil over. Remove from the heat, and stir the remaining 1 tablespoon chamomile into the hot milk. Set aside to steep and cool completely, about 1 hour.
Step 3
Heat oven to 350 degrees. Grease a 9-by-5-inch loaf pan with the nonstick cooking spray and line with parchment paper so the long sides of the pan have a couple of inches of overhang to make lifting the finished cake out easier.
Step 4
Add the sugar and salt to the bowl with the butter, and whisk until smooth and thick, about 1 minute. Add the eggs, 1 at a time, vigorously whisking to combine after each addition. Zest the lemon into the bowl; add the baking powder and vanilla, and whisk until incorporated. Add the flour and stream in the milk mixture while whisking continuously until no streaks of flour remain.
Step 5
Transfer the batter to the prepared pan and bake until a skewer or cake tester inserted in the center comes out clean (a few crumbs are OK, but you should see no wet batter), 40 to 45 minutes. Cool in the pan on a rack for 30 minutes.
Step 6
While the cake cools, make the icing: Into a medium bowl, squeeze 2 tablespoons juice from the zested lemon, then add the confectioners’ sugar. Place the dehydrated strawberries in a fine-mesh sieve set over the bowl and, using your fingers, crush the brittle berries and press the red-pink powder through the sieve and into the sugar. (The more you do this, the redder your icing will be.) Whisk until smooth.
Step 7
If needed, run a knife along the edges of the cake to release it from the pan. Holding the 2 sides of overhanging parchment, lift the cake out and place it on a plate, cake stand or cutting board. Discard the parchment. Pour the icing over the cake, using a spoon to push the icing to the edges of the cake to encourage the icing to drip down the sides dramatically. Cool the cake completely and let the icing set.
I may not work at Starbucks anymore but that doesn't mean I'm gonna stop bitching about secret menus.
(and before someone asks, the TERFs threatening me over the TERF dog whistle post didn't get me fired, I quit during the union busting and when they cancelled my insurance long before that)
Anyways, Secret Menus.
They're dogshit.
I'm sure we've all seen drinks like these on Tiktok and Instagram, but the trend of ordering things off menu predated both sites by a long time with 'secret menus'- Special little codewords to order things a particular way that wasn't how they were normally served. If you work in food service, you're already groaning and you already know. For those that don't though, these secret menus are horrific for employees. They're not managed by the companies or employees who work there, they're generally made by customers. I'm gonna focus on Starbucks here, but it applies to other 'secret menus' too, basically how ordering these kinda makes you an asshole and how its a pain in the ass.
Customers do not know what they're doing and this is a horrible system for many reasons:
Customers don't know whats in stock seasonally/for limited time
Customers don't generally know how drinks are made
Customers don't understand conflicts with ingredients
Customers don't know how to order them
Customers make up items for clout
Number one: What is actually in stock
What I'd say is the absolute biggest problem with secret menu and Tiktok drinks is these things stay online for far longer than most ingredients are in stock for.
Starbucks in particular has a lot of flavors that stay year round, but also a huge rotating stock throughout the year of temporary seasonal flavors. Marshmallow, Chestnut Praline, Milk Chocolate, Irish Creme, Pumpkin Spice, Pistachio, to name a few are seasonal and your local store isn't going to have them all year. Their seasonal stock varies, they might have it longer if it wasn't popular at that location, but they might have run out of it far before the season ended if it was. A sudden burst of popularity of a tiktok drink using a seasonal flavor might suddenly make all of that temporary stock of flavor go away due to hype, vastly increasing the demand for it before more can be produced. Items with very short term availability, such as Irish Creme or Pistachio, probably won't get more produced once it's run out because it's only around for a very short period of time, unlike things like Pumpkin Spice or the holiday flavors. Compounding with issue number two, because the recipes aren't made by employees, these secret menu items often use far more of the ingredient than normal, making it run out even faster than before.
The secret menu items on a lot of these sites also aren't typically updated to keep up with items that have been discontinued either. Often, they list things that used to be flavors or ingredients, like Mango syrup, Lime refreshers or pieces, Hazelnut drizzle, Cold Brew Whip, and so on, that haven't been produced in literal years. They don't exist anymore, but the recipes still do. People still try to order them because they think they're still around.
It's a pain for the workers to have to explain it, time and time again, as customers go through entire lists of secret menu items that are impossible to make because half of the things in them are discontinued, even with a full menu being right in front of them of things that can be made.
Number Two: How are they actually made?
The customers have no idea how the drinks are actually made, both proportions of ingredients wise and the actual process.
Part 1: Proportions.
