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Seems nice, but way too many tech tree threads on the go. Did he invert refrigerator for the leftovers first?
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Made a potato and leek gratin, with smoked Gouda. Cooked up some steak sous vide, a quick sear and a beautiful dinner was had.
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Going to see if I can find this evercrisp, cuz this stuff looks damn good (there’s even the recipe)
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Corn starch works the same way, in around the same proportion.
Really any pure starch will do the trick. Some people use potato starch.
I’ve never used straight up dextrin, so I can’t say it neccisarily works better or worse. But starch works just fine at home. Most Korean fried chicken recipes use this approach and that shit stays crisp fully sauced in the fridge for days.
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Aggregate Accessory Fruit is my new neo-new-wave band.
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Yeah, they said it’s mostly avoiding gluten that’s the important bit, so corn, potato and arrowroot should do too then I guess.
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Every year I make an Easter Lamb Cake. It is Tradition.
I use this mold, which is 80+ years old,
and the cake looks like this before frosting.
We do a celebratory Slaughter of the Lamb every year, wherein the youngest person in the room who can safely wield a knife gets to cut off its head. This is done in loving memory of my mother, who baked a lamb cake every year and didn’t let us eat it until Easter Week was over and the cake was dry and hard and terrible. So we bake a good cake and everyone gets to eat it that day. And to make it more fun for the kids, I started giving them “blood” when they cut off the head, as they requested.
Frosted lamb cake, and aftermath, with lingonberry jam this year.
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In part. Limiting gluten development keeps the coating from getting tough or overly bready, which is less crunchy crispy to begin with. But also tends to become greasy as it cools.
I forget the exact details but the stays crunchy has more to do with how the starch interacts with moisture, especially steam coming off the food post cooking. Something about it binding water better than flour, without adding extra gluten that causes other problems. So water from steam, or sauces, doesn’t soak the batter the way it does with an all flour batter.
There’s probably an impact from lower gluten in that a lower gluten batter won’t be as strong, so it won’t hold air or steam bubbles as well. Allowing more and larger bubbles. And more of them to burst, so you get an open airier structure. That wouldn’t trap moisture as much, and it would give sauces somewhere to go besides soaking into the batter itself.
Mixing in starch seems to go hand in hand with a thinner batter (as a prep for a dry dredge with American fried chicken). Which would do a bit the same, and you can juke that up with some baking powder for leavening.
Can’t recall how much of each was involved. But does make me wonder how it compares to dextrin. Cause it’s not neccisarily all about diluting gluten. And Dextrin isn’t a starch, but it’s made from and a component of starch. So it might not neccisarily act the same way.
You can also limit gluten development by subbing vodka for some of the other liquid in a recipe. Which helps keep a batter from getting tough over time. And the three tricks together just work insanely well. Part starch, use vodka, bit of baking powder.
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Awesome tradition!
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Yeah, we’ve used vodka in shortcrust for a while, makes it ever so crispy…
I will try the starch option first, have both potato and corn starch here.
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Making goulash tonight! Got the recipe from my German friends, and still count the cookbook they gifted me as among my favorites:
They told me it was traditionally given to every young person they knew when they left the nest, so to speak. The recipes I’ve tried so far are foolproof.
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What’s the title of the cookbook, if you don’t mind sharing?
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Oh, duh, sorry. It’s “Basic Cooking.” A real winner. The potato salad alone has gotten accolades. Pasta salad, also.
Also, I used to be fluent in German, but am losing my edge, but I find I can still read and understand this book. It’s written in a chatty and accessible tone that I might find annoying in my native language but am very grateful for in a foreign/second language!
Oh, and I don’t want to link to Amazon, but it turns out it’s now available in English.
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You might want to give a little more clue, though, because searching for “Basic Cooking” is a lesson in futility!
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Ugh. Okay. Only because I love this book and want to share…
Edited to remove Amazon link. See below. Thanks, @zfirphdn !
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I found it on Goodreads
which has links to a number of stores other than amazon, including Better World Books which appears to have two used copies.
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