Food & Drink Cookery: Lifehacks and Cooking Tips [In Quarantine or Otherwise]

Abhorsen

Local Degenerate
Moderator
Staff Member
Comrade
Osaul
How do I check for that?
Ask your butcher about the cuts, they should know. I mostly just grill burgers, so I want about 80/20 lean to fat ratio. Usually chuck (the shoulder) has about the right amount. You can probably ask the butcher to add beef fat in to a cheaper cut as well, but IDK how good that will taste.
 

Urabrask Revealed

Let them go.
Founder
Ask your butcher about the cuts, they should know. I mostly just grill burgers, so I want about 80/20 lean to fat ratio. Usually chuck (the shoulder) has about the right amount. You can probably ask the butcher to add beef fat in to a cheaper cut as well, but IDK how good that will taste.
Ehh, so I should just experiment and see what suits me best then.
 

Abhorsen

Local Degenerate
Moderator
Staff Member
Comrade
Osaul
Ehh, so I should just experiment and see what suits me best then.
Research also helps, and saves money. That's how I found out about the 80/20 for burgers. Also how I found out how to season them and stuff. I change up what I use, but I use a lot of salt and also don't mix it into the patties but instead put it on the outside.
 
Last edited:

LordSunhawk

Das BOOT (literally)
Owner
Administrator
Staff Member
Founder
When a recipe calls for black pepper, don't use the fine ground stuff that comes in packets or is sold for table use, get course ground or, better yet, get a pepper mill and grind it yourself. The more coarsely ground pepper tastes far better in sauces and meats than the fine ground stuff that is meant more for a surface accent and is destroyed by cooking.
 

ThatTabiFromSB

Professional Jissou Abuser
Cool, do you have a recipe for filling a tortilla, or is that a freeform thing where you can put near anything on a tortilla?
Freeform really. You can use anything you want. But typically Americans like ground beef seasoned with cumin, paprika, and pepper. Topped with chopped tomatoes, chopped lettuce, and sour cream, right? You can go wild, honestly. I've had good results with canned tuna or samon, capers, whipped cream cheese, and pickled onion. The tortilla is a vessel, like a pizza.
Huh? So mince meat/ground beef is not a specific part of the animal, it's just leftovers?
Pretty much, yeah. You could say mince/ground meat is the whole cow in some cases... :eek:
I need some advice with a new recipe I intend to try out this weekend. It's called "shashlik roast".
A Shashlik, afaik, is basicaly a shis kebab. Pieces of meat and veg, marinated, and grilled.

Judging by the recipe you've shown, I'm assuming you're going to basically season the ground turkey with those spices and let them get to know each other. Same with the cut bellpeppers. Then form meatballs and skewer the whole lot. And probably grill or bake the whole lot of them whilst basting with the marinade.

That said, ground meat has a tendency to fall apart. To prevent that, you can use a Chinese technique to force meat mince to become 'tight'. It's sort of like kneading, except all you do is pick up the mass of meat in a bowl and slap it back down into the bowl. As you 'Daht' it, it eventually becomes tight and elastic. The resulting meatball will hold it's shape and the texture will become more uniform. I would also recommend adding some more fat to it; if you have some poultry fat or drippings, add some in, because typically poultry has less fat than other animals and will go dry quicker.

Bacon fat works pretty well, but it'll overpower the natural turkey flavor (which tastes like a gamier chicken).
 

LordSunhawk

Das BOOT (literally)
Owner
Administrator
Staff Member
Founder
When you are working the meatball like Tabi recommends, when you 'daht' it have a little fine flour in the bowl. Just a few pinches, you won't taste it but it helps to hold everything together.

If you can get your hands on super-fresh rosemary (I'm lucky, got a rosemary bush right outside the front door so when I want some just snip snip) then if you chop the leaves as fine as you can it makes pretty much anything taste better.
 

ThatTabiFromSB

Professional Jissou Abuser
When you are working the meatball like Tabi recommends, when you 'daht' it have a little fine flour in the bowl. Just a few pinches, you won't taste it but it helps to hold everything together.
Potato or corn starch mixed with water to make a thickening sauce also works too. A little goes a long way!
 

Urabrask Revealed

Let them go.
Founder
Judging by the recipe you've shown, I'm assuming you're going to basically season the ground turkey with those spices and let them get to know each other.
When you are working the meatball like Tabi recommends, when you 'daht' it have a little fine flour in the bowl. Just a few pinches, you won't taste it but it helps to hold everything together.