Places like Starbucks use extremely specific guides to make drinks. Each size of each drink type gets a certain amount of each ingredient, every time, or it stops being that type of drink. Adding too much of a flavor, or many flavors, and it basically becomes nothing but syrup. Too much liquid in a frap and it no longer fits in the blender.
An EXTREMELY basic run down:
Tall, Grande, Venti lattes, get 1, 2, 2 for shots respectively (3 for venti if iced), and 3, 4, 5 pumps of syrup for hot, 3, 4, 6, for iced.
Tall, Grande, and Venti frozen drinks get 2, 3, or 4 pumps of syrup respectively.
All refreshers get one scoop of berries, but Trenta, which at least at my store, got two.
Trenta hot drinks and Trenta blended drinks do not exist, period. There is no Trenta americano or nitro either.
If you add too much to your drink, it will stop being that kind of drink or purely be syrup, completely negating the coffee to it at all and each syrup added to some drinks, like lattes and fraps, adds a charge to it. Adding more than 7 pumps to a frap and it won't hold together anymore, it'll separate. The berry pieces for refreshers don't actually add much (if any) flavor either, they're there to look nice. Adding more than 4 scoops makes it very hard to shake your drink without spilling it.
Part 2: Process
Drinks are obviously made on certain stations- Espresso and steamed drinks on the espresso bar, blended and cold foams on the blended station, teas and refreshers on tea station. This is a HUGE part of efficiency and getting your drink to you fast. The more stations a drink has to go through to be made, the further it pushes back the line and longer it takes to make and more employees it must go through before getting to you. It can add confusion on how exactly to make it too.
Something like a frapp with added shots and fruit pieces now relies on three stations: Bar, blender, and tea station. A lot of stores, that's three employees all making your drink. It has to go to the front of the line for bar, then gets put at the back of the line for frap station, and once done there, goes again to the back of the line for tea station to get its topping. By then, it's probably even started to melt because of all the extra added steps, especially if it has syrups it wouldn't normally get and aren't normally on the frapp station, making that barista go all the way to the other syrups to get those too. It is a MASSIVE waste of time for everyone involved, and slows down other people's drinks too.
Layered or swirled drinks also aren't a thing at starbucks, and most secret menus aren't going to tell you that. You don't know to ask for it layered, and the barista doesn't know to make it layered either. A lot of secret menu drinks rely on special instructions baristas won't ordinarily do for the way those drinks have to be ordered to look anything like the picture. This also further slows down the line too.
Sometimes, they ask for impossible things, like blending fruit pieces- That damages the blenders. Adding pastries to fraps was something Starbucks used to do, but doesn't anymore due to the added strain on the blender. Steaming syrups causes damages to equipment by clogging or even melting parts of the steam wand and can horrifically burn you or the barista. Because the customers that came up with the drinks don't know this, they don't know they shouldn't order them this way and a lot of times it's easier to just do it anyway or completely ignore the customer's request for it and now you're both unhappy.
Powders, like vanilla bean, chocolate malt, spices like cinnamon and whatnot, they're not really made to be steamed and slowly grind away at the steam wand and cause scratches to it. It makes it harder to keep the equipment clean and sanitized, making grooves where ingredients can get stuck and not only fester if not cleaned properly, but also cause allergic reactions for other customers. Powders in the shakers, in high amounts, also break the seal when shaking them and can make the lid fly off or make a drink so dense it's not able to be shaken anymore.
Number Three: Ingredient Conflicts
I'm putting this completely separate from two because it's its own beast of a problem: Some ingredients just shouldn't go together.
Adding dairy to refreshers is adding base into an acid, making the drink curdle into a gross mess within a few minutes. Lemon juice, which is in a LOT of the refreshers, added to milk is one way to make cheese, actually. You're making proto cheese. Fruit flavored proto cheese. It's unpleasant to drink, doesn't taste great once it's curdled, and can make you feel sick afterwards.
Cold foams on hot drinks melts, completely absorbing into the drink. If you wait a bit before drinking it, it'll look like the foam is completely gone or was never added to begin with. Many a Karen have bitched about being charged for foam and 'not' getting it for this exact reason. Adding cold milk from the foam to a drink can also cool a drink down significantly, making it seem like it wasn't made right and being a perfect environment for bacteria to grow throughout the day because a lot of people nurse a drink throughout work or class. A lukewarm drink out of the zone that kills bacteria becomes a breeding ground for germs, it doesn't spontaneously spawn bacteria as some people have said but it still isn't safe if you leave your drink out, which way way too many people do because 'well it got steamed, so it's safe'.
