Wandering Adventure Party

As it pickles, the contents will likely get a little softer, and the weight might drop down into the larger portion of the jar. If that happens, you’ll be able to rotate it out of the way, and get all your stuff out of the jar. Then you can actually stick your hand in and grab the weight and try to pull it out perpendicular to the opening. Odds are that the weight (and the jar opening) are not perfectly circular, so you can try rotating both to pull it out.

Borosilicate glass (which this probably is?) has low thermal expansion, so heat probably won’t help.

Slow cooking? How long does that take? I’ve used a pressure cooker to make applesauce really fast, but then obviously you’d have to evaporate off a lot of moisture to get butter.

I have one that’s bamboo, and it’s not that great, but i also have one that is probably maple, and it’s great. You don’t need it to be actually “sharp”, but i suppose there’s no reason I couldn’t sharpen it periodically.

Did you start from dried chickpeas? That’s the key

My only complaint about my immersion blender is that the part at the bottom is 100% metal, which sounds good, but it makes me paranoid to use it in my enameled pots for fear of scratching up the enamel. I wish I had one with nylon or silicone overmolding.

In terms of really simple “gadgets”, my favorites are wooden spoons that are flattened and almost sharpened like a chisel. They are great for scraping the bottom of pots/pans to get up fond.

In terms of more complicated stuff, I really like my Anova oven. It’s basically an overbuilt convection toaster oven that has a thermometer for wet-bulb temperature and a water tank to create steam. You can control temperature to the degree, and humidity in 10% increments. It also has a built-in probe thermometer. What this basically means is that you can set the oven to a strict temperature to hold with steam and convection, and you can cook a roast to an exact temperature for an exact amount of time (which they call sous vide, even though there’s no vacuum sealing involved). You can then set it to automatically ramp to a high temperature for browning.

It’s really nice for baking bread.

They made a new version at double the price with even more advanced features, but they’ve given it the nebulous “AI” treatment, so it might be enshittified.

Pressure ovens are a thing; I know someone with one. I think it has potential to really do some interesting stuff, but since they aren’t common, I figure it’s a lot of trial and error.

Meat is an obvious good use case, but i also use my thermometer to check the doneness of bread. Recipes often tell you a time/temperature, but it’s going to really depend on your oven/pans/the rise/etc, which is why recipes will tell you to insert a toothpick or something like that. It’s way easier to just stick a thermometer in.

I’ve found that you need to use an instant read for this, though, not a leave-in thermometer because bread has much less thermal mass and thermal conductivity than meat (which is mostly water), and the probe of a leave in thermometer will conduct heat into the bread, giving an arbitrarily high reading.

I also use my thermometer for checking the temp of leftovers because I hate when something is cold on the inside, and I don’t like jamming my finger into like 5 different spots to test to see if I heated something up enough.

So many people way overuse the term “sterilize”.

For anyone unaware, “sterile” means zero life remaining, not “really clean”. You serilize things with a pressure canner and strict protocols or an autoclave (which is essentially a pressure cooker). With steam, you need 15 minutes at 121 °C or 3 min at 134 °C. Dry heat requires 2 hours at 160 °C.
There are a handful of other ways (like tyndallization), but not common or convenient.

For fermentation, you don’t need sterile unless you are working in a yeast lab or something like that where you are trying to grow up pure cultures. Sanitization or disinfection is good enough. Basically you want to kill enough of the bad bacteria/yeast that the good stuff out competes it.

Trying to get jars sterile for fermenting peppers is pointless because the peppers themselves are host to a huge heterogeneous population of bacteria and yeast, and you aren’t operating under a laminar flow cabinet or something crazy like that.

Yeah, you want them clean and sanitized, but it’s really all about controlling the probabilities. Higher salt concentration helps, being really careful about keeping things submerged helps, using a good airlock and relatively small headspace helps, and rejecting any peppers that seem suspect helps. Also, resist the urge to open the jars a whole bunch of times. Every time you do, you let in oxygen.

Also, OP, buy some pH test paper. It’s nice to be able to double check that the pH is in the right range once you think it’s done.

And most importantly, fermenting takes fruit/vegetables/whatever, and turns sugars into lactic acid, reducing the pH and making it inhospitable to spoilage microbes.

That’s why cabbage spoils quickly, but sauerkraut lasts a very long time.

Technically, dark brown sugar will be more acidic, and will therefore require more baking soda to balance it out, though I think that would have minor effects

Yup. Butyric acid, it’s what makes parm and Hershey’s chocolate taste like they do, but its also what makes vomit smell like it does.

I have a fancy one (mauviel), and i don’t really have any reason to think it’s any better than something 1/3 the price.

If you look at Mauviel vs something like Lodge, the design is pretty much identical, including the steel thickness. If you go from those thicker pans to something even cheaper, you can basically get 1/3 the price of even a Lodge.

For example, my Mauviel is $120, an equivalent Lodge is $40, and an equivalent Choice (restaurant supply store brand) is $12.

With thinner metal, maybe you wouldn’t want to really crank maximum heat on an empty pan like to sear a steak, but for most uses, I’m sure you’d be fine.

I have this one. I will say that their instructions for seasoning the pan really suck.

My instinct was to treat it like my cast iron, but since this was my first carbon steel pan (other than my wok which works differently), I decided to follow their process exactly.

If i remember right, it came coated in beeswax, which you have to melt off. It then tells you to basically have a pool of oil in it while you put it in a really hot oven. It just ended up with a really splotchy season. I’m hoping it smooths out over time, but it’s been a couple years at this point.

I keep debating stripping it off entirely and starting over like i would for cast iron, but that’s a whole undertaking.

I’m sure you know this, but some of the maesri pastes are non-vegetarian.

Strongly agreed on the delicious, lazy, vegan food, though.

“Tastes like it’s from your local Thai restaurant” is different than “tastes like it’s from Thailand”

https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-surprising-reason-that-there-are-so-many-thai-restaurants-in-america/

The TL;DR is that the Thai government has sponsored many Thai restaurants around the world as a form of diplomacy. Menus and recipes have largely been standardized by the Thai government, but adapted to local tastes.

Personally, if I want takeout style Thai curry, I use maesri brand curry paste cans. They are cheap and don’t take up much space, and they have instructions on them like “add curry paste and 100 ml coconut milk to wok and cook till fragrant. Add 400 g protein …”. It’s easy to keep a selection on hand of the different flavors. Yeah, it won’t be the same as doing it 100% from scratch, but a lot of Thai restaurant food like pad Thai is notorious for requiring a lot of ingredients.

They aren’t talking about rolled or steel cut oats, they are talking whole grain as in unprocessed other than winnowing. They are also known as “groats”.