Lower fat content, and generally uncultured (so it’s sweeter than cultured butter, which was a BIG suprise when I moved here from Canada, which defaults to EU-style cultured butter as well).
9 Likes
ETA - ninja’d by @orenwolf!
Less water content. A good deep dive on that is All the Types of Butter, Explained | Bon Appétit
4 Likes
I love baking bread, have always done, and mostly by hand.
Then I inherited a bread maker, and I hated it for the weird round loaves it made, and tough-ish crust, and the way it walked off the counter - but I loved it for doing the kneading and timekeeping for me.
It walked off the counter and died, after a few weeks, so I got another one from a garage sale. It didn’t walk off the counter for a year or so, but the coincided with my wedding when I got the breadmaker of my dreams - a Cuisinart that doesn’t move, makes square loaves of many many different kinds, and even cooked strawberry jam for me. I almost never use it to bake but after 12 years it still does the hard work of mixing and kneading for me.
We are poor, and homemade bread, sourdough or otherwise, makes cheap meals better.
6 Likes
There was a news story I read pre-internet of a guy in Russia who survived on nothing but potatoes and dairy products for five years with no ill effects. Closest I could find online is this story:
3 Likes
Works for Martians, too, I hear.
3 Likes
Relevant xkcd, because of course there is one:
Just replace “the stock market” with “nutrition” and “where did all my money just go” with “why am I dying of scurvy”…
7 Likes
sighs heavily
Even for a trash website like Urban Dictionary, that entry is bad. No, as far as I know, BDSM enthusiasts are not melting Legos (which melt at 220+ F, and molten would be at about 350 F) and pouring it down male or female urethras. Even liquid wax would cause problems if you poured it into a urethra.
There are a lot of idiotic mentally 12 year old people who seem to get off on putting absolutely stupid crap into the Urban Dictionary, particularly sex or BDSM related entries.
The kinkiest thing I have heard about doing with Legos is making people walk on them. But how much of a sadist are you?
3 Likes
Oh boy. That’s the double whammy. I guess you can be glad that he isn’t also a Brazilian or Philippine or Polish or Hungarian citizen…
(That list is getting uncomfortably long)
4 Likes
Urban Dictionary is like 99% joke entries
2 Likes
One of the interesting things to me is that they don’t factor in energy costs, and if you really want to get into the weeds of cost analysis, they should be factoring in the capital costs of appliances like a fridge and stove, as well as the value of time – spend an hour cooking and that is a effectively a cost because it is an hour that could be spent earning.
Which is not to say their approach is complete nonsense – exercises like this are useful approximations and can be helpful for people who never buy groceries or cook. I just wouldn’t treat them as more than a back of the envelope calculation, which to be honest, is a good place to start before people start thinking harder about their food purchases.
1 Like
Those markings are even less accurate for slicing those larger slabs of butter than they are for American-style sticks (since the cross section is larger). But if your recipes specify butter in grams, you can just use a scale, which is a much better way to do things anyway.
American recipes using volume measurements even for baking (even for flour!) drives me nuts.
1 Like
Eh, they’re accurate enough for most purposes if you use them right (i.e. not tearing away the side with the scale when first opening the packet like I have done here because I wasn’t using the butter for anything that needed measuring). Obviously if you’re baking you generally have your bowl on a scale anyway so you might as well use it but even there being a gram or five off isn’t going to ruin anything.
2 Likes
I can just buy rock-bottom (rock hard?) day-old bakery goods, those are full of flour and butter and some eggs, I’ll totally beat that list.
1 Like
rice and beans FTW. It’s like god said “let there be something nutritious enough, simple to make in a variety of ways, ingredients store well in bulk, and delicious”.
This cannot be emphasized enough. Sometimes it’s even just a matter of going to the “ethnic” (
) aisle in the same grocery chain store. I just don’t even understand how McCormick gets away with their highway-robbery prices.
8 Likes
Don’t forget the salt, to make what my kids call “patate a modeler”.
2 Likes
You know, the big shock for me moving from the US to Canada was butter that was one big stick. For my fellow Americans, that means a pound of butter coming not in four sticks but as one gigantic brick. You can get it in sticks, though.
I had honestly never noticed any differences in the butter itself–although now that I think about it I never used a lot of it. Occasionally I fry something in butter, or use it on sweet corn. I wonder if the butter we buy in sticks is also US-style.
5 Likes
3 Likes
Higher butterfat content and fewer ‘other’ ingredients (such as food colourings) apparently.