Number Four: How to order them
Some secret menus/tiktoks are better than others in how to actually order these drinks (though in my firm opinion, theyre all kinda dogshit for the above reasons)
Way, way, way too many just say to order 'the harley quinn drink'. That's not how it works at places like Starbucks. Secret menu items are NOT trained because they're NOT on the menu, the barista has no fucking clue what a Harley Quinn drink is. Chances are, neither does the person ordering it either- They were given a picture and that's it. Butterbeer, Harley Quinn, Oreo, Twix, Mango Sunshine, they mean nothing to the barista because it doesn't tell what the drink is or what's in it, or most importantly to the barista, how to fucking make it.
The way you order at Starbucks has been mocked relentlessly but it's the one direct praise I'll give them: How you order reflects exactly what your drink is, how to make it, and what's in it.
Example with some of my drinks:
Venti kid's temp chai, 2 caramel, 2 vanilla. It's a chai latte, the size, a specific temperature (120 degrees), and the exact pumps of syrup.
Trenta Strawberry Acai Lemonade, 2 raspberry, no pieces. Again, the exact drink and size, I want 2 raspberry in it, and no fruit pieces.
Tall iced blonde caramel macchiato, upside down, 3 vanilla. It's a small caramel macchiato, a fairly standard drink, with blonde espresso instead of regular, 3 vanilla added. Upside down is basically the same thing as stirred, so it's all mixed.
There's no confusion over 'secret' ingredients or processes to make it, it is exactly as it comes out on the label. It's how all drinks at starbucks work: Drink type, size, added or removed ingredients or processes. You can follow it pretty easily with any drink.
Secret menu drinks don't often give the recipe, and even when they do, they won't take into account other sizes. A grande of a secret menu drink sized up or down leaves a barista guessing at how to make it and probably won't taste right to you, because it wasn't made to be drank in that size. Now you're annoyed, and if you go to get it remade, the barista has not a damn clue on how to make it 'the right way' because the 'right way' doesn't exist. Your barista has no idea that there's supposed to be crushed berry powder (which we don't make) on top, or matcha, or sprinkles that weren't on the recipe. They don't know it's supposed to be half whipped cream and blended in two separate blenders for different colors. It's a pain in the ass.
Number Five: Clout
Sometimes, these drinks just straight up don't fucking exist and never did. You might have seen a few like this 'Under the Sea Refresher'
It doesn't exist. Starbucks doesn't have a blue refresher or gummy worms and never has. It's completely made up for internet fame and clout for the 'cool new drink'.
The 'Rainbow' Refreshers and most layered drinks also aren't real.
This isn't a way Starbucks baristas make drinks, any layered drink like this, or ones with swirls or whatnot, if you don't see it on the actual Starbucks menu, it's not real. They're made up because they look pretty and it's incredibly easy to spoof a Starbucks drink that looks pretty and grabs attention- all you need is a cup from Starbucks and to put whatever you want in it. Most of them are just food coloring and water to make up 'refreshers' with random shit thrown in. Notice a lot of the accounts spreading them never actually drink them on camera- its because it's just water or completely random shit to look good, with no intention of actually tasting good.
More maliciously, a lot of these drinks are pranks to make you look like an idiot for ordering something that doesn't actually exist and has no way of actually being made. A whole lot pick on kids- I can't find the original Tiktoks, but people would try and order lots of Disney themed drinks like the Simba, Ariel, or Ursula frap at my store: Those drinks never existed, someone made them up.
So just... please stop ordering Secret menu shit. It's a pain for you, it's a pain for the employee, and there's plenty of things that are on the menu for you to enjoy, especially at places like Starbucks. Ask your barista for a recommendation, their favorite, or a 'surprise me'. They'll probably ask you things like 'hot or iced, coffee or tea' and any allergies you have, but usually they'll be more than happy to make you something they think you'll like, rather than fight with secret menu and tiktok garbage. Chances are, you'll probably like it. If not, change it up or try again.
Just order or modify something that already exists, your baristas are dealing with a whole fucking lot as it is, pandemic, union busting, and horrible customers alike.
so i get this pizza from the local place that's mushroom and truffle oil. last week i ordered it with extra mushroom and when rhys went to pick it up the guy was like "was that a mistake? that would be a lot of mushroom"
rhys assured him it wasn't a mistake, i just REALLY like mushroom, so he put the extra on and finished it up
this week i ordered it again, rhys went to pick it up and pizza guy is like "i assumed since she ordered it again it wasn't too much mushroom so i actually put a little EXTRA on this time"
i can still see bits of the base, good sir, but a valiant effort
tempted to order double extra mushroom next time to really fuck with him
rhys says if i order double extra mushroom i have to go and pick it up because the pizza guy might snap and decapitate him with a pizza cutter
also the pizza guy thinks he's alexis because the orders are all in my name and he has too much anxiety to correct him which is very funny but also i can lean into this and just say i'm rhys (reese) since we both have neutral names
I live in Massachusetts and I was curious what the Fuck this could possibly mean and uh
Basically no one knows what’s in it and it’s maybe poison but Massachusetts is the only state that holds carbonated water to the same health and safety standards as regular water so LaCroix is just doing nothing and hoping there’s no consequences
So I had to look this up because my "omg, not CHEMICALS!!!" sense was tingling.
