/ck/ - Food & Cooking

>>14082242
It's deconstructed, you wouldn't get it.

>>8186686
Many of the aromas of basil are highly sensitive to heat and will be destroyed if you add them to a sauce that's too hot, or if you keep them heated for a long time. Other aromas are highly volatile and will simply evaporate off the longer you keep the mixture hot. You don't make tea by boiling your tea leaves at a rolling boil for 30 minutes, do you? Doing so may extract more flavor in the sense that it results in a higher proportion of total dissolved solids in the infusion than steeping for a shorter time, but the result would obviously be bitter and terrible, because you've over-extracted most of the harsh flavors and destroyed most of the delicate and desireable ones.

You don't make a good infusion of anything, be it tea, coffee or herbs in cooking, by just focusing on getting maximum extraction. If you've ever made the mistake of adding your herbs to a beef stock at the beginning or the simmer, you may have noticed that after 12+ hours of simmering there's hardly any flavor left from the thyme and bay leaf other than a faint bitterness.

>>7625408
PRO TIP: be a professional by using the metric system and cooking with ratios and percentages instead of adding a cup of this and a cup of that like some kind of a fucking flyover suburban white trash single mother who can't pronounce "mise en place". You too can into good culinary practice with the low price of a kitchen scale.

How to salt your food:
Sweet foods: 0.1% - 0.5% total salt by weight.
Savory foods: 1.0% - 1.5% total salt by weight.

How to adjust the richness of your food:
Basically everything you put in your mouth should have a minimum of 3% fat or it's going to suck.
For most foods 10% - 20% fat content is a good rule of thumb, assuming you only care about taste and not about maintaining your figure.

Everything with a lot of fat should also be accompanied with something acidic to cut through the richness, either by adding something like wine, vinegar or lemon juice into the food or serving it with something acidic on the side, like a pickle. Similarly, everything acidic should be balanced with something sweet, for example adding sugar into tomato sauce. Everything sweet benefits from a little salt. You can see it's basically rock paper scissors, and often a good meal contains all of the elements in a good balance - fat, acid, sugar and salt.

I think the biggest issue is that fat people, and probably most Western people, really, are somewhat addicted to the feeling of satiety. The way I see it there are basically four states of food desire: hungry, not hungry, satiated, full. If you pay attention while you eat, you should notice as these states transition to each other. People tend to naturally want to eat until they're at least satiated (the point of reduced appetite), or in the case of food addiction or especially tasty food, until they're full (as in stuffed).

In healthy eating, you should normally stop eating after you're no longer hungry but before you feel satiated. This is difficult to do if you've been conditioned for your whole life to eat to satiety, or worse yet to fullness. It leaves you with a feeling of incompleteness and the psychological desire for more food because you're addicted to the feeling. But really, this is the root of all evil when it comes to unhealthy diets. The whole reason people have to worry about their foods being high in fat or carbs or cholesterol or whatever is because they eat so fucking much. I notice a lot of these fad diets that get popular are essentially coping strategies to try and get around this fact - they all seem to promise that you get to stuff your face as long as you don't eat any carbs / gluten / animal products / non-paleo foods / whatever the demonized foods are today.

>not farming your own crabs for meat
into the trash it goes
I bet your muffin isn't even leavened with sourdough you fucking pleb

>>7245884
A sticky is more or less impossible because unlike in /fit/, there is basically no consensus on anything in /ck/. Consider the slapfight that inevitably occurs in every thread about chili, pasta carbonara or steak. The real problem is that while /fit/ for example is filled with individuals who are generally at least sort of knowledgeable about fitness and bodybuilding, most people on /ck/ are a lot more interested in eating than cooking. The vast majority of us are pretty shitty cooks. This would need to change for there ever to be something like a "/ck/ guide to cooking", in the fashion of the various guides on /fit/ or /g/ for example.

If they made a sticky today it would probably just contain your typical pleb infographics like the "how to make less shitty ramen by adding spices and an egg" guide and that infamous fucking stick figure chili recipe, which really only serves to lead people away from good cooking technique.

Which ancient civilization had the best cuisine?

Boiled in 95 C water for 2 minutes to harden the very outermost layer of egg white in order to facilitate peeling.
Then dropped into an ice water bath for 1 minute so the thermal shock loosens the shell from the white.
Then cooked in 70-75 C water for 40 minutes to just barely set the yolk while keeping the white soft.
Then cooled down completely to 1-3 C in an ice water bath to firm up the egg for peeling.
Then very carefully peeled under running water to avoid losing any pieces of egg white with the shell.
Then heated up again in a 60 C water bath for 30 minutes before being patted dry with a paper towel and served.

If you make boiled eggs in any other way you're a pleb.

>>6938393
>>6938404
>>6938411
>>6938432
>>6938435
>>6938442
>>6938831
>>6938899
>>6938942
>>6939005
>not using boiling water
The only way you'll overextract your coffee (due to heat) is if you're brewing with a pot on the stove, i.e. you're using a method that adds heat after the point where the temperatures of the boiling water and room temperature grounds have equalized to somewhere around 85-90 C, depending on your coffee-to-water ratio. If you are overextracting it's likely due to too fine of a grind (or an uneven grind with a lot of very fine particles) or too long of a steep. Or maybe you're just a pleb and think that any hint of bitterness in coffee equals overextraction.

Here's what happens when I make coffee with my French press. I measured this with a thermapen:
>pre-heat the french press with boiling water for 1-2 minutes while grinding the beans
>pour out the water, pour in the grounds and bring the kettle to a boil again
>water temperature as it leaves the kettle: 98 C
>water temperature as it hits the coffee: 95 C
>water temperature after the pour is finished (5-10 seconds): 92 C
>water temperature after 30 seconds of extraction: 87 C
>water temperature after 4 minutes of extraction 80 C

Bump! We need moar!

You haven't seen anything until you've seen Marie's Homemade Italian Tomato Sauce from Italy (it's Italian!): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDGqtjcyxlQ