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Very thin crust. Nothing like a cracker, but not soft. Minimal sauce, a thin paint of tomato paste, oil and garlic. Mushrooms on provolone with chunks of brie.

I just want to get extra virgin olive oil if I'm paying for it. The olive oil business is almost as crooked as the honey business, and I stay with domestically produced olive oils (not just domestically bottled or labeled). Most of the big-name European imports and domestic importers like Whole...

I don't like them to be drowned in sauce. But I do like a pico de gallo that adds some extra flavors and colors. But good tamales should be able to stand pretty much on their own. They're too much work to end up with just shredded meat rolled in corn dough. Although the local Mexican bakery this...

In terms of simple heat transfer to the food, the oven is very inefficient. Almost all of the heat generated by the fuel goes into the oven walls and is radiated or convected to the kitchen. Convection ovens are better but are still far short of the 90%+ efficiency of the range burner. (All...

"See the edge" is rather imprecise. I can "see" my finger, even though I can't see the individual cells. Circle of confusion for normal human vision at close range is about 0.2 mm, so we can pick out individual lines down to about 5 lines per mm. A fairly modern APS-C digital sensor can only do...

You can get people to temporarily straighten up, if only to get the free makeover, but you just aren't going to change people in any fundamental way in a few days. Of course, they're not so bad as they are coached to pretend. They're not going to invest all that time with crew and star with...

You could try baking at a lower temperature for longer, to slow the rise and set the brownies before they come out, but note that that recipe seems short of flour to be a "cake" brownie. (Make sure your oven isn't running hot. The amount of rise you describe seems a bit much, and that can be...

Hey, there's a project around here getting started to make cricket flour.

I would direct you up to Chief Windy's #4. Note that he says to rice them. If you don't know what a ricer is, it is a press that forces potato through a screen of small holes. It is a preferred alternative to mashing. And beating or blending should be avoided. When potatoes are taken to high...

An associate (who himself cooks well) lives in a new, upscale urban development. You know the kind. $250,000 and a Yard that you (literally) can't swing a cat in. All the houses have well-appointed kitchen. Many have very high dollar commercial style equipment. But the vast majority never cook...

I have to watch myself for trying to get too much stock out of a given amount of chicken. It's supposed to have a rich color. When it's too light, I know I was too free with the water. If that happens, I live with it. Boiling it down is the wrong thing to do and will greatly cloud the stock. The...

Pork chops are even a greater problem for home cooks than beef steaks. Both must be bought very thick, a inch of more. Home cook tops just can't provide enough heat to brown them without overcooking the inside. Pork chops are worse. They are leaner. They overcook just as readily, but they get...

It's been a long week already. I first read the title as "These crackpot recipes sound good." I'm relieved. I didn't have a cracked pot to work with.

I did a little reading, and a very large seed with a thin flesh layer is typical of a wild avocado. But avocados are known for wide variation in seed size, and I would guess that, like a lot of other domesticated things, there are occasional throw-backs to primitive traits. And maybe it's a...

There are pretty much four things that can happen to avocados Dark and mushy throughout is just overipe, rotten. Dark strands through the flesh means fruit from a young tree. Pick them out. Diffuse bruised looking placed under the skin are probably exactly that, bruises. Well-defined...

Not in any way that won't get me banned from the group.

If you get stuck and just have to use bread flour, add an egg and some milk or powdered milk. They will help them be not so flat and crisp. Of course, if you're after chewy cookies, try the bread flower. There are a lot of different tastes among cookie lovers.

Butter and shortening cannot be exchanged equally in recipes that are sensitive to the amount of water in them. Pie crust is one. Good shortening (Crisco) has no water. 12 grams of Crisco has 12 grams of fat. U.S. common butter typically has about 81 percent fat. European butter has more like...

It may relief some anxiety about chancing picking them before they're ripe to note that you may have never seen its relative, a ripe lime. They are yellow when ripe, but always sold green to stores, and they juice just fine.

I am happy to report that, after many years of providing a solid array of meats for upwards of twenty people who come to our house, this year, there are only two coming, and I'm not going to hit a lick until Wednesday afternoon. We will be having blue cheese lamb burgers on homemade buns. The...

We shouldn't use one maker's sauce to predict the behavior of another. Lee Kum Kee is quite different from the more renowned Huy Fong product ("rooster" sauce). Lee Kum Kee ingredients are: Red Chili, Sugar, Salt, Garlic, Fish (anchovy) Extract, Lactic Acid, Acetic Acid, Ascorbic Acid. Huy...

Don't worry about it. The size and shape of the container will largely dictate how you move it to bring the shearing forces of the blade to bear on all the product. Where my blender head fits pretty neatly into the 2-cup measure that came with it, I move it slowly up and down to avoid eddies...

Yes. You boiled the pasta for several minutes, which is sufficient to bring the bacteria count way down. Again, something like pasta is going to get unappetizing long before it presents any danger. Recommendations are always very conservative and simplistic. For instance, temperatures to which...

Now you've got a base for all sorts of things. In fact, that sounds like a pretty extravagant stock that could stand on its own as a light soup. Be a great start for a brown and wild rice mix to make with mushrooms and walnuts for next week. In general, I try to keep stocks at a bare simmer...

The Healthy Kids recipe book looks like a really good source book for cooking with kids, not the least because of the very good food photography, which is something that struck me immediately about the site. It all looks appealing.