The lawsuit also alleges that the chemicals in LaCroix "include limonene, which can cause kidney toxicity and tumors; linalool propionate, which is used to treat cancer; and linalool, which is used in cockroach insecticide.”
Okay so let's get more information about these "scary" chemicals:
Limonene: it comes from citrus peels
Linalool: it comes from a lot of chemicals, including citrus peels, lavender, and cinnamon
Propionate: it comes from literally every organic process
this shit is so tiring, y'all.
EVERYTHING IS MADE OF CHEMICALS
CHEMICALS ARE NATURALLY OCCURING IN NATURE
IF YOU SAW THE CHEMICAL BREAKDOWN OF A COMPLETELY NATURALLY OCCURRING FRUIT YOU WOULD SEE A LOT OF SCARY SOUNDING WORDS AND SOME CHEMICALS WHICH ARE INDEED TOXIC FOR CERTAIN THINGS ESPECIALLY IN HIGH CONCENTRATIONS AND QUANTITIES
Do I think food safety is important? Yeah. Do I think it's good that beverage manufacturers are being held to a high standard? yeah.
Do I think La Croix should be put out of business for using naturally-occurring chemicals that come from fruit? fuck no
If you want to ban those chemicals from food, you'll have a hard time finding anything to eat
I just saw yet another debate over MSG sensitivity online.
The way I see it, the problem with MSG usage in processed food isn’t that it has MSG, just that it has a metric shit-ton of it.
I’m sensitive to MSG but I’m fine with it in the lower quantities that it occurs naturally in many foods - it’s just that the amount in, say, a bag of Doritos, or in the flavor packet in instant ramen, is enough to give me a very bad time. (And I was experiencing these bad times long before I ever heard of MSG sensitivity or knew that MSG was a thing, so I don’t think it’s a placebo effect.)
I have done some experiments to find where my threshold is and it’s kind of annoying to do; all I know is that it’s higher than nothing and lower than the amount used in a single-serving bag of Chili Cheese Fritos. (Plain Fritos don’t cause me a problem.)
Since MSG levels are never outright stated in a food’s nutrition label, it’s easier to just assume that if something lists MSG in its ingredients it uses too damn much and to have something else.
[ID: Tumblr reply from qwertystop asking, "found this and showed an acquaintance when MSG sensitivities came up in conversatoin - do you get problems from soy sauce, parmigiano-reggiano cheese, vegemite, boullion cubes, meat stocks, etc? Things which contain similarly extremely high levels of glutamic acid, but not as something isolated and added back in?]
Soy sauce, Parmesan cheese, no. Boullion cubes and meat stocks, it depends on whether they've had MSG added in or if they're just full of the natural glutamates. Vegemite, I have no idea, I can't stand the flavor of it.
I had an interesting conversation with someone about this where it seems plausible that the problem isn't with the MSG itself but with the brain's response to being overwhelmed by the concentrated flavor. Like, apparently MSG kept in gelatin capsules and swallowed doesn't cause a problem, when the same amount tasted and spat out can.
Given that migraines are often a response to a sensory overload condition it seems like it could be the concentrated MSG flavor itself that's the issue. My migraines tend to be triggered by protracted intense sounds and smells, so that feels plausible, anyway (although the specific symptoms I have when I eat MSG-laden foods are different than my usual migraines).
Imho the idea of ‘cruelty free’ products or food shouldn’t mean that nothing died to create it, but rather that anything and anyone involved in the creation process hasn’t been exploited or harmed.
Leather is good actually. Veganism isn’t the end all be all to morality and consumption. The issue isn’t that a chicken died for those nuggets, but that while the chicken was alive, it’s life fucking sucked. Vegan chocolate means little if the cocoa that made it was gathered by child slave labor.
Factory farms, abuses of the people who pick the fruit and vegetables we eat, the focus profit and productivity over all else - that’s the fucking issue here. It’s capitalism folks.
The main thing I get from Dylan Hollis cooking old recipes is this:
Recipes from the 1910s and the Great Depression are great, and I suspect it’s because they were made by someone with limited resources. But they found a way to make something good, maybe even something fantastic with those limited resources, and they wanted to write it down and share with their friends so that they could also make something out of saltines and potatoes. Recipes from the 1910s and the Great Depression are written down and shared in love.
The recipes you should fear come from the 1950s and 1960s, which I’m pretty sure are written down and shared as a form of McCarthyism.
