111–120 of 155 posts
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I checked this out. FLW actually said (in the 30s) "a 10k house for 5K", which translates to a 200k house for 100k today. source: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4633622
Yes indeed. Though most of his so-called $5k houses actually ended up costing around $20k.
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Live in Tokyo and couldn't agree more. I've been to Mt. Mitake a few times, where wasabi makes up a nice portion of the economy. Towards the top of the mountain, you can literally smell the wasabi in the air. It's kind of the locals' gimmick as well to put wasabi in everything -- pretty sure I saw wasabi ice-cream. The fresh "real" stuff is quite earthy, and frankly, I find unpleasant in any significant quantity. I b…
> wasabi ice-cream And you didn't eat it?!
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I've been recently pondering sugar tolerance. I've been avoiding it for the last few years, eating it only sometimes and moderately, checking sugar contents of processed food I buy, etc. I'm at a point where anything with more than ~30% sugar tastes bad: it gives a sort of mouth-wrinkling shock to my taste receptors; my sugar tolerance is decreasing. Given that sugar is addictive and most producers seem to have the a…
Many (many!) years ago a friend brought some bottles of Pepsi from a trip to Egypt. I still had a couple of the bottles left until last year, when I finally ditched them. The reason he brought them was to show how the Egyptian version of Pepsi had much more sugar added (I didn't actually think that was even possible..). Then again refined sugar was invented in that region of the world and was used hundreds of years b…
Since we're trading anecdotes, I was told that in Egypt people drink sugar drinks, like Cocacola, like you would drink alcohol in the West. Islam forbids drinking alcohol, so they use the next most boring drug: sugar. The picture that was painted for me was a group of grown men sitting around a cafe-bar drinking Cocacola.
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I few years ago I was was reading the back of a can of New York style hotdogs and realised the main ingredient was chicken. By a substantial margin too. Ever since then I’ve been sceptical about the contents of products I buy.
Are you in Europe? I notice the things they call "hot dogs" there are almost always canned, which is exceedingly odd coming from an American perspective, where the concept of a canned hot dog basically does not exist.
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> properly What does this mean, really? This always strikes me as snobbery signaling. Perhaps it's traditional, but does that make it "proper?" Why do only some cuisines have such constraints on what is "proper" or "authentic?"
The names of dishes (and ingredients) are culinary trade jargon, just like the names of the techniques used to prepare them. In order to achieve unambiguous communication between chefs across temporal and cultural distance, terms like "cacio e pepe" have to be taken to mean one fixed thing—one platonic ideal dish that someone hypothetically made at some point, that all such real dishes are attempts to recreate. Other…
Italian dishes tend to be extremely precise in terms of what ingredients may be added, to the point where many people would disagree you're making an authentic Carbonara sauce if you add garlic to the sauce, or even use pancetta instead of guanciale.
On the other hand, a culture like the US usually only requires that dishes follow a rough template - a meatloaf is a meatloaf provided it's predominantly ground meat molded into a loaf shape and baked.
So is most truffle oil. Canned reindeer meat in the Nordic countries can be up to 40% pork. Budget-brand soy sauce might actually be "soy sauce powder" mixed with water, as opposed to something straightforwardly brewed. If you travel the developing world, you may find that what is sold as chocolate actually has no cacao in it. Lots and lots of disappointments out there in the food world. I find reading labels careful…
> Canned reindeer meat in the Nordic countries can be up to 40% pork. On the other hand the frozen sliced reindeer meat is 100% reindeer. The canned stuff is meatballs, which is difficult to make from reindeer or moose -- the meat contains no fat whatsoever. Thus the pork mix. As for wasabi, what my wife says (she's Japanese) is that wasabi isn't there for its own flavor - its only job is to enhance the flavor of the…
FWIW, tempura dipping sauce is usually ginger/mirin/daikon/sugar/soy sauce, and is far sweeter than soy sauce alone—a wonderful combination for tempura.
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This isn't what we're talking about at all though.
derefr has a great explanation of traditional vs proper vs authentic. But on Why do only some cuisines have such constraints? , that's probably just down to culture. Prescribing how a dish is made expresses a deep cultural identity through food, even if that food has evolved greatly over time. You might be able to change a dish and even improve its flavor, but it would no longer be that culture's food. Now, why do on…
Really interesting how you feel burgers are less than "real" in other places.
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>You could say the same thing about vanilla, for which Cooks Illustrated was infamously not able to triangle-test a meaningful preference between artificial and real in a baked goods panel (IIRC, the Milk Bar cookbook went a step further and specified recipes that only worked with artificial vanilla). Sometimes, the artificial ("beer-grade") version is a legit advance. True. (And TBH I prefer a decent beer to an equi…
I love the story that lobsters used to be peasant food before they became rare, and that it was limited in how frequently it could be fed to prisoners except as a "cruel and unusual" punishment.
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> Canned reindeer meat in the Nordic countries can be up to 40% pork. On the other hand the frozen sliced reindeer meat is 100% reindeer. The canned stuff is meatballs, which is difficult to make from reindeer or moose -- the meat contains no fat whatsoever. Thus the pork mix. As for wasabi, what my wife says (she's Japanese) is that wasabi isn't there for its own flavor - its only job is to enhance the flavor of the…
> And she's horrified when she sees people around here (we're not in Japan) dip vegetable tempura into soy sauce. FWIW, tempura dipping sauce is usually ginger/mirin/daikon/sugar/soy sauce, and is far sweeter than soy sauce alone—a wonderful combination for tempura.
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There's no such thing as a non-synthetic truffle oil. It is not made from truffles what so ever. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truffle_oil
There absolutely is such a thing as truffle oil made with real truffles, and you link also says so.
Truffle oil can be produced using any oil. Common versions use olive oil, or a more neutral flavorless oil such as canola or grapeseed oil.[6]
Some truffle oils are made with truffle residues incurred during collection or preparation for sale. Many truffle oils sold in retail markets are not made from truffles[1] but instead use manufactured aromatic compounds including 2,4-dithiapentane (one of many aroma active compounds that can be found in some truffle varietals) with an oil base. There are no regulations regarding the labeling of 2,4-dithiapentane and it can legally be called truffle aroma, truffle flavor, truffle concentrate or other similar terms, even though it is not extracted from truffles. In the United States, the ingredient may use the modifiers "organic" or "natural" as long as the components meet the federal requirements for those terms. Truffle oils range from clear to cloudy, and yellow to green, depending on the base oil used. Some include a piece of truffle in the bottle.[2] These pieces can be from any of over 200 different truffle species and may be listed as "black truffle" or "white truffle" even if not one of prized culinary varietals such as the black Périgord or white Alba truffle.
This is historic and no longer the case:
Truffle oil is frequently used as a bait for truffle-hunting dogs and pigs. Modern Italians often use a strufion, a ball of rags scented with truffle oil.[7](p87) Truffle oil has been used for this purpose since at least 1756, made by boiling truffles in olive oil and given to hunting dogs.[9]