Happy Mutants food and drink topic (Part 2)

I grew up (50’s 60’s) with that pan. I don’t remember it having Teflon, just stainless steel. Fried chicken!

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Levantine saturday: Lebanese Fatteh.

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My personal chef (spouse) makes two batches of pizza dough at a time. We have it weekly as one of the foods the kid will reliably eat on the longest/energetic day of the week.
He makes it in the morning and let’s the first batch hang out all day in the microwave (safe from marauding kittens) and the second goes straight into he fridge and does its thing until the next week. The pizza from the week-in-fridge is always tastier.

Edited to add photo for marauding kitten. It’s been rough teaching him kitchen counters are water bottle territory

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Do you like Becks? Amongst the cheap Pilsen/lager beers made by AmBev around here, I think It has the best taste/price ratio.

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Question for any who make fruit leathers. This is my favorite “candy,” and fairly diet-safe. But mine keep coming out looking like the shoreline of a Nordic country. I use silicone sheets, i have tried oiling then, pouring thinner, thicker, but it seems to consistently dry shattered. Just did one with goumi that was so thick it was nearly solid when i poured it, and that did better, but there is just no way to get that with juicier berries like the mulberries i am teying desperately to use up. The neighbors don’t want anymore, the birds are full, and still they come!

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Have you tried anything to act as a stabilizer, like xanthan gum or carageenan or agar-agar? Maybe even some pectin? Most pate de fruits recipes I’ve seen use gelatin to get a nice bounciness.

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I know little to nothing about making fruit leather, but I did run across this paper in my explorations.

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I have never made fruit leather but i wonder if adding pectin will help.

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Obviously you just need to make mulberry wine

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Where my mind went was wondering if you have a pasta-making machine.

Could the puree be dried just enough to gather it into a dough-like mass and pass it through the pasta machine, and then complete the drying process? That might compress it enough to stay stuck together, plus enable you to make a uniform, repeatable product.

I’ve only rarely bought fruit leathers, but it seemed that ones I’ve bought must have been put through an extrusion/compression process. The paper linked to by @lastchance seems mostly to describe various methods of spreading the puree on trays before drying them (for small studies, I assume). But the part about Pineapple Leather at section 2.15. includes a description of extrusion with a leather forming machine…

They fed every 500 g portion of pineapple paste through the cylinder (an inner diameter of 42 mm) located on the top of the leather forming machine, and pressed the paste into the extruder zone with a pneumatically driven ram at a pressure of two bars, and then extruded them through a die (27 mm width × 2.2 mm thickness) at a screw speed of 50 rpm to obtain a flat rectangular paste.

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My (uninformed) hunch is that the fruit puree will be either too liquid, too sticky or too firm to extrude easily through most home made appliances. But i do recall having seen various videos and cooking shows where fruit leather was made and it seemed as easy as spreading it evenly on a tray so i think extruding it is over complicating the process. Probably adding a little bit of a gelling agent might help get it to the desired consistency but i don’t know if there’s a baker here with knowledge in confectionery foods. If i was looking to make a better fruit leather it might be best to post somewhere like Reddit or a more food specific site/forum :man_shrugging:

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Our professional baker (BakerB) commented just five posts above :grinning:

Yeah, extruding is probably overcomplicating it for home production. It was a thought, though. :woman_shrugging:t2: I am not a professional baker. But I would agree that adding something like pectin might help to stabilize while keeping it flexible. I think I even saw a mention in that PubMed paper to one study that added wheat flour—that might help it all stick together.

How about a small amount of some kind of neutral oil, for softness? When I buy dried cranberries at the co-op, there’s a big difference between the ones that are just cranberries (hard and stiff), and the ones that have some added sugar and oil (softer). (Of course, overall moisture content probably makes a difference in their softness, too.)

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as well as shelf life, i would assume. higher residual moisture content is an invitation to mold/ fungus/ other nasties.

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Yeah, I was just thinking the same thing. The added sugar might help toward preservation, but the moisture sure wouldn’t.

The moister cranberries are more what you’d want to add to muffins that you’re baking now, while the drier cranberries are more what you’d want to carry on a backpacking trip.

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good point. nice, soft cranberries for muffins… mmmm!
drier, chewier ones in the backpack, also good. however, i am the guy who leaves that backpack in the boat for 3 days (or longer :roll_eyes: ) in the hot, humid sun, only to discover them before the next outing (along with the half-eaten ham sandwich :face_vomiting: ) that are now biohazard material.
but never a banana… bananas don’t come onboard, no matter how hard you look at one.

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Just look at it!

Hungry Food GIF

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Yeah, gonna try using some pectin. Not trying to make jam, but need something to give it some, well, give.

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Bunana alert?

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The perfect combo

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