I strongly suspect that the rise in horrifying recipes in the 50s, 60s and 70s is that this is when recipes were being used as advertising. Whether or not the recipe was tasty or even palatable at all was a secondary concern at best to if it could convince a housewife to buy more Chlorox Brand Lard™️ to try it out.
Okay. Maybe that’s a little too harsh to not explain… Let’s start with Slavery.
Back in the first 400 years of America being populated by white colonizers and enslaved black folks it was mostly black people doing the cooking. Particularly in the South. Oh, for sure you’d have poor white folks cooking for themselves and their families, using traditional recipes handed down. Or making things with New World foods like Potatoes and that newfangled Corn stuff.
But particularly in the South, Slaves did the majority of cooking. And when they were freed in the 1860s and 70s, you suddenly had a mess of wealthy white folks who didn’t have a -damn- clue how to cook. You know how Tiana’s Dad started up a restaurant in The Princess and the Frog? Yeah. LOTS of former slaves did that. Used the skills they learned working for white slavers to cook banging meals they knew the white folks couldn’t cook for themselves.
It took -decades- for white folks to start getting their culinary feet back. To really understand how to cook and make recipes work.
And then you know what happened? WW1. Food shortages before the Dust Bowl happened caused people to tighten their belts and try and figure stuff out. Know what the most popular meat was on the dinner table? MUTTON. Sheep. Lamb. Delicious and flavorful and just -so- good for you with it’s healthy amounts of fats and all the luscious goodness in that nummy snackiness.
Recipes expanded. Exploded. Got shared.
Then WW2 hit. And this is where shit went sideways again… but this time? Not because of Shortages. See, Mutton was cheap. Cheap for the people, Cheap for the Government. And that made it the premier Ration for American GIs… but.
Tinned mutton is a slimy gross paste.
And soldiers were eating it two to three times a day. No MRE packs with variety menus. Just straight up canned mutton over and over and over and over. And when they got home? They BANNED it from the dinner table. The sheep industry in the US went from top dog to bottom of the barrel.
So once again you’ve got American Culinary Understanding flailing and reaching out for anything it can to replace a -staple- of the American Diet.
“Beef, it’s What’s for Dinner”. “Pork, the Other White Meat” “Chicken of the Sea”
Folks knew how to prepare -Mutton- and -Lamb- and maybe Chicken. And now they’re slapped with these other foods? Add in the massive changes in availability of new products (Again that are largely untested) and marketing pushes for things like Crisco or Gelatin…
The 50s and 60s are a culinary nightmare in the US’s collective memory for the same reason the 1880s were: No one knew what the fuck they were doing.
Don’t forget to add in the absolute explosion of people owning refrigerators in the Baby Boom/Post-WWII period. Then you have the fact that the great sort of… mixing-up of people that happened in the late 40s through the 50s when the suburbs exploded… moved a lot of young mothers away from their support structures.
See, Jell-O between WWI and the late 40s was largely used by women who had tea in the afternoons. Gelatin already featured heavily in cookbooks intended for Ladies Who Lunch.
But then you hit the late 40s and you have these harried women who were trying to put A Nice Dinner on the table for their husbands, and their husbands remember dinners where their mom had like 6 or 7 daughters to help her while the men were out in the fields, and aunties and grandmothers to hand to take the baby for a minute but their mother made two pies for supper and two for dinner, every day!*
And so these women, who now have refrigerators instead of iceboxes and have far less support in caring for their children than previous generations, are trying to put together a Nice Dinner 7 days a week. And here’s this miracle substance that can turn out these jewel-tone dinners and desserts, and they make it in savory flavors now, and it’s very modern and there are lots of recipes!
Basically, Jell-O was the Instant Pot of the post-war period. 🤷🏻♂️ Yeah, people didn’t know what they were doing to some extent, but a lot of people who did really needed a quick way to do things alone for which they’d had community support before.
*Yes, my great-grandmother (different one from that one post) did this on the farm she and her husband owned. Two pies a meal, 2 meals a day, for 50 years. I have her recipes. :p
It's all fun watching these dudes eat a twinky but I really need them to know that there is good cooking made by hand with love that Americans can be proud of. Give them brisket
That said, it’s worth seeing what Native American food is like. Some of it is pretty darn amazing! And it’s definitely had a lot of influence on modern American food, as well as Mexican food (which is a lot closer to being indigenous American food than anything that is referred to as “American” cuisine, which is primarily of European origin).
My dad was a veterinarian in the meat animal industry so here is an explanation of why medium rare is a thing with steaks, but not chicken:
In beef, what you worry about is e. coli. In healthy live cattle (and they must be healthy to be butchered for consumption) e. coli is only in the digestive tract but it can escape and contaminate the outside of the beef during slaughter and butchering. The bacteria does not migrate to the interior of the meat as there is no circulation to take it there. So you can eat beef where the inside is less cooked as long as the outside is well seared to kill any bacteria that may be on it. Hamburger should always be thoroughly cooked because it is all “outside”.
With chicken, the concern is salmonella, which is found through out the body of the chicken. Chickens can tolerate it, it doesn’t make them noticeably sick, but humans can not, so the entire meat must be cooked enough to kill any bacteria present in the meat. As a note, it used to be believed that salmonella was not passed on to the eggs and in fact in the 1950′s, when my dad was in Vet school, studies showed it was not present in the eggs even if it was present in the hen. That’s why there used to be a lot of recipes that used raw eggs, it was safe then. However due to some change in the bacteria, or changes in egg-farming practices, it is now found in eggs as well. The amounts are small, and if you are eating eggs within a couple days of being laid it’s probably not a problem, but store eggs are old enough for bacteria to have reproduced to dangerous levels and the liquid interior allows it to spread all through the egg.
As a side note, with pigs the concern is trichinosis, a parasite that used to be common in pigs and spread to humans through under-cooked pork. However, it has been essentially eliminated in commercially produced pork these days. It should be safe now to eat “medium rare” pork, but trichinosis was so horrible and the fear of it so ingrained that it is rare to see pork that is not well done.
I also wanted to mention that apart from the salmonella risk (which is a freakin’ big “apart from”), you also have the risk of Campylobacter infections. Not only can these lead to really really horrible gastro-intestinal problems, a small number of infections also cause an auto-immune response that leads to the body destroying its own myelin (the stuff around your nerves that makes them good at carrying electrical signals). Basically, your nerves stop working and even if you survive, you’ll be hooked up to an iron lung for… a long time. I don’t know how long it takes to regrow myelin, I’m not a neurologist.
Note that you CAN safely have slightly-pinkish chicken if it’s been cooked with a pasteurizing-type cooking process such as sous vide or other low-and-slow techniques. However, chicken cooked that way will just be, like, slightly pinkish, and consistently so throughout, rather than a band of well-done meat surrounding a transparent core like in most of those photos.
It’s also still a bit risky and not particularly recommended.
American electric kettles are slow because American houses are wired for 110 volt electrical sockets. Whereas UK sockets are 220 volts. UK kettles have literally twice the power as American ones.
I'm aware of that, and in fact said so just after the first picture. In that same paragraph you'll see something which had nothing to do with US vs UK power.
According to the American review of American kettles running on American voltage, one kettle (OXO Brew Adjustable Temperature Electric Pour-Over Kettle, $105-135) boiled water much faster than another (Fellow Corvo EKG Electric Kettle, $150-200).
How much faster? A few seconds? Nope, a full three-and-a-half minutes: 4 min 12 sec compared to 7 min 42 sec. Come on!
Waiting for nearly eight minutes - though the review states that this is "still faster than most stovetops", that's no compliment - defeats the reason for buying an electric kettle in the first place, and that electric kettle in particular.
Calling it "a beautiful kettle for your countertop" means nothing if it doesn't do its job, and IMO an asking price of $150-plus for such an inefficient contraption is daylight robbery.
In the US the best way to get a ridiculously-fast boiling kettle is to get an induction stovetop. I did a couple of videos on this, first one of a 240V induction stove vs. a reasonably-fast dedicated kettle:
and then one of a 120V induction cooktop vs. the same electric kettle:
Basically, if you want fast tea, and can afford/have the ability to do it, get an induction stove; otherwise, get an induction hotplate. Either of those will work with a traditional stovetop kettle and be significantly faster than a dedicated electric kettle. Induction cooktops also have a lot to offer in other respects, like fast, even heating, way better temperature control than gas or traditional electric, being a lot safer (especially in homes with curious hands and paws), and just plain being cool. Although there’s downsides as well (some folks can’t stand the vibration noise, you have to get ferromagnetic cookware, etc.) so the choice isn’t necessarily right for everyone.
(That said I still use the dedicated electric kettle because I’m usually not in a hurry and I like the convenience/small footprint of its power base, and that base also works with my automatic milk frother so it serves a dual purpose for me. I also find the electric kettle much easier to clean.)
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste
DIRECTIONS:
Place a chicken breast on a cutting board. With your hand flat on top of it, carefully slice the chicken in half horizontally. Trim excess fat as needed.
In a large shallow baking dish, combine chicken, pickle juice and ½ cup milk; marinate for at least 30 minutes. Drain well.
Heat peanut oil in a large skillet over medium high heat.