If you can get your hands on super-fresh rosemary (I'm lucky, got a rosemary bush right outside the front door so when I want some just snip snip) then if you chop the leaves as fine as you can it makes pretty much anything taste better.
Iiii think you missunderstood something. The recipe doesn't use minced turkey meat. Lemme take a picture:
JPEG_20200530_095254.jpg
That's what the end-result is supposed to look like. It's bascially layers of bell pepper rotating with turkey breast and differently colored bell peppers.
 

Urabrask Revealed

Let them go.
Founder
Your post, at the time before you edited it, said ground turkey. That was presumably a mistake and I didn't catch the correction.
No, the upper part of the post was added later, I wrote "turkey breast" there. Maybe there was some confusion, or I screwed up saving the post.
Huh? So mince meat/ground beef is not a specific part of the animal, it's just leftovers?
 
D

Deleted member

Guest
I strongly recommend this recipe:


It requires only flour, sugar, salt, yeast. It only takes 2 hrs of rising. There is no kneading. I used brown sugar and black salt. The result was a thick, heavy, delicious loaf of bread with almost no effort whatsoever, baked in a casserole dish.

image0.jpg


I then used it to make buterbrody style sandwiches with salmon, cheese, and some dill and paprika sprinkled on top. Absolutely delicious.

image0.jpg
 

ThatTabiFromSB

Professional Jissou Abuser
Most no knead bread recipe are basically just 2 cups of flour, 2 cups of water/milk, one tablespoon of yeast, salt to taste, mix, rise, bake.
 

LordSunhawk

Das BOOT (literally)
Owner
Administrator
Staff Member
Founder
Any advice on the best way to flip crepes without burning them? I've been trying to figure it out and haven't had much luck LOL.
 

LordSunhawk

Das BOOT (literally)
Owner
Administrator
Staff Member
Founder
been using a spatula to do it, but it either falls apart when I try to do the flip (because I do it too early) or it is burned (because it was too late), maybe 1 time in ten does it work right, and the frustrating thing is that even with the same setting on the stovetop, same pan, same recipe, it's never consistent in terms of the time.
 

ThatTabiFromSB

Professional Jissou Abuser
been using a spatula to do it, but it either falls apart when I try to do the flip (because I do it too early) or it is burned (because it was too late), maybe 1 time in ten does it work right, and the frustrating thing is that even with the same setting on the stovetop, same pan, same recipe, it's never consistent in terms of the time.
Sounds like you need practice, is all. I flip them with a spatula or without. Honestly, it's what you're comfortable with. You can also flip them by loosening the edges and then picking them up and flipping them with your hands if you don't mind the heat.

The pan should be medium-hot, a drop of water should sizzle and hiss.

The rule would be a 45 second cook, loosen around, then flip and cook that side for 45 seconds.
 
D

Deleted member

Guest
Most no knead bread recipe are basically just 2 cups of flour, 2 cups of water/milk, one tablespoon of yeast, salt to taste, mix, rise, bake.

In this case the ratio of flour to water is doubled, and there’s the initial high heat trick with cooking. It produces a very thick bread which is very nice for sandwiches, especially open-faced, but cheese and pickle was really good on it last night when I made a second loaf too. This will become a habit.
 

Tiamat

I've seen the future...
I strongly recommend this recipe:


It requires only flour, sugar, salt, yeast. It only takes 2 hrs of rising. There is no kneading. I used brown sugar and black salt. The result was a thick, heavy, delicious loaf of bread with almost no effort whatsoever, baked in a casserole dish.

I then used it to make buterbrody style sandwiches with salmon, cheese, and some dill and paprika sprinkled on top. Absolutely delicious.

I never made bread in a pan before but now I gotta try it.

And on a different note, as much as some might like to make jokes about crockpots, those things are wonderful and a lifesaver for me, especially when I can put together something in the morning before work and come home when the recipes done cooking, and the aromas filling the house.
 
D

Deleted member

Guest
I never made bread in a pan before but now I gotta try it.

And on a different note, as much as some might like to make jokes about crockpots, those things are wonderful and a lifesaver for me, especially when I can put together something in the morning before work and come home when the recipes done cooking, and the aromas filling the house.

45F1A7A0-6351-49D5-BA8B-DC61A783F8B1.jpeg


7115C1D7-CA30-46CE-A245-562E4A912979.jpeg

The bread, and the sandwiches. You definitely have to.
 

Users who are viewing this thread

Top