In another large shallow baking dish, whisk together remaining 1 cup milk and egg. Stir in chicken to coat and drain excess milk mixture.
In a gallon size Ziploc bag or large bowl, combine chicken, flour and confectioners’ sugar; season with salt and pepper, to taste.
Working in batches, add chicken to the skillet and cook until evenly golden and crispy, about 4-5 minutes. Transfer to a paper towel-lined plate.
Serve chicken immediately on burger buns with green leaf lettuce, tomato and pickles.
Sorry everyone didn’t grow up in a household where their caretaker cooker or knew how to cooked. Some of us didn’t grow up in a household with fresh fruits and produce. Some of us didn’t have the money to spend on a shit ton of garlic.
So how about enjoy the video instead of being a snobby bitch.
Also Julia Child would be ashamed of people behaving like that. Her whole deal was just... Making cooking accessible for people. Hell, she had a whole segment devoted to "oh, nobody taught you how to cook eggs? Here's how you do that." A significant part of her show was basics that people take for granted (and though the equipment may have changed somewhat, its still pretty helpful). My dad had busy parents who didn't have the time or knowhow to cook, and he learned from watching Julia Child. French cooking made easy, here's the basics everyone assumes you know but never taught you. And ever since, he's had a love of cooking.
Stop putting people down for not knowing basics. Everyone is a beginner at some point or another.
So confit is a way of cooking things, and it does marvellous things to many things.
You put stuff in oil and slow cook it. That’s confit. Garlic confit? Put it in oil and slow cook it. Chicken confit? You put it in oil and slow cook it.
(side note: confit historically means to preserve by cooking at a low temperature, (which often also meant a cure prior to cooking). So Fruit confit is fruit that’s been cooked at a low temperature in a very concentrated sugar solution, not in oil. Nowadays, confit usually just means cooking slowly in oil outside the context of fruit and does not imply a curing process)
Compared to deep frying, almost no moisture is lost, and the flavour is not changed via the maillard process because it doesn’t happen. There is no charring or searing done to the meat/whatever you’re confitting.
For veg in general, to confit them will cause them to become ultratender, as fibers and stuff will partially break down, cell walls will collapse, but no moisture will be lost. And their flavour will mostly remain; for garlic in particular, the hot garlicky taste, the result of the allicin, which is a result of crushing or chopping the garlic, will never come out. The chemicals will break down under that amount of heat.
The oil does not terribly seep into the food by the way; it’s already saturated with water, and unless that water leaves, the oil doesn’t have a place to seep into. It’s saturated already, and the result of connective tissue breaking down, or fibres breaking down, is less room for fluids. Which is why a carrot can be nice and dry, go into a hot oven, and come out floppy and moist, as the water inside can no longer be held by its inside, and available, unabsorbed water = wet.
You do get a thin layer of oil coating the outside of the food.
This means that confit’ing a food item is actually very close to steaming that item at a particular temperature, or cooking it sous vide; in either case, the item does not dry out and slowly reaches its final temperature.
no it’s not cutthroat kitchen or gordon ramsey it’s a documentary exploring the anthropological & historical significance of cooking, and the dangers of the mass industrialization of food.
and i misspoke it’s rated TV-14 (for language and nudity)
this guy is so fucking angry about sliced bread (justifiably) that he really came out on camera with this absolute banger of a quote:
“And this is really how capitalism usually works. It creates a problem, and rather than fix the problem, it creates a new business to solve the problem.”
utterly scathing and yes this is from a 60 minute documentary episode dedicated entirely to the subject of Bread
right ok so technically it’s not sliced bread but industrial, mass-manufactured bread that is…causing problems. Here’s the theory as the show presents it:
For about ~10,000 years bread was a fucking staple of the human diet. we evolved to eat this food, our bodies, our societies were built on this food, but all of a sudden we’re seeing a rise in gluten sensitivity* (distinct from celiac disease). Aka our bodies are rejecting this food we’ve spent 100 centuries eating. Where is this coming from?
Well, a big part of it is probably that less than 100 years ago corporations changed the definition of bread. (Like, figuratively and literally, they petitioned the FDA to change the legal definition of bread so they could put in additives.) In fact, industrialization has changed the process and the ingredients used to make bread, to the point manufactured bread is a profoundly different product from what our ancestors knew as bread. Let’s start with:
1) The Process: For thousands of years, humans relied on naturally occurring wild yeast and bacteria found in the air to make (leavened) bread and bread starters (fermented dough used to “start” new loaves. hence the term “sourdough”). you can still do this at home–all it involves is leaving a mixture of water and flour lying around for a few days. notice something missing? that’s right, YEAST. this process of making bread involves yeast–yeast from the air around you–but it doesn’t involve concentrated baker’s yeast. Baker’s yeast refers to various strains of yeast that are added directly to flour & water mixtures as a leavening agent. This allows the bread to rise more quickly and cuts down on the overall production time. Convenient, right?
Now, adding yeast is not automatically a bad thing, and bakers have been doing it for a damn long time in interesting ways (such as using yeast from beer brewing). But lately we’ve taken it to extremes–we’ve gotten too good at creating more and more efficient forms of commercial Baker’s yeast, specifically for industrial use on a mass scale. Manufacturers want bread to rise as fast as possible, because that is how you get more product on the shelves. Making bread in factories now takes a small fraction of the time it used to.
And why is this a problem? Because it turns out a more traditional “long fermentation process allows bacteria to fully break down the carbohydrates and gluten in bread, making it easier to digest and releasing the nutrients within it, allowing our bodies to more easily absorb them.” [1] This (added to the fact that some commercial breads contain extra added gluten) has the unfortunate result that the product you buy from the grocery store is less digestible and nutritious than the bread human societies traditionally relied upon. Hence the rise of gluten intolerance–the gluten we are eating is simply more difficult to tolerate than gluten in properly fermented bread. (This is the reason many people with gluten sensitivity don’t experience symptoms when eating more traditionally made, longer-fermented sourdough.)
That’s not the only issue though. There’s also:
2) The Ingredients. not just the countless additives, but specifically: the flour. See, a grain of wheat is…incredibly nutritious, honestly. It has almost everything we need to sustain life and health. Civilizations did–and do–rely on bread as a fundamental dietary staple, to the point that you can track political instability with rising wheat prices. It’s essential. Look at this:
In a single grain, the essence of life.
So yeah, wheat is nutritional. We can build bodies and civilizations out of wheat. But it’s also, like…super difficult to access that nutrition. Well, more so than with most foods. If you eat a handful of wheat grains, a spoonful of flour–your body can’t digest that, you get basically nothing out of that (also raw flour isn’t safe to consume, don’t do that). Unlike many crops, wheat relies on being carefully and correctly processed in order for the final product to be as nutritional as possible. As stated above, part of that process is about fermentation. Another part is the quality of the flour, what it contains and how it has been milled and treated.
And that quality has changed a lot in just a century or two. Take white flour, for instance. White flour has been around for a long fucking time actually, but until the late 19th century it was considered a luxury item, a treat for the very wealthy. White flour was never considered a staple food–until industrialists learned how to manufacture it cheaply. [2] And then it was everywhere. And suddenly, surprise surprise, we started to see a rise in nutrition related illnesses. Because the bran and germ have been stripped away, white flour has only a fraction of the nutritional value of whole grain. But because this gives it a higher shelf life, it was more convenient (and profitable) for manufacturers. So when they learned about the health issues, what did they do? Go back to making healthier flour?
Pshaw. Of course not. No, instead they kept removing nutrients, then artificially adding them back in. And that is how we got enriched flour–flour which is still significantly less nutritious than whole wheat flour. [3] And this is what the previous quote about capitalism was referencing. The food industry created a problem, and rather than undoing the problem, they created a whole new business to “fix” it:
And thus came the mass rise of “enriched” foods.
Eat Wonder Bread! It has as much protein as roast beef! As much calcium as cottage cheese! As much iron as lamb chops! No need to eat real foods, when you can eat highly processed foods instead! Don’t cook your own meals, let trustworthy corporations feed you! Mass-produced factory foods are easy, are healthy! There will be literally no downsides or long-term repercussions to public health & wellness!
So yeah. Much of what we think of as “bread” is chemically and molecularly distinct from traditional bread, and is very different (and less nutritional) than what our ancestors were eating even just a century ago. (On an individual level, I’m not sure how to mitigate this, other than by purchasing the healthiest options available (e.g. whole wheat, sourdough), buying from small bakeries/farmer’s markets, or baking bread at home. Lately there has been a rise of small health-concious brands focusing on traditional fermentation and whole ingredients; some may be available in your area. But ultimately, it’s the entire wider system that needs to change.)
And there you have it! I have never been so incandescently furious about wonder bread. This documentary will do that to you–and will change your whole understanding of modern food. It’s a 4-part netflix series called Cooked (2016), based on Michael Pollan’s book of the same name. Most of the info above comes from the third episode, and is accurate to the best of my knowledge (but let me know if I got anything wrong).
*I want to be perfectly clear though, gluten itself is not inherently bad. It’s being demonized in the press on no scientific basis, just to push yet another diet fad. Unless your body has actual issues with gluten (e.g. celiac disease, gluten sensitivity) there are no proven benefits to eating gluten-free. There are, however, benefits to eating less processed, more nutritional (delicious delicious) bread